SSS-RANK: Super Extraction System-Chapter 34: [34] The Silk Labyrinth

Chapter 34: [34] The Silk Labyrinth
The VTOL couldn’t land. The fog rolling off the Petrified Forest was too thick, a soup of magical interference that scrambled the navigation sensors.
"This is as close as I get!" the pilot shouted over the comms. "Thirty-meter drop! Go, go, go!"
Wraith Squad jumped.
They plummeted into the grey mist, gravity chutes firing at the last second. They landed with heavy thuds on ground that wasn’t dirt or stone.
It was chitin.
Leon looked down. The floor of the forest entrance was a carpet of crushed insect shells, layers deep, crunching under their boots.
Above them, the trees loomed. But they weren’t trees. They were colossal, calcified spires of ancient wood, dead for centuries. And stretched between them, weaving them into a single, suffocating canopy, were webs.
Thick, white cables of silk hung like vines. Sheets of gossamer fabric blocked the sky.
"Welcome to hell," Rhino grunted, racking his shotgun. His cybernetic eye whirred, switching to thermal. "I’m picking up... nothing. The webs are scattering the heat signatures."
"It’s the mana," Seraph said, her voice calm. She raised her hand, and the light around her bent, making her outline shimmer and blur. "The silk is infused with it. It acts like a Faraday cage for sensors."
"Gideon, keep Rhino’s vitals on screen," Leon ordered. "Seraph, cloak us. We move quiet."
"Understood," Seraph said. She gestured, and a ripple of distorted light wrapped around the squad. To an outside observer, they were now just a smudge in the fog, a trick of the eye.
Leon took point.
He didn’t need thermal. He didn’t need light.
[ EYES OF THE NIGHT: ACTIVE ]
[ BLOOD SENSE: ACTIVE ]
The grey fog vanished from his vision. The world turned into a high-contrast landscape of black and white. He saw the individual strands of the webs. He saw the pulsating egg sacs clinging to the undersides of the massive branches.
And he saw the blood.
Thousands of tiny, frantic heartbeats pulsed in the darkness around them.
And deeper in, slower, heavier rhythms. The guards.
"Follow my steps," Leon whispered. "Don’t touch the white strands. They’re vibration-sensitive."
They moved into the labyrinth.
The entrance was a gaping hole in the base of a massive tree-spire. It led down into the earth, a tunnel lined with silk.
It was claustrophobic. The walls pressed in, sticky and warm. The air smelled of rot and musk.
Skitter... skitter...
The sound was constant. It came from inside the walls. From the ceiling. From beneath their feet.
"I hate bugs," Rhino muttered, sweating. "Give me a vampire any day. At least they have faces."
"Quiet," Leon hissed.
He stopped. He raised a fist.
The squad froze. Seraph’s cloak flickered but held.
Leon stared into the darkness ahead. To the others, it was an empty tunnel.
To Leon, it was a choke point.
Ten meters ahead, hidden in the shadows of the ceiling, five large shapes were waiting. They weren’t moving. Their heartbeats were slow, ambusher-style.
[ HOSTILES DETECTED ]
[ TYPE: ARACHNE HUNTERS ]
[ RANK: C ]
[ TACTIC: CEILING DROP ]
"Ambush ahead," Leon whispered. "Ceiling. Five of them."
"I don’t see them," Gideon whispered back, checking his scanner. "Are you sure?"
"I can hear their blood moving," Leon said.
He looked at Seraph.
"Can you make a distraction?"
Seraph nodded. "I can project a photon decoy. It won’t have mass, but it will look real."
"Do it. Send it down the center. Rhino, be ready to flush them."
Seraph closed her eyes. A ball of light formed in her hand. She threw it forward.
As it flew, the light unfolded. It took the shape of a running soldier, a glowing, white figure sprinting down the tunnel.
The decoy ran past the ambush point.
SCREEE!
The ceiling erupted.
Five Arachne Hunters dropped. They were sleek, black spiders with jagged forelegs. They landed on the decoy, mandibles snapping, tearing into the light.
When their claws passed through the illusion, they paused, confused.
"NOW!" Leon shouted.
Rhino stepped forward. His cybernetic arm transformed. The hand retracted, and a heavy rotary cannon barrel extended.
BRRRRT.
Muzzle flashes lit up the tunnel like a strobe light. High-caliber rounds tore into the confused spiders, shredding chitin and flesh. Green blood sprayed the walls.
Two spiders died instantly. The other three shrieked and charged.
Leon was already moving.
He slid along the floor, a shadow beneath the tracers. He popped up under the lead spider.
His shadow-steel daggers flashed. He didn’t just stab; he dissected. He severed the leg joints on one side, causing the spider to collapse. He spun and drove a blade into its eye cluster.
[ CRITICAL HIT! ]
The fourth spider lunged at Gideon.
"Get back!" Gideon yelled, raising a bio-shield.
Seraph didn’t panic. She raised her white rifle. She didn’t use a scope.
PEW.
A beam of concentrated light punched a hole through the spider’s head. Clean. Cauterized.
The last spider tried to retreat, crawling back up the wall.
Leon threw his dagger.
[ VENOMOUS STRIKE: COATING ]
The dagger hit the spider in the abdomen. The black toxin spread instantly. The spider convulsed, its legs curling inward as it fell from the wall with a wet thud.
Silence returned to the tunnel.
"Clear," Leon said, retrieving his dagger.
"Impressive," Seraph noted, lowering her rifle. "Your intel was perfect."
"He really can smell them," Rhino grunted, kicking a spider corpse. "That’s... useful. Creepy, but useful."
