by Harry Nix
Defanged and slightly shocked, something must have finally got through to its arachnid brain. It yelped something that almost sounded like a word through its smashed mouth and then I finally hit it with Bolt, shocking it to the ground. I grabbed the Echo Knife from beside Scarlet who was on her knees and weaving like she was drunk.
The spider stabbed at me with its feet and I took some damage but I didn’t care. I got in close and went to town with the Echo Knife. The first two stabs had no mirrors but the next six or so did. I couldn’t be sure how many times I stabbed it but it might have been thirty times in under a minute. I would have kept going in some mindless frenzy but then Scarlet crashed to the ground behind me.
All three spiders were well and truly dead... but so was Scarlet.
She was frothing at the mouth, looking up at me with terror in her eyes.
“Please, I’m sorry,” she gasped before she choked and died.
“Scarlet, no!” I shouted. Some old first-aid training came to me and I was giving her chest compressions, singing that old Bee Gees song for the timing. After a few minutes I stopped.
Her icon was grayed out. So was Ori’s. I looked for him but there was no body, just some ink smears on the dead spider with the ax buried in its body.
I was still slightly poisoned but I hardly felt it. I sank to the ground beside Scarlet, touching her shoulder, her arm, as though she’d just wake up.
I don’t know really how long I sat there in some kind of shock. Could have been a minute or an hour. The poison status had worn off though.
What brought me back was Ori’s icon lighting up again, going back to full color.
I hit it and my hands began casting on their own. I spoke words I didn’t understand and then the portal opened and out shot Ori. He hit the spider that killed him dead on and burst like a water balloon but quickly reformed.
As he was doing his liquid terminator thing, Scarlet’s icon came back to color. It wasn’t until I hit it, using up the last of my mana, that I wondered how she would react seeing her own dead body. It was too late to change it by then though. The portal opened and out strolled Scarlet like she was taking a leisurely walk down the beach. She was wearing a duplicate of her graveyard dress.
I opened my arms to hug her but she stepped back.
“Whoa there! You’re covered in dead spider and Demoness vomit. Is there any part of you that’s clean?”
I looked down and saw she was right. I was filthy.
“The end of my little finger, I think,” I said, checking my hands.
Scarlet put out her hand, and we touched the ends of our pinkies together in a very careful sliver of a high-five.
“So sad to see the hot die so young,” Scarlet said, crouching down beside her own dead body.
With the life gone from it, the red of her skin had somewhat faded. She was still staring up at the sky. Scarlet used a finger to close her own eyes and then found some leaves to clean the Echo Knife before reaching into her dead bodies’ cleavage to grab the graveyard spike.
Ori had finally reformed. He wasn’t talking but didn’t seem too unhappy. He set about collecting the spider fangs that I bashed out of mouths. We found five in quick succession, but the one that poisoned me after being shot out took a good half hour of searching. In the meantime, Scarlet gathered leaves, wrapped them around the hilt of the barbarian’s ax to avoid the blood, and managed to dislodge it.
Looking over the destruction around us and smelling the blood, vomit, and whatever else that was all over me, I was nearly ready to call it. Just three half-sick spiders had killed Scarlet and Ori, and it was just sheer luck they hadn’t taken me down.
One more spider, though, and we’d get the bonus. A gold for a day out in the forest. That would buy a night to sleep, food, and better gear than these rags. Gear up, run it again, climb the ladder.
On the other hand... it was likely the spiders got stronger the deeper we went into the forest. Although I knew if I died, I’d end up in a graveyard, I didn’t want to test it. I especially didn’t want to find out if Scarlet’s original graveyard was the nearest one.
I noticed a small image of a scroll on my HUD that hadn’t been there before. Tapping it with a finger, it opened up to a recount of the fight. No damage numbers listed but just text, me stabbing the spider, and so on.
