I Stopped Simping and the Heroines Lost Their Minds

Arthur held the pulsing, pitch-black core in his bloody palm.

”Boss?” Emily asked, stepping closer. ”What is that? F-Rank cores are supposed to be gray.”

Arthur stared at the jagged stone. He had memorized the wiki for Lornfell’s Legacy. He knew every mob drop, every spawn rate, and every dungeon layout. But looking at this mutated core, his mind drew a complete blank.

”I don’t know,” Arthur said honestly, his voice tight. He dropped the stone into his spatial inventory. ”Keep your eyes open. Whatever did this to an F-Rank mob is still down here.”

He led the squad deeper, tracking the heavy, misshapen footprints of the mutated goblin. The tunnel grew narrower. The temperature plummeted.

They squeezed through a jagged fissure in the cavern wall and stepped into a massive, hidden chamber.

Arthur’s night vision flared.

The walls weren’t regular stone anymore. They were entirely covered in thick, pulsing veins of pitch-black ore. The dark minerals glowed with a sick, toxic light, casting long, unnatural shadows across the cavern floor. In the center of the room was a massive crater filled with thick, gray webbing and shattered bones.

”Look at all this ore,” Felix whispered, his eyes wide. ”We could mine this. It’s got to be worth a fortune.”

”Don’t touch it,” Arthur ordered sharply. The ambient mana in the room felt heavy and suffocating. It felt fundamentally wrong.

Before Felix could ask why, the cavern ceiling shifted.

A horrific, wet screech echoed through the chamber. A Cave Spider Matriarch dropped from the darkness, landing heavily in the center of the crater.

It was the size of a magi-transport van. But it wasn’t a normal arachnid. Thick plates of the unknown black ore had fused directly to its exoskeleton, acting like heavy, jagged armor. Its eight red eyes locked onto the squad, and its massive mandibles snapped open, dripping a glowing, blackish-green venom.

”Formation!” Arthur roared, falling back and drawing his bow.

”I’ve got the line!” Felix shouted.

The Matriarch didn’t hesitate. It lunged with terrifying speed, raising two massive, armored front legs like scythes. It brought them down directly onto Felix in a devastating overhead strike.

CLANG.

The Aegis Bulwark caught the blow. The sheer kinetic force forced Felix down to both knees, the heavy metal ringing loudly.

But the strike wasn’t just physical. A wave of sick, blackish-green venom splashed off the spider’s mandibles, spraying directly across Felix’s exposed right shoulder.

The heavy leather armor instantly began to sizzle and melt.

Felix grunted in agonizing pain as the toxic venom ate through the fabric, biting into his skin. His grip on the shield faltered. If the shield dropped, the spider would instantly impale him.

”Cleanse!” Chloe screamed.

She didn’t freeze. She stepped right up behind Felix, slamming her staff into the ground. A bright, purifying burst of white mana shot from her pendant, washing completely over the tank. The sizzling venom evaporated into harmless steam, and the necrotic rot on his shoulder vanished.

”I’m good! I’m good!” Felix roared, adrenaline surging as he violently shoved the massive shield upward, throwing the Matriarch off balance.

”Break its legs!” Arthur commanded from the rear.

Emily was already moving. She used Felix’s shove as the perfect distraction. She blurred past the shield, sliding across the gravel right under the Matriarch’s armored bulk.

She targeted the back left leg—the only joint not fully covered by the black ore.

”Shatter!” Emily yelled, channeling every ounce of her mana into her Titan Knuckles.

She delivered a brutal, upward haymaker directly into the spider’s exposed knee joint.

CRACK.

The thick leg snapped backward with the sound of a falling tree. The Matriarch shrieked in absolute agony. Deprived of its anchor, the massive beast violently collapsed onto its left side, its heavy black armor dragging it down into the dirt.

Its soft, fleshy underbelly and central eye cluster were completely exposed.

Arthur was already at full draw.

He didn’t just use his normal strength. He tapped deeply into his Troll Blood vitality, pulling the heavy bowstring back so far the wood groaned under the pressure. He infused a dense, lethal spark of mana directly into the arrowhead.

He tracked the thrashing monster, exhaled, and let go.

THWIP.

The arrow broke the sound barrier. It streaked across the cavern and punched directly through the Matriarch’s central eye cluster. The heavy shaft buried itself to the fletching, piercing straight into the monster’s corrupted brain.

The Matriarch convulsed violently, its remaining legs thrashing against the gravel for three agonizing seconds before it finally went entirely limp.

Silence rushed back into the cavern.

Emily rolled out from under the dead beast, completely covered in dust and spider ichor, panting heavily. Felix collapsed backward onto his ass, letting the heavy shield drop as he caught his breath. Chloe sank to her knees, her hands shaking as she clutched her staff.

They had just flawlessly executed a mutated boss monster.

”Perfect,” Arthur said, walking forward with his hunting knife drawn. ”That’s exactly how we hold the line.”

”What the hell was that thing?” Emily gasped, wiping sweat from her eyes. ”That wasn’t an F-Rank.”

”It’s a mutation,” Arthur replied, his eyes scanning the pulsing black veins on the walls. ”Harvest everything. The silk, the uncorrupted venom glands, and any loose ore fragments around the nest. Do not touch the walls.”

The squad got to work. They were exhausted, but the adrenaline of the kill kept them moving. Emily and Felix began carefully extracting the valuable silk.

Arthur knelt directly by the Matriarch’s ruined head.

He drove his knife into the thick skull, digging deep into the gore. He pulled out the dungeon core. It was entirely black, but a massive, jagged splinter was protruding from the center, pulsing with a sick, heavy energy.

Arthur snapped the splinter off the main core. He tossed the standard boss core into the squad’s shared loot pile.

But the pulsing splinter? He slipped that directly into his personal inventory space.

As soon as the item entered his storage, a faint blue screen materialized directly in front of Arthur’s eyes.

[System Notification]

[Unknown Route Progress: 1%]

[Abyssal Signal Fragment Acquired.]

Arthur stared at the glowing blue text. His brow furrowed.

Abyssal.

He knew that word. In the game’s lore, the Abyss was absolute endgame mythos. It was the unreachable, final-tier threat that players only read about in flavor text before the servers shut down. It had absolutely no business being inside a beginner’s dirt cave.

And Unknown Route?

Arthur clenched his jaw, dismissing the screen. His entire advantage in this world was his meta-knowledge. If the system was generating ”unknown” routes, it meant he was completely off the map.

”Pack up the loot,” Arthur ordered, his voice sharper than before. ”We’re done here. Let’s move out.”