The gazes of the spider and the mother weasel meet in the air.
They face off, each having drawn a great deal of cursed energy up from their cursed cores. A blade wind whirled and howled around the mother weasel's body, while the spider merely raises its tactile sense quietly on end.
After that first moment, when the spider fired poison silk to keep her in check.
Neither side is moving rashly.
This was a distinctly different pattern from the previous life, and the cause was, naturally, that the spider's weight class had changed.
The spider as it now was had already become a cursed fiend on a level equivalent to the yellow serpent.
Though it had not yet digested the serpent's cursed core, the sheer volume of cursed energy it had ingested was already immense, and thanks to pouring all of that cursed energy wholly into growth without the slightest waste, the spider had now reached a level where it could be called the overlord of a whole district without exaggeration.
So the mother weasel, too, could not act carelessly.
If her body had been in sound condition it might have been another matter, but the mother weasel had only just returned from taking advantage of the jade-hued hawk's absence to raid her nest and slaughter her chicks. Because of that, hounded by the pursuit of the mother hawk burning with vengeance, she could not say how many times over she had already escaped death by a hair.
She had barely made it home in that wretched, ruined state, and the very first opponent she ran into was that enormous spider cursed fiend.
The look in the mother weasel's eyes is nothing but hollow now.
She lost her husband and she lost her youngest.
And now even the young she had left behind have been eaten by some spider cursed fiend.
Had leaving her place been the problem? Had tracking down the hawk's nest for the sake of revenge been the problem? Had being discovered by the mother hawk in the end, even after her revenge had succeeded, been the problem? Had failing to hurry back because of it been the problem?
She does not know. The only thing the mother understands is that nothing at all is left to her now.
There is not one single reason left to go on living.
So if she can offer up even her paltry life at the last to avenge her young, that alone will be enough.
And so the mother weasel resolves upon death.
The primordial true energy that had been condensed and condensed again within her cursed core, forming the core at its center, slowly begins to seethe.
It was primordial true energy she had not used even against the jade-hued hawk. Because until then the rest of her young remaining in the cave had still weighed on her eyes. Because those young had still needed this mother.
But now not even those young remain. So she will burn every last bit of it.
Of course, the spider does not know such circumstances. In fact, it has no particular need to know them. The spider merely concentrates on the phenomena before its eyes.
The density of the cursed energy the mother weasel gives off changes abruptly. It grows dense. It is a phenomenon it is seeing for the first time. The spider's eyeballs roll round and round as they observe this.
And then, with a sound like SHRK—!
The spider's body pulls back and withdraws in an instant. But it was a little late. One of the spider's eyeballs had already been split in two and burst, fluid streaming out of it.
Even that counted as a good evasion. If it had been even a little slower, it would not have been one eyeball but part of its head that was sheared clean off.
The remaining seven eyeballs, excluding the one that had been cut away, recognize the situation. Claws. The mother weasel had rushed in before it knew what was happening and swung a forepaw that grazed its left eyeball and sliced it clean through.
That terrifying rapid assault continues one blow after another. The movements of the mother weasel, who had begun to burn her primordial true energy, had already gone well beyond the level of cursed fiends of her own class.
Taking a short engagement alone, she would be able to put up a fair fight even against that jade-hued hawk.
Naturally, this was an explosion of combat power the spider had not been able to anticipate. With no other choice, the spider simply spewed out all the poison silk it had and flailed wildly.
Of course, the mother weasel was not in a purely advantageous position either.
To begin with, she was in a state of severe injury from being chased about by the jade-hued hawk.
And in that state she had now given up on living and set her primordial true energy alight.
At this rate it was clear that before even a quarter of an hour passed she would burn up all her energy and die. So the only thing that mattered was killing that spider cursed fiend within that time.
The problem was that this was not so easy.
To strike down the poison silk flying in from every direction with blade winds, and to avoid the legs the spider swung about as it flailed and inflict proper damage on its body, she had to press it relentlessly and watch for gaps to attack through.
The spider even threw some strange silk jars out of its mouth from time to time, and the mother weasel instinctively felt a sense of foreboding about them and moved so as to avoid the jars without touching them at all.
