The silk bulge pulsated. Something was trying to tear its way out.

  Kaizer didn’t rush. He stayed where he was, partizan spear held low, shoulders loose, and watched the way the strands tightened across the ceiling. The light in the wall veins made the webbing look cleaner than it should’ve, almost polished, and that annoyed him more than the spiders had. He tested his footing on the stone. There was no grass in this cavern, just bare rock with a faint tack to it where old silk had been worn flat.

  He drew a slow breath and felt the burn flare in his throat, then fade again. Smoke still clung to him, in his hair, in his wrappings, in the back of his mouth. He swallowed and tasted soot. His left eye stung when he blinked, the dried blood cracking at the corner, and he wiped it with his wrist without taking his gaze off the shelf.

  The cocoon split with a wet tear.

  A spider unfolded out of it, long-legged and flat-bodied, the kind of shape every Australian kid learns to hate in a bathroom corner and every adult fears when they drop the visor in their car. It was bigger than a normal huntsman, thickened along the joints, its abdomen ridged like it had armour plates ridged along it. It moved with the same unnerving speed though, legs flicking across silk like it weighed nothing, and it turned its head just enough for its eyes to catch the wall glow.

  Kaizer stared at it for a beat, then sighed.

  “You’re joking,” he muttered. “Why are there even silken webs… That’s not realistic at all.”

  He didn’t wait for it to pounce. He focused on the creature and waited for the familiar sensation.

  ====================================

  Mutated Huntsman

  ====================================

  Level: 24

  Rank: Initiate

  Tag: Floor 1 Boss

  A huntsman altered by dungeon conditions. Watch out… It’s bite is painful, though non-venomous to humanoid creatures.

  ====================================

  Kaizer read it twice anyway, hoping that something would actually change.

  Initiate.

  Painful but non-venomous.

  He looked back at the thing, then at the silk beams overhead, then at the scraped-clean floor like the room was some big dramatic stage for someone’s first day out of the tutorial. His face twisted into an agonised smile.

  “All this bullshit,” he said quietly, “for a bloody huntsman.”

  The bite he’d taken back in the smoke throbbed in his leg, more irritation than injury. He could feel his regeneration smoothing it out already, turning it into background noise. The swarm of spiders were no doubt babies of this thing. How had he not recognised it before. They were simply trying to survive and he’d gone and done the natural thing when you saw spiders in your house… burn it down.

  Kaizer’s jaw tightened as the thought landed properly.

  If he’d Identified at the start, he would’ve known. He would’ve known the spiders were weak, the bites were a nuisance, and the only thing that could’ve made it dangerous was letting them pile onto him in a way that pinned his movement. He could have literally just stood there for hours casually swinging his claws, killing steadily, and walked through without cooking his lungs. He could’ve sat in the middle of that swarm and barely taken more than stinging nips through his wrappings while he worked the spear… It would have been the perfect training room.

  Instead, he’d lit the whole place up and nearly choked himself.

  “Right,” he muttered. “Lesson learned.”

  The huntsman shifted on the shelf, legs spreading wider, weight settling into a spring. It watched him with the blank patience of something that didn’t care about his self-critique.

  Kaizer lifted the Partizan and pointed it at the spider’s centre mass. He wasn’t angry at it. He was annoyed at himself, and that meant he wasn’t going to rush. He wanted to train. He wanted to see how a dungeon-mutated huntsman moved. In the end, was this thing an different to a normal huntsman?

  The spider launched.

  It crossed the distance in a blink, a flat blur of legs and chitin, and Kaizer stepped forward into it instead of back, spear tip angling up to meet the underside. The huntsman twisted mid-air with a sharp, unnatural flick, trying to slip the point, and Kaizer felt a brief flare of interest. That was new. Real huntsmen were fast, but this had control.

  He rotated the spear and slapped the shaft into the spider’s leg base as it landed, knocking it sideways rather than trying to stab clean. The huntsman skittered, recovered instantly, and cut hard across a line of silk already stretched through the space.

  The anchored thread snapped up and caught Kaizer’s boot for a heartbeat.

  Kaizer felt the tug, mild and sticky. He lifted his foot and tore free without drama, then scraped the spear butt across the rock to clear the strand before it could catch again. The spider stayed low and wide, circling, testing angles, keeping its legs inside the web lines like it knew exactly where the room would help it.

  “Alright,” Kaizer said under his breath. “So you’re a nuisance that thinks it’s clever.”

  He kept the spear between them and let the huntsman make the first few commitments. It rushed again, lower this time, trying to get under the point and into his legs. Kaizer slid his lead foot back half a step and jabbed, not at the body, but at the space it wanted. The huntsman clipped the edge of the spear’s reach and recoiled, legs tapping the stone in quick stutters, then snapped sideways and flicked another anchored strand with a foreleg, trying to bite at Kaizer’s footing.

  Kaizer adjusted his grip.

