Immediately after biting the serpent's tail with its venom-fangs and, at the same time, bursting three potent poison sacs in one go.
The spider at once swiftly left the spot and hid its presence.
Belatedly the serpent slid out of the cave and flicked its tongue as it examined its surroundings, but it could no longer find any sign of the spider that had ambushed it.
A dark night with the last crescent moon risen.
Having drawn all its cursed energy toward its cursed core so that none leaked out into the surroundings, the spider, hidden in the darkness, holds its breath and concentrates its whole mind on its sense of touch.
SNAP, CRRRK, RIP.
Soon it feels the thin, fine strands of silk being swept up by the movement of that huge body, snapping and tearing away. The movements grow gradually more violent, until it even hears the CRACK of a small tree breaking.
And all those vibrations reach the spider's tactile sense, connected by a few thin strands of silk, and take shape three-dimensionally in its mind's eye.
It seems to see clearly before it the serpent, unable to endure the pain, thrashing and rolling about in a frenzy.
Since it was raving like that rather than dying instantly even though three potent poison sacs had been burst, it was clear that had they clashed head-on, the spider would have been eaten without so much as a squeak.
But in any case, the serpent's convulsions did grow steadily weaker. Precisely because it was thrashing about so wildly, the venom circulated through its body all the faster.
And so the serpent trembled for a while and then stopped all movement.
Even so, the spider only waited calmly, holding its breath. It does not act rashly.
After waiting a little over a quarter of an hour more like that, the serpent's motionless body shuddered violently once, and only then could it be seen that its breath truly stopped.
Only then does the spider slowly show itself. But it is still cautious.
Cautiously, without making any sound at all, it approached the fallen serpent and bit down hard with its venom-fangs, bursting one more potent poison sac, but there was no reaction at all.
It was clear the serpent was truly dead.
Only now does the spider's wariness ease a little. But it was somewhat early yet to relax.
It gropes inside its mouth and checks the number of potent poison sacs remaining. Now only two potent poison sacs are left. Of the six potent poison sacs it had made over the past six days, four had been consumed all at once in this serpent hunt.
But even this much was fortunate enough.
For if the serpent had come even a few days earlier, it might not have been able to hunt the thing for lack of potent poison sacs.
In any case, since the hunt had succeeded, it was now time to collect the reward.
The spider moved cautiously this way and that in the darkness, wrapping the enormous serpent's corpse in silk. Because the body was so huge, wrapping it into a cocoon was no easy task either.
To hold that huge body properly, it had to make a sturdy cocoon out of silk richly imbued with cursed energy, as when making potent poison sacs.
It drags the cocoon, which took a long while to barely complete, into its nest.
Inside the nest lie strewn the rotting, foul-stinking corpses of beasts, pools of blood, and a bundle of webbing steeped in cursed energy.
All of it was a trap the spider had laid.
Over the past six days, the spider had deliberately not stayed in its nest and had lived outdoors. Meanwhile it had deliberately put foul-smelling animal corpses and the like inside the nest.
In that state, it had itself hidden in the hiding place it had used when hunting the weasel pups last time, concealing even its presence and its scent as much as it could.
The reason was simple.
Because, already knowing the information that a powerful cursed fiend would come to the cave before long, it saw no need to stupidly stay inside the cramped cave.
If it met a powerful cursed fiend like the mother weasel or the serpent in a narrow burrow with only one passage for an entrance, then far from hunting, it would only be unable even to flee and be eaten itself.
But by hiding outside like this and striking an ambush, it could hunt the enemy as it just had, and even if it failed to hunt, it could at least gain a chance to flee.
In any case, this hunt was tremendously successful. Barely a week had passed since it gorged on the weasel pups, and it had brought down a cursed fiend far stronger than itself, half by fluke.
Setting down the serpent cocoon it had dragged in, the spider hauled the pile of corpses and filth in the nest out of the cave and cleaned up.
Then it came back into the nest, and this time it blocked the entrance with silk containing no cursed energy, sealing it completely.
For a while yet, eating the serpent cursed fiend alone would be more than it could handle anyway. Since there was no reason to go out hunting, there was no need to deliberately leave the entrance slightly open either.
Rather, it was the better choice to block the entrance as much as possible and take every precaution so that the cursed energy the serpent gave off would not flow outside.
