Chapter 57: The Endless Void

The jump is behind us.

There is no "up." There is no "down." There is no "direction." There is only the fall.

We are plunging into an infinite, absolute, pressurized blackness. It is not the empty air of the world above. This is a cold, thick, ancient dark. It is the Abyss. It is the parlor of the Spinner King.

We are a four-person chain, a pathetic, broken string of lives, plunging into oblivion. And our only anchor is the spell.

Yogawa's "Leap of Despair."

It is not a bubble of light. It is a bruise. A sickly, terrified, purple aura clings to us, a magical field that slows our descent from a terminal velocity freefall to a merely catastrophic one. It is a magical air-brake, and it is fueled by nothing but Yogawa's abject, mind-shattering terror.

He is just sobbing. He is tied between me and Hachiro, his body limp, his eyes squeezed shut, his voice a high-pitched, unending wail that recites the single verse of the spell, over and over.

"By the weight of regret, by the price of the fall, I bind the void..."

He is a broken record. A prayer wheel of pure, unadulterated panic. And it is the only thing keeping us from becoming a red smear on an unseen floor.

I am Erima. I am the Arrow. My mind is a fortress of logic, but my fortress is falling. I am useless here. There is nothing to see. Nothing to shoot. Nothing to plan.

I check the new bow Krell gave me. It is strapped to my back. It is heavy, cold, and alien. The obsidian-shod arrows in the quiver are just dead weight. I am a strategist with no board, a warrior with no enemy.

Above me, Hachiro is a picture of silent, breathing agony. His good hand is locked onto the rope. His other arm, the one seared by the Rekka-moss, is a ruin. I can hear his breathing, a wet, ragged gasp every time our descent lurches. He is not the 'Fist'. He is not the Miasma-eater. He is just a boy, broken and empty, falling into the dark.

Below me, leading this mad descent, is Kizawa.

He is the anchor. The point of the spear. He falls with a rigid, terrible purpose. He is a stone. The Rekka-moss on his back, that agonizing patch of divine fire, must be screaming at him. But he is silent. He has embraced the pain. He has become the wound.

His blue eyes are open. I know they are. He is staring into the nothingness, as if he can gouge a path to Mizuki with his gaze alone. His Will is a thing of iron, a blade aimed at a heart of darkness he cannot even see.

We fall for an eternity. An hour. A minute.

Time does not exist here.

There is only the cold. The pressure.

The pressure is new. It is not the wind. It is a mental weight. It is the sentience of the Abyss. The Spinner King.

He is here. He is everywhere. This is his mind. We are not just falling. We are sinking into him.

The purple light- our tiny, fragile, terrified reality- begins to flicker.

"No," I whisper.

Yogawa's chant is faltering. His terror is not an infinite fuel. He is fainting. His voice becomes a choked sob, then silence.

The purple bubble snaps.

It is gone.

We are falling.

A true, terminal velocity freefall.

I scream. Hachiro yells.

The rope goes taut, yanking us into a line.

We drop like a stone.

Faster. Faster.

"KIZAWA!" I shriek.

He does not answer. He twists in the air. He spreads his arms and legs. He is trying to be a rudder.

But there is no air.

This is the end.

The impact is not a crash.

It is a catch.

It is a thud- so vast and deep it is almost soundless.

It is a stickiness.

I slam into Hachiro. We all slam down onto Kizawa.

We stop.

The fall is over.

My stomach lurches. I am on my hands and knees.

The surface is not stone. It is cold. It is vibrating. It is tacky.

It clings to my hands.

I cannot see. The blackness is absolute.

But I know where we are.

"We are in it," Yogawa whispers, his voice a new kind of terror. He is awake.

The fall woke him up.

"We are on the web."

Hachiro is panting, a faint whimper.

Kizawa is already moving. I hear him grunt in pain as he unties the rope from his waist.

"Light," he rasps. "Magician. Light. Now."

"I- I... cannot!" Yogawa sobs. "The dark... it eats it!"

"Try. Or I will break your other arm."

That is Hachiro's voice. It is weak, but it is filled with a *new, cold venom.

Yogawa gasps. I hear him fumbling, muttering a new, frantic chant.

A tiny, pathetically small white light flickers into existence.

A ball of light, the size of an apple. It floats from Yogawa's trembling hands.

It does not illuminate the Abyss. It barely illuminates us.

We are huddled on a *single, massive strand of the Spinner King's web.

It is as thick as a road, black, and glistening like wet silk. It stretches out in every direction, into a gloom that the tiny light cannot penetrate.

We are a million miles from anywhere.

Kizawa is on hissfeet. He is staring into the dark.

"Mizuki," he breathes.

"Kizawa... how?" I whisper. "How do we find her? It is an ocean..."

"I can feel her," he says. It is not a boast. It is a confession.

He points his sword not down the strand we are on.

He points left, into the gloom, where *another, smaller strand intersects with our own.

"She is that way."

"You cannot know that!" Yogawa sobs. "We are lost! We are food!"

"Hachiro," Kizawa says, ignoring him. "The song. The God. Can you feel it?"

Hachiro is silent. He closes his eyes. His face is a mask of concentration.

"No," he whispers. "It is gone. The pressure is too much. His pressure. The King."

"Then we use me," Kizawa says.

He steps onto the new strand.

"Stay close," KRequest says, "And do-"

THWACK.

A sound. From the darkness.

Yogawa's tiny light ball explodes.

We are in absolute darkness again.

"Yogawa!" I scream.

"It was not me!" he shrieks.

Scuttle. Scuttle. SCUTTLE.

The sound. The Stalker's sound.

But this is wrong. It is too heavy. Too big.

It is on the web.

It is coming.

"Kizawa!"

"LIGHT!" he roars at Yogawa.

"I- I CANNOT! IT- IT IS HERE!"

A new light.

Red.

Dozens of tiny, pinprick red lights, igniting in the darkness in front of us.

It is a cluster of eyes.

But this is not a Stalker.

The red eyes are as big as my fist.

The shape they are on is the size of a house.

A gargantuan, black-chitin, spider-like horror is crawling down the strand toward us.

A Royal Assassin.

"Erima," Kizawa's voice is cold. "Your bow."

"I cannot see it!" I hiss.

"You do not have to."

He grabs my shoulder. He turns me.

"Shoot at the red lights."

I fumble for an arrow. My hands are shaking.

The thing roars. A sound that vibrates the web beneath our feet.

We are not rescuers.

We are bait.

And the spider has come.