Chapter 2: The Wolf Spider
Three days passed.
By the end of the third day, Kai Shen had eaten forty-one insects.
Fruit flies. Midges. Springtails. Two aphids that had landed on the wrong leaf at the wrong moment. One very unlucky fungus gnat.
None of them were impressive prey. But they added up.
[Kai Shen]
[Strength: 4]
[Speed: 7]
[Agility: 9]
[Perception: 12]
[Devour Power: 6]
[Abilities: Devour, Stillness, Reflex Boost I (reaction speed +10%)]
Reflex Boost I had come from a leafhopper on the second day.
He hadn't expected anything from such small prey but when the extraction triggered, he felt it instantly. A sharpening. Time did not slow, exactly, but the gap between seeing and reacting shrank to almost nothing.
Kai was pleased.
"At this rate I'll be the size of a thumb in... a few months. Fantastic."
He was being sarcastic with himself. He did that often now.
It was easier than confronting the reality that he was four centimetres long and the forest floor looked like a war zone.
The wolf spider appeared on the fourth morning.
Kai detected it as vibration first heavy, rhythmic, unhurried. The pattern of something that had never been ambushed.
He raised his head slowly and looked.
Big.
That was the first word that came to mind. Not dramatically large perhaps two centimetres of body but built wide and low, eight legs spread for stability, two enormous forward eyes tracking with predatory focus.
A Hogna wolf spider. He recognised the genus immediately from the eye arrangement.
Kai assessed the situation.
The spider outweighed him. It had venom. Its reaction speed was not far below his own.
The rational choice was obvious.
"Stay still. Let it pass. It isn't looking for you."
He activated Stillness.
He adjusted his surface colour toward the grey-brown of the bark.
He became part of the tree.
The spider moved across his field of vision three centimetres away, two, one
Then it stopped.
A springtail had landed on the bark four centimetres from Kai's position.
The spider oriented toward it.
Its rear legs shifted.
Kai ran the trajectory calculation in about half a second.
If the spider pounced for the springtail, it would land directly on top of him.
There was no longer a rational choice.
"Fine. We are doing this."
Kai Shen moved.
Three rapid steps to the left silent, precise, placing him at the spider's flank where its secondary eyes had the weakest overlap.
The spider's pounce began.
Kai struck first.
His right foreleg drove into the junction between the spider's cephalothorax and abdomen the softest seam in its armour.
The spider convulsed.
Eight legs scrabbled at the bark.
One caught Kai across the side with a panicked flail and the impact rattled through his whole body like a strike from a hammer.
He did not let go.
Seventeen seconds later, the spider went still.
Kai sat on top of it for a long moment.
His abdomen ached. Something in his left mid-leg had been wrenched.
But the spider was dead, and he was not.
"Brother Wolf," he thought, "you nearly had me. Nearly."
He began to eat.
The warmth that flooded through him this time was nothing like the small, gentle heat from a fruit fly.
It crashed through his body in a wave.
Strength +3
Speed +2
Agility +2
Perception +1
Devour Power: +8
And then, as the warmth faded something else.
A new sense, unfolding like a second set of eyes opening all at once.
[Ability extracted: Eight-Point Awareness (passive: simultaneous threat detection from all angles)]
Kai went very still.
The forest around him previously felt only in fragments resolved into a complete picture.
He could feel the beetle thirty centimetres to his left. The moth forty centimetres above. The ant colony working beneath the bark four centimetres below his feet.
Everything, all at once, without effort.
He sat with the wolf spider's absorbed strength settling into his body and thought:
"So this is what it is supposed to feel like."
He cleaned his forelegs.
Then he looked toward the deeper forest, where the trees grew thicker and the shadows deeper and the prey, certainly, grew larger.
His leg still ached.
He ignored it.