The group stood frozen, their breaths caught in their throats as their wide eyes locked onto the shattered tree. A heartbeat later, their heads snapped toward the source of the terrible noise, just as razor-sharp splinters exploded outward, pelting the air like deadly hail. People scrambled back, curses and gasps tearing from their lips.
Rin had lingered at the farthest edge of the firelight, the cold gnawing at her skin despite the flames. Better to endure the chill than let her guard down. "I won't be caught unprepared," she told herself, fingers twitching toward the hilt of her blade.
The memory of the inverted katana, buried in the earth as time itself twisted backward, flashed in her mind. This wasn't treachery. No human hands had orchestrated this. Only the mindless hunger of nightmare creatures lurked in the dark, waiting.
A prickle of warning shot down her spine. She moved without thought, lunging aside just as another tree groaned and collapsed, crushing the space where she'd stood seconds before. The impact sent tremors through the ground, the sound of splintering wood drowned out by a wet, sickening crunch.
'That would be the [Genin] attribute saving me.'
One of the twins hadn't renewed their life license. Now, they were little more than a crimson smear beneath the fallen timber, fate's cruel punchline, delivered a breath too late.
Lisa's voice cracked as she screamed, "We lost Eric! David, get your fucking head in the game we can't afford to lose anyone else!" Tears streaked her face, her hands shaking as she tried to steady her breath, to force some semblance of control back into her crumbling team.
But before anyone could react, the fallen tree trunk, once just a lifeless husk, suddenly convulsed. Wood splintered with a sound like gunfire as the massive log split open, and something moved inside.
The team froze. Terror locked their limbs in place, their minds screaming at them to run even as their bodies refused to obey.
All except Eric.
The thing that crawled from the shattered trunk was a writhing, inky mass at first, a shapeless blot of darkness. Then, with a grotesque unfolding, eight spindled limbs stretched outward, each joint bending at impossible angles as the creature rose. And rose. And kept rising, until it loomed over them, a thirteen-foot nightmare given flesh.
Rin's thoughts cut through the panic.
'Wait that sentence made no sense. It is literally a nightmare creature.'
Its chitinous armor gleamed under the pale moonlight, smooth and impenetrable, with an unnatural sheen that made it look almost liquid. A stark red hourglass marked its enormous abdomen, a cruel mockery of nature's warning.
Eight pitch-black eyes, each glinting with malice, locked onto the group. Twin fangs dripped with venom, hissing and clicking as droplets hit the snow, dissolving it instantly into acrid smoke. The ground beneath sizzled, the earth itself recoiling from the toxin.
The situation couldn't have been worse. This thing wasn't just dangerous, it was a predator, and they were prey. Sure, Maybe someone could've tried reasoning with it, but one look at those eyes, cold, calculating, hungry—and Rin was pretty sure "friendly" wasn't in its vocabulary. Definitely not pet material.
Then she saw it.
A flicker of movement in the shadows behind the beast. The ground itself seemed to ripple, shifting with shapes—smaller, but just as grotesque. More of them. Oh, fantastic.
'Alright, then. Run? I die. Fight? Probably die. Come on, Rin, think—what the hell can I—'
Her thoughts shattered as the spider moved.
One second it was there, towering. The next, it was a blur of chitin and hunger, hurtling straight for her.
Instinct took over. genin had overclocked essence throughout her cells and her body twisted mid-air, muscles coiling and releasing in a desperate leap to the side. She landed just as the stranger, some poor, oblivious fool, stumbled into the space she'd occupied a heartbeat before.
Now he was between her and the nightmare.
'you did this to yourself jinxing prick'
Her body had moved before her mind could process the horror, just fast enough to cheat death.
The spider's scythe-like legs struck like black lightning, punching clean through the man's skull with a sickening crunch. The tips burst out the other side, glistening.
No. She wouldn't describe it.
Couldn't.
Dead weight collapsed onto her, the man's ruined head lolling against her shoulder. Hot blood poured over her, thick and metallic, soaking into her clothes, her skin.
'I… can't… move…'
'Gods, this bastard's heavy—'
She twisted her head, desperate for sight, for sound, anything but the suffocating dark and the wet, ragged breaths she couldn't tell were hers or his. Then came the noise
click-click-click
the spider's fangs gnashing together in a grotesque rhythm, almost drowning out the screams of the others.
Gritting her teeth, she shoved against the corpse. Nothing. Too heavy. She tried again, bracing her palms against the cooling flesh, heaving with every ounce of strength. Still trapped.
Panic clawed up her throat.
A final, desperate twist. A shift in the weight. Just enough space to wrench herself sideways, scraping elbows raw against the ground as she slithered free.
Air. Movement.
Alive.
Her hands scrabbled against the frozen earth as she kicked backward, putting distance between herself and the nightmare unfolding before her. The corpse jerked unnaturally—not from her shove, but from the dog-sized spider now burrowing into its skull, mandibles working with wet, crunching sounds as it hollowed out the head from within.
Ew. Ew. EW—
Get away—get AWAY—
Across the bloodied snow, Greg stood paralyzed, his face a mask of pure terror. Rin waved wildly, her voice raw.
"Oi, Greg! MOVE!"
His legs buckled. He collapsed to his knees, trembling.
But the corpse twitched
Rin's breath hitched as the body convulsed, bones snapping and reforming beneath the skin. The spine arched violently—crack-crack-CRACK—as eight jagged, bone-white limbs erupted from its back. The face split apart like rotting fruit, peeling open to reveal a gaping maw lined with needle fangs, dripping with fresh blood. Eight glossy black eyes bubbled up from the flesh, locking onto her with predatory hunger.
