In a fit of anger, Nathan threw everything on the dining table to the floor with his arm. He hit the table with both hands and read again the letter stuck on the wall in front of him. "We'll be going on a trip for a while, good luck"
"Damn that old man!" shouted Nathan angrily. He took the note and tore it into several pieces and then threw it on the floor.
Amelia remained silent while Nathan tried to unburden himself. He walked to the dojo where he had spent so much time training and noticed a light layer of dust on the floor.
Nathan bent down and wiped his hand through the dust. "It looks like it's been abandoned for over a year"
Slight suspicions began to creep into his thoughts. It was just over a year ago that Nathan had joined Khan, so Boreas and Lira quite possibly must have left the house shortly after he left.
"That old man knew something" Nathan ruffled his hair in annoyance knowing that surely Boreas had fled wanting to avoid any kind of trouble. Plus somehow he knew it was Nathan who would find himself in the eye of the storm.
Nathan went to the living room and sat down on the sofa, took off his mask and put it on the table in front of him. Then he covered his face with both hands and sighed.
Looking through his fingers, Nathan noticed a door at the end of the corridor. It was Boreas' room and the only room he had never entered since he had lived in the house. The old man had never allowed him to enter. Nathan vividly remembered the times when his curiosity led him to try to enter, only to be beaten by Boreas, reminding him of what happened if he ignored his warnings.
"...This time you won't reprimand me" Nathan said in a nostalgic tone before getting up not without taking Orion's mask again and heading towards Boreas' room.
Once he was in front of the door, he frowned as he smelled a faint putrid odor coming from inside. He frowned and slowly opened the door and looked inside.
For years he had imagined what Boreas' room would be like. Luxurious, mysterious, or decrepit, but he was completely wrong. The room was similar to Nathan's, only the furniture arrangement was different. The only thing that differed from his was the extra door inside the room.
Nathan ignored the rest of the room without much interest and approached the door, then he noticed that the putrid smell was coming from inside the room.
Without thinking too much, Nathan carefully opened the door only to find some stairs leading down.
"Was there always a basement in the house?" wondered Nathan as he slowly started down the stairs. The smell was getting worse and worse, but Nathan was unfortunately used to smelling ugly things, so he had unintentionally developed a resistance.
The stairs were not very long, so Nathan soon found himself at another door. This time he was more careful about entering so quickly, knowing that he was likely to encounter something dangerous.
Very slowly Nathan opened the door and this time he could not help but frown at the strong smell that invaded his nostrils. Everything was dark, so he had no choice but to ask Amelia to light the door.
Amelia agreed and materialized in the form of an orb of light. She floated to the center of the room and then Nathan entered and could see completely.
'Did Boreas like to collect insects and reptiles?' asked Amelia as she saw dozens of glass cages of different sizes with small ecosystems perfect for various insects and reptiles to live in.
"Not that I am aware of" whispered Nathan quietly looking at all the broken glass cages. There may have once been dozens of bugs and reptiles living in these, but now they were empty, with only the trail of dead skins a sign that they had molted.
Nathan walked over to one of the glass cages and studied one of the dead skins, realizing that they were not normal.
"They're from calamities" Nathan muttered. "They have a faint trace of scent...earth fauna don't normally have scent"
'It seems so' said Amelia mentally. 'But what happened to them?'
Nathan shook his head not knowing the answer to her question, then he noticed an old wooden desk, where on top of it was a cage larger than the others, with a large egg that at some point had hatched and now only the shell remained.
"How are calamities born?" asked Nathan as he looked at the hatched egg.
'I don't know...' answered Amelia. Neither of them knew much about calamities. Creatures from the realms, and therefore Amelia's home world.
Suddenly Nathan noticed that there was a faint trail from the egg cage to the others. He followed the trail observing the ground and noticed that it was full of dried blood, camouflaged by dust and dirt.
"Looks like they killed each other... makes sense without Boreas leaving them without food" Nathan muttered looking at the dried blood marks on the ground.
'But then one of them must have survived in the end, right?' asked Amelia. It was at that moment that Nathan felt a slight presence of essence right next to him, but it was too late, and he was not able to react.
Nathan felt a severely painful bite on his neck. He stepped back a moment later and looked up at the small spider hanging from the ceiling with a thread practically invisible to the human eye.
"Ughh" Nathan groaned as he pressed down on the bite wound the spider had inflicted him. A mere second later Nathan staggered slightly as he felt his body lose his balance.
"Poison... damn!" complained Nathan as he realized that the spider's bite was poisonous and quite efficient.
Nathan flowed essence into his neck in an attempt to stop the spread of the poison. All this while keeping an eye on the spider, which climbed back up to the ceiling, where Nathan realized that there was a large spider web.
'That spider is the one that devoured the other calamities!' said Amelia when she saw that it had bitten Nathan. He nodded at her thought but did not remove his doubt.
"How could something that size take down calamities much bigger than him?" Nathan's first thought was its powerful poison. But he quickly dismissed that idea.
The spider's venom was indeed strong, but not strong enough to kill with other calamities that surely had their own methods of attacking to finish off the spider.
It was then that Nathan realized that something was beginning to happen to the spider. It began to writhe, then its body began to visibly enlarge, growing more than ten times its size until it transformed into a spider similar to a tarantula, only it was almost the size of a basketball.
The spider looked at him with its eight red eyes, to which Nathan responded with a frown. "...Gross"