I scrolled it to the top and found the burst of gold writing I’d missed. When I’d rolled, it had registered as Critical—Level One Clowning. So falling on my face in front of Scarlet had been useful in the end. I swiped it away and checked my experience. I was about three-quarters of the way to level three. There was no info about what would happen at level three. Maybe a spell, or possibly nothing. Hopefully, I’d get some choice in the future because while Bolt was useful, it had downsides, like shocking Ori and Scarlet. I needed an attack that wasn’t so indiscriminate.
I was looking at the barbarian’s ax, wondering the ethics of selling it when I focused on a plant on the far side of the small battleground. The leaves were broken, bent away from us. There was a footprint underneath too. It was the strangest thing—I could feel the details leaping out at me.
Investigation level one!
Veni vidi vici. I came, I saw, I conquered. You came, you saw, you... have a clue on the barbarian. Are you going to leave him to his fate?
An accept, and decline button appeared. Adaptive questing here we go.
I stuck my staff to my back and then tried the same with the barbarian’s ax but got a message saying I could only have one weapon bound to me at a time. No problem, I could just carry it.
Despite the fact I was still in graveyard rags and we’d nearly wiped, I hit accept and the quest joined the list.
“We’ll see if we can find the barbarian, maybe save him. If we kill some spiders, all the better. If we rescue him, then we’re going back to Bron to turn in the fangs. Get the hells out of here,” I said.
“So we’re just going to leave my dead body here like this?” Scarlet said, hand on hip.
That had been my plan but I kept that to myself.
“We can bury it maybe,” I said. The ground was soft-ish.
“It’s so easy to get you,” Scarlet said with a grin. Then she waved me over.
“Get some of that demoness blood first,” she said.
I pressed the end of my staff against dead Scarlet’s arm, where the spider had bitten her. A moment later another sliver added to the demoness blood bar. I also got Spider Venom. Later on I’d have to see if using the collected fangs did anything.
“All done? Step back,” she said.
Me and Ori moved back as Scarlet knelt over her dead self. She murmured something that sounded like a prayer and then leaned down to kiss her dead body’s forehead. Then she quickly joined us. The body burst into flame and crumbled to white ash in all of five seconds.
“Bring any vials? Demoness ash is useful,” Scarlet said.
“Just my bag.”
“Give it a try,” she said.
The ash was cold by the time I scooped my hands though it. I managed to get a double handful, carefully dropping it into my bag of holding before the rest of it disintegrated away.
Demoness Ash
Useful for dark spells, staff enhancement and removing love curses.
I had a stack of two, taking up one slot. The other filled slot was still Reginald, the dead rabbit. Wondering if spoilage happened in the bag, I pulled his body out and found it still slightly warm, like it had been right after his death. I quickly stuffed it back in the bag. If we had to spend the night out here, it was our only food source.
I sure as hells did not want to spend the night in this forest.
Looking around one more time to see if there was anything I’d missed, I noticed none of the spiders that attacked us had been missing legs. Two had been pinned to the tree by the barbarian’s ax.
Hopefully, that meant the next spider we came across was weakened by injury, at least.
“Super slow
now,” I said.
Ori and Scarlet fell in behind me as we left the battlefield behind.
10
“Throw rocks, bash the webs, make a ruckus and then melt away,” I said.
Ori looked dubious, but he nodded and began carefully making his way out of the webs through the forest. I knew we had about half an hour before he’d get to the edge, so I settled back to wait, watching the clearing and the five spiders.
It had taken about an hour to find them, although they were only a short distance from the location of the last fight. We’d quickly come across the edges of webs laid out across the ground, the strands of them humming and vibrating as soon as anything touched them. That had slowed our progress to a crawl as we made our way through the forest to the heart of the enormous web that stretched out through it.
“These ones don’t look as sick as the other ones,” Scarlet whispered. She was twirling the Echo Knife between her fingers again.
