Quickly, the flames spread through the room, with the heat pulling spiders closer to the fire, and a crackle like a bonfire starts to sound. The smell slowly wafts down to us, and it is like the scent of burning hair and rotten flesh.

  Given how quickly it has spread, the room temperature has risen to the point where we are starting to sweat.

  “We need to move,” Strauvana calls, not bothering to lower her voice with the sound of the roasting spiders surrounding us.

  Taking another look behind us, I notice the spiders that were getting closer have instead moved closer to the flames spreading down the walls. Screeching sounds are heard throughout the room, and the Queen has decided to grace us with her presence. While we haven’t done anything to give her an idea of where we are located, she appears to be smart enough that the small flame near the base of the wall might have been the reason for the ignition of her entire brood chamber.

  Following Strauvana, we give up the stealthy approach to skirting the room and instead start to run towards the location she has recently mentioned. Wanting to get the room fully burning, I see a glint of mania in Gibnic’s eyes. He starts casting more firebots into the surrounding webs. This is working wonderfully, except that the webbing is spreading the flames faster than we can run.

  “Gibnic, you need to stop! We will never be able to make it so safely if you keep blasting the webs and lighting our path, we won’t be able to get away from her!” Muiress shouts at the gnome.

  “Oh, you worry too much,” Gibnic shouts back, launching another bolt higher up the wall. More crackling is sounding, but there has been the inclusion of screeching of spiders that can withstand the flames a bit longer as they start to fall from the ceiling behind us.

  There is a loud thud, and we turn to see that the broodmother has dropped from the ceiling with parts of her setae burning. There aren’t many spots that have started to flame, but I can see they are slowing her movements down. Turning to look, I see Xelyphe is still holding onto the torch.

  “Xelyphe, you need to put out the torch. I think the mother is smarter than we are giving her credit for!” I call up to her. She starts to scramble to find a spot to snuff the torch out, but finds nothing useful other than the spider silk right next to us. She quickly thrusts it inside a patch, reasoning that it won’t burn the silk, we think.

  As quickly as she could, Strauvana grips Xelyphe’s arm. “Don’t you remember how we lit this torch? Do you know what would have happened if you were to thrust that into the webs right beside us?”

  Taking the briefest of moments to realize what she is talking about, I remember we had Gibnic light it with his magic. Sweating a little from the thought of bringing doom down on our heads because of the torch lighting up the webs further, we can only do one thing: throw the torch away.

  “How far can you throw the torch?” I asked her.

  “It has some heft, so I should be able to throw it quite a distance.” Xelyphe weighs the torch in her hand thoughtfully. Not taking any more time to think about what to do, she winds up and throws the torch behind us towards the wall.

  Thankfully, the flames in the room have spread to the point we can see the entirety of the room, and to say it is repulsive would be an understatement. There are spiders everywhere we look. They are skittering along the walls towards the flames, and the larger ones are climbing up their dropped positions to get closer to the disturbance in the webs.

  I thought we had seen the largest spider in the room, with the broodmother, which she is, but the spiders we are witnessing are something out of a nightmare in terms of their size. Some are just smaller than the Broodmother Queen.

  - Cave Spider Broodmother (Expert)

  Level 10

  HP: 1036/1500

  Cave Spider Broodmother Guard (Expert)

  Level 11

  HP: 2164/2500

  Cave Spider King (Elite)

  Level 9

  HP: 258/400 -

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  All of these have taken damage from the flames, and there are obvious spots on their exoskeletons that show the damage more than others, either being bald of the setae or, in one instance, the leg has been scarred to a near-fuseless state.

  Flames continue to lick through the room, and it doesn’t take more than a minute to get to the point where Strauvana points to the location of the thinned-out webbing. There aren’t any more spiders in the room chasing us. They are instead being drawn to the flames.

  “Two options and we have to be quick, we can either run through the webs and hope nothing bad happens, or we can burn a path. With how quickly these webs burn, we should be in the clear in a couple of seconds,” she quickly explains.

  The gleam of being able to set something else on fire, the sparkle in Gibnic’s eyes returns, and a spark quickly lashes out from his hand. It lands on the web, and just like we had seen with the room, the web soon spreads the fire and burns. Turning around, I sensed something approaching and then saw a small amount of something drop onto the stones right beside us.

