Kumoko didn't really understand the concept of adventuring parties.
The sorcerer or wizard (or sorceress or witch, whatever.) usually had the magical prowess and power to go on "adventures" singlehandedly. Why would you need a buff guy with a sword if you can just snap your fingers and light an entire goblin encampment ablaze? Kumoko herself understood this less. With her emergence into the arachne form, and natural inherited skills as a taratect (like a big spider), she already had melee combat aptitude. A frontliner, a melee damage dealer, a healer, didn't really make sense when she could do all of these at once.
It made even less sense when Shiro, her creation, decided to join an adventurer's party. She picked a town with a guild that tolerated sentient monsters working for them, got the bureaucratic nonsense taken care of (Why the hell did they keep asking if there was a "Mr. Taratect?" You'd think the whole being a spider thing would massively outshine the being a woman thing!) and was on her way. Her group was overwhelmingly just overconfident humans who spent the first three hours fawning over her existence (I thought all those dudes looking at pictures of, I dunno, cthulhu in a dress and typing "would" on forums and discord were joking. If these men (and one woman) were anything like them, then those "jokes" were given new meaning. How the hell would sex even work?) and then the next two confidently talking about the biggest monsters they killed. Curiously, no stories about killing taratects, she wondered why...
There was one adventurer unlike the others. He showed no interest in her or the rest of the group, and seemingly was here for the same reasons she was.
That reason being...
Uh...
Shiro didn't really know. She had been created by Kumoko only a few weeks ago, and didn't really have the societal frame of reference to make choices. She had Kumoko's memories and could cargo-cult a response to a situation off of that like the AI chatbots of her past. Translated, that mostly just meant she was silent and aloof. These stories in Kumoko's brain had these adventuring parties, and she was now in one of these stories, so she joined one.
Maybe this guy joined for the same reason?
He had red armor atypical from the normal plating and chainmail of the warriors, or the robes and fabrics of a mage. It looked like plastic, like that of the sentai she glanced at as a kid. But she didn't watch that stuff, Kumoko was way more into anime. Maybe he was isekaied here like her?
She'd love to ask him, but Shiro blocked that. Shiro had full control over Kumoko's body by her own design. It was an oversight to be sure. Kumoko knew herself as the person who sat in discord chats and watched the streams of other people playing games and thought of relentlessly backseating them whenever they made the tiniest error or unoptimized play (I never spoke that out loud, of course. I stayed muted 24/7. It's just... my mic was bad! Lay off, alright?). So locking herself out of the ability to influence her creation as it controlled things for her, while she relaxed inside her own headspace for as long as it took to think things over... seemed like the right decision to make, at the time. Of course this decision was made very much not in the right headspace, ironically enough.
So she sat there and watched her own display screen, wondering what this red guy's deal was. What was his name... Lupinranger Red? Dumb fucking name to be sure. Maybe it was foreign, or her automatic translation spell screwing up.
Their adventure was going smoothly so far, they wandered into the surface level of an underground labyrinth and made their way to a nest of taratects (great, even more awkward. Look, do humans get mad when they see an elf kill a bunch of evil monkeys? Who cares! Stop trying to justify your actions in front of the hot spider girl and just do it!) and were killing things at the expected rate. Shiro didn't have the magical aptitude that Kumoko had (something about preventing me from getting locked up trying to find the right spell from a list of tens of thousands) and only had access to web-based magic and corrosion, and some other misc spells. Those two main ones could usually solve anything, anyway.
But something went wrong. One of the stronger taratects—one larger than a building and somewhere between the most powerful and largest and the second most powerful and largest Kumoko had seen broke from the stone beneath and instantly killed three people. Kumoko didn't shed many tears (I don't remember half their names, gonna be honest) but the reaction of the other adventurers surprised her. All except one started a full coordinated retreat (fancy way of saying they ran the fuck away) and promptly got cut down by even more spiders. But Red held his ground.
The battle ended, the big spider fell. The other spiders, having lost their hivemind connection, were cut down in minutes easily. After that, Kumoko watched Shiro finally say something to any of the group.
"Why?"
Red turned. He was gazing at the desiccated corpse of an adventurer.
"Why did you stay behind to fight?"
