77 – Daelan POV
She's taunting us.
The queen.
I stand still, barely breathing as I look up at her—massive, silent, watching.
We're near the bottom now. I thought she was big before.
I was wrong.
She's enormous.
And she knows it.
Her body is a grotesque, elegant sprawl of glossy black limbs, her torso swollen with mana-rich silk, her eyes glittering like shards of obsidian—nine of them, each unblinking, each thinking. Calculating. Intelligent.
Higher-tier monsters are hell.
"Look at those eyes," Choi Jihun mutters beside me, his usually relaxed voice tense, dry.
"Dammit."
He's not wrong.
We've been down here for three weeks.
Descending layer after layer of this cursed webbed hell, battling mutated spider beasts that get larger, faster, and smarter the further we go.
But none of them compare to her.
The queen.
She doesn't attack. She just watches.
She lets her children do the work.
She lets us grow tired.
She's waiting.
I hate that.