  Looking up, I am staring into the dead eyes of the Queen. The stench of her breath washes over us, it is putrid and I can see the rotten flesh sticking to her mandibles that she hasn’t had time to clean in what I can only assume is ever. Quickly casting a shield spell onto myself, I push us through the still-burning webs to get away from the Queen. I am lucky that she tried to strike me with one of her burnt legs; otherwise, I would have been run through on the spot with how sharp the end of it is. It’s so sharp that when I look at the place where I was standing, the stone has been cleanly punctured, and there is now a 10 cm-wide hole in the ground.

  “Run,” I shout, and when everyone turns to see why I was pushing them, they start to sprint through the webs, damage be damned. I am thankful I hadn’t fallen when I began to make my way through the webs, otherwise there would have been nothing we could do to save me or anyone else, for that matter.

  Reaching further into the small passageway, the webs finally give way to a clear room. There aren’t many webs in this location, probably because there is a door blocking the way. Looking around to see if there are any clues to open the door, but also to give ourselves some time to rest, we quickly sit near the door, breathing out.

  “Are we sure the Queen won’t be able to follow us into this room?” Muiress asks.

  “Just from her size alone, I would think we are safe for the time being,” Strauvana responds to his question. She quickly pulls out another torch she had grabbed from the entrance of the cave and hands it over to Gibnic.

  He looks at us with a sheepish smile. “What?” I asked him.

  “Uhhh, I don’t think I will be able to light this for the time being,” he answers while scratching his head.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked him, and there is only one thing I can think of that would cause a mage not to be able to cast their spells.

  “I’m ummm.. Out of mana,” his answer is the last thing I wanted to hear.

  “We threw our only lit torch away because it was potentially causing the broodmother to come after us, but now that we are in a safe location away from the literal claws of that monstrosity, we have no way to light a single torch?” Xelyphe says, a bit exacerbated by the circumstances we find ourselves in.

  “How far in do the webs go into this path?” I asked everyone.

  They all shake their heads, signaling they didn’t pay attention and were just being ushered to go faster into the cave due to the Queen potentially pursuing us. The light behind us hasn’t died down since we had entered the tunnel we found ourselves in, the temperature has increased, it’s not as bad as out in the cavern. We still hear some screeches of spiders on fire occasionally but other then that we are in silence.

  “Should someone go and see if we can light the torch with the flames on the webs?” Gibnic asks sheepishly.

  “Are you volunteering?” Strauvana asks a bit short in her speech from the fact the gnome went on a pyrotechnic mania during our progress to this room.

  Sweat appears on his brow at the thought of going back towards that hulking monstrosity of a spider. “I think we should just wait for a couple of minutes, maybe the fires will die down and so will most of the other spiders?” His tone shows how much he is convinced of his own thoughts.

  Since we had nothing to do anyways, we looked around the door and there isn’t much to the door. There is some words spaced out here and there but it appears that they have mostly faded from the frame. No one tests the door yet since we don’t want to suddenly have a second set of monsters attacking if the spiders decide to come our way once the fires wane.

  With nothing else to keep us occupied we continue to wait. The light where we came from slowly dims and so does the screeching. After waiting for another 5 minutes the fire seems to have mostly burned itself out. The good side of things is we didn’t have to worry about being roasted alive since the webbing didn’t get near to where we are. The bad new is, we are losing the light the flames provided.

  “How are you doing on mana, Gibnic?” Muiress asks.

  “I almost have enough to cast a simple firebolt,” He responds, “Just a couple more minutes and then we will have a source of light again.”

  With no one else volunteering to go and light the torch we continued to wait. It didn’t take long as he said and we finally have a torch to continue to explore the area. Casting our gazes down the hall, we see some spiders were approaching but they are mostly juvenile spiders, they are heavily burnt and aren’t able to reach us before something else slams into the back of them.

  - Cave Spider Broodmother Guard (Expert)

  Level 11

  HP: 314/2500 -

  With this one spider, I can only imagine the damage to the Queen in the other room. Hopefully she either has completely fallen, or she is in such a wounded state she is unable to either come after us herself or this is the only one of her guards she can send our way.

  Now the reason it slams into the juvenile spiders isn’t because of its speed. No, it is because it literally squashes the younger spiders under its immense bulk and strength of its limbs, well it’s limbs that are still functioning. There are several legs that have been burned so badly they were removed either by it impacting walls, or from bursting as the oozing ichor showcases.

  We quickly prepare for battle.