  He didn’t feel fear. He felt the same focus he’d had in the tutorial when he was working out how something fought. The difference was, back then, guessing wrong meant losing chunks of himself. Here, guessing wrong meant a painful bite and a bit of silk snagging his boot for half a second.

  The huntsman rushed a third time and Kaizer let it get closer.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  It lunged for his thigh. He turned his hip, took the bite on a wrapped section of his leg, and the pain flared sharp enough to make his eyes water. Then it was done. No venom spike. No creeping numbness. Just teeth and pressure.

  Kaizer’s expression didn’t change. He slammed the spear shaft down across the spider’s head and drove it off him with brute force, forcing it to stumble back two steps.

  Painful. Yeah.

  He could’ve taken dozens of those and still kept moving.

  “Good to know,” he muttered.

  The huntsman didn’t spin silk. It didn’t need to. It moved with the room, stepping on the right patches, flicking the right strands, shaking loose a hanging sheet overhead so it drooped into Kaizer’s line for a moment, enough to make him blink and shift. Each time it did, its body weight told on it. A slight lean. A leg that loaded. The direction it wanted to follow.

  Kaizer started treating those movements like tells. He watched them. He ignored the annoyance and watched the intent.

  His next jab caught the underside near a joint and the huntsman squealed, a high, thin sound that grated. It leapt back and slapped onto the wall, legs clinging to stone like it had claws. It scuttled sideways along the rock and then dropped, using a curtain of hanging silk as cover as it came down.

  Kaizer didn’t chase. He stepped to the side, spear tracking, and waited for the drop. The huntsman hesitated behind the sheet, then launched again.

  Kaizer shifted his stance, spear tip rising with the motion, and this time he drove forward and planted the point into the underside with a clean thrust.

  The spider’s weight hit the spear like a sack of bricks.

  Kaizer absorbed it through his arms, held the shaft steady, then ripped it sideways to tear the wound wider before the huntsman could twist free. It thrashed, legs scrabbling for purchase, and Kaizer felt the sting of another bite land on his forearm. Teeth through wrapping. A sharp flare. Nothing after.

  He grunted once and shoved.

  The huntsman hit the stone with a hard crack and rolled, trying to regain its feet. Kaizer stepped in and pinned one leg with the spear shaft, then drove the point down into the exposed joint.

  Chitin split.

  The spider’s movement stuttered, one side collapsing.

  Kaizer didn’t finish it yet. He watched what it did with a damaged leg, how it shifted weight, how it tried to compensate by staying tight to the ground and using short lateral bursts instead of full lunges. It was slower now, forced into quick, ugly scrambles rather than clean commits. Kaizer gave it space, then took it away, herding it where he wanted with the spear’s reach and keeping his boots off the worst of the anchored lines.

  “Yeah,” he said softly, mostly to himself. “That’s the pattern.”

  He stabbed again, deeper this time, through the underside where Identify had flagged vulnerability. The huntsman shuddered and tried to twist, and Kaizer stepped on its abdomen to keep it from rolling away. The spider spasmed under his boot, legs scraping and then slowing.

  Kaizer leaned his weight down and drove the spear through until the tip hit stone beneath.

  The huntsman stopped moving.

  Essence flowed into him in a steady pull, more satisfying than the swarm kills had been. He felt it settle into his core, warm and dense, and he exhaled through his nose. The fight had lasted long enough to teach him something, but it hadn’t made his heart race. It hadn’t asked for desperation. It had asked for attention.

  Kaizer withdrew the spear and stood still for a moment, letting his breathing steady. The chamber stayed quiet except for the faint creak of silk overhead. A few smaller spiders skittered at the edges of the light, testing, uncertain, staying just inside the anchored strands like they were afraid of the open rock.

  Kaizer looked at them, then at the huntsman corpse, and huffed.

  “Alright. Come on then.”

  He didn’t chase them. He moved to the corpse and knelt, pulling his harvester’s knife from his belt. He worked like he’d done it a hundred times, even though he hadn’t. The blade slid into a seam near the abdomen plates, and he cut along the line where hardened chitin met softer tissue. He ignored the smell. He ignored the silk sticking to his gloves. He found the core by feel, a dense pressure under the flesh that tugged at his own essence.

  The first time he’d harvested in the tutorial, it had been messy. Hesitant. Slow.

  Now it was work.

  He braced the body with his knee, widened the incision, and slid two fingers in to grip the core’s edge. It resisted, anchored by thick connective fibres that were half flesh and half hardened silk strands from the warren’s influence, sticky and tough in a way that didn’t belong in a huntsman.

  Kaizer frowned and adjusted his angle, then cut the strands cleanly with a short, precise motion.

  The core came free with a wet pop.

  Essence surged up his arms, into his chest, and into the centre of his being like a breath he’d been holding for too long. The pressure in his core tightened and smoothed at the same time, like something aligning.