She wasn’t wrong. Although the five spiders were covered with that red mold, they looked far healthier than the three we’d just fought. They were gathered around what had been a temple in the distant past. It was set in a clearing in the midst of the forest against the backdrop of a cliff, the hill overlooking it topped with boulders.
Near the temple, there was a golden statue of a headless centaur covered in old web and stuck to the side of it, partially wrapped, was the barbarian. His face was uncovered, but the dark purple suggested he wasn’t getting much oxygen. His eyes were closed, and from this distance, it was hard to tell whether he was alive or not.
In the midst of the clearing sat a large spider touching strands of web with its eight legs. It was covered in red mold too but didn’t seem as crazy as the other four spiders, which were twitching and screaming, running about the place.
As we sat there, a leaf drifted down from a tree, alighting on a web, causing some of the spiders to run towards it, screaming like drunks. When they found it was just a leaf, they returned to their ceaseless skittering about the clearing. One of them was missing two legs—the ones we’d found pinned to the tree.
Ori was going to hurl rocks back into the clearing, trying to hit the spider in the middle. Then he would make enough noise and send vibrations down the webs to hopefully lure the five of them away so we could get in and cut the barbarian down. If he was still alive, our plan was to drag him out of the clearing and take him with us up the hill until we were above the ruined temple. Hopefully, that would be enough distance for us to hide away from the spiders when they discovered their prey was gone.
If we could manage to revive the barbarian, then we’d either escape out of there or roll some rocks down on the spiders, hoping to kill as many of them as we could. The top of the cliff was the high ground, and although it was covered in webs, I thought we had a good chance of fighting the spiders off as they would have to come crawling up towards us. If not, well, I was getting myself ready for a resurrection in the nearest graveyard.
Another half-hour passed, me and Scarlet watching, before suddenly a rock came flying out of the forest, hitting the spider in the middle of the web dead on. It was followed by others. Ori must be out there somewhere hurling with all his might. Then he started yelling. The effect on the spiders was immediate. The one in the middle of the web screamed, and the other four went racing off running into the forest
The problem was, the spider in the middle of the web wasn’t moving much. It had taken a step or two but seemed it was going to stay behind, wrecking the whole plan. Then another rock came flying out of the forest in a perfect arc, smashing the spider in the face. It screamed in rage and abandoned its post at the center of the webs, chasing the four other spiders and soon disappearing.
“Go, go, go,” I urged. Up until now, we’d avoided stepping on the spider webs because we didn’t want to alert them, but there was no time for that now. Hoping that I wouldn’t hit one that was super sticky, I stomped my way out of the forest and down to where the temple stood, slowly crumbling into ruin. Scarlet was close behind me with the Echo Knife ready. With two quick swings of the barbarian’s ax, I managed to cut the two cables of web that had bound him to the centaur statue.
He crashed to the ground and then Scarlet went to work with the Echo Knife, slashing the web away from him. Up close I could see he was still alive but he was hardly breathing. The moment we got the web off him though, he managed to take a deep breath and some of the purple faded away from his face. He blearily opened his eyes and looked up at us.
“Ugh Lot,” he said.
Casting a glance in Ori’s direction, I couldn’t see him or the spiders, but I knew we had to hurry. Together, me and Scarlet got the barbarian up. It was like lifting a side of beef, but at least he had it together enough to realize what we were doing. It was hard for him to walk, but with the three of us, we managed to start tottering out of clearing heading for the small path I’d spotted that eventually led its way to the clifftop.
“Lot ax,” the barbarian groaned, spotting the ax that I was carrying.
“Yeah, it’s your ax. Now come on, we need to get away,” I said.
“Lot treasure,” the barbarian said and tried to wave his hand, pointing back at the ruined temple. Maybe there was a lot of treasure back there, but there was no way me and Scarlet could fight off all those spiders. We kept dragging the barbarian as he slowly came to, heading into the forest and up the steep hill. The webs vibrated under our feet, but there was no spider sitting in the center of the web to sense it.
