Chapter 921 — The Hunt

Here, any ordered calculation ultimately pointed toward a disordered result. Every second, useless data was destroyed here; formless "thoughts" and "memories" dissolved into nothingness—thoughts and memories formed when the network's connectors influenced one another in their dream-murmurings, the fruit of countless minds wandering together. They took shape and broke apart endlessly in this borderland, and what those cloud masses and vortices presented was precisely that.

A mind properly connected to the neural network would never visit this region—over a dozen layers of security protocols protected the user's brain, preventing rash network wanderers from being devoured and digested by the "unconscious zone." But today, this "frontier," which should have had no visitors, received an uninvited guest.

A vast, pale violet phantom flashed deep within the fog. The shadow was cast upon the gray-white water at the fog's base, yet what it reflected was countless bizarre runes and colored orbs of light. And around this swiftly passing phantom, fine spider silk and illusory arachnid limbs ceaselessly sprouted and extended like a dream that would not disperse.

A giant spider, pure white from head to tail, was moving swiftly above the fog. A vast web took shape rapidly around her and spread just as fast, while her long limbs churned the thick mist below as she ran. The power of the "border" was marshaled by the spider, ceaselessly forming disruptive barriers and false paths, while the white spider's eyeless head remained fixed upon a single direction—

Swift as the pale violet phantom was, it had already fallen into the spider's web. To a predator, any attempt at escape within the web was merely entertainment before the net was drawn shut.

Narytir was a predator with little patience.

So once she was certain the moment was right, she immediately drew in all the flows of information in the border region.

In an instant, the pale violet phantom was bound by an invisible force within the fog. Countless runes and chaotic lines of light and shadow burst from its surface, and it took on the posture of a spell-model on the verge of collapse. Yet the next second, this "runaway spell-model" swiftly steadied itself and began to collapse inward—a great mass of multicolored orbs and runes first spread outward, then condensed inward again, and within mere seconds this chaotic, eerie shadow had acquired a definite "appearance."

It was a woman—at least, certain features seemed female.

Her form was as vast as a bell tower, her face beautiful yet touched with an uncanny, unhuman quality. Her eyes were like shattered constellations, showing only scattered points of starlight, with no division at all between sclera and pupil. Black hair cascaded down from the back of her head, glittering with countless drifting lights and fine, dense lightning. Yet from the head downward, her entire upper body appeared illusory, as though condensed from cloud and mist; only a vague suggestion could be made out of a short black robe draped upon her, and beneath the robe the outline of a female form. Her lower body was nothing but a thin wisp of cloud, ceaselessly dispersing and gathering, with no limbs within—only layer upon layer of faint, indistinct runes and orbs of light surfacing and circulating there.

This bell-tower-sized "lady" finally came to a halt. She raised her head and saw the colossal white spider descending from the fog, dense webs appearing around the spider, threads extending into the surrounding space, already forming a fine-meshed net of encirclement.

At last she cried out in exasperation: "Why do you keep chasing me?!"

The white spider settled steadily on the gray-white water. Hearing the shout directed at her, she seemed to pause for a moment; then, from the fine down atop the spider's head, a tiny figure with white hair trailing to the ground slowly emerged. Narytir looked levelly at the "giant lady" not far away, her face utterly earnest: "You broke the arcane net. Pay for it."

"I didn't break anything!" The bell-tower-sized lady seemed to grow even more furious. She glared at the tiny girl atop the spider before her—in her eyes, the girl and the spider were plainly a single whole. "I made precise calculations—I've been calculating since last year. Nothing is broken! I could not possibly have made a mistake!"

Nairetil blinked, then seemed to confirm something with someone far away, and only then nodded: "It does seem that nothing was damaged..."

"So you were the one who made the mistake—I won't hold it against you, but I must..."

"But I still can't let you go," Nairetil said, shaking her head. "You delayed the project, and that counts as 'economic loss'..."

"...Damn it!"

The clock-tower-like lady was dumbfounded for a moment, then could not help but curse. Her whole figure suddenly turned illusory; while the white spider was briefly taken aback, she broke free of those webs and the mist around her in one burst, once more becoming a spectral phantom, and vanished from where she stood in an instant!

Yet this sudden flight, which seemed so likely to succeed, did not. She had moved only a short distance when the white spider's limbs, as if teleporting, blocked every path before her—she had failed.

After several unsuccessful attempts to break through, the clock-tower-like lady coalesced into form once more and looked at Nairetil with an expression of shock and fury: "Impossible... how can you be this fast!?"

Nairetil thought it over quite seriously, looked down at her own spider body, and only then raised her head to face the other: "I have more legs."

Then she studied the "giant lady" earnestly for a few more moments, her gaze settling on the mist that ceaselessly gathered and scattered about the other's lower body, and shook her head with some regret: "You don't even have legs."

"???"