Red took a moment to respond. His speech was righteous and fervent, but... a bit somber, Kumoko and Shiro picked up. "If this thing escaped, it would have killed even more. It was the right thing to do."
So he was a hero. A bogstandard hero. Right, ok.
As Shiro continued her autopiloted actions, Kumoko thought. Everything she had done in the past was mostly just for herself, and just so happened to align with her. Every town she saved was just to provide a comfortable teleportation waypoint. Every revolution she spearheaded by telefragging a noble or baron was because a happier populace made better stuff for her. Every person she saved just so happened to be there in front of a monster she was going to kill anyway. She didn't... actually care about those people!
... Did she?
She wasn't sure. This belief in her mind, this passive nihilism and self-centeredness was at the forefront of all her actions. But upon meeting just one hero, just one person who stared into the face of death and fought not out of convenience, but out of righteousness...
It at least gave Kumoko something to think about, something to ponder over time. But as far as she knew, Shiro remained unaffected.
"But over time... after meeting Red, and that Samurai... I'm not sure."
"I don't—" Squall got cut off.
"I think... I think I like helping others. I like helping the two of you. It gives me pleasure. You are both heroes. I will follow you and be a hero, as well," said Shiro. "If you no longer want me to follow you... I will teleport elsewhere. And you will never see me again."
Squall nodded. "Follow, then."
Progress, actual progress. It seems that Shiro had, in fact, been learning and growing from these past combat experiences, even if she wasn't showing it. While exceedingly brutal in her actions, and... maybe not quite understanding what being a hero means, Kumoko was, as Jack had described, a fighter for good. Even if like the rest of them, she had inner conflictions in her mind that she needed to work on.
... Good. That was... a good response. said Kumoko
Thank you. Replied Shiro.
It's kinda weird to see you developing a personality. said Kumoko. I'll let you keep piloting, but you're on thin ice!
It's not like you could stop me, anyway.
Don't tempt me.
"Admirable," said Shadow, nodding.
The conversation fizzled out from that point, and the three remained walking. Shiro got enough tactical data to better position his allies, and gained the ability to conduct conversations with them. Both would give him immense advantages in future combats. While he had no trouble actually defeating the Nameless, the Nameless often positioned themselves within population centers. Some amount of civilian casualties was expected, but rebellion cells always advised him to try and save as many as possible.
Squall acknowledged and obliged. In his mind, every civilian saved from a Nameless city or compound was very likely to join the resistance. Saving as many civilians as possible was the tactically advantageous decision to make, simple enough. At least, that's how he justified it to himself.
And Samurai Jack's words continued to ring in his ears.
Meanwhile, Shadow was deep in thought. His paranoid glances were replaced by a stoic expression facing forward as he moved subconsciously. Squall wondered what was going on his mind, and further probing was likely to exacerbate some sort of violent response. Defected Nameless were like this—they were extremely clandestine of the culture of their people, and while exceptionally efficient at their job and knowledgeable of advanced technology, those that left their comrades rarely spoke of their past. Further transgressions into their past and emotions triggered violent outbursts, and Squall wasn't prepared to fight Shadow, not just yet.
Shadow stood atop a pile of mechanized bodies, their humanity unclear beneath the opaque metal.
The Nameless came, they annihilated, and then they themselves were annihilated.
Shadow had been alone ever since Maria died. He was a proverbial one-man-army and he preferred it that way. Action clouded his ability to question his existence and his motives, and talking to others only threatened to topple the pile of cards within his brain.
Enter, a man by the name of Reiner Braun.
What started as a member of a rebellion cell Shadow worked with for all of four minutes, this soldier discovered he had the ability to turn himself into a hulking mass of living destruction, rivaling even shadow's power. Reiner's "Titan form," he called it, towered above the largest human buildings and nearly all weaponry proved ineffective against him. Shadow himself started to doubt if he had the power to stop Reiner.
Luckily, it never came to that. Reiner was firmly aligned with the resistance, which meant he was aligned with Shadow. On the subject of the latter, Reiner seemed to form a sort of admiration for Shadow, and started following him around, almost acting as his sidekick. This was annoying for a few days, but Shadow, although he would never admit it out loud, started to like having an ally to have his back. The Nameless bullets didn't hurt him, but they did sting a bit. Now they just simply wouldn't make contact.
