Chapter 07
It had been less than a year since Hans died.
Spring had reached the North, too.
For a brief time, the weather turned gentle.
But in Isaac’s heart, it was still the season of a storm that would not relent, a ceaseless blizzard howling within.
He had been haunted by nightmares each night, so deeply that he could no longer tell day from night.
And so, he had thrown himself into the study of magic, as though to claw his way out of the abyss.
Then, one day—
He heard angry voices rising from the courtyard, just below the window of his bedchamber.
“What were you doing until things came to this?!”
“Watch your words. You stand before His Excellency.”
“Who here doesn’t know he’s a Margrave? I’m asking the lord of this land why he failed to protect his people! I’m demanding to know why he let so many precious lives be cast aside!”
Three men stood in the courtyard.
His father, Margrave Goethe.
Schiller, the head chamberlain.
And a priest dressed in formal clerical robes.
The Margrave said nothing from beginning to end.
Only Schiller and the priest were raising their voices in an impassioned exchange.
The subject of their argument — the children of Black Goose had all died of pneumonia.
Isaac paid it little mind.
No, he had no room in his thoughts for such things.
His thoughts were consumed by one thing and one thing only; the fear, the gnawing dread that more of those he cherished might be claimed next by the mana explosions.
And so, he didn’t know.
He didn’t notice that the nanny hadn’t returned to the estate in months.
Didn’t think to ask why she looked at him, now and then, with such unbearable sadness in her eyes.
Didn’t hear her muffled sobs as she wept alone in the kitchen.
Isaac didn’t know.
He was young.
He was foolish.
It wasn’t until months later, when the nanny finally spoke, her grief worn smooth, dulled into quiet resignation, that he understood.
That the name of the village where the children died was Black Goose.
That it had been her home.
That her last surviving son, Hinder, had died of pneumonia.
Isaac couldn’t even remember Hinder’s face. He had only seen the boy a handful of times, after all. He wasn’t even sad, only confused. It didn’t occur to him to consider how much pain she must have been in.
He wouldn’t understand until she lay dying.
—”By now, my boy would’ve been around your age, young master. When he passed first, I thought my heart had truly broken. But this time… I get to go first. I’m glad.”
Only then did he come to see it…
How she had dragged her shattered soul through each day, barely surviving.
And he had realized it far, far too late.
Several more years passed.
Then came word that the village of Black Goose had been utterly destroyed by an incursion of winter spiders; there were no survivors.
Even then, Isaac didn’t spare the news a single thought.
By then, Hans, the nanny, and two of the maids had already died in a mana explosion.
A Black Goose without his nanny meant nothing to him at all.
𝄞 𝄢 𝄞 𝄢 𝄞 𝄢
‘Not anymore.’
Isaac opened his eyes.
He stretched out his legs from his kneeling meditation posture and yawned.
The spiders were still surrounding him, but their movements were no longer the same.
In fact, several of them were already lying on their backs, convulsing.
It was because they had failed to detect the hidden Frost Belladonna within the smoky air.
The breathing organs of those creatures, called “book lungs,” were primitive like gills, incapable of filtering out toxins in the air. As a result, their bodies gradually became paralyzed, and even their respiratory systems relaxed to the point where they could no longer breathe.
In contrast, Isaac focused on the changes in his body while meditating.
The toxins in the air, once filtered through a damp cloth and his nose, were further purified using the mana within his body.
At the same time, he continued maintaining the fiery sphere that guarded his surroundings.
This was the benefit of multiple mana circuits.
Purification, fire magic, and magical phase alteration.
Because he could perform all three simultaneously, he was able to buy time until the spiders succumbed to the status effects.
‘There are two more tunnels aside from the main shaft.’
Isaac gauged the passages leading to the cavern by observing the direction in which the smoke flowed.
Just sensing the airflow alone had its limits, but now he was confident about the structure surrounding the chamber.
After finishing his mental calculations, he stood up.
“Farewell.”
Whoosh—!!!
The ball of fire orbiting Isaac shot toward a nearby winter spider.
KIIIIIIE—!!!
The spider burst into screams as its body was set aflame.
It blazed intensely, like kindling catching fire; that fire spread to the other spiders nearby.
It was because of the oil they secreted onto their fur to preserve body heat.
In an instant, all the spiders surrounding Isaac were engulfed in flames.
Every burning spider moved in the same direction.
‘Looks like there’s water that way.’
Isaac nodded.
It was one of the two pathways he had deduced by watching the direction of the drifting smoke.
Whether beast or monster, anything alive needed water to survive.
And if it’s a monster colony, then ‘something crucial’ is always located nearby.
KIIIIIIE—!!!
Isaac unleashed fire on the winter spiders, still dormant and untouched by flame.
