Chapter 55
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
My footsteps echoed as I stalked down the corridor, my senses stretching out as I attempted to locate the creature.
Nevertheless, I had a grin on my face. It felt good to be the hunter again.
With weapons in hand, I had a sense of confidence that I'd been missing since I landed. Any trace of apprehension left over from my encounter with the Leviathan was gone, replaced by giddiness.
The lightsaber hummed as it moved along with my hand, a constant reminder that, yes, it was real and functional. The fact that it worked at all after three millennia without any problems worse than a dead power pack raised my personal opinion of Jedi tech several notches. But I had more things on my mind than the quite frankly ridiculous durability of Force tech.
Now, if I was an injured giant spider, where would I hide?
I suppose the first thing that would come to mind would be that I'd want to find a nice, dark hole in the ground where I could bind up my wounds. Where I could plan how to wreck bloody vengeance on the bastard that took my eye.
And once the bleeding stopped, I'd go hunting.
Of course, I could be overestimating its mental capabilities. Being enhanced with Sith Alchemy did not necessarily make a creature more intelligent. However, it had proven that it had the ability to set traps and to pick its battles. It was far from mindless, but it wasn't exactly a genius.
I could feel the spider's oily presence getting stronger as I walked. As before, I couldn't tell its exact location, only that it was getting closer. But was I getting closer to it? Or was it getting closer to me?
I knew it wasn't completely silent. Twice so far it had given away its presence by screeching. It was likely some form of intimidation tactic that was meant to work against prey that was already frightened. Half…or mostly…maddened by literal centuries of hunger, it might not be capable of realizing that I wasn't scared.
Leviathans were a hell of a lot scarier than this thing. I hadn't been scared when I walked in and I wasn't scared now. At the end of the day, the Pit Horror was just a giant spider with a few tricks.
I just needed to find the fucker first.
So deep, dark hole…that could fit a spider the size of a semi comfortably. About half of its size was from its legs, which I didn't doubt it could fold up to squeeze into a smaller space. But even with that, it wasn't going to fit in a supply closet.
I had to keep in mind that this was still a spider, no matter how monstrous it was. It needed someplace to build a web, its shelter. That couldn't be in a small space.
Another turbolift shaft was a possibility, but that didn't feel like the right answer. While the Pit Horror had set up webs in one, it had too many entrances and exits to be considered "safe." At best, it had just been a place to stash food and a means to get from level to level, maybe even catch the odd bit of prey.
I paused and placed my hand against the wall, drawing on the Force to refresh my mental map of the ship.
That left a short list of potential places, from which I immediately crossed off Engineering. That part of the ship had been completely devoid of webbing for some reason, perhaps because it had been too close to the surface back when it had made its lair and thus liable to get it eaten by a Leviathan.
After that, only two places remained: the mess hall and the cargo hold.
Given its choice of lair, it obviously preferred the dark. With the secondary power core re-engaged and the emergency lights on, there was an easy way to check for that.
The groaning of metal echoed as a section of bulkhead peeled back like the top of a tin can, exposing the aging wiring beneath. Shifting the lightsaber to my left hand, I carefully wrapped my right around a bundle of them. With a bit of mental effort, I forced my will into the chaotic network of wiring and followed the hum of power along its many paths.
There were countless dead ends from where the wiring had decayed from time or been physically disconnected by battle damage, so it was practically a maze. Thankfully, it was one easily navigated as all I had to do was follow the flow.
Eventually, I made my way through. After that, it only took a moment to check each place.
The mess hall's lights were still functioning perfectly. The cargo hold, on the other hand, was pitch black, the lighting fixtures smashed and the wires left sparking as the re-energized system futilely tried to power them.
"Found you."
Now I just needed to get down there. The rear cargo hold, or what was left of it, was seven levels down, near the bottom of the ship.
Letting go of the wiring and stepping away from the wall, I double checked my mental map before flipping the lightsaber around in my grip and plunging it nearly to the hilt into the floor beneath my feet, quickly carving a circle around myself. Gravity took hold almost immediately, dropping me down to the next deck.
After my little bit of dungeon bypass, I casually stepped off a short stack of seven near-perfectly circular deck plates, their edges still glowing from the lightsaber's cut.
As expected, the entire deck was pitch black, the overhead lights and wall lamps having all been smashed to pieces, littering the floor with transparisteel. The only illumination that leaked down here was from the hole I had just cut in the ceiling.
Thanks to my Force Sight and the lightsaber in my hand, that wasn't a great obstacle and based on my mental map, the cargo hold was only a few corridors away.
