Egil Rosenblaun bent down to examine the cuts on the heads and bodies of the spideroids, noting the surgical ease with which they'd been carved through. As their bodies were as tough and elastic as flexamite armor, capable of taking sustained small arms fire, this was pretty impressive.

That was a very impressive mindblade, if that was true. He grunted. He might just have found someone competent enough to take on some of the backlog cases.

He began to review her killfile, and appreciated the thoroughness. Vid file combined with building layout and scan results, locations of the dead and missing along with the kills, very neat and ample justification for release of funds if his superiors asked. Not that they bothered. He was long since good at being so thorough they didn't even bother looking at his claims anymore... unless there was interference Higher Up.

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Now she was on the clock and moving back towards the killsite that she had just vacated. He'd have to send in a cleaning team to wash the place down of mutant flesh and blood, or who knew what else might settle in there... standard protocol, there were always pyros happy to do a flamewash...

He also noted the two dead punks outside were being unceremoniously sucked into the cleaning vehicle of the TC, right on time...

-------

Their backtrail wasn't all that hard to follow. Actually, a dog probably could have done it, because they all came the same way. I noted a massive dearth of the local rodent population and recent signs thereof, as well as all the stuff that usually fed on them. Ah, picking off bums, cats, rats, dogs, and lizards. The preferred diet of mutant night hunters everywhere.

The trail led over and through a bunch of abandoned buildings, all of them looming empty of life, and more than a few of them with webbed bodies decaying in corners, who I harvested a bone sample from. At least three had been places where addicts and the lowest of street girls did their trade, now suspiciously silent and empty of anything. Some of the spiders had checked back regularly to see if there were more victims, too.

Up, down, and around. They didn't cross any major roads aboveground, a sure way to be caught by camera. No, whole stretches were along subterranean walkways, sunken hallways, silent transfer lines no longer used, or oversized ventilation tubes gone still and quiet. They'd done a real good job of clearing off those who'd set up shop in their path, and then immediately moving on.

Thankfully my attack on their queen had driven them all to attack me, and she hadn't run away while I was fighting and killing all her babies. Lucky me, right?

I was plotting this whole course of travel, very interesting, and wondered just how far and deep this world went. I'd have to find out. The Boole wasn't giving much detail, but seemingly there was a whole sunken sea under the city, some five thousand feet down, and the water wasn't totally caustic or anything. That was a lot of build-up over time. I knew the foundations for the algae-vats and recycling pits went down a long ways...

Met nothing bigger than my hand on the way, and most of those were sliced in passing. Some of the vents and pipes were kind of small, but if the spideroids could pass, especially that queen, I certainly could. My Vajra squeezed me through in a nigh-frictionless manner.

Up, down, around, repeat. I covered over three miles on the surface, at least six miles with the rising and falling between all these interconnected buildings, and didn't step outside even once. Damn. This place was a maze of mazes.

Of course, I knew all that. I'd been tracking just the subways and underground I could see/reach from the surface, and that had been pretty complex all by itself. While the thought of Live-Lining this whole city was pretty dazzling, I realized I probably wouldn't have the time. Well, I had the time, but I wasn't going to take the time. Hundreds of cubic miles of city was just too damn long to travel all the way through.

But damn if I wasn't going to go through a huge part of it, because it was like the biggest dungeon just waiting ever... and I got sooo much practice with my Tremblesense and working on the upgrades to it...

--------

It probably would have blinked if it could, the five beady orbs looking in my general direction as it scampered over the edge of the pipe and literally ran into my face before it stopped.

So there I am, face to face with this shadow-oozing, poison-dripping, cleaver-waving, mandible-working, ten-legged pig-sized spideroid.

My Claw became a blade on my face and I lunged up and came down on it.

Now, getting my face full of spideroid blood is not the way I wanted to greet the morning, but needs must. I slammed its head to the pipe, which burst wetly, and it didn't give off more than a quiver of its legs before it stopped moving.

They might smell the blood, but I couldn't do anything about that. I shoved the carcass back out, not sensing any movement in range as I did, and grabbed the rim to flip myself out and come down on it with a bit more a crunch as the durasteel pipe faintly protested my weight.

I'd seen at least two other packs of spiders diverging away from this trail here, so my pack hadn't been the only one leaving from this location. I had the impression I was getting close, because there was a cold and bitter smell in the air... and a lot more shadow silk evaporating around me.

Big room, lots of large pipes, pumping machinery, very automated, limited access. I'd come through a ventilation pipe with the vermin barriers removed at some time in the past centuries, giving these guys an easy way out.

I touched one of the pipes running past in parallel. Semiliquid ooze mixed with numerous solid objects of varying densities flowing past at a constant rate...

Sewage lines. I was near one of the major pumping and cleaning stations for the city's waste?

Motion caught my eye, and I glided to a stop as I saw a large cover slowly get pried open against its counterweights, probably a lift tunnel for moving heavy equipment below. It creaked a little as it was forced open by numerous legs, and then up boiled two dozen spideroids, small ones first, moving around the bodies of the larger ones holding open the cover, and then the larger ones followed, carefully moving up as they held open the lift seal, and then the queen of the group was suddenly up and through, and the adults released and let the seal slide slowly shut.

Huh, would you look at that.

I double-checked my authorization... wow, nice; visual authorization accepted commiserate with date and location logs. I'd been clocking my location, of course, but the pipes and ground structure was totally cutting off my Boole links, so I was on my own for now.

But that was okay.

The spideroids seemed to pick up the death pheromones, and scuttled in my direction. I smiled and waited for the Cleave Train to form –

Now.

Chalice hissed to golden life, and I was moving.

