MMORPG : Ancient WORLD
Author: Aibek
Chapter 627: The Spider (III)
Zarach stood transformed, though unlike Tsolmir, he did not undergo major physical changes, as his new form was barely altered, refined yet unsettling.
His fusion with the Moth Empress had not twisted his form, merely given him more arms, three new spectral limbs that, as much as humans, also evoked the unsettling symmetry of a spider’s grace.
It was as if the spirit’s essence had flowed seamlessly into him, amplifying what was already there rather than overwriting it.
The spectral arms that had formed from the swirling mist settled into solidity, bone-white and elegant, as if carved from translucent jade.
They seemed to waver between the states of flesh and spirit. Each limb shimmered faintly, their pale surface glinting under the moonlight, half-corporeal and half-illusory.
Every faint twitch of their fingers made the surrounding air hum, the threads of fate quivering as though stirred by a phantom wind.
His once dull eyes now mirrored the world around him, glassy, reflective, and bottomless. They caught the faintest glimmers of light, turning every reflection into a silent echo of motion. To look into them was to see one’s own soul blurred, fading in and out like a wavering image on water.
The transformation was not limited to Zarach himself, as with his nature, the nature of the silver strings he controlled began to shift.
In Alex’s Ancient Eyes, the silver strings no longer glowed with a single, metallic luster. The soul element began infusing them with its essence, making their silver color no longer flat but more alive, layered with faint white luminance and ghostly gray undertones that pulsed like living veins.
What once seemed simple and direct now carried a second essence beneath it, intangible and elusive.
The transformation ended within seconds, but Alex did not just stand there and watch. Before the changes fully took form, he was already upon Zarach, the stygian blade silently descending upon him, making his figure sent crashing back into the Dark enclave like a silver arrow.
Alex followed Zarach like a shadow, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the wound he delivered, turning blurring beneath a silver veil, only to vanish a fraction of a second later.
The edge of Alex’s blade darkened, thick with Severance and Error, as he struck again. The second slash cleaved through one of Zarach’s phantom arms, severing it cleanly, and bit into another.
For an instant, the wounds held, the flesh quivering but failing to recover, yet the anomaly lasted only seconds before the silvery veil drowned it and mended the wound as if it had never even been present, while a new spectral arm took its place.
’He is no longer using fate to mend his wounds... he is manipulating his own soul to recover.’ The world unfolding before his eyes like an open book, making Alex realise why, even after being influenced by error and so thoroughly cut, Zarach was healing so quickly.
The fast recovery came at the cost of soul essence, but it didn’t appear that Zarach was using much. This put Alex at a bit of a disadvantage, since the only thing capable of affecting Zarach’s quick recovery was Error, and a small amount didn’t seem to pose much of a threat.
But that was it, a small disadvantage if the battle dragged on for multiple minutes, and Alex had no plan to make it reach a point where he had to worry about his mana reserve.
Anyway, if things went out of control, he had more than one option to salvage the situation, and the easiest one was Revrie, the dragon mask that allowed him to turn back time on himself, though he would rather not rely on it.
Done with his transformation, Zarach’s spider-like arms unfurled in eerie synchronization, each motion deliberate and graceful.
From every finger extended a filament, threads so thin they could have been mistaken for glimmers of light, yet each one connected directly to the branching weave of reality itself.
As he moved back, avoiding the merciless slashes, his phantom arms moved with inhuman speed, weaving the silken striges into a complex and shifting pattern.
Some strings met Alex’s descending blade and were severed instantly, while others withstood even the erasing grasp of darkness, humming faintly as if resonating with the laws that bound the world together.
Before long, the intricate lattice dissolved, not broken, but assimilated. The strands burned into motes of silver embers, disolving into the air and merging seamlessly with reality’s unseen fabric.
The reaction was immediate, as the vast weave around them shuddered, countless points of fate igniting like distant stars in the dark enclave’s void.
