Ashton squatted down in front of the spider queen's body. Gordy had done a real number on her. There was a pool of dark blue blood on the ground that had started to congeal and turn into a mass of mud on the ground, mixing in with small bits of concrete and dust and dirt.

  This place was mostly a really well-protected nest, so Ashton had actually been curious about how Gordy had come in here. Ashton himself had been the one to rip open that spider-silk dome, after all. However, as he walked around the spider queen's body and looked around more, he spotted a small hole on the far side of the dome. From the scraps of food, plastic packaging, and empty water bottles laying in that hole, it seemed like Gordy had just been sitting in there ever since the spider queen showed up and made this place.

  Since there was nothing important in that hole, Ashton just focused on the corpse itself. This spider queen was, all in all, around the size of one of the giant spiders outside, maybe a little bit larger, but she looked very different in other ways.

  The colour of her chitin and the hairs covering her body, and the patterns that covered her body overall. Her legs were a lot longer proportionally, too. The chitin was far thicker. Maybe he should bring some of this back, it might be a great material to add onto Paul's shield. Since he was studying entomology before this all started, he might get pretty excited about this in general. He did seem quite curious about the spiders before Ashton left earlier.

  Ashton had stashed a few things in Sam's office, so the Backpacker had more than enough space for anything that he could ever try to give to them. He grabbed that meat-cleaver that he had gotten from a goblin and, though it was already on the blunt side, used it to continue widening the cracks along the spider queen's body before prying a large chunk of chitin away. It was actually a spot with a pretty neat pattern that should look good on a shield.

  Anyway, with that given to the Backpacker, Ashton moved on to harvesting some of the other parts of the queen's body.

  For one, Ashton cut out the heart and pulled the long tube, which was as long as he was tall, out of the corpse. Gordy had bitten some chunks out of this, and seemed to have destroyed parts of the long crystal threads that were growing alongside this heart, but there were plenty that were still perfectly intact. And even the ones that had been at least broken in half, you could still do a lot with those halves.

  Ashton tried to be as careful as he possibly could be. It was a sort of satisfying sensation once you got a good grip on a piece of the mana stone thread and got to fully pull it out without it breaking. Plus, the spider queen had far more of these threads than other spiders, so Ashton managed to get a ton out of this even though a few of them still broke apart.

  With that done, Ashton moved on to another incredibly important part of the spider queen's body. The ovaries. In here, hundreds of small spider eggs, just before being laid, were laying in wait. They were stock-full with magic, and had some niche uses in potions. But one of the potions that these spider-eggs could be used for was a genuinely insanely useful one, allowing you to stick to surfaces like a spider. There were other ways to get the same effect, but these young spider-eggs, not even close to ready to be laid, were one of the best that Ashton figured he could get anytime soon.

  Once Ashton had collected everything from the body, he moved on to the head and thorax.

  Basically, he quickly plucked out the spider queen's eyes and venom gland, and was then done collecting everything that he needed from the queen. Though the body looked relatively fresh, he didn't know how long it had actually been since this monster died, so Ashton didn't want to risk anything by eating it.

  "I should ask Paul how to preserve these things," Ashton muttered to himself as he gave the jar of spider-eyes to the backpacker. In Lumia, he didn't have to worry about that, because all the materials in the storage item they were kept in were magically preserved. Ashton didn't have access to that sort of magic right now, though. But well, he figured that an entomologist would know at least a little bit about where to get your hands on the right materials to preserve these on earth.

  "What are you doing?" he raised a brow as he climbed back out of this hole, seeing Sabrina standing over Gordy's body. She was really just staring down at him, not saying anything. She didn't even look over at Ashton when he asked.

  Instead, she just quietly replied, "Nothing... nothing, just... I guess I'm trying to see if he's really dead."

  "Oh, yeah don't worry, I made sure of that," Ashton explained, though he caught himself just as he said it. That was an absolutely insane thing to say, wasn't it? Consciously he knew that he shouldn't let other people see how used he was to killing, but being in this situation was another thing.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Frankly, Sabrina didn't seem all that shocked at the idea that Ashton had killed Gordy. Seeing him laying on the ground looking like that, it might be hard to still think of Gordy as a full human being. Ashton went through some severe physical changes for certain periods of times back in Lumia, and ones that were this severe, ones that took his humanity away in the manner that this transformation did... made him want to rather die than keep living on.

  Of course, he couldn't speak for Gordy, but Ashton still pitied him, the way that he was laying there on the ground. With his face bashed in, it was hard to recognise him as a human. If the transformation had continued, the man called 'Gordy' would have probably disappeared from this world, and the only thing left behind would have been the king of Drakewood's spider army.

