I think that the main reason I found this giant spider more terrifying than in the movies was the fact that this was not a fluffy tarantula. This was covered in dark and shiny chiton, an acid-green pattern of cracked glass on the underside of it, and it had eight long, spindly legs that it moved swiftly and gracefully on. The thing looked large enough to eat me and have enough room left in its gargantuan stomach for more.

It crawled down to the ground with its legs seeming to simply cling to nothing. I didn't see any webs, which I took as a bad sign because I assumed that this spider had just arrived and was ready to fight. I turned to run, going in the most opposite direction of the spider as I could. I bolted and came to a complete stop, stuck in something incredibly sticky and just slightly pliable. I had nowhere near the strength to rip free of my invisible trappings.

I used a string of Mana to pull the quill from my soul, a very instinctual process as the spider approached with speed. The quill was an ornate bronze with a black and green feather sticking from the top. It seemed to be a theme in color. The feather reminded me of the code in old hacker movies, although I didn't have time to reflect on that, as the spider was almost upon me. I invoked the spell I got, pumping Mana into a serrated blade that glowed an acidic green. I felt a little lightheaded as I jammed magic into this quill and started cutting at the invisible strings holding me in place.

The spider's shadow covered me completely and I cried as I frantically sawed at the strings and urinated at the same time. The spider was calm as it crawled around me, its asshole pulsating uncomfortably as it did. The spider pulled my arms to my side and my quill fell away, going back into my soul. The spider finished encasing me and the last thing I saw was the spider crawling close to me before suddenly my cocoon went opaque. I was encased in white, sticky webbing, that was somehow invisible until I was completely encased.

I tried to pull out my quill again, but there wasn't enough room for it to manifest, and it hurt my head like hell using more Mana. "So this is how I die," I said to myself, feeling the spider crawling along the outside of my cocoon until it stopped, finding itself very close to my torso. "Oh fuck no!" I screamed. I then realized that I could still feel reality itself pulled in tight sheets around me, almost as a sixth sense.

Panicked, I pushed at those sheets with my mind, making a bubble into what I assumed was the Aether. The spider jammed its fangs into the cocoon right behind me as I stepped into the bubble and pulled it closed behind me. My head was still pounding, and the effort of making this bubble didn't help at all. I dropped my concentration, assuming that now that this bubble had been created it would stay put. It did not. The bubble immediately started to dissolve and I had to pull it back into place with immense concentration. I couldn't appreciate my surroundings because they were spinning as I tried to take a few steps forward through the Aether. Not a chance. I had to reconnect the bubble to a more stable reality and stumble through.

I found myself, luckily, standing on a string of what looked like flowing energy. I felt something in my head, which almost made me fall off the web. There was a complex network of webbing coated with a silver energy that felt like Aether. While Mana seemed to have its own personal color, the Aether was different, it was colorless, and I guessed that the spider had a way to access the energy and it coated its webs in the stuff so that the large webs were harder to avoid.

I wasn't in the Aether long, but it seems to have filled me almost full with Mana. The spider was still latched onto the ball if webbing, but something told me its confusion wouldn’t last long. The problem was, I was very high up and there didn't seem to be a good way down. Also, my bare feet were stuck to the web I was standing on. "Oh come on!" I whispered out in complaint as I tried to take a step. The spider must have noticed the vibrations my struggling caused and it moved away from the mass of Aether to deal with me, scittering horrifiyingly closer.

As I stared at the approaching monstrosity, I felt one of my racial traits activate, letting me see the name of the spider floating above its eight awful eyes. The name was "Aetherweb Poisoner", a rather fitting name if you ask me. No time to waste, I summoned my quill again, holding it up and ready to fight with it, regardless of what little knowledge I had of swordplay. The spider crawled closer, legs landing on strings of Aether without a single missed step, grace and speed nearly flowing from the large creature.

The spider was almost close enough to touch, and I pushed Mana into my spell, pushing the Mana to flow in the shape of a one-handed longsword. I was glad it was weightless because I could only imagine that a real longsword would weigh far too much for me to hold. The thing got close and I started swinging wildly, closing my eyes and whipping the blade around helplessly. The spider did not engage yet, watching its prey flail wildly. Not a single swing connected with the spider, who backed up and watched the flailing human with several of its eyes until I stopped and looked back, not seeing so much as a scratch on the beast. "Oh fuck me," I whined out.

