ALL NOVEL Chapter 13 – 8 Legs
It was early morning. The thick, green grass field was still wet from the previous night, and the air was a bit chilly as the sun's first rays barely shone above the horizon, slowly trying to climb above the distant layer of white clouds. Koa and Lia were constantly yawning, walking behind Aurora, arriving at the thick forest's edge north of the Academy. The part they were heading to was dominated by beech trees, and the ground was turned into a sea of purple by the many lavenders growing around the trees. They left the dormitory when it was still dark, woken up by Aurora, and ushered to get moving as soon as possible so they could finish before noon.
"It is rare to see you like this." Aurora wrote, looking back at Lia, who was wearing knee-high boots, leather trousers, and a white shirt with an adventurer's vest. "And I mean, being sleepy." She added, watching her barely open eyes and messy, unkempt hair.
"Because I barely slept…." She moaned, "The simple thought of today gave me the creeps!"
"Agreed!" Koa added, dressed and looking similarly to her cousin. The only big difference was she had a belt around her waist, filled with bug sprays for some reason.
"Haahh… You two are completely unfit for the adventurer life!" Aurora said, making Lia flinch, as she always wanted to be one, just like her mom was. She had to admit Aurora was way more fit for the role at that moment. She was already dressed in combat boots, pants, and a military-like vest, ready to go when the duo was still trying to hide under their blankets. "Sooner or later, you two will also be sent out. It is inevitable, so get used to it!" Aurora stopped after entering the forest, walking past the massive trees. Watching them, she now looked like a unit commander, displaying her aura of a soldier. Lia tried rubbing her eyes, straightening her posture, and listening to her as she did look up at her sister.
"I was once almost sent to the 4th early," Koadriana said, yawning. "I know everyone goes there at least for a year... Eh..."
"You wouldn't last a day as you are now," Aurora replied, and Koa did not dispute it at all, nodding at her words. "Look at me; I am not even from the bloodline of Amarin! If others saw you now, they wouldn't believe it!" She shook her head, "There are duties that you must fulfill. Even if you don't want to. That is what comes with the name."
"You are just as much an Amarin as we!" Lia said quickly and with a loud voice.
"Yeah, can't argue with that!" Koadriana nodded, "Hell, you are more Amarin than me!" She stuck her tongue out, making Aurora chuckle.
"Thanks~" she wrote into the air while smiling, "We are close by!" She switched topics quickly, raising her hand and displaying the map of their area. "By the information that I received from the Mission Hall, our target is a nest in the deeper part of this chunk of the forest. It is spring, and the spiders are making their nests around this time to lay their eggs. The supervisor of the forest, Miss Ceiline, had already scouted ahead and marked all the locations of nests for the Mission Hall." She explained, pinpointing it on their maps. By the measurements of the system, they were a few hundred meters away from it. "Our target here should contain a pair. The female one should be in the middle of laying her eggs while the male guards it."
"Brr…" Koa grumbled but kept reading her messages, not wanting to interrupt her. Aurora had the most battle experience in their group, and defaulting to her as their leader was natural.
"Spiders are usually active through the night and right before sunrise."
"..." Koa and Lia looked at each other, and before they could open their mouths, Aurora had already answered the coming question.
"You need battle experience. Both of you. That is why I wanted to come as soon as possible! We are going to face two of them. I'll take care of one; you go and deal with the other! It shouldn't pose too big of a problem if they let 1st-year students take the mission!"
"Haaah!" Koa sighed, giving up and just nodding, while Lia raised her hand as if she was in class.
"What kind of spider are we talking about?" She asked.
"Simple, normal ground spiders," Aurora answered, already leading them further into the forest, sending over images through their bracelets.
"Ew!" Lia and Koa said simultaneously, watching its sticky hair and elongated features.
"They should be around 2 meters tall, not any bigger. The school heavily regulates the land here, so... There shouldn't be any bigger versions around us!"
"There are…bigger ones?" Lia asked, gulping loudly, closing her projection, and feeling all the hair standing up on the back of her neck.
"Yeah." Aurora nodded, writing in the air behind her with the end of her ponytail. "My squad once ran into a group of trapdoor spiders…." She looked over her shoulder before continuing to write, silently sighing, "They were twice the normal size, and I lost two comrades that day."