We eventually reached the cliff top and I spotted a small clearing hidden behind the boulders. There was still a lot of webs everywhere, but it seemed the spiders hadn’t bothered much in this direction. We laid the barbarian down and he promptly threw up on the grass and then wiped his mouth before looking at us.
“Lot spiders,” he said, pointing towards the temple below.
“That’s right. There’s a lot of spiders,” I said.
I get it that the barbarian characters put all their points into strength and none into intelligence, but this one must’ve been really pushing it. It seems he hardly said two words at a time and one of them was always “Lot”.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Lot Lot,” the barbarian said, pointing at himself.
“I’m James. This is Scarlet and we have another demon, Ori. Once you’re feeling better, we’re thinking we roll some of these boulders down on the spiders,” I said.
“Lot spiders,” Lot said. In spite of his clear illness, likely from being poisoned, he seemed to understand what I was saying. I held out his ax to him and he gratefully took it, running his fingers down the handle and then nodding at me.
Leaving him to recover, I crept over amongst the boulders and looked down at the ruined temple below. If I thought the spiders were being crazy before, now they were in a frenzy. They had returned from chasing Ori and apparently hadn’t found him. His icon was still in full color, which means he hadn’t been attacked and poisoned.
Now they were running around the clearing, all five of them screaming like lunatics at finding the barbarian gone. They kept running up to the headless minotaur, feeling the cut webs as though they couldn’t believe it and then running around searching for whoever had done it. I saw the one that had sat in the middle of the web was moving slower, like it was a bloodhound sniffing, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before it found our trail.
“I don’t know if he’s going to be ready to fight,” Scarlet said, looking over at the barbarian.
“Lot fight. Kill Lot spiders. Get Lot treasure,” Lot said. He tried to pound on his own chest, got dizzy and fell backward before struggling to his feet again. I looked down at the spiders again, seeing the one from the center of the web was getting closer to the beginning of our trail.
I had to make a decision. Lot was standing, so I thought we had a good chance of getting away. The spiders hadn’t built their webs out much in this direction, and if we could get out in
to the forest and then loop our way back, we could get back to Bron. Either Ori would meet us along the way or I’d find a quiet spot and summon him.
Option number two was to roll some boulders down on the spiders, hopefully crushing all of them to death. Then we could collect a lot more fangs, get bonus silver and maybe see what this treasure the barbarian was talking about.
I looked back at Lot. He nodded at me eagerly and then grinned. Then he threw up again, but managed to wipe it off and gave me another grin and a thumbs-up.
“Oh, the hell with it. Let’s crush some spiders,” I said. I waved Lot over and told him the plan. Although it seemed like he didn’t have two brain cells to rub together, he got it quickly. It was a good thing he did because the boulders were a lot heavier than I’d imagined.
I put my shoulder to one of them and even with Scarlet, we could barely move it, but then Lot helped. Bracing his back against another one and using both his legs, he pushed out and the boulder came free, rolling off the clifftop and tumbling down it. I didn’t stop to see whether it hit any spiders or not. We just immediately moved to the next one and together, the three of us shoved it off the cliff. We went through four boulders in quick succession before exhausting the useful ones.
I finally stopped and looked down. One of the boulders had crushed a spider against a tree. It was still alive but probably wouldn’t be for long. Another spider was just a smear of blood and legs on the ground, but there were still three to go and they looked perfectly healthy. The spider who had sat in the middle of the web, the one I was starting to think was more intelligent than the rest, was screaming commands at the other two. The three of them split up and began running towards our location, coming directly up the cliff. It wasn’t the best path for them, especially if we had more boulders to throw, but there wasn’t much more left up there that we could move.
“Get ready,” I yelled. Down below I spotted Ori on the far side of the clearing creeping his way back along through the spider webs. He was too far away though to be of any use to us, but hopefully, he’d be able to get close before long, maybe blind a spider at least.
