The scream was Alice’s.

The girl barely spoke unless someone spoke to her first. Most of the time she kept to herself, quiet enough that a room could forget she was there if the others got loud. Hearing that voice tear through the jungle like that meant one thing.

Something had gone very wrong.

It was still night, though dawn could not have been far. The jungle remained dark, but darkness had never meant much to Neo. Back in Zone 0, night turned whole streets into blind pits where broken glass, hungry men, and worse things waited without needing to announce themselves. His sight had learned how to live with that a long time ago. Compared to those alleys, a jungle full of ruins and roots felt like the same problem wearing different clothes.

He was moving before the thought fully caught up.

No time to pull his clothes back on. No time to collect his boots. Neo burst out from between the roots in his underwear and inner shirt, bare legs cutting through wet brush while the scream kept echoing in his head.

’What am I doing?’

The question came late and sounded annoyingly reasonable.

His own nature had no trouble answering. This was stupid. He barely knew Alice. She was useful in a fight, yes, but that hardly justified sprinting half-naked through the territory of some unknown predator because he heard one scream in the dark. The beast she had run into could be far beyond anything he had dealt with so far. Something large and vicious. Something strong enough that every spider in this stretch of jungle had learned to stay away from it.

And yet he kept running.

By the time he reached the source of the sound, the answer had stopped mattering because what he saw hit hard enough to wipe every other thought aside.

Alice hung wrapped in white.

A cocoon of webbing bound her from shoulders to ankles, leaving only part of her face visible while her body dragged across the ground behind a spider that dwarfed every one Neo had fought so far.

He froze where he was.

The thing was monstrous.

Its abdomen was transparent in places, greenish from the fluids moving beneath it, swollen enough to drag low while the rest of its body towered above the undergrowth. Four times larger than the spiders from before, which meant it stood several heads above Neo himself. Its legs were long, thick, and covered in coarse black hair that caught the weak light in sickly streaks. Its mouth was worse, built from four heavy pincers instead of two, each one long enough to shear through a man’s arm without much effort. Sixteen eyes covered the front of its head in clustered rows, dull and glossy and wrong in a way that made his skin crawl.

’What the fuck is that thing?’

Neo did not move closer for now.

He stayed low behind wet brush and forced his breathing down while the spider kept dragging Alice through the jungle, the cocoon catching on roots and stones before jerking free again. She did not wake. Whatever had hit her before the webbing had put her out hard.

Neo watched the beast in silence, weighing distance, size, terrain, angles, and every ugly way a direct rescue could get him killed.

Rushing in now would be suicide.

That answer came with complete clarity.

He had no intention of dying because he saw a girl he knew and let instinct outrun reason. If he attacked without a plan, Alice would stay trapped and he would end up in a second cocoon, if the thing even bothered to keep him that intact.

So he followed.

That alone told him something. The spider had not wrapped her for food on the spot. It was taking her somewhere. There was a reason for that, and whatever waited at the end of that path mattered more than a reckless charge in the dark.

He moved after it at a distance, using roots, ferns, and collapsed stone for cover while the beast dragged Alice deeper through the jungle. The route bent between ancient trees and fragments of structures half-swallowed by green until the spider finally reached its destination.

An abandoned church stood ahead.

Or what had once been one.

The building rose out of the jungle like something faith had built centuries ago and the jungle had claimed back piece by piece. Cracked stone walls leaned beneath blankets of vine and moss. Broken arches framed darkness behind torn curtains of webbing. Green stained the place everywhere, splashed across the walls, threaded through the web, spread over stone in patches that looked half like mold and half like old venom. Even the outside carried silk between buttresses and along shattered windows.

Neo stared at it and felt his jaw tighten and his ass clench.

’If I step inside that place, I’m dead.’

The answer came too quickly to argue with. The whole church felt wrong. Webbed and too full of the kind of patience predators built around themselves. Alice disappearing into it only made the knot in his chest worse.

’And if I don’t know what’s inside, she could die anyway.’

His attention shifted up.

The jungle pressed close around the church, trees rising high enough to crowd the upper stonework. One of the old stained-glass windows had been broken apart long ago, leaving a jagged opening in the side, and a thick vine ran from the trunk of a huge tree straight across the gap and into the church.

Neo studied the line and understood immediately.

He was not walking through the front.

A climb would be quieter. Safer. Not safe, just less stupid.

He caught hold of the vine and started up, feeding Beast Strength into his arms and legs to make the ascent easier. It would cost some Soul Essence, but nowhere near as much as a fight he could avoid. The vine swayed under his weight, damp from the night, and Neo climbed it with a speed that would have looked ridiculous from below.

’Like a monkey,’ he thought, even though he had never seen one in his life.

By the time he reached the broken window, dawn had finally begun scratching weak light across the jungle. The first rays slipped through the trees and touched the church just enough to give shape to what waited inside.

Neo narrowed his eyes and peered through the shattered stained glass.

The inside turned his stomach.

Alice hung from the ceiling near the far side of the church, still wrapped and sleeping, suspended by layers of web that held her above the cracked floor like some preserved offering. She was not alone. Two more cocoons hung beside her, both human in shape, both motionless.

Victims.

Below them sprawled clusters of eggs, each one as large as Neo himself, pale and glistening in the dim light, packed together across the old nave where pews had once stood. Webbing covered the floor between them in thick veils. Green stains ran from the eggs, across the stone, up broken pillars, into the walls. At the center of it all, not far from the altar, the giant spider had settled into itself and gone still.

Sleeping. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Or close enough.

A shiver ran down Neo’s back.

’If those hatch, this will get very bad very fast.’

That thought came first.

The second followed right behind it, meaner, colder, and much more his.

’Would it count as kills if I destroy them?’

He did not even bother pretending that had not occurred to him.

The eggs were alive. Probably. Alive enough to become future Soul Beasts. Alive enough that crushing them might give him something. Maybe not. Maybe the system would refuse it. Maybe it would count every single one.

The possibility sank its teeth in immediately.

Neo kept scanning the interior, forcing himself past the horror of it and into the useful details. Ceiling height. Distance from the broken window to the floor. Thickness of the web. Position of the spider. Where Alice was hanging. Where the eggs clustered thickest.

That was when he saw the massive chandelier.

It hung above the center aisle, enormous and heavy, built from blackened metal and old crystal, the sort of thing that should have crashed down years ago and yet remained suspended over the whole nest like a threat waiting for permission. One of its chains ran back into cracked stone high above the altar.

Neo stayed there, hanging to the vine, and felt the shape of an idea slide into place.

He looked once more at Alice, hanging motionless in her cocoon, and once at the giant spider sleeping beneath its nest of eggs.

There was time.

A little.

Enough to prepare.

Neo eased back from the broken glass and began climbing down the vine again, silent as he could manage with his body stretched across wet bark and hanging green. He needed his clothes. He needed the rest of what he had left behind. And he needed them for more than modesty.

By the time his feet touched the ground, dawn had spread a little farther through the jungle, turning the leaves pale and the old church ahead into something even uglier to see clearly.

Neo glanced back at it one last time.

’Don’t die before I get back.’

He was not sure whether he meant Alice, the spider, or his own bad idea.