Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 81: The Red Apostle

" Doctor . You too . "

Rapax’s voice carried across the glade — the baritone holding an anger it did not usually carry , the question under it plain : how was the man standing , when Masters had fallen .

Doctor turned , the needles already away , the warmth on his face undimmed .

" No , dear , " he said . " I am not affected . My mind has been shattered countless times to be affected by any mind attack . There is nothing left in here for the eye cascade to break that has not already been broken . "

" Then why . " The anger surfacing now , unhidden . " Why did you kill him ? "

" His mind was shattered fully . He was past saving . That is why I — " Doctor’s eyes moved past Rapax’s shoulder , the sentence breaking off into something almost gentle . " Rapax , dear . Look out . "

Four derived apparitions had closed the distance .

Rapax drew the twin sabers from his weapon bead — the curved blades resolving into his hands — and turned into the apparitions , the Living Darkness flickering at his edges as he engaged . And Doctor stepped inside the shadow domain sphere with him , into the contained shell of Rapax’s domain , and drew from his own weapon bead a thing the Temple of Caedis had never seen him wear under his robes : a length of metallic chain , fine and pale , uncoiling into his hands . He began , unhurried, to assist .

Behind them , the glade resolved the last of the guillotine.

---

The silken blade , canted , finished the descent the third pull had given it — and it came down across the front legs of the Red Widow , the legs she had lifted toward the canopy as the cascade turned her mind , and it cut them apart through the middle . Green fluid sprayed from the severed limbs , the spider’s blood , and with it pieces of flesh and muscle tissue flung across the bloodglow-lit ground .

The pain brought her back .

The cascade’s hold broke under it — the lifted legs , the praying stillness , gone in the white shock of severance — and the Red Widow recoiled , loosening the silk strands , confused for an instant and then alert , the alertness pain bought . The eyes that remained to her — the clusters that Rada’s double had not punctured on the floor of the north path — fixed first on the Choir-Eater , its opponent , and then , instinctively, on Rapax . Its prey .

The Choir-Eater had rolled onto its stomach .

The shed segments were wriggling back to it , finding the parent body and rejoining it , the nine meters the guillotine had cut it down to climbing back toward the twenty it had dropped from the canopy as . And the countless eyes that had opened across its length were closing — gone, vanished into the skin they had erupted from , the Eye Cascade finished , its work done and its eyes put away , the lasting damage it had dealt not yet fully counted .

The Red Widow saw her prey .

Rapax , engaged with the apparitions , ringed by Doctor’s chain and his own sabers — the prey that had cost her . The realization arrived in her whole, the ledger of it: the eyes she had lost to the double on the north path. The crimson brood, squeezed dead by the segments. The shadow energy she had hoarded inside herself across a tenure of feeding, the store she had been saving toward her evolution, spent now and gone. Her front legs, on the ground in pieces. All of it, every loss, in pursuit of the one prey still standing in front of her.

The realization triggered the rage .

Not the berserk of the hunt — past that , beneath it , a clean and unadulterated rage that had no hunger in it at all , only the wanting of one specific death . And the Red Widow’s body began to glow . Red, deepening, the light rising out of her skin until it was the brightest thing in the glade.

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" Kaiser . Kaiser , you okay there . "

A voice in the Mind Palace .

Kei stood from the chair . He knew the voice — Asp’s , reaching him from somewhere that was not the hall .

" Your auditory nerves are still functioning , " Epoch said , " and she is in close proximity . Her words are entering your mind . The mind attack is gone . You can return when you wish — though the danger outside , as you can see , is still escalating . "

Kei looked at the screen . The Red Widow’s glowing body filled it .

" What is happening to it ? " he asked .

" It is transforming , " Epoch said . " It is mentioned in some archives , very vaguely . "

" Into what ? "

" That data is not available to me . " A beat . " But from the look of it , it soon will be . "

" Kaiser . Can you hear me ? " Asp again , the voice threading into the hall.

" Send me back , " Kei said .

" Close your eyes , " Epoch said . " Open them in the next second . "

He closed them . A drifting came over him , the hall letting go — and when he opened them he was lying in the fissure again , the bloodglow at the gap , Asp’s hushed voice calling his name through the thin wooden veil between their concealments .

" Yes , Asp , " he said , low . " I am okay . I faded out . What about you ?"

