The size of these tunnels is inconsistent. It makes me think of a cave, and if it weren’t for the walls being dirt and the roots breaking through the walls and trailing all throughout the tunnels then I would have just called it that. It seems like the true cave like levels are below us so ill just have to wait and see.
“Fifteen minutes have passed since the last boar. I think we’ve been down here for about an hour. How long till we head up for rest? I’m getting tired after walking all day and then jumping straight into this.”
“Don’t start complaining already. We’ll head up in a half hour or so after we do a bit more delving. The point of being here is to level you up, isn’t it? We’ll never get anywhere if you’re always too tired to do anything. Besides, your not even fighting yourself. You just make your minions do it. That could hardly be called working to begin with.”
“We haven’t found anything around here, what makes you think will find anything in the next half an hour? Plus it’ll take that long just to get back!”
“You whine more than a child you know that. Just suck it up and keep walk-”
It was so quick that I almost missed it. One of the skeletons on the side of the group has just disappeared into the shadows. The others don’t even react and keep moving forward. Soon it happens again on the other side.
“Defend us!” My cry to the skeletons is answered as they quickly turn to form around us in the tunnel. This stretch is one of the widest we’ve been in, and I can’t even see the walls with the small amount of light from the torches.
All of the skeletons are soon packed around us who are trapped in the middle, sandwiched between the forty or so skeletons I have managed to build up during our delve. And everything goes quiet just as fast as all the noise had started.
With the relative quiet, I start to hear something. A skittering noise builds in my ears and I glance over to Venessa for an explanation only to see her face frozen with a look of dread.
Damn it. What is it this time?
“Do you know what this is?”
Silence for a second until I hear a small whisper back.
“spiders.”
DAMNITDAMNITDAMNIT. I hate spiders!
Venessa seems to share my conviction. The look on her face was still one of despair.
Then webs start flying, from above, to the sides, and behind, a wall of white netting flies out of the darkness and quickly covers half of the skeletons around us, even managing to land some on my shoulder, tying me to a nearby skeleton and prompting me to quickly draw my new dagger to cut the filth off of me. Which is soon done, but my dagger is now wrapped in strings of the web, making most of the cutting edge useless.
“Defend us as we move!”
I grab the nearest torch and fling it in the direction we came from, and when it lands on the ground I can lay eyes on them for the first time. A carpet of cat sized spiders seethes back from the light and I nearly scream. Why spiders?
Who invented this hell of a pay to win spider infested world? Not cool.
So we start running back towards the part of the tunnel we came from, pushing through skeletons while still trying to keep them between us and the spiders.
The sounds of boney combat ring out now and if I look I can see skeletons farthest from the light get covered and dragged down into the shadows by the mass of spiders.
I don’t want to be one of the poor souls who meets their end like that. How many adventurers have been dragged away and torn apart by those eight legged freaks? Or wait, don’t some spiders liquefy the inside of their prey and drink it?
My thoughts don’t help the panic that’s been raising in my mind and I fight my way closer to the barrier of skeletons rushing back. Thankfully the skeletons with torches have pushed to the front of the pack and are lighting the way, keeping the majority of those terrible creatures away from us.
Soon the walls close back up around us and the tunnel gets thinner which means that we’re close to relative safety. Sadly that doesn’t mean it’s easier. The spiders coat these narrow walls and it turns the path in front of us into a slugfest of clashing bones and thin black hairy limbs.
Venessa is next to me and seems even more frenzied than I am, slashing her own daggers around faster than I could dream of doing. Following her lead, I also start lashing out with my dagger and stabbing the spiders whenever I can get a chance with the unwebbed point of my blade. I’m starting to envy B… Bernardo? I think his name was. And he literally got stabbed, healed, and then released back to the street the moment he woke up.
I’m hoping he makes it out there until we can make it back. I definitely still owe him.
But for now, we are here in this cave fighting against a wall of spiders, surrounded by a wall of bones, and covered in remains of webs, the gore of spiders, and dust of broken bones.
Eventually, we grind our way through and make it to the narrower section of the tunnel, currently not filled with arachnids, and bolt down it for a solid two minutes before we stop and look back.
I managed to pick up the torch I had thrown earlier and now we sat around it on the floor as we rested. Eventually, the skeletons joined us. We waited a while, but in the end, only five showed up, four of them with torches. Talk about a close call.
