Divine-Class Awakening: I Can Steal From Gods!-Chapter 32: A Roof Borrowed from the Breach
Neo kept moving with the tower fixed somewhere ahead, surfacing now and again through breaks in the canopy like a promise this place kept showing him just to remind him how far away it was.
The jungle had a way of swallowing distance. What looked close from one patch of ground vanished behind walls of green the next minute, and every stretch of progress had to be fought from roots, mud, hanging vines, and stone half-buried under years of growth. The air clung to him in a warm, damp layer that never eased. Sweat mixed with dirt. Green blood from the spider had dried in patches across his clothes and skin, tacky in some places, stiff in others.
He did not waste Soul Essence keeping the sword out. If something wanted to die, he could summon it fast enough.
That thought lasted until another web shot out from between two trunks and tried to wrap around his chest.
Neo jerked aside, summoned the sword into his hand mid-step, and cut the strand before it could stick. The spider came right after it, dropping from a branch in a blur of hairy legs and swollen body. This one was smaller than the first, but not by much, and its mouth opened wide enough to ruin the rest of his day if he let it.
It rushed him. Neo stepped in instead of back, drove the blade up through the soft underside near the mouth, and felt resistance give way with an ugly wet split. Green blood splashed down his forearm. The spider twitched once, twice, and collapsed into the roots.
[You have slained Stoneweb Spider - Ember]
Its Soul Core surfaced in the corpse a breath later, a yellowed crystal orb with weak light trapped inside it. Neo picked it up, watched the glow drain away while his soul consumed it, and the familiar window unfolded before him.
[Soul-Window]
[You have absorbed the Soul Core of Stoneweb Spider - Ember]
[+1 Souls] [393/1000 Ember]
He dismissed it with a thought.
’Not much. Worse than the skeletons, actually.’
He wiped the blade against the spider’s coarse leg and kept going.
’Makes sense, though. This place is harder. One bad slip and I’m dead.’
That was the trade. The ruins outside had been cleaner in their own way. Skeletons walked at him with rusted weapons and simple patterns. Here everything had angles, cover, ambushes, poison, webbing, bad ground, and more places to die than the jungle had leaves.
By midday he had killed three more.
One dropped from the underside of a broken stone beam inside a half-swallowed ruin and nearly caught his shoulder with a web. Neo cut the strand, let it lunge, and drove Beast Strength into his arms hard enough to split its head open in a single strike. Another tried to rush him through tall grass and died when he kicked it sideways into a tree trunk and put the sword through its abdomen before it could recover. The fourth came while he was drinking water beside a patch of cracked stone. It earned a blade through the mouth for interrupting him.
Each Soul Core dissolved the same way in his hand, the yellowed crystal losing its weak shine while the inside of him pulled it apart and made it his. By the time he absorbed the fourth, the number had climbed to 396.
No new class appeared beyond the same Stoneweb Spider path he already had.
’Fine by me. One of those is enough.’
Clouds had been gathering overhead for a while, thickening above the jungle until the light lost some of its weight. Neo noticed the change first in the smell. Wet earth before the rain. Leaves turning restless. Air turning heavier in a different way.
When the first drops came, they were large enough to feel like small impacts against his skin.
A minute later the sky opened.
Rain hammered through the canopy, broke across leaves, branches, stone, and earth, and turned the jungle louder than any fight he’d had since entering. Heat bled out of the air just enough to stop annoying him. The ground became a worse problem immediately.
Neo found a section of rock slanting out from a rise in the earth, enough cover to keep him from standing directly under the full downpour, and set down his pack. Water ran down his hair, across his face, over his neck and shoulders, carrying streaks of green blood and mud with it.
He peeled his shirt off, wrung it once, and snorted under his breath.
’Hope there isn’t some pervert peeking. This body deserves better than a muddy spider funeral.’ The thought almost made him grin.
He used the rain while he had it. Shirt, trousers, even the inside of the boots got rinsed as well as they could without him standing there like an idiot for half an hour. He scrubbed dried blood from his arms, chest, neck, and stomach with both hands, worked dirt off his skin, and crouched to wash green stains from his legs. The rain did most of the work once the worst of it loosened.
He did not clean himself for comfort.
Covered in blood, sweat, and the stink of dead Soul Beasts, he may as well have walked around ringing a dinner bell.
