Jason's system began to work overtime.
He felt it the moment they burst through the shattered wall and into the winding passage—a strange, unfamiliar hum beneath his skin, like electricity coursing through his veins. But this wasn't because his body was rejecting whatever had been planted inside him.
It was because it was adapting to it.
The spiders born in this dungeon all listened to the queen. That much Jason had pieced together from the scattered fragments of conversation. The queen was the source. The hive mind. The command center.
All these things, he just knew, it was like they were synchronized in a twisted way.
If this spider—whatever had been inside that egg, whatever had hatched and somehow found its way into Jason—if it had the ability to adapt, to evolve, to learn from its environment... there was no telling what its limits would be.
But Jason didn't plan to find out.
-
When his eyes shot open, everyone froze.
