The Eternal Winter - Book 1 - Chapter 47 - Splitting up Again (Patreon)

                                                                                         Alexander North

“Looks like we have spiders,” I warn the others, making them all stiffen up slightly with their eyes moving towards the spot I’m looking at. And as if responding to the sound of my voice, several tiny spiders, even smaller than the foot-long spiders from before, begin rushing away from us from their places beneath some of the eggshells. “Lots of them.”

“Didn’t you say that the spiders were sealed in the main metal weapons storage room?” Cynthia asks, and I nod my head at this.

They were trapped there the last time I checked. Although…

“It’s possible that they might’ve dug through the wall like the worms did,” the captain mentions as we continue walking through the tunnel.

Definitely possible.

I look around as we walk, occasionally seeing spiders rushing out from underneath the shells until something strange happens. Another screech echoes throughout the tunnel, but this time coming from the direction we’re heading right now. And it sounds a lot like the screeches made by the spiders from BF5, but a lot louder. And following the screech, dozens of worms begin rushing through the tunnel towards us from the way we’re heading.

I frown at them as I call out, “Watch out!”

But to our surprise, the worms all go around us in their rush towards the other end of the tunnel, just like the other worms did. This time though, they somehow appear to be in a panic.

“Guys…” I begin, only for the captain to nod and say, “I know. Those weren’t rushing to their leader.”

“W-what do you mean?” one of the IT civilians asks while shivering from the cold and letting out puffs of mist in the form of their breath.

The captain turns to look down the tunnel where the worms came from as he answers, “They were running away from something.”

I have a very bad feeling about this. Because if I had to take a guess, then I’d say the worms were running away from the spider queen.

Which doesn’t bode well for us.

I glance at the captain before finding him continuing on through the tunnel. So I follow after him, with the others all coming a few seconds later.

After several more minutes of walking, which is making me wonder just how long this tunnel is, the trail of eggshells stops. Then just a couple of minutes later, we begin to find cobwebs made out of ice instead of the eggshells.

The captain comes to a sudden stop and just stares down the tunnel for a second with the rest of us stopping behind him.

“Alex,” he suddenly says, turning his head to look at me, then at the others, then back at me again, “would you mind…?”

I frown at that.

Is he seriously asking me to go deal with them myself? After almost yelling at a superior officer for ordering me to do the same?

After seeing my change of expression, the captain raises his visor and says with a frown, “Before now, we had a choice of sending you alone or not, and they just chose to send you to lower the possible casualties. But now, the only one who would likely be able to survive against them is you. So there isn’t a choice here.”

My frown lightens slightly at that.

It’s not that I’m against going alone, after all, it wouldn’t be the first time. But I don’t like hypocrites.

His logic does make sense though, so…

“Yes, sir!” I call out with a salute before glancing at Cynthia and giving her and the others a nod, then going further into the tunnel on my own, leaving the captain to guard the others.

This is probably for the best. After all, the captain would be the only efficient protector for the civilians outside of myself since we’d need to leave them behind anyways.

The other soldiers wouldn’t be able to survive and defend them at the same time, assuming they can even deal with the suicidal spiders on their own in the first place. And obviously the civilians would die without putting up much fight, with the exception maybe being the veteran.

As I walk further into the tunnel, leaving the others behind with the light sources, the cobwebs coating the tunnel grow thicker and thicker, and soon enough, the dirt walls begin looking more like the walls of some icy cavern than an underground tunnel on a tropical world. Not only are they all coated with bits of icy webbing, but the temperature appears to be dropping the further in I get, and the walls are practically frozen at this point.

Which might be another reason for the others to stay behind, as while this feels fine for me, it’d probably leave the civilians with hypothermia by the time they reached the other end of the tunnel.

For some reason though, I don’t find any spiders as I walk. Just more and more webbing, along with the occasional cocoon. Of which I destroy every time I find them just to make sure they don’t hatch and end up attacking me from behind, or going after the others.

I wonder why the spiders are taking over the worms’ tunnels. Did they just happen to dig into them and decided to take them over?

My thoughts come to a halt as I turn around a bend in the tunnel just to find two different paths in the tunnel – one completely frozen by icy webbing and the other a much smaller branch that leads directly into some icy tunnel that looks like a better size for the smaller spiders than the larger worms.

Looks like I found the place they broke in through. But why did the spiders block the other direction of the tunnel?

I walk up to the blocked off portion before knocking on the ice to test how hard it is. But surprisingly, my knocking doesn’t even phase the icy webbing. So I pull my arm back and send a punch straight at it, only managing to crack it a little in the process.

My eyebrows rise in surprise, and I pull my fist away from the icy wall of webbing.

That’s some powerful webbing.

I turn to glance at the branch tunnel right as another loud screech echoes from it.

Guess there’s nothing else to do but check out the smaller tunnel.