Dex stood in the heart of the thick darkness, his blue eyes moving at insane speed in their sockets, sweeping every tree trunk, every falling leaf, and every shadow trembling in the mist. The air around him whistled at a barely audible pitch, as though invisible blades were cutting through the space. He knew with absolute certainty that the Shadow Spider was weaving its killing web around him and Lumia, tightening the noose with sadistic slowness, savouring its prey's terror before the final strike.
Dex understood, watching the silent forest with his naked eyes, that his human sight, upon which he had depended his entire life, had become his greatest liability. In the advanced magical world, and in the depths of forbidden zones where creatures manipulate the laws of physics, conventional senses are the first things that deceive you. The human eye captures only the reflection of light, and if the enemy possesses the Spectral Reflection ability that swallows light and fuses the creature's body with the surrounding dark Mana, the eye will see nothing but empty space. Depending on sight here was like trying to see the bottom of an ocean with a candle: the illusion of safety that directly precedes death.
"In solitary confinement," Dex thought, the dark memories of prison flooding his mind like slow poison, "when they would leave me in absolute darkness for weeks, I learned to see without opening my eyes. I learned to sense the warden's intention from the change in temperature of his breath, and from the vibration of the ground under his military boots. The spider may deceive light, and may deceive the flow of Mana, but it is a living creature in the end. And no living creature can conceal the heat emanating from its soul and its nervous system."
Dex drew a deep, scorching breath and closed his eyes entirely.
To any outside observer, this would appear suicidal: to close your eyes while encircled by invisible threads capable of cutting steel, with a Rank B− beast preparing to devour you, was the height of madness. But for Dex, this was the height of concentration. He had decided to isolate the false outside world and ignore the counterfeit images his terrified imagination might paint, to focus every particle of his consciousness and will on the Phoenix Core resting at the centre of his heart, that cosmic jewel pulsing with the heat of a small star.
Dex recalled an old lesson: a flash of knowledge carved into his soul in the moment of his fusion with the Core in that cursed cavern. A lesson about the nature of pure fire. Most ordinary sorcerers, and even the Empire's knights, viewed the fire element as nothing more than an instrument of destruction, a means to burn enemies and reduce them to ash. But the Phoenix, the supreme entity of flame, did not see fire with such superficiality. Fire in its true essence was not only destruction. It was the source of light and heat. It was the primal energy that had driven darkness from the cosmos, the absolute instrument for revealing truths hidden beneath veils of illusion.
"Blood of my ancestors, awaken. I do not want your fire to burn my body, I want your light to illuminate my sight." Dex called in the depths of his consciousness, directing his Mana toward the Core in a complex, circular pattern.
The Core responded. He felt an immense heat rise from his chest and flow through the arteries of his neck to reach his closed eyes. Not pain, but the sensation of absolute opening. Dex whispered in a voice whose echo resonated in the surrounding Mana like an ancient church bell:
"Heritage of the Phoenix: Absolute Thermal Manifestation!"
In that pivotal moment, Dex opened his eyes.
The world was no longer as it had been. The dark, misty scene of Falus Forest transformed into a complex and terrifying painting of thermal spectra. The wooden tree trunks vanished. The green and purple mist vanished. The black shadows filling the space vanished. In their place, the world appeared in graduated colours reflecting energy and heat levels with micrometric precision.
The forest around him was cold as death, draped in a dull, dark blue, and sometimes a deep violet where the toxic Mana concentrated. The soil beneath his feet appeared as a sea of dark blue ice. Directly behind him he saw Lumia. She did not appear as a human girl. She was a black hole in the thermal vision: her Celestial aura was absorbing all surrounding heat and radiating a pure white-blue cold, entirely devoid of any ordinary biological thermal signature, confirming her otherworldly nature.
But what he was searching for was neither Lumia nor the trees.
He began sweeping the space before him. The invisible threads the spider had been weaving appeared now in his vision as very pale blue lines, cold as frost, intersecting in the air like a lethal laser grid. Seeing these traps, Dex understood how close he had come to death: one of the threads was less than a single inch from his throat.
He continued sweeping the vision upward, tracing the threads to their source. And five metres to the right, four metres above the ground, pressed against the trunk of an enormous tree that appeared entirely empty to the naked eye… he saw it.
He saw a massive, pulsing mass glowing in blood red and bright orange, with yellow-white patches concentrated at the centre where the creature's heart and central nervous system resided. That was the heat radiating from the Shadow Spider's blood and vitality, heat which no spectral concealment ability in the world could hide from the Phoenix's revealing eye.
The creature was enormous beyond description, its body spanning two metres, its eight limbs coiled around the trunk with terrifying force. In the thermal vision, Dex could see the venom glands in the spider's jaw glowing with concentrated yellow heat: evidence of its readiness to launch a lethal strike. The beast was looking directly toward Dex, believing itself still safe within the cloak of darkness, waiting for the moment the young man would step one pace forward and be severed by its threads.
Dex's smile widened. Not a smile of relief, but a savage, cold, vengeful smile overflowing with a gothic satisfaction. The smile of a prisoner condemned to death who had found, without warning, a crack in his cell wall, and realised the warden had left the key in the door by mistake. He whispered, his blazing eyes staring directly at the vital centre of the invisible spider: "Found you… insect."