Lyze turned over in his futon groggily and pulled in his covers more tightly because this night, he was alone in his bed for once. Not that he didn't miss Ais's company but the girl seemed to be growing into her own skin a bit more these days and so he was left in peace. Although her fighting was becoming practically more useless down here since she was only useful for maiming and slowing monsters down than actually killing them, it was very clear she too was growing stronger.
There was a fire in her eyes that he could now see, some sort of religious fervour in her spirit that now urged her to fight harder, with every stroke of her sword being more powerful than the last. Truly, it seemed she had finally started on her own journey, which was about time that it did happen too. After all, by herself she'd managed to become the famous Sword Princess in the original timeline. Now with seemingly him there to be her role model, it may turn out that she would be even stronger.
Lyze's mind was more relaxed now too. He'd been meditating quite a bit when he had spare time because he needed focus for when fought Balor eventually. He couldn't afford distractions or doubtful thoughts slowing him and his reflexes down. That was a death sentence if nothing else could be more obvious. Though he did wander how he could fight the monster. It's attacks were both magical and physical in nature, with pulverising punches that could snap Udaeus like a twig and a breath attack that would probably overpower a dozen of Amphisbaena's. Not to mention, its roar was enough of an attack as itself, like Goliath's Howl.
How did Ottar manage to half-kill it? Lyze knew he himself relied on his hacks to push through an impossible fight but how did Ottar pull through odds like these? Did he just lower his head like a boar and charge in with his tusks? It was not like Ottar didn't have magical powers either...he did have them. But it was testament to the force of the Boaz's nature that he could half-kill such a terrible beast and survive the ordeal.
...
All of a sudden, Lyze felt a weight press down on his upper body and just as he was accustomed to doing so, that slight change of the situation immediately forced him awake. He flexed his hand and Excalibur which was laying beside him flew to his grip as he prepared for the possibility to strike down whatever was pressing on him. But upon opening his vision, he saw no person sitting on top of him as he'd expected.
Instead what he'd found was that the Golden Armour had suddenly appeared on his body. The long forgotten piece of vain gear held him down deeper in his bed as the chainmail, the breastplate and the helmet became very much real to him. Lyze had the ability to call upon this armour if he wanted to but he did not call it, nor would it ever just appear except for one reason...that another piece of the set was nearby.
And if another piece was nearby, that meant it had a guardian. Which means there was a Beast present somewhere around here.
As Lyze properly woke up, he became alert to feet running around outside along with the angry shouts of his Familia members. Quickly dismissing the armour, he exited the tent to greet the dim lighting of what must probably have been dawn, but instead of the usual campfire and quietly chatting guards, he saw the healers out of their tents and still in their sleepwear, applying treatment to badly wounded adventurers. He grabbed a passing adventurer by the arm.
"What happened?" He demanded.
"The guards on night-duty were attacked by spider monsters not too long ago when they tried to scout a disturbance." The boy said hurriedly. "The Captain and Gareth have gone to save the remaining few out there."
"Why did nobody come and get me?" Lyze asked. "I could have flown us all over there and torched the vermin."
"I don't know but you're awake now. So that's a good thing, right?" The boy said before he pulled his hand out of Lyze's grip. "I'm sorry sir, I have to tend to the wounded."
Lyze watched him go as he looked out past the camp towards the end of the Floor where the entrance to the next floor was.
"Spider monsters?" He muttered to himself. "What spider monsters? I'm not aware of any spider variety here in these Floors."
"Because they aren't from here." Riveria said suddenly as she stepped into place beside. Her shawl had been hurriedly thrown over her nightgown while she was barefoot and her hair dishevelled. In her hand was her Magna Alfs and from the look of things, she'd been healing people up until now.
Having to do all of this in the state she was now was unbecoming of an elf...and he was sure that when this was all over later, they'd get an earful.
"Where are they from then?" Lyze asked. "What do they look like?"
"They're red and purple in colour and they have more eyes than could ever be needed by any creature." Riveria sighed. "Only one monster fits that description I was told."
