Free Web NovelChapter 21: The Widow Drowned in the Tide
We carried on down, and the corridors changed their face.
Wider. Higher. The mana flowing beneath my feet thickened at every stretch, and my Eye watched it converge straight ahead, toward something still far off that swallowed it like a drain. The heart of the dungeon. We were getting closer, and everything around us grew denser, tighter, quieter.
Too quiet.
"It’s been a while since we ran into anything," Alice murmured against my ear. I could feel her breath, and the tension in her voice she was trying to hide. "Since the kamikazes. You don’t like this any more than I do, do you."
"No. Stay latched on. Whatever happens, you don’t let go."
"I never let go."
We came out into an enormous chamber — a true cavern, the ceiling lost in the black above our torches, the floor riddled with round holes, dozens of them, like a sponge. And the moment I set foot in it, my Eye blazed from every direction at once.
They were pouring out of the holes.
From the floor, the walls, the ceiling. By the dozen, then by the hundred, a torrent of carapaces spilling from every opening in a sizzle of legs over stone, a dry rasp that swelled into a single huge sound, a vibration that climbed up through the soles of my feet. Workers — but not six, not ten. A tide. And behind them, taller, the long silhouettes of the artillery ants, tails already raised toward us.
"A whole colony’s coming down on us," Alice breathed, and I felt her straighten against my back, suddenly focused. "All right. All right. Listen to me, Kuro — you don’t think. You don’t count. You strike where I tell you and you move where I tell you. The rest is my problem. Understood?"
The brain and the muscle. That was always how it worked, between us.
"Understood."
"Sacred Surge."
The warmth flooded me — and I dove into the tide.
The first ant threw itself at me, mandibles wide. I didn’t dodge: I slid. A step to the side, the hip pivoting, and I called the water. It surged up from the soaked floor, climbed the steel in a living spiral, and when my blade met the thing’s skull the thread of water struck a fraction of a second before the metal — the carapace burst in two as if under a hammer. I didn’t linger on it. The next one already.
Mandibles on the left: I bend the knee, they snap shut on empty air above my skull. Carapace on the right: the water climbs, bites, cuts. Three of them scaling a corpse to leap at me in a single mass — I pivot on one heel, and the liquid ribbon trailing my blade lengthens, curves through the air, and scythes all three down mid-flight before spitting them out in shreds against the wall.
And still they came. Always.
That was the true face of a swarm: not one ant, not ten, but a floor that moved. I cut, I cut, and the gap I opened sealed within the second, filled by ten fresh carapaces climbing over the bodies of the last. I could mow down whole clusters with every arc and the level of the tide wouldn’t drop an inch. Bailing the ocean with a spoon.
They weren’t trying to kill me. They were trying to bog me down. Throw themselves at my legs, let themselves be cut just to steal half a second from me, make weight, mass, number, until I was mired — long enough for the artillery at the back to line up its shot.
"Ice, right — DASH!"
I Dashed on the order, without thinking. A block of ice pulverized the heap of workers where I’d stood a fraction of a second earlier, throwing sharp shards that raked my cheek. They were firing through their own ranks. Ten workers sacrificed for one chance to crack my skull open, and it cost them nothing: the holes kept vomiting up more.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 33 — ... Level 34 — Path of the Spellblade applied
The windows blinked at the corner of my eye. I brushed them away with a flick of my lashes. No time.
And I kept striking. My arm was starting to burn — not to weaken, never, not with Apotheosis topping me back up beneath the skin, but to burn, that dull fire in the shoulder from repeating the same arc a hundred times. Sweat stung my eyes. The cavern reeked of split fluid, the ozone of Alice’s lightning, my own sweat. And still that tide rose, and rose, indifferent to everything I tore out of it.
A cold thought crossed me, despite myself: what if they never stop?
"Hey." Alice’s voice cracked against my ear, hard, as if she’d felt the crack open in me. "None of that. You don’t think, I told you. You dance."
So I danced. freewёbnoνel.com
And the water, little by little, stopped being a thread along my blade.
I could feel it answering now, as the levels stacked up in my body — quicker, wider, more mine. I no longer had to hunt for it in puddles: I tore it out of the damp air, the weeping walls, the blood of the beasts, and it came running. With a backhand flick of the wrist I raised a curved wall of water in front of me that caught two ice blocks mid-flight, swallowed them, froze them in its belly — then with a gesture I blew it forward into a dozen liquid lances that shot out to run the carapaces through one by one, each finding its mark. Around me a cold mist rose off the floor, glittering under the torches, and it followed my steps, spun when I spun, as if the whole cavern had started dancing with me. Every arc of the blade drew a fresh jet; every jet opened a fresh corpse.
It was no longer a reserve I rationed drop by drop. It was a flood. And I was its riverbed.
