Rinerva walked through the hellscape that had once been the Lower City.

  It was silent. Perfectly, oppressively silent.

  There were no screams. No crying. No begging for mercy. There were no rats skittering in the alleys, but the crows were out in force.

  There was just the wind, whistling mournfully through the miles of thick, crisscrossing strands of silk that draped between the buildings like ash. And, beneath the wind, the soft, heavy thump-thump-thump of the cocoons bumping against each other as they swayed in the breeze.

  The silk wasn't white. It was a rusty, dried copper in the moonlight.

  Rinerva knew Lillik was dangerous—she’d seen examples of it firsthand in other jobs—but she was so used to the image of the Spider quietly grinding herbs and mixing potions in the background while Rinerva schemed. She was used to the professor. The alchemist.

  This… this was not the Lillik’zeil she knew. This was something ancient and starving.

  Rinerva held the bubbling potion tightly in one hand, her knuckles white, while her eyes scanned the darkness for any trace of movement or mana.

  She had obeyed the request to leave Talos and Nomi at the inn. Now, walking through the silent graveyard of the district, she understood why. Nomi would have broken seeing this.

  Rinerva wasn’t walking into a battlefield. She was walking into a larder.

  Whatever Thralls and Loyalists had been stationed here, they hadn't stood a chance. This wasn't a fight; it was a harvest.

  Every few blocks, Rinerva would pass a house that had been converted into a temporary nest. She saw the remains of barricades—tables, pews, iron bars—sundered. She saw the twisted limbs of Bat Mutants tangled in the webs, frozen in expressions of screaming terror. They had desperately tried to fight off the spider, tried to pry it out of the lower city.

  From the looks of it, none of them had lasted more than a few seconds.

  Rinerva paused.

  Ahead, in the center of an intersection, a massive shape was bundled in thick, shrouding silk.

  Her breath hitched.

  It was a spider. Massive. Bulbous.

  For a terrifying second, she thought Lillik had fallen. That the numbers had finally overwhelmed her. Rinerva drew closer, the potion trembling in her hand. Then she saw the truth, the anatomy was wrong. Too many legs, curled tightly into its chest. The chitin was a mottled, sickly green, not Lillik’s obsidian black. An over-mutated abomination. A guardian of the cult.

  But it was… deflated.

  The exoskeleton was cracked open. The insides were gone.

  It had been hollowed out and consumed.

  Rinerva shuddered involuntarily, a wave of nausea rolling through her. Lillik hadn't just killed the competition. She had eaten it.

  She pushed deeper.

  The webs grew thicker and thicker as she neared the center of the district, converging on a massive cathedral. The structure had once been a temple to the Lady of Mist, then remodeled to worship Carmilla.

  Now, it had been reshaped once more. It was a temple to the monster that had wiped out a third of the Lower City.

  Rinerva didn't step on the silk. She knew better. She summoned frost, freezing the strands instantly upon contact, deadening the vibrations as she walked over the sticky, red carpet.

  She stood at the entrance to the nave.

  A disgusting, wet crunching sound echoed from overhead.

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  Rinerva’s eyes turned up to the vaulted ceiling.

  There, in the center of the darkness, the obsidian black spider hung inverted. She was holding a half-eaten body in her front limbs. The victim’s legs were still twitching, jerking rhythmically as the digestive acid injected into the torso made the nerves misfire. It was illuminated by a single half covered stained glass window, the light shining off the black carapace, more shadow than form.

  The human eyes on Lillik’s face were shut tight. She was lost in the feeding.

  But the Spider felt the presence.

  The massive arachnid paused.

  It stared down with its cluster of unblinking, black eyes.

  The spider eyes tracked the intruder instinctively. Then, slowly, the human eyes opened.

  They blinked, clearing the fog of instinct. They looked at the half-devoured corpse held in her own claws. They looked at the cocoons—almost a hundred of them—hanging from the ceiling like grim ornaments.

