The silence after the rat's demise was heavier and more profound than before. It was a weighted silence, thick with the presence of the hunter below. Leo pulled Evelyn further back onto the landing of the 35th floor, his mind a whirlwind of panicked calculations. Every option felt like a different path to the same grim end.
"A spider," Evelyn whispered, her voice trembling despite her effort to control it. "God, I hate spiders."
"It's not a spider," Leo whispered back, the information from the System providing a cold, unwelcome clarity. "It's a Stalk-Weaver. The web is the trap, the creature is the killer. It's sensitive to sound and light. We can't go down there."
"So we go back up?" she countered, her practical nature reasserting itself through the fear. "Clear a floor and find another way?"
"Go back up ten floors we know nothing about?" Leo considered it. It was a logical choice, but his instincts screamed against it. The stairwell felt like a narrow, vertical coffin. They'd been lucky so far, but their luck wouldn't last. They needed to get out of this chute. They needed lateral movement. "No. We can't stay in the stairwell. It's a funnel. We're exposed from above and below."
He pointed to the heavy steel door of the 35th-floor landing. "We go through here. Now."
They slipped through the door, closing it as softly as humanly possible behind them, plunging themselves back into the dim, red-glow of a deserted office floor. This one was different. It was an open-plan layout, a sea of cubicles stretching out under the emergency lighting. Papers were scattered everywhere, chairs were overturned—the signs of a panicked, sudden exodus.
Evelyn immediately moved to a nearby window, her risk-analyst brain automatically seeking data. She peered out, her body tense. "This is bad. The street… it's worse now. More of them. Bigger ones."
Leo joined her, looking down at the nightmare unfolding below. Evelyn was right. The chaos had… organized. Smaller creatures, like the Skitterers, now seemed to move in packs, herding panicked humans while larger, more grotesque abominations acted as living tanks. The world was being systematically conquered. His sister Sarah, in her hospital, felt impossibly far away.
The sight solidified his resolve. There was no waiting this out. There was no rescue coming. The only way was forward.
"The web is a problem," Leo said, turning from the window. "We can't go down, but we need to. The security office is our goal."
"How can we possibly get past that thing?" Evelyn asked, her gaze sweeping the empty office. "We'd have to be invisible."
Leo's eyes followed her gaze, but he wasn't seeing the same things. She saw empty desks and ergonomic chairs. He saw resources. His mind, now tuned to a strange frequency of janitorial pragmatism and System-logic, began to connect disparate elements.
He saw the large, five-gallon water cooler jugs, still mostly full, sitting on several desks. He saw the fire extinguishers mounted on the walls. He saw the thick, black electrical cables for the server racks, snaking across the floor.
And in his inventory, he had two full sacs of Skitterer acid.
A plan, audacious and utterly insane, began to form in his mind. It was a Rube Goldberg machine of desperation, a solution only a janitor could have conceived.
"We don't go through the web," Leo said, a strange light in his eyes. "We destroy it. And the weaver with it."
He walked over to one of the cubicles and retrieved a small, metal wastebasket. Then he walked to the water cooler, and to Evelyn's confusion, began to carefully pour the water out onto the carpeted floor. He emptied the entire five-gallon jug.
"What are you doing? Making another mess?"
"I'm making a bucket," Leo said. He then took out one of the plastic bottles containing the Skitterer acid sac. It pulsed with a faint, sickly green light. He carefully lowered it into the now-empty water jug. Then he did the same with the second acid sac and a second jug. He now had two heavy, sloshing, makeshift bombs.
"Acid isn't enough," he muttered to himself. "It's a predator. It will just move."
He looked at Evelyn. "I need your help. We need cable. All of it."
For the next twenty minutes, they worked in a feverish, silent partnership. They unplugged computers, printers, and servers, dragging the heavy-duty power cords and networking cables into a pile. Leo then began tying them together, his fingers surprisingly nimble, creating a single, unbroken line of cable over a hundred feet long.
He "borrowed" a roll of duct tape from a desk drawer and heavily taped one end of his cable-rope around the neck of the first water-jug bomb. He did the same with the second bomb, tying it about ten feet down the line from the first.
"Okay," he breathed, looking at his creation. "Now for the hard part."
He handed the loose end of the cable-rope to Evelyn. "When I say so, I need you to lower this down the stairwell. Slowly. And do not, under any circumstances, make a sound."
They returned to the oppressive darkness of the service stairwell. Leo opened the door just a crack, peering down. The Glimmerweb was still there, its lures pulsing hypnotically in the gloom. The Stalk-Weaver was invisible, waiting.
