Convergence: Eclipse Chapter 5: Chapter 5: Matriarch

Read chapter 5 of Convergence: Eclipse by J.L.Hollingwell on NovelPedia.

Fire. Fire cook food, fire good. Fire burn hands, fire bad. Fire burn attackers, fire good. Fire burn attacker’s homes… fire very good. Orc Chieftain Bront Badland For the next day and a half, Laurie hunted spiders like a man possessed. At first, he just observed, stalking through the shadows, trying to work out how many spiders there were, how they moved, where they hid. He didn’t want to end up overwhelmed by a swarm. He quickly realised (with no small amount of relief) that although there were plenty of them, the spiders seemed to be solitary creatures, each one patrolling its own little territory within the webwood. Once he had determined that, it was easy enough to identify the most opportune moments for an ambush - when to strike as they scuttled over the grass, or when to throw a carefully timed rock to knock them out of their trees. As he moved deeper into the forest the spiders increased from level 3 to level 4; each fight was now longer and carried more danger then the last. Though the level 4 spiders were larger and moved faster, they were thankfully less numerous, giving him more time to recover between fights. Laurie started to cover his feet in shadows as he crept about; it muffed the sounds of his steps and meant that he left no footprints, but it meant his mana took longer to recover. It was an addictive process; Laurie found himself craving the rush of energy that came from each kill and moved relentlessly from fight to fight until his mana was too low to continue. Luckily, he had avoided any serious damage. He had taken a few bites here and there, and he had ended up sacrificing his cloak entirely, keeping only the hood, using the rest for bandages. Laurie’s third day in the webwood found him wandering between the trees, in search of yet more prey. He had spent all day feeling as though he must be close to a second level-up and wanted to push on for just one more kill to see if that would tip him over the edge, but he hadn’t seen a spider for nearly an hour. In the trees ahead, Laurie glimpsed a swathe of white and headed cautiously toward it. It was a wide stripe of web, but thicker and denser than before - it looked almost like a wall. Laurie crept forward and, as quietly as he could, being careful not to disturb anything, inspected the wall. It was about ten feet high and stretched as far as he could see in either direction. There were little gaps he could see through, but although he could just about make out a clearing immediately behind the wall, he couldn’t see anything in any great detail. Night fell, quickly, as it always did, the sun abruptly going veiled and dim. He walked alongside the wall for a while, trying to see if there was a way past. He kept a careful eye out for spiders lurking in the trees or undergrowth as he did so, but nothing moved. Eventually, Laurie found a tree with a long, low branch that intruded over the top of the web. He braced himself for the climb, but found himself moving confidently from foothold to handhold, scampering up the tree without any trouble at all. He peered over the wall and saw a large, circular clearing, with a large tree at the centre. It was the same type of tree as the others, with pale bark, and strange branches that looked like sprouting hands, all covered in red flower-buds, but it was the tallest he had ever seen - at least a hundred feet. He noticed that there was an odd mound near its base. Laurie sat frozen on the branch and scanned the tree and the clearing carefully. He had seen nothing else like this since arriving in the Starting Zone and was unsure what it meant. It’s got to be something bad though, hasn’t it - that one tree, right in the middle? It’s too suspicious. It’s got to be a trap, surely? I should just go and find somewhere to sleep… Laurie’s curiosity won out; he had three quarters of his mana left and had a strong strategy for tackling the spiders. He was confident he could deal with another spider, if one was in there. Maybe even t