Wovan began the battle without delay. Her two revived bodies teleported down to land on the Magma Serpent's back, right on the spot where a falling boulder had cracked its scales. The spiders immediately attacked the weakened area, using their legs to pry the cracked scales away and expose the pale flesh beneath. Wovan had a pitiful strength stat, but she made up for it by using telekinesis to reinforce her movements.

  110 kilograms in the post-system world wasn’t anything to write home about, but when all that energy was focused on a five-millimetre surface area… Well, the results spoke for themselves. It took Wovan four seconds to reach vulnerable flesh, and she bit down viciously, fangs glowing with ember magic. While the Magma Serpent was immune to heat damage, the magic did marginally increase the physical force Wovan could bite down with.

  Unfortunately, the snake was about ten thousand times larger than his Soul Splinter. Even post-revival, she was only twice as large as a tarantula, terrifying but still tiny. Her bite on the snake was the equivalent of Arthur getting a paper cut. Judging by the Magma Serpent's roar of pain and outrage, though, it was significantly more painful. Without access to its pool of lava to dive into, the monster was out of its go-to defensive technique. It wasn’t helpless, though—the snake was still a level 251 creature—and rapidly moved its head forward, cracking its sinuous body like the world's biggest whip. The resultant force sent Wovan's revived spiders flying away at the speed of sound. Half a second into her flight, she disappeared and teleported back to the tiny cavity she’d made. This time, she managed to get seven bites in before she was punted away. Arthur grinned, summoning a folding lawn chair from his storage ring. This fight would take a long time.

  The little spider accompanying him teleported to stand on the armrest, and Arthur was proud that he didn’t shriek like a little girl this time. Getting used to his Soul Splinter's teleporting shenanigans would take a while. For the next few minutes, Wovan continued to employ the same tactics, getting her other bodies involved once she’d made the hole in the snake's side large enough for all of her to fit. She’d created a tunnel into the monster's flesh that prevented her from getting sent away every time the Magma Serpent whipped its body. While teleporting her bodies took a negligible amount of ether, she would have run out soon with the regularity she’d been forced to teleport these last few minutes.

  Arthur checked the snake's health.

  This fight was progressing at a glacial pace. Already, he could sense predators closing in. They could smell blood in the water, and this was prime territory up for grabs. They were held back right now by caution and his presence, more forbearance than he’d seen from any corrupted creature, but he knew it wouldn’t hold for much longer. Arthur could very easily prevent others from interfering in Wovan's fight, but that would count as assisting her and risk ruining her chance at the title he hoped she would get.

  Things only got worse when the Magma Serpent revealed a skill Arthur hadn’t seen before. The snake began to glow faintly at first, but it wasn’t long before the monster looked like iron that had just come out of a furnace, red hot and glowing. Wovan was forced to teleport out of the creature when she started to take damage. Arthur frowned. It seemed he’d underestimated the beast and would have to look for easier prey.

  Wovan, however, didn’t seem ready to give up and glared imperiously at her foe. Even half a mile away, he could feel her disdain. Whatever skill the Magma Serpent had used, it wasn’t one it could maintain indefinitely. The little time it bought, however, was exactly enough to prevent Wovan from winning the fight. Or at least it prevented her from winning it in a reasonable time frame, which, in this case, was functionally the same thing. Still, if Wovan thought she could still prevail, he wasn’t going to stop her.

  Arthur watched his Soul Splinter carefully, splitting his attention between Wovan and the dozens of predators steadily drawing closer. He’d give her another seven minutes. If she wasn’t showing results by then, he’d have to draw this little adventure of hers to a close. Some of his urgency must have seeped through to his Soul Splinter. The single spider accompanying him turned and stared at him… incredulously—Arthur wasn’t sure. He wasn’t exactly a master at reading spider expressions—yet, but he got the distinct impression she wasn’t pleased with all these rules he kept adding to her fight.

  Nonetheless, his ultimatum pushed her into high gear. The nine spiders hovering in the air spread out, flying around in seemingly random directions. It took him an embarrassingly long time to realise Wovan was building a web. In his defence, her web looked like nothing he’d ever seen a spider make before.

  For starters, it was invisible, so thin it was nigh impossible to see and made from what Arthur suspected was a mix of space magic and physical material, an opaque, shimmering thread that perfectly blended in with the air around it. Arthur could sense the strength in her web, more durable even than her powerful body. Arthur had no idea what she was planning to do with it, and he watched on with rapt attention, wishing he could move closer to watch. His eyes were great, but he was missing out on a lot by watching from so far away.

