Free Web NovelChapter 91: Rapax vs Red Apostle
The gnarled gateway where the high reaches of the Hemoth Pines met the Bleed Bark canopy rose out of the gloom like a skeleton’s arch.
Rapax and Doctor pushed through the choking undergrowth beneath it, their breath ragged but kept, and came at last to the exact place where Team Noctis had stood among the hanging choir the evening before. It was a place of deep, wrong stillness — a tangled geometry grown over countless bloody generations where two ancient species of tree had claimed the same vertical ground and never let it go. The branches did not merely touch. They had woven into one another, a strangling lattice of wood and bark like petrified black muscle locked in a long mutual suffocation.
They had no time for the sight of it.
Their pace had climbed the whole way into a breaking sprint under the steady fall of silk lances out of the canopy behind them. The Red Apostle did not relent. She tracked them with a precision that should not have belonged to a thing wearing a borrowed shape, swinging through the high dark vaults on strands she drew together from her own grotesque body — thickening them and stiffening them in a fraction of a second into rigid gleaming shafts. Not cobwebs. Spears of the same silk she traveled on, their points hardened by her alien biology to drive deep into flesh and split the bone behind it.
And even running for his life, Doctor’s eye caught the flaw in them.
Each time they slipped a strike, the thrown lance held its shape for only a second, two at the most. Then the rigid spear loosened and collapsed back into a flat, harmless drift of web, falling to the wet floor like shed skin. He filed it away as he ran, the way he filed everything — a fact about the creature, stored against the moment it would be worth something. The lances could kill on the instant of the throw. A breath after, they were nothing. Distance bought safety, and so did time, and a thing that had to be everywhere at once to keep them in range could not also be patient.
The moment their boots crossed into the zone of the hanging choir, the air changed, and the song began.
In this deep and shuttered pocket of the Heart the cold deepened, the air thick with old iron and rot. The dark was near absolute; the canopy overhead let down not one thread of the faint red Cruoris morning. Looking up into it, small clusters of the hanging choir could be seen suspended from the highest reaches of the overlapping branches, dangling at a dizzying height above the two who had come in.
It was a sight built to unsettle. Their ankles simply vanished into the pitch where branch and shadow met. No rope. No vine. No mechanism the eye could resolve to hold them up — only the absolute black at the branch’s edge, the impossible absence of their ankles within it, and the pale elongated bodies hanging below, holding the particular stillness of things that had reached their places long ago and had never once needed to shift since. Withered monuments to an old, forgotten curse. freewёbnoνel.com
The shadow domain sphere around Rapax and Doctor hummed up at once.
It threw an unseen vibrating barrier of dark energy that caught the song’s waves and neutralized them before they reached the ear. The song was a psychic poison aimed straight at the nervous system, made to lock the limbs and break a traveler’s mind open from the inside. Within the insulating shell of the sphere it could only scratch uselessly at the edges, and posed no danger yet.
The danger was the apex thing that had run them down for the better part of two hours, and she would reach them in less than a minute.
Rapax slowed, his boots crunching the detritus, and turned his dark gaze on his companion.
" I will fight , " he said, flat and steady against the coming clash. " You keep watch on these choirs, and on anything else she tries — like spitting out swarms of those flesh-eating spiderlings. "
Doctor nodded, the weight of it pressing down on them both.
" Yes, dear. But do not let this run long. " His voice kept its warmth even now. " The Red Apostle form is the Red Widow’s most adaptable state. It exists in a fluid, predatory resonance with whatever it is hunting. Give it time enough to read your movements, to feel your rhythm, to learn your style — and it will evolve in the middle of the fight. It will become the precise answer to your exact attacks. Finish her before she has the chance to study you. "
He stepped back into the shadow, and pointed an analytical finger at the dense canopy where a vast shifting shape was dropping fast.
" And use the dark on her. The Choir-Eater has already gutted her shadow defense — it ate up the vast reserves the Red Widow had hoarded in that body over decades. Her spiritual hide is torn open. Right now she is terribly vulnerable to shadow. "
Rapax gave a sharp nod. A flick of the wrist, and his twin sabers came out of his weapon bead, and the moment the cold steel formed in his hands it took on a heavy roiling black — concentrated shadow essence drawn straight from his own reserve. At the same moment he woke his innate talent, the Living Darkness, and his edges began to blur and dissolve, his body slipping into a fluid half-real state that ran together with the gloom around it. A ghost waiting on a nightmare.
Then the air tore.
The Red Apostle came out of the upper black, swinging hard through the branches on the thick wet webs spat without pause from the spider-legs that rose from her back. Her clustered gaze fixed on Rapax’s shifting silhouette below, and without a beat of hesitation she dropped. She struck the ground with a sick heavy thud and threw up a spray of black soil and dead leaves, and the impact of her landing was the impact of something that weighed far more than its frame suggested, a density of muscle and chitin and hoarded change packed into a shape stretched to look almost like a woman and failing at it in every particular.
Rapax looked at the abomination that stood across from him, and read it the way he read every enemy he had ever faced, taking the measure of it in the half-second before steel met it.
Her skin was a deep wet arterial red, the color of the body’s inside worn obscenely on the outside, glistening as though freshly peeled. The flesh was drawn taut over a frame too long in the limb to be any human’s. No hair anywhere on her. No ears — only the smooth unbroken red curve of the skull where ears should have been. No nose, only a flat expanse of crimson.
Where a face should have arranged itself, eight spider’s eyes sat across her brow in even rows, pitch-black and domed and lidless, not one of them where a human’s eyes would sit, all of them open and wet and staring. Below the gallery of them was a mouth and only a mouth, no lips, no feature to soften it, and when it opened it showed a crowding of jagged canines, far too many and far too long for the jaw that held them, clicking together in a hungry rhythm.
Her long arms ended in thick curved claws, and her feet were no different — the toes splayed and hooked, a beast’s feet made to run prey down across jagged ground and grip slick stone and tearing bark. From her back, burst out of the skin where the shoulder blades would have been, two more pairs of limbs had grown — long, jointed, tapered to cruel points, the unmistakable segmented architecture of a spider’s legs, rising high over her shoulders and arching forward like a ribcage turned inside out.
In her human-shaped hands she held a pair of curved bone blades. Weapons born of her own mutilation. She had made them from her own severed forelegs — the ones the guillotine had taken — stripping the living flesh and muscle off the heavy chitin with her claws, biting at the bone-ends, grinding the stubborn material against her crowded teeth down to crude angular points now stained with dried marrow and fresh venom.
She did not hold back. She did not circle, did not test him. The pent fury of a missed hunt and the pure ferocity of an apex stood plain in every line of her, and with a screech that shook the damp air she lunged straight at Rapax — the jagged bone blades sweeping across in a blinding horizontal arc meant to take his head, while behind her the two pairs of spider-legs churned and loosed thick choking torrents of web into the air to wall away every path he might run.
