"What do we do with this? Burn them all?" He suggested.
"Why?"
"Well, I wonder too. It's just that
"H-help me…" He was interrupted midway by a very frail voice.
When they turned toward the source of the voice, they saw a white-haired old man leaning against the wall of the cave.
They had thought it was just a corpse because of his wide, open entrails filled with white eggs.
"Ayo gramps, I can't heal that." Dante crouched before the old figure, slowly and cautiously touching the white eggs in an attempt to understand how he was still alive.
"Th-then, huff haah." While trying to say something else, he quickly lost his breath.
"P-please, find. Help." He said it in a ragged and breathless voice.
His pleas fell on deaf ears as Dante continued to observe this pitiful man.
"Death is sometimes a blessing." Next to him, Sylph spoke as she looked at the scene, clearly disgusted. Not at the eggs or something, but at how cruel monsters could be in their indifference.
A predator would have quickly killed its prey.
"What do you plan to do with him?" She inquired.
"Nothing; maybe give him salvation in death. His mana is extremely weak, almost nonexistent, as if it were leached by those eggs to grow faster. Maybe it's not his mana, but his mana core.
Anyway, he would not die even in a few weeks; for some reasons, the eggs can keep him alive. Which is even more interesting, hehe." His eyes looked interested, like a kid seeing a WW2 cannon on display in a museum.
"How did you all get here anyway? I mean, you can't just be dumb enough to come here one by one or get defeated by some spiders when you're this big, right?"
"Ambushed by five giant spiders." The old man looked like he had abandoned all hopes of surviving.
Knowing well enough that they were just kids and couldn't drag him all the way out of the forest without getting attacked.
"Ohh, so they're a cooperative kind of species? Hmm, the books definitely said they were solitary beings, and until now, they have displayed such behaviors.