But on one occasion the spider deliberately exposed its own flank as though laying bare a weak point, and when the mother weasel lunged for that spot, it threw two silk jars side by side in that direction.
Unable to evade them because of the speed and the angle, the mother weasel had no choice but to raise a blade wind and tear the incoming silk jars to shreds, breaking straight through them, and then she inflicted a great wound on the spider.
It was a blunder.
As a result she did tear the spider's flank open badly, but the mother weasel herself ended up drenched in the venom that sprayed out from inside the silk jars as they were ripped apart.
Her body had been covered in wounds from the start. There could hardly be an easier situation for venom to seep into her body.
Potent venom thick with the spider's cursed energy penetrated the mother weasel's blood vessels and nerves. Along with agony hard to endure, her body began at once to stop answering her properly.
It does not matter. She had burned her primordial true energy already, resolved to die anyway. If she burst the remaining true energy all at once and purged the venom from her body, then even though the time she could live would shrink further, she would at least be able to keep moving for the moment.
The mother weasel did just that. Cursed energy seethed up inside her as though running out of control. At this the potent venom that had finally seeped in was burned away and lost some of its toxicity.
Immediately after, the mother weasel glares at the spider. The spider, too, was in no very good state now, its flank torn wide open.
That move a moment ago had surely been used by the spider in full expectation of taking heavy damage itself. It had meant to give up its flank on purpose in order to feed her a lethal, extreme poison.
Only, it could not have known that she would burn her primordial true energy once more to purge the toxin.
In the end it was a result produced by the difference in resolve. The spider was trying to survive, and the mother was trying to die. That was all there was to it.
Now the mother weasel gathers up the last of the little strength she has left. It was time to cut off the spider's breath completely.
The dwindling blade wind rises up again, and in the instant the spider's seven eyeballs sensed death one more time.
Suddenly.
SCREEEE—!
From somewhere in the blue vault came the cry of the jade-hued hawk, full of fury.
And that cry came flying swiftly toward exactly where the spider and the mother weasel were.
Hearing the hawk's cry, the mother weasel flinched. Several of the spider's eyeballs turned skyward as well.
There, beneath the now setting sun, was an enormous hawk with its jade wings spread wide.
The jade-hued hawk, who had lost her own chicks to the mother weasel, had sensed the primordial true energy the mother weasel burst from far away after all, and was flying this way.
SHWIP-SHWIP-SHWIP!
From high in the sky, green-jade feathers came flying down like sheeting rain and attacked the mother weasel. The spider beside her caught several in its abdomen and legs as well.
With its flank already torn open and fluid streaming out, once it also took piercing wounds, its organs began to protrude too. Two legs being severed whole was thrown in on top of that.
Even so, this much was fortunate. The mother weasel had her entire body pierced through by feathers outright and ended up pinned to the ground as though mounted there. By this point the mother weasel was already dead, and there was no telling whether she died because her primordial true energy ran out or whether she expired because her whole body was skewered by the feathers.
The enormous jade-hued hawk descended upon her. The hawk's sharp beak drove straight down into the corpse of the mother weasel, whose life had already ended.
STAB! STAB-STAB STAB!
Blood bursts out and the small weasel's body is reduced to rags. She tears off the limbs, rips open the belly-hide, pries into the organs, and finally pulls out the blue bead that had been inside.
The mother weasel's blue cursed core was already nearly empty inside, with only a little heat left in it, cooling. That was because she had burned all her primordial true energy away.
The jade-hued hawk pecked at that bead. With a CRUNCH, the bead broke feebly. And even after that, as though her grudge would not be resolved, the jade-hued hawk tore and shredded the already dead body again and again, shrieking.
And even in the midst of that, the spider thrashes about, groping for a way to live.
With two legs severed and its abdomen torn wide open so that its organs spill out, it thrashes and tries instinctively to get away from this spot.
Perhaps that grated on the hawk's nerves. The gaze of the jade-hued hawk, who had been shredding nothing but the mother weasel's corpse all this while, suddenly turned toward the spider.
FLAP-FLAP, CHOMP!