He spared none.
Crackle, hiss—
The eggs clinging to the ceiling were no exception.
As the flames licked up their shells, hundreds of spiderlings burst out in a panic, only to be devoured at once by the hissing inferno that snaked toward them, tongues of flame flicking greedily through the cavern.
“Burns well,” he muttered.
For a moment, the cave blazed as bright as day, lit by the fires that leapt from surface to surface.
‘I’ll suffocate on this smoke if I stay here much longer.’
Leaving the burning chamber behind, Isaac moved down the tunnel the spiders had used to flee.
It sloped downward, a natural cavern narrowing as it descended, and sat lower than the main chamber, far enough that the smoke didn’t reach it.
Breathing came easier here, but the air was no less thin.
His head pulsed with a dull throb.
‘I can’t stay long. Better end this quickly.’
He shrugged off the thick fur cloak, now soaked in sweat.
There was no cold here, there was only heat. It clung to his skin and stung his lungs.
Without pause, he pressed forward.
Scattered along the tunnel floor were the scorched husks of spiders, burned alive before they could escape.
As he neared the end of the passage, he began to hear it—
The sound of water droplets striking a surface, echoing faintly.
‘A subterranean water vein… I was right.’
Just as he’d expected.
He conjured a small light spell with the tip of his finger, and the pool below reflected it back at him.
Stalactites and stalagmites clawed from ceiling to floor in tangled rows.
Water, knee-deep, blanketed the ground.
It wasn’t as vast as the main chamber, but the space was still large, broad, deep, and ominous.
Isaac regretted discarding his fur cloak, as the temperature dropped sharply the farther he went in.
The water that once splashed around his ankles had now completely frozen over into a sheet of ice.
Shivering from the cold that pierced to the bone, Isaac trembled.
This wasn’t a natural phenomenon.
With no other choice, he swapped his light spell for a fire spell.
The heat helped alleviate the cold a bit, but it wasn’t a fundamental solution.
“…Damn. Nothing’s happening outside my predictions.”
Isaac clicked his tongue.
It was good that things were going as expected, but sometimes he wished they wouldn’t.
The ceiling of the chamber had been covered in eggs.
At a glance, there had to be at least several hundred.
A female winter spider lays at most two or three eggs per month.
Especially during the frigid northern winters, they lay none at all.
Without maturing into adults, growing fur, and protecting themselves with bio-oil, they would freeze to death quickly.
Given the number of spiders Isaac had seen so far, it should have been impossible for the ceiling to be filled with eggs.
There could be only one answer and he hoped it was wrong.
The Winter Spider Queen.
Littered across the ice were the corpses of adult winter spiders.
They weren’t the ones Isaac had burned.
Judging by their thick, angular chelicerae, they were all males, and none of them bore burn marks.
Their bodies had shriveled to nearly half their original size.
They had been drained of fluids, devoured by the queen.
‘Right. They said the colony had been massive before the subjugation.’
A queen doesn’t appear in a colony of just a few dozen.
There’s no need for one, and the colony couldn’t support her food requirements.
But once the number reaches several hundred, a queen is born to maintain the group.
The current queen had survived the subjugation from two months ago.
She needed to replenish her nutrients quickly to restore the colony.
And when eating beasts wasn’t enough, she turned to consuming males.
Thump—!!! Thump—!!!
Something heavy was drawing closer to Isaac.
Ssshhh—
Within the field of light cast by his fire magic, the queen revealed herself.
She was easily two or three times larger than any winter spider he had seen before, and all eight of her eyes were locked onto Isaac.
She didn’t even flinch at the fire spell he had conjured.
Whoosh—!!!
Sputter—!!!
Isaac hurled a fireball at the queen, but it fizzled out weakly.
‘Would’ve been nice if this was different from what I expected.’
A monster.
A creature that possessed mana.
Or, to put it more viscerally, a beast imbued with magic.
If the ordinary adult winter spiders had inherited their unnatural size and power from some primeval ancestor born of the Demon Realm, then this queen—
She was closer to the true essence of a magic beast.
Her presence radiated a chilling cold, and her resistance to flame confirmed it.
She wasn’t just a spider, she was the namesake.
She was why they were called winter spiders.
Thud—!!! Thud—!!! Thud—!!!
If Isaac took any comfort, it was in the fact that the queen moved with less agility than her brood.
Her sheer bulk betrayed her.
She wasn’t meant for battle, her purpose was mass reproduction.
Whoom—!!!
Isaac moved away from the icy patches and flung another fireball at her.
Screeeee—!!!
His spell veered slightly off target.
He had aimed for her head but it struck the joint where her thorax met her leg.
Even so, it worked.
That leg, now burned, could no longer support her.
