SKREEEEEEE—!
The shrill scream of Elder Eight-Eyes’s black bone whistle echoed across the valleys of World 34, rattling the leaves of the giant swamp trees for twenty miles around.
Up on the high stone cliff overlooking the Jade-Ribbon River, Elder Eight-Eyes pumped every drop of his Rank 6 Peak Golden Core Qi into the whistle until his cheeks puffed out like two purple toad bellies.
RUMBLE-CRACK-SCUTTER-SCUTTER-SCUTTER!
Five miles north of Green-Web City, the rocky slopes of Thousand-Cave Spider Mountain suddenly split open!
Out of ten thousand dark, webbing-choked caves poured a terrifying black tide of 50,000 Giant Black-Iron Tarantulas!
Each spider was the size of a heavy farm ox, covered from head to abdomen in bristling black-iron hairs as stiff as steel knitting needles. Their eight hairy legs clanked against the stones like iron pickaxes, and their twin curved fangs dripped with sizzling purple venom as eight glowing red eyes on each spider locked onto the World 34 Star-Train Station.
“Run! Everybody get inside the station walls!” Old Blacksmith Zhang shouted down by the riverbank, grabbing two neighborhood kids under his arms as the ground shook beneath the charge of four hundred thousand iron spider legs. “Those are the Venom-Spider Sect’s war beasts—Rank 4 and Rank 5 Black-Iron Tarantulas! Their hair can bounce off broadswords, and when fifty thousand of them charge together, they can flatten a stone city wall in three breaths!”