A living cursed fiend can hide its energy by concentrating its own cursed energy into its cursed core at will, but a dead cursed fiend cannot.
Because of that, the serpent cursed fiend, though dead, was in fact giving off far more cursed energy than while it had been alive. It was only thanks to being bound up tightly in silk that not much leaked out.
In any case, having finished all its preparations that way, the spider ate back up the bundle of cursed-fiend-luring webbing that still had cursed energy left in it.
Because it had been left inside the cave for days on end, the cursed energy remaining in the luring bundle was fairly depleted.
But for the spider, which had just spent a great deal of cursed energy and stamina hunting the serpent, even this was something to be thankful for.
Making a simple meal of the webbing bundle, the spider slept deeply for the first time in a while. Over the past six days it had constantly kept watch on its surroundings and had not been able to rest properly, so fatigue had built up.
It was still a little early to eat the serpent it had hunted.
Because it was a cursed fiend of such a different class, it would only barely become edible after being pickled thickly in digestive fluid inside the cocoon for about two days.
***
The spider rested soundly for two days straight.
During that time the serpent's body must have digested considerably, for now the cursed energy flowing out of the cocoon was thicker than before.
But because it had been bound up so tightly, it was not enough to flow out beyond the nest, so it seemed there would be no drawing the attention of other cursed fiends.
In any case, it was now about time to ingest it.
The spider carefully untied only the end of the cocoon and checked inside.
From inside the opened hole, thick cursed energy wafts up and stirs the spider's hunger.
The spider had experienced excessive gorging beyond its station any number of times so far, but this time it truly felt like a different class.
It puts its mouthparts to the hole and begins to suck up the fluids inside the cocoon.
SLURP, SLURP!
Liquid holding a flavor so intense that it rather seemed to strike the senses flows in down its throat.
Energy both hot and sweet enters the spider's body and, drawn by the rotation of the cursed core, circles around it.
Even after it sucked down fluid until its belly swelled taut, there was still a great deal left to eat inside the cocoon.
It would probably take more than a week just to eat it all.
The spider had no intention of devouring it all at once anyway.
The spider seals the cocoon again.
Then it takes its rest and slowly begins to absorb the life force and cursed energy of the serpent it has ingested.
Because the cursed energy the serpent held was so strong, it had to concentrate its whole mind on its cursed core and raise its rotational force. Otherwise the cursed energy it had gone to the trouble of ingesting would scatter emptily into the air.
The spider instinctively raised the rotational force of its cursed core and packed the ingested serpent's cursed energy into a spherical form centered on the cursed core. Then, once the cursed energy had stabilized around the cursed core to a certain degree, it would tear the cocoon open again and repeat sucking down and swallowing the contents.
Ten days passed that way. By now the cocoon holding the serpent had grown completely gaunt, its contents almost entirely emptied.
What remained now was only the serpent's head.
The serpent's head was giving off especially thick cursed energy compared with the other parts, and it did so even now that it had melted thickly in the digestive fluid until it was half like jelly.
The spider pushed its head halfway into the cocoon outright and began to swallow the fluids down.
In the middle of that, it felt something hard and round catch against its mouthparts.
The spider's digestive fluid was second to none in strength and could melt even a fair-sized bone fragment to mush, so there was no way anything this hard could still remain.
So the spider gripped that strangely hard impurity with its mouthparts and pulled it out, and that impurity was none other than a round yellow bead—the serpent cursed fiend's cursed core.
The spider examined this new spoil closely.
The cursed core did not seem to be letting out any particular cursed energy in itself. Perhaps having lost its internal rotational force as well, it showed no efficacy in drawing in the surrounding cursed energy either.
But looking closely, the interior of the translucent cursed core was filled full with dense cursed energy.
The identity of that dense cursed energy was none other than the serpent cursed fiend's primordial true energy. It was the very core of its own being, built up over the whole of the serpent cursed fiend's life.
Seeing this, the spider could understand instinctively.
That the primordial true energy held in this tiny bead was far more valuable than the entirety of the cursed energy contained in the serpent's flesh it had swallowed until now.
But how could it ingest this?
The spider's eyeballs roll round and round as it examines the cursed core.