"Deformis Spiders." Lyze realized before scrunching his brow in confusion. "But they're monsters of the 51st floor aren't they? What are they doing all the way up here?"
"It's not uncommon for monsters to venture upwards, especially if there's too many of them to keep themselves confined to one place." Riveria said. "Though I'm skeptical about that being the case...especially since they pass two floors to get here. Monsters lie in wait, so they couldn't have come up just to get to us."
"What are you saying? That they were running from something?" Lyze asked.
"No." She shook her head. "The nasty creatures don't get that scared easily and they're territorial...but all the same, it is a mystery."
"A mystery huh?" Lyze repeated under his breath as his mind instantly began working it out.
The Golden Armour had reappeared most likely to the presence of another piece of it, and now there were spider monsters coming up here that were out of place and attacking adventurers outside of their own territory. It meant only one thing...he knew which Beast he had to fight next. He was about to ask to leave but Riveria beat him to it.
"Go." She urged. "I won't be able to stop you...and besides, your fires would be a lot of help to win this fight. Finn and Gareth will be happy to have you I'm sure."
"Thanks a lot." Lyze said as he rose into the air and blasted off in the direction of the 49th floor. Along the way, he continued to mutter to himself as he pieced it altogether. "Spiders. As if it wasn't so obvious. He's quite literally called the Spider King for goodness sake." He then let out a huge sigh. "Man, I hope I can be done with these fiends someday...having to deal with them so randomly is becoming a pain in my ass."
But he was excited about this, truly. Because if the next Beast was the one he imagined (of course it had to be), then the armour piece he'd be treasuring was the one he'd been looking forward to the most. If he bested the creature and got his hands on it, he would never need a development ability for a new weapon ever again. It was another cheat to power for sure, but he supposed he could let this one slide. Being able to wield any weapon at all expertly was after all an opportunity hard to come by. He'd rather it be with him than anyone else.
...
He finally reached the end of the floor, but to his surprise he found that Finn and Gareth were not fighting by the exit to the 49th floor. No, they were fighting quite some distance from it, but then again who knew how long the monsters had been up here. Finn was darting between the legs of each monsters as they tried to skewer him with the pointy ends of their limbs and he would end up running them through their underbellies with his Fortia.
Gareth had discarded his axe since the creatures were too agile to be caught by such a heavy weapon and instead was using his bare hands to fight the giant pests. Lyze smiled as he watched the dwarf managed to grab two legs that had been stabbing towards him and tugged on them harshly to yank the monsters of its feet and he performed some sort of suplex to smash the creature's head on the ground, crunching its face as vile green blood spurted out.
Lyze watched as another spider came up behind Gareth and tried to attack him from behind. Seeing this and not wanting to waste anymore time than was necessary, Lyze's quickly entered his Greater Demon mode and his flight suddenly gained the speed of a jet as Darkness bubbled up in his hand to form a blade.
Gareth looked behind his shoulder to see the monster rising behind him with its abdomen lowered to the ground while its front legs were in the air poised to strike. It's mouth opened to reveal two long fangs like that of a tarantula as all of its many eyes fixated on Gareth. The dwarf grimaced as he realised he didn't even have time to turn around and could only process what was happening at this speed. But before the monster could do anything, a dark shape seemed to just fly right through its body, and Gareth heard what sound like the slicing of a blade before the spider split into two halves and collapsed into dust as its stone fell to the ground shattered.
The dark shape collided with the ground nimbly revealing itself to be Lyze in his dark form. Gareth raised a brow at the appearance but said nothing as he continued to finish off the dying monster wriggling in his grasp. Lyze dispelled the blade of Darkness from his hand and drew out Excalibur as he blurred again and another spider was split in two. One of them opened its mouth above Finn's head ready to clamp down on the Pallums skull but Lyze threw a ball of Darkness down its gullet and before long, the spider seemed to lose all its colour as it became petrified by the dark magic.