It bought me air. Not victory — air. Enough to breathe between two waves. Enough to feel, under my soles, the floor change.
Because the floor opened.
A sapper. They’d been digging while I danced, in silence, beneath the din of the swarm, and this one was rising straight up under my feet. My Eye screamed the collapse a fraction of a second before it happened — I Dashed upward, and a mandible as wide as my forearm closed on the empty space where my ankles had just been.
"Ceiling, two!"
No time to Dash. The lightning cracked over my shoulder — the smell of ozone, the crackle against my nape — and the two workers dropped from the tunnel above came raining down around me in two sizzling sprays, without grazing me.
And that was when I understood what we were really in.
Not a battle. A siege. The floor below me, the walls around me, the ceiling overhead — all of it could open and spit out an ant at any instant. I wasn’t fighting the enemy. I was fighting inside it.
"They’re coming at us from everywhere." Alice’s breath had gone short, but her voice held. "Floor, walls, ceiling. We’re surrounded, completely. So we stop defending one spot."
"What do you suggest."
"You don’t stop moving. At all. You become the thing that moves too fast to be surrounded. I’ll guide. Go."
And I stopped touching the floor.
Dash. A wave scythed down, already gone. Dash. The wall, three workers opened on the way past, gone. I crossed the cavern in bursts, setting foot down only long enough for a single strike, never letting the circle close. And Alice, at my back, had become my eyes behind me: "left," "up," "stop," "now right," a steady stream, calm, surgical, while I was nothing but the blade at the end of her orders. With every leap I felt Dash stretch a little farther, cost me a little less — use was polishing it under me, mid-fight.
[ Skill Dash — Lv. 2 -> Lv. 3 ]
A kamikaze slipped into a wave, its mana balled into a clenched fist in the hollow of its belly. I almost missed it.
"The hidden one — ten o’clock!"
A crack of the water whip, and I caught it at range, hurled it into the middle of its own. It exploded in the heart of the swarm; the scalding blast threw my hair back and tore a smoking crater in the tide.
We fought like that for a long time. Too long to count. The waves came one after another, identical, unkillable, and there was something hypnotic in the endless repetition — cut, slip, Dash, again, the levels raining silently at the corner of my eye while my limbs slowly loaded with a fatigue that only my will held at bay. The tide never ran dry.
But neither did I. And for once, it was the enemy that had a bottom, not me.
I felt it in the slackening flood. The holes spat out less. The waves spaced apart. Where I’d had to cut without pause, I suddenly had the time for one breath, then two, then the time to see the bare stone at last beneath the carpet of smoking carapaces.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 35 — ... Level 41 — Path of the Spellblade applied
The last artillery ant collapsed, split from tail to skull. Silence dropped all at once, total, deafening after the din.
I stood there, water streaming off my blade in threads that slapped the stone, breath short, in the middle of a charnel field of carapaces that stretched as far as the torchlight reached. Level 41. A reserve of free points I hadn’t even glanced at the total of — you don’t allocate your points in the middle of a battlefield. I left them.
And in that too-clean silence, I knew.
"Alice. It isn’t over."
"No," she breathed. "Look."
At the back of the cavern, three openings widened with a grinding of stone. And what came out of them had nothing of a worker about it.
The first was a wall. Colossal, twice the artillery ants, its carapace thick as a siege shield and bristling with spurs. Every step it planted shook the floor beneath my soles, a dull boom, steady, that echoed through the whole chamber.
The second was its opposite — long, low, hunched on legs fine as needles, two forearms tipped with scythes that scraped the stone in a screech of metal that set my teeth on edge. It didn’t walk. It flowed. My Eye struggled to fix its speed — and that hadn’t happened to me since Elsa.
The third didn’t advance. Smaller, crouched near a hole, it drove its forelegs into the earth, and all around it the floor began to shiver, the walls to breathe. It dug without moving an inch. Somewhere beneath our feet, I felt fresh workers stirring in the dark.
The Wall suddenly threw its head back and let out a cry that had nothing of an insect in it — a deep, wet bellow that made the air vibrate:
"Vrooohhhzzz —"
The Scythe answered it in the high register, a shrill grating, its blades clashing together:
"Fhhzzt-fhhzzt!"
"The royal guards," I murmured. By their mana density alone, my Eye ranked them three tiers above anything we’d faced.
Alice gave a short laugh, without joy, against my ear.
"All of this... the swarm, the waves, hours wearing us down before she sends her best pieces against a prey already spent." A pause. Then, almost admiring: "She’s intelligent, this queen. Truly intelligent."
"She is. Definitely." My fingers tightened on the grip. "Except she spent her pawns to tire out a prey that doesn’t tire."
Half true. The body was holding — Apotheosis saw to that. It was the other half that worried me.
The three royal guards lowered their heads toward us, together.
And they charged.
