As I emerged into the third chamber, I quickly came to the conclusion that this space was fire attuned. I didn’t deduce this from seeing the color of the ore deposits, but rather from the hundreds of miniscule embers hanging in the air. They glowed brightly enough to my erg sight that it disrupted my ability to see the rest of the erg in the chamber, like a bright light ruining my night vision.

There was a raw beauty to the embers though, the way that they delicately bounced in the air, the warmth of their light. I felt drawn in, like the embers had drawn themselves around my heart like a hook and were slowly dragging me forward. The numbness felt deeply comfortable, like all of my worries were being healed within the warmth of this light, these embers casting their gentle, curing energy over me. I let out a heavy, but warm, sigh and followed the urgings inside of me.

In the very back of my mind, a voice screamed out in concern. I simply ignored that voice and reached my hands forward to lightly cup one of those embers in my palms, feeling the warmth wash over me. My motion lightly tugged on the ember which sent all of the surrounding embers bobbing in a rippling response, heading towards the center of the chamber.

Nearly invisible strands, which I could see now only in the shadows cast by my hands, wrapped around my arms, growing thicker and thicker with their binding, until I could not move them. Somehow, I didn’t feel any worry, just the warmth of the ember flowing into me. More embers floated around my body and more strands wrapped around me, successfully managing to wrap me up, thanks to my dazed state.

Slowly, a massive, bloated spider, with an orb-body ten feet wide and with mandibles that blazed bright, lowered itself from the ceiling and crawled its way along those nearly-invisible strands towards me. Its razor sharp legs danced delicately over those threads, carrying itself with a shocking grace for a creature of its size. It opened its eyes, ten on each side of its elongated head and all shining with an internal flame that matched the red and orange patterns of its body. I wondered how I had missed it, but in a distant way, like I might wonder at the coincidental shape of a cloud.

Its mandibles opened wide and a scratchy, but human, voice echoed forth, resounding in my ears. “You. Small, fragile, but fight.” I could see through the ember’s glow to see the snake-form of the spirit coiled around the spider’s neck, the spirit’s eyes looking out through the spider’s. “You should surrender. I know how much pain you carry with you.”

That force cried louder from the deepest parts of me, but I could only gaze onward. The spirit-spider hybrid spoke further as it drew in those last few feet towards me. “I have seen it all, in the terrors of your heart and in the turning of realities and the death that always comes, always comes, always comes. The Creators were not mad, they were wise!”

In the eyes of the combined being I could see it, the uncounted centuries of suffering, of having seen such things as would drive any being into the worst depths of their trauma, leave them unable to interact with the world in the same way as the innocent. “No.” I croaked out the word, echoing that voice in my core.

“No!” The spirit-spider’s voice rose to a scream and it smashed down, wrapping its mandibles around my neck. “No? No. No. No?”

“I will stop it.” My voice wavered, there was no strength behind them but still, I had caught the attention of the spirit-spider.

“No. Stop it? Not possible. They’ve always tried, always failed, always failed, and merely added grief unto grief.”

“I am…” I coughed in the back of my throat, the heat of those mandibles singing my neck, but the spirit-spider remained still. “I am.. inheritor. Of something larger than me. Larger than you. There is room for hope.”

The spirit-spider recoiled at those words and scurried back several steps along the thread-web. “No. No hope. No hope! We are all always damned! Embrace the void!”

I flexed the enhanced muscle fibers and tore the strands from my arms. My lower body was still captured, the strands too tight despite my surge in power. The spirit-spider rushed towards me, mandibles bearing sharp, aiming straight for my next. Intuition flared in me and instead of moving to attack or dodge, I instead summoned my soup pot, turning it to catch the mandibles in the water.

The spirit-spider screeched in agony and I saw the spirit slowly loosening its grip, even as the mandibles steamed and scorched, cold water hitting fiery chitin in a continuously billowing cloud of steam. I pushed forward with the pot and the steam stung at the spider’s eyes, while the spirit fled from the growing pain and disorientation.

