Physical

When she woke up, the first thing Alice did was quietly stare at the pearlescent ceiling of her house-tent, the silken cloth it was made of gently moving with her every breath.

How the hell am I going to cure the Queen? She asked herself as she tossed and turned on the cushiony pillow-mattress that was her floor.

Not only it’s something I have never done before, but the illness must be pretty fricking strong if it’s managing to bring her down. She thought as she gently slapped her cheek, her forehead wrinkled in concentration. And yet, thinking that I won’t be able to do something is not going to help me save Maath, the opposite really… Let’s reason then.

She finally sat up, crossing her legs and starting to scour through her mind for any option, closely reviewing all the basic knowledge that came from her studies back on Earth.

Until I manage to learn the language enough to actually inquire what caused the wounds and how they tried to heal them, I’ll be basically going in blind.

Given the way the injuries appear, however, with the evident loss of legs and eyes coupled with the color of her exoskeleton, it must be something that prevents regeneration and keeps going for a long time, probably some kind of infection, maybe a cancer or a poison… I sincerely hope it’s not some kind of spell because I would probably be useless.

With her Enhanced Hearing skill active, Alice could already hear the sounds of the first convoy of food trudging through the forest, the bundles scraping on the metallic floor.

I guess that now it’s only a matter of finding out uh? But first, I’ll make sure not to get infected myself. If an ancient spider as big as a house has been affected, I honestly don’t want to know what would happen to me if I were to come into contact with the illness.

Alice finally stood up, groaning a bit as she did her daily stretching and quickly clothed herself. She gently grasped the shadowy core that had been tucked between her legs while she slept and carefully maintained its contact with her body as she slid it back within the prosthesis that she had left on the ground just outside the house.

After quickly washing her face in the now thriving bowl of Lumen particles, she briskly walked to the edge of the Queen’s burrow, still thinking about her options as she waited for the giant spider to emerge from her slumber.

Which she did only a few minutes later just as Qhevi finally crossed the last of the crystalline protrusions and moved through the clearing with the first meal of the day.

The large, injured body of Maath emerged from the darkness of her lair and almost immediately laid on the huge cushion at its entrance, a loud, pained groan making the metal around them ripple and twist.

Alice ignored the Queen as she started eating her breakfast, deciding to instead focus on the tarantula-like Thinker that was busy ripping open the bundles for her ruler.

After getting Qhevi attention, the girl spent a few intense minutes as she tried to explain her request to the spider while trying to ignore the small trickle of venom dripping down her enlarged fangs. Thankfully, a recently awoken Skitter came in her aid after emerging from his own resting spot at the edges of the clearing. After a quick translation from the smaller male, Qhevi finally plinked out of the clearing with a single affirmative sound.

In the meanwhile, the Queen finally finished her meal and the two resumed the conversation they had halted the previous day, still working on learning their respective languages.

Their talks went on for a bit more than an hour until, to Maath’s evident surprise, Qhevi reappeared from the metal forest and stepped into the glade once more.

The Thinker was carrying a single, basketball-sized bundle with her pedipalps, a bundle she soon placed at the feet of the young Biomancer, who briefly thanked her as she started tearing through the silk.

“What is that?” Maath asked in confusion.

“A test for safety” Alice briefly replied, more focused on the contents of the cocoon than answering the Queen’s questions.

Maath clicked in annoyance at the vague answer just as Alice finally managed to open up the wrappings. To her disgusted relief, from the bundle emerged a brown slug as long as her arm upon which, with a bit of reluctance, the girl carefully placed a single digit.

Alice felt the slightly wrinkly texture of its mantle under the thick layer of slime that coated it, she perceived the way its deceptively muscly body contrasted the pressure of her finger and the gentle pulsation of the organs underneath its skin. From the connection, she expanded her power until it completely enveloped the gastropod’s system, carefully learning its inner workings as she moved from organ to organ, from cell to cell, trying to get an idea of how the creature worked.

As soon as she was finished inspecting the simple mollusk, Alice repressed a small shiver of disgust before grasping it with her hand and picking it up.

“Dammit” she growled, the mucus of the slug immediately coating the armored dress she had spent so long crafting “Now I’ll have to go back to the spring and wash it. Again.”

She kept on rambling as she moved towards the giant spider, only stopping when she stood barely a couple of meters away from the edge of the huge silken pillow.

Once in position, Alice gestured for the Queen to bring her limb closer, which she did after an instant of hesitation.

As soon as the large leg of the spider was in front of her eyes, Alice brought forward the still paralyzed slug and planted it on the streetlamp-sized spike. Without missing a beat, the girl started smearing its slimy mucus on the silvery exoskeleton of the spider matriarch with wide, round motions.

Learn balance Alice-san, Wax on, Wax off. She repeated in her mind.

She chuckled at the thought, still trying to ignore the mucilage trickling down her arm as she kept smearing.

After few moments of frozen, and probably horrified, astonishment, the giant spider recoiled, pulling away her leg from the unexpected slime bath, a section of her limb now drooping translucent goop.

From the Queen’s maw erupted a stream of low, enraged hisses that went completely ignored by the culprit, who had quickly focused back on the slug’s body and was now searching its surface for signs of contagion.