  Kaizer held the core for a second, feeling its weight and heat, then slid it into the bracelet without looking away from the chamber edges.

  A small spider darted closer, brave or stupid. Kaizer flicked the harvester’s knife and nailed it to the rock through its body. The spider twitched, then stilled.

  Essence trickled.

  Kaizer pulled the knife free, wiped it on the huntsman’s hide, and continued.

  He didn’t stop harvesting because there was a fight nearby. He harvested while the fight tried to start, and that alone was progress.

  [Ding! Congratulations, Core Harvester has reached Level 26.]

  Kaizer felt it like a click behind his ribs, a shift in understanding more than strength. The way the fibres had resisted made sense now. The cut he’d chosen wasn’t luck. It was instinct backed by practice he didn’t remember doing.

  Wait a minute… Why was the system being so cheery all of a sudden? Kaizer thought.

  He pondered as he kept moving, clearing the remaining strands, checking the corpse for secondary deposits, hardened silk sacs, anything that mattered. Perhaps the System acted different inside certain dungeons? Who knows… Anyway, the spiders at the edges didn’t commit. They watched. They circled. They stayed out of reach.

  Kaizer stood, rolled his shoulders, and set the spear beside him within easy reach while he cleaned the knife properly. His hands were steady.

  [Ding! Congratulations, Core Harvester has advanced to Level 27.]

  He didn’t smile, but he did exhale like something had eased.

  “Good,” he muttered. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  The essence from the huntsman core kept settling, deepening the pressure in his own. Kaizer felt it building towards a threshold he recognised by now, the moment where his body and the System agreed he’d crossed a line.

  He looked down at the huntsman corpse again, at the long legs sprawled across the stone, and shook his head.

  “I nearly died,” he said quietly, mostly to himself, “purely because of stupidity.”

  The spiders at the edge finally made a decision. Three of them rushed in at once, smaller than the huntsman, fast enough to be annoying, keeping to the anchored strands until the last second.

  Kaizer picked the spear back up and killed them in three clean motions. A jab. A sweep. A downward thrust. No wasted movement, no anger, no theatrics.

  Essence trickled in, and the pressure in his core tipped over.

  [Ding! Congratulations, Chimeric Warrior has advanced to Level 30.]

  Kaizer stood still for a breath, feeling the shift spread through his body. It didn’t feel like a sudden rush of power. It felt like he’d been carrying weight incorrectly and someone had corrected the posture. His muscles sat better on his bones. His balance felt a fraction more sure. His breathing eased, just slightly, even with smoke-damaged lungs. His Instinctive Regeneration was working overtime. He was already starting to feel better.

  “Alright,” he said. “Keep going.”

  The silk beams overhead creaked again, and Kaizer lifted his gaze. The chamber looked the same, but the air had changed. The tension that had sat in the room since he’d entered it eased, like a lock releasing.

  A line of light pulsed along the far wall, and the stone there split, not crumbling, but parting with a clean seam to reveal an opening.

  [FLOOR 1 CLEARED.]

  Kaizer stared at the opening for a moment, then glanced back towards the tunnel he’d come through. Smoke still seeped in faintly, a reminder of his own decision.

  He wiped his face again, clearing dried blood from the corner of his eye, and it stung. He checked the bite marks on his wrappings and found shallow punctures and bruising, nothing more. Annoying. Not dangerous.

  He let out a low laugh and shook his head.

  “Next time,” he said, voice flat with irritation at himself, “I Identify first.”

  He adjusted his grip and continued through the dungeon. Floors two through four weren’t harder, they were just different flavours of the same headache. One floor had the silk laid across the ground so thin he didn’t see it until his boot stuck for half a heartbeat, and half a heartbeat was enough for a wave of little spiders to rush his ankles. Another had low ceilings and hanging sheets that kept brushing his face and spear shaft, breaking his sightlines and forcing him to fight by foot placement and instinct instead of clean visuals. The third had too many anchor strands across the corners, the kind that didn’t stop him, but did nag at his rhythm until he started treating the room itself like part of the enemy. He Identified first, found where the threads were tightest, worked the edges, and killed the spiders the same way every time. Spear point to control distance. Spear butt to clear strands. Knife only when something got close enough to be annoying. The bites still stung when they landed, but without venom they were just reminders to stop being sloppy.

  The System stayed weirdly cheerful through it all, chirping at every little breakthrough like it was proud of him, and Kaizer couldn’t decide if that was better or worse than the usual cold tone. He harvested on the move, knife in and out, cores sliding into the bracelet one after another, the pull of essence settling deeper each time. By the time he reached the Floor 5 safe room, his lungs were still a little raw from the earlier smoke and his forearms had that steady ache that came from doing the same motion a hundred times without rest. He stepped inside, let the door shut behind him, and leaned the spear against his shoulder. No point pushing tired. Better to take a few minutes, check what he’d gained, and go back out ready.