" I am okay . " Her voice came back through the veil . " We spirit nagas can form a scaly armor around the brain against mind attacks . " A pause , and the pause had a question in it . " How did you fend it off ? "

" I have an artifact , " Kei said . " For mind attacks . "

The reply came a beat late — Asp not buying the artifact , and not prying either, because everybody had secrets and secrets were what kept the people who held them alive . " The High Clerics are both dead , " she said instead . " The Umbra Rite Cleric too — Doctor killed him . Rapax and Doctor are on the derived apparitions . No word on Tula , or the other rite cleric . Corvyn something . But they did not come out and jump like the Umbra High Cleric did , so the attack may not have reached them . We stay cautious . "

" Asp . What is that red glow ? On the Widow . "

" Never seen it . Never read it . " A beat . " Hey . What was that rite cleric’s name again . Corvyn , or Corlain ? "

" Corvyn . "

" Right . Right . " The voice easy , conversational , wrong for the hour . " Hey , Kaiser . Do you remember what we talked about , in the Umbral Archive ? "

Kei paused . The question did not fit the moment — too idle , too placed .

" Yes , " he said . " I remember . "

" Oh , good . " A beat . " And — do you remember we planned to kill someone . Do you remember who ? "

Something was happening . He answered anyway , flat .

" Vera . "

And Asp’s voice changed — turned away from him , spoke to someone else in the concealment with her . " See . It is proven . Kaiser is fine — the cascade did not take him . You can relax now , Tula . " freewēbnoveℓ.com

Then , back to him : " Tula is in here with me . When the second guillotine pull came down on the section her fissure was in , the wood was on the verge of breaking — she climbed out and dropped fast , just as the eyes were starting to open on the Choir-Eater . She found my fissure and got in and put her shadow domain cocoon around both of us . It held the mind attack off both of us . " A grunt . " Hells , it is tight in here with two . Tula , get lean . "

" Asp , " Tula’s voice said . " Get a bath . "

Kei almost felt the corner of his mouth move .

" So , " he said . " The questions . You were checking whether the cascade took me . "

" Yes , " Asp said . " Tula knows these mind attacks — House Nightloom keeps records of them . She said a taken mind keeps the wrong memories . So we checked yours against the ones we share . You kept the right ones . "

The cocoon , Kei understood , had not drawn the Choir-Eater the way Rapax’s sphere had drawn it . A shadow novice’s cocoon , folded inside a fissure , raised in the same moment the creature was opening its cascade among a field of derived apparitions — too small a shadow , too hidden , lost in the noise of brighter shadow all around it . Where a grandmaster’s sphere , out in the open glade , was a beacon . The fork cut by magnitude . The strong it lit ; the small it never saw .

" Tula , " Kei asked , through the veil that now held two of them . " Do you know what it is ? The red glow . "

A small silence .

" Yes , " Tula said . " The Red Widow is transforming . "

" Into what ? "

The silence again — Tula reaching for the thing House Nightloom’s records held and the rest of them did not .

" A shape suited for killing its prey , " she said . " It varies . It becomes what best kills the thing it hunts . " Her mild voice, lower now. " Its primary attack . The Red Apostle . " A beat . " See now . It will transform . "

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Kei looked back to the forest floor .

Rapax and Doctor had finished three of the four apparitions and were on the last , the sabers and the pale chain working together inside the sphere . The Choir-Eater lay with its segments rejoining , the twenty-meter length nearly restored . And the red glow of the Widow had brightened past the point where the shape inside it could be seen — the spider’s body lost entirely in the light , no legs , no abdomen , no cluster of eyes , only the glow where the apex had been .

Then the glow began to dim .

And a figure resolved inside it .

The glow faded out , and what stood where the Red Widow had been had decided to wear a woman .

Not a woman . The shape of one — arrived at the way a thing that had never been human might assemble one from the memory of the prey it meant to kill , the proportions almost right and wrong in the places the almosts went wrong . Red skin , wet-looking , the deep arterial red of the body’s inside worn on the outside , stretched over a frame too long in the limb to be a person’s . No hair . No ears — only the smooth red curve of the skull where ears should have broken it . No nose . Where a face arranged itself , eight spider’s eyes sat across it in even rows , black and domed and lidless , none of them placed where a human’s eyes would sit and all of them open , and beneath the eyes a mouth — only a mouth , no other feature to soften the face around it — that opened on a crowding of canines too many and too long for the jaw that held them .

The hands ended in claws . The feet ended in claws , the toes splayed and hooked , a beast’s feet made to run prey down across a forest floor . And from its back , where the shoulder blades would have been , two more pairs of limbs had grown — long , jointed , tapering to points , the unmistakable architecture of a spider’s legs rising over its shoulders and arching forward , four extra reaches folding and unfolding in the bloodglow as if learning what they now were .

It had been the apex of the northern web . It had lost its eyes , its brood , its hoarded evolution , its legs — and it had spent the last of what it held becoming this . A shape with a single purpose , built from the body of the thing it meant to kill . A woman’s silhouette , to walk where a spider could not go . Claws , to open what chitin could not reach . And the spider kept folded over its shoulders , for if the woman was not enough .

The Red Apostle .

It turned all eight eyes toward Rapax