  But that wasn't really what Gordy had been to Sabrina. It didn't sound like they had really gotten along before, nor that Sabrina was even comfortable around him, but seeing him laying there on the ground, especially after being changed into something so... inhuman, must be a rather complicated feeling.

  At least that was something that Ashton didn't have to go through. Yes, he knew that he wouldn't always be able to save the people that he cared about, so it was possible that something terrible could happen to his loved ones, but that wasn't the case in Lumia.

  Over there, the only ones that he could ever see changed or killed were people that he had no connection to whatsoever. By the time he had gotten close enough to some of the summons to care about them enough, Ashton had already grown numb to this sort of death, especially considering that those summons would come back again and again and again even if they were brutally killed. And now that he was here, even if he saw something like this, even if the man that was laying on the ground there, distorted and twisted into something so unrecognisable had been Sam... Ashton wasn't sure how he would react.

  Was he still human enough to grieve his best friend? One of the people he cared for the most in this world? Or was he-

  "Disgusting bastard," Sabrina spat down at Gordy's dead body, interrupting Ashton's cycle of self-pitying thoughts.

  "... Huh? Oh, you weren't in disbelief, you were just double-checking that I actually killed him?"

  Sabrina looked over at Ashton, grimacing slightly, "Judge me if you want, but this guy was absolute scum when he was alive. I had heard rumours about him. Nonce shit, you know? But well, I never really cared too much, I had my own shit to worry about to bother to try and figure out if there was any truth to it. But you said that this guy was a 'Marked', right? And you can only become a Marked if you kill people?"

  Ashton was quiet for a moment, staring down at Gordy's body. Maybe he was too harsh with the constellations earlier after all. If those rumours were true, then maybe this guy was never a human to begin with. "... Yeah, at least at this point in time. You can also become a Marked if you actively torture or kill a large amount of people as well, but one of the more straightforward ways is through the first main quest."

  "Well, in that case, if this guy decided to kill a guy, then maybe there's some weight to those rumours after all. Not that it changes anything now." Sabrina clicked her tongue, limping over to the doorway. "You wanted me to check on the other bodies, right?"

  Ashton slowly nodded, following behind her. Ashton squatted down in front of the bundled-up corpses. He opened all of them, just to be sure. Most of them were already dissolved beyond recognition. Though, it was clear that there were three humans here, two goblins, and a lizardman. A geckarian, specifically.

  "Do any of these look like they could be the other two that came back with Gordy?" Ashton asked, but Sabrina was holding a hand in front of her face. She was extremely pale. "If you need to throw up, then..."

  As though that moment of permission was enough, Sabrina dropped down onto her knees and emptied out the contents of her stomach onto the sidewalk next to the casino. It was pretty dark inside, so she probably didn't see Gordy's corpse properly. But these properly-illuminated, dissolved corpses were pretty nasty-looking.

  "Backpacker, could you?" he asked, specifically pinging a bottle of water and a can in the corner of the spirit's storage. The small figure walked up to Sabrina and handed them both to her when she was done throwing up. "Wash out your mouth with that water, and then... you can have that soda if you want. Might help get rid of the taste a bit more. Plus, you lost a lot of blood, so a bit of sugar wouldn't hurt either."

  "... You carry around soda?"

  Ashton shrugged. "I like sweet things."

  Him and poppy had that in common. That was why every time he gave a bit of candy to her, he would pop a small piece into his mouth as well. It wasn't that sugar was hard to come by in Lumia, but the people over there weren't human and had different tastes. He was pretty sure a lot of them couldn't even taste it, so it was mostly used medicinally or as an abrasive in cleaning products. They still needed sugars to survive, obviously, but they would get it through other types of carbs.

  That was why 'candy wasn't really a thing until Ashton simply played around and tried to make a bit some day while the Summoner was resting. The fellow sweet-toothed summons quickly took a liking to it, though it was utterly horrible, so Ashton was told to keep making more. Until then, the main source of sweetness to keep summons like pixies happy was fruit.

  "It's not them," Sabrina explained, snapping Ashton out of his memory again. He really was reminiscing a lot. Weird, in Lumia, he could only ever think of Earth. But here on Earth, he kept thinking back on Lumia.

  "Are you sure?" Ashton looked down at the bodies. They weren't exactly recognisable.

  "Yeah, I'm sure. One of the other two had a neck tattoo, none of those three have one. The third was missing an eye and was, sorry to be crude, way fucking fatter than any of those."

  "Hm, alright, if you say so," Ashton replied. That didn't match the description of the Marked he had killed yesterday, either. Well, that guy had also definitely killed more than just one or two people. Ashton shrugged, turning back around. "In that case, we've got two other Marked running around the area. So that's good to know. Come back inside when you can, I'll start looking for those slot machines now."