Ashton pulled back as Gordy lunged at him, pushing his staff at the monstrous man's chest. Clearly, Gordy didn't care enough to dodge out of the way of attacks, thinking that he could just take anything.

  Hell, he was even still swinging his broken arm around, not caring for the pain that he was experiencing. Some people got more lost in the monster side of things, and others managed to keep their human personality perfectly.

  Gordy was, very obviously, one of the former.

  Ashton was actually pretty curious about how and why certain people were able to keep their personality, while others turned into spider-eating freaks. One of which Ashton currently tried to keep at a distance with his staff. But Gordy was strong. Really, really strong.

  Gordy seemed to be able to walk forward effortlessly despite the staff pressed into his chest, while Ashton slid backward over the ground. Even when he tried to push back against this with all his strength, Ashton was barely able to slow Gordy down a little bit.

  "This shit is... so... unfair," Ashton groaned, as he very suddenly pulled back his staff and span it forward, hitting Gordy on the head while jumping out of the way. He immediately moved on from this by continuing to spin his staff around while trying his best to dodge out of the way.

  Sure, Gordy was strong, but he was also incredibly slow on foot. The only thing that he had going for him that made dodging a little annoying were his freakishly long arms. Seriously, if his overall proportions weren't changed through the transformation, then he must have been a weird looking guy to begin with. No wonder Sabrina immediately knew who Ashton was talking about when he asked about a 'spider-looking guy'.

  Of course, while he was dodging, he was also trying to attack. By hitting him with his staff, obviously, but also through the elementals. However, there was another issue with that. With how close all the dodging was, Ashton was really struggling to hit Gordy with the wisp.

  He couldn't afford to do any of the weirder moves that he usually did when trying to hit a close-by target, but shrinking down his channelling range that much also really strained him. It was like that incessant exhaustion after staying up for too long, or at the end of a massive overtime shift.

  Ashton could practically feel that sensation forcing its way into his head the more he tried to compress his channelling range. Clearly, this wasn't the right way to do it. There had to be something else he could do, right? A better way to give him more control over his summons. Ashton pulled his staff toward himself, and the wisp hit him in the stomach. Of course, he jumped backward as he did, so the impact itself was nothing more than a slightly uncomfortable thud, but it wouldn't even cause a bruise. Either way, it definitely helped him dodge backward.

  As built a little bit more distance with that move, Ashton was now closer to some of the tables. Specifically, he was standing right in front of the poker table, and pushed his staff into the ground while jumping up to quickly leap up onto the table surface.

  Gordy swung his arm forward, and the four massive legs that were protruding from his lower back moved perfectly in tune. They would copy whatever his 'focused' hand was currently doing.

  Whenever Gordy punched forward, the spider legs would stab themselves forward while surrounding the punching arm, if he swung to the side, then the legs would similarly swing to that direction, barely letting themselves be stopped by the slot machines that were in the way. Rather, those machines were promptly dented or fell over. The ones that were still standing before now, at least.

  This casino looked like it had been a nest to these spiders for weeks. There was basically no surface that wasn't covered in webs or spider threads to some extent.

  Loads of the tables and machines had been destroyed, and Ashton didn't even want to mention all those large bundles of web hanging from the walls. Those were either egg-sacs or people and monsters that had been dragged in here for food.

  But since Ashton was used to fighting in ruined environments like this, it wasn't really an issue. He had a rough idea of the layout of this place and where everything was located. At least, the important parts. Where it was safe to step, where there were areas where he might trip if he wasn't careful. And, of course, where the places where that he could take advantage of in a fight.

  Standing on the table in front of Gordy, Ashton let go of the staff with one hand and started gathering up some air while continuing to direct the concrete wisp at the man before him.

  That man then slammed down on the edge of the table that Ashton was standing on, and the four legs on his back quickly followed behind. The table was broken into small pieces immediately, and the thin fabric laid out on top of it was torn. Immediately, Ashton jumped up to get off the collapsing table, but used the air he had gathered through the sylph to blast all the splinters, and most importantly that green fabric, directly at Gordy.

  He continued to use gusts of air to force the fabric onto Gordy's face, just long enough to blind him. Ashton placed both hands onto his staff again, pointing one end at Gordy. He then made his mana pattern flip inside the staff, to have the wisp immediately shoot from one side of Ashton's channelling range to the other. Gordy was hit in the back of the head by the wisp while Ashton used the short moments where Gordy was practically blinded build up some more distance to him.

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  However, something happened that Ashton didn't quite expect. The four legs growing from Gordy's back caught the wisp. It had a layer of concrete around it, and the legs seemed to have pierced into that concrete in four distinct spots where it was possible for them to stop the wisp from moving.

  That had never happened before. Sure, the wisp wasn't some kind of unstoppable force, and while there were some monsters that reacted to it before getting their faces smashed in, there was never anything or anyone that was able to actually catch it like this.

  Especially considering how slow Gordy had been, there was no way that he would be able to react that fast. Unless...

  "... he's been playing around this whole time." A nervous grin appeared on Ashton's face as he stared at the spider-human in front of him. He instantly told the wisp to shrink down as much as it could, and even had it shed the concrete that it took on earlier to let the wisp slip out of the legs' grasp.