I loosed my grip from the pot and then slugged forward with my right fist, bringing the drill with it. The tip of the bit lodged right behind the spider’s head and began to whirr with increasing speed, but failed to find purchase. Still, the side of the drill scoured the chitin of the spider, until it finally bucked and flailed its head, hitting me with the pot with enough force to tear me from the webbing and send me flying towards the other side of the room.

I slammed into position with a firm impact, but the new earth-metal plates absorbed the force of the hit, allowing me to quickly rise to my feet. As I did, though, the fibers deactivated and a wave of weakness passed over my body. The spider fully flung the pot off and began a skittering charge to me, but I was ready, firing off a mud-spike at the spider’s face. Its now extinguished mandibles snapped at the spike, causing it to explode in a burst of that tacky mud, covering its mouth and eyes.

I loaded up a normal spike next and ran forward as fast as I could. As the spider lifted its front claws to try to scrape off the hardening mud, I dropped and slid forward, scooting across the ground under the wide body of the spider. There, I punched up repeatedly with my drill, carving holes again and again into the underbelly of the spider, causing cracks to appear and spread through the chitin of the spider.

It brought one of its middle claws down in an attempt to stop me, but I met the blow with my drill, sparks flying as metal met chitin. The force and mass of the spider pressed down on me and my arm, my body struggling against that raw force. I increased the power to the drill’s engine and it spun faster, its whirring becoming a whine, even as the bit began to glow red from the heat and the friction of the contact.

I was beyond terrified at this point, to the point that my mind was blanked by fear, leaving me only with that raw animal urge to survive. The engine’s whine increased, but as it did, small cracks began to appear in the claw’s chitin. It pushed down harder and I pushed back with every last bit of strength I had.

Then the drill’s engine exploded from the force. The drill itself ripped from my arm, shearing my armor in the process, before shrapnel scraped along my flesh, digging deep furrows into it. The spider’s chitin shattered along with the explosion, shredding in an explosion of glowing red blood. As the spider fell to the side, I fired off another shot into one of the holes in the spider’s belly.

It twitched and lay on the ground, blood oozing from its many wounds. I halted for a moment, finding the curling body of the spider a pathetic sight. My right arm hung limply at my side and I had nothing left in my tank of energy. I really needed to find a way to fight more efficiently, more safely, but perhaps that was the nature of battle, to constantly break and be broken upon the wheel of conflict. Violence turns all things onto themselves, making monsters out of men.

The spider managed to scrape away the stone from one of its eyes and stared at me. It no longer seemed a terrifying beast, no, it was a being in pain, slowly dying. I swallowed up my doubts, strode forward and took aim with my spikethrower. Something resembling understanding flashed through its expression and I fired a spike into the spider’s eye, puncturing into its brain. I did not turn away from the violence that I did to its body, in my urge to relieve it of further suffering.

The erg flowed into in a surge, rocking my body with pain, but it was not the physical pain that made me sob, chest heaving as I slumped down onto the ground.

Level up! +10 Path Points, Health and Erg restored!

War Drill 30->40

Spikethrower 15->25

Battle Harness Proficiency 25->32

Battle Harness Customization 14->18

the higher you climb, the harder the fall the fall the fall

I stared for a long moment at the notification, before shoving it off to the side; I had no way of dealing with that information right now. Instead, I focused on pulling out the fragments of metal from my arm, wincing as each bit was torn free from my freshly healed body. I winced with each single piece that came free, and my hand and arm was a bloody mess when I was finished.

I leaned back, staring at the ceiling as I fell onto my back. One by one, the embers faded from the room and the blue light of the erg returned to everything. So cold, that blue, no mercy, no hope, nothing but that killing urge. It would be easier to give up, let that spirit claim me fully, but I simply would not. As heavy as this expectation was, it had to be done, that much was clear.

Hope. What a foolish notion, but it had to be my guiding star. I reached my left hand upwards towards the ceiling, then clenched it into a fist, allowing the blood to drop down slowly onto my face, painting me in its warmth.

Hope. Only I could bring it, and if I had to baptize myself in blood to be the morning of a new dawn, so be it.

Again, I cried in the dark.