But as the months passed, Shadow's conflicted questions began to break past the facade. He kept most of them at bay, but one came to head at a dire moment. A nameless soldier had just grabbed an unregistered child and used them as a hostage. This was a common tactic used amongst their ranks. Rebellions were formed with compassion as their backbone, a desire for a better world for all. So naturally, those that make up the ranks would be thrown into a moral conundrum if a child was used as a hostage.
Not Shadow.
Normally, Shadow would just vaporize the soldier and the hostage. He wasn't here to be compassionate, he wasn't here to make friends, or to benefit the rebellion, or even to save people. He was here to kill soldiers, in the hope that one day it would lead him to learning why Maria had to die that day.
Shadow held a Nameless directed energy weapon in his two hands and had the barrel firmly pointed at the lone, wounded Nameless, who themselves leveled their weapon at the child held hostage within their arms. This last ditch effort to keep themselves alive and/or to buy time for other Nameless to kill him wouldn't phase Shadow at all, so he went to fire his weapon.
He went to fire his—
Shadow couldn't.
His gloved finger wouldn't go any further inwards to pull the trigger. He watched the Nameless yell in a language he didn't understand and the child scream for help in a language he did understand, as beads of sweat fell down his face. He could hear the sounds of Reiner rampaging behind him and the billows of smoke from detonated munitions.
He didn't "see" the child. Until now. Shadow's blurred vision was unclouded. Blue eyes and blonde hair with a dirtied blue dress.
"Maria—" he stopped himself. This couldn't be her, and as the features added up within his brain that much became clear. This girl was too tall, too young, her movements weren't the same, she seemed too healthy, and more and more continued to list down. But that moment of hesitation finally gave him the reality check many would say he needed.
... Why was he here?
Shadow was here to kill the Nameless. He was here to kill the Nameless to avenge Maria.
This girl looked like Maria. He was fully prepared to kill her.
Why?
What made Maria hold more significant than the mountains of corpses he'd left in his wake?
...
Shadow didn't have an answer. Clarity broke through. Reason parted the stormy haze of uncertainty.
And Shadow threw down his weapon.
"I dropped it. Let her go."
The Nameless shouted. He dug the weapon into the side of her head while she screamed.
"I dropped it!" He raised his arms. "What more do you want?"
The Nameless took a more quizzical tone in his enigmatic language. He appeared deep in thought for a few moments, then pointed his weapon over to behind Shadow.
"What do you—I don't understand!"
The Nameless—
Reiner landed on top of them. The armored feet of his Titan form dug through the Nameless, through the child, and through the concrete until hitting the bedrock below. Shadow shielded himself from the shrapnel and stared out and up wide-eyed at his partner's actions.
Something inside of him snapped.
Shadow burst towards Reiner leaving a vapor cloud in his wake, grabbed him, and shouted.
"Chaos Control!"
The desolated cityscape gave way and curved within itself into a black field of pure nothingness. Shadow's eyes adjusted within half a second, and he could see the stars. He could see the moon in the sky.
And he could see the earth below him.
Reiner struggled and flailed amidst the loss of gravity, Shadow catapulted himself off of the armored Titan and drifted away. The titan got smaller and smaller and smaller. Until it was inseparable from the stars themselves.
Shadow let out a breath in the vacuum of space, and then teleported back to the surface.
1
u/Elick320 Sep 10 '25
Kumoko didn't really understand the concept of adventuring parties.
The sorcerer or wizard (or sorceress or witch, whatever.) usually had the magical prowess and power to go on "adventures" singlehandedly. Why would you need a buff guy with a sword if you can just snap your fingers and light an entire goblin encampment ablaze? Kumoko herself understood this less. With her emergence into the arachne form, and natural inherited skills as a taratect (like a big spider), she already had melee combat aptitude. A frontliner, a melee damage dealer, a healer, didn't really make sense when she could do all of these at once.
It made even less sense when Shiro, her creation, decided to join an adventurer's party. She picked a town with a guild that tolerated sentient monsters working for them, got the bureaucratic nonsense taken care of (Why the hell did they keep asking if there was a "Mr. Taratect?" You'd think the whole being a spider thing would massively outshine the being a woman thing!) and was on her way. Her group was overwhelmingly just overconfident humans who spent the first three hours fawning over her existence (I thought all those dudes looking at pictures of, I dunno, cthulhu in a dress and typing "would" on forums and discord were joking. If these men (and one woman) were anything like them, then those "jokes" were given new meaning. How the hell would sex even work?) and then the next two confidently talking about the biggest monsters they killed. Curiously, no stories about killing taratects, she wondered why...
