28 Not Spiders Again

Everyone sticks close enough to cover each other, but far enough away to not get in each others way as the fight is joined. Julie hangs back to set up her arrays before joining in on the fight. Xue is hanging a bit further away from Sen than she should be, which Sen finds a bit odd.

Each of the group Sen is with is facing two enemies, and while the King guild players aren't that good, they're good enough that facing two at once is a massive problem. Sen is stuck passively defending, constantly parrying blows from two people, who luckily can't work together well. The fight changes completely when Julie finishes her first array though, five images of her joining in on the fight.

The King guild simply ignores them for a bit, likely used to the lower level illusion arrays that can't harm you, but are met with a rude awakening when the first person to ignore it takes a deep cut in his neck.

The King guild instantly has a few people turn off to try and deal with the illusions, but they can only block the actual attacks. Any time they try to strike back at the illusions their weapons simply phase through them.

"Someone break the damn array!" The arrogant leader of king yells.

The members of King simply look confused, and the leader of them curses and starts looking on the ground to find the array keystones, in this case, Julie's knives. He's intercepted by Julie herself though, and they start to fight a bit away from the main battlefield.

With only one opponent remaining, Sen decides to end it quickly, as most of the group is still outnumbered, using one of the skills he recently learned that blends his sword into the wind, removing all resistance, speeding it up immensely, and making it nearly invisible. He's almost tempted to shout out the name, but he's not going to act quite so foolish. Plus, Cutting Squall just isn't a cool name to shout.

Regardless of the bad name, the skill is extremely effective, confusing his opponent when he can't see the sword, and he goes to block a nonexistent strike as Sen's blade removes his leg at the hip.

Sen instantly turns to help Lynna next, Gale Stepping behind the King lines and stabbing one of her opponents in the back. Lynna takes advantage of this when her other opponent goes to look at who killed his buddy, slicing through his neck with a water whip formed of energy.

Lynna then turns to help Jennifer while Sen goes towards Xue. They quickly eliminate their opponents, and Xue pointedly doesn't look at Sen as he helps her, bringing back his earlier confusion. At this point, they finish off the enemies that are trying and failing to deal with the Julie clones, before finally turning back and helping the Ares players, who have lost two of their members.

Jennifer notices that one of the dead is the guy who beat her in the tournament, and gets a smug look on her face.

"So what the hell was with the clones? Those aren't supposed to do any damage!" David says.

Julie tilts her head. "It's not that hard to make their weapons constructed from energy so they can cut."

David looks at her like she's grown another head. "So not only can you make more illusions than anyone else known in game, you can also make their weapons actually wound people?"

Julie simply nods as if this is completely reasonable. David holds his head in his hands, looking to Sen like it's his fault. Sen notices the look, and completely ignores his plea for reason.

"Alright, now that King knows that we found out about this dungeon, they're going to send basically all their nearby players here to try and kill us. So I'll hop off for a second to confirm that this dungeon is indeed real with the higher ups for some reinforcements. We'll do the dungeon while we wait, and hope that our troops get here faster than those from King," David says.

Everyone nods, and Sen and the group wait for David to log out and back in before heading into the dungeon. Once they get in, Sen starts using curse words from his past life, getting odd looks from the others in the group.

The dungeon itself is built into a hill, and it looks like it used to be some sort of catacombs. The sides are lined with alcoves, each holding remains within, bones slightly tinted in different colors.

That isn't want makes Sen unhappy though, rather, it's the multitude of webbing littered within each of the alcoves, and plastered between the walls and ceiling. The strands themselves are ridiculously thick, a good two inches in diameter, and they seem to form fractals in the way they're set up.

Sen instantly pulls a torch out of his inventory rather than the lantern he usually uses, lights it up with a lighter that is powered by cores, which Sen found odd until he remembered in lore that anything particularly volatile tends to spontaneously combust.

Sen feels slightly better as he starts to burn the webbing, but isn't going to be properly satisfied until the spiders themselves are turning into blue sparkles.

"Isn't this going to be a fun dungeon Sen?" Lynna decides that ribbing Sen takes precedence over clearing the dungeon.

"Very funny." Sen tries to give a flat look to Lynna, but her giggle in return implies that some of his uncomfortableness, as Sen refuses to believe it's fear, is showing on his face. The other girls are set off after that, but Xue is kind enough to give him a pat on his shoulder in comfort, which makes him feel even worse than the giggling.