***
Name: Orehoarder Spider:
Grade: Common-8
Might: 35
Swiftness: 31
Resilience: 28
Clarity: 40
Mana: 95/106 (+2/hr)
General Description: A giant spider that habitually lives in underground mines, capable of preserving its prey using its orehoarder core. Its main abilities are as follows:
- Mineral Regurgitation: Vomits compressed ore shards and scrap at high velocity.
- Preservation Web: Wrapping itself in its metal-laced webs to increase its resilience.
- Metal Feast: Reclaiming shards and scraps from stored cocoons to reload Mineral Regurgitation.
***
It was a strong beast alright. He'd have to end this fight quickly.
The giant orehoarder spider gulped, abdomen flexing like a bellow, then spat a fist of metal junk at him. Nails, wooden boards, and pebble-ores—blasting it all down in a glittering rain.
A gust of wind whistled behind him as he dashed deeper into the cavern. Metal clattered and crashed behind him, while a scrap pinged off his oreblade. His silverplume wings, of course, flapped and gave him extra downwind, lengthening his stride.
He cut left behind a toppled cart, then right behind a giant webbed pillar, and—because habit was stronger than fear—he glanced up mid-sprint to glare at the giant spider coated in hexagonal ores.
Orehoarder spiders were Orland’s early favorite punching bags. They lived exclusively in Obric mines starving for meat, but since there weren’t a lot of beasts down here, they developed special organs called ‘orehoarder cores’, turning their guts into larder. Special minerals would sluice through their abdomens to brine the prey they swallowed without salt or smoke, which allowed them to preserve and slowly digest anything they ate over the course of months.
They basically have to eat only one or two goats, and then they’ll be set for the rest of the winter months while they hibernate.
As a side effect of the orehoarder cores, the webs they produced also shared the preservation effect, which was why there were so many metallic silk cocoons on the ceiling encasing all sorts of half-devoured prey. If they didn’t want to store food in their abdomens over months, they could just swallow it first, wrap it internally in their metallic silk, then spit it back out to hang so they could re-swallow it whenever they wanted.
… All that was to say, their orehoarder cores were very commonly used in obtaining storage-type relics.
The spider spat again. The junk blast rattled his rotted beam and showered his back with splinters, but he slid away before he could get shredded, his wingcloak shouldering him through the slide like a friend shoving him out of a tavern brawl. The spider tried yet another cough of ore—then a pause. Its great body shuddered as it retched nothing but foul air.
Out of ammunition.
My turn.
While the spider crawled to a set of cocoons to refill its stomach, he took a deep breath, raised his prosthetic, and fired windspheres up in swathes. They weren’t flashy attacks, but they got the job done. Four of them hammered the ceiling, bursting four fat cocoons, and then he fired two more, breaking another three cocoons around the spider. While their slick contents tumbled down and crashed around him—all manners of half-devoured goats and half-digested metal ores—the spider screeched, clawing at the air where its cocoons had been.
It didn’t give up. It immediately skittered over to another set of cocoons, so he tracked its movements, firing more windspheres in bursts to shred the cocoons before it could chew on them. Two more fell. Four more fell. He faltered and staggered a little as he felt a slight wave of nausea—he had to mind not draining his lungs while shooting this quickly—but he recovered quickly and felled two more cocoons from the far corner of the cavern, completely denying the spider’s food source.
Thank the deep breathing exercises I've been doing on the way to Braskir.
Nowhere left to run, nowhere left to reload. Choice cornered the orehoarder spider.
With its cocoons scattered and its belly empty, the spider finally unclasped from the ceiling and dropped. The whole cavern shook when it landed, stone rails clattering under its weight.
From the ground-up it was enormous—its eight legs were braced like black girders, and its bright red eyes glittered like a string of coins, but Dain’s anxious grin came despite himself. Yes, it was big, but not ironmaw toad big, and it certainly wasn’t armed with as many tricks as the gargoyle golem. He’d survived worse beasts than this, and this time, he even had a new relic with him: the firelight oreblade.
Come on.
Show me what you got.
