A new turn began, and the Phantom Archer dissipated.

Dylan instinctively chose to generate so that he could play Mana Shield.

Shit! As the protective energy formed around him, he cursed at himself. I needed to draw.

He’d been too preoccupied with worries about the potential bombs littering the floor around him, and Dylan’s mind had acted on autopilot, choosing the fastest method to safeguard against the new threat.

Generating energy at the beginning of his turn could be done almost simultaneously with activating the shield, but using Basic Energy to pay for the shield’s cost would require playing two cards in sequence.

His instincts’ focus on speed had expedited the Mana Shield’s materialization, but when everything was done, he’d only saved the better part of a second. A gain so small as to be meaningless in his current situation.

Hell, he thought, I could’ve played both cards in the delay between a fire reaching a corpse and the resulting explosion.

Dylan looked at his remaining hand. One Basic Energy, one Intermediate Energy.

His brief loss of judgement had proven costly. He’d be useless until at least the next draw.

Around him, the fight continued.

Chester moved to reengage the armored spiders, but the time it took him to recover from the explosion made it difficult for him to dodge. A thick line of white thread streaked across the room, hitting the Guardian in his recently injured shoulder.

The force of the impact pushed Chester off balance, and as the web landed, it spread, splashing across the man’s right arm and upper back.

While he was leaning forward, carried by the blow’s momentum, one of the armored spiders reared back and drove its fangs toward the Guardian’s extended head.

Fortunately, Rowan intercepted the attack with his blade. With limited time to position himself before he'd acted, the swordsman stumbled backward as he diverted the power of the spider’s strike. Though he wasn’t able to kill the monster, his sword still sheared through one of its legs and both fangs.

The arachnid let out a screeching sound just before Chester slammed his shield into its head, pushing the spider back and allowing the group room for another step forward.

A dull thud came from behind the fight. Dylan turned to see one of the web shooters had crashed into the mass of white silk coating the floor, dead. Presumably brought down by Jaiden. Judging from its position, it was the one that had just hit Chester.

While still capable of killing the monsters, the Earth Mage now struggled to trim down the number of web shooters without the Phantom Archer’s support. At the same time, the shaman's added threat forced Rowan and Chester to take extra care as they slowly pushed the group forward.

The fight became a slog.

But after a handful of labored seconds, Dylan finally stepped past the webs covering the ground and onto a more stable surface.

As his boots met the roughly carved stones, his mind split, and a new turn began.

He drew a card, but before he had time to look at it, a flash of light from between the pillars diverted his attention.

The shaman’s fire had recovered.

Once again, the creature raised the flames in its hand above its head, and once again they danced wildly.

When the bright green fire became dark, a torch to Dylan’s left flashed.

Flames leaped from their stand, streaking toward one of the web shooters that had been killed early in the fight. Where it had fallen now positioned it to the left of the group. The green fire burrowed into the corpse, and everyone near it quickly backed away. Everyone except for Mark.

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The Herbalist seemed frozen in panic. Fear swept back and forth across his features, but his body did nothing but shiver.

“Mark! Move!” Dylan shouted as the corpse began to sizzle and expand with energy.

The boy stumbled back, but it obviously wouldn’t be enough. Mark seemed to realize it too. As control returned to his body, he turned around and leaped toward the webbed ground he’d just escaped.

Before he landed, the spider exploded. Viscera spread through the air, carried forward by an eruption of green fire.

While doing is best to dodge the spider parts flying his way, Dylan watched the blast throw Mark further down the room. The sticky threads coating the floor helped to break the Herbalist’s fall, repeatedly clinging to his body only to be torn apart by his momentum. He rolled several yards before finally coming to a stop.

Dylan kept staring long enough to see Mark move to get up before looking at the new addition to his hand. Draw.

He activated his Basic Energy to pay for the card and drew twice more. Phantom Archer. Phantom Archer.

Just as he was about to use Intermediate Energy to summon one of them, he was once again stopped by a change coming from the shaman.

The lizard let out a sound that was a mix between a rumble and a hiss. The circle of flames around the pillars stopped flickering, and then the creature spat out a glob of green bile at the webs binding its vestigial limbs.

As the mucous-like substance covered the spider silk, the white threads began to sizzle and dissolve. It was as if they’d been bathed in acid. It only took a moment before they disintegrated, and once gone, they left burns running across the shaman’s arms in their wake.

When the last strand dissolved, the lizard roared. A sickly-green ripple erupted in the air around the altar, and when it reached the circle of flames, smaller ripples erupted from each one. The space in front of the pillars became chaotic, and after a dizzying moment of accumulation, the mess exploded toward the rest of the room.

Dylan quickly moved his arms to shield his face, but he didn’t feel anything. Not even a breeze.

He held his breath for a moment, but there was still nothing.

When he lowered his arms, he saw the green ripples dancing in the air around him, but they never crossed his Mana Shield. They didn’t even seem to cause it damage.

Once it all washed past, Dylan found that every web in front of him had taken on the sickly-green color. He turned around and found the same. The only white threads left were the ones clinging to him, isolated by his shield.

Suddenly, a pained grunt came from Chester before the Guardian shouted, “Stay off the webs!”

A crackling sound echoed around the room, and the webs affected by the ripples began to dissolve.

Dylan glanced to his feet and saw nothing but a few of the thinnest strands of spider silk dusting the stones beneath him. The rest of the group wasn’t as lucky.

Like him, most had moved beyond the webs carpeting the ground, but without a similar shield, they all had to deal with the bits and pieces of sticky fiber that had inevitably become attached to them in their trek through the caves and throughout the fight.

Having been hit by one of the web shooters, Chester had even more trouble.

The Guardian braced his shield to block an armored spider in front of him with one arm while he tried to remove the strands of spider silk coating his back and shoulder with the other. Dylan could see him struggling to maintain his balance against the weight of the monster and grimacing in pain as his hands touched the melting threads.

But the worst was Mark.

Flung across the webs by the explosion, the Herbalist was both coated in the dissolving fibers and struggling to move over a floor quickly eating through his shoes. When Dylan turned around, he saw the man hobbling forward, pained gasps warring with the cacophonous sizzling echoing across the room around him.

Just as Dylan was about to step over to help, the ground shook.

One of the web shooters closer to the entrance of the room had lost its grip on the disintegrating threads covering the ceiling and fell. But it didn’t crash into the floor. It crashed through it.

When the monster’s body met the partially dissolved web, the ground fell out from under it. And when it went, everything around it followed.

A rapidly expanding pit reached across the room, pulling web and stone to join it.

Dylan’s mind couldn’t quite grasp what he was seeing. How this was happening.

It wasn’t until the hole was close to ten yards across that he finally recognized the truth.

The ground they’d thought had been covered by webs wasn’t actually ground at all. It was a cluster of rocks held together by a thick mass of spider silk. A scant sliver of earth hanging over a deep chasm.

As its only support disintegrated, the entire structure collapsed.

The first half of the room they’d just trekked through. What parts of the cave that could see beyond the archway. All of it was falling into an abyss Dylan couldn’t see the bottom of.

“Mark! Run!” Dylan shouted.

It was only a matter of moments before the ground beneath the Herbalist would fall as well.

Mark made his way across the crumbling ground in a staggered lope. He was no longer bound by the sticky threads he’d been struggling against moments earlier, but his injuries combined with the increasingly shaky footing prevented him from moving fast enough to escape.

Just before he could step on solid ground, the last of the webs dissolved, and the floor beneath him gave way.