The spider saw that I stopped moving and lunged forward with its forelegs, ends sharp as any knife I had ever seen. I blocked one with my quill, the other cutting deep into my arm, causing me to cry out and lose feeling in my fingers in my left hand. The spider lashes out again, advancing forward to my stuck position. I swung at the forelegs, my quill biting deeply into one of them and causing the spider to retreat some. This dance continued for a time, but I was taking damage faster than the spider and I didn't have mobility on my side. My head was starting to pound as I used every ounce of Mana I had gathered to make the smallest of cuts on the spider. The spider was taking damage, looking rougher and rougher with each passing moment, but it had no critical wounds to speak of, unlike me, who felt that all of my injuries were critical.

Something changed, and the spider decided to wrap a leg around mine, which was thoroughly attached to the web I was standing on. It tugged at my leg and I heard a sharp *crack* followed by blinding pain. It tugged again and I felt like my leg was going to rip in half. "Let me the fuck go! Oh shitshitshit fuck," I cried out as I started hacking repeatedly at the limb. The spider tugged once more, trying to pull the limb back, but enough had been cut through that the limb separated itself from the spider. It screeched, backing up with blood spraying from the wound as it flailed. I turned my quill to my feet, trying to cut my way free of the webs. I managed to cut around my feet, which remained stuck to the webbing as a sort of shoe. As soon as the webbing was disconnected from the flow of Aether it gained a white coloring normal for spiders without magic.

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The spider was not done though, it raced forward, locking me in its seven remaining limbs. I started hacking at the spider with my quill, my head pounding and the world spinning. I hacked over and over until another limb disconnected with another spray of blood and a sharp screech. The spider wasn't done, twisting me rapidly to wrap me in webs again. I started cutting through the webs with my quill before I ran out of Mana and the blade collapsed into nothing. I looked about frantically for something to get me out of the situation and saw one of the limbs I had crudely hacked off within reach. Spider still wrapping me up, I grabbed the leg, turning my torso violently and stabbing the leg directly into the abdomen of the spider.

The beast cried out as I punctured the chiton, twisting to find something vital. Dark blood sprayed out of the wound, covering me in the ichorous fluid as the spider paused in its turning. I cried and frantically tried to kill the beast. It had, apparently, decided that I was too much trouble to wrap up and lunged with its disturbing mouth to bite me with large fangs dripping with acidic green venom. I panicked, pulling the leg from the spider's abdomen and holding it above my head, the sharp tip pointed up. I heard a squelching and felt resistance against my arm but didn't let up until the legs of the spider opened up to drop my half-encased body on another sticky web, where I luckily came to a stop before falling several hundred feet.

I opened my eyes again, blinking through the tears just in time to see the spider fall down and hit the dirt floor of the forest with a colossal crash. I figured that I couldn't find a safer place to sleep than the web of a dead Aetherweb Poisoner, what I assumed was an apex predator. I cried myself to sleep, with a horribly mangled leg wrapped in webbing covered in Aether so as to make the bottom half of my body invisible.

I woke up to pain. Nothing new, just the same, overwhelming pain from my previous fight with the spider. Summoning my quill, casting my spell, and starting to saw away at the webs encasing my lower half, I cut my left leg out of the webbing, leaving the mangled right in the webbing. The webs didn't seem to stick to each other, so I dragged my way over to a more diagonal strand. I slowly moved from web to web, hobbling along on one leg and one arm, dragging the rest of me behind painfully.

Slowly making my way down to the ground where the spider lay dead, chiton cracked and intestines flowing out, I was hungry, and the only thing that looked like it might be edible was the meat visible through the chiton of the spider. I wasn't sure how to cook it though, because I didn't have any knowledge of how to make a fire. I had enough knowledge of physics to try friction, but the movies always made a point that that wouldn't work.

