Only once did a spider try to attack him, the creature having no webs, simply jumping onto him from high above a bamboo tree. Axl noticed the surprise attack, however, and was able to step out of the way and easily outrun the spider, which was rather slow to move, being far bulkier than the other spiders, and unwilling to enter any of the nearby webs.
Axl was also gaining distance from the wolves behind, the racket from their charge only growing more chaotic, clearly from fighting the spiders in the way of their hunt. So Axl kept going, hoping they'd eventually give up the chase, the spiders too much for them to fight off indefinitely.
This kept going for a while, Axl needing to contort his body in increasingly difficult ways as he manipulated [Mana Shroud] to keep the webbing away, only occasionally switching to the Mana sensing function to see where to go next.
He even had to backtrack a few times entirely, seeing a spider over three meters in diameter, its Mana easily in late G grade, its focus scanning the area as he approached, noticing something was off, even if Axl was far from its web. While he'd love to have the beasts chasing him go up against that monster, Axl wasn't sure it would let him pass their domain uncontested, so he decided to lose some time to go around.
Eventually, he reached the shattered base of a bamboo tree, the first time he saw a stump in the forest. Looking around and to the distance beyond the other side of the stump, Axl was disappointed to see that the web density started to slightly decrease, which was clearly the core of the spider's domain.
The howling and barking were still following him, its density lessened only slightly. He guessed that if he simply passed clear to the other side and continued through the increasingly thin density of webs and spiders, maybe half of the wolves and werewolves would be killed or otherwise held back, and that wasn't enough.
He stared at the darkness within the trunk's circle of jagged struts reaching up to the sky around a hollow core. Even the dead wood gave a sense of density and heft, as if daring reality to claim it no longer stood tall and mighty. A thin shaft of light shone from the impossibly distant foliage above, for the first time, Axl realizing how dark it was in this forest.
To one side of the trunk, an uneven break in the bamboo led to a cavernous entrance into the ground, the gloom turning into pitched darkness. Even from a distance, [Mana Shroud] could sense an increased density in the web's Mana from within that cavern, the spiders within likely more powerful than the ones he saw so far. But there was also something else that he could barely detect, another reason he paused.
Axl could sense the Void.
It was something beyond his [Mana Shroud], a reverberation at the very core of his being, clear as the sun against Luna's black sky. Perhaps this was why he was placed in Piril, not necessarily because of the Oocile business, but because it was close to a source of the Void. He figured that the other attunements his main quest would be easy to find, be it Water, Earth, or Metal, his memories from Roken having plenty of references to all those concepts. At the very least, there were plenty of elves of those kinds back in Piril, among many others, and nothing to suggest the city held an unusually large diversity of elves. But he never heard a reference to the Void until Olkan mentioned it in reference to Honorable Mistress Nox.
Best case scenario, this cave was some sort of cultivation spring or resource garden to Nox, where he'd be able to sneak in and discreetly establish Terrania's Foundational Nexus, the aloof cultivator living in some conveniently distant mansion. Wouldn't it just be great, if she wouldn't even notice as she focused on her cultivation or whatever else the idle rich and powerful did around here? But Axl could feel in the pit of his stomach that this wouldn't be so easy, that Mistress Nox was obviously a giant slitting spider, and that this was her lair.
Dig my way out of this hole, I guess.
Axl and started into the cavern, slowly, so his eyes could adapt, but found the darkness too pervasive, so he paused at the threshold, turning [Mana Shroud] fully to Mana sensing. The walls soon bloomed with a faint glow, many layers of discarded webbing coating the surface of a long hallway leading down. He was surprised no spiders made their web at this entrance for as far as he could see, so he went in at a fast clip. The narrow entrance soon broadened to several meters across and tall, a proper hallway, the edges of the rock slightly uneven, as if chiseled with claw and fang, not filed drilling.
It turned a few times in a rather steep descent into the ground before ending in a large cavern, dozens of meters high and almost a hundred wide, with numerous stalactites and stalagmites littering the space. The webs were back, all of them full of the largest spiders Axl had found above. The closest ones moved slightly as he stepped closer into the cavern, even if he was still rather far from their webs.
Clearly, if he tried approaching further, they'd sense him and likely attack. This was a risk he really shouldn’t take, since every single one of these creatures had denser internal Mana than Olkan, and none of his leaky hollowness.
Axl had no delusions as to his power, even with all the stuff on his Status. Olkan was late in the G grade, but clearly weakened by his missing arm and flagging lifespan, and Axl was still level 1. That he lasted as long and came close to beating the elf captain was a sheer miracle, and one he didn't want to try and repeat, especially not with a pack of wolves also actively chasing him.
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Axl crouched at the edge of the room, redoubling his effort on [Mana Shroud], focusing deeply on the webbing around him.
He felt that he'd only been probing the surface of the Mana around him with the now Rare skill, that he could see deeper now. Normally, this kind of problem would be carefully picked over at the corner workbench where he stored his rig, indulging in the pleasant buzz of carefully and thoroughly tackling a problem with tools in hand.
But this was an emergency, with the pack gaining ground behind him and the large spiders ahead, perhaps able to detect him if he lingered too long. This kind of situation required field repairs, a frantic scramble for the good enough—and he had plenty of experience with that too.
