Chapter 122: The Harder They Fall
As Simon crouched there on his hands and knees, taking in huge lungfuls of air, it took him almost a minute to remember where he was. “The spiders,” he whispered to himself.
No, the spider, he corrected himself. Remembering the giant that loomed in the darkness somewhere above him in the darkness. Suddenly, it all came back to him. The webs on fire, the spiders surrounding him, and the giant spider towering over it all were each a terrifying memory all on their own, but together?
For a second, he wondered if he should set the place ablaze again, but then he realized he had precious little choice. Last time, no one had noticed him until he’d sliced through his first web on his quest to get to the next doorway. This time, though, he could hear skittering and chittering around him on all sides in the darkness, and worse, he was glowing.
Between the exceptionally loud way he’d entered this level and the light, it was like he’d painted a bullseye on himself. So, aiming toward the closest sound, he uttered, “Meiren,” and sent a long streamer of fire out into the dark.
That single blast wouldn’t be enough to kill even one of the dog-sized spiders he saw moving toward him, but it was enough to catch all of their very flammable webs on fire. As the monstrous creatures fled the flames, he ran toward them, seeking the relative safety of the known clear area as the fire started to spread throughout the cavern.
For now, he wasn’t heading to the exit or to anywhere else. He was just staying a moving target, just in case, as chaos unfolded all around him. It was literally insane, he decided, but he couldn’t help but smile to fight the madness.
He was running through the center of a firestorm, and that firestorm was illuminating a spider stampede of dozens of eight-legged critters, several of which certainly outweighed him. That was just the warm-up act though. As soon as the fire spread far enough, it finally illuminated the two nearest legs of the spider god that towered over everything else that was going on.
Simon’s light had dimmed enough to be invisible, and the light of the next level was lost in the thousands of tiny temporary flames that raced along the spiderwebs in every direction. The world was on fire now, and that afforded him just enough light to make out some of the larger details. He could see that this was a city, or at least it had been one, long ago. Beyond that, he could see the bottom of the giant spider’s abdomen and thorax, lording over everything.
It had to be thirty or forty feet tall at least, and though it was possible he might have been able to cut through one of the thing's massive legs with a battleaxe, there was no way that the dagger he currently had was going to do more than scratch it. That was okay, though, because he had other weapons.