Molting the Mortal Coil

After being launched like he was shot out of a cannon, the Swordsman spun in mid-air and stabbed his sword into the giant spider’s back. Digging in effortlessly, the sword carved a path across the spider’s body, and only when the swordsman added a little twist to its path did it actually slow him down. It cut too cleanly and perfectly through the carapace, there was no resistance unless he wanted there to be. The slice was as thin as the blade of his sword, so even though it was quite long, it wasn’t all that damaging to the giant spider. Some of its ‘blood’ started to leak out, but it was far from a fatal injury.

While the swordsman came to a stop, hanging from the handle of his sword and skidding to a stop in a crouched position, the Fu Clansman leisurely strode through the air and came to a feather light stop beside him. Somehow the masked man was able to treat the clouds of smoke as solid or immaterial as he desired. Sage was still underneath the giant spider, but he’d seen the man ascending into the air and immediately made a comparison between the man’s ability and his own Cosmic Traction. He seemed to be treating smoke the way that Sage treated space. Of course, he also seemed far more adept at it than Sage was, and it also appeared effortless in comparison to how strenuous Cosmic Traction was for Sage. The other main difference was that Sage felt the man drawing upon Laws as he strode through the air, while his own technique was something inherited from some sort of Space Dragon.

The two Nascent Souls shared a look and then rushed into action.

The Swordsman held up his sword with one hand and used the other to trace two fingers along the flat side of the blade. His sword shimmered slightly, and its outline grew blurry as it started to vibrate. Then the blurriness faded and it looked like it had grown still once again, but there was still a low humming sound. He used the long slice he’d made to stop himself as a starting point for another cut, he sunk his sword into the ‘ground’ and dragged it along behind him. While he worked to turn the single line into a V-shape, the Fu Clansman went to battle with the Swamp Genesis Spider.

The giant spider wasn’t about to let them mess around on its back without interruption and many of its limbs were already lifted and twisting around to stab towards the tiny creatures upon it. The single cut had traveled almost from one side of its abdomen to the other, drastically compromising the already soft spot on a spider. It viciously struck towards its tiny enemies, but the thick smoke obscured its vision and this time the thick masses of smoke that the man threw had more substance to them than before. Rather than shattering apart easily, the columns of smoke struck with the strength of a giant. When the man threw out his fist, black smoke swirled around it and a vortex coalesced into what seemed like a ten foot wide fist and arm. It was quite like he had summoned the arm of a giant out of the darkness and used it to punch.

Impressive as it looked, the giant fist was still dwarfed by the giant legs of the Swamp Genesis Spider. Huge dark spires, tilted and pointed down at them, they swept through the air and attempted to wipe the pair off the monster’s back. The first giant smoke fist was instantly destroyed by the sharp tip of the spider’s leg, but the following fists weren’t aimed to strike it dead on. The smoke columns swerved, forming arcs in the air and delivering a few strong hooks to the side of the leg to divert it from colliding against the two men. As it got closer, they both saw that the sharp point of the spider’s leg was actually an illusion. With how large it was, they got an up close look at many thick hairs that covered the spider’s legs and also a trio of large talon-like claws. The inner edge of each claw did not have a smooth curve, it instead had a feather or comb shape to it. Both the Swordsman and the Fu Clansman got a very good look at those claws which passed just a few feet away from their bodies.

While they were trying to cut a big hole into the spider’s back, the serious woman had pulled herself out of the thick swamp water and rushed towards the Swamp Genesis Spider’s face. Her sound blasts didn’t do much against the spider’s thick armor, but she was far too experienced to be defeated so easily. How many heavily armored Demonic Beasts had she destroyed in her extraordinarily long life as a cultivator? She blasted into the air again and flew towards the spider’s face. Since she couldn’t penetrate the toughest part, she struck for the weakest. She slapped the air and bursts of sound billowed towards the spider’s face. There was no dull thud like before, instead there was a light cracking sound.

Her body flipped around in mid-air and she stomped towards the spider’s incoming leg, one which had swept toward her half-heartedly while the spider focused on removing the pests from its back. Instead of being hit by the giant limb, she absorbed the impact with her legs and then pushed off, leaping closer to the spider and launching a rapid flurry of attacks. One of them resulted in the cracking sound when one of those deep sound waves struck against one of the Swamp Genesis Spider’s eyes. The spider released a pained screech and one of its smaller forelimbs, a pedipalp, flew forward and smacked the woman. She tried to leap off the limb like she’d done to the spider’s leg, but it was moving too quickly and her legs buckled. The pedipalp was a smaller limb used like an antenna and an arm for eating. While it was many times smaller than one of the spider’s huge legs, it was still over a hundred feet long and it had more than enough force to collapse her attempt to push off and smack against her rear end, sending her body to skip across the surface of the swamp water and smashing into the trunks of half a dozen trees before her momentum was arrested.

With the second slice on its back rapidly growing larger and one eye damaged, the spider was feeling distressed. It was really not much of a fighter, it usually used its giant web as a fortress to chase away sea creatures and stay hidden from those traversing the swamp it created. These tiny and dangerous enemies made it revert back to what it was best at, and its two rear legs swung back and grasped at its spinnerets, pulling forth its thick webbing and working together with another pair of its legs to start weaving. A few moments later a large net of spider silk was pulled onto its back like a cape. Normally a spider touched webbing only with the tips of its feet, but in this case it was making an exception and draping the web over itself to capture the tiny enemies in a net.

“Go!”

The Fu Clansman sent out a tendril of smoke to the Swordsman and then dashed away leaping off the spider’s back and into thick black smoke. While the smoke was a large billowing cloud, he fell through it at a diagonal angle. His feet caught on something and he looked like he was riding a giant rail, grinding down towards the swamp water. The Swordsman held onto the smoke that was wrapped around his waist, smoke that suddenly went taut like a rope and pulled him along. The assassin’s mobility was clearly much greater than the Swordsman and they worked together to escape the web that the spider draped over its back.