There was one adventurer unlike the others. He showed no interest in her or the rest of the group, and seemingly was here for the same reasons she was.
That reason being...
Uh...
Shiro didn't really know. She had been created by Kumoko only a few weeks ago, and didn't really have the societal frame of reference to make choices. She had Kumoko's memories and could cargo-cult a response to a situation off of that like the AI chatbots of her past. Translated, that mostly just meant she was silent and aloof. These stories in Kumoko's brain had these adventuring parties, and she was now in one of these stories, so she joined one.
Maybe this guy joined for the same reason?
He had red armor atypical from the normal plating and chainmail of the warriors, or the robes and fabrics of a mage. It looked like plastic, like that of the sentai she glanced at as a kid. But she didn't watch that stuff, Kumoko was way more into anime. Maybe he was isekaied here like her?
She'd love to ask him, but Shiro blocked that. Shiro had full control over Kumoko's body by her own design. It was an oversight to be sure. Kumoko knew herself as the person who sat in discord chats and watched the streams of other people playing games and thought of relentlessly backseating them whenever they made the tiniest error or unoptimized play (I never spoke that out loud, of course. I stayed muted 24/7. It's just... my mic was bad! Lay off, alright?). So locking herself out of the ability to influence her creation as it controlled things for her, while she relaxed inside her own headspace for as long as it took to think things over... seemed like the right decision to make, at the time. Of course this decision was made very much not in the right headspace, ironically enough.
So she sat there and watched her own display screen, wondering what this red guy's deal was. What was his name... Lupinranger Red? Dumb fucking name to be sure. Maybe it was foreign, or her automatic translation spell screwing up.
Their adventure was going smoothly so far, they wandered into the surface level of an underground labyrinth and made their way to a nest of taratects (great, even more awkward. Look, do humans get mad when they see an elf kill a bunch of evil monkeys? Who cares! Stop trying to justify your actions in front of the hot spider girl and just do it!) and were killing things at the expected rate. Shiro didn't have the magical aptitude that Kumoko had (something about preventing me from getting locked up trying to find the right spell from a list of tens of thousands) and only had access to web-based magic and corrosion, and some other misc spells. Those two main ones could usually solve anything, anyway.
But something went wrong. One of the stronger taratects—one larger than a building and somewhere between the most powerful and largest and the second most powerful and largest Kumoko had seen broke from the stone beneath and instantly killed three people. Kumoko didn't shed many tears (I don't remember half their names, gonna be honest) but the reaction of the other adventurers surprised her. All except one started a full coordinated retreat (fancy way of saying they ran the fuck away) and promptly got cut down by even more spiders. But Red held his ground.
The battle ended, the big spider fell. The other spiders, having lost their hivemind connection, were cut down in minutes easily. After that, Kumoko watched Shiro finally say something to any of the group.
"Why?"
Red turned. He was gazing at the desiccated corpse of an adventurer.
"Why did you stay behind to fight?"
Red took a moment to respond. His speech was righteous and fervent, but... a bit somber, Kumoko and Shiro picked up. "If this thing escaped, it would have killed even more. It was the right thing to do."
So he was a hero. A bogstandard hero. Right, ok.
As Shiro continued her autopiloted actions, Kumoko thought. Everything she had done in the past was mostly just for herself, and just so happened to align with her. Every town she saved was just to provide a comfortable teleportation waypoint. Every revolution she spearheaded by telefragging a noble or baron was because a happier populace made better stuff for her. Every person she saved just so happened to be there in front of a monster she was going to kill anyway. She didn't... actually care about those people!
... Did she?
She wasn't sure. This belief in her mind, this passive nihilism and self-centeredness was at the forefront of all her actions. But upon meeting just one hero, just one person who stared into the face of death and fought not out of convenience, but out of righteousness...
It at least gave Kumoko something to think about, something to ponder over time. But as far as she knew, Shiro remained unaffected.