Between the violet lines, a deep darkness formed. Staring into it brought back the same uncomfortable sensations as when she had been dead. A hole into pure nothingness, so empty that putting words to it couldn’t be done.
Arachne took a step back, waiting for some creature to emerge forth and attack.
Not even I will violate my laws. However, a few back doors have been left open by my attacker.
Arachne didn’t budge. Her instincts were shouting at her to flee. Her thoughts screamed at her to run from this anomaly before she wound up dead once again, further delaying her reunion with Eva.
It was obviously a portal of some sort. Reminiscent of the portals Void used to drag deceased demons back home. It wasn’t dragging Arachne into it and nothing was coming from it.
It just sat there, inviting someone to wander inside.
Arachne took a step forward.
If this was a trick, there would be hell to pay. Mortal, demon, or even Power, she would tear them to shreds.
Another step had her right in front of the portal. She was too large to fit through in her largest form. With a thought, she started shrinking. The bulbous abdomen sticking out of her melted into her torso. Her legs pulled up, recessing into her body one by one until only two legs were left.
Reaching an arm out, Arachne let the tips of her fingers scrape against the surface of the hole in space. She half expected something—magical force or a creature—to grasp her fingers and drag her into it, but nothing happened.
Nothing but a sensation of not being able to feel her fingers. As if they suddenly ceased to exist.
Pulling her hand out, Arachne found her fingers to be whole and intact. Wiggling them, she made sure that she could feel them again.
Everything seemed fine. She clawed through the stone walls of her domain, checking to ensure that the strength and toughness of her fingers hadn’t been ruined by exposure to the portal.
Stone crumbled into chunks and dust while her fingers came away with just as much sheen as they had started with.
Moving back just a bit, Arachne took a deep breath and charged at the portal.
There was a brief sensation of nothingness, as if she were back in the depths of Void again, before she could feel the wind rushing past her body.
Violet filled her vision. That only lasted a few seconds.
She was falling.
Soon enough, the all encompassing violet distanced itself from her, becoming nothing more than purple streaks in a starry sky.
The tendrils making up her hair whipped around in the roaring air. Her flailing arms failed to find any purchase.
Twisting her body, Arachne oriented herself towards the Earth.
And it was the Earth. There could be no doubt about that. Not only could Arachne not see an end to the ground, but she could see a few distinctly familiar sights.
Brakket Academy, the city that shares its name, the forest and the lake.
She was back.
And Eva…
Eva had to be somewhere. The dormitory or the school itself. Perhaps at the prison.
If not, someone would know where she was. The professors or Devon, if he was still skulking about the prison.
But first, she had to survive this fall. While she might be able to hit the ground and walk away without much issue, Arachne wasn’t willing to take any chances. She had never fallen from such a height that she had time to think about how she wanted to land before, that alone had her a little nervous.
Though, if Void wanted her to fulfill her end of their agreement, dropping her off in the middle of the sky only to have her fall to her death didn’t seem like a good way to go about sending her to the mortal realm. Of course, that assumed that a Power who had never been to Earth wasn’t completely out of touch with quite literally everything.
Best to take matters into her own claws.
Twisting in the air again, Arachne shrank. Her body collapsed in on itself until she was little more than legs sticking out from a hand-sized body.
Regular spiders survived falls from great heights all the time. And, while it was true that Arachne’s spider form was a great deal larger than most spiders, she could help slow her fall by rapidly spinning thread between her legs.
A task that was easier said than done.
With the wind, her threads whipped around and went everywhere. Just ringing it around her legs was a chore. Once she got it going, the air resistance built up. Had she not been a demon with exceptionally strong webbing, the threads would have snapped long before she had it woven.
Woven implied a certain finesse that was lacking in her final result. The threads wrapped around her legs were patchwork quilts, full of holes and stitches.
Arachne couldn’t bring herself to care at the moment. Not only was weaving while falling a challenge, she had to rush.
The ground was rapidly approaching.
Flexing her legs allowed her to glide—almost. Enough that she could control her direction.
Spotting and feeling a certain winged bull down below, Arachne angled herself towards the roof of the dormitory building.
Arachne landed without the slightest hint of grace. She struck the building at speed. Failing to remain upright, Arachne tumbled. End over end, she skidded across the roof. She had come in at far too shallow of an angle. The gravel on the rooftop scattered, some exploding outwards while some dug into her carapace—a feat that was only possible thanks to the speed that she hit the roof at.
Burrowing her legs into the building itself, Arachne managed to come to a stop.
For a full minute, Arachne didn’t move. Her entire body ached. Granted, her body wasn’t that large at the moment. Still, she was fairly certain that one of her legs had twisted the wrong way while the carapace on another had shattered.
But she was back.
Unfurling to her full height, Arachne charged towards the edge of the building.
Zagan, in his full demon form, fought against a man. A mere human, presumably. He certainly didn’t fight like a demon. Too much dodging, too much maneuvering.
And, of course, the sword.
Just looking at the emerald sword gave Arachne a bad feeling. It could be likened to the sensation she got from being near Zagan. That disgusting sensation of far too much power.
Both of them together had Arachne shuddering.
Something was obviously going on, but Eva wasn’t down there. She had to be nearby. If Eva had managed to keep herself uninvolved in whatever was happening, Arachne would eat her own legs.
Charging off towards a thin plume of smoke at the school building, Arachne leaped from the roof, crossing almost the entire distance in a single bound.
She promptly froze as she came to the wall of the school. A certain window looked as if a bomb had gone off inside. A bomb filled with ice.
A person-sized lump of ice was blocking part of the window, but more had shattered outwards, scattering across the lawn. Smoke billowed from the hole.
Much of the smoke was coming off the faintly smoldering remains of a desk. Or the pieces of a desk, at least. Much of the room looked as if a small bomb had gone off inside. In particular, the wall around the doorway wasn’t much of a wall anymore. The ceiling light in the room had snapped at one end and was dangling in the middle of the room by its power cord. Sparks jumped from the cable every time it swung against the metal brace that had once held the light.
More alarming than the state of the room were the walls themselves. Beads of black blood sweat from the walls. Each droplet dripped down, joining with other droplets to pool along the edges of the room. The pools were drawn into thin streams leading towards the middle of the room.
Eva stood amidst a whirlwind of blood. She had her void metal dagger clenched in one hand as she glared with burning eyes at a woman on the opposite side of the room—just to the side of the window.
The woman had a small patch of ice around her feet. Any liquid blood that dared to venture too close wound up frozen solid.