"..." The duo gulped, looking at each other before making sure their senses were sharpened to the maximum, preparing for anything.
They did not have to walk for too long to notice the weird noises coming from deeper in. It was like the sound of scurrying insects running around the shrubs surrounding the forest floor. Under the shades of the thick canopy of the trees, it was still dark and cold, but the girls shivered because of the nasty sounds traveling into their ears. Being mages, their senses were much sharper than normal humans, already picking up and identifying their source.
"Mask your mana flow!"
Aurora wrote, sneaking forward, jumping up without noise, and easily landing on a thick branch. Koa and Lia followed suit, trying to imitate her elegant and quick moves, but they still made subtle noises when doing so. Looking forward, they could see a giant, hairy, brown spider, making its webbing between two trees, walking in circles while laying it down. It produced a weird, squelching sound, pushing its sticky silk out of its spinneret.
"Where is the other?" Lia asked, writing through her bracelet.
"Probably close by. Maybe where their nest is, guarding the eggs." Aurora answered, "I'll go, find it and eliminate that! You deal with this one!" She wrote back, suddenly turning into a shadow, disappearing from the branch.
As soon as she did so, the big spider stopped, raising its front pair of legs like antennas, scanning for the sudden fluctuation it caught onto. It didn't take long before it noticed Koa and Lia, very quickly turning around and shooting a sticky string of web at them.
"Damn it! She did that on purpose!" Koa cried out, jumping away toward the left while Lia dodged to the right.
"For sure!" Lia agreed, also annoyed, raising her hand with an open palm, shooting out fireballs, hitting the new, incoming webbings of the spider in the air, aiming perfectly while dodging.
"I hate the noise it makes!" Koa added, feeling creeped out by its weird cries and the sound of its sticky projectiles leaving its abdomen.
Concentrating, she summoned the water from the earth below them. As two magic circles appeared around her arms, she swiped them upwards, and from below the spider, two blades of water flew up, cutting its giant web apart. As soon as it was disconnected from the trees, the spider fell to the ground, which had completely dried up because of Koa's spell. Lia was already ready, as if they had worked together for years. Clapping, behind her back, a red magic circle appeared, spinning as she summoned blazing hor fire, forming a circle around the spider on the ground. The beast released painful screams as some of its legs caught on fire while trying to flip itself from its back that it landed on, and Lia was working hard to engulf its body in flames, not giving it a chance to flee. The spider, in desperation, quickly shot out a long strand of webbing, latching it onto another tree and pulling itself out from the flames, trying to escape.
"Don't let it go!" Lia shouted, waving her hands, collecting her fire, forming a hand out of it, and grabbing after the beast.
"I won't!" Koa answered, already casting a new spell, collecting the dew from the trees, forming another blade, and cutting away the spider's web once again. Inside her head, she couldn't help but curse Aurora as she realized why they came so early, drawing a smile onto her face.
Being this far from any body of water was a weakness of hers. Yet, at this exact moment, there was enough moisture in the air, on the grass, and on the trees that she could easily manipulate and fight normally with her proficiency over the element of water. If they arrive at noon, everything would be much drier, and her spells would cost her much more mana to cast, creating water where there is none. When the blade cut away the string, the spider was once again falling towards the ground, right into the 'hand' of Lia.
"Gotcha!" She shouted, clapping, holding her palms together as the flaming hand did the same, catching the beast. As soon as it landed in it, the intensity of the fire turned up, doubling its strength and drawing out bone-chilling screams from the spider. There was no chance for it to escape this time as it was killed, consumed by Lia's fire.
Its death was clean, leaving behind only ashes. Lia only turned off her spell and stopped the consumption of her mana when nothing remained of the spider. It was also why every adventurer group had at least two people capable of wielding fire, if not more. Many of those mages who managed to master more than one element and were aiming to travel the continent, more often than not, picked fire as their second option. Leaving behind corpses was a big sin and was branded as an act of terrorism.
While the duo killed off their spider, Aurora had already found her target. It did not take long for her to find the nest in the shades of multiple beech trees that were growing close together. The spider guarding it was a bit smaller but way more aggressive because of its eggs. It launched itself forward, attacking Aurora as soon as she emerged from the shadows.