The spider charged, forelegs scything. He dashed back, cloak snapping wide. His wings caught the air, trimmed his motion just enough to make each dodge smoother, and he did dodge: spinning and ducking and sidestepping its metal claws as they slammed sparks against stone, lashing into minecarts and ripping through rotten wooden pillars. It wasn’t very agile on the ground. Spending most of its life upside-down on the ceiling made it scramble, clawed feet skittering on the uneven ground as it tried to slash him. He even blocked its slashes once or twice, lighting up the firelight oreblade right before impact every time to burn through its chitin with raw heat.
Then he saw it. The smallest opening between this swing and its next.
He leapt.
His wings redirected him mid-air, twisting him like a note bent in song, and he landed square on the spider’s thorax to drive his oreblade down. Purple heat shrieked as it bit through metal, chitin, and burned a jagged wound into the flesh beneath.
The spider screeched and spasmed, hurling him off immediately, but he spun mid-air—his wings righting him again—and circled onto its abdomen this time. He stabbed down once, twice, again and again, carving smoking grooves while the spider writhed in a frenzy. It broke into that wild, panicked dance he’d read about in The Tales of Seeker Orland: legs flailing, body skittering in place, and flinging him around like a coin tossed in a storm.
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He didn’t get thrown off this time. Both his wings stabbed down into the holes he’d made, anchoring him to its abdomen, so all he did was stab harder and harder, his heart burning with energy… until the spider’s great body became unable to hold itself upright.
The giant bug collapsed. Black and burning matter leaked out the beast’s wounds as it crashed into the stone floor with a final muted thud, and only once he was sure it was dead—by stumbling onto its head and stabbing its brain a few times for good measure—did he extinguish his firelight oreblade.
His shoulders dropped, and he almost laughed.
Maybe I could’ve fought the ironmaw toad, after all.
The bigger they are, the easier it is to just get on their backs and stab away.
Then again, he wasn’t sure his firelight oreblade was hot enough to burn through the ironmaw toad’s skin. The orehoarder spider’s chitin was considerably thinner, so maybe not. Not with ease. One day he’d get his revenge on an ironmaw toad, but not today.
Excitement swelled as he turned back towards the giant abdomen. If memory served him right, its orehoarder core should be somewhere in there, tucked deep past the plating. A storage-type relic was waiting for him, and his mind was already drafting what he could obtain from Belara—a pouch that could preserve fresh food, or a satchel that could shrink and compress objects placed inside—when a sound broke the silence behind him.
He froze, listening.
Then—tap.
His wings stirred. One of them brushed forward to tap his shoulder, urgent, as if trying to say ‘we’re not done yet’.
So he spun on his heel and whipped his oreblade and Bloodlight Eye the same way, throwing out as much light as he could muster.
There were three more.
The giant orehoarder spiders crouched deeper in the cavern where the black ran widest, eyes like balefire embers, mandibles clicking menacingly.
… Well, fuck.
He pivoted back to the carcass at his boots and started carving crosswise into the abdomen, igniting the firelight once more so he could burn through the black plates quicker. His left hand was already starting to burn a little from the extended activation of the firelight, so he worked fast. He knew what the organ looked like in the drawings—a golden egg-shaped lump of metal mineralized with pale veins—but drawings weren’t a map, and he was no butcher. Viscera, fat, odd pockets of blood, and the stink of old brass all gushed out as he struggled to find the orehoarder core.
Just grab the core and run, just grab the core and run, just grab the core and run!
Legs thundered behind him. He widened the cut and found nothing still, so he gritted his teeth, knelt, and shoved his hand in up to the wrist, groping for anything cool and smooth with mineral grain. No luck. Just heat and jelly and hard chitin ridges.
He glanced back. The nearest pair of eyes flared brighter as the giant orehoarder spider lowered its head.
Dodge.
He tensed to leap—
When a dwarven bellow suddenly cracked through the ceiling.
“Hah!”
Timber split. Planks rained down like cheap shingles in a storm, and three bodies crashed through the wooden boards that’d been covering a vertical shaft over his head, landing with a cloud of dust and splinters that made the orehoarder spiders skitter back.