Walking in circles while still holding the slug, its mucus gently pattering all around her like a gentle spring shower, Alice carefully scoured every inch of the gastropod’s system before dropping it on the ground with a relived sigh, the slug squelching slightly as it hit the floor.

“No direct transmission confirmed. Thank god. At the very least I’m okay if I only touch the non-blackened sections of her body. I guess I’ll check her up before trying with the veins.” She muttered pretty much to herself before taking a look at the pissed-off queen, sighing, and then starting to tiredly sign and translate her findings.

About an hour later, Alice was once again standing a couple of centimeters away from the Spear Spider Queen’s limb, staring at it in concentration.

She had spent quite a bit of time talking with the annoyed matriarch and, right when everything seemed to be resolved, the sound of a second convoy of supplies destined to the ruler had thrown yet another wrench in her plans, delaying her inspection once again.

Thusly, she had sullenly spent her break while keeping her attention on the now-moving slug that she had decided to name Specimen H which, to her relief, even after a couple of hours hadn’t showed any sign of infection.

As soon as Maath was done with her meal, she had quickly tied up the mollusk to one of the crystals at the edge of the clearing and, after quite a bit of cajoling and promising, she had finally reobtained access to the limb, which now stood in front of her in all its glory.

Now that she had the Queen’s permission, however, she was filled with trepidation; beneath the thick layer of silvery alloy, hidden for everyone but her, lay the greatest battleground she could imagine; tens of systems, hundreds of organs, thousands of connections and uncountable billions of cells pumped and lived in the Queen of the Spear Spiders, each stuck in an unending war with the insidious invader that had contaminated her body. A relentless clash of life versus death, a fight the spider was slowly but inexorably losing.

Alice shivered at the thought, absolutely terrified of what she would find.

Despite her dread, with a final flinch of hesitation, she placed the palm of her hand on the warm metal and started gently prodding it with a tendril of her power.

It didn’t work.

Her brow furrowed as she tried to push harder, her power dissipating on the surface of the shell, unable to even create a hold on the material. She poured more of her own magic; the small brook of warmth that had been moving out of her well becoming a fast-flowing spill that impacted the metal, starting to pierce the stubborn surface; only to stop halfway through, its power dissipating as if hitting a dam.

Alice grit her teeth as she pushed more, letting all of her power pour out in an impetuous river that raged against the exoskeleton, finally piercing through and soaking the softer tissue beneath.

A beachhead established; her consciousness finally entered the Queen’s body.

Still a bit shaken by the huge amount of magical energy she had had to expend to simply enter the huge system, the young woman found herself observing Maath from the inside, taking her time to finally observe all the inner workings of her current location: the giant limb of the spider.

Instantly, the Biomancer realized that not only Maath’s body was different from her own, but also from the other spiders she had previously inspected.

Where Alice’s own limbs were composed and supported by muscle tissue, tendons and bones, the Queen’s had heavily braided ropes of strengthened muscle that stretched between each one of the many joints of her leg. The muscle fibers themselves were incredibly condensed and specialized; in the space Alice’s body would have had one or two fibers, Maath’s had hundreds, all tightly packed and ready to contract at any time.

At the same time, where the other spiders had a hollow cavity filled with the highly pressurized hemolymph that allowed them to move, Maath had brought the concept to another level. The rest of the space, in fact, was filled by multiple vein-like tubes which coursed along the limb, strengthened by a silvery lattice that allowed them to sustain the immense pressures of the fluids contained within. Every time the spider moved, the hemolymph coursed through the complex hydraulic system, allowing the limbs to work while also offering a much finer degree of accuracy.

Completely awe-struck, Alice entered one of those channels and moved with the fluid toward the final joint of the leg, jumping straight into the wide thorax of the monstrous queen where lay the many large arteries that allowed hemolymph to continuously flow to and from the abdomen.

The lower half of that segment was occupied by a large and flat stomach that digested the quintals of liquefied preys the giant spider consumed every day, continuously breaking down the ingested food into digestible proteins and sugars.

The upper part, instead, was completely filled by the heavily corrugated brain of the Spider Queen. It was similar, and yet completely different from a human encephalon, with a heavily ridged surface that seemed to continuously fold in on itself, and many neural connections to the main organs of her body. She could see large threads of coiled nerves traveling into the legs and towards the eyes, as well as a huge stalk moving towards the abdomen and its many contents.

The shape of the brain followed the one of the exoskeleton, occupying every inch of space available, separated from the hard carapace only by a somewhat thin layer of membranes.

Inside of it, she could feel the core of the creature, shining like a sun in her magical perception as it pumped its unending energy throughout the entire system, following the neural pathways of the Queen.

Alice stared for a long time, not daring to move closer to the sprawling information complex that made Maath herself, the core contained within eating away at her own magic, warping it.

When she finally managed to pull herself away from the wondrous and terrifying sight, the girl moved along with the warm hemolymph, gently flowing into the arachnid’s huge abdomen, where, once again, she could see the many differences between the matriarch and the previous spiders she had observed.

