The Azure Carapace was great at making Juno feel great.
Juno turned slowly in the pale light of the spine, watching the black‑and‑azure mail flow with his movements. When he rolled his shoulders, they flexed instead of biting in. When he twisted his torso, the scales overlapped without gaping. It hugged his ribs without crushing his lungs. From what he had learned about armor during his Academy days, this type was called scale mail armor.
An added benefit: the armor included pants as well.
The only thing left was to test the armor out. Sadly, Juno had no way of doing that safely. Using Execution was too risky since it was an Ascended-level weapon. Fighting against a Nightmare Creature was optional, but still really dangerous. He had no healing ability or Memory, and recovering from the injury he got in his chest was taxing enough.
Suddenly, a light bulb went off in his head. What if he tried not an abomination, but something an abomination had secreted?
That could work… Yeah, that could definitely work. Especially with the enchantments on the armor. Well, well, well, I'm certainly a genius.
Juno was, of course, thinking of the iron silk that the Iron Spiders had made. It was supposed to be sharp and of the same rank as the armor. Usually, he wouldn't have thought of using it, but the memory enchantment was just a little too perfect not to do it. Rechecking the Runes on the Memory, Juno decided that was what he was going to do as soon as possible.
Memory: [Azure Carapace]
Memory Rank: Awakened.
Memory Tier: I.
Memory Type: Armor.
Description - [On this forgotten shore, only steel remembers.]
Memory Enchantments: [Tougher One]
[Tougher One] Enchantment Description: [This memory is tougher and more durable than others of its kind.]
Still, that was for later. Glancing around his small camp, Juno let the idea settle at the back of his mind as the routine of survival took precedence.
For now, he had a body to keep in one piece.
He dismissed the armor once, feeling the cool absence of its weight, then summoned it again and dropped into his evening routine. Stretching came first — slow, careful pulls on aching muscles, testing how far he could raise his arms before his chest wound started to complain. Balance drills along the spine wall followed, bare feet gripping smooth bone as he walked sideways on the curve, Azure Carapace shifting with him instead of fighting.
Then grip work.
He looped scavenger shells and bits of coral onto seaweed cords, hefting and twisting them until his forearms burned. Short sprints up and down the spine came after that, focusing on acceleration and sudden stops, feeling how the added weight of the armor changed his center of gravity.
Only when his lungs were pulling hard, and his legs felt pleasantly heavy, did he pick up King's Execution.
He didn't go all out.
This was about form, not power — clean cuts, sharp footwork, swings that stopped exactly where he wanted them and no further. The black‑and‑azure scales flowed with every motion, never snagging, never shifting off‑beat. If anything, the resistance they added made his movements feel more grounded.
By the time he finished, the grey light above had thinned to narrow bars. The hiss of the returning sea was already whispering up from the lower spine.
Juno dismissed the armor, doused the fire to embers, and climbed into his sleeping groove high in the bone, letting the curved vertebra hide him from sight.
Tomorrow, he would finally confront the spiders.
…
But when dawn arrived, things didn't go according to plan. Day thirteen arrived, but it wasn't spider day.
Instead, day thirteen became a day of mud, Scavengers, and walking.
Juno had gotten just a little bit too excited to start exploring more areas around Bongo, only remembering that he should scout the area right after waking up. It wasn't all bad, though, since whilst scouting, he did run into three lone Scavengers, getting paid a nice sum of twelve Soul Fragments for his problems.
Besides those incidents, he made sure to stay well out of the Carapace Legions' territory, properly scouting and mapping the Iron Territory. By the time the dark sea rose again, he had a cleaner mental picture of where Bongo sat in the labyrinth's body. Lines of travel. Dead ends. High ground. Places to never stand still.
And a plan.
…
On day fourteen, he put his plan to work.
He left the Bone Ridge right after he completed his morning routine, never letting himself forsake it. The air outside was wet and cold, the mud still slick from the night's retreating water. He moved left of the Ridge this time, into the narrower canyons where the coral rose in tight walls.
Thin slashes of grey gleamed here and there between the blades.
Iron.
The first web was exactly where he'd expected it to be — strung between two leaning spires, a faint, almost invisible sheet of metallic strands that only resolved fully when he deliberately softened his focus.
He stopped at the edge and summoned his runes for a heartbeat, more out of habit than necessity.
[Soul Fragments: 92/1000]
Not bad for two weeks of work.
"Let's see if we can keep that going," Juno murmured, dismissing the symbols.
He stepped into the webbed corridor, senses wide open, ready to test both his new armor and his ability to borrow a spider's own song against it. The plan was simple: he would take the web to try to cut the armor.
He picked a strand at chest level and reached out, this time leading with his shoulder instead of bare skin. Azure Carapace met iron silk with a soft, ugly scrape.
The line bit.
It didn't go through.
He felt pressure, the faintest sting where the force concentrated, but no tearing. When he stepped back and ran his fingers over the scale, there was only a thin, shallow score.
"Good," he said. "Very good."
He tried another, this time at a slow walking pace, letting the strand ride along the armor for a few steps before slipping free. It left a brighter scratch, but still no breach.
Tougher, indeed.
Emboldened, Juno drew King's Execution and began to cut.
He started with the strands that would be in his way anyway — long horizontal lines at leg height, a few angled traps that crossed the corridor where any normal traveler would be forced to brush them. Each one parted with a soft, metallic twang, the tension snapping from the web into the surrounding structure.
The maze of lines shivered.
He paused, feeling the vibrations ripple outward like ripples in a pond.
