The spider’s leg punched through Hajin’s block and threw him sideways across the pit.
He hit the floor rolling, came up onto one knee, and felt the chain humming at the edge of his grip. His ribs were already in pain, telling him two had gone at the very least but even so, he kept his weight forward, eyes locked on the thing in front of him.
She filled the pit in a way the gate’s rating had no business allowing. Eight long black legs held up a body the size of a house, with a row of red eyes above too steady for the violence about to land.
"You move well," she said, her voice dragging slow and amused, "for something this small."
He spat blood onto the floor instead of answering, then pushed off and went at her again.
The chain lashed in a tight arc, gold whip-cracking around her front leg, and he yanked hard to throw her off balance. The leg did not budge, not even a finger’s width, the pull ripping back through his arms and dragging him in toward her instead.
He let go a second before she could swing him under her, twisted in the air, and landed back on the floor.
"Cute," she said, her body shifting until she was facing him head-on again, "I gave you that one for free."
A second leg was already coming down on him before she finished talking, fast and angled straight for his skull. He raised the chain overhead with both arms, took the hit on the cross of the links, and his knees buckled under the weight.
His feet sank into the ground, his shoulders screaming under the press while the chain held by half a thread.
"You see it now, don’t you," she went on, leaning her weight a little more into the strike, "this is what your kind feels like, right at the end."
He grit his teeth, looked up past the chain at the eyes hanging over him, and made himself smile.
"Lady," he forced out, "you talk way too much."
She did not smile back, the weight on the chain doubling, causing the ground under his feet to split wider as she pressed down harder.
The chat blew open across his vision, dozens of pings stacking on top of each other as the viewers caught up to what they were watching.
[ CringeSlayer91: ] bro this isnt a fight anymore, he’s getting STEPPED on 💀
[ ShadowMage44: ] that thing is the size of a HOUSE bro how is he still standing
[ Voxa: ] he finally met his match holy shit
[ ashley (Mod): ] Hajin GET OUT, just leave, please
He read the lines in the second between her presses, and the worst part was that none of them were wrong. He felt the gap in his bones every time her weight came down, and his core was telling him the same story the chat was.
But he was not built to lie down for any of it, not even this.
His eyes dropped from the chat to the chain, then to his hands, and a different idea started lining itself up inside his head. He had been trying to fight her in his own form, with his own techniques, and that was where it had been going wrong.
He reached through the bond, both of them at once, Juna sleeping back in his core, Loccy out beyond the trees, and pulled.
The insignia on his chest flared under his armor, two streams of something familiar layering over his own mana through the line.
Juna came first, lean and predatory, the scent-sharpening pull that had been bleeding into him since the wolf-boss fight, now reached for on purpose.
Loccy came second, slower and denser, the raw weight of her arms settling into his shoulders like he had borrowed them clean off her body.
He let the chain go slack, dropped one hand to the ground, and crouched down on all fours under the leg. Above him, the spider went still, the weight on the chain easing as she registered something new about him.
"Strange," she said, her voice losing its drag, "what are you doing now, little—"
He moved before she could finish the word, body uncoiling out of the crouch.
The new stance threw him out from under her leg in a low burst, knees barely scraping the ground as he came up around her flank.
Her leg punched the ground where he had been, throwing rock in a wide arc.
He drove his palm into the joint of her closest leg, all of Loccy’s borrowed weight riding the blow. Something inside the leg gave way, the first piece of her he had managed to break.
He landed back on his feet a few paces from the broken joint, breathing hard, but already a smile was pulling at the corner of his mouth.
It was working, the combination doing what nothing in his own form had managed.
Loccy’s weight stacked clean over his own strikes, turning every hit into something his body should not have been able to deliver. Juna’s pull threaded the speed underneath it, letting him move in and out of range before the spider could track him.
He felt like a whole new person standing in that pit, body running on three streams instead of one.
The strange part was that none of this was new, the same shift having hit him back in the wolf-boss fight on its own. He just had never thought to reach for it on purpose in any of the fights since then.
’Right,’ he thought, rolling his shoulders under Loccy’s weight, ’guess that one slipped my mind.’
The spider only watched him from above, her eyes flat, his new trick getting no reaction at all.
"Better," she said, her voice back to its slow drag, "you found a way to scratch me, little thing, but you are still bleeding from somewhere I have not even seen yet."
He ran the back of his wrist across his mouth, smearing the blood, and shot her a grin that did not match how bad he felt.
"You sure about that, lady," he called up at her, rolling his shoulders again, "because last time I checked you were the one missing pieces."
She did not answer this time, her silence pulling tight across the pit for one long second.
One of her back legs whipped around from his blind side, faster than anything else she had thrown so far.
Juna’s instincts spun him sideways while Loccy’s weight braced the chain across his chest, both moves hitting as one beat. The leg crashed into the chain, every borrowed instinct in his body screaming that he had read the angle too late.
The impact lifted him clear off his feet and threw him across the pit, the chain pressing flat against his ribs the whole way.
He crashed into the far wall of the pit, the chain still pinned flat against his ribs. Blood ran from his mouth as he peeled himself off, vision blurring at the edges.
The spider crossed the pit toward him, the broken leg dragging behind her, every other one moving in rhythm. He pushed off the wall, planted his feet, and brought the chain back up into his guard.
Then a new shape dropped into the pit between them, claws sinking into the floor, eyes locked up at the spider.
"Sorry, mommy," she said up at the spider, her tail flicking once, "this one is taken."