Chapter 154: Liliana Enters The Caves 2

Words : 1049 Updated : Sep 19th, 2025

Chapter 154: Liliana Enters The Caves 2 Liliana took a slow breath. The pressure near the cave was shifting. Not like gravity. More like the air itself was holding its breath. She wasn’t scared. She’d seen worse. But something in her gut tightened—a quiet, nagging feeling she couldn’t explain. The cold breeze that rolled out from the cave wasn’t natural. It carried that scent again—wet stone, rust, and something older. Something dead. But not decayed, but preserved, like a memory. Her eyes stayed locked on the entrance, even as the drones floated back toward the surface. Their scanning lights blinked as they returned, data streams syncing to the relay pads behind her. She didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Behind her, the special unit made their final checks. There was no need to rush. These soldiers didn’t need barking orders or rallying cries. They were used to operating in silence. Efficient. Trained. Trusted. A faint shimmer passed across the rocks to her left—one of the concealment suits activating. The soldier vanished from sight completely. The air warped for half a second, then settled like nothing had changed. Liliana didn’t glance back. She trusted them. Another step sounded nearby—a soft crunch of boots against gravel. One of the lieutenants stopped beside her. His visor was dimmed, helmet tucked under his arm. "Commander," he said quietly. "Everyone is ready and is waiting for your order." Liliana didn’t hesitate. "If everyone is ready, then move out. I don’t want to waste time here, as the alpha and beta teams are still in there, and we cannot waste time." "Understood," the lieutenant nodded. He didn’t need to write it down. Orders like this are stuck, especially when they come from her. Behind them, suits activated one by one. Some shimmered and vanished. Others ran final syncs with the underground relay—a system buried beneath the rocks and wired into the Association’s long-range scanning net. The Mark-9 suits responded to mana like skin to heat, fitting perfectly once the user was stable. But if your focus wavered, if your control slipped? The suit rejected you. Some fried the user. Some just shut down. These men and women? They passed. Not by luck. By sheer discipline. Liliana gave a short nod as the last of the scouts disappeared into the rock shadows. "No weapons drawn until we’re inside. We’re not here to start a fight. We’re here to understand it." The lieutenant gestured with two fingers, and the units split off. Two to her side. Three behind. The others peeled away toward the Beta trail, their movement soundless and invisible. For a few seconds, there was nothing. Just wind. Just silence. Then Liliana took the first step toward the mouth of the cave. The air grew colder with each meter. It didn’t feel like walking underground. It felt like walking into something. A mind. A presence. Like they were being swallowed. But none of them hesitated. Not even her. Meanwhile... Deep within the nest, far below the upper tunnels, the Spider Lord remained still. He hadn’t twitched in minutes. His long, bladed limbs hung motionless around the throne of bone and silk. But he was thinking. Watching. And waiting. The web threads stretched around him like nerves—each one carrying faint pulses of activity from different sections of the cavern. Earlier, they had buzzed with motion. The two surface teams—Alpha and Beta—had triggered all kinds of movement: echoes of footsteps, mana surges, and slight tremors from equipment. But now? Nothing. The signals had gone quiet. Not gone. Just... dull. Dim. Muted, as if the teams were still there, but not doing anything. He didn’t understand it. Although he does not understand these bipeds, he does not think they will stay quiet like this and do nothing. Something was off. He clicked his mandibles once. A quiet warning to no one but himself. He had already sent scouts to flank the two teams earlier, small drones built to move between rocks and web channels without detection. They reported minimal resistance. The humans were slow. Waiting. Maybe scared. But now? Even the scouts had gone quiet. The sensory web—the nest’s inner detection layer built from refined magic particles—had thinned in several places. Not broken. Just... blurred. That wasn’t normal. He reached out mentally, brushing his will against the core node embedded in the throne beneath him. The feedback came instantly—data streams feeding into his awareness through the living network. Still no clear alerts. Still no visual relay. But the air felt wrong. Something had brushed the detection layer. Lightly. Like a ripple in still water. Just enough to be noticed—but not enough to trace. His clawed fingers curled against the bone of the throne. The detection web wasn’t just for sensing movement. It tracked flow—mana particles, pressure shifts, body heat, and even emotion. And now? It wasn’t showing movement. It was showing fluctuation. Tiny, inconsistent fluctuations in mana density... scattered in two locations. And both of these came from the same path that these two bipedal teams took to come inside, so he knows for sure that it had something to do with them. But the problem is just quiet, too quiet. The kind of quiet you get when someone erases their presence. He sent out a new command—deeper, sharper. More scouts. Different ones. Smaller bodies. Tuned for fluctuation tracking, not visuals. They skittered out like shadows, crawling between cracks, vanishing into the deeper web channels—but he already knew it wouldn’t help. Because whatever was hiding in his nest... ...was using the same material that his website depended on. Magic particles. What he didn’t know is that it is his own system, designed to detect through mana, that was being clouded by suits that masked themselves using those very same threads of reality. It didn’t make them invisible. It made them invisible to him. The thought made his jaw tighten. This wasn’t a normal infiltration. This was planned. And it was working. His scouts reported nothing again. No enemy signatures. No visual cues. No biological disturbances. But that pressure in his chest stayed. A weight he couldn’t explain. Not from logic. From instinct. From the part of him that had survived ambushes before he could even speak back when he was one molt away from being eaten in his sleep.

Chapter 154: Liliana Enters The Caves 2

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