I pushed BB down into our synchro mode, drew my sword, and checked my system display. At the same time I looked around the room and noticed one glaring omission, Rin wasn't among our number.

"Did anyone see where Rin went?" I asked, my eyes wild.

"She… She was right here a moment ago," Fal replied, yellow coating her pupils. I quickly gathered that was the colour of fear, or if not fear, then certain dread. "I don't understand where she could have gone…"

"Yr'Arl, did you see her leave?" I asked.

The cat-like alien shook his head, "I also cannot sense her manna signature, as she is too weak to get a lock onto."

That made a lot of sense. She wasn't strong enough to get recruited into the Guard so her signature was probably non-existent. I could only hope that meant whoever had made her scream like that couldn't sense her either, and she'd managed to get away into some sort of hiding place.

"Fal, Rin's old room. The one that they'd put her in when she'd been bad… where is that?"

I figured that, if she had gone anywhere at all, it would have been back down into the pit that they had kept her in. Perhaps she had been drawn there like a moth to a flame, ready to burn itself up to sate its curiosity.

"It's at the base of the structure. At the end of the corridor, there should be a flight of stairs. You go down that for three flights, and then you'll find a door. It's right behind that door."

"Okay, in that case here's the plan. I'm the fastest so I'm going to go down there and try to get Rin out. Yr'Arl, I want you and your spectral armour thing to be waiting up here for me," I said, getting a nod in confirmation from Yr'Arl, "I'll lure whatever's down there out so we can try and fight it on more even footing."

Before anyone could say anything else I turned my propulsion up to the max and flew out of the room. I was down the corridor and the stairs in moments. The door to Rin's room was shut fast.

I tried the door and it swung open with a creak.

The room was just as small as I had expected it to be, with only really just enough room for a bed and a bucket which, as disgusting as the thought was, must have been what Rin used to use as a toilet.

I lit up my left hand with the beginnings of an energy beam and raised my sword in my right, expecting to come face to snarling face with a Null Space Invader. But there was nothing of the sort.

The room was covered in more of the webbing that I had seen before up in the office. It was thicker down here, it coated every single surface. In the middle of the room, hanging by her feet from the ceiling, was Rin. Crawling over her body was a creature that made my stomach flip end on end.

I'd never been an arachnophobe back on Earth, but the spider-like creature I was looking at now was about to turn me into one. The creature was a dark black with orange flesh slipping out of the cracks in the exoskeleton, just like the Null Space Invader had been. It had a bulbous abdomen from which it was spurting its thick web across Rin's body.

Two legs extended from each side of the Abdomen, while a third pair jutted out in front of the Thorax. Unlike a normal spider's thorax, this creature had an almost humanoid torso. The front two legs jutted out from where there would usually be arms on a human, fingerlike and ending in probing points.

Between those two shoulders was a twitching fanged mouth, surrounded by six small claw ended fingers. It had two more tiny arms, jutting out from the side of its chest. They ended in two small prehensile fingers that would be perfect for digging into the crack in its chest, to be ripped apart just like the chest of a null space invader.

Below that was a thick, muscly tail, ending in yet another spiked claw. This one dripped with liquid, I assumed some sort of deadly venom that I didn't want to get on the bad end of.

"Foooooooooood," the mouth chittered, it was like a thousand bugs moving at once. Slowly but surely, the face of the creature turned toward me as it sensed the ball of manna glowing in the palm of my hand

"Huuuuuuuuungry!"

I let the bolt of energy loose, intending to slice the webbing holding Rin so she would fall to the ground. But the skittering legs of this horrifying new Null Space beast were faster than I expected. It leapt off of Rin's hanging body and intercepted the beam of energy mouth first and devoured the entire blast.

In the low flickering lights of the Clan Pren base I could just about make the creature out as it drew itself, in jerky shuddering movements, up to its full height of around three feet. It swayed from side to side as it digested the manna meal I had provided it.

"Deeeeeliiiiicious," it hissed, "Waaaaant moooooore."

In a moment the creature had launched itself at me, leaping through the air at speeds I could only just keep up with thanks to my propulsion and enhanced speed cognition. I dodged to the left, and was just about able to bring my sword up to deflect the flailing tail as it crashed into the stairs behind me.

My plan had been to run Rin up and away from the creature, but now with it on the stairs there was no way for me to get past, and if I let it launch itself like that again there was a heavy chance that Rin could get caught in the crossfire.

I was going to have to fight it down here.

Alone.