Lyze dodged between several limbs trying to stab at him but each time one of the pests seemed to finally have him, he would blur out of sight before a series of cutting blades could be heard and the legs would be sliced into several pieces, making the creatures shriek, before the same dark blur would fly up by their heads and took their prosoma right off. Before long, most of the spider horde had been dealt with and Lyze, after bisecting yet another spider and returning it to dust, flipped in the air and released his demon powers and sheathed his sword.
He held his hands together as currents of silver lightning began to storm between his palms and fizz with power as he slammed his hands forward and blasted multiple streams of lightning out at the monsters. All that were remaining were hit with the lightning and began to scream as they caught alight with the silver fire. Surprisingly enough, they seemed to resist the blast a little bit as they tried to fight back against this attack by refusing to fall down. But only so much could be done when your soul was being devoured and one by one they all fell.
Lyze descended to the ground, a little out of breath as he approached his elder who had not wasted any time and had retrieved two wounded adventurers from behind a large rock. He rushed up to them and asked with no small amount of urgency.
"Did we save everyone?"
"No." Finn said regretfully.
"The bastards managed to get Liza before we got here." Gareth said. "We would have tried to go for her but these two were being swamped by the mob down here."
Liza was a spear girl that trained under Finn directly at times and made up part of the rear defences. She was a bit of an older girl and so had a bit more responsibilities, amongst them being part of night guard rotation...and Lyze was pretty sure she hated spiders. So if they'd managed to get her...
"Where did they take her then?" He asked them hurriedly. "Down to the next floor?"
"No, they took her where they came from." Finn pointed up towards the part where the ceiling meet the wall. Lyze looked up there, and it was only because of his Chaos Vision that he saw what he did. There was a large crack there, hidden by the shadows but definitely large enough to be entered by the giant spiders in droves. The crack didn't seemed to lead into the previous floor but rather someplace else.
Without another word, Lyze blasted off through the air in the direction of that crack, ignoring the shouts of surprise from his executives. His teammate was in danger and though he'd not had much exchange with the girl before now, it did not mean he wouldn't save her if he had the abilities to do it. He entered the crack and found it immediately a tricky place to be navigated. The entrance was big but what it led to were narrow twists and turns to push through.
He imagined the spiders would sometimes have to flip on their backs and walk upside-down on the 'ceiling' to get further in. His flight path became more difficult as he then found that there were several webs strung up in place to catch anything not a spider entering. It seemed he was entering their lair...or the lair of whatever was controlling them.
After an agonisingly tight journey, Lyze broke out into a huge chasm that was criss-crossed with suspending webs all wrapped around different bundles of what were definitely creatures that had been wrapped up for dinner. Some of them were still alive as even now he could see them kicking and squirming. And of course, the whole chasms was infested with Deformis Spiders.
They flittered about with their legs, nimbly walking across the giant webs as they passed by each dinner option. Lyze saw a group stop by one particularly large bundle that was still moving and thrashing around. Cringing, he watched as one of the spiders used it legs to spin the wrapped bundle around so as to get to the vulnerable side of it and with its fangs, it plunged into the abdomen of whatever the creature was, and tore out its guts all the while they prey was still kicking and roaring.
Lyze wasted no more time observing the sickly scene and looked around for Liza. She was a human, so she had to be smaller than the rest of these large bundles. He strained his ears for any noise familiar to him besides the bellows of captured monsters and the gleeful hisses of the giant spiders and before long, he managed to catch the whimpers of a girl probably half dying with fear. Following the noise, he saw one singular spider trussing up Liza like turkey first before wrapping blankets of web strings around her. The girl seemed cut between crying in fear or vomiting in disgust. But whichever it was going to be, the trauma had already been inflicted as she was now reduced to nothing more than a warming up meal.
...As much as he felt sorry for her, there was no way he would ever trade places. Just the thought made his skin crawl.
But however much it did want to crawl away from him, he knew he had no choice going forwards. He had to save her. He looked around to determine a suitable flight path where he would not just fly into one of these webs like...well, a literal fly when he heard a multitude of tappings above his head and he knew what it was instantly. Without looking back, he stuck Excalibur in the air behind him just in time as he felt it pierce the head of a spider...and he knew it was a head because he could feel his arms brushing against several eyes as it squealed in pain. Its legs curled inwards instinctively before he brought his arm forward and flung the spider into the chasms, its body colliding with many strands of webs as it approached the ground he could see down there.
