Chapter 173: The Boss Fight Part 1

They slipped back into the violet-lit chamber like hunters slipping into a storm. The crystal glow above pulsed slow and sickly, casting the webs in bruised color. Silk coated the walls in layered sheets and ropy bridges, drooping into catenary arcs over a floor spangled with chitin shards and shed skins. The air was noisy in a quiet way—tiny fibrils humming, egg-sacs ticking faintly, a low breath that wasn’t theirs reverberating through stone. Inigo raised one hand: hold. The shadow at the far end wasn’t a boulder. It was a back—armored with layered plates the color of tarnished iron, stippled with white scars. The body filled a hollow between four columns of stone, legs folded in a throne of web. A sloped abdomen—vast, pitted, striated with ugly seams—rose and fell with that subterranean breath. Lyra leaned close, voice thinner than a whisper. "It’s bigger than a troll." "Big doesn’t change physics," Inigo murmured. "Joints, eyes, spinnerets. We blind her, slow her, break her stance. You take the highs, I take the lows." Lyra’s nod was a feather’s weight. She knelt and drew three arrows, laying them across her thigh as she nocked the first. Inigo rolled his shoulders once; blue sigils crept under the skin like bioluminescent ink and settled over calves and feet. He flexed his hands—tendons hot, nerves tuned. The M4 sat snug against his chest, safety off, a round already chambered. "On my shot," he said. He sighted an eye, a glossy coal set deep in a cranial plate. He controlled his breathing—half in, half out—and squeezed. CRACK. The Broodmother uncoiled in a single nightmare motion. Legs like stacked scythes slammed to the floor, the web throne snapped apart, and a furnace hiss rose from her throat. The first bullet hit the eye; fluid misted. She reared, thrashing, smashing a stone column into rubble. Debris sprayed like shrapnel. Lyra’s first arrow flashed bright and pinned a smaller ocular cluster along the left ridge; a second arrow followed, hard into the hinge where the forward left leg met carapace. The titan lurched, stumbled, and then— She spat. A jet of viscous acid slashed the air where Lyra had been. Lyra dove, rolled, came up behind a fin of rock. The acid hit stone; it hissed, ate, smoked. "Spit," Inigo barked. "Cover!" He dashed. The enchantment pulled the world into a smear; he crossed ten meters in a gasp of blue light, slid behind a stalagmite as a foreleg speared down, fractured the stone tip like glass. He popped out the other side and iron-sighted the base of that leg—short, controlled bursts. CRACK—CRACK—CRACK. Black ichor spattered; the Broodmother snapped the leg back, curling it tight to protect the wound. "Lower left joint’s soft!" he called. Lyra answered with a piercing shot that buried to the fletching exactly where he’d opened flesh. The leg convulsed and skidded, skidding spider-weight carving trenches into webbed floor. The ceiling sang as tension redistributed—webs strummed like a thousand harps as the monster adjusted posture. Then the ceiling itself blinked. They weren’t alone. Hatchlings—too big to be called spiderlings, too fast to be called anything but trouble—rippled down in a studded curtain. Half the chamber moved. Lyra loosed twice, three times; Inigo swept bursts across a line charging his flank. Skittering bodies tumbled, legs pinwheeling. Broodchirps—high, needling—filled the air. The larger mother surged behind the tide, a fortress pushing a flood. "Flash!" Inigo shouted, palming a cylinder. Lyra covered her eyes without being told. He thumbed, tossed. WHITE SUN. Sound compacted to a shock; even prepared, his ears rang. He moved in the silence, a smear of blue crossing to the right pillar, sliding behind it as blinded hatchlings thrashed and clattered over each other. The Broodmother shook her head—plates grinding, mandibles clacking—trying to wipe the white out of a thousand facets. Inigo fired into an exposed slit between head plate and thorax. The rifle hammered his shoulder; ichor jetted, hissing where it struck web. Lyra vaulted a fallen web-beam, landed on a ledge, and shot down an arrow like a skewer into a spinneret cluster beneath the abdomen. Silk geysered, uncontrolled, rope-thick streamers knotting the Broodmother’s rear legs. The giant screamed—an ugly cello note played too