Threads of the Soul

"What the hell happened to him?! Where the hell is he?!"

With his mind stretched thin and the near overwhelming stress of having to keep an entire army at bay by himself, whilst trying to do six different things at once, he wasn't exactly in the right frame of mind to keep his emotions under control. So when he noticed that Corvus had gone missing, he didn't keep his cool all too well.

Fortunately, being blinded by the sudden blast of light helped put a stop to the panic he was currently having and gave some time for his rational mind to take over from his dumb, panicky lizard brain. Whilst his vision was still recovering, every blink making him see countless red spots in front of the blurry world, Seth shifted his focus away from his own vision towards Corvus'.

He did feel annoyed that he had been prevented from doing his job, but he could only hope that this light had been the start of his reinforcements advance, so he left it up to them to stem the flow while he recovered.

However, when he focused on Corvus' vision, he found it disappointingly unhelpful. No matter where he looked, the world was utterly black. There was no possible way that he had simply left his eyes closed or that they had been gouged out, he had no proper eyes after all. Thus, there were only two options. Something was covering his eyes or he had been taken somewhere in the span of a few seconds.

Either one was an unnerving thought, and both were difficult to prove without the sense of touch. If it was his real body, he could at least feel around or touch his face to find out the answer, but with the puppets he got no haptic feedback, just sight and sound. Or just sound, in this case.

Speaking of, he could definitely still hear the battle ongoing, the cracks of thunder told him that Astra had got involved at some point, so he was definitely nearby at the very least. All he had to do was look around and maybe find a door or something... Wait, what was that?

Tilting his head, Seth commanded Corvus' to look in the previous direction. Not left or right, but down. When he looked down, he was finally able to see something. A muted and dull light, peaking through and illuminating an intricately weaved veil of threads that was pressed against his eyes. These threads were not his own, nor did they belong to any sort of cloth or human-made blindfold. Such a weave could only be made by one thing that he knew of.

Armed with this new knowledge, Seth felt ashamed of himself. Finally blinking the last of the red marks from his vision, the first thing that he did was the same thing he chastised the others for not doing when he was using Geets the spy puppet. He looked up.

That good ol' 45 degree head tilt that many game developers wished people would do more often finally revealed the answer to him, although it was an answer he was hoping he was wrong about.

Far above him, above even the height that Omelette was circling at as he searched for viable prey, was a silk cocoon. Attached to the wall above the cocoon, slowly finishing it off as it spun webs from its backside, was a spider. A spider the size of a car, with large beady eyes, mandibles the length of his arm and a mouth that was dripping with a thick, viscous green liquid that sizzled when it hit the ground.

Seth was currently unaware of the fact that, if he were to document this creature in his journal he would find that the original discoverer had named it the 'What in the Hell is that thing, Holy Shit!'.

Obviously this was not a proper name, instead it was named in a sheer fit of panic upon first discovery before said discoverer was promptly ensnared and slowly devoured. Those who did know this creature's name, and those lucky enough to escape it after learning such a detail, did not use the full name. That would be ridiculous. Instead, they simply called it the Hell Spider.

His first thought was, naturally, 'kill it fire' which would be a viable option despite the name of Hell Spider. But, since he had no fire on hand to do the aforementioned killing with, he settled for 'kill it with knives', which was just as effective.

Sending his trusty blade forward, the dirk shot through the air and cleanly sliced through the side of the silken cocoon before having to dart away to avoid being melted by the Hell Spiders acidic breath.

Whilst it wasn't enough to release Corvus from the confines of the spiders silk, it was enough to free his arm, and that was all he needed. Using his free hand to pluck one of his feathers, he quickly carved his way to freedom with the feathered blade. After a few moments, his vision finally returned just in time to see himself plummeting head first towards the ground.

Alas, Seth, and by extension Corvus, didn't panic. For one, even if he did hit the ground it wouldn't hurt and it was unlikely to permanently damage the puppet in any way. Even if it did, he could always find a replacement while Corvus was 'recovering'.

But that was not the main reason he wasn't worried about the sudden stop at the bottom of this fall. Instead it was simply because he wasn't stupid enough to cut himself free from a hanging prison without some sort of plan. There was still a spider to rid the world of after all, he couldn't let it leave and ensnare someone else. Plus, he just really did not want that thing to stay alive.

He might not have known the official name for it, but he absolutely agreed with it nonetheless.

Corvus held his hand outstretched to the left as he fell, as if he was trying to summon something to assist his plummet, and immediately wrapped his fingers around the hilt of Seth's dagger as it rocketed past.

The moment he gripped the dagger his momentum jerked to a halt, a movement that would have probably dislocated the shoulder of a normal man, before soaring back into the air alongside the dirk.

With his hand held forward, Corvus flew through the air through the power of Seth's dagger, clinging to the weapon as many observers compared the spectacle to the flight of a hammer wielding God of Thunder. Rocketing back up to the Hell Spider, the dagger circled around while dragging Corvus with it, before shooting towards the Hell Spider's exposed back.

At the last moment, when he was sure the Hell Spider couldn't dodge out of the way, Corvus released the dagger and sailed freely through the air, allowing the dirk to circle back and dive towards the ground. It still had its own work to do at the wall after all.

Latching onto the spider's back, Corvus immediately hooked his legs underneath its body to keep himself in place before plucking a pair of feathers from his cloak. Now, Seth wasn't exactly an expert on spider anatomy, especially giant mutant spiders. He had once heard that their hearts were in their butts, or the lower half of their body, but he wasn't sure how true that was. Then again, at this distance it didn't really matter. Everything was a target he could easily hit.

Whirling his blades around, so he was holding them in a reverse grip, he immediately got to stabbing. First starting with the eyes, plunging the blades into the variety of gooey targets and doing his best to hold on as the Hell Spider bucked like a derby bronco.

Locking his legs tighter, to make sure he didn't slip until the job was done, he continued to plunge the blades into the beasts sedan sized body. He even made sure to give it some good ass stabs, just to test if that was true. That idea turned out to be an effective one, sending a plume of blood spurting out.

As the spider let out a bloodcurdling shriek, which sounded like trying to shave a chalkboard with a dull razor blade, it finally released its grip on the building. Its legs curled up as its blood oozed from its dozens of wounds, letting both of them plummet to the ground.

Seth wasn't planning on letting Corvus be crushed underneath a giant spiders corpse, however. When the beast started to fall, Corvus unhooked his legs, crouched on its quickly tilting back before launching himself upwards using the corpse as a springboard.

Flipping in the air like a trapeze artist, a particularly ungraceful one, so that he was facing the right way up, Corvus gripped the edges of his cloak and extended them outwards. The feathers flapped rapidly in the rushing air before catching it, his cloak of feathers returning back to their main purpose. Not as weapons or decoration, but as wings.

With his 'wings' spread wide, as the spider plummeted to the ground below, Corvus soared through the air like a raven in the night. For a second, at least...