The air rippled as those stars flared to life, giving birth to phantoms of Zarach, nearly two dozen in number. They bore his unaltered human form, lacking the spider-like arms, yet their eyes remained the same lifeless crystals, each figure bound to countless silver threads like puppets on unseen strings.
They moved as quickly as they took form. The one nearest to Alex rushed at him and, without warning, blazed like a star, and in the blink of an eye, the Dark Enclave quaked with a series of muffled detonations.
Soul essence burst outward, and the chaos spread through the surrounding fate threads in a chain reaction, making new fate strings appear only to collapse a moment later, having fulfilled their destiny.
Each phantom embodied a separate fate, each carrying a distinct soul effect. Individually, their attacks lacked the devastation of a single, focused strike, but together, their sheer numbers turned them into a storm of unavoidable calamity.
The darkness around Alex surged in response, swallowing several phantoms into its silent embrace, while his twin blades tore through half a dozen more.
Yet even as they faded, the destinies those phantoms carried began to manifest, each one unfolding like a curse written into the fabric of the world.
Alex watched as a ripple tore through the air, stretching nearly a hundred meters wide, splitting the space between him and Zarach.
A heartbeat later, the very fabric of reality fractured, releasing a violent surge of violet energy that bled into the world like liquid chaos. The rupture expanded, howling winds spiraling outward as the pressure of collapsing dimensions screamed across the battlefield.
In mere moments, the distortion evolved into a raging storm. Space itself shredded like thin parchment, spilling torrents of void that devoured darkness and fate alike.
The ground buckled beneath the strain, giving way to another equally devastating calamity as vast fissures were torn open, making chunks of land the size of houses get torn free and hurled skyward by torrents of gravity pillars.
The entire enclave trembled beneath the growing wrath of two calamities, the world groaning under the clash of impossible forces.
Through the chaos, the remaining phantoms closed in, their soulless eyes fixed upon him. Alex’s figure shifted, the darkness around him tightening like a living shroud as he turned to face them.
The two growing calamities, alongside the dozen soul phantoms, were a great threat, but Alex saw through them and knew, just like before, they were just a distraction meant to buy some time.
So reacting quickly, Alex raised the twin blades to eye level, their obsidian edges glinting faintly in the baleful chaos. He exhaled, and his mana surged, dense, refined, merciless.
Between the blades, a point of absolute blackness was born, small enough to fit within his palm, yet impossibly heavy, a void given form. It spun faster and faster, the revolutions so violent that the air itself screamed.
And soon the very reality bent around it.
The storm’s roaring winds stuttered, the violet chaos of ruptured space coiling inward like serpents drawn to a single point. Even the enclave’s darkness suffered, bending and twisting before being consumed.
The pressure was suffocating, as matter, energy, even the ghostly phantoms began to stretch and contort as if caught in invisible chains, their forms dragged toward the spinning core.
The first phantom shattered, its body unraveling into smokeless fire before being swallowed whole. The others followed, some torn apart mid-flight, others distorted until they ceased to exist, devoured by the false black hole’s ever-growing pull.
Alex didn’t wait to see it finish. His figure blurred, darkness streaming off him like smoke, wings of tattered shadow cutting through the maelstrom of baleful chaos.
He tore through the collapsing chaos head-on, crossing the gulf in an instant, and emerged on the other side where, far ahead, Zarach stood unmoved, eight arms stretched wide, each finger bound to a hundred gleaming fate-threads that shimmered like a chain of stars burning bright against the void.
A massive structure loomed above them, an impossible web of silver strings, glimmering faintly in the light devoured by the surrounding void. It was neither solid nor ethereal, its form shifting as though it existed across layers of reality.
The Loom stretched all around, vast and intricate, tens of thousands of strings interwoven in maddening precision. Each thread pulsed with an alien rhythm, like veins carrying the lifeblood of something ancient and conscious.