I found a stick and jammed it in next to my leg, turning the webs into a makeshift splint, I hoped. I then started with a stick, perpendicular to a larger bit of wood with some smaller kindling around the vertical stick, like everyone always saw in the movies. It didn't work, no matter how hard I tried it just didn't work. Then I tried rocks. I had no idea what flint would look like, and I could only guess for steel, but I would have to try something. That also didn't work. Not a single spark.

I decided to try friction again, growing desperate. I dragged myself around and found a piece of wood that had been split by some force or another. I made a little circle of stones and pulled a stick back and forth across that split in the wood. Eventually, smoke started billowing from the wood, and in moments of me blowing on the wood and piling kindling on top, I had a fire. I put bigger pieces of wood on when the fire was big enough, and then I put a piece of spider meat that I cut off on the end of a stick to hang over the fire.

While I was waiting for dinner, I summoned my book for the first time. It was leather-bound and looked rather thick, with had high-quality paper inside. The outside was black with a green outline of a much more brave than reality battle between me and the spider. I was curious if that battle was represented on the cover because it was the most traumatic event in my life, or because it was the first thing that happened here that was worth having a representation of before I summoned the book. I didn't question it yet and instead simply wrote the crazy events of the day out in black ink.

I had never been motivated to keep a journal, never really having the time or the mental energy for it, but as I wrote I felt something. It was amazing! I wrote out every detail as I remembered it, and even as I reached the end of what happened I wrote about how I wrote. It was freeing, yet sadly the spider meat was charred and not worth eating by the time I was done. The sun at its peak, I started again, cutting off another chunk and hanging it over the fire with sticks.

I turned a few pages, knowing that the pages would arrange themselves however I wanted instinctually, and I wrote out things I knew that might be useful. I included coding knowledge, but I wasn't sure how useful that would be out here. Most of it was guesswork from TV, but I fact-checked that with what I knew about physics and discounted anything too obviously wrong. I also included what little I knew of physics, although it's mostly just concepts of math and very few of the actual equations my world ran on. I did include a few, F=MA, or Fullmetal Alchemist as I called it, E=MC^2, and the pull of gravity on earth, 9.13 M/S^2 not taking into account wind resistance. I wasn't sure any of that would be useful, but I kept it because it made me feel smart.

I did keep an eye on the meat, and when it seemed well done, I cut it open with my quill. It seemed cooked all the way through and I was rather hungry, so I took a bite. It wasn't half bad for insect meat, even unseasoned it had a surprisingly decent flavor, sweeter than anticipated. I scarfed down what I had cooked and put more on the fire, hoping it wouldn't kill me. I then decided that I was done sitting in the wilderness with my dick hanging out and went to go make some clothes out of spider silk. The stuff was ridiculously sticky, but I perfected the art of throwing one hand into an Aether pocket with minimal mental energy to get the webbing unstuck.

Eventually, I just covered the silk in leaves to prevent it from sticking to me and carved out a shirt. I put the leaves on the inside, but I decided I wanted something more heavy-duty for myself, so I chopped some bits of the spiders' chiton to the right shapes and sizes and stuck them to the webbing. I then filled gaps in the armor with leaves so I wouldn't get stuck on anything. It looked like shit, but it was a sort of semi-functional armor that I could carry, even with my fucked up leg.

I ate the spider meat I had cooked and contemplated what to do next. My leg was surely not splinted right and it would heal fucked up if I just stayed out here, but I had no idea where to go, this was the only notable landmark for miles and it was a death trap. I took a spider leg as a cane and crafted a small sled to put the spider's body on. I probably wouldn't be able to move it with some sticks stuck together with webs, but it made me think that maybe I could make it out with these new resources.

I made an effort not to let the fire go out, with all my crafting I was starting to run out of nature to destroy to make my meager possessions with. I explored closer to the tree, looking around closer to ground level. I found that the tree was actually hollow, discovered qhen i found a large hole that looked perfectly round in the tree. I walked in and saw massive blobs of Aether. The spider had clearly not shown up recently if the web system outside was anything to go by, but this very much proved the fact that this spider had not, in fact, come to this tree recently.

The blobs of Aether were clearly Aetherweb Poisoner eggs covered in webbing to hide them from outside viewers. They seemed to go all the way to the top of the tree, where I lost sight of all of the eggs in the darkness.