I fell onto the ground beside the dead spider.

“Goddamn,” I said, breathing heavily.

I squeezed my eyes against the pain. Heat throbbed in my leg. My chest and back felt like they were on fire, like coals were burning my skin. I took a few shuddering breaths, to make sure I wouldn’t pass out. Okay. I was scraped and stabbed, but I wasn’t going to faint.

I wasn’t going to die.

Well, not unless another spider came to investigate.

That thought made me push myself into a seated position, with my back against another tree. I watched and prayed, and didn’t see anything coming. I also didn’t cry or puke, because I was a badass.

When my head stopped spinning, I looted five foam beads from the spider. Ha! That brought my total to ten. I took them from my domain into my shaking, bloody hand, and tried to combine them. Tried to merge all ten together, into a single one. Nothing happened.

Well, if I killed one more spider, I’d get enough foam beads to make a pearl bead. Which would heal me, unless ... well, unless the whole thing was bullshit.

Nah, Oksar wouldn’t have lied about that.

So I just needed to kill one more spider. Easy.

Sure.

I felt fine. What kind of boring hatchetman kept all his blood inside his body? I watched the trees for any spidery movements until I managed to rise to my feet. Took a while. When my head stopped spinning, I limped away. Leaving a trail of drops of blood. When my head stopped spinning the next time, I tied fabric around the deepest slice on my thigh. I didn’t bother with my other cuts: I couldn’t reach half of them, and couldn’t bandage the other half.

And anyway, the pain was turning ... manageable. Better than I would’ve expected. Another function of Fortitude, probably.

Health: 22/35

Damn. Not great. Though not terrible, either. Even after losing thirteen points, I was still at about my starting health. Except ‘health’ didn’t seem to tell the whole story. My injuries impaired me. Weakened and slowed me. I hadn’t only lost a third of my health, I’d also lost a third of my ability.

I’d start my next fight at a disadvantage.

“Unless I heal first,” I said.

But how? Well, cleaning my cuts couldn’t hurt. And with my increased Fortitude, maybe I’d heal better from resting? Worth a try. I’d head for the temple and the fountain. Laze around, take it easy, and see how I felt tomorrow morning.

So I started back the way I’d come. The wooded area with the burl-trees grew sparser, then a clearing opened into a grassy area ...

Shit! That wasn’t the way I’d come. I’d gotten turned around during the fight. I was heading the wrong direction. And ahead of me, two spiders stood on low rocks in the grass, while beyond them boulder loomed.

Except those weren’t ‘low rocks.’The spiders were standing on wolf corpses, not rocks. Those were there boulders I’d climbed ... four days ago? Five? I was a little surprised that there was anything left.

I froze in the shadow of the trees. I barely breathed. I just bled a little.

I couldn’t fight two spiders at once. I could barely fight one at once. So I stood stock still for a time, watching, worrying. And realizing that the dead wolves were fully wrapped in silken cocoons; so many that’s why there was so much left: the spiders were keeping them fresh, only eating them a bit at a time.

Yikes. That though inspired me to start backing off.

But what if I lured one away, once I healed? Yeah, I’d lure a single one away, kill it, heal again, then kill the final one. Well, if the second of those was the final one. For all I knew there were a bunch more on the temple grounds. But I’d killed a juvenile one, then the one at the shrine. Oksar had killed one in the forest. I just killed another.

That made three adults and one juvenile. Plus two more in front of me. Five adults and one juvenile, total. That seemed like a pretty good total number of monster spiders. Plus, I’d never seen more than three in one place, and they were pretty large predators for such a small area. Of course, I didn’t know how they’d coexisted with the wolves before I arrived. Or if they had. Maybe they’d been summoned, too. There was no telling.

Anyway, magic didn’t need logic; if it did, it’d be science.

Well, better to err on the side of caution. Maybe there were five of them, maybe there were ten. So I’d rest first, see if my health ticked up now that I’d improved my Fortitude. Then I’d kill them one at a time, without calling attention to myself.

So I kept backing off ... and noticed motion in the trees. Well, in one tree. In the tree I’d slammed into, hard enough to shake the branches.

And in that tree, one of the burls was wobbling.

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Shaking and drooping.

“Wait,” I said aloud.

Not drooping, unfolding. With bulges and joints and ... oh, shit.

It wasn’t ‘unfolding,’ either. It was goddamn hatching, into a juvenile thornspider.

Those weren’t burls, they were spider eggs or cocoons or something. And there were hundreds of them in the courtyard. I backed off faster, my gaze skipping from one burl to the next, dreading the first wobble or shake, imagining an entire horde of those things creeping after me.

None of them were active, thank god, except that first one, which fully hatched as I moved.

And which immediately spotted me. I considered running, but these things liked to attack fleeing prey. So I stopped in the middle of a path and waited for the juvenile spider to attack. It crept toward me through the trees. It was smaller than the very first one, with less-developed thorns. And with less speed: and when it jumped at me, I cleaved it in half without getting a scratch.

Huh.

INTUIT: A Newborn Thornspider Corpse

Oh, a newborn. That explained why it was so easy. I looted five small, clear beads that looked like frog eggs.

INTUIT: A gel bead. These combine into foam beads.

So the currency went: gel, foam, pearl, gold, black. And each one was worth ten or fifteen times more than the one before? Well, that didn’t matter. What mattered was the healing properties that kicked in at ‘pearl.’

