Cards flashed into existence around Dylan, and beyond their rotating patterns, the complete picture of the room through the archway revealed itself.

The space was a mixture of cavern and crude masonry. With an uneven width ranging from twenty to thirty feet and a length Dylan estimated at about two hundred, the eerie green fires provided just enough light to keep his eyes from straining to make out the details around him. It was like a prelude to twilight. Dim around the edges, but the torches corralled the deepest darkness into the flickering shadows they cast.

The walls were still plastered with thick webs, but the carpet of sticky fibers beneath the party’s feet only extended a few dozen yards before starting to thin. Halfway down the room, roughly carved stones crawled their way out of the mass of white threads. They gradually became more uniform the closer they were to reaching the stone pillars Dylan had seen near the back wall.

Unlike he’d assumed before breaking through the veil of spider silk at the room’s entrance, the ring of fire around the pillars was not supported by torches. Green flames hovered in an expansive circle about ten feet out from the large stones, and as the floor passed beneath them, it formed into a smooth a set of steps. At the center of it all was a dais holding an obsidian altar. On either side of its black surface was a smoking bowl of incense.

And in front of the altar was a monster.

It was one of the lizards, standing maybe half a head shorter than the others the group had encountered. Its vestigial limbs were bound together with spider silk, the small fingers constantly moving as they weaved and erased different patterns in the white threads. One of its larger hands held a staff made from a polished spider leg; the other controlled a miniature version of the green flames.

It looked like a shaman of some kind.

“That thing’s like the caster I fought in the combat trial,” Jaiden said through slightly labored breaths as she ran into the room. An endeavor made more challenging with the constant pull of the webs beneath her feet.

The creature roared. Sounds of spiders drew closer from a series of channels dug along the intersection of the walls and ceiling.

“Try to kill it as fast as possible,” Chester ordered the group.

With the party only a few steps into the room, spider legs began to claw their way out of the holes, and Dylan drew his opening hand.

Basic Energy. Intermediate Energy. Living Spider Shield. Phantom Archer. Draw.

Not wasting any time, Dylan played Basic Energy, and with the added two points of energy from his deck enhancement, he summoned the Living Spider Shield.

As the weird little creature materialized, Dylan played the Intermediate Energy and Phantom Archer cards in quick succession.

Beside him, Jaiden had slowed her advance, focusing on gathering her mana. When the archer appeared, so did a mass of rock that shaped itself into one of the mage’s Stone Bullets. She swung her staff and launched the projectile across the room.

Dylan ordered the archer to support the attack on the lizard, watching as the stone neared its target.

As it crossed the ring of green fire, the air seemed to ripple around it. The bullet slowed. Despite its lost momentum, it didn’t drop. Continuing forward, it appeared to be attempting to cross through an ever-thickening pool of molasses. It crawled past the pillars before finally expending the last of its energy.

The lizard shaman reached out with the hand holding its staff, extended a finger, and tapped the frozen stone. At the touch, the rock fell to the ground, dissipating into wisps of smoke that rose to circle the altar, joining the burning incense.

The air rippled again; the green fires briefly flickered with an extra hint of vitality.

A moment later, Dylan’s archer fired; its misty arrow following in the same journey as Jaiden’s Stone Bullet. The rippling air, the deceleration, the dissipation. The only difference was that the arrow didn’t travel as deep, stopping just between the pillars.

“Fuck,” Rowan cursed.

“Do we keep trying?” Dylan exchanged glances with Jaiden. “I can’t tell if it’s just stopping or feeding off our attacks.”

“Hard to say, maybe it has a limit—”

“Get down!” Alice shouted, practically tackling Jaiden into the web beneath them as a streak of white thread shot through the space where the mage had just been standing.

Dylan jerked his head around to see a large spider with a bulbous abdomen clinging to the ceiling. It looked like it had just crawled out of one of the holes along the top of the wall. One of the web shooters Dena had described.

Another white line flashed past in his peripheral vision, and when he followed it with his head, he saw Rowan twist to the side to avoid it.

“Four along the ceiling,” Chester said. “Kill them first.”

While Jaiden and Dylan began to target the new monsters, Sara asked, “Dena, can you put the caster to sleep?”

“I can try,” the violinist began to play a new score. A moment later the air above the ring of fire began to ripple again. The movement created by the music was smaller than what they’d seen when Jaiden and the archer had attacked, but it was continuous. It was the difference between dropping a rock into a pool and pouring in a small but steady stream of water.

But no matter the visual discrepancy, the end result was the same. The shaman was unaffected.

“Not working,” the Bard stopping focusing on the lizard and switched to the familiar deceleration debuff.

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The web shooters didn’t move more than was necessary to aim, choosing to harass the party like turrets, but the music was enough to lower the frequency of their shots.

With less pressure on them to dodge, the group continued a labored advance to reach the center of the room and to get out of the webs trying to bind their feet.

But as the group adjusted to the challenges the fight presented to them, new troubles arrived.

The mage and the Phantom Archer had just cooperated to kill one of the web shooters when another group of monsters appeared. Smaller versions of the armored spider Dylan had fought in his combat trial crawled out of from the holes and scrambled down to meet the party, but even with their reduced size, they were still the largest spiders the party had seen in the dungeon.

Four came from the front and two from behind. Suppressing his discomfort, Dylan ordered the spider shield to attach itself to his arm.

“Rowan support the back until the spiders get to me,” Chester called and then used Taunt.

At the same time, Dylan felt his mind split. He chose to generate and played Draw. With only a moment before the spiders reached him, he glanced at his new cards. Mana Shield and Intermediate Energy. He decided to wait instead of playing either, trusting Chester’s skill would be enough to hold this wave of monsters.

