Chapter 58: Frustrations

*** Warning: gore ***

"Are you jealous, Ian?"

"Me?" Ian scuffs, flabbergasted, "Why would I?" 

Inside, he feels a tingling sensation.

Ian looks at Kyrie's alluring eyes narrow, showing off playfully.

"You are not?" 

Ian prepares himself to be teased again, but he gets weirdly disappointed when their interaction gets interrupted by a high pitched sissy scream.

Eric screams while waving his hands up, jumping away from the three adventurers whose eyes flip back to hide their pupils. Tiny spiders crawl out by the millions, covering their human bodies by crowding against each other. 

Kyrie steps away at the same rhythm as everyone does. 

Erebus's shadow starts to move as it darkens. It wiggles on the ground and then shoots up, extending itself like a crashing wave of tainted water. It expands and moves towards the three tied up adventurers. Then, the shadow that turned three dimensional wipes away the tides of tiny spiders flooding the tunnel floors. The bodies of the three adventures are in sight again. However, their bodies soon get cover again by another tide of spiders that comes out.

The tide slowly comes out less dense by the second. Soon, only a couple of tiny spiders crawl out. 

The adventurers' bodies contort violently. Their throats expand and inflate like a balloon. The object inside moves up and down the throat as if it forces itself to move upwards against the constraints of a tiny exit.

Eight thin, stick-like, and hairy legs grab onto the skin around the adventurers' mouth. Their sharp ends dig into the skin. Then, a white looking sphere appears on the opened mouth. The white sphere clashes onto the row of teeth multiple times, but it is too big to go through the mouth. 

The creature stops like it is getting annoying. It moves back and forces itself out with a burst of energy. The adventurer's teeth get knocked out, flying from the force impact. A loud cracking sound reaches their ears. The adventurer facing them has his jaw entirely detached from his face - only dangling from the skin attached. 

The white thing turns out to be a skull. The skull has eight hairy legs like a spider. As it walks out, its steps leave behind some sort of slime. Then, two more cracks resonate on their ears. Two other similar creatures to this one come out of the other two adventurers.

"Skull faced spiders…" says Ian.

One of them jumps towards them but gets blocked by Ian with his sword. With a concrete exterior, the skull-faced spider only bounces away with a mark of a sword.

"These spiders exclude a weird fluid that could cause a person to go on a drunken state and make them act strangely! Don't touch them!" warns Ian.

Seeing that the rest of the group is not with Eric, most likely, they have also become fertile containers for these invasive creatures. Precisely that, more skull spiders arrive, moving as they pin their thin sharp legs on the ground, ticking like the keys of a typewriter. 

Kyrie turns his eyes towards the gods. All this time, the gods have barely done anything despite possessing the most power, often just relying on him and Ian to deal with the upcoming obstacles first. However, skull spiders are tricky. They spawn extremely fast once they get their eggs into a living body.

Phanes sighs while biting into the inner cheek of her mouth from the nerves. She feels so restrained despite being a god. She is watching how everything is unfolding, yet she has to stay restrained due to their laws not get involved too much with mortals' fates. The balance within fate is susceptible and sensitive. Her involvement this time with Kyrie and Ian will already get an earful when she returns to the god realm. She is not even supposed to interact with them, but here she is, interacting with them like she is a mortal herself.

She takes a step forwards.

"Phanes…" Erebus calls her.

Phanes looks at Erebus, and his eyes express that he understands what she is feeling. Still, her involvement will cause more significant problems. Erebus has already helped them by wiping out the majority of the tiny spiders.

Watching on the peripheral of his eyes, Kyrie is now sure that all gods indeed have the restraints that Yue mentioned. 

[Seems like we will have to deal with this on our own.]

Kyrie summons his sword again through his palm and draws it out. His body gets wrapped in a blue aura, and the air around him drops in temperature. Fog forms loosely around him. The ground he is standing on freezes, cracking from the cold.

On his side, Ian breathes out deeply and concentrates on his own mana. Zaps of electricity run over his body. His hair gently lifts. 

Then, both of them propel towards the army of spiders. One after the other, the spiders fall. They fall limp either from the electricity sending high pulse frequency by impairing the nervous system or crash frozen solid into the ground.

As they both take on a side, the army slowly decreases in number. In the middle of the fight, as they slay the spiders, their eyes meet from across the room for a brief second. 

Despite both are inside the crazy situation, they make sure that the other is okay.

Eric once again screams. This time, because he is getting chased by a skull spider and getting cornered to the wall. From all sides, spiders are coming at him. 

Ian abandons his position since he is almost done on his side and runs towards Eric who is struggling to keep himself from soiling his pants. He comes at the right time and knocks off a skull spider that almost got to Eric. 

He faces Eric, who sits on the ground, shaking. 

"Thank you…" Eric blurts out while trying to calm himself from the freight.

His eyes catch a skull spider that started to move once again, but his mouth gets tangled at the wrong moment. 

Ian frowns at Eric with confusion. 

Eric tries to straighten out his mouth and yells, "A…. a skull spider… over there!"

The skull spider jumps at Ian, whose back is turned away. 

When Ian turns back, the skull spider is already in the air spitting off that slime that so disgustingly drips off its body.

Erebus tightly grabs onto Phanes, whose body has already getting ready to propel towards Ian to save him. She looks at Erebus with widened eyes. What is all this power for if she cannot use it in critical times like this?

Ian looks at the fluid raining down on him, he prepares himself to face the slime's effects. However, his view blackens, and he crashes to the ground. His head bounces the cold floors hard. He feels the weight on top of his body.

"No…" He lets out a cry that cracked into a whine. The frustrations are squeezing out tears.

He wants to lift his arms to wrap around the body on top of him.

"Don't touch it…"