The air itself seemed bound by those lines. Every flicker of motion, every breath, every mote of energy felt guided by an unseen pattern, like the world had been reduced to a marionette under a perfect puppeteer.
His fusion with the Moth Empress had not twisted his form, merely given him more arms, three new spectral limbs that, as much as humans, also evoked the unsettling symmetry of a spider’s grace.
It was as if the spirit’s essence had flowed seamlessly into him, amplifying what was already there rather than overwriting it.
The spectral arms that had formed from the swirling mist settled into solidity, bone-white and elegant, as if carved from translucent jade.
They seemed to waver between the states of flesh and spirit. Each limb shimmered faintly, their pale surface glinting under the moonlight, half-corporeal and half-illusory.
Every faint twitch of their fingers made the surrounding air hum, the threads of fate quivering as though stirred by a phantom wind.
His once dull eyes now mirrored the world around him, glassy, reflective, and bottomless. They caught the faintest glimmers of light, turning every reflection into a silent echo of motion. To look into them was to see one’s own soul blurred, fading in and out like a wavering image on water.
The transformation was not limited to Zarach himself, as with his nature, the nature of the silver strings he controlled began to shift.
In Alex’s Ancient Eyes, the silver strings no longer glowed with a single, metallic luster. The soul element began infusing them with its essence, making their silver color no longer flat but more alive, layered with faint white luminance and ghostly gray undertones that pulsed like living veins.
What once seemed simple and direct now carried a second essence beneath it, intangible and elusive.
The transformation ended within seconds, but Alex did not just stand there and watch. Before the changes fully took form, he was already upon Zarach, the stygian blade silently descending upon him, making his figure sent crashing back into the Dark enclave like a silver arrow.
Alex followed Zarach like a shadow, his eyes narrowing at the sight of the wound he delivered, turning blurring beneath a silver veil, only to vanish a fraction of a second later.
The edge of Alex’s blade darkened, thick with Severance and Error, as he struck again. The second slash cleaved through one of Zarach’s phantom arms, severing it cleanly, and bit into another.
For an instant, the wounds held, the flesh quivering but failing to recover, yet the anomaly lasted only seconds before the silvery veil drowned it and mended the wound as if it had never even been present, while a new spectral arm took its place.
’He is no longer using fate to mend his wounds... he is manipulating his own soul to recover.’ The world unfolding before his eyes like an open book, making Alex realise why, even after being influenced by error and so thoroughly cut, Zarach was healing so quickly.
The fast recovery came at the cost of soul essence, but it didn’t appear that Zarach was using much. This put Alex at a bit of a disadvantage, since the only thing capable of affecting Zarach’s quick recovery was Error, and a small amount didn’t seem to pose much of a threat.
But that was it, a small disadvantage if the battle dragged on for multiple minutes, and Alex had no plan to make it reach a point where he had to worry about his mana reserve.
Anyway, if things went out of control, he had more than one option to salvage the situation, and the easiest one was Revrie, the dragon mask that allowed him to turn back time on himself, though he would rather not rely on it.
Done with his transformation, Zarach’s spider-like arms unfurled in eerie synchronization, each motion deliberate and graceful.
From every finger extended a filament, threads so thin they could have been mistaken for glimmers of light, yet each one connected directly to the branching weave of reality itself.
As he moved back, avoiding the merciless slashes, his phantom arms moved with inhuman speed, weaving the silken striges into a complex and shifting pattern.
Some strings met Alex’s descending blade and were severed instantly, while others withstood even the erasing grasp of darkness, humming faintly as if resonating with the laws that bound the world together.
Before long, the intricate lattice dissolved, not broken, but assimilated. The strands burned into motes of silver embers, disolving into the air and merging seamlessly with reality’s unseen fabric.
The reaction was immediate, as the vast weave around them shuddered, countless points of fate igniting like distant stars in the dark enclave’s void.