And the adult spiders I didn’t want to fight.

I jogged painfully back toward the temple, rested my hatchets on the lip of the fountain, and washed my wounds. Despite my Fortitude, the pain took my breath away.

After I finished, I returned to the safety of the veranda steps and ate a fruit and rested and waited.

Hours later, I checked my status again.

Health: 22/35

Not even a single point better.

“Goddamn,” I muttered. “So much for natural healing.”

On Earth, I wouldn’t have expected to heal from a papercut in a few hours, much less from injuries caused by monstrous spider claws. But this wasn’t Earth. This was fantasyland with a ‘Health’ score, and in fantasyland, resting healed you.

I chewed on a piece of Oksar’s jerky and drank my fill from the fountain, then waited another few hours. Still no improvement, at least not numerically. I felt a little better, though. Less fragile.

So I left the steps and headed toward a small copse of the green-barked between the forest gate and the boulders. I hadn’t seen any adult thornspiders there the first time I’d explored, and if I needed to retreat, the shrine was nearby.

I got into position between the nearest burl-laden tree and the shrine. Then I raised one sandaled heel to the trunk and shoved. The tree swayed and a few seconds later, one ‘burl’ hatched into a newborn.

I had to wave a hatchet to get that one’s attention, to goad it to attack. When it obliged, I easily chopped it half for another three gel beads.

Over the next two hours, I killed seven more newborns. I moved slow and cautious, afraid that the adults would ambush me. I figured that I’d clear this area of forty or fifty burls, but something changed after the ninth newborn spider hatched.

I shook the tree, then got into position. High above me, two legs broke the surface of the ‘burl.’ The newborn thornspider stretched its legs and shook fluids from its abdomen.

“Down here,” I said, not too loud, and raised a gore-smeared hatchet.

The newborn thornspider crept halfway down the trunk toward me, then stopped. Its blueblack eyes gleamed.

“C’mon, leggy,” I said. “Let’s play.”

It took one more step then leaped sideways, to another tree. Avoiding me. That was new. It climbed that trunk until it reached another burl, which it drummed with its forelimbs.

“What the fuck?” I said. “Are you trying to wake your little friends?”

It leaped to a third tree, climbed to another burl, and drummed on that on too. Meanwhile, the closer one started hatching. And by the time the new spider fully emerged, the first spider had drummed on five burls and was starting on a sixth.

I thought for a second ... and the first two new arrivals dropped on silken threads to attack me.

Fighting two at once was little trickier than I’d expected. More than a little, actually; the shift to multiple targets took a mental leap. I needed to split my focus. Still, they were weak, and it was good practice.

I managed to kill them before they did more than scratch me. Then the next two dropped--along with the first one, the clever one--with the final newborn on the way.

I was fairly certain that I could beat four newborns at once ... but on the other hand, fuck that. If I failed, I’d die.

So I looted the corpses of the ones I’d killed then trotted back to the shrine. To my surprise, the newborns didn’t chase me. Maybe they knew they were too weak. So on second thought, maybe I should’ve fought them, but I was still new to this. Also I was a little scared of monster spiders, even the newborns.

In my defense, they were monster spiders. Despite being ‘small and weak,’ they were three feet long if you included their legs, and could bite through leather.

When I reached the shrine, I sat between the statues and counted my beads.

Domain

10 foam beads

43 gel beads

1 rahico fruit

3 pieces mandrill jerky

1 skillet

Yeah, I still had the skillet in my domain. I kept thinking it might come in handy for armor--or as a really crappy weapon, if I lost my hatchets.

When I withdrew the gel beads into my cupped hands, and sort of ‘thought’ at them, nothing happened. Hm. I tried again, envisioning my ‘mana’ pouring into them--and they melted.

“Whoa!” I said, surprised at my success.

The melted gel beads flowed together into a puddle on my hand. Then lumps started forming, and after a moment they combined into three foam beads, with two gel beads left over.

I put those away and withdrew all my foam beads. Thirteen of them appeared ... and I merged them into a pearl bead.

“Ha!” I said, holding the pearl bead up to the sunlight, ridiculously pleased with myself.

After a moment, I popped it into my mouth and felt a spread of warmth. It tasted good, too.

Health: 24/35

“C’mon,” I muttered. “All that for two health?”

I wanted to cry.

Instead, I lay back and watched the clouds for a while. When I got bored of that, I tried sharpening my hatchet blades by grinding them on the ash-covered stone floor. Might’ve helped a little, too. I practiced with my smoke, mostly because that calmed me. I napped. I woke, pissed off the side of the altar, then in sort of petulant disbelief checked my health again.

Health: 25/35

“Oh! Oh, so ... “ I frowned toward the pond. “So the pearl beads keep adding points over time?”

The gold bead hadn’t done that. Of course, the gold hadn’t needed to do that: it had completely healed me all at once. I bet the healing beads interacted with my Fortitude, too. Somehow. Like the more I had, the better they worked.

I checked my health points obsessively for the rest of that day. I gained about a point an hour, after eating a pearl bead, as near as I could tell.

The next morning I was fully healed. 35/35.

I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on with recovering from wounds, but I knew one thing: I was tired of being scared and weak and hurt. It was time to hunt.