“GEEEENEEERAL!!”
As soon as his feet touched the ground, he scrambled forward and rushed to the crumpled rhinoceros beetle who looked more like a pile of rocks than a living creature. Watching him, the spider rubbed his neck where faint bite marks remained and clicked his tongue. The sharp pain lingering there made him worry about the honeybee’s teeth.
“Gen, are you okay?! No! You can’t die!”
If he’d fallen from that height, he was almost certainly concussed. Grabbing someone like that by the collar and smacking their cheeks wouldn’t help in the slightest—but the spider didn’t feel any particular obligation to gently point that out, so he simply kept his mouth shut.
“Gen, hey, come on, wake up!”
“Uuugh… Bla… save me….”
“Hani, look! He’s alive! I think he’s still alive!”
“Seems like it. Though probably not for long.”
From being slapped.
“W-What should I do?! Should I try CPR?!”
“Haha, sure, Bee-Bee. Let’s see how that goes.”
“N-No… don’t… don’t you dare….”
Somehow surviving the fall only meant a new kind of threat loomed over him. A slow, excruciating, and horrifying death barreled toward him like a runaway train—mouth-to-mouth from a honeybee. Desperately trying to fend it off, the rhinoceros beetle groaned in anguish.
“Hani, hic, Gen’s not breathing…!”
“Well, that’s because you’re choking him while doing CPR.”
The honeybee blinked his tear-filled eyes at the soft, amused voice. His lips parted in a daze but couldn’t form a single word, only a pitiful breath escaping instead.
“Gah!”
“Now, what do we have going on here?”
Suddenly, everything went black. A metallic taste flooded his mouth. It took a moment for the breathlessness and searing pain in his chest to register.
“Tch. How dare some pathetic flying bug pull something like this? You’ve got a death wish.”
His guts hadn’t spilled out yet, but they might as well have. Blaine thrashed helplessly against the pain that felt like his body had been shattered against a boulder, wheezing out grotesque sounds. Then, the instant the weight crushing his chest lifted, breath whooshed into his lungs. He collapsed, gasping, vision blurry but gradually clearing.
“You little bastard… who do you think you’re messing with…?”
The creature that had just been stomping on Blaine’s chest was sent flying across the room in a flash. A blinding white spider gritted his teeth, dark smoke curling around him in fury.
Hurel had crossed the room in a heartbeat and now gently lifted Blaine up.
“Bee-Bee, are you okay? Can you stand?”
“Ugh….”
Blaine nodded to say don’t worry, but he couldn’t form words yet. The soothing hands rubbing his back and patting it softly helped calm him down, and he slowly managed to catch his breath. The deathly pallor in his face began to fade.
“S-Sage….”
Blaine turned his head at General’s rough, cracked voice. The creature that had been hurled into the wall was now stalking toward them, fury blazing in his icy expression.
His light gray hair was a mess of dust and debris, but it was clear that underneath the dirt, the color must’ve been strikingly beautiful.
“Ha… figures. Of course only one creature in this world would be audacious enough to barge into someone’s home uninvited and slam the host into a wall. What a joy to see that goddamn face again….”
“Ugh… Sage, did you really hate seeing me again that much?”
The man glanced back at the rhinoceros beetle, who now had tears welling up in his eyes. His expression had gone cold, which only made his sharp, sculpted features stand out even more.
The delicate slant of his eyes and the way his silvery-gray irises shimmered beneath his lashes were beautiful—but the sharp lines of his nose and firmly closed lips kept him from looking soft in any way.
More than anything, it was the way his face twisted in displeasure that raised the atmosphere’s tension, making it abundantly clear: this man was a predator.
Blaine, the prey, felt a chill crawl across his skin on instinct.
And then, just like that, the chill in the air melted, as if someone had dropped a warm stone into a frozen lake.
“Oh no, General. That’s not what I meant. As if I wouldn’t want to see you again….”
“You’re not mad because I barged in on my own?”
“Of course not. You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for you.”
Whispering with a voice dripping in sweet affection, the man gently caressed the beetle’s rough, bulky face with the same tenderness. The spider watching this scene let out a breathy scoff, utterly dumbfounded.
It was disturbingly familiar.
“General, you hurt your wing, didn’t you? Poor thing.”
“Yeah… I was trying to help my friends and the fire spread to me…”
“Ah, how unfortunate—no, wait, I mean, what a shame….”
Even Blaine—who had the situational awareness of a rock—could tell something was off.
The way the man had completely shifted from moments ago into someone smiling with soft, easy grace—it was eerily familiar. Almost like he had a second personality.
“Hey, Hurel… is he your brother or something?”
“What kind of nonsense is that? Where do you even see a resemblance?”
“…I dunno… kinda looks like you….”
Hurel was slender and lovely, while this man had the kind of features you’d call classically handsome—a beautifully sculpted face more than a pretty one. But it wasn’t just about appearances. There was something deeper. Something eerily alike.
Still, Hurel only smiled and said, Stop talking nonsense, before pinching Blaine’s thin lips playfully between his thumb and forefinger and pulling them out.
“Mmph, no….”
“Fucking hell….”
The man with gray hair—who had been tenderly soothing the beetle just moments ago—stood frozen in place, slack-jawed.
The expression on his face made it seem like if he could, he’d scoop out his own eyeballs.
“…What the actual hell… Is he seriously doing that? Did he finally lose his damn mind?”
“Huh? Did you say something just now…?”
The words had slipped out of his mouth before he could stop them. Flustered, the man quickly shook his head as if to say it was nothing.
The master of this wooden lair—known for digging pitfall traps into tree hollows and capturing wingless victims to eat alive—finally seemed to realize things weren’t going the way he wanted.
Groaning, he pressed his hand to his aching forehead.
***
Ceasefire.
The word clearly meant a pause in war brought on by unavoidable circumstances or negotiation—not that the war was over.
Which was probably why the air inside the Sage’s house, despite the lack of windows, was filled with nothing but an icy breeze.
The two spiders sat facing each other across the tea table, lips twitching with strained, forced smiles as they stared into each other’s dreadful faces.
“I was so surprised—who would’ve thought you two knew each other?!”
The rhinoceros beetle exclaimed with innocent wonder, but Blaine didn’t even take a sip of his tea, eyes wide as he stared intently at the man’s face.
“A friend of Hurel’s…”
Sure, Hurel had seen all of his colleagues and acquaintances in person, but Blaine knew nothing about his past relationships with other creatures. He wasn’t the type to say the past doesn’t matter; what matters is the present, either.
In fact, he was very, very curious what kind of childhood Hurel had to end up like this.
“Friend, huh? We were much closer than that… once.”
“Yeah. That’s right. F…friends.”
Unlike Hurel’s usual soft, dreamy smile like bubbles, or his gently lethargic expression like blooming flowers, both spiders were smiling now—but something about it creaked.
“We’re very close… oh yes.”
“Of course. There’s nothing we don’t know about each other.”
