"No seriously, how are we going to get down there?," Hurricroak asked again, "there are like hundreds of spiders and giant insects on the way down if we do jump and I do not want to fight that."
"Of course we’re not going to jump straight down the hole there’s a-wait what?," Zhen Liu asked with a mildly shocked tone,"Aren’t you guys like borderline invulnerable? I threw Frosttusk into a volcano and he came out the other end barely toasty and I even abused the fact that Nepherage is made of stone to cheese a wandering ruin’s traps. How are you guys spooked now?
Before any of the kaijin could answer, however, a certain pair of reality defiant weirdos interjected for them.
=Milord, the kaijin may be "minmaxed glitches in reality" as you put it, but even Aether Overlords would fall to superior numbers through sheer attrition. An elephant may kill a single lion, but that’s why they hunt in packs.=
=She found the musicals about historical events.=
=Speaking of music, I should probably point out that there are at least several species of insects down there that can use innate music-based aether arts.=
’How is that rele-wait...oh shit,’ Zhen Liu cursed in realization.
Zhen Liu recalled how he and Nepherage, a few months back, doubled over in pain and were basically rendered useless when the bard known as Draigo used a very potent sour note to render him and her useless. He never did figure out what happened to that guy after they took out the Marquis together.
Regardless, if a rusty bard could cause him and one of his heaviest hitters basically useless, he shuddered at the idea that there was probably mutant cicada down there that could make him kill himself willingly or a cricket siren or a yodelling banshee spider or something.
It should be note that despite having a background in aether beasts, his family didn’t process insect type beasts all too often, so his gaps of knowledge in that regard was pretty big.
Except when it came to scorpions.
The family had to process a lot of scorpions.
"I just realized something important," Hurricroak stated as she turned towards her counterparts, "Frosttusk can you make me an iceball?"
"Too...cold...," Frosttusk denied.
Nepherage hand began to glow red hot as she channeled her aether into it in order to provide Frosttusk with the heat he needed. Once it was as hot as she wanted it, Nepherage placed the burning hot hand on Frosttusk’s back.
An audible sizzle could be heard as burning magma hand met cold metal skin.
Once sufficiently heated, Frosttusk produced a volleyball sized chunk of ice that Hurricroak plucked from the air and bounced it between her hands.
"Hmm," Hurricroak hummed between bounces, "good weight. Alley-oop!"
Satisfied with the weight, Hurricroak proceeded to throw the ball of ice down the hole.
"Is...is that even remotely safe?"
"I don’t know, let’s see."
The group watched intently to see what would happen as the ice ball plummeted to the jungle below.
"Okay and the ball is about to hit the web in-"
Hurricroak had thrown the ball of ice with the intention of hitting one of the web bridges and see what kind of spider beasts would scramble out of hiding to see what disturbed their little trap/nest.
Instead, she had accidentally hit a second tier Iron-Leg Cricket mid-jump in the head, knocking the unfortunate bugger directly into the spider webs it was about to jump over.
This led to a rather...bloody chain of events.
Once the cricket got caught in the webs, it understandably started to freak out in an attempt to break free, it’s legs kicking as hard and as fast it could muster, but this led to it getting further entangled in the webs and alerting the denizens who called this bridge of webs their home.
*Skitter, skitter. Skitter, skitter*
The sounds of hundreds and hundreds of chitinous legs scraping against each other could be heard as the spiders made their move.
"Okay, here comes the natives. I wonder how they-LORDS IN HEAVEN!"
"Spiders...so...many...spiders..."
"That...is an unholy amount of spiders..."
Coming from very nook and cranny of this web bridge trap were over a hundred different types of spider aether beasts, with power ranging from first tier at the weakest and third tier at the strongest. Not that power disparity really matter when confronted with a literal wave of spiders.
As the cricket kept struggling to get free, the spiders kept crawling closer and closer, all attemtping to outpace one another to get first dibs on the new prey with some of the spiders even attacking each other in order to claim first bite.
That being said, some of the spiders just began to eat each other in the process.
"Oh joy...they’re cannibalistic too..."
"Yeah...that cricket is fucked..."
=Milord, did you want Logos and I to inform you about the type of spiders you’re seeing? The information might prove useful.=
’I-I think I’m good."
’I said I’m goo-wait, what was that last one?’
Just as Zhen Liu was about to ask for clarification on that last name of spider species being dropped, a couple of the faster spiders were almost upon the giant cricket and were just about to feed on it. Some of them were even leaping towards it, pouncing like leopards for the kill.
However, from off the pit’s walls, a massive spider as big as rhino, covered in shining plates of metal, leaped from its perch and onto the web bridge, knocking several of the smaller spiders off of it and forcing them into free fall, while the armored spider proceeded to scare off the competition via roaring and outright eating the ones who dared to cross the threshold it had establised.
As for the unlucky spiders that were knocked off the webs, they proceeded to become food for the flying and leaping insects that rested on the walls. Granted that lead to more fighting, and more insects being knocked into even more web bridges and even more spiders coming out to participate in this feeding frenzy murderfest.
The feeding brawl last for a good twenty minutes as dozens if not hundreds of different type of insect beasts became prey to one another, or fell to the jungle below, disappearing in the misty veil that covered it.
It was a good thing Zhen Liu and the kaijin were hanging around the edge of the pit, and several thousand feet above the violence, otherwise the sheer smell of all the insect blood and viscera being spilt would have them vomit at least three times over.
Not that the sight was doing them any favors.
"You still want to eat some of them, Hurricroak?"
"Nah...I think I’m good on eating...for like a week," the frog woman answered Nepherage, looking a touch more pale than her usual blueish neon blue.
"That...was...gross...," Frosttusk simply stated while looking over the aftermath.
As for Zhen Liu, he proceeded to swallow his disgust and deeply repress this memory for later him to deal with.
"Well then...thank you Hurricroak for showing us exactly why we’re not going to be jumping directly into the pit...or scaling down the wall in such an obvious manner. Instead, we’re going to be following in the footsteps of our forefathers. Follow me," Zhen Liu announced before walking the perimeter of the pit.
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Zhen Liu and his kaijin were thankfully not the first group of travelers, adventurers or cultivators to visit Insect Hell, that unfortunate honor went to one Izaiah "Bugbait" Jones, an Aether Grandmaster who earned that nickname after finding Insect Hell and losing his leg to a Three-Eyed Centipede Prince.
Regardless, after Insect Hell was discovered and Bugbait shared his findings with others, several organizations and would-be adventurers made it a point to try and explore the area for knowledge and profit. While not all of these expeditions were successful, the ones that did brought back enough of a bounty that it was agreed that a "safe" passage had to be established for others to try their luck in this horrible death trap.
It took a bit of time to figure out how to do that exactly, especially on the shoestring budged provided, but they eventually figured it out.
________________________________________________
"Behold my monstrous friends, the elevator to hell," Zhen Liu proclaimed while gesturing to their way down into the pit, "aka, how our forefathers got down their safely."
As the kaijin stared at the passageway down into the depths of that insect ridden hell hole, Zhen Liu could feel doubt flowing through jai connection with them.
"That...is somehow more of a deathtrap than the actual deathtraps we just witnessed."