The situation was tense. I had told them everything truthfully. They all started discussing something, and it seemed like some of them were still not on the same page. At least that’s the feeling I got. I mean, apart from the elder spider, I can’t understand anyone else. A part of me wants to understand what they are talking about. I think that way my fear will go down. While I was thinking all of this, the elder spider approached me.
“I have one more question for you. Why were you dying continuously when you entered this level? We didn’t do anything to you?” he asked.
This is an awkward situation for me. I have to explain a spider that I have Arachnophobia. I am having a hard time answering this. This is embarrassing.
“Honestly, you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. I am just curious. If you are feeling uncomfortable answering it you don’t have to, I will just live with this curiosity,” he added.
He looked a bit disappointed, but I still don’t think I can tell him about this. Wait! Let’s do this instead.
“I can tell you, but can you do me a favor before that? Can you tell me if you are all going to kill me or not? I think I will die of anxiety at this rate. And if it’s possible for you, can you make me understand your language, I think that will help me a lot,” I politely told him.
“Well, that’s easy,” he said.
And then he does some weird chanting and BOOM! Now I can understand everyone. I could hear them all but the weird part was that all of them were talking about me dying when I entered this level. They were all confused by it. I don’t think they have any intention of hurting me after hearing my story. I sighed in relief. But now I must tell them the reason. Well, here goes nothing.
“The reason for my death was fear. I have Arachnophobia. To put it simply, I have an irrational fear of spiders. So, basically, I was dying because of fear” I told them hesitatingly.
After hearing this, everyone became silent. And after a brief pause, they all started laughing loudly. Even the elder was laughing. I knew this would happen; this was why I didn’t want to tell them.
Now that I can understand their language, I am able to talk with them and this is helping me a lot in getting my fear down. Honestly, apart from the fact that they all look scary, they are all pretty chill. On top of that, they are vegetarian. There’s no way they will harm me. I don’t know if I am lucky or unlucky.
Stolen story; please report.
Now I just need to stay here for a single day. A day is pretty long when you have to spend it in your nightmare. Even though my fear has come down, it’s still there. It’s something which can’t be healed that easily. The elder spider seemed to notice my condition.
Suddenly he says, “If you aren’t to be punished here, then it means that you are our guest. So let me give you a tour of our forest.” I almost denied that, but since I don’t really have any other idea to distract myself, I just agreed with him.
I sat on the head of the elder and he started walking. The forest is nothing special, to be honest. Just think of any forest on the earth, but in 10x zoom. It has a lot of webs all over the trees, spiders on the webs, some fruit here and there. A river is also there, which was a little unexpected. Honestly, this looked like a peaceful place to live in if I didn’t have Arachnophobia. But considering that this is a level of hell, it’s really weird that this place is peaceful. Before I realized, I said these words aloud and the elder heard me.
“Is it wrong for a level of hell to be peaceful?”
“But you are right to a certain extent. It’s really peaceful if compared to other levels. But we don’t really have a sinner come down to our forest.”
“You are the first to come here while you aren’t even a sinner. You see you only came here because you have an extreme fear of spiders, which became your nightmare, and you ended up here.”
“Nightmare level is different for every sinner. I guess none of the sinners had this much fear of spiders or maybe Satan just didn’t want to disturb us. I can only think of these 2 reasons,” the elder said to me.
“If he (Satan) wasn’t even going to send someone here, then why did he create this level? Are you all his pets as well?” I replied again before thinking.
But he didn’t seem to be offended by my response, thankfully. I guess since he can detect lies he can also understand that I didn’t have any ill intent in my words.
“Well, one can see us that way. Honestly, that’s not a bad analogy, but you can just say that he gave us a home to live in.”
“A long time ago, we were almost annihilated by a disaster. For some reason not everyone died, but our land was corrupted by the disaster.”
“We have very long lifespans, and it was getting hard to live there. We were suffering a lot, but we weren’t dying. It was miserable. That was more of a hell than this place.”
“But one day, Satan suddenly sent his clone to visit us and said that he liked our race and wanted to give us a place to live in. We just have to agree to some of his weird terms.”
“He also said that if we were to agree, we would become his subjects and eventually become demonic spiders. Nothing will change much, it’s just that we will get some extra abilities from Satan and his blood will be flowing inside us.”
“We hesitated a lot at the start because, even if it was corrupted, we still loved our land, but eventually, we were swayed by him and ended up here.”
“Honestly, this place shares a striking resemblance to our land. The only thing he demanded from us was to punish a sