As I saw the horde of spiders dart towards us, I resisted the urge to start swearing in frustration.

One spider was stronger than most guardians for better shops in the outer district. It had access to offensive magic, healing, incredible speed, plant control, and some way to create footholds and maneuver around in midair. Worse, it was intelligent. Every time I used a certain trick or ability against it, the damn thing adapted to it shortly afterwards. Now, there two of them heading towards us. My essence was gone, I was missing two legs, and Felix was missing both arms. Anise’s grenades had turned out to be nearly useless, and Sallia wasn’t fast enough to cut the spiders without help. How were we supposed to handle this?

As light bled out of my missing legs, I looked at my friends.

I said.

said Felix. Anise and Sallia started scuttling back towards us, before Sallia picked me up and tossed me over her shoulder like I was a sack of potatoes. I kept an eye on the two new spiders with my soul sight as our group moved as quickly and silently as we could towards the exit. I kept expecting one of them to notice us and launch itself towards us, or for the strange creature that fed on silence to drag us into its domain and kill us.

As seconds ticked by and I bounced off of Sallia’s back, my heart hammered like a drum in my chest. But the spiders didn’t notice us, even as we crossed the threshold and left the Spatial Fair again. My view of the incoming spiders disappeared along with the rest of the Spatial Fair.

asked Felix as he glanced behind us.

said Sallia.

I nodded. Our group started sprinting down the street as fast as we could, dashing along for nearly thirty seconds. Then, without a word, Sallia jerked to the left, kicking open the door to a shop filled with rubble, and then we sprinted towards the second floor. To round it off, we jumped into the closet of one of the rooms upstairs. It felt childish… but we were in no condition to fight right now. We just had to hope that the spiders didn’t see us.

I turned my attention back towards the spatial fair, and activated my soul sight. Thirty seconds later, two bright, silver souls peeled out of the spatial fair. One of them stayed right next to the entrance, while the other began to slowly skitter around. I immediately shared what I was seeing with the rest of the group.

said Sallia.

I grimaced. Intelligent enemies were far more difficult to deal with than brainless skeletons.

asked Anise, breaking me out of my frustrated spying.

I frowned. In the chaos of losing my clone and the desperate rush out of the Spatial fair, I had forgotten to check my System messages. I popped them open, and saw two new messages waiting for me.

Slaughter: Killed a Wanderer of Lost Silence for the first time.

Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.

Achievement +600, Achievement +6.00

The Achievement was more than expected for a single kill, and brought me straight from 8,492.72 Achievement to 9,098.72 Achievement. However, Achievement wasn’t going to help us here. There was no way we could generate enough Achievement to out-fight these spiders in the short month and a half we had left. Instead, the second System message was the one I was hopeful for.

Unlike the first System message, this one delivered something amazing.

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Wanderer of Lost Silence for the first time. New Skill created.

Silence Lost - If you have not heard any sound for an extended period of time, and a sound disturbs that ‘silence,’ gain a temporary boost to the [Agility], [Strength], and [Manifestation] Stats. The longer you have spent in silence before it was disturbed, the larger the stat boost. (Maximum boost - 4 Grades of stats. 1 Grade requires about 4 hours of silence, 2 grades is about 24 hours, 3 Grades is about 72 hours, and 4 Grades is about 336 hours). Temporary boost will start to decrease after 3 minutes, and will completely vanish after 20 minutes.

This skill, in and of itself, wasn’t necessarily amazing for our current situation. After all, we were in a dangerous position right now. I was missing both legs, so my [Agility] was pretty useless. I wasn’t a great melee fighter either, so the [Strength] boost wasn’t as useful as it would have been for someone like Sallia. [Manifestation] was even more useless, since I didn’t even have a magic system to pair with the stat. I wouldn’t mind trying to swing the sharp end of my umbrella around and help out the group, but we didn’t have time to let the Skill fully build up if we wanted to make reasonable progress in the Spatial Fair. It took two weeks to prepare for one fight, and I doubted we would be done exploring in 20 minutes.

However, this was important for another reason.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

{Endless Hunger of the Ocean} typically stole some trait or ability from an enemy, and gave me a weakened version of it. Which meant that the spiders had a similar ability.

All along, I had been thinking that the spiders just had overwhelming physical abilities. That no matter what, they were so utterly fast and strong compared to us that we had no chance in a frontal battle without resorting to desperate measures. After all, the first spider had been so ridiculously fast that I couldn’t even track it with my eyes. I had noticed that the spider was slowing down as the battle progressed… but I had still been thinking that it was some sort of essence related ability. Even if the spiders weakening over time was good, it definitely didn’t give us a way to exploit their vulnerabilities. They were just too dangerous to fight head-on, even if we were only trying to stall.

This skill meant that we had a way to strip off their stats before each fight. I could send in my clone, and then blast music at the spiders before we fought. Or Anise could lob in some grenades first. After that, we just had to withdraw, wait for the spider to weaken, and then attack before it rebuilt its temporary buff. There was a way forward.

I quickly sent a description of the ability to my friends, so that they would have a rough idea what we were dealing with. However, as they were reading, Sallia’s mental voice interrupted them.

said Sallia, interrupting my thoughts. I frowned, and focused on my soul-sight again. Sallia was right. The spider wasn’t quite locking onto our position… but it was getting nearer and nearer to us. It must have had some way of tracking us, even if it wasn’t very precise or efficient.

We might have had a path forward, but if we died right now it wouldn’t matter. Who knew where the Market would send us if we died and had to use another life? We might end up on the other side of this nursery. With how massive this city was, it could take years just to walk from one end to the other. There was no way we would find the Spatial Fair again before we had to leave.

I said.

said Anise.

said Felix. Anise nodded, and then started squinting. In the distance, I saw a few plants start to grow and twitch. It was nothing amazing - in most other circumstances, Anise had struggled to find a real use for her eyes. However, in this situation, we didn’t need to do much - just distract the spiders until their physical boost ran out. If the spiders were still nearby afterwards, Sallia might be able to kill them, instead of the other way around. Felix and I were incapable of fighting right now, but Sallia was a terror with a sword in her hand. If the spiders were weakened, I felt Sallia might be able to win against them. Anise still had plenty of grenades, too.

The spider kept creeping towards us. When it was finally within a street of us, Anise started making the nearby plants rustle. She could only manage a block or two away… but it was enough to confuse the spider. I saw the little soul start jerking and twitching, before it darted towards one of the nearby streets, seemingly at random. I breathed a sigh of relief as it started to move away from us.

I saw a flash of motion from the spider, and then one of Anise’s plants collapsed as it was bisected. Perhaps its tracking ability was reliant upon sound, as well?

Anise immediately picked another few plants, and started rustling them. The spider flashed towards the plant and once again cut it in half.

This continued for a few more plants… before the spider stopped responding to the rustling of plants entirely.

said Felix.

said Sallia.

I said, cautiously.

Anise did as I asked. I summoned the few wisps of absorption essence I had regenerated in the last few minutes, and managed to crack open a tiny portal. It snapped shut almost instantly, but Anise fired a magic missile through it before it closed. There was a small clunk as the magic missile splattered against a shop wall in the distance, followed by a return to silence.

The spider whirled towards the shop and then flashed away, making the four of us sigh in relief. The spiders really did respond mostly to sounds.

A few moments later, the spider reached the shop. It seemed enraged, and started cutting apart the shop’s walls after it found nothing there. If we had been hiding in the shop, I would have been sweating at that point. The spider’s magic cut through the stone and wood in the shop as though it were rice paper. If we had been hiding there, it would have found us and killed us instantly.

But we weren’t there.

Finally, the spider seemed to realize it wasn’t getting anywhere. It started wandering back towards our area, but it was no longer drifting perfectly towards us. It seemed lost and confused.

We waited in tense silence for several minutes, as Anise and I worked to keep the spider distracted. Finally, after about ten minutes, the spider that had been searching for us returned to the entrance of the spatial fair. At first, this puzzled me, before I realized the blasted things were even smarter than I thought.

They knew that their sound-related boost was wearing off, so they were retreating before we could ambush them and kill them. That was… frustrating, but at least for now it meant we were safe.

True to my thoughts, a few moments later the two spiders withdrew into the spatial fair.

said Felix.

We froze.

About ten seconds later, one of the spiders popped back out of the spatial fair, and I shuddered. The spider had been hoping we would expose ourselves after it left. It had… faked leaving in order to trick us.

These things weren’t just intelligent. They were actively capable of tricking and manipulating us. If we were careless… this had a huge chance of going horribly wrong.

The spider, seeing nothing, returned to the spatial fair after a few seconds. After that, we waited in the closet for nearly half an hour, just to make sure. During that time, I also worked on patching up my and Felix’s wounds anytime I regenerated a bit of essence. Finally, we decided it was safe to come out and get moving. As we left the area, I breathed a sigh of relief.

It had been dangerous. This might be the most terrifying enemy we had encountered in the Market so far. But we had found a hint.

Even if we had suffered disastrous wounds, this fight hadn’t been a loss. We had found a path forward.