When the rain eased from violent to heavy, he dressed again. Damp clothes were annoying. Damp clothes were better than walking around naked in a jungle that clearly wanted to kill him.
He moved on and caught two more spiders before the light began thinning.
One came out of a webbed split in a fallen structure and took a slash through the side when it tried to circle him. Another dropped from high above and managed to nick his forearm before he crushed its body under Beast Strength and stamped the head in. The bite left a hot sting in his skin that made him pause.
Nothing serious followed.
Low Poison Resistance.
Not much, but enough to turn a bad surprise into an irritation.
Its Soul Core brought him to 398.
By the time the seventh one died under his sword, Neo had stopped being annoyed by the count and started being annoyed by how slow everything around that count was. Every kill came with real risk. Every small gain had teeth behind it.
[Soul-Window]
[You have absorbed the Soul Core of Stoneweb Spider - Ember]
[+1 Souls] [399/1000 Ember]
He stared at the number a second and exhaled through his nose.
’Just eight cores in a whole day to get here.’ His hand dragged down his face. ’Not great.’
The trees ahead were darkening as evening pressed lower through the canopy. Rain still dripped from leaves and branches. The ground had turned slick enough to punish carelessness, and his body had finally started admitting what the rest of him already knew.
He was tired.
Not the kind of tired a short pause fixed. The kind that made shoulders heavier, legs slower, concentration easier to lose. That last part was what worried him. A lapse here would be enough. A missed strand of web. One bad step in mud. One spider above him instead of ahead.
’I wonder if there are more Soul Beasts here besides the spiders. Lucky I haven’t found any yet.’ The second that thought crossed his mind, Neo stopped walking and rubbed a hand over his face again. ’Why do people even say things like that?’
He stared at the wet jungle in front of him with open distrust.
’Every time someone says it can’t get worse, it does. Films, stories, all of it. Surely real life isn’t that stupid, right?’
He waited as if the jungle might answer by throwing some new nightmare at him.
Nothing came.
"Good," he muttered. "Keep it that way."
Darkness would come soon, and sleeping was no longer optional. He could push a little farther and gain what, another miserable point? It was not worth walking into the night half-dead on his feet and blundering into a web he failed to spot because his thoughts had started dragging.
He needed a place to rest.
The jungle gave him nothing generous, so he took what he could.
A huge tree had grown over a rise of black stone, its roots thick as coiled beasts, twisting around the rock and leaving a cramped hollow between them where rain had trouble reaching. Part of an old collapsed wall leaned nearby, broken enough to be useless as a structure and good enough to block one side from sight. It was ugly. Uneven. Damp. Better than sleeping on open ground.
Neo cleared the worst of the muck first, dragging wet leaves, loose branches, and old debris out of the hollow with his boot and the flat of the sword. He laid down thicker branches and broad leaves to raise himself a little off the mud, used fallen vine and snapped wood to pull a rough cover lower across one side, and kept the opening narrow enough that nothing large would rush him without warning.
By the time he was done, the shelter looked like something built by a stubborn animal.
Good enough.
He ate carefully and drank less water than he wanted. The jungle never went quiet. Rain dripped from everywhere. Something moved through the brush once and got close enough that he summoned the sword before it lost interest and passed on.
Neo did not sleep deeply.
He drifted in and out, body resting where it could, mind surfacing at every shift of sound outside the roots. The ground remained hard despite the branches. Damp clung to his clothes. His muscles ached. None of it changed what had to be done.
If he wanted to keep walking tomorrow, he needed this.
By the time the darkness thinned and the first weak trace of morning filtered through the soaked green above him, he had managed enough rest to stand without swaying.
The day before had left him with nine kills and nine points.
One more spider found near the roots while dawn spread through the jungle gave him the last one before he packed up.
[Soul-Window]
[You have absorbed the Soul Core of Stoneweb Spider - Ember]
[+1 Souls] [401/1000 Ember]
Neo watched the number settle and slid the window away.
His body felt dirty again already. His clothes were still damp. His shelter looked miserable in the gray morning light.
He picked up his pack, glanced once toward the hidden line of the tower somewhere ahead, and let a faint smile pull at his mouth.
’Ugly night. I’m still here.’