The squeal of the spider however had brought all the eyes of the other spiders on him and he could feel himself cringing beneath their glares in disgust. To have so many eyes on you all at once...really was a horrid feeling, especially when it was bloodthirsty arachnid monsters who didn't see you as just an intruder but a free meal that walked right into their lair. Of course with it came the outrage of him entering their lair and in anger of his intrusion and for killing their friend, they began to blitz towards him screaming. Just the act made him nearly jump out of his skin in disgust but his Familia member needed him and from what he could see, she now saw him.
And seeing that it was him of all people who had come to save her, there appeared a small glimmer of hope in her frightened eyes.
Lyze waited until they had all left the side of the web enclosure that Liza was on and were nearer to him than they were to her. He was not engaging this many all on his own. Once they were well away from Liza and were close enough to him, he teleported right past them and they all stopped in confusion at seeing their prey just disappear. But it seemed those many eyes were indeed useful for something as it gave them near 360 vision and they spotted him immediately as he reappeared behind them.
Lyze wasted no time, nor did he give them any to react as he slashed away at the webs using shockwaves with Excalibur. The shockwaves sliced though the strands easily, severing them and making the bridgeways collapse as the spiders tried to come towards him. For extra measure, he fired multiple shots of blue fire at the severed strands he'd cut loose so that they all caught fire very fast. And webs were extremely flammable apparently as streams of fire nearly ran across the webs at near speed of sound, and lit the giant pests on fire as they started screeching agony. Within moments their entire network began collapsing into flames as their torched bodies began to plummet into the chasm.
In the meantime, Lyze flew up to Liza and began to cut away at her trappings, freeing her mouth first so she could breathe and she gasped for air while he cut away at the rest of the webs trapping her.
"Thanks." She managed to get out. "You saved me!"
"Yes I did." Lyze said. "But we don't know how many more there are. So let's get you loose and away from here as fast as possible. I've had enough of spiders for one morning. I'm sure you can agree."
"Y-Yes." She stammered before she was reminded of her experience and her face became green with disgust as she began to retch.
"Don't get sick all over me." Lyze warned her. "Not exactly the best show of gratitude to a saviour now is it?"
"Sorry, I just...those things were really and truly gross."
"They're vermin and they are in need of extermination." Lyze said. "Doesn't matter if they're a little bigger than normal, they need to be executed on sight."
"Easy for you to say." Liza said. "You're not the one who nearly got eaten."
"Because I was smart." Lyze said as he finally managed to get her free. "Anyway, no more talk. Let's get out of here Liza...Liza?"
The girl was no longer looking at him but now above him with even wider eyes than before as a look of complete horror came over her face. Following her eyes, he saw what was making her so petrified all of a sudden. There was a web above them that he'd hadn't noticed before. It was the biggest one yet and it spanned the entire chasm. In it, there were also several monsters wrapped in bundles and he could already see some carcasses.
But in the middle most part of the web lay wrapped up the thing he'd ben hoping to see. A pair of golden gauntlets, made of the finest gold that even Liza had ever seen was wrapped in the webs by the wrists and it called to Lyze as he finally found the treasure he'd sought. But looming over them, with drool falling from its fangs was a giant spider, though this one was different to the others.
It was coloured black and its body seemed to have an exoskeleton as hard as armour, and he was much bigger than the others. The eyes adorning its head were red and its fangs were about as big as the spears Finn and Liza carried with them. It made clicking noises as it stared down at them, hissing slowly as it watched the intruders try to escape. Lyze grinned however as he had found the guardian he'd sought.
"Hello...Arachnid the Spider King."
...
The giant spider responded by firing a stream of webs from its belly, intent on capturing the two once again in the bindings. Lyze however flew off with his hand around Liza's as the webbing sailed past them. He was determined not to waste time though as he didn't want to risk Liza's life trying to claim a piece of treasure for himself. No, this time he would be precise and not have another of these assholes play around with his life again.