Leo took one of the carapace shields from his inventory and held it in front of him. "I'm going down one flight," he whispered. "To the 34th floor. I need a better angle."
"Leo, that's suicide! It will see you!"
"No, it won't," Leo said, his voice grim. "It's sensitive to light and sound. Not slow movement in the dark."
He slipped into the stairwell alone. Each step was a masterpiece of control. He moved with a liquid slowness that felt unnatural, his new Agility stat granting him a balance and grace he'd never known. He didn't breathe. His heart seemed to beat in slow motion. He was a shadow moving through a larger shadow.
He made it to the 34th-floor landing, directly above the web. He could feel the low thrum of its existence through the concrete. He waved a hand in a slow, circular motion, the signal for Evelyn to begin.
Up on the 35th floor, Evelyn began to pay out the cable. The first water jug, heavy with its payload of acid, swung out into the center of the stairwell shaft and began its silent descent.
Leo watched, holding his breath. The jug spun slowly, a pendulum of death. It descended past his level, dropping towards the center of the web. The Stalk-Weaver gave no sign it had noticed. It was waiting for a sound, a flash of light, the frantic scramble of prey. A slow, silent, non-biological object didn't register as a threat.
The jug touched the Glimmerweb. There was no noise, just a slight adhesion as the crystalline strands stuck to the plastic. It rested there, a bomb in the heart of the enemy's lair. Leo waved his hand again. Evelyn stopped lowering the rope. He now had one bomb on the web, and a second one dangling about ten feet above it.
This was it.
Leo retreated back up the stairs to Evelyn with the same unnatural slowness. When he reached her, he took a deep, shuddering breath.
"Get back from the door," he ordered.
He looked at his hand, then back at his inventory. He'd killed four Skitterers. The system had given him loot. He pulled one of the sharp forearm claws out of its bag. He gripped it tightly.
Then, with all his strength, he yanked the cable-rope.
The effect was instantaneous. The water jug on the web, now pulled taut, tore a huge section of the delicate web apart. At the same time, the second jug, swinging wildly on the line, slammed into the concrete wall of the stairwell with a tremendous CRACK!
The plastic jug shattered. The acid sac inside ruptured. Corrosive, hyper-golic fluid sprayed everywhere.
A fraction of a second later, the Stalk-Weaver moved.
It dropped from the ceiling, enraged by the sound and the destruction of its web. It landed right where the bomb had been, precisely in the path of the spraying acid from the second bomb.
A horrific, silent scream echoed in Leo's mind as the potent Skitterer acid splashed across the Stalk-Weaver's shadowy body. Its form, which had seemed ethereal and ghost-like, began to sizzle and dissolve. It thrashed wildly, its crystalline legs shattering against the walls.
But it wasn't dead. Injured and furious, it abandoned the web and began scrambling up the wall, straight towards their position.
"It's coming!" Evelyn shrieked.
Leo was already moving. "The first bomb!"
He pulled the cable again, hand over hand, hauling it up with frantic strength. The first jug, still intact and attached to a tattered piece of webbing, came flying up the stairwell shaft.
The charging Stalk-Weaver, blinded by pain and rage, met the bomb halfway.
Leo didn't wait for it to hit. He let go of the cable and slammed the heavy steel door shut just as the sound of the second impact and the splash of acid echoed from the other side. A furious, inhuman screech of agony tore through the thick metal, followed by a violent thrashing that dented the door inward. Then, silence.
Leo and Evelyn stood in the red gloom, their chests heaving, their ears ringing.
After a long moment, Leo slowly opened the door a crack. The foul smell of dissolved alien flesh and melted concrete washed over them. The Glimmerweb was gone. Drips of acid had eaten holes straight through several steps. And crumpled on the landing below, the half-dissolved corpse of the Stalk-Weaver lay smoking.
[You have killed Lvl 5 Stalk-Weaver!]
[Massive XP Bonus awarded for unconventional kill and environmental destruction!]
[DING! YOU HAVE LEVELED UP!]
[You are now Level 4.]
[DING! YOU HAVE LEVELED UP!]
[You are now Level 5.]
[You have gained +10 unassigned Stat Points.]
[New Skill unlocked due to Class actions: [Improvise Tool (Lvl 1)]!]
Leo stared at the string of notifications, his mind numb. Two levels. A new skill. He had faced a predator five levels higher than himself and won, not with strength, but with a spray bottle, trash bags, and a couple of water coolers. The Apocalypse gave him the class [Janitor], and he was starting to think it might just be the best class in the world.