Though it had been steeped in powerful digestive fluid for more than a week, there was not a single scratch on the cursed core.
It tried biting the bead with its molars as a test, but it was hard as hard could be, and ingesting it in this manner did not seem to be the correct method.
So for now the spider gulped the cursed core down and kept it inside its belly. Even inside the spider's belly, the serpent's cursed core simply stayed as it was, without being digested or anything of the sort.
***
In any case, thanks to eating a powerful cursed fiend, the spider realized that the time for another molt had arrived.
As it happened, it had already prepared a nest, and it also already knew from the experience of its previous life that no other powerful cursed beast lived in these parts.
The point at which the mother weasel appears is a matter of ninety more turns of day and night from now. In short, three months of leeway were guaranteed to the spider.
The problem, if any, was that this molt would take far longer than the last one.
Each time it repeated a molt, the amount of energy the molt required and the time it took to carry it out were both increasing greatly. The last molt alone had taken nearly three weeks, so this molt would take at least a month at the very least. Perhaps it might take far longer than that. Since it had ingested so much, even the spider itself could not get a sense of when this molt would end.
If by any chance the spider did not finish its molt before the mother weasel came, it could well be caught and eaten for nothing.
But then again, if it simply stayed as it was, it was not entirely out of the question either that it would fail to control the cursed energy flowing out of its body and be found and eaten by another powerful cursed fiend that sensed that cursed energy.
In the end, after much deliberation, the spider resolved to proceed with the molt.
Finally reinforcing the webbing blocking the entrance once more, it settled in at the very center of the deepest part of the cave and slowly spewed silk to wrap its body in a cocoon.
By the time it woke again, the decisive battle with the mother weasel would not be far off, so its body too would have to grow strong enough to face her.
And so the spider began its molt inside the cocoon, and how many times over did the sun and the moon rise and set in turn?
CRACK, CRRRACK....
Suddenly the cocoon split in two, and from within it the spider, its metamorphosis complete, slowly raised its body.
Its ink-black body writhes and glistens in the dark cave.
Eight black eyeballs roll about, searching the darkness.
Every sense has grown far keener than before, to the point that it can now make out objects even in complete darkness.
When it spread out wide the eight legs it had kept curled inside the cocoon, now its legs on either side seemed almost to touch from this wall to that.
At this the spider thinks.
That this cave is now far too cramped for it to stay in.
And.
That it now seems able to face the mother weasel on even terms.
Though the mother weasel's cursed power does hold something of an advantage even compared with its own weight class as it is now.
As it recalls, the mother weasel that came to the cave had been covered head to toe in wounds, so it had a feeling that if it aimed for that well, it had a fair chance of victory.
Having raised its body that way, it stays still a while and dries the moisture on its surface. So great were the nutrients it had ingested before the molt that, unlike previous times when it had always been utterly spent right after a molt, strength overflows in its body as though it had woken from a deep sleep.
After drying its body, it tears away completely the thick webbing that had sealed the entrance for months on end. Outside it is evening, the sunset just now falling.
Its eyes sting slightly at the evening glow pouring in, and after wiping them a couple of times with a foreleg.
The spider looks off ahead. Riding the wind that brushes the undergrowth, thick cursed energy is flowing in.
"......."
A blue weasel, her whole body covered in wounds, one eye lost outright.
The mother who lost her husband and her youngest to the enormous jade-hued hawk, and who has now had even her other young eaten up entirely by the spider cursed fiend, is looking this way with a blankness that is chilling.
The spider 'reads' that expression and thinks.
That fortunately, it is not too late.
SSSHHH....
The massive body of the spider cursed fiend, the setting sun at its back, casts a huge shadow toward where the mother weasel stands.
Even if the size of a body is not so important in battles between cursed fiends, that is not to say it means nothing at all.
FWIP!
This time too the first strike was the spider's. Sticky silk spewed abruptly from its rear crosses the air and flies toward the mother weasel.
At this the mother weasel too raises her cursed energy and calls up a blade wind. After the whooshing sound of wind rings out a few times, the silk the spider fired loses the force of its flight and falls to the ground with wet slaps.
HISSSS....
From where the silk landed comes the sound of something melting. Poison. The spider had now become able to put potent venom into its silk as well and spew it.