Just looking at the respiratory system of the Queen showed some of the many changes and improvements on the basic design of a Spear Spider.

Where the smaller members of her species had one or two sets of lungs, Maath had a veritable industrial complex solely focused on pumping air to her organs, the thousands of folded membranes filtering every single molecule of oxygen and sending it to bond with the coppery hemolymph pumped by the huge hearts of the ruler, which, while similar to the pumping cylindrical tube she had seen in Chillushrith’s body, were on a completely different league.

The four hearts of the Spider Queen were able to pump torrents of her blue ichor through the many blood vessels of her circulatory system which, unlike the open circulation of her kindred, directly moved most of the oxygenated blood and nutrients straight to the main organs.

She was just beginning to explore that immense new environment when something strange caught her attention. Flowing in the otherwise empty hemolymph, Alice saw uncountable small particles which gently floated through each heart and got pumped to one of the many organs of the segment.

A hint of fear in her mind, she got a closer look to the dark-brown cell.

It was a pearl-shaped globule, much smaller than the cells of the body she was in and, unlike the many bacteria she had had the time to watch while in her own system, this one seemed to be completely inert, its somewhat translucent form letting her get a glimpse of a darker nucleus within.

Alice relentlessly followed the cell until it finally impacted with one of the walls of the vein, somehow managing to stick to it. As soon as it came into contact with the artery’s wall, the particle suddenly stirred, its outer coat changing its shape as it started extending a handful of root-like tentacles through the layer of the unfortunate cell it was pressed against.

The moment the root finally pierced the cell, however, some sort of brackish liquid flowed outwards, completely coating the invading organism which quickly started dissolving from the outside, finally dissipating in a cloud of waste that was immediately carried away by the flow of blood.

All over the vein, she could now see the same events happening again and again, the invading substance trying to pierce through and infect the tissues and the defending cells fighting back with their own bio-weapons.

She is definitely still fighting. And effectively too. Maybe it’s not too bad? She mused as she left that section of the body.

Somewhat reassured, Alice continued along her path, inspecting the internal organs and seeing them mostly intact. When she moved to the intestine, however, the real state of things finally dawned on her.

Maath’s viscera were completely invaded by the resilient infection. Huge, green and brown excrescences could be seen growing on most of the internal tissue of the bowels.

Some of the protrusions almost blocked the entire tract, absorbing the nutrients destined to the healthy body and using them to grow and thicken. The bigger mounds could be seen continuously shedding small shards of themselves, which quickly got absorbed by other cells or moved through some of the inflamed abscesses that had formed throughout the intestinal tract.

Damn, It seems to be some kind of bacteria or another living organism… Can I even do anything at this stage? Half of my power got eaten just entering her system! I’ll need to do some more trials before even risking it on her.

Alice grimaced as she moved along the infested viscera; the deeper she went, the worse was its state.

She was halfway through the intestine when the original cause of the Queen’s suffering was finally bared in front of her eyes.

A huge, suppurating abscess had speared the spider from one side to the other, a corroded crevice filled with brown protrusions, blackened pus and dying, infected cells.

Alice moved through the festering wound, watching in horror as the infection within it grew and broke down the healthy cells, using their nutrients to unrelentingly multiply as it further dug its way through the body, ripping open passages to invade new organs and tissues with its tireless corruption.

As she delved deeper into the abscess, the damage became worse and the pathway that the infection had dug through the Queen’s flesh became larger and longer.

Her magical reservoir running dry, she quickly pushed through the rot until she finally found herself staring at the internal side of Maath’s exoskeleton.

There, surrounded by the blackened veins that had spread all over the matriarch’s weakened carapace, sprouting from its edges of decaying metal, was a large, circular wound; still open and weeping dark and congealed ichor.

Whatever had caused that infection, it had speared through the Queen’s body like a knife through flesh.

Panic welled inside of her as the weight of her task threatened to squash her, her horrified eyes still watching the matriarch body rotting from within.

She might be dead… I don’t even know where to start!

Feeling her powers waning, she let herself return to her own body, her focus still on the invasion taking place in Maath’s body, her mind trying to find a solution to an apparently insurmountable problem.

When she finally re-entered her own system, Alice dropped down on the floor, her numb legs unable to sustain her as a headache bloomed in her brain.

She ignored the questioning words already coming from the vibrating wire of the Queen, instead focusing on taking deep breaths to stymie the panic and nausea she was feeling.

“When did it happen? How long ago?” she anxiously asked the Queen, dreading the answer.

“✈︎◆︎♋︎⬧︎♓︎ five molts ago, in the ❖︎♏︎♍︎♍︎♒︎♓︎□︎ Nest” Maath readily replied.

Alice sagged in relief, her dread lessening slightly as she multiplied the average time between each of the titanic spider’s molts.

Five molts… it means more than a year as far as she told me. I might have some time.

The young Biomancer stood up, clenching her only hand to mask its tremor.

“I will try. But I will need to know everything Maath.”

The Queen seemed to hesitate for a moment before finally replying.

“Yes, Alice”.

She got to work.

*****

This chapter is officially sponsored by White Neko Knight! Thank you for the support!