  He took a quick look at the wisp, trying to make sure that the elemental wasn't injured in any way. There were some scratches on their usually perfectly smooth surface, but that was something that could be 'healed' pretty easily with just a little bit of mana.

  But before he could even call the wisp closer to himself to actually do that, Gordy dropped onto the ground. Ashton could hear the sound of him scurrying around the room, climbing onto and over the metal slot machines. It was so dark in here that it was tough to actually follow Gordy's movements perfectly. If it weren't for the sounds that he was making, together with a ridiculously creepy cackling that was making Ashton's skin crawl, he would have had no idea where this guy was running off to.

  But soon, the sound of the steps started sounding different. The light given off by the wisp was barely enough to show some outlines and shadows in this dark space, so it took Ashton a while to notice what was actually going on. But before long, he realised; Gordy was running on the ceiling.

  Of course, 'running' might have been the wrong word. It really looked like he was crawling, with his body parallel to the ceiling and floor.

  "Marked always look so fucking creepy," Ashton shuddered slightly. What was happening was obvious.

  That constellation, the Eight-Legged Queen, seeing the perfect candidate, had given Gordy a large amount of power in return for basically complete control. A constellation so clearly aligned with spiders would obviously pay attention to an area where such a large amount of arachnids appeared, and seeing a Marked with spider-like features in its centre would seem like hitting the absolute jackpot.

  Ashton smiled lightly. That meant he was probably going to make an enemy amongst the constellations right now, after all, although he wanted to avoid that as much as he could.

  He cracked his knuckles and had the wisp pull in some of the stale air from the surrounding. Cobwebs and spider threads were being pulled toward them, but the wisp shot away before anyone could get tangled up.

  Ashton had also made it shrink down as much as possible, so the speed at which the magic elemental could travel while being infused with air now was frankly ridiculous. And of course, the wisp was extremely light right now as well, but speed had a higher impact on the resulting force than the mass of an object. Frankly, with this speed, each of the tiny wisp's impacts at top speed were comparable to the base wisp at their 'neutral' state. Uninfused and their size unaltered.

  Basically, right now, the bottleneck was more about how fast Ashton was able to spin his staff around. But he also had a small trick for that.

  While the air wisp was shooting around the dark environment, controlled by Ashton's staff, he switched his mana pattern to make the wisp shoot back and forth between the two ends of the channelling range at the fastest speed that it could muster.

  Like this, despite Gordy's fast movements, Ashton was able to hit him wherever he was trying to hide on the ceiling. Of course, at this speed, it was also hard to actually hit the exact spots that he was aiming for, but the sheer attack speed was making up for it. It was also exhausting as fuck, but that was something Ashton could deal with after the fight.

  He kept aiming for Gordy's legs, trying to make them detach from the ceiling. Of course, Gordy was still moving along and trying to get Ashton, so they were in the middle of a race that often resulted in Ashton ducking under tables or vaulting over them with the help of his staff.

  About ten minutes passed like this. Ashton was getting a few decent hits in, but since he was concentrating on not being trapped, or even hit at all, by Gordy, he was missing far more than he wanted to. It also wasn't like Gordy was the only threat here.

  Wherever Ashton went, there were tons of those tiny spiders that attacked him when he first came in here. There were a handful of larger arachnids as well, though nothing all too troublesome.

  However, Ashton wasn't quite sure of something. The spiders were still cooperating a bit too much for his liking. The queen was dead, so technically, the spiders should be scattering by now. But then, he thought of what the spider queen looked like when Ashton got to her.

  She had clearly already been dead for at least a few hours, but the spiders outside barely showed a sign of having changed their behaviour. So... maybe Gordy didn't just speed up his transformation by eating her. Maybe he also took over her position.

  It didn't make much of a difference, of course. Ashton was going to kill him anyway, but it still made things a bit more troublesome. He didn't know a ton of specifics about Marked to begin with, and this showed that there were a lot of surface-level things he didn't understand about them yet, either.

  "Just..." Ashton saw a moment, a slight gleam that made his heart skip a beat. He twisted his staff in an awkward way and redirected the movement of the wisp, and managed to hit one of the spider-legs at exactly the right moment. The wisp was basically between the tip of the leg and the ceiling at this point, and immediately, Ashton released all of the air that was stored inside of the wisp.

  A strong gust of air made Gordy stop for a moment, and Ashton immediately told the wisp to increase in size and slammed his staff down. Gordy was hit in the stomach and lost his grip, falling down onto the ground. The legs tried to twist around and catch him, but by then, Ashton was already waiting.

  He hit one of the legs with his staff and managed to crack the chitin. As the leg twitched and curled up, he hit the next, and the next, and soon, Gordy dropped onto his back on the ground.

  Ashton hovered over him for just a second, holding his staff tightly while he breathed heavily, "That was a good fight."

  The next thing that sounded out was a loud crunch, as Ashton put his entire weight into slamming the steel caps of his staff into Gordy's face.

  [You have killed a [Marked Human]. For your efforts, you are awarded 35 Coins]

  [Your favourability with the Constellation [Eight-Legged Queen] has dropped significantly for killing their Disciple]

  [You are now an enemy of the Constellation [Eight-Legged Queen]]