Her thoughts burned with singular, primal clarity:
'Kill it. Burn it. Purge it with holy fire.'
Greg's gaze flickered between her and the monstrous abomination before them, his voice cracking with raw panic.
"Ki-kill it!"
'Oh, brilliant, Greg. Truly groundbreaking advice.'
He staggered just behind the other twin, his grip on the kunai unsteady, the blade trembling as it pointed towards the twitching corpse. His face was ashen, eyes wide with unspoken terror.
'OH, THAT'S HELPFUL, GREG. REALLY. BECAUSE I'M THE ONE STANDING THREE FEET FROM IT.'
Rin's instincts, honed to razor-sharp precision when it came to sniffing out deception, immediately called foul. The spell was supposed to be fair—rigidly controlled, with strict limitations on what horrors could crawl out of a Nightmare.
The hierarchy of power was clear: Beasts, then Monsters, then Demons. Devils followed, then Tyrants, Terrors, and at the apex, the things whispered about in dread—Titans.
Yet here, in her first Nightmare, the universe had seen fit to drop a Tyrant at her feet. She recognized the signs the way its influence bled into weaker forms, twisting them into extensions of its will. What kind of game was this creature playing inside her trial?
'I've reached a verdict,'
she thought dryly.
'Some cosmic bastard up there has it out for me.'
Rin shoved aside thoughts of cosmic injustice; there was no time for divine conspiracies. If the gods wanted her dead, she'd survive just to spite them.
The creature lurched forward, its form a nightmare of fused limbs and rotting flesh, more spider than man. The wet click-click of its chittering fangs coiled ice down her spine. Instinct took over. Her foot snapped up, kicking a fallen kunai into the air. She caught it mid-spin, fingers tightening around the hilt as she settled into a wide, ready stance.
The [Genin] attribute hummed in her veins, flooding her with borrowed reflexes a hundred phantom battles whispering through her muscles. The blade flipped effortlessly into a reverse grip, her body moving before her mind could second-guess.
The monster struck. Two bladed arms slashed toward her, claws glinting with predatory hunger. Rin twisted, deflecting the blows with a sharp clang of metal on chitin.
But let's be honest it wasn't just the [Genin] skill keeping her alive. The slums had sharpened her long before any system could. Every back-alley brawl, every knife pulled in the dark, every breath stolen from the jaws of starvation, they'd all carved survival into her bones.
So when she moved, it wasn't just training. It was the unshakable certainty of someone who had danced with death before. And this thing?
Just another predator in a world full of them.
Rin's arm snapped forward, hurling the kunai with deadly intent. The blade sang through the air, guided by some unseen instinct, before burying itself deep in the monster's sinewy neck. The force sent the creature reeling back, until it slammed against a gnarled tree trunk, pinned like a grotesque specimen. Black ichor seeped from the wound, thick and foul.
She didn't pause. In one fluid motion, she snatched another kunai from her pouch just as a scything limb whistled past where her head had been. The creature thrashed, but Rin was already moving inside its guard. A sharp crack echoed as she parried another strike, then drove her blade down, nailing two of its spindly legs to the wood with brutal efficiency.
Backstepping out of range, she avoided the flailing limbs that still clawed at the air, each one a razor-edged threat. Six legs remained, twitching with violent intent, far from harmless.
Her voice cut through the chaos, sharp as steel.
"Quit gawking and get over here! Keep its legs busy—I'll finish it."
Greg and the twin, whatever his name was, shared a brief, wordless look before nodding in grim unison. Weapons drawn, they lunged at the monstrosity in perfect sync, their attacks forcing it to divide its attention.
'Great. Time to earn my right to live... unlike Eric.'
The creature bucked violently, its grotesque body twisting as it tried to snap the kunai pinning it. The blades groaned under the strain, metal warping dangerously.
No time left.
Rin ripped her katana free and drove it straight into the thing's skull with a wet
crunch
It wouldn't kill it, she knew that much, but she wasn't about to roll over and die just because the odds were shit.
Blade lodged deep, she reached for something she'd never consciously touched before: her essence pathway. A sharp inhale. Focus. Then—
Raw power flooded her veins.
Her arms surged with unnatural strength as she wrenched the katana downward. The monster's head split further, unleashing a screech that scraped against her eardrums like nails on stone.
But it wasn't enough.
The abomination kept thrashing, its chittering growing frenzied as it fought against the twins' distraction. The kunai trembled, one wrong move, and they'd snap. The fight hung on a knife's edge, victory or disaster a single second away.
'For the love of everything—just DIE, you eight-legged bastard!'
Exhaustion dragged at her limbs. Each pull from the essence pathway carved another piece out of her, leaving her swaying on her feet. Sweat and blood streaked her face as she poured everything she had into one final, desperate strike.
Time stretched like taffy, each second dragging as her strength bled away. Only the fire of adrenaline kept her moving, smothering the white-hot agony from the creature's claw marks raking her skin.
Her katana rose and fell
once
twice
each strike chipping away at the monster's armored hide. Then, with a final, brutal thrust, the blade punched through. The creature stiffened, its many limbs twitching in a grotesque dance before collapsing in a heap of oozing chitin.
Silence.
Then—
[You have slain a dormant beast: Black Widow's Spawn.]
The voice, dry and mechanical, had never sounded so sweet. Rin exhaled, her knees nearly buckling as the rush faded, leaving only the ache of wounds and the metallic tang of blood in her mouth.