"Relax," he muttered. "You're not trashing the whole thing. Just carving a path."
He took another step, raised the sword again—
—and the web sang.
The vibration changed pitch in an instant, from lazy background hum to something sharp and focused. It was like plucking a guitar string and having the entire instrument answer.
Juno froze.
"…Right. Spiders. Webs. Sense prey through vibrations. Genius."
He'd spent an entire day planning to use their own mechanism against them, and somehow, somewhere in all that "cleverness," failed to fully account for the fact that cutting their alarm system would ring their alarm system.
The answer dropped in from above right as that thought finished.
Juno heard the quiet scraping sound just a tad too late, so by the time he readied himself and looked toward it, he saw a spider blocking his way back. It was a beefy thing, about the size of a rottweiler and easily weighing hundreds of kilos. Hell, the thing looked heavier than a Scavenger, even though that thing was like six times larger.
The second one came right behind it.
He heard it before he saw it, a high staccato tremor through the webs. It was moving fast. Quickly, he saw it appear around the corner, now only thirty meters behind the first spider. Juno didn't let himself think any further.
Reading his sword, Juno charged at the spider right in front of him. He didn't have experience fighting two-on-one and didn't want to start learning about it against a new type of abomination.
The spider jolted, changing angle with unnerving precision. It darted to the side, legs a blur, then snapped a foreleg forward. A line of fresh silk shot out, too fast for a normal eye to catch, angling to wrap around his torso.
He saw it.
He twisted.
The iron thread scraped along Azure Carapace, trying to bite, then slid off with a nasty skree sound. The pressure was real — if he'd been bare‑chested, it would have cut him open — but the armor held.
Grinning widely, Juno lunged.
Execution flashed, aiming for the area where the legs met the body. Juno would first make it hurt, then, whilst it was distracted, he would cut the thing open. The other spider was already twenty meters out.
True to his plan, Execution slid right into the leg joint a moment before the spider could dodge. With terrifying ease, it slid right through and cut the leg off.
Still carrying the momentum with him, Juno didn't let it go to waste and extended his arm just a little bit more to cut off another one of the creature's legs. Two weeks ago, he would've failed, but he didn't now. A spray of light blue told Juno he succeeded.
The second spider was ten meters out.
The first one finally seemed to realize just how bad its situation was.
With two legs sheared off on one side, the Nightmare Creature lurched away from him, trying to scurry sideways along the webbed corridor, angling back toward its approaching kin. It moved well for something half‑lamed, metal points stabbing into strands, abdomen already twitching to cast more silk.
Juno wouldn't be caught dead letting his adversaries regroup.
He kicked off the mud, closing the distance in two long strides. The spider desperately tried to pivot away, climb up the walls, or roll to the side. Sadly, its missing legs inhibited it from doing anything quickly.
For a split second, its front was exposed, eyes and fangs pointing straight at him.
Next second, the face was slashed in two, Execution making quick work of a simple Awakened-level body. What had before been a single head now parted to show the things brain.
'Whoa… I didn't know the anatomy of these things was so complex. Wow…'
[You have killed an Awakened Beast, Iron Spider]
[Your desire sharpens.]
The Spell's announcement brought Juno back to reality. He would attempt to dismember Nightmare Creatures later. Right now, he had to kill the brother of this spider.
He looked up, feeling the gust of air coming down on him.
The second spider had crossed the distance between itself and Juno incredibly quickly, almost arriving at its destination seemingly whilst he was daydreaming. It came down like a thrown boulder wrapped in needles.
Juno didn't think; he moved. There was nowhere to dodge, and bringing up Execution would take too long. Instead, he did a move he didn't even read in the library; instead, it was something he saw in a webtoon back on earth.
He stepped toward the falling shape, drove his weight up through his legs, and punched it in the belly.
Azure Carapace met dark metal with a brutal crack.
The impact rattled his bones all the way to the shoulder. For a heartbeat, it felt like he'd tried to stop a car with his bare hand. At the same time, the spider's legs raked down his raised forearms, metal tips screeching across scale and occasionally finding the small gaps.
Thin lines of fire opened on his skin where a few points made it through, but most of the force skidded harmlessly off the armor.
More importantly, the spider bounced.
It hit the mud just beyond him instead of on top of him, skidding in an ugly tumble of limbs and silk, one leg folding under its own weight with a snap.
"Bad landing," Juno spat.
He pounced before the thing could recover.
Just like he had done with his brother, Juno brought Execution down in a wide arc and slashed at the abomination's face. Just like before, the sword split the ugly thing apart, revealing its insides.
Silence reclaimed the webbed corridor, broken only by his own rough breathing.
[You have slain an Awakened beast, Iron Spider.]
[Your desire sharpens.]
"Two," Juno muttered. "And I lived. We'll call that a successful field test."
He yanked Execution free and stepped back, giving himself a moment to listen.
No new tremors in the web. No fresh signatures racing toward him. For now, at least, the nest wasn't sending more enforcers.
Good.
He moved quickly.
A few intact lengths of iron silk came away easily once he'd hacked their anchoring points free. He wrapped them carefully around a length of scavenger chitin, keeping his fingers clear of the edges; even dulled by armor, the earlier scrape on his knuckles reminded him how sharp they were.
He then moved on to the Soul Shards. These were trickier to get out than their counterparts coming from the Scavengers, but Juno managed anyway. In under five minutes, he had absorbed the two Awakened shards, got his four Soul Fragments, and started to move away from the battlefield.