  It took Wovan two minutes to create a web spanning the entirety of the cooling lava lake. The endeavour bottomed out her ether pool, and she had to dip into her health to complete the structure. The web wasn’t much to look at, every strand was thinner than a hair and practically invisible to the naked eye, but Arthur was certain it was the most durable thread that had ever existed in Haadran. With the entire structure being crafted with space magic, Arthur shouldn’t have been so surprised by what happened next.

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  Wovan’s web disappeared and reappeared around the Magma Serpent, now in a cocoon-like shape. The trap shrank in size, wrapping around the snake like a net and squeezing it down into a ball of coiled flesh. The monster roared in outrage, or at least it tried to, but Wovan’s web had formed a muzzle over its jaws. The Magma Serpent struggled to escape, muscles tensing and contracting as it tried to generate force. It was a futile struggle—a mouse would have a greater chance of success escaping a net made from diamond thread. Arthur wasn’t sure if he’d fare any better in the snake's position.

  The more the Magma Serpent struggled, the more it hurt itself. Its scales cracked, and lines of red appeared on its flesh, the blood rapidly evaporating the second it left the monster's body. One of Wovan's spiders teleported onto the snake, landing on the only part of the monster's flesh that wasn’t a burning pyre: its eye. Arthur wasn’t sure if it was by design, but Wovan's web had trapped the monster's eyelid, preventing it from blinking.

  Watching his Soul Splinter walk across an eyeball five times larger than herself made Arthur feel queasy, and he winced when he imagined the spider's crystal-tipped legs applying pressure on such a fragile organ. He had to look away when Wovan took a bite out of the serpent's eye. Even with the monster's jaws sealed shut, he could hear its screech of pain, a keen wail of agony that almost made him feel sorry for the creature.

  Four more spiders teleported down until the entire surface of the eye was covered. Wovan began to feast, eating her prey's eye while it remained trapped, unable to even flee. A minute later, she’d consumed a fifth of the organ. The Magma Serpent looked like it had been knocked unconscious, though the occasional twitch when Wovan took a particularly large bite told him the snake was still very much aware. And struggling. Arthur had killed his fair share of monsters, but nothing he’d done could match up to the callous brutality his Soul Splinter was capable of.

  Unfortunately, at the rate Wovan was going, it would take her another half hour to reach the monster's brain and kill the snake; time she did not have. Thankfully, it looked like The Eternal Weaver was far more resourceful than her former self had been. All but one spider teleported out of the bloody cavity they had formed in the serpent's skull, one of them joining Arthur on his chair half a mile away. The little critter didn’t waste any time, crawling up his arm and onto the crown of his head.

  Then Wovan did something most would consider impossible. She created a portal, a small one no larger than her body, within the monster's skull. Everyone knew creating portals inside another creature was impossible; the natural defences of your soul extended to the space your flesh occupied, making the creation of portals there impossible. At least it should have been. Wovan, however, was cheating a little. She was using one of her spiders as an anchor for the spell, using the small space her soul claimed as hers within the serpent's body to circumvent the hard rule. The spider on his head also created a small portal, though this one was far larger, big enough for his shoulders to fit through.

  The little spider that had been with him from the beginning started to rapidly fly upwards, so fast she quickly left his sight. At the speed she was going, Arthur didn’t know how high she was right now. Twenty miles? Fifty? His eyes widened in shock when he realised what she was doing. True to his suspicions, he spotted Wovan a minute later, rapidly free-falling through the air. Her body was glowing white hot, her body denser than most rock and far more durable. The damn monster's made herself into a living meteorite.

  She was on a direct collision course for Arthur’s skull, and it took all his self-control not to dodge out of the way. He trusted his Soul Splinter. The ball of molten spider punched through the portal at several times the speed of sound and immediately shot out of its mirror half a mile away.

  Directly into the Magma Serpent's skull.

  All that momentum was perfectly preserved. The snake's head didn’t so much as break as it did explode, instantly vaporising the suicide bomber and the spider that had maintained the portal inside the monster's eye socket. Wovan’s foe was very much dead, and Arthur was struggling not to laugh at the absurdity that was his Soul Splinter. What in the nine hells had he created?

  He could feel the deceased spiders returning to the realm of the living as The Firebird's Rebirth worked its magic. That was merely a surface-level change. Arthur gasped when he felt primordial ether rushing in to saturate Wovan’s soul. This was the kind of power Arthur had unlocked when he was far too weak to understand it, the formation of a tier 4 title, only this felt far more powerful, on the cusp of tier five. The changes weren't even happening to him, yet he was locked in place by the potency of the energy running through Wovan. An eternal moment later, the changes were finished. Arthur was drenched in sweat, his body trembling like a leaf in the wind. He pulled up Wovan’s status page, and his eyes steadily widened in shock.

  Wovan had just become so much more terrifying.

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