Angry chittering greeted me as I started walking. My entrance hadn't exactly been quiet or subtle, so it knew I was here. That was fine.
There wasn't much it could do to stop me.
The door to the cargo hold had been ripped away long ago and the dust on the floor recently disturbed. I stopped on the threshold and observed the battlefield.
The cargo hold, like many of the lower decks, had been crushed under the combined weight of the upper decks when the ship had made its last landing, though it had only been partially destroyed. The far end of the large room bowed sharply down halfway in, covering the doorways that would have been there.
The entirety of the remaining space had been filled with densely packed webbing, forming rough tunnels of blue-white that spiraled into what was no doubt a very complicated nest.
Too bad I wasn't going in there.
Just to check to make sure I wasn't about to do something extremely stupid, I tapped on some nearby strands of webbing with the hilt of the lightsaber, ready to zap it with some lightning if it got stuck. It didn't stick.
The angry chittering was louder now, but the Pit Horror stayed where it was, ensconced in its nest. The monster was an ambush predator and likely felt uncomfortable and uncertain of what to do when the prey followed it back to its lair. For all its cunning, it was still an animal, relying on instincts over true intelligence.
I was about to give those instincts a great big poke in the eye.
Grabbing the strands that I knew weren't sticky, I drew heavily on the Force and unleashed. Blue-violet light flashed as the bundle of silk in my hand started to glow, carrying the immense electrical charge I was generating down the lines to all the strands it was connected to. The small amounts of dust clinging to the surface of the webbing burst into momentary flames before vanishing with tiny puffs of smoke.
Though I couldn't feel it through the bodysuit, my helmet helpfully supplied me with the rapidly increasing temperature as heat that accompanied the lightning radiated off the webbing, banishing the lingering cold that permeated the room. Almost as one, the structure began to contract on itself, turning what had once been safety into a cage.
"Dodge this," I grinned savagely beneath my helmet as the Pit Horror's chittering was replaced by screeching, the electricity jumping from the webbing and into its body.
The mass of webbing in the center of the room bulged and distended as the spider creature thrashed about and threw itself at the walls of its own nest in an attempt to escape. Sizzling and crackling echoed from the next as its exoskeleton was seared by the heat of the webbing, the screeching growing louder every second.
It was just an animal and didn't understand what was happening. Whatever anger and hunger it had felt before, whatever cunning it possessed, it was all swiftly replaced with blind panic in the face of excruciating pain.
But in the end, blind panic saved it…from its own lair, that is. The smoking form of the Pit Horror came crashing through of one of the "walls" of the nest, two more eyes seared into useless shriveled orbs, likely from burning strands falling on them.
As the tractor trailer-sized creature leaped towards me, seeking to end the source of the pain, I cut the flow of power and ducked into a roll. The lightsaber flashed up as it passed.
The screeches got louder as the now six-limbed monster awkwardly crashed to the ground in the hallway behind me. Two of its immense legs, now separated from its body, clattered against the walls and floor before coming to a stop, the smoking stumps still glowing.
While the creature wasn't finished yet, I couldn't help but think that perhaps I'd vastly overestimated what I'd need to kill it. Though it managed to stagger up onto its remaining legs, it was obviously off-balance now that it was missing the two front legs on its left side.
Its fangs and thorax twitched. Now knowing what that meant, I was already moving before the glob of webbing could hit me, leaving it to sail through the spot I used to occupy. Pumping the Force into my legs, I crossed the distance between us and swept the lightsaber up in a two-handed slash just as it was about to leap back, severing two more legs.
Without the weight of its front legs to weigh it down, its heavy thorax caused it to pitch backwards, the stumps waving wildly as it landed on its back.
Jumping onto the enormous creature's belly, I quickly jabbed the lightsaber's tip up and into its brain, the searing plasma flash-frying its gray matter.
The flailing limbs and fangs stilled before falling limp.
As I drex the lightsaber out of its head and extinguished the blade, I felt a strange sense of…disappointment.
This was a monster created by Sorzus Syn, the ur-alchemist and sorceress of the Sith herself. And it felt too easy. But then, I suppose this was a "prototype" creature, from when she was still experimenting. Not every prototype was a super prototype and for every major discovery, there had to be a thousand and one failures or comparatively minor successes.
It seemed the Pit Horror was just one of those minor successes.
That said…
I spared a glance towards the shriveled, still-glowing remains of the Pit Horror's lair before shifting a speculative eye back to the smoking carcass beneath my feet. Tapping its hard chitin with my boot, I hummed in thought before my grin widened.
I had an idea.
"I'm going to need some power tools…"