hard. "She tangles!" Lyra cried, already drawing again. "Keep her tangled!" The Broodmother slammed her abdomen to the ground, smashing spinnerets against stone to clear blockages. The force shook the chamber; crystals shivered and shed dust. Hatchlings, recovering, split without orders—half launched at Lyra’s ledge, half swarmed for Inigo’s pillar. He went vertical—one step up the rock, then a light-assisted leap, hands catching a webline, body swinging. He let go and dropped behind the oncoming wave. Pivot, raise, two-round bursts to the back plates where chitin thinned before the abdomen. Three fell; two more turned and leaped. He dashed again, a smear to their side, boots biting stone, and met the closest with a rifle muzzle under-fang. CRACK. He snapped the stock into the second’s eye cluster—bone-crunch—and kicked it off his knee. Lyra’s ledge dissolved. Hatchlings flowed up it like ants up a stick. She gave ground, then stopped giving—she spun, shot, spun, shot, each arrow ripping an eye, a joint, a mouth. She kept one half-drawn, the other half-loosed, the rhythm like breathing. When one landed close, she slammed it with the bow’s limb and stabbed it with an arrowhead, then pivoted into a next shot before the body hit the ground. "Inigo!" she called. "She’s angling for me." He saw it—the Broodmother’s bulk turning, front lifted, rear legs braced, pedipalps flexing. She charged like a siege tower. Inigo sprinted—then went higher. He jumped for a hanging web bridge, caught it, ran along it with the enchantment keeping him light, then kicked off the wall. He came down on the Broodmother’s forward carapace. The world narrowed to plates and seams and heat. He jammed the rifle muzzle into the cracked eye he’d ruined at first shot and fired point-blank. The gun thundered. The eye caved completely; fluid sprayed his chest, hot and stinking. The Broodmother bucked. He flew. Stone met shoulder; he rolled, came up on one knee, gasping. The rifle clattered, skidding. He hand-snatched it mid-scramble as a foreleg hammered the ground where he’d been. He dashed under the monster’s belly, sliding in ichor, and planted two shots into the soft triangle between thorax plates. The scream this time shook dust from the ceiling. Lyra found an angle, put an arrow through the far medial joint—one of the load-bearing legs. The limb folded. The beast listed. "Oil," Inigo snapped, brain flipping through the entrance cache, the side shack, the rope coil bouncing at his belt. He pulled the coil free, looped it around a fallen stalagmite, and dashed zigzag, dragging the rope low across the Broodmother’s rear legs, weaving a crude trip snare under her own silk. "Cut her to kneel!" Lyra understood immediately. She shot two more spinnerets; uncontrolled silk blasted and tangled with his rope. The huge abdomen kicked, slipped on its own secretions. The Broodmother reacted with malice. She spat again—this time a wide fan, not a jet. Inigo rolled; the acid sheet sprayed past, a curtain that turned web to froth. A few drops freckled his sleeve; fabric smoldered, skin prickling. He hissed and slapped it out. "Watch the spit pattern—she can fan it!" he said. "Copy." Hatchlings regrouped, smarter now—working around his dashes, trying to flank. He swapped to short-control bursts, conserving what was left of his magazine, and brought one up only when it dropped from above; he shot it mid-fall, then kicked the corpse into two more. The Broodmother lunged to close the distance to Lyra’s ledge—and the makeshift snare caught. Her rear legs knotted in rope and silk. The huge abdomen thumped again; she dragged rock, shredding the rope, but not before momentum forced her front low. For one second—one precious second—her head plate angled down, exposing the pale hinge under the armored brim. "Now!" Inigo shouted. Lyra took the shot she’d been waiting for. The arrow left her bow with a sharp, singing hiss—and drove deep at that hinge. The monster’s head snapped, not fully severed, but jolted. She shrieked and flung her front legs blindly, battering pillars, spraying more acid. Inigo rushed the gap. He yanked an incendiary from his vest, bit the pin free with a grimace, and slammed it onto the fresh silk at the abdomen’s base. "Fire in the nest!" He dashed back out as the grenade’s chemical core bloomed. Flame uncoiled