Hit the first one, full length of its body. Death. Cleave through to the second one starting to rear up, take off its upper body and parts of four legs. Step. Third one, split its head upwards. Step. Diagonal down on the next. Step. Rip down the side of the fifth, legs bouncing off me as they were severed and fell past me. Step.

From their standpoint, what they saw is someone dancing forwards in diagonal patterns, and a glowing golden arc of light passing through and past their little ones.

They reared up, looking mighty impressive with those cleaver-pedipalps, and lunged at me.

I Flared my Sword at the first one, and the Sun Strike ripped through it rather explosively, ending it immediately in messy fashion. The next one leapt at me, ate the sword that snapped up to meet it right in the mandibles, and I ripped it through and tore off its blade-leg as I stepped past, ignoring the other legs ramming into my chest as it died. Chalice Flared again as I focused and my Nimbus returned, while Combat Focus kept me straight anchored against their mass and arms.

Three, four, six more small ones died in a ball of dripping fangs and blade-like pedipalps, the last elder came in, missed with its first attack, lost its second when I cut that limb off, tried to bite me, Sword Beats Fist activated to plunge into its mouth, and only the Queen was left.

This one had some sense, and scuttled rapidly to leave, moving over the pipes and uneven flooring with a spider's casual ease of defying gravity, despite being the size of a cow.

I flipped off my belt, bounded after her, and as she was driving her legs into niches in the plascrete wall and climbing for altitude, her unblinking eyes saw me running along the wall for thirty feet and driving Chalice right into the joint of her thorax while all her legs were occupied. Oh, and I turned off the Belt as I hit her, slicing her thorax clean off, ripping her off the wall, and we fell twenty feet down to a patient pipe where five hundred pounds or so me, aided by the golden ridge that came up along my backside, slammed down on the queen and cut her in two again, ringing against the patient durasteel pipe a little loudly, but nothing to write home about.

Would something come up from below to investigate?

I eyed my clothes, where stabbing blade-legs and bristles like thorns had totally savaged my shirt and pants, although they hadn't been enough to draw blood. I looked around at the mess I'd made, and moved quickly to grab my harvest of nexal crystals from inside the carcasses.

Oh, hey, more of them were coming up? Little ting ting impacts of their legs on the durasteel of the liftshaft were coming up from below, like alarm bells to my Trembling Domain.

I debated on what to do, but I felt they had more than animal cleverness, and did I absolutely want them knowing a human had been here? I didn't leave any scent, so they wouldn't know what killed everything here...

Then again, I didn't know what was down below here, either. I only knew a lot of these things came up from down there and headed away, the behavior of things leaving a colony because the numbers were too large.

I debated, and then I shrugged, because I didn't know what was down below, and I really had to learn.

The lift for this hole was down below. I thought about that, looked over the levers here and there, walked over, and pulled one down.

There was a hum of machinery, counterweights clunked and clanked, and the hole levered itself open of its own accord.

A few adult spideroids pulled themselves out of it, looking a bit twitchy, possibly because they were met with the smell of a lot of dead of their own, including the queen that had recently come up this way.

I dropped down from above on the first of them, my heels like a plunging axe, and drove the thick resistance of its head into the plascrete floor. As the others reared and moved, Chalice was humming and lighting into them. Forcing into them? Mwa-ha-ha...!

----

The side of the shaft had recessed rungs in it for emergency exiting, thoughtful of them. Probably why the sliding hatch could be forced. I went down the webbed-up sides quickly, the black webbing dissolving around me and my Null, reached the ground now decorated with a couple fallen spideroids, and knew I didn't have much time.

That was okay, because I didn't want to take much time.

I stepped out of the lift-shaft, and found myself in a larger underground space. At this point, I was about three hundred feet under the street, and I found myself looking at a lot of convoluted piping, coming into and going out of nowhere, yet with plenty of extra space where power-machinery could be suspended from rafters and bring in and place new pipes. The place went on for miles, of course, beyond my sight, pipes mostly straight, but coming into and out of the walls, merging, splitting, and doing that engineering for multi-millions thing.

It was all festooned with webbing and crawling with spideroids, web tunnels, egg nests, and the like.

The crux of it was down low and about a quarter mile away, where a bulging mass of webbing was gathered around one of the pipes. The webbing seemed to be slowly moving, pulsing, and pumping stuff out of the pipe. The webs around it seemed thicker, carrying the contents away from that pipe, while spideroids were clustered around the webbing, occasionally leaving it with prizes grasped in their limbs, or entering to try their luck.

The smell was enough to tell me... they'd broken into one of the sewage lines, and were feasting off the organic material within. They were probably fishing for corpses and other things tossed into the sewers by those wanting to hide something, which in a city this large would have been an uncomfortable number. Maybe baby alligators or lizardoids too, who knew?

Their webbing must have had some ability to filter the organic waste out of the slurry, and was slowly drawing it out for the spideroids to feast on.

Well, wasn't My Queen going to get his money's worth. I wondered if he was still on duty, considered that he probably slept there, and realized it was time for me to go while some people with a lot more firepower cleared this place. I mean, this place couldn't have been more than a couple of years old, or the inspection drones would have discovered it. I shook my head at the speed of reproduction and growth all of this represented, wondered where the spideroids had come from originally, and headed back up the shaft.

Back at the top, I closed and locked the hatch, and then looked around for alternate ways out of here. No reason not to expand the lived-line while I could, right? And Termites engaged in underground travels and with the proper licenses had authorization to use access tunnels and the like... some of whom abused it, and who generally got quickly dead if they did, and others who ended up in all sorts of interesting places where they weren't wanted, and sometimes where they were wanted for dinner.

Ah, the Underspires. Truly a massive dungeon...