It dangled limply against her side like a wilted leaf, swaying with her movements.
“Haah… Haah…”
He couldn’t afford to celebrate.
Unlike the other spiders, the queen didn’t go up in flames from a single hit.
More than that, Isaac felt the wave of dizziness cresting over him.
He was nearing his limit.
‘So this is as far as I can push it… At best, I’ve got two more shots left.’
Only now, amid real combat, did Isaac understand how critical stamina and mental fortitude truly were.
Mana still surged fiercely through his circuits, but wielding it was another matter.
He had overreached.
And now came the backlash—
Lethargy, discomfort, irritation, emptiness.
His limbs felt heavy, drained.
He was only twelve.
And here he was, in the very depths of an abandoned mine, having burned through dozens of winter spiders and hundreds of their eggs.
All in a single night.
“…This is a mess.”
He muttered, irritated.
‘Was I too reckless? Should I have prepared more? Was there a better way?’
The doubt in his heart kept turning him backward.
Thud—!!!
Thud—!!!
Meanwhile, the queen closed the distance, step by step, inexorably advancing toward him.
“Fuu…”
Isaac exhaled slowly.
And thought of what he wanted most at that moment.
It wasn’t something grand; surprisingly, it was something quite small.
The wheat bread Hans had given him yesterday.
He hadn’t been able to savor it properly in all the chaos, but thinking back on it, it had been delicious.
‘When I get back, I’m going to ask the nanny to make me a ton of wheat bread. With fresh apple jam on top.’
His mouth watered.
His mood lifted just a little.
Isaac pulled a hand shovel from his rucksack.
The queen had approached close enough to bare her fangs.
‘Even if it’s a queen, it’s still a species of spider.’
Just as her fangs were about to pierce Isaac, he blocked them with his rucksack.
The rucksack instantly froze over and shattered like glass.
That brief opening was enough.
Isaac raised the hand shovel and struck her eye.
KIIIIII—!!!
She lifted her front legs and let out a piercing shriek.
Isaac dove straight underneath her body.
Because she was thrashing wildly, Isaac was repeatedly hit and rolled around, getting crushed and kicked.
He was fortunate that the queen didn’t have a stinger on her tail.
If she had, this strategy would have been nothing short of suicide.
Isaac focused on his objective.
All those years of meditation in his previous life were finally paying off.
With the last bit of focus he had left, Isaac came up with his best move.
He didn’t have the accuracy to hit a moving target, nor the stamina to fire multiple fireballs.
And even if he landed a lucky hit, a fireball alone wouldn’t be fatal against a creature resistant to flames.
‘Then…’
Isaac scraped together the last remnants of his mental strength and lit a spark at his fingertips.
This wasn’t an ordinary fireball.
Where the earlier fireball had involved creation, compression, and phase alteration, this one was creation, compression—and compression again.
A fireball tinged not with crimson, but with blue, formed in Isaac’s hand.
It was something he wouldn’t have even considered normally, let alone attempted.
This wasn’t the usual long-range battle style a mage employed.
“Just—die already!!!”
Isaac thrust the fireball directly into the queen’s lower abdomen with all his might.
The blue flame pierced through her spinnerets and ovaries, then burned straight through to her heart.
FWOOOSH—!!!
A blue flame burst from within the queen’s abdomen.
KIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE—!!!
The queen twisted her entire body, screaming in pain.
BOOM—!!! BOOM—!!! BOOM—!!!
Then she frantically ran toward the unfrozen water.
“Gah—!”
Isaac, still unable to pull his arm from her abdomen, was dragged along.
His shoulder and arm were slammed again and again against stalagmites and rocks.
Up to that point, he could still consider himself lucky.
But in the end, the queen’s thrashing sent his head crashing into the icy floor.
Isaac’s vision went black.
𝄞 𝄢 𝄞 𝄢 𝄞 𝄢
“…Ugh, my head.”
Isaac opened his eyes to a throbbing pain.
He had no sense of how much time had passed.
His whole body ached so badly he couldn’t even tell where it hurt the most.
“My arm’s about to fall off.”
Isaac’s arm was still lodged in the queen’s abdomen.
The blue flames had long since vanished, and all that remained was her charred corpse, black as coal.
Crackle—!!!
As he pulled his arm free, the queen’s body crumbled without resistance, disintegrating into ash that scattered into the air.
“…………….?”
From within her shattered remains, a pale, wavering light began to glow.
Almost reflexively, Isaac reached toward it, his fingers brushed against something solid.
It was a stone.
“Ah—cold! …Wait, cold stone?”
A stone that radiated chill.
And then, it struck him and he remembered what it was.
An Ice Mana Stone.
He had only ever read about it in books—
A rare and precious gem of crystallized mana.
