Chapter 81 Bloodbath Spider
Karl looked down at the egg. The Bloodbath Spider was an urban legend. They were an invasive predator from a nation to the East, and survived entirely on blood, like a mosquito. But unlike the common mosquito, they grew to the size of a small car and had mandibles that could tear through steel to get to what they wanted.
They were supposed to have been hunted to extinction, but it seemed that there were still some hiding out here in the wilderness.
Karl was still admiring the soft egg when the truck made an abrupt turn, circling back the way that they had arrived from, and Jodi increased his speed.
"You know that it is an egg, right? It's not hatched." Karl reminded the playboy.
"Yeah, you say that now, but where is mother Bloodbath? They lay their eggs on the strands of their web. If Hawk came back with a spider egg on him, he broke a strand of the web as he flew over to get the other egg.
They don't lay many eggs at a time because it would overpopulate an area too quickly, so they're probably going to be very protective." He replied, beginning to panic.
"The mother can bite through the armoured roof of this truck." Daniel whispered to Karl, explaining the situation more clearly.
They had four fully trained and high-ranking Elites, but precisely zero who fancied walking home after their car was demolished by a giant spider.
Karl moved the egg back into the secondary Beast Space. If they didn't find another option, this Bloodbath Spider hatchling would do very well.
It looked like the spider and the Lightning Cerro might be his only options if they were picking today because Jodi was headed straight back to town, and he wasn't even slowing down when they got near the river, where the other options on the original list should be.
As Hawk had done, the beast began to grow rapidly out of its awkward newborn phase, but the Cerro wasn't as helpless as a baby bird, and he was screaming for food already.
Karl focused, and found that he could move the creature to Hawk's space, but he felt like a visitor there. It wasn't his space, but the small prehistoric looking beast began to happily graze on the imaginary grass that Karl had made, and its body fleshed out with the influx of energy.
So, Karl kept adding more energy to the second space with the Bloodbath Spider egg, which was still growing and maturing.
"What are you up to? We're here." Alice asked.
"I need to focus. I think that the eggs can both be hatched and bonded." Karl muttered, not opening his eyes.
"Alright, just follow me to a hotel room and you can finish your work." Alice instructed as Jodi parked the truck.
The others went to talk to the staff, while Alice led Karl to a room, then closed and bolted the door while she waited there with him.
"If that spider hatches, and you can't bond it, you will need one of us here to keep you safe. It will be weaker than you, but they're fast, and they can dig inside the skin, which makes victims panic." She explained.
Karl hadn't considered that possibility. If he couldn't bond it, he likely couldn't keep it in that space either, but he wasn't sure that either he or Hawk could handle it running wild in the hotel room. A tiny spider running loose would be a nightmare to catch, but Alice was a mage, so she likely had some way to deal with it.
Karl forged ahead and kept the progress going on the spider egg in the secondary space, growing it to the size of a baseball, with a transparent membrane that held a large black spider inside. It was almost ready to hatch, and the space had been expanded by quite a bit, though the quality of it still seemed very low compared to the first space.
In retrospect, that was the wrong course of action. But Karl had no way of knowing that until the egg hatched, and the pain hit his mind.