Ilvaren rolled and rose in the same motion with both shortswords already drawn. Kargun hit like a dropped anvil and stood with his feet planted wide, giant floating gauntlets gleaming as he pounded them together. Sahlir took the fall like a feather, bladesheath whispering as he eased his curved sword free and tilted his hawk-head to listen.
There was a different air around them.
“... We each take one,” Ilvaren said coolly.
“Aye,” Kargun rumbled.
“Okay,” Sahlir said, simple as that.
And while Anisa, Yasmin, and Rena rushed in the cavern from the mineshaft behind Dain, he extinguished his firelight oreblade and stepped back on his half-butchered spider just enough to watch the three warriors leap into the fray.
Ilvaren was first to show teeth. She whirled at her spider with her Galespitter Shortswords, wind howling sharp around her as she hacked and slashed and carved the spider’s limbs to ribbons. Her laughter was louder every time it screeched. Bloodthirsty didn’t quite cover it—she looked like she’d been starving for a proper fight.
Kargun’s titanic fists smashed chitin apart like a man cracking ore, slow and steady, merciless all the same. One leg went flying, then another. The spider tried to climb the walls to get away, but he just grabbed it down with one giant gauntlet and hammered its skull again and again, unrelenting until he heard a splitting crack.
Then there was Sahlir. Dain had already seen the hawkkin’s serpentine sword, but now Sahlir himself was more serpent than hawk. Every slash the spider threw landed where he’d just been. There was nothing awkward about the way he flowed like water, always a breath ahead, darting for joints just as they opened before letting his blade’s momentum carry him through with circular, spinning slashes. Dain recognized his form now: the Galewind Swordstyle of the Seven Founding Swordstyles.
… Dain had written them off as reckless idiots, but if their bouts against the orewhisper wisps weren’t proof enough already that they were competent in battle, this was proof enough.
When the final spider twitched its last leg, the three of them climbed atop their respective carcasses as if mounting thrones. Ilvaren tilted her head and tossed her hair, her smile sharp as her swords. Kargun folded his arms, gauntlets shrinking back onto his hands with a chorus of cracks, chin lifted high. Sahlir just stood stiff as a totem pole, but his eyes burned gold—each of them, in their own way, saying ‘how about this’.
They wanted him to judge their abilities.
“So, human,” Ilvaren said, twirling her shortswords once more before sheathing them, “which of us earns the honor of joining you on that scorpion hunt?”
Dain blinked at them.
“How many wisps did each of you get?”
The three blinked back. Then, almost sheepishly, Ilvaren hauled up a satchel. Glass vials and a dozen blue, screeching wisps glimmered faintly inside. “I’ve got fifteen.”
Kargun grinned, showing his own bag. “Fifteen.”
Sahlir raised his satchel as well. “Fifteen.”
Of course it was a perfect, stupid tie. The gods must be laughing. For a long moment, he weighed the problem of which warrior he should bring with him… but he supposed the answer was obvious, if not a bit inconvenient.
If it meant a higher chance of success…
With a groan, he finally whipped his oreblade back into its cane form and gestured at all three. “Fine. You’re all strong enough. All of you get to come with us on the scorpion request.”
But one would think they weren’t happy at all, because instead of celebrating the fact that all of them were going to be paid, they instead began hurling curses and insults at each other, shouting at Dain to pick only one to be his favored warrior.
Dain, meanwhile, nearly fell off the head of his giant spider as he tried to slide down. Just as his boots hit the ground, his lungs burned raw, and—before he could hide it—he staggered back into the spider.
Ow.
Deep… breaths.
I should probably get a relic that increases my lung capacity in the future, huh?
While he wiped sweat off his face, Anisa and Yasmin stormed over. Yasmin didn’t look like she was worried whatsoever, but Anisa’s bright smile didn’t carry the meaning behind it, because she seized his shoulder with a powerful death grip.
“What’s up?” he said, trying to sound casual.
Her smile only widened, dangerously sweet.
“Please do not run off to fight magic beasts by yourself without telling us,” she said smoothly. “If the three of them had not heard the commotion and rushed straight to your aid, it could have been bad for you. You will trust us. You will rely on us. We are in the same party, right?”
The cheery menace in her voice made him shiver, but he managed a nervous, anxious smile.
“... Yes, my lady.”
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