It took them two grueling hours of dragging the heavily laden wooden sledge through the carnage-strewn valley before they finally caught up to him. The dense, humid mist of the lower ridges suddenly shattered, blown apart by a catastrophic tempest of shockwaves and violent shrieks.
The moment Mary, Roy, and Louisa stepped onto the ridge overlooking the central nesting grounds, they completely froze, their limbs paralyzed by a wave of sheer, unadulterated evolutionary terror.
The clearing ahead was a arena of chaos. Ethan was locked in a ferocious, high-speed battle against three massive, four-meter-wide elite spiders, while a colossal six-meter matriarch—a terrifying tyrant covered in thick, jagged chitin armor—roared like a maddened beast, slamming its massive, spear-like legs into the earth as it coordinated the assault.
