“Waaaaaaaaaay too many spider webs around here…” Vaile said in a grumbling voice as he wandered through the caves he had teleported into. Perhaps had he had more time to locate a better place to teleport to, he might not have had to deal with so many sticky, clingy and irritating cobwebs. Alas, his flight from the crazy rat ladies that saw him leave the Solusand Dominion resulted in him having to take what he could get. Thankfully, the crazy rat ladies did not seem to be around, which made him slightly less concerned.

As he wandered through the cavernous depths, he noticed that his minimap showed quite a lot of dots which were shifting quickly between the colors denoting both allies and enemies. This did not sit well with Vaile, and it only made him walk even faster. Thankfully for him, his minimap showed exactly where he needed to go to reach the exit of this web-filled nightmare. A bit farther and his minimap showed a more civilized area, with actual people and not the rapidly shifting entities that couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be enemies or allies.

Vaile eventually reached an exit, stepping through a hole and out into….

“Well, crap.”

Vaile was not out of the underground, or at least it didn’t appear that way. Instead, he had just stepped out onto a natural balcony above what appeared to be a cult gathering of some kind. The décor, combined with the chanting and the dress of the cultists, made Vaile want to nope the hell out of there. He had seen this kind of shit before back when the game was actually a game, and it never ended well for any Player who wandered in unannounced.

Plus, there were a metric fuckton of cultists down there and while their levels were individually far lower than his own, he didn’t much desire having to plow through them all to reach the exit. That was not to say that he wouldn’t do so if there wasn’t another, less dangerous option, but if he knew cults as well as he thought that he did, then this was definitely one of the ‘human sacrifice’ kind of cults. And, to be brutally honest, he really didn’t want to get involved in that if he could at all help it.

Carefully sideling along the edge of the cave from the natural balcony he had found himself on, Vaile made his way as far as he could go until there was nowhere else to move. Even with this sneaky behavior, he was still barely one tenth of the way to the massive underground room’s exit. From here, all he could do was jump and hope for the best.

And so he did.

Leaping off from the wall and putting his absurd strength into his legs, Vaile rocketed off the wall with such intensity that it cracked the stone behind him. This probably wasn’t the smarted move, nor the sneakiest, as it alerted those below to the fact that something was going on above them. And, as much as Vaile would have loved to simply land behind everyone assembled there and bolt out the door, he was stopped by something he should have foreseen happening.

As he flew through the air, a mass of spider thread shot out from the darkness above him and attached itself to his leg. Thus, as Vaile flew towards his target, the thread acted as a bungee cord and his body took on the properties of a pendulum. Much to his own embarrassment, Vaile began to swing back and forth above the crowd of onlookers like he was a bargain-bin imitation of a certain superhero who had gotten his leg stuck on a web line.

After swinging for a bit, Vaile managed to free himself and land among the crowd of cultists, sticking a perfect superhero landing before running through the massed people towards the exit. Before he could reach it, however, the exit was blocked by a mass of spider webs that Vaile realized was too thick and durable for him to simply power through. He quickly checked his minimap and, much to his dismay, the only other exit was back the way he had come and several tens of miles through the caves.

“Fuck!” Vaile cursed as he skidded to a stop before he could crash into and stick to the massed cobwebs. Vaile turned around and tried to make a break for the entrance he had used previously but found that it was now filled with giant spiders. He was going to have to let the mask fall to get past this obstacle. Leaping up to the natural balcony, Vaile pulled off his mask and used the power of his Reversed Attractiveness to stun the giant arachnids, which, in turn, gave him enough time he needed to fly past them without them interfering.

He bolted down the cave system and didn’t stop for anything. This was, unfortunately for him, a bad idea, as he failed to notice that along a certain straightaway the ground was held together by the very same threads that were around him. He made it roughly one third of the way down that section of the cave system before the ground gave way as the threads holding it together were unwoven by the spiders around them, which sent Vaile plummeting down deeper into the cave system.

He fell for what felt like three or four minutes before he landed on top of something hard and black. Rising to his feet, Vaile was about to leap up and try to leap up and wall jump back up to the path he was trying to go down, but before he could the ‘ground’ beneath his feet shifted like an earthquake had rocked through it. This caused Vaile to slide off of the smooth surface and plummet even further until he landed on a mass of webbing that, unlike all the ones he had been forced to deal with prior, was not sticky or clingy.

In fact, the web was woven thick enough to allow him to stand, and as he did, he came face to face with a man who certainly looked like he had seen better days. He was clad in a loose and ratty old robe that was crawling with small spiders and had webbing attached to it in random places. The man’s face itself was an odd sight, as it bore a wizened countenance that was tinged with tones of fanatic zealotry and insanity. The man was partially a hunchback, but that man was not the biggest thing in the room.

Vaile found himself looking up past the man’s head and behind him, his two eyes locking with the eight massive eyes of a spider that could easily be at least the size of an Olympic Stadium. As he looked up, he felt as though the mouth of the creature twisted with a small hint of crazed joy, and he immediately felt his ‘This Fucker Is Crazy!’ sense go off for the first time since he had to deal with all five of the crazy rat ladies all that time ago.

He was wrenched out of his stunned silence when the cultist who he had laid eyes on before the spider spoke up.

“Ah, so you are the one whom Mother desires so much! Welcome, most honored guest, to our humble home. I am High Confessor Gareth Killinger, and by my connection to our God, I speak, Her divine voice transmitted through my sinful mouth. Mother is overjoyed that you have come here, so please embrace our hospitality, dear guest.”