He pulled out Geranos and made a mental note of where the webs had been shot from. Finding the spinneret on the underside of its body, he threw the dagger right into the hole, bypassing all that hard armour as the dagger sank into soft flesh making the Spider King scream. Lyze pulled Liza up into the air and her body landed in his arms as he held her in a princess carry. She blushed in surprise at this...how many grown girls like her were so boldly handled like that by a little boy.
He seemed very much unaware of it though as he snapped a couple of fingers and the dagger inside the Spider King lit alight with the Flame. The Spider King screeched out terribly, one last scream of defiance and humiliation at being dispatched so quickly before its soul was devoured and fed to Lyze as it collapsed into its own web, the structure straining under the sudden weight before it snapped. As the body fell towards them, Liza finally couldn't hold it in anymore as her disgust of the situation grew worse and she both screamed as well as threw up over his shoulder and into the chasm.
Lyze grimaced at that but he couldn't blame her for it. After all, that last shriek from the spider made him shiver too. As the structure fell close to them he telekinetically reached out to both his weapon and the gauntlets. Geranos pulled free from the monster's behind and the gauntlets hovered in the air as the webbing around it grew thinner and thinner from the weight of the rest of the web pulling it down before snapping altogether and freeing the artifact into Lyze's possession. Beckoning them forward, he put them both in his storage space before waiting for Liza to stop her business.
He did notice about now that a foul smell was starting to rise from the ground up, the smell of burning, putrid flesh. He waited for her to stop retching and looked at her flatly as she brought her face back towards him.
"You done now?" He asked.
"Y-yeah. I-I think so." She muttered, going bright with embarrassment. Because who the hell vomited in the arms of their saviour!?
"Good." He said. Then much to her chagrin, he added thereafter. "You still have some bile running down your mouth."
She squeaked as she rubbed it off with her sleeve but by then they were already moving towards the exit.
...
Finn and Gareth breathed a sigh of relief as they saw Lyze appear from the crack with Liza in his arms, both safe and sound it seemed. Though judging by the state of the girl...she hadn't been too well. Lyze set her down on the floor like she wasn't a lady at all but some baggage, for which she pouted angrily at him but he was in the process of flying away, seemingly preoccupied with something.
"Let him be." Finn said to her. "He doesn't like to take credit for saving someone's life. Are you feeling okay?"
"I am now Captain." Liza said to him. "Thanks to him. But...I'm not quite sure I want to continue with this adventure anymore after what I just experienced."
"...I understand." Finn said. "But we're too deep for me to send you up with a small squad. So we're going to have to press on until we're done with what we came here for. We'll be heading home soon."
"I hope." Liza said before her face turned green. "No, not again!"
She hunched over as she released more of the contents of her stomach on the ground. Finn and Gareth grimaced at the implications of how the experience must have been for the poor girl. Whatever the case, they hoped that whatever she experienced, was not something they'd go through anytime soon.
---
Lyze chuckled with glee as he entered his tent and took out the gauntlets. Without a moment's hesitation, he slipped them on and like the rest of the armour, they became a part of him. Immediately, he felt himself change, he felt his confidence change too. That is, the confidence in his abilities.
The power of the Golden Gauntlets was that whoever wore them and was bestowed their power, could pick up any weapon and fight at a master level with it, even if they'd never used the weapon before. Having put these on, Lyze knew once and for all that his sword arts had changed drastically, and it didn't matter if he picked up an axe, a mace or a spear, he was now proficient in every weapon known to man.
Dismissing the gauntlets like he did with the other pieces, he stretched his arms and his back, sighing with relief at the crack noises. If nothing else, this morning's sudden incursion provided a good workout, though it would be some time before he would forget the smell of burning spiders monsters. And he regretted not being chivalrous enough to give Arachnid the fight he truly deserved. But time was of the essence and he could not afford to use up his strength before the next battle. In a few hours, he would be faced with a monster that was really worthy of being feared. Balor...
...maybe he would skip breakfast though.
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