F Grade Healer Becomes Strongest Biomancer

Mio

The Queen's arms tightened around Amori. Small hands gripping where skin met shell, the girl pressed her face into the woman's chest. Flat black eyes found Chi-chi over the top of Amori's head.

The silk came alive.

Chi-chi's skin rippled where the threads tore free. Shoulders and forearms, the line of her ribs. Hundreds of strands fanning into the tunnel, latching to walls and wet concrete.

The corridor became a web with Chi-chi at its center and both arms open.

Eight legs churning, shell grinding floor, the Queen charged through the outer layer with Amori flat against her chest.

Chi-chi's threads caught the front pair and wrenched sideways. Both snapped at the joint and the Queen came forward on six.

Mio was already moving. Obsidian arm back, angled for the shell. She closed four meters before a thread caught her across the collarbone and threw her sideways into the wall.

The impact cracked tile.

"Stay out of the web!" Chi-chi didn't look back. "One distraction and I lose the weave!"

Mio peeled herself off the wall. The thread had left a welt across her chest that burned through the Bureau-issue gray. She raised her left hand instead.

[Spark]

Burn the size of a coin on the Queen's shell. Two hundred and fifty against sixty-three thousand. The Queen didn't slow.

Chi-chi pulled silk from her body faster than she'd ever pulled through fabric. Ribbons wrapping the Queen's legs in spiraling lattice, binding and severing in the same motion.

A third leg came off. Purple light flared where the thread bit.

Five legs and the Queen dragged forward.

Mio circled wide, outside the web's reach. The Queen's human half was exposed from behind, flesh above the shell line. Close the gap from the blind side and drive the obsidian arm through the spine.

She got six meters before the Queen's torso twisted a full hundred and eighty degrees on the crab body. The woman's face stared at Mio upside down, neck bent at an angle that should have killed her.

Below the lips, splitting the collarbone down to the sternum, a second mouth peeled apart. Teeth in rows, gums black and receding. The smell hit Mio before the spit did. Rot and bile and something acidic underneath.

The glob caught Mio's obsidian arm and right hip. She hit the ground and the adhesive set on contact, bonding to concrete and arm and fabric in a single fused surface.

She pulled and the obsidian arm didn't budge. Her right leg was pinned from hip to knee.

[Spark]

The burn hit the adhesive and did nothing. Didn't crack. Didn't give.

Chi-chi didn't see it happen. She was past the Queen now, working the joints from behind where growth thinned and old shell gave to tissue.

The Queen bled from four wounds, then six, then eight. A fourth leg folded. Purple-dark blood swirled in the ankle-deep water.

The Queen's charge stopped. Two good legs couldn't push sixty-three thousand HP through a tunnel's worth of silk. The front pair churned and the water frothed and she moved maybe a meter before the anchors caught.

Chi-chi took the fifth leg while it was still pushing. Threads wrapped the joint three times and pulled in opposite directions. It came apart wet.

Down to two legs, the Queen sagged into her own web, held upright by anchor points that groaned against the walls but didn't give. Chi-chi circled to the right. Silk trailed from her fingers and stuck to everything it touched.

She was winning.

Mio pulled at the adhesive with her free arm. The pearl gauntlet could break it. Jii's trait shattered immobilization on contact. But the gauntlet was on her LEFT arm and the adhesive pinned her RIGHT.

She twisted, reached across her own body. Couldn't get the angle.

She pulled harder. The concrete cracked under the obsidian arm but the adhesive held where it bonded to the surface underneath.

From the ground, thirteen meters away, she watched Chi-chi plant both feet. Every strand in the tunnel pulled taut, cinching inward from ceiling and tracks and walls. A cage closing from every direction.

The Queen's remaining legs buckled under the pressure and her shell groaned.

It held. For three seconds nothing in the corridor moved except the water dripping from the ceiling and the purple light pulsing through Chi-chi's web.

The Queen's human hand found a strand and tugged, let it go, found another closer to the anchor point. Her head tilted as she followed the line with her fingers, tracing it strand to strand back toward Chi-chi's shoulder where the thread emerged from raw skin.

She'd figured out where they grew from.

Both arms released Amori. The girl hit the water face-first and didn't get up. The Queen gathered the silk in two fists, threads rooted in Chi-chi's body, and pulled.

Chi-chi came off her feet. Dragged across wet concrete, bouncing once, twice, before the silk hauled her upright and into reach.

The right pincer caught her across the midsection. Barnacled edges ground through rather than cut.

The pincer closed.

What hit the floor was most of Chi-chi.

The web came down thread by thread, silk settling on the water in pale ribbons that turned pink around her body. The dripping from overhead and Chi-chi's breathing, which was wet.

Thirteen meters from Mio. Stuck to the floor with her right arm fused to concrete and her hip locked in resin that Spark couldn't burn.

Chi-chi was alive. Her hands moved, fingers closing around threads that didn't answer. The compression shirt still carried a trace of purple glow but it was going out.

The Queen gathered Amori back to her chest and cradled her with one arm. She dragged herself toward the body on two legs.

Her free hand reached down and stroked Chi-chi's blue hair. The way Mio tucked Nana's bangs behind her ear when she slept.

Chi-chi's mouth opened, lips shaping one word.

Nothing came out.

The purple went dark. Blue hair in the water.

Jii was on her left shoulder. Both daggers drawn, weight forward on tiny feet. She'd been ready since before the first pincer swung.

Mio looked at her left hand. Jii hopped into the palm.

[Equip]

The pearl gauntlet swallowed her forearm. The adhesive cracked down the middle and fell away in chunks.

[Status: Cleared]

She stood up.