Leon ignored them. He walked over to one of the egg sacs lining the wall. It was pulsing.
He could see the shadow of the hatchling inside. It was almost ready to burst.
[ EXTRACT SHADOW? ]
Leon placed his hand on the sac.
"Extract."
The sac withered. A tiny, wisp of shadow flowed into his hand.
[ SHADOW ESSENCE: +1 ]
It was nothing. A crumb.
"We need to keep moving," Leon said. "The gunfire will attract more."
They pushed deeper.
The tunnels twisted and turned, a maddening maze of silk. Dead ends were common. Traps were everywhere.
At one point, Rhino almost stepped on a patch of floor that looked solid but was actually a pitfall trap covered in illusion-web.
"Stop," Leon warned, grabbing Rhino’s cybernetic arm. "Look."
He picked up a loose rock and tossed it onto the patch.
The rock fell through the floor without a sound.
Rhino peered into the hole. At the bottom, five meters down, was a bed of spikes coated in fresh poison.
"Thanks, kid," Rhino breathed, looking pale.
"Seraph, bridge it," Leon ordered.
Seraph created a hard-light bridge over the pit. They crossed silently.
An hour passed. The air grew hotter, thicker. The smell of ammonia became overpowering.
They reached a cavern that was different.
The walls here weren’t just web. They were lined with husks.
Hundreds of them.
Cocooned bodies hung from the ceiling like chandeliers. Some were small animals, lesser monsters.
But many were human-sized.
"Explorers," Gideon whispered, shining his light on a desiccated hand sticking out of a cocoon. "Scavengers. Anyone dumb enough to come here before us."
"Or unlucky," Seraph added.
Leon walked through the hanging graveyard. His [Blood Sense] was silent here. These things had been dead a long time.
But then, he stopped.
At the far end of the cavern, there was a husks that looked... different.
It wasn’t a human. It was massive. A Crimson Hound, dried and hollowed out.
And next to it... a Shadow Panther.
"These aren’t local," Leon said, touching the Panther’s husk. "These are from the surface. From the city."
"So the Queen hunts outside?" Rhino asked.
"No," Leon said. He looked at the way the bodies were arranged. They weren’t just stored. They were... displayed.
"They’re trophies," Leon realized. "Or warnings."
He looked at the tunnel ahead. It was wider. The silk here was thicker, pulsating with a rhythmic green light.
[ WARNING: HIGH-LEVEL MANA DETECTED ]
[ ROYAL SHADOW PROXIMITY: CLOSE ]
"We’re getting close to the inner sanctum," Leon said.
"How do you know?" Seraph asked.
"Because the shadows are getting heavier," Leon said.
He felt it pressing against his skin, the Queen’s Dominion. It wasn’t gravity like Kain. It was a sticky, psychic pressure. A feeling of being watched by a million eyes.
"Wait," Gideon said. "My scanner. It’s picking up... movement. Lots of it."
He tapped his screen frantically.
"It’s not a patrol. It’s... the walls. The walls are moving."
Leon looked at the tunnel walls.
The silk wasn’t just fabric.
It was alive.
Thousands of tiny, translucent spiders were crawling over each other, forming the very structure of the tunnel.
[ HOSTILES DETECTED ]
[ TYPE: ARACHNE HATCHLINGS (SWARM) ]
[ COUNT: 10,000+ ]
"Run," Leon said.
"What?" Rhino asked.
"RUN!"
The walls exploded.
The hatchlings swarmed. It was a literal tide of insects. They poured onto the floor, a carpet of clicking legs and biting mouths.
"Go! Go! Go!" Leon was the leader now.
"Seraph! Flashbang!" Leon ordered.
Seraph turned and fired a burst of blinding light into the swarm. It stunned the front wave, burning thousands of them to ash.
But there were millions more.
Wraith Squad sprinted down the tunnel. Rhino bulldozed through the webs. Gideon scrambled behind him.
Leon stayed at the rear.
[ VENOMOUS STRIKE: AREA COATING ]
He slashed the walls as he ran, coating the silk in his corrosive shadow toxin.
The toxin spread. The webs turned black and dissolved. The swarm following them screeched as they ran into the poisoned barrier, melting into slime.
It bought them seconds.
"There!" Leon pointed.
Ahead, the tunnel opened up into a massive, illuminated chamber.
They burst out of the tunnel and into the light.
They skidded to a halt on a platform overlooking a vast, underground canyon.
Below them, suspended over a dark abyss by chains of silk thick as suspension bridges, was the heart of the labyrinth.
A massive, spherical nest made of golden web.
And guarding the only bridge leading to it were two colossal figures.
[ BOSS DETECTED ]
[ ARACHNE ROYAL GUARD (KNIGHT CLASS) ]
[ RANK: B ]
[ COUNT: 2 ]
They were humanoid spiders, armored in heavy chitin plate, wielding scythes made of bone.
"Out of the frying pan," Rhino wheezed, checking his ammo.
"Into the fire," Seraph finished.
The swarm behind them stopped at the tunnel entrance. They chattered and clicked, but they didn’t enter the chamber.
They were afraid.
Leon stepped forward. He looked at the two Knights guarding the bridge.
He drew his daggers.
"Rhino, take the left one. Seraph, support him. Gideon, keep them alive."
"And you?" Seraph asked.
Leon’s shadow elongated. Iron, the Vampire Knight, rose from the darkness, his blue eyes burning.
And beside him, the smoky, tattered form of the Fallen Marquis materialized.
"I’ll take the right one," Leon said.
The Knights screeched, raising their scythes.
The battle for the bridge began.