Chapter 460: Not Quite

Eight long, chitinous legs – each ending in a deadly point that could run a man through with barely any effort – clicked against the stone and wood mix of the Elven throne room. The creature’s entire body, at least what they could see slowly creeping out of the shadows, was completely bone white except for a small, black symbol shaped like an hourglass on its back.

The clicking stopped, the creature was hesitating in its movements, before it simply dispersed into pure white smoke and faded into the air with barely a whisper.

“White Widow…” Revenant whispered to himself, the blood in his rotten body turning to ice. He immediately summoned his Death Knight, which wrapped his shield around its master to protect him and scanned the room, looking for what it was summoned to kill.

It wasn’t just that he had heard nothing of this creatures presence from his information gathering in the future, although that alone was surprising. If the idiots of Dread somehow managed to kill a White Widow, they should have absolutely bragged about it to no end.

It was that a White Widow was one of the few creatures that seemed specifically designed to ruin his entire existence.

They were a Fell-Spawn sub-species, specifically of the Whisper family. The same family that Vestra was a part of.

It was a creature that was rarely seen by mortals, as it spent the majority of its life within the Astral Plane. That was its main ability, to move perfectly between the Astral and the Material plane, where it couldn’t be detected and where its mortal victims – if it chose to take some – would never see it coming.

The part that really screwed over Revenant, and why he was reluctant to summon anything more powerful than his Knight to take care of it, was that a White Widow fed on souls.

Summoning his undead would just be presenting a buffet of powerful, enchanted soul energy to this beast, and if it did decide to gorge itself on that feast it could kill them. Permanently.

Seriously though, How the hell did Dread kill this thing?! This was bad. This was really bad.

“Not Quite.” Raev chuckled softly, snatching Revenant out of his thoughts as he whipped his head towards the high Avatar.

He was about to dismiss anything this man said as his ‘Herbal’ ramblings, but Raev gestured towards Belladonna with a knowing smile.

“Look. Does that look like a normal White Widow to you?”

Revenant frowned and turned to see what he was gesturing to, before his eyes widened in disbelief.

Hanging above Belladonna, suspended in the air, was six pitch black orbs. Arachnid eyes, all of them glaring down at her from over ten feet tall.

A white mist pulled itself from the air, and quickly combined together to form the solid body of the White Widow.

However starting from the eyes, what was forming was not the body of an arachnid. Not Quite.

Although the features were that of a White Widow – Bone white chitinous plating and mandibles wriggling either side of a needle teeth filled maw that was dripping with spit – there was something… human about the shape.

It was as if someone had fused a human together with a White Widow, creating a demented Centaur-like creature, as the human torso started where the spiders head should be.

Wait no… Not human. Those long, spiked growths either side of its head. Those were ears. This… was an Elf.

The White Widow Hybrid rubbed its hands together slowly. Each finger was a curved blade of chitin that could slice through steel, and was making a bloodcurdling noise as they slowly scraped together, as if the beast was already imagining what its victim would taste like.

It slowly leaned down to Belladonna, hunching over so that it was eye level with her, as it stared directly into her eyes. Yet Belladonna didn’t move an inch, except for the smallest tilt of her head to better look back into the White Widows eyes.

Its mandibles clicked and wriggled as it tilted its head curiously. It whipped its head towards the rest of the party, analysing them with those cold and dead voids it called eyes.

It saw the way Figg shivered on the ground, his face twisted in fear at the creature before them and how something so massive had appeared so silently with barely a single sign of its presence.

It saw Revenant, hiding behind his Knight which was just waiting for its orders to slice this beast apart and serve its head to his master. It could see the fear in Revenants eyes, as well as the confusion and apprehension.

It saw Raev casually smoking, with a goofy smile on his face as he stood with barely a care for anything that was going on, and was possibly completely unaware of the cat that had been sitting atop his head this entire time.

It looked over all of this, tilting its head silently again, before whipping its head back to meet Belladonna’s confident gaze.

Without warning it lunged, its razor sharp claws shooting towards Belladonna’s throat, but even still she didn’t move.

Not even when the blood trickled from her neck, from the cold steel of the Armours sword pressed into her skin. It had risen behind her quietly amongst the commotion and made its move, however it only managed to dig in a single millimetre, before it had been stopped by the White Widow, who pinched the Armours sword between two clawed fingers.

It glared at the Armour, giving it a silent order that the construct happily obeyed. It pulled its sword back when the White Widow released it, and sheathed the blade on its hip before standing back and slamming its fist against its chest in a salute.

“See?” Belladonna chuckled, the cut on her neck already healed completely, “I knew you weren’t trying to kill me.”

The White Widow tilted its head again, knitting its hands together as it shied away from Belladonna.

“You mean… You’re not scared of me?” It said, its language being translated by the system, allowing them to perfectly hear the sweet and timid voice it had. The voice of a young girl.

“Of course not. How could I ever be scared of such a pretty girl?” Belladonna smiled sweetly, touching her hand against the cold, bone white cheek of the Widows chitinous face as she gently caressed it with her thumb.