along the silk like a hungry serpent, bright and fast, racing across webbeds overhead, jellied heat dripping in blazing beads. Egg-sacs hissed and burst like overripe fruit; a reek of scorched protein filled the air. The Broodmother panicked. All the world became motion—her, them, flame, silk. She thrashed; the chamber shuddered. One stone column cracked top to bottom. Crystals rained like hail. Hatchlings screamed; some fled the flames, some ran straight into them. Lyra shot everything that came near her; Inigo shot everything that came near her, too. "Ceiling!" Lyra cried, pointing with her next arrow. Fire took a swath of web that had been load-bearing above their entry tunnel. Strands snapped like bowstrings. Rock groaned. "Time to relocate!" Inigo slammed a fresh mag—last one—home, racked the bolt, and covered Lyra as she ran a contour path along the wall to a new perch. He dashed to a low saddle of stone and dropped behind it. The Broodmother, crazed, advanced through fire, plates blackening, wounds leaking. The left-front joint—arrow-wedged, bullet-torn—buckled again. She put weight there anyway, spite stronger than pain. "Her eyes are failing," Lyra said, noticing the aimless rocking of the head. "We can blind her." "Not ’can’—do." He time-sliced the chaos: two seconds of suppression left, one second to move, three to draw her spit, and in that window Lyra to take three shots at three remaining eye clusters. They didn’t need to speak it; they’d rehearsed plans in other lives, other fights. He stood on the saddle a hair too tall, fired a double-burst into her mandible to enrage, and stepped left. The spit fanned hard right—where he’d been. Lyra’s arrows thrummed, cruel and true—one, two, three—and three clusters guttered out like lamps in rain. The monster was not blind, but the world to her had narrowed to heat and pain and sound. "Last trick," Inigo said, voice low. He slid a second incendiary from the vest and palmed it. "Spinnerets again. If she can’t clutch to web, she can’t find footing once we make the floor worse." Lyra’s smile was grim. "Make it worse." He dashed for the tail-end, shoes skating on melted silk. A foreleg stabbed where his head had been a breath ago; he hopped, planted foot to leg, vaulted off like a springboard, and landed behind the abdomen. He slapped the incendiary under the spinneret rosette; it stuck in slick threads, blinking red. The Broodmother vented a raw, wordless hatred through her mandibles. She convulsed the abdomen; the grenade popped. Fire jetted like a forge blast. Silk fouled, sloughed, ignited. The enormous body lurched, slid, and then dropped to one side, legs scraping for purchase and finding only gummed, flaming ropes. "Pull back!" Inigo called, grabbing a fistful of Lyra’s cloak as another section of ceiling web gave way with a gunshot snap. A stone fin fell where she had stood. They slid together behind a slab as smoke thickened and the chamber cracked like an eggshell. The Broodmother tried to retreat—toward a darker tunnel that tunneled deeper—but her rear was aflame and her forward placements were failing. She slammed her body into the wall to smother the fire and, in so doing, tore open a new seam in the stone. A hot draft exhaled from it—old air, deep earth. Lyra took a long shot in that brief stillness. The arrow sank into the seam between head plate and neck—deep enough to matter but not to end it. The monster spasmed and fell half-sideways, one leg tangled in a burning cable of silk. "Inigo," she said, voice tight, eyes watering from smoke. "We need to finish this." "We will," he said. He felt the magazine’s weight—light. He gauged the room—worse. Fire was eating their cover and their air. They’d bloodied her hard, blinded her mostly, fouled her silk, and taken her footing. And still, the Broodmother lived. She rallied all the mass she had left, lifted her front in a last, hateful rise—and screamed. The sound cleaved the smoke. The remaining hatchlings—dozens they hadn’t seen—poured from the deeper crack behind her like black water. "Of course," Inigo growled. Lyra lifted three arrows in one hand. "Second wave." He bared his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a grin. "Then we drown it in fire." They rose together into the ash-bright chamber, side by side, as the second wave hit like a tide.