Dawn came but to Bai, hanging in the darkness with dried blood on his face and hope running thin, the arrival of visibility felt like a thunderclap announcing disaster.
He'd stayed awake all night.
Kept rocking. Kept reaching. Managed to hook one finger around the broken piece of beetle exoskeleton and drag it close enough to press against the webbing around his waist.
Then began sawing.
Back and forth. Tiny movements, barely perceptible, creating friction against silk stronger than rope. His finger ached. The chitin edge was sharp enough to cut his skin when his grip slipped, mixing fresh golden blood with the dried remnants of yesterday's wounds.
But he'd made progress.
One strand weakened. Another partially severed. He could feel the webbing around his waist loosening fractionally, could sense freedom approaching one microscopic sawing motion at a time.
And then the nest woke.
Screeches filled the air. Hundreds of them, overlapping, creating a cacophony that made thought difficult and focus nearly impossible. Insects poured from burrows he hadn't known existed. Spiders and beetles, small ones and medium-sized ones, flooding the chamber in a tide of chittering exoskeletons.
The day's activity had begun.
And apparently, he was breakfast.
He gave one final saw against the webbing.
The strand snapped.
He dropped, didn't go far, the other strands held, lowering him partially but not freeing him completely. But it was enough. He twisted in the remaining webbing, tore at it with hands that were still half-numb, pulled with strength born of desperation rather than power.
More strands broke.
He hit the ground.
The impact drove air from his lungs. His legs buckled, the paralysis hadn't worn off completely, his muscles weren't responding properly. But he forced himself upright anyway, forced himself to move, to run, to do anything except stay in this chamber where hundreds of insects were converging on his location.
He ran toward the opposite side of the nest.
Away from the acidic pools, away from the webbing, toward what looked like another tunnel entrance. If he could get out of this chamber, if he could find the exit—
His left leg plunged through the floor. But it wasn't solid ground, instead a covered burrow. A pit trap disguised with a thin layer of stone and debris, invisible until weight was applied and the covering collapsed.
Bai fell deeper.
Insects swarmed over him immediately. Beetles with metallic shells and acid-spraying mandibles. Smaller spiders with paralytic bites. All of them tearing at his flesh, injecting venom, trying to subdue prey that had escaped and needed to be recaptured.
Golden blood sprayed across chitin shells.
His regeneration tried to activate and failed. He was beyond his limits, body exhausted, concept depleted, no reserves left to fuel the healing that might have saved him.
A purple web descended from above.
The matriarch.
She'd been watching.
The purple strand wrapped around his legs. Paralytic venom flooded his system, concentrated, overwhelming, turning his limbs to dead weight.
He collapsed.
Beetles tore at his flesh. Their mandibles couldn't pierce his divine existence durability easily, but they didn't need to, they just kept tearing, kept biting, kept working at the same spots until golden blood began flowing freely.
He was going to die here.
But his hands still worked.
One of the beetles was directly on top of him, mandibles clamped onto his shoulder. Their acid came from a sac in the abdomen. He drove his fingers into the beetle's underside.
The exoskeleton was softer there, vulnerable to direct pressure from above or below. His fingers punched through with more force than he'd known he still possessed. They found the sac. Closed around it. Tore it free.
The beetle screeched and tried to pull away.
But he held on.
He ripped the acid sac completely out of the beetle's body, its yellow ichor mixing with the corrosive fluid, creating a volatile combination in his hand.
Then he threw it at the nearest spider.
The sac burst on impact. Acid splashed across the spider's eyes and mandibles. The creature recoiled, screeching, its defensive instincts overriding everything else.
It attacked the beetles around it.
Chaos erupted.
The beetles responded to the spider's aggression by spraying their own acid, defensive secretions meant to deter predators, released in panic by creatures that suddenly found themselves under attack from supposed allies.
The spiders reacted in turn.
The matriarch's children, sensing their siblings in danger, turned on the beetles. The symbiotic relationship that had existed between the two species, spiders providing webs and paralysis, beetles creating acidic pools for shared hunting, shattered in seconds.
Bai crawled away from the melee.
His legs weren't working. The purple web's venom had done its job too well. But his arms still functioned marginally, and he used them now to drag himself across the floor, pulling his dead-weight lower body behind him.
The fighting intensified.
Beetles swarmed the spider offspring. Their acid began taking effect, chitin dissolving, internal fluids leaking, young spiders dying by the dozens as their armor proved insufficient against the concentrated assault.
The matriarch screeched.
A rage-call. The sound of a creature watching its children die and responding with absolute violence.
She descended into the melee.
Her massive form crashed into the beetle swarm. Mandibles snapped shut on beetle after beetle, crushing them, tearing them apart. Her legs swept through clusters of insects, sending them flying.
But there were hundreds of beetles.
And they'd gone berserk.
Acid sprayed from every direction. The matriarch's exoskeleton resisted initially, hardened by age, reinforced by countless successful hunts. But volume overcame durability. Layer by layer, her armor began dissolving. Golden-green ichor leaked from wounds that shouldn't have been possible to inflict.
She killed dozens. Hundreds. But they kept coming.
Bai reached an acidic pool.
He paused at its edge, staring at the green luminescence, at the liquid that had been dissolving his flesh since he first entered this nest.
Behind him, the matriarch's screeches were weakening. The battle was reaching its conclusion. The beetles would win through sheer numbers and accumulated acid damage.
And then they would remember him.
Would hunt down the prey that had caused this disaster.
He looked at the acid, then at the carnage behind him, then back at the acid.
This was insane.
He rolled into the pool.
The pain was immediate and absolute.
His skin began melting. Instantly, flesh liquefying on contact with concentrated acid. Golden blood mixed with the pool's contents, creating swirls of luminescence that pulsed with dying runes.
His regeneration tried to activate.
Failed.
Tried again.
Failed.
His body had nothing left. No reserves. No fuel for healing. Just the stubborn refusal to die that characterized divine existences at his stage, consciousness persisting even as the physical form broke down, awareness continuing until the final moment when existence itself gave up.
His vision blurred.
He could hear the matriarch's screeching grow weaker. Could hear the beetles' triumphant chittering as their enemy fell. Could hear his own flesh dissolving, the sizzle of acid eating through divine existence durability that had seemed so strong compared to mortals but was pathetically weak compared to what hunted in dead realms.
The matriarch's screeching stopped.
He opened his eyes.
The matriarch had collapsed. Her massive form lay still, half-dissolved, ichor pooling beneath her. The beetles swarmed over her corpse, already beginning the process of consumption that would sustain their hive for days.
They'd won.
And they'd forgotten about him.
He dragged himself out of the acid pool.
His skin was gone. Most of it. What remained hung in strips from exposed muscle, golden blood flowing freely from wounds that covered nearly every part of his body. His regeneration was still offline. His consciousness was fading.
But he was alive.
Somehow.
He crawled toward a crevice in the wall, a covered location, somewhere the beetles wouldn't immediately see him. Somewhere he could hide while his body tried desperately to heal, to recover, to do anything except die.
His vision went black.
His regeneration failed completely.
And he lost consciousness.