The hawk sprang up into the air and then came down crushing the spider beneath her. With her sharp beak she smashed even the legs that were still whole to utter ruin, then split the spider's belly open and rummaged among its organs.
Then, when something round and hard caught on her beak, she yanked it straight out and put force into her beak to shatter it.
CRUNCH!
The cursed core breaks and the true energy contained inside it streams out. Only after seeing that state of things did the jade-hued hawk seem to feel a little better; she spread her wings, soared up into the sky, and before long vanished.
And so, with the jade-hued hawk's arrival, everything was settled, and in that place where only scraps of flesh and bodily fluid lay strewn about in grisly ruin.
TWITCH!
Suddenly the spider's body flinched.
Though all eight legs had been torn off and even its flank and belly-hide had been ripped so that fluid and organs streamed out, the spider was still alive.
That was not all.
Even though its cursed core had certainly been broken, the light of intelligence still dwelt in the spider's seven undamaged eyeballs, and it was still watching the direction in which the jade-hued hawk had gone.
The reason it had turned out this way was simple.
The cursed core the jade-hued hawk had just bitten and shattered was in fact not the spider's cursed core, but the yellow serpent's cursed core that the spider had swallowed some time before.
There was no way for the jade-hued hawk to know such a thing, and in fact the spider itself had not even imagined that matters would turn out this way.
But in any case, coincidence overlapping coincidence had produced this result, and the spider, as always, only cognizes its present situation and tries to make the optimal judgment.
Its body... every part of it apart from the cursed core had in effect been smashed to pieces. In this state it could not move its body, and it was obvious that its life force would drain away until it died.
In fact, strictly speaking, that it was still alive at all in this condition was itself a strange thing.
That the spider was alive like this was entirely thanks to the primordial true energy that had flowed out of the broken serpent cursed core.
The yellow serpent had been a cursed fiend endowed by birth with tenacious regenerative power, and the primordial true energy that serpent had built up over its whole life held an immense recuperative force within it.
Of course, if that were all, it would not have worked so well for the spider. Fundamentally, the primordial true energy of another cursed beast was hard to absorb whole, and moreover, seeing such great efficacy this immediately was an extremely difficult thing.
But the spider had previously absorbed the serpent cursed fiend's cursed energy and had even finished a molt on the strength of it, so its flesh itself was in a state already mixed to some degree with the serpent cursed fiend's cursed energy, and because of that the serpent cursed fiend's primordial true energy seeped into the spider's flesh without any particular rejection.
Barely maintaining its lifeline that way, the spider gathered its own life force and cursed energy, along with the serpent's primordial true energy as it flowed out, around its own cursed core, and formed a cocoon made of cursed energy inside its body.
Though no one had taught it, it had combined its own molting ability with the serpent's regenerative power to create a makeshift recovery cocoon.
And so the huge body that had originally been the spider's flesh slowly lost its life force and grew cold, but inside it hot cursed energy still seethed, forming a new body.
Then, a few days later, something rustled inside the bone-dry corpse of the enormous spider and carefully crawled out through the belly-hide.
A spider the size of a puppy, with an ink-black body and the light of intelligence dwelling in its jet-black eyeballs.
It was the spider's new body, which had barely survived by means of the makeshift recovery cocoon.
Because it had reconstituted its body in haste amid such an emergency, its bulk was small, but if anything its ability to condense and conceal cursed energy alone had become far superior to before, so that it was hiding its energy so well that at a glance it did not even look like a cursed beast.
'It must go about in hiding.'
The terror of the jade-hued hawk that it had been vaguely harboring all this while.
Through this affair the spider had felt for itself the concrete scale of that terror.
The gap between the jade-hued hawk and itself was not something that could be filled by eating a few serpents or a few weasels. If anything, growing bigger and stronger by half measures for nothing would only draw the hawk's attention and get it eaten wretchedly.
So it hides. It flees far away. This could no longer be put off.
The spider watched the stretch of sky the jade-hued hawk had crossed for a while at the last, then began to move its steps in the opposite direction without any aim. Wherever its destination might be, in any case it had resolved for now to get out of the jade-hued hawk's territory.