The beast raised the front of its body, rubbing its multiple legs together, making its fur let out a metallic ring before being fired out. Yet Aurora was faster than the spider. Its attack hit nothing but only Aurora's shadow as she danced around them effortlessly with a long, curved blade held in her right hand. It was letting off a black mist formed of pure mana, ruffling the spider's senses and disturbing its mind. With her free hand, Aurora shot out her own 'web,' attaching it to the raised torso of the spider and pulling herself forward like a bullet.
By the time the spider realized what was happening, Aurora was arriving before it, sliding along the wet ground, going right under the beast. She used her increased momentum to slip by under it with her raised sword, cutting the beast wide open and letting its gross intestines spill onto the forest's floor. She was unbothered by the scene and the stench, sliding out at the other end of the spider and standing up leisurely. She was watching its tumbling body collapse, already dead. After no tiny spiders jumped out of the corpse, she just shook herself, dispelling her sword and looking towards the nest, seeing the hundreds of tiny eggs ready to hatch at any moment.
"Aurora!" Shouted Lia, sounding proud and happy after defeating their spider, arriving with Koa in tow.
"Uwaaa… this stinks!" Koa moaned, holding her nose, watching the female beast lying in its spilled-out guts.
"I'll clean it up!" Lia laughed, snapping her fingers, spewing out fireballs, lighting them up, and turning the dead spider into ash.
"After it's gone, torch the nest too!" Aurora wrote, watching them with a slight smile, nodding. "See? I told you all this is going to be quick~."
"Well… it wasn't THAT bad…." Koa murmured, unable to deny that it was kinda exciting doing something like this.
"It is a great way of keeping yourself fit!" Aurora replied, stretching, as this was truly nothing more than a light exercise for her.
The only one who felt a bit exhausted after they were done was Lia, as she used up the most mana, burning away everything. Yet by the time they were heading back to the school grounds, she was bouncing at the front, skipping happily in the warm sunlight.
"We are going to come across an outpost soon," Aurora sent over a message to them, checking her map. "It says Miss Ceiline is there. It would be best if we reported our mission to her directly. We are from the House of Amarin; it would be cordial to introduce ourselves."
"I'm in!" Shouted Lia towards them from the front, waving her hand. "I never met with others who are as cool as us! I am curious!"
"Cool as us?" Koadriana laughed, shaking her head, "Well, ain't that something?"
"Well…" Aurora, wearing a small, proud smile, wrote, "Our family can be considered the Number 1 with Lady Reyra at the helm… If I had to rank the House of Nerifit, I'd say… Number 4?"
"Like it is that easy!" Koadriana smiled, "When you start to establish rankings, problems start rearing their heads!"
"Yet you ranked every classmate of ours by how good-looking they are." Aurora wrote back, looking at Koadriana with one eye. "I saw your notes when you wrote them."
"Tsk… that is different!" She rolled her eyes, not even denying it. "You get what I'm saying!"
"Who is the first?!" Lia asked, suddenly appearing before them, making the two almost fall over her.
"Me, of course!" Koa answered proudly.
"But your boobs are not the biggest!" Lia countered, raising an eyebrow.
"Hey!" Koa flared up while Aurora silently laughed at her. "I am ranking us by an overall score! It has to be perfectly put together! You have to be aesthetically desirable on all fronts! Like our teacher's jugs, those big mommy milkers are not the be-all and end-all!"
"Aurora…" Lia whispered, covering her lips, but of course, Koadriana could hear it, looking into the little pipsqueak's mismatched eyes. "Wouldn't that put Koa into the middle of the bunch? She is too tall! She is like a breadstick!"
"You little-!" Koa yelped, starting to chase Lia, who was laughing, running away, once again, full of energy, racing against Koa until they arrived at the Academy's small outpost, not that far from the city.
First, some images I tried to make about the Institute of Eight Elements, our floating Academy~ Don't forget it is around as big as England in the story!
I know, it is not perfect, far from it... but it is something at least~ Commissioning art is expensive and I burnt myself three times in a row just a month or two ago. So, this AI image creation thingy is super handy~ And waaaay cheaper.
Aaaaanyway! The next batch is going to be a random cityscape. I did not decide what kind of city are we talking about yet... but if you want, one of these can be the same city, built next to the Academy!
Next, I was trying to see what it gives back if I try to prompt our AI Overlord to create battlefields. It was a hit and miss but I like the aesthetics of the images.
And now to the castle pictures. Take your pick!