  Then, they looked down at Rinerva.

  The creature looked horrified.

  The corpse dropped from her claws, hitting the stone floor with a squelch. Lillik recoiled, curling her legs in, trying to hide her face, trying to shrink away from the witness. It took time, but then the monster started moving. She made her way slowly down the walls, moving not with the speed of a predator, but with the jerky hesitant movements of something in pain. She reached the floor and skittered toward Rinerva, her human eyes wide and pleading.

  The Mage hesitated. The smell of acid and old blood was overpowering.

  But she didn't step back.

  Rinerva held out the bubbling potion.

  Lillik snatched the vial with trembling, multi-jointed claws. She downed the bubbling liquid in a single, desperate gulp.

  The empty glass slipped from her grasp. It didn't shatter. It landed with a soft thud, sticking fast in the rusty red glue of the silk.

  Lillik shuddered violently, her limbs jerking as the alchemy went to war with her biology. Bones groaned, and the massive thorax seemed to deflate slightly as the pressure receded.

  “...My... click-click-click... cloak.”

  Her voice came back from the potion, raspy and broken, but the look in her human eyes remained wild. Haunted. Rinerva stepped forward, unfolding the heavy wool she had carried through the slaughterhouse.

  “Is she dead?” Rinerva asked, her voice tight. “Jiang?”

  Lillik looked down at her own hands—hands that were still stained to the elbows.

  “...Consumed.”

  Rinerva felt the bile rise in her throat again, but she swallowed it down. She handed the Spider her cloak.

  Lillik snatched it, wrapping the heavy dark wool around herself immediately, pulling it tight, pulling the hood low. As if the fabric could hide her from the victims hanging above them.

  Rinerva stared at the huddled shape. A scholar. An alchemist. A healer. Reduced to a monster. Reduced to exactly the kind of beast the world thought she was, but that she had never actually been. Until tonight.

  Rinerva’s gut twisted with guilt. With self-loathing.

  But they were alive.

  And Jiang was dead.

  Was this the price of her ambition?

  The question sat heavy in Rinerva's mind, outweighing the victory, as the monster shivered in the dark, surrounded by the silence she had made.

  “Nomi,” she rasped. The clicking sound was receding, replaced by ragged breathing. “She is… healthy? Safe?”

  “She’s… she is worried about you,” Rinerva admitted, her voice low. “She could smell the blood from the inn. Even I could smell it from the Mid-City. But she’s holding herself together. She spends a lot of time with Talos.”

  “Talos… He is recovered?”

  “Yes, Zeil. The withdrawals are hard, but he’s doing well. Everyone is healthy.”

  “Good.”

  Lillik’zeil stared down at her hands. They were caked in dried, flaky darkness. The blood of a hundred people. The blood of a Prophet.

  “Can I afford…” Her voice trembled, small and terrified in the dark cathedral. “Can I afford to break?”

  Rinerva looked at the shivering shape. She wanted to say yes. She wanted to tell her to scream, to weep, to wash the sin away with tears. But Carmilla was watching. The mission wasn't over. They were still in the dark.

  “No.”

  Rinerva spoke the word softly, but it landed like a stone. Lillik let out a shuddering breath. She looked up at the Mage, her human eyes wide and wet.

  “How are you so calm?”

  It wasn't just a question. It was an accusation. It was disgust. Rinerva looked at the carnage around them—the webs, the husks, the desecrated temple. She looked at her own steady hands and felt… nothing. She cared nothing for these people. They were not her responsibility. Most were likely enemies anyway—fanatics who would have killed them without hesitation. They were just obstacles, removed from the board. She felt only for the damage to the spider.

  “...I don’t know.”

  She reached out, hovering her hand over Lillik’s shoulder for a moment, before letting it drop. This was her fault. She was the monster. But how would she explain that to the spider coated in viscera?

  “Come. We need to get you cleaned up.”