The webbing felt different than the green mist that poisoned Piril and the dense, oppressive air outside, and was also distinct from the stone beneath. He'd never felt this before in Luna, there were only varying amounts of Mana, sometimes so little it was barely detectable. Maybe it was a matter of density? Or was his Skill not as refined back then?
Regardless, Mana here always had a certain flavor to it that was hard to describe, like taste and smell pressed directly into his mind. Axl probed the webbing, the stringy flickering impression soon becoming a combination of different things: A sense of bending flexibility given form, a resolute resilience calmly standing ground, and sight touch constantly vibrating against itself. There were other components as well, lighter fragments at the periphery of the Mana's being, but Axl felt these three were the main ones, what defined the webbing's Mana.
They also interacted with each other in specific ways, the flexibility and resilience in stark opposition, like counterweights providing a stable equilibrium. Meanwhile, the sense of vibrating touch erupted in long pinprick stabs away from the stable line between the other two, quickly and nervously, forming a rod-shaped shell of stabbing attacks.
This small rod repeated and interacted with itself, forming the larger streams of Mana, which gave the physical material of the webbing its unnatural power.
Hoping this would be enough, Axl absorbed the webbing's Mana with [Mana Shroud] and pushed it out into his shroud as before. However, when he looked into his webbing-flavored Mana, he found the internal structure was disrupted, the small rods aligned into each other in a way that felt fundamentally wrong.
Taking a re-centering breath, Axl set aside the howling barking getting ever closer and dove into the Mana he produced outside of his shroud, and immediately saw the problem. The balance between flexibility and resilience was shifted, from a carefully balanced line into a twisted arch. The Skill still imposed the rod-like shape to it, mimicking the larger Mana structure, but it didn't quite behave in the same way.
He probed into his body, tracking a sliver of absorbed Mana as it was refined into his own and then extruded into the shroud. The process was seamless and easier to see than what happened with Mana outside his body, so he quickly corrected the problem, slightly slowing the conversion process to maintain the delicate equilibrium before pushing the Mana back out.
The process took more of his attention than before, the effortless Skill activation and maintenance now needed more work to maintain. However, immediately he saw a difference, the Mana surrounding him was now denser and more coherent. Even in the pitch darkness, he knew the air around him was getting slightly opaque, with a white tint. This was a harder and slower use of [Mana Shroud], but also required less of his internal Mana to use, which was a welcome side-effect.
Carefully, Axl took a probing step forward, surprised that he could now easily use the Mana sensing, absorption, and shroud-producing aspects of his skills at once. But he had no time to revel in the skill's new feature, since one of the larger spiders twitched and, with a flash of movement, turned to face him.
Axl stopped, focusing on the Mana of his shroud, particularly where it touched the few strands of webbing connected to that spider's own web. The foreign Mana vibrated slightly, a sliver of the vibrations being carried back up the strands, the punctuating halo of all those little rods reverberating with each other, clashing against his, which refused the outside call. With a tight flexing of his will, Axl had his shrouding Mana match the vibrations, the ones coming down the strands coursing through his shroud and returning, like waves passing over a still pool.
He messed up a few times, the vibrations causing the spider to tense a bit, then raise two of its front legs. Axl redoubled his concentration, focusing on getting each probing wave to calmly pass through his shroud, even as each one was slightly different, be it in amplitude or duration, sometimes a few arriving one right after the other.
He could see it now, the spider was slightly plucking at one of its structural strands with a single leg, the vibration emanating outwards like echolocation. It even slightly spread across the dead webbing on the walls and ground, but far less sharply. Seeing the source of the probes made his job easier, and slowly the spider put its legs back down, then turned back to look to the side.
Axl smiled and took a moment to check in his Status what he thought happened here just now.
Skills: Mana Shroud (Rare, Proficiency G.2), Mind-Soul Bulwark (Rare)
His Skill had increased in proficiency again, not only allowing him to drastically increase his control over the shroud and how Mana was produced by it, but could now use all three aspects of the Skill at once. Being able to sense, absorb, and shroud at the same time felt like the true manifestation of the Skill, as if it were slowly becoming its true self, not just getting better.
He pressed onwards into the cavern, winding past a labyrinth of webbing, often needing to push thickets of the webs aside to make gaps. This always caused the spiders to start producing probing vibrations, which he had to again struggle to match, each spider having a uniquely different style of disruption, forcing him to constantly adapt his technique.
The other side of the cavern had a tunnel continuing onwards, a larger one than at the entrance, and the only viable option, since the other holes towards the ceiling were out of reach. Axl was almost there, greedily eyeing the exit corridor lacking the high density of spiders.
A single wolf yipped far behind him, all the spiders in the cavern turning to look at the loud trespasser. The sound was quickly silenced, which was eerie, since Axl heard absolutely nothing from the spider's attack, and he was glad he didn't even consider fighting the large creatures.
The clamor of the howling, barking pack soon started to fill the cavern, joined by the frantic hissing of attacking spiders. Axl hoped the entire group would stream to the entrance to form a unified front before the wolves, but the spiders further from the group simply kept to their own domains.
His pace increased, even at the increased risk of being detected, since Axl realized the wolves were still gaining ground. When he reached the clear area before the exit, he dashed down the corridor, wanting to gain as much distance as possible from the pack.