The scene unfolding beyond the illusion was a nightmare made real.
The feeling of cold intensified until it chilled me to the bone. I had crossed into a hidden natural chamber, a huge circular clearing where the trees didn't grow tall, but twisted, forming a tangled canopy that filtered a gloomy, greenish light.
The ground was covered in a kind of thick, pulsating moss, and the air smelled of dampness, fermented earth, and something sweetish, almost nauseating.
But what dominated the space, what froze the blood in my veins, were the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eggs. They were a pearly white color with grey veins, each one as tall as I was, arranged in orderly rows and pulsing with a faint, rhythmic light, like heartbeats of monstrous hearts. In the center of this nightmare incubator, coiled upon itself like a profane deity, was her.
The gigantic beast. The same one I had seen moving away from the village in my aerial vision. Up close, its horror was overwhelming.
The lower part was that of a colossal centipede, a segmented and armored body of a jet black, from which sprouted countless legs as sharp as daggers. Each segment of its torso, wider than a cart, gleamed under the faint light with an oily sheen.
From the upper half of this monstrous body arose, in a grotesque yet disturbingly harmonious transition, the torso of a woman. It was of a sculpted, pale beauty, like cold marble, with long black hair falling like a cloak over the insectoid segments. She was naked, her arms crossed over her chest, her face serene, her eyes closed. She was asleep. Or in a state of deep lethargy, exhausted, after having given birth to that brood of eggs.
My mind refused to process it for a moment. The contradiction between the ethereal beauty of the upper half and the alien horror of the lower one created a vertigo in my perception. But then, the instinct for survival, sharper than ever, took control.
There she is. The cause. The one who destroys the village. And she is vulnerable.
The [Luck] attribute… was this it? Having found her secret lair, having crossed her protective illusion, and finding her, the most dangerous creature, in a state of total vulnerability? It couldn't be mere coincidence. It was an opportunity. An opportunity the size of a nightmare.
I crouched down slowly, without making a sound, leaning the pickaxe against the silent moss. In my hands remained the white spear and the bag of flammable oil. My mind, once overwhelmed, began to work at full speed, connecting dots with a cold clarity.
The eggs. Her, exhausted. The oil. The fire-starting stick.
I couldn't face her directly. Not with this spear, not with this boy's body. A single movement from one of those sharp legs would split me in two. But… what if I didn't have to fight her?
I looked at the eggs. Hundreds of future monsters. Her offspring. Her investment. Her reason for attacking the village, perhaps to feed them, or to expand her territory.
A reckless and brutal idea took shape. If she was exhausted from laying, her deepest instinct must be to protect her young. If I threatened her young in the most devastating way… maybe, just maybe, I could distract her, hurt her where it mattered most, or even make her flee.
Without taking my eyes off the slow rhythm of the female torso's breathing, I carefully unhooked the bag of oil. The putrid smell was stronger here, mixing with the atmosphere of the clearing. With fingers numb from cold and fear, I untied the cord.
Luck is on my side, I thought, but it wasn't a triumphant thought. It was a prayer, a desperate hope. Luck had brought me here, to the wolf's den, with just the right tools. Now I had to be smart enough, and ruthless enough, to use them.
I began to pour the thick, sticky oil, forming a dark trail over the first eggs closest to me. The liquid slid down the pearlescent shells, staining them, pooling at the base on the moss. I advanced in a crouch, slowly, following the perimeter, creating a line of fuel around the area nearest to the illusory entrance. Every second was an eternity, every crunch of the moss under my feet a possible awakening.
My heart was pounding so hard I felt the sound must be echoing throughout the chamber. But the creature, the mother-monster, remained asleep, her beautiful face expressionless.
When the bag was almost empty, I left the last thread of oil forming a path to where I had left the pickaxe and the fire-starting stick. I crawled back, my hands trembling. I took the stick. I had no way to light it here, but I didn't need to yet.
I took a deep breath, looking at the scene. A ring of oil around about thirty eggs. The beast sleeping at the center. And me, a boy with a spear and a desperate plan.
Luck had put me in this position. Now, everything depended on the next move. And on whether, when the fire started, the beast's instinct would be to protect its young and not, simply, to crush the insignificant intruder who had condemned them.
The thick, foul-smelling oil had already formed its ring of doom around the nearest eggs. It didn't smell like mint, but a distant memory from a biology class in another world lashed through my mind with whip-like force: centipedes. Creatures of damp and darkness. Nocturnal. They hate drying out.
