When they looked up, they could still see spiders hanging from the ceiling above. No one in the squad showed any surprise.
They had already sensed the situation outside the moment they jumped up from below.
Both Ronin and Muir had been running En the entire time. The giant spiders couldn't hide from their perception.
The instant the team emerged, the mercenaries opened fire. Ronin finished a fresh set of hand seals at the same time.
Another Wind Style technique.
This time it was Wind Style: Pressure Harm.
It was the same ability Kakuzu had used in the manga—the one Ronin considered perfect for clearing a battlefield.
Ronin's chakra formed a dense sphere of wind that detonated in mid-air. A violent storm exploded outward, hurling every spider above them into the air and driving them toward the passage at the far end of the platform.
Spiders along the technique's path were flung aside. Some were pushed all the way to the edge of the building.
Ronin noticed that even in the middle of the storm, several spiders fired thick strands of webbing from their abdomens and anchored themselves to the ground. The webs let them slowly stabilize their bodies against the raging wind.
But Ronin wasn't the only one attacking.
The golem's flamethrower shifted back into a Gatling gun. While the mercenaries fired their submachine guns into the spiders struggling to regain their footing, the Gatling finally spat blue fire.
The bullets came out in a solid, continuous line that tore through the wind and ripped apart every spider in sight.
The golem kept advancing at a steady pace even as the storm slowly pushed forward.
Ronin stopped casting ninjutsu. The effect of Pressure Harm would last until he ran out of chakra, and in his estimation that was more than enough time for the team to reach the entrance.
With his hands free, Ronin turned his attention upward.
More spiders were crawling along the cave ceiling in three long columns, all heading toward the entrance. The powerful wind whipping across the platform made the hanging spiders shriek. The ones in front swung down on white strands of silk and launched themselves straight at the team.
Ronin's wind had been blowing forward, so the spiders behind them were still a threat.
Muir and Maschur handled the rear.
Muir still carried his custom sniper rifle. When he raised it, Ronin saw a massive surge of aura pouring into the weapon.
It wasn't a conjured gun. It was a specially modified real firearm. When the bullet left the barrel, Ronin felt a genuine flicker of danger.
It didn't feel like a sniper round. It felt like a howitzer shell.
Boom!
An explosion thundered against the cave ceiling, followed by a spreading wave of fire.
Enhancer?
Ronin made the judgment instantly. Muir had enhanced both the rifle and the bullet itself.
The sniper's target was the spiders on the ceiling. The ones that had already dropped down on webs weren't in his line of fire.
That was where Maschur stepped in.
Maschur planted his feet, drew both hands back to his waist, and formed two dense spheres of aura. He thrust them forward. The spheres exploded outward like shockwaves.
Pure Emitter.
Ronin recognized the type immediately—classic Emitter with no spatial properties added. The focus was raw, long-range firepower.
The shockwaves slammed into the swinging spiders and blew away more than half of each body in a single hit.
The power looked even greater than Franklin's dual machine guns.
The difference came from two things: Maschur's enormous aura reserves, and the fact that his aura blasts were significantly larger than Franklin's bullets.
A few shots were all it took. The spiders that had been swinging toward them were reduced to twitching remnants still dangling from their own webs.
The intense heat from Muir's explosive rounds also burned through the silk. One by one the ruined spider corpses dropped into the abyss below.
The support members of the squad stayed behind the golem, firing their submachine guns in controlled bursts.
The wind finally died down. The golem's Gatling barrels were glowing red-hot. The Nen user riding in the secondary seat looked pale from overexertion.
The crew swapped positions with practiced efficiency. The golem never stopped moving.
Its war hammer swung in heavy arcs, smashing every spider that tried to rush back in from the entrance and sending them flying.
Vanessa had already slipped into the shadows and entered the passage ahead of everyone else.
Ronin walked at an almost casual pace behind the golem. Most of the time he didn't even need to fight.
When he did, he simply picked up chunks of rubble from the ground and hurled them. Enhanced by his aura, even simple stones were more than enough to deal with the spiders.
"These spiders are flesh-and-blood creatures," Ronin said, eyes scanning the bodies as they moved. "They need to eat. But their food source clearly isn't the tree-born monsters below us. That means there has to be another passage somewhere on the ceiling that leads to whatever they actually hunt."
"The middle passage is full of monsters too," Muir added. "But those ones are real flesh-and-blood creatures, not like the ones spawned by the trees down here. If the spiders have a steady food source, it's probably the monsters living in the space connected to the middle passage."
He paused. "After all these years, we've never heard any reports of mass animal or human deaths in the Etoria Kingdom."
Ronin nodded. "Then why are these spiders suddenly rushing toward the entrance we used? And why do they seem so desperate?"
"I don't know if you noticed," Muir said, "but not all the spiders on the ceiling are coming this way."
"I noticed," Ronin replied. "There are huge clusters gathering above the buildings near the walls. Anything farther out is too dark to see."
If there really was a path leading to the middle area, it was probably somewhere high on the ceiling or along the walls in the distance.
Still, unless it became absolutely necessary, Ronin had no desire to go into the middle passage.
From everything they had seen so far, that passage felt more like a monster paradise.
Near the conveyor belts by the withered trees, they had found plenty of bone fragments. Whatever flesh had been fed into those trees clearly hadn't been human.
Combined with the sheer number of spiders on the ceiling and the question of what they were actually eating, the most likely explanation was that somewhere inside these ruins there was a breeding ground or storage area for whatever "offerings" had been used to sustain the trees.