AN ADVENTURER’S SOLILOQUY
I was hunting in the labyrinth with my team of adventurers.
Most adventurers go into these mazes to raise their levels. There are monsters outside, but not nearly as many as you can find inside.
In particular, this dungeon had a lot of indigenous monster species, so materials from them could fetch a high price.
Leveling up and collecting resources. That’s why adventurers brave the labyrinth.
“Hey, look at this. It’s a web.”
I looked to where one of my companions was pointing.
There, glowing faintly in the reflected light, was a web of evenly spaced geometric patterns.
A spiderweb—the nest of a spider-type monster called the taratect that’s often found living in the Great Elroe Labyrinth.
“Is there a spider in there?”
“Must be. I’m gonna burn it down.”
Taratects are fundamentally weak monsters.
As long as you’re careful of their poisonous bite, they’re just small-fry.
But occasionally, some of them make webs like this.
These snares are extremely dangerous.
The sticky and durable fibers are very difficult to escape on your own if you’re caught. Apparently, it’s possible if you have high enough strength, but most usually consider escape as impossible.
The easiest way to extract yourself is by burning the web away.
The threads are hard to break with brute force, but they’re extremely susceptible to fire.
My comrade used the end of his torch to set the web aflame.
It blazed up easily and continued to burn for a while.
“Whoa, hey. It’s burning farther into the passage!”
“This is a big nest. You don’t think it’s evolved, do you?”
My friend’s words sent shivers down my spine.
Monsters can sometimes evolve. When they do, they become much stronger than before. The unevolved members of the taratect species are very weak, but when they do mutate, they can become almost impossible to deal with. And that goes double for the ones that make webs.
Once the fire went out, we explored the burned area where the nest had been.
“Hey, look…”
“No way.”
My comrade groaned, and I looked up at the heavens as if for answers. Although, all I could see was the ceiling, of course.
Before our eyes, the bones and scales of an enormous snake were scattered on the ground. Along with the skeletons of several other monsters.
If one creature took all of these down, it would be truly terrifying.
The giant snake skeleton probably belonged to a monster called the Elroe baladorado.
It was a high-ranking monster on the power scale.
“Where’s the corpse of the thing that was living here?”
“It’s…not here.”
“There’s a thread trailing out of the nest over here. It must have gotten away.”
I took a look at the thread my friend had found. It was the kind of fiber that spider monsters constantly produce.
If we followed this, we would find whatever built this nest.
“What should we do?”
“Let’s go after it.”
It would be dangerous to let this thing roam around unchecked.
If it was evolved, we might not be able to beat it, but in that case we’d just run for our lives and report this information to the outside world.
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