It wasn't mint, but fire… fire was absolute desiccation, the most violent light, the antithesis of their damp, dark world. It wouldn't just kill the young; it would be torture for the mother, an insult to her very nature.
With hands that no longer trembled from fear, but from a glacial determination, I took the fire-starting stick. My [Spatial Sense] confirmed what my eyes saw: the Devourer Queen remained sunk in her postpartum lethargy, her breathing still slow, oblivious to the danger looming over her progeny.
So be it, I thought, without a hint of glory. This wasn't heroism. It was extermination.
I struck the flint I'd found in the bag against a stone from my pocket. The sparks, tiny and anemic at first, fell onto the oily rags of the stick. One, two, three… on the fourth, a tongue of flame was born with a voracious whisper. The torch came to life, illuminating my childish face with dancing, sinister flickers.
Without hesitation, I lowered the torch. The flame kissed the trail of oil.
The effect was instant and terrifying. It wasn't a spreading, it was an eruption. The flammable liquid ignited with a dull whoosh!, and the fire, a dirty blue at its base, lunged like an enraged serpent along the ring I had traced. The flames licked the pearlescent shells of the eggs, which didn't burn so much as begin to char with a dry, repulsive crackling. The heat, humid and acrid, hit my face immediately.
And then, the voice. It wasn't a sound; it was an intrusion, a whisper of ice that slid directly into the back of my skull, devoid of all emotion:
[You have slain a Great beast, Egg of the Devourer Queen]
A shiver, different from the forest's cold, ran down my spine. The voice sounded again, almost overlapping:
[You have slain a Great beast, Egg of the Devourer Queen]
And another. And another. A mechanical, relentless hammering that marked the rhythm of destruction. Crack. Whoosh. Whisper. The fire now leaped from egg to egg, fed by the same viscous fluid the shells seemed to secrete as they burned. The clearing filled with a horrendous crackling and that ghostly voice tallying my crimes. I tried to ignore it, to drown it out with the noise of the blaze, but it pierced my mind like a fine needle.
That's when the world stopped.
The roar did not come from the air. It came from the earth, from the trees, from the very bowels of the nightmare. It was a sound of pure ruin, of infinite rage, and of a pain so primordial it made the ground shake beneath my feet. The fire seemed to falter for an instant.
I looked up.
The Devourer Queen's eyes were open.
They were not human eyes. They were pits of absolute darkness, with vertical pupils that blazed with an incandescent red, reflecting the flames devouring her children. The serene beauty of her face had shattered into a mask of agony and indescribable fury. Her perfect mouth opened, and from it came not another roar, but a piercing, rending shriek that shattered my eardrums like glass.
She moved.
It wasn't an uncoiling; it was an explosion of motion. Her colossal centipede body, so lethargic before, convulsed. Her legs, sharp as sabers, drove into the ground, tearing up chunks of moss and earth. The female torso reared up, twisting its neck at an unnatural angle to stare directly at the hell I had created. I saw her marble-like skin crack, as if something dark and rough beneath it struggled to break free.
Her gaze, that twin abyss of red and black, swept across the flaming clearing. It passed over the charred eggs, over the ring of fire, and… stopped on me.
On the small boy, with a torch in one hand and a useless white spear in the other, standing at the edge of her destruction.
The intelligence I saw in that gaze was not animal. It was ancient, cold, and laden with a hatred that promised an eternity of suffering. There was no recognition, only the instant and absolute certainty that I was the source of her pain.
Terror, pure and primitive, injected adrenaline into every vein. All my plans, my cold logic, evaporated. Only the instinct of prey remained.
Hide.
I pivoted on my heels and lunged not toward the illusion I'd entered through—too obvious, too slow—but toward the wall of twisted trees on the other side of the clearing, where the shadows were thickest. I ran as I never had before, the legs of this adolescent body pumping, ignoring the voice still whispering murders in my mind, drowned out by the sound of my own heart and the thunderous cacophony coming from behind.
I heard the sound of earth being shredded, the snapping of tree trunks splitting like twigs. I didn't turn to look. I didn't dare. I knew, with the absolute certainty of the damned, that she was already moving. That those sharp legs were pounding the ground, pursuing me. That those eyes were searching for me through the curtain of smoke and flame, and that she would not rest until she found me.
Luck had led me to her lair. Now, it would have to be enough to get me out of it alive.