The calm that followed the whispers was not the reward Dex and Lumia received for their patience. It was a new and evolved form of organised, lethal dread. At this extreme depth of the Forbidden Zone, the beasts were no longer merely hungry, mutant creatures attacking with stupidity and savagery. They had become professional hunters, serial killers of nature possessing magical and biological capabilities that defied human logic and shattered the laws of physics.
While Dex advanced in measured strides, keeping Lumia behind him at a short distance to avoid any sudden frontal attack, he swept his surroundings left and right with the wariness of a seasoned prisoner who feared being stabbed in the back by those closest to him. His Phoenix-enhanced senses operated at full capacity, tracking every slight shift in the surrounding temperature.
But even as the Phoenix Core in his chest was pumping immense heat that made the air around him oscillate and shimmer like a desert mirage, he suddenly felt a strange and physically impossible phenomenon to occur under his aura.
He sensed a sharp, stinging, sudden cold course through the back of his neck, as though a needle of ice had been driven into his spinal cord. This was not cold from any drop in air temperature, and it was not the comfortable Celestial cold of Lumia's aura. It was the cold of void: a dark and terrifying sensation of imminent death's approach, the absolute emptiness that precedes the severing of the thread of life.
Dex did not wait to see the source of the threat. He did not turn to confirm it. The raw survival instinct forged by fifteen years of living on death's edge among the most hardened criminals, fused with the Phoenix Core's immediate sharp perception, screamed one word in his mind: clear, direct, unambiguous.
Move. Now.
Dex threw himself sideways in an acrobatic, spiralling dive, pulling Lumia by her wrist simultaneously to yank her clear of his trajectory. In the fraction of a second that followed his movement, a violent, extremely sharp tearing sound was heard, like the snapping of an enormous metal string stretched to its absolute limit.
The massive trunk that his shoulder had been leaning against moments before, thick as the wall of a stone fortress, sheathed in bark harder than steel, was split into two halves in a terrifying silence. It did not explode in splinters. The upper half simply slid slowly and fell to the ground, producing a tremendous crash.
There was no visible blade that had fallen from the sky. No massive beast that had appeared to strike with claws. Not even a beam of Mana. Only deep, straight gashes appearing suddenly in the space itself before cutting through the solid wood, from which seeped the smell of black, corrupt Mana and dried blood.
Dex rolled and settled on his feet, raising his blazing dagger, his blue eyes, now two burning embers, sweeping the void with lethal concentration in search of any visual distortion.
"A Shadow Spider… Rank B−… and perhaps higher given the density of this zone," Dex whispered through clenched teeth, cold sweat mingling with the heat of fire on his face.
This beast was a genuine nightmare for legendary adventurers and elite knights alike. The Shadow Spider did not rely on simple visual camouflage like a chameleon changing colour. It possessed a complex and lethal magical ability called Spectral Reflection. This ability allowed the creature to fuse its magical and biological frequency entirely with the dark Mana frequency of the surrounding forest. The result: the creature became entirely invisible to the human eye, to ordinary magical senses that relied on reading Mana flow, and even to biological radar. It existed physically, but it erased its trace from the spatial awareness of the forest. And its attacks relied on weaving Shadow Threads: filaments thinner than a human hair, invisible, but sharp as sword blades, which it extended through the passages to sever its prey without drawing near.
Lumia stood directly behind Dex's back, sheltering within his fire. For the first time since they had met, visible confusion showed in her delicate features, and her brows drew together in perplexity. Her customary Celestial aura, which had just moments ago been capable of spreading existential terror in the hearts of tigers and forcing their submission, appeared to be entirely ineffective here.
The reason was catastrophically simple: the Shadow Spider was a creature that existed in the absolute nothingness of shadows, a being devoid of the ordinary biological soul that could be frightened. Lumia's aura was broadcasting waves of cosmic terror, but to the spider those waves registered as nothing more than an empty space, a void lacking life. Lumia's absolute defensive advantage had been rendered completely inoperative. The creature was not defying her primal dread or resisting it with courage. It was simply bypassing it because it was not registered as a conscious material presence in the sensing network of the forest or the Celestials.
"Lumia! Do not move an inch! Stay extremely close to the centre of my fire!" Dex ordered in a sharp voice, feeling the Mana pressure intensify around them, the killing cold approaching and receding in circular patterns.
He knew with absolute certainty that the spider was watching from somewhere in this open void, hanging in the air by its invisible threads or pressed against a tree trunk, waiting for the fatal moment when its adversary blinked, or the moment the Phoenix fire dimmed for an instant. A lizard or a tiger attacked with its body and risked drawing close. The Shadow Spider used Shadow Threads capable of cutting through matter and energy alike from a safe distance.
The air around them was whistling at a barely audible pitch, the result of those cutting threads passing through the air as the creature wove them tighter, contracting the noose. Every rustle of a branch, every falling leaf, sounded like the beginning of the killing strike that would separate their heads from their bodies.
Dex understood, his mind working at speeds beyond sound as it calculated probabilities, that continuing in passive defence and waiting was slow and certain suicide. The place was the creature's arena, its web was closing, and time was working entirely in its favour to bleed out the Phoenix energy. He had to find a way, any inventive, desperate way, to materialise this ghost and expose its position in the void: either by using the density of his fire to burn the threads and trace their source, or by using his own blood as sensory bait. If he failed to do so in the next few minutes, they would end up as neatly severed pieces, scattered like cheap feed across the floor of this merciless, cursed forest.