The spiders arrived quickly, the webs the human group struggled with no hindrance to the arachnids. Even with Dena’s debuff, the monsters’ movement was slightly faster than the party’s, and despite having a shorter distance to travel, Rowan was barely able to reach Dylan and Jaiden at the same time as armored creatures.

A glowing sword sliced through two legs and left a deep gash along one of the spider’s sides, but its rocky carapace proved strong enough to prevent the blow from being fatal.

As the swordsman tried to finish off his target, the other spider rushed to get at Chester. Dylan saw that his archer was in the way, but the monster didn’t seem like it was going to take a detour. He took a breath and stepped forward, shield angling to take the impact and, hopefully, deflect the spider around the rest of the group in its charge toward the Guardian.

Rocky armor crashed into rocky armor. The shield held, but the force of the blow was enough to throw Dylan into the web beneath him and leave his arm throbbing.

That’s gonna bruise, Dylan thought as he watched an arrow streak from his archer’s bow toward another one of the web shooters on the ceiling. But at least it worked.

The collision diverted the armored spider just enough for the monster to move around the group, letting the archer fire uninterrupted.

Dylan worked to pry himself from the sticky fibers that had broken his fall and saw Rowan move past him in pursuit of the creature, the first one presumably dead.

By the time he gained his feet, the spider was just about to join the others in assaulting Chester. Dylan was worried about how the man would block attacks coming from opposite directions when he watched Rowan leap from the webbed floor in a burst of strength that carried him toward the monster's back. His boots trailed ragged white threads of spider silk and what looked like wisps of steam. A glowing blade stabbed down through the rocky armor, and the creature’s charge faltered.

A few seconds later and it was dead, Rowan having needed two more strikes at the spider’s head to kill the monster.

The Blade Warden joined the Guardian in dealing with the remaining four, and Dylan returned his focus to the web shooters above.

He counted the spiders only to find one more than there should have been. Another must have crawled out from the holes while he’d been distracted by the armored monsters’ charge.

He watched yet another emerge when a Stone Bullet smashed through one of the creatures’ heads.

Just as Dylan chose to draw at the beginning of his next turn, he heard a curse from behind him. “Fuck.” It was Rowan.

Dylan glanced at the new card, Phantom Sword, and then turned his head. A new armored spider had crawled down the wall and was rushing to join its companions.

It soon became apparent that they weren’t facing a massive wave of monsters like they’d seen in earlier fights, but a steady trickle. Just as they killed one, another seemed to take its place.

Dylan and Jaiden managed to keep the number of active web shooters down to two, while the number of armored spiders assaulting their front line stayed between three and four. But the monsters just wouldn’t stop.

A sort of balance was formed, but there was a problem.

So far, the shaman had done nothing. Its roar when they’d entered the room had seemed to summon the spiders, but it hadn’t taken any other initiative to attack. And that worried Dylan.

The group pushed forward, but progress was slow. The defensive nature of the armored spiders combined with the constant harassment of the web shooters made it difficult for the party to work their way past the sticky threads beneath them and onto the solid ground just yards to the front. It also didn’t help that Rowan kept having to shuttle back and forth across the webs whenever one the armored spiders came at the group from behind.

When his mind split again, Dylan chose to generate and then told Alice, “I’m about to summon a sword.”

“Finally.” The Blacksmith looked antsy at not having been able to contribute to the fight.

When the weapon materialized in front of Dylan, he passed it to Alice, and then gestured to the Living Spider Shield still attached to his forearm. “Do you want the shield too?”

She hesitated for a moment before saying, “Pass it over.”

Dylan ordered the creature to detach. “Hold your arm out.”

Alice pressed her lips together in a thin line as the stubby little spider bounced up to latch onto her forearm.

“Unlike the other things I summon, that won’t disappear unless its destroyed or I let go of my deck.”

The Blacksmith nodded, and when the next armored spider came from the back, she moved to intercept it. She couldn’t defend as well as Chester and didn’t have Rowan’s attack power, but she was more than enough to hold down a single monster.

When the swordsman saw the situation and realized that he didn’t need to rush back again, he continued to deal with the monsters at the front of the group. The pressure eased, and they advanced faster.

As a new turn came, Dylan drew a Basic Energy. Counting the time, the Phantom Archer would disappear in fifteen seconds, and Dylan started to worry that he had nothing to replace it with.

I really hate being at the mercy of the draw.

He briefly wondered if it was a problem he’d be able to overcome in the future before he refocused his attention on the fight.

Moments later, Chester stepped past the webs, finally reaching the rough stones at the center of the room, but before anyone could be relieved at the loss of one of the group's obstacles, the shaman made a hissing sound that reverberated through the air around them.

It raised the fire in its hand above its head. The green flames undulated wildly before darkening, seeming to lose their color. To the side of the group, one of the torches along the wall flashed with light. Flames vacated their stand and rushed into the corpse of an armored spider by Chester’s feet.

The monster’s carapace took on a pale green cast as it began to pop and bubble.

“Step back!” the Guardian shouted, ignoring the other monsters in front of him, he shifted his shield between himself and the corpse.

Despite one of the living spiders tearing at his shoulder, whatever instinct had made Chester move had probably saved him. Dylan watched as the corpse swelled, leaking wisps of green smoke, before reaching its limit and exploding.

A roiling ball of the eerie flames launched dismembered spider bits across the room as the main force of the blast sent Chester skidding backward.

The only good part about the corpse detonating was that its damage was indiscriminate. When it crashed into the Guardian, it also threw the armored spider that had just attacked him into a tumble.

Dylan looked around, wide-eyed. Shock and worry warred through his mind.

There were spider corpses everywhere, and the entire room was lined with those green torches.

The flames held in the shaman’s hand were slowly regaining their color, and Dylan guessed it wouldn’t be long before it could attack again.