Duskbound

Chapter 30

The spider was bigger than he was expecting. Its exact size was still obscured, but it had to be at least two feet long, not including the legs, which were thin and delicate. Somehow, it had enough agility to slip up and down trees and across branches without so much as shaking them. That probably meant it was extremely light in addition to being adept at distributing its weight across all of its limbs. There could be some magic involved in the process to account for its incredible speed, or that might just be raw stats.

Either way, it was blocking his escape routes. The idea of trying to navigate his way through strands sharp enough to cut through leather that brushed up against it while simultaneously fending off a lightning strike in arachnid form did not appeal to him. That meant he needed to find a different way out of the grove, or he had to kill the champion.

Hard to fight a monster I can't keep track of, he thought as he scoured the branches overhead for even the smallest signs of movement. It wasn't a good strategy, not against something so quick and nimble. However the monster was doing it, its movements were practically undetectable.

Velik was usually the one doing the ambushing when he found a monster, but there'd been occasions where he'd been caught by surprise back before he'd forged [Predator's Visage] out of its disparate skills. Most of them had been sensory skills, but they also included one called [Ambush Tactics] that helped him pick out vulnerable targets and find places to hide while he waited to strike.

Except I don't need that now. I'm the prey this time. Well, two can play at this game. Maybe I can't find it, but with [Stealth], I can make it harder for the champion to find me.

A cat and mouse game with two cats wasn't what Velik had been planning when he'd stepped into the grove, but if that was what it took to kill the champion, he'd do it. [Predator's Visage] had only gotten a glancing look at it, but that had been enough to confirm how dangerous it was. He could kill it if he could catch up to it.

Fading back behind a tree to break line of sight from where he'd last seen the spider, he leaped up into the branches and paused to listen. There was nothing but the breeze in the trees and some bugs in the background. A bird flew over the grove, something blue with black bars across its feathers. It got halfway across before it suddenly burst into a cloud of blood and meat.

The blood ran down an otherwise invisible silken line that had slashed through the bird. Territorial little bastard, aren't you? But that was a mistake. Now I know where you are.

He crept out on the branch, his balance perfect to keep it from shifting as he moved. It was thick enough to hold his weight, but he could only get a few feet from the trunk before that changed. That was enough to give him an opening to leap to the next branch without touching anything, though. After shrinking his spear down to something only two feet long, he made the jump. [Stealth] flared in his mind, guiding his body to keep him quiet as he touched down and the wood absorbed his momentum.

It shifted ever so slightly, just enough to rustle the leaves once. It could have been a stray breeze, but Velik was counting on the champion to know it wasn't. He knew where it was. Now he knew where it was going. All he needed to do was adjust his position to catch it on its way in. To that end, he dropped lightly to the ground and ghosted two trees over in the row.

That was the dangerous part. He couldn't assume the spider would move in a straight line, but if it did, the trees would block its line of sight. If it angled in from the left, he'd also be fine. If it came from the right side, though, it would definitely see him. Two in three chance this works.

He jumped up to his new perch, his spear ready in his hands. If he was right, the spider would pass right in front of him on its way to ambush him. If not, he was about to get hit again. But he knew where his blind spots were, and there were only two possible angles the spider could hit him. Both of them required the spider to either circle the entire grove or to pass through other areas he could see in order to reach him.

It was a faint rustling that saved his life. Whether the monster had some way to sense his position or had just known enough to eliminate the other possibilities and predict where Velik had hidden himself—or had just gotten lucky and cut across the grove at the one angle that Velik couldn't hide from—it had decided to avoid his trap altogether and had taken to the tops of the trees. The canopy hid it, but not even its skills could keep it from shifting branches with its weight.

Velik looked up just in time to see it dropping down from above. For a fraction of a second, he got a good look at it – eight thin, tapered legs with barbs and hooks at the joints and what looked like dagger tips at the end, a segmented body of green and black covered in fine, spiky hair, and a pair of wickedly curving fangs with a horror-show of a mouth between them. Its eyes were a ring around the front half of its head, all of them dull and black, the passionless eyes of a predator.

Then he realized the spider wasn't falling. It had flung itself off a branch, likely what had caused it to rustle, and it was moving far, far faster than merely falling could account for. There was no time to bring his spear around, not before the monster hit him. And he did not want to be trapped between the legs of a spider that could give him a full-body hug, so he did the only thing he could do.

Velik threw himself backwards off the tree branch. Other, smaller branches struck him on the way down, most of them snapping under his weight, but a few of the larger ones smacking and jostling him. At the same time, his spear grew another two feet and the tip sharpened into something similar to a sword's blade.

Pain shot through him as he struck the ground, back first, right where the spider had cut him before. He ignored it and readied the spear to drive it right through the monster's abdomen when it tried to land on him. It was in a freefall now; it couldn't possibly avoid being impaled.

Inches away from contact, it was suddenly pulled sideways, where it did an impressively acrobatic flip in midair to land on the side of a tree. Already situated, all eight of its legs propelled it up into the canopy and out of sight.

No, you don't! Velik jumped to his feet, intent on chasing the spider down. He froze halfway there, just barely in time to avoid wrapping the slicing line of spider silk it had used to pull itself out of the way of his spear around his face. By the time he'd slipped around it, the champion was gone again.

Damn it! Where'd you go, you little shit?

This thing was the ultimate ambush predator, and if he was going to kill it, he needed to start thinking like it. He'd tried to set a trap, but had failed to think in three dimensions. This was a champion elite. The grove was as much a part of the battle as the spider itself. So, I'm a giant, murderous spider intent on killing the intruder in my territory. I want to ambush the human, and I'm light enough to move completely silently anywhere but the very top of the trees. I also shit out silk lines strong enough to hold my weight and capable of scoring enchanted steel.

He had to keep moving to avoid getting caught in the spider's net, and it knew that. It was probably predicting his moves because it knew which directions it had already cut him off in. A damn spider was outthinking him no matter what he did. As Velik slunk through the grove, pulling hard on [Stealth] to keep him hidden, he realized that he was never going to spot the spider before it attacked. It was too good at what it did.

He needed to outflank it instead of waiting for it to come to him. There was no turning its ambush back on it, not as quickly as it moved and not without the ability to actually hide. The only way to win was to do exactly what it was doing to him. How does the predator move? And how does the prey protect itself when it can't see the predator, but it knows something is there anyway?

By being acutely aware of its own weaknesses. By knowing where it's most vulnerable, and ensuring that those vulnerabilities can't be exploited. The prey that survives does so by being prepared for the predator to attack long before the predator even shows up.

It was something that seemed so obvious in retrospect that Velik couldn't believe he hadn't thought of it before. Too many years of playing the predator had blinded him to the opposite side of the cycle. But he knew what to do now. It was just a matter of doing it.

[Stealth has advanced to rank 9.]

[Stealth has been folded into Predator's Visage.]

[Predator's Visage has become Apex Hunter.]

[Apex Hunter set to rank 1.]