The air rippled as those stars flared to life, giving birth to phantoms of Zarach, nearly two dozen in number. They bore his unaltered human form, lacking the spider-like arms, yet their eyes remained the same lifeless crystals, each figure bound to countless silver threads like puppets on unseen strings.
They moved as quickly as they took form. The one nearest to Alex rushed at him and, without warning, blazed like a star, and in the blink of an eye, the Dark Enclave quaked with a series of muffled detonations.
Soul essence burst outward, and the chaos spread through the surrounding fate threads in a chain reaction, making new fate strings appear only to collapse a moment later, having fulfilled their destiny.
Each phantom embodied a separate fate, each carrying a distinct soul effect. Individually, their attacks lacked the devastation of a single, focused strike, but together, their sheer numbers turned them into a storm of unavoidable calamity.
The darkness around Alex surged in response, swallowing several phantoms into its silent embrace, while his twin blades tore through half a dozen more.
Yet even as they faded, the destinies those phantoms carried began to manifest, each one unfolding like a curse written into the fabric of the world.
Alex watched as a ripple tore through the air, stretching nearly a hundred meters wide, splitting the space between him and Zarach.
A heartbeat later, the very fabric of reality fractured, releasing a violent surge of violet energy that bled into the world like liquid chaos. The rupture expanded, howling winds spiraling outward as the pressure of collapsing dimensions screamed across the battlefield.
In mere moments, the distortion evolved into a raging storm. Space itself shredded like thin parchment, spilling torrents of void that devoured darkness and fate alike.
The ground buckled beneath the strain, giving way to another equally devastating calamity as vast fissures were torn open, making chunks of land the size of houses get torn free and hurled skyward by torrents of gravity pillars.
The entire enclave trembled beneath the growing wrath of two calamities, the world groaning under the clash of impossible forces.
Through the chaos, the remaining phantoms closed in, their soulless eyes fixed upon him. Alex’s figure shifted, the darkness around him tightening like a living shroud as he turned to face them.
The two growing calamities, alongside the dozen soul phantoms, were a great threat, but Alex saw through them and knew, just like before, they were just a distraction meant to buy some time.
So reacting quickly, Alex raised the twin blades to eye level, their obsidian edges glinting faintly in the baleful chaos. He exhaled, and his mana surged, dense, refined, merciless.
Between the blades, a point of absolute blackness was born, small enough to fit within his palm, yet impossibly heavy, a void given form. It spun faster and faster, the revolutions so violent that the air itself screamed.
And soon the very reality bent around it.
The storm’s roaring winds stuttered, the violet chaos of ruptured space coiling inward like serpents drawn to a single point. Even the enclave’s darkness suffered, bending and twisting before being consumed.
The pressure was suffocating, as matter, energy, even the ghostly phantoms began to stretch and contort as if caught in invisible chains, their forms dragged toward the spinning core.
The first phantom shattered, its body unraveling into smokeless fire before being swallowed whole. The others followed, some torn apart mid-flight, others distorted until they ceased to exist, devoured by the false black hole’s ever-growing pull.
Alex didn’t wait to see it finish. His figure blurred, darkness streaming off him like smoke, wings of tattered shadow cutting through the maelstrom of baleful chaos.
He tore through the collapsing chaos head-on, crossing the gulf in an instant, and emerged on the other side where, far ahead, Zarach stood unmoved, eight arms stretched wide, each finger bound to a hundred gleaming fate-threads that shimmered like a chain of stars burning bright against the void.
A massive structure loomed above them, an impossible web of silver strings, glimmering faintly in the light devoured by the surrounding void. It was neither solid nor ethereal, its form shifting as though it existed across layers of reality.
The Loom stretched all around, vast and intricate, tens of thousands of strings interwoven in maddening precision. Each thread pulsed with an alien rhythm, like veins carrying the lifeblood of something ancient and conscious.
The air itself seemed bound by those lines. Every flicker of motion, every breath, every mote of energy felt guided by an unseen pattern, like the world had been reduced to a marionette under a perfect puppeteer.