Duskbound

Chapter 31

What had been vague intuition moments ago crystallized into sharp focus. Velik was no longer blindly guessing where his prey was and how it would approach him based on incomplete information. Now, he could clearly see the whole game laid out in front of him – move and countermove, feints and strikes.

[Apex Hunter] was the merger of his extraordinary senses, his ability to position himself in such a way as to take his victim by surprise, and most importantly, his newfound insight into how to infer the location of a predator without actually ever seeing it. With that, he had all the tools he needed to win.

The cutting strands of spider silk had been a hindrance a minute ago, something that limited his options and forced him to proceed carefully lest he stumble into one and injure himself on it. Now, he found them easily because they were right where he expected them to be. Knowing where to look instead of sweeping the whole grove with his eyes and hoping to find something made the whole process far more efficient.

They also laid a trail for him to follow back to the monster's current hiding spot. It could shoot them out, but one end of every strand had connected to the spider itself, at least momentarily. Together, they painted a map of the roads it took across the grove, which branches it favored to support its weight and which angles it liked to move at.

The champion was forty feet away, halfway up a tree to his left, and still as a statue. Almost its entire body was hidden in the foliage, but tracing the spider silk had revealed a clear trail, and that single sliver of green-black body was all he needed to confirm its location. The question then became how best to approach it, and that was a question he was sure he had an answer for.

Knowing where the lines of spider silk were helped, but they were still in his way. Some of them had been placed deliberately as obstacles between him and the spider's current position. Throwing the spear this early in the fight was a disastrous idea. Unlike the last champion he'd fought, this one didn't have a scratch on it. Besides, he wasn't trying to fight his way through a bone-charring aura of fire, and he was pretty sure a single good blow would end things, anyway.

Casually approaching it was also out of the question. The spider was greased lightning on eight legs, so fast that his eyes could barely trace the blur of its movements. There was no way it would just sit there while he walked over to it, but maybe he could force it in a specific direction. The trail of spider silk it had left gave Velik the impression that it wasn't immune to its own webs, and it had been careful not to cross the lines too closely when it made more.

His new skill provided the answer. He'd tried it before, but the spider had bested him last time. It was faster than him and had a custom arena to stalk its victims through. He couldn't chase it down, but he could force it to come after him simply by trying to leave the grove.

It would have to stop him, and to do that, it would need to get ahead of him. Unless it wanted to circle outside its designated arena, which Velik wasn't sure a champion could actually even do, it would need to either take to the very top of the trees, or it would have to pass down a corridor it had made of its own silk. If he moved fast enough, he could take even that choice away.

There was one final trump card to play, a move that he was almost sure the champion couldn't know about. If Velik was right, it would eliminate the spider's biggest advantage over him, forcing the monster into an open confrontation that it would certainly lose. His only fear was that it would instead choose to flee, turning their battle into a game of tag where he failed to match its speed and had to worry about getting sliced up by spider silk lines.

His plan was made; all that remained was to execute it and see how many times he'd wrongly predicted his foe's responses.

Velik started walking backward, angling off to his right as he went to cut between two trees and jump into the next row. There were still silk lines there to be wary of, but not so many that he couldn't thread his way through them. His spear haft shortened while the blade lengthened until it looked something like a machete with a handle that was five times longer than it needed. [Shape Shifting] had its limits, and the weapon still needed to have a profile consistent with a spear.

As soon as he slashed through the first line, the spider figured out what he was doing. It disappeared from its perch in a blur that he immediately lost track of, and he didn't bother to try finding it again. The only thing that mattered was whether it would approach from above or below. If he didn't hear the tree tops rustling, he'd know for sure.

Abandoning all pretense at caution, Velik spun on his heels and dashed forward. He dipped under a line that was the same height as his nose and sliced apart another one two feet later that would have bit into his knee, his focus now on [Apex Hunter] to tell him whether he'd correctly guessed his prey's reaction.

No rustle. That means it's coming right by me. Just need to time this right.

Velik did something he normally never would have done while fighting for his life. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the mana compass. Its arrow pointed almost directly at him, just slightly to the right, which he took to mean the spider monster itself was there. With each passing moment, the champion got closer and the arrow shifted a few degrees. As soon as it pointed straight to the right, it would be passing him by.

Got you.

The arrow hit the right angle and Velik spun in place, lashing out with his spear even as [Shape Shifting] worked to increase its reach. In the blink of an eye, it tripled in length and the blade bit into something with a hard crunch. The impact almost jerked the weapon out of his grasp, forcing him to drop the compass and grab hold with his other hand.

A blur of black and green flailing limbs tore past him, leaving a wildly spurting trail of dark ichor as it rolled end over end. A leg went sailing off between the trees when the spider struck one of its own silk lines, but despite the damage, the monster quickly reoriented itself. They stood on the ground, twenty feet from each other, one bleeding from the stump of a missing leg and a split open carapace, and the other from a wide gash down his back.

The spider wasn't stupid. It saw the mana compass between Velik's feet, and he was pretty sure it realized exactly what it meant. With that, its hit and run tactics wouldn't be nearly as effective. If it moved from its current position, he'd be free to walk out of the grove. That meant the monster's only choices were to stand and fight or to let its prey escape.

For all his newfound insight, Velik couldn't read what it was thinking. That half circle of dead, black eyes stared at him steadily, perhaps assessing its chances, perhaps seething with silent, single-minded hatred. Whether it thought it could win or it just couldn't fathom letting prey escape without a fight, a single twitch of its mouth between those sharp, wickedly curved fangs was all the warning it gave Velik.

The loss of a leg did nothing to slow its rush, and even on open ground, it was still so fast that Velik saw nothing but a blur of dark color. Acting on instinct he couldn't fully rationalize, he whipped his spear out, slashing to his left while stepping to his right. It was tough to say whether he or the spider was more surprised, but the blade of his spear clipped another of its legs and sent it into a tumbling spin as it rushed past him.

There was no time to follow up on the attack before it rushed back out of range. Velik lunged after it, his spear leading the way, but he couldn't keep up with its speed, even when it was wounded. Quit running and end this already!

Unsurprisingly, the champion elite didn't oblige him. It disappeared deeper into the grove, leaving Velik to retreat back to his position to reclaim his compass. The problem was that when he got back there, it was gone. Did I kick it during that last exchange?

He scanned the ground nearby, hoping to find it a few feet away, but there was no sign of it. Oh. Shit. Don't tell me…

Looking up, he saw the compass a hundred feet away from him, almost exactly in the center of the grove. The spider had snatched it up when it blew past him somehow, probably to try to eliminate his advantage. Or trying to use it as bait. That thing took weeks of non-stop work to save up for. I need it. Damn spider is too smart for its own good. It turned the tables on me.

Now he was the one being forced into a position of vulnerability, or he could abandon the compass and run, but the spider knew he wouldn't. "Come on, then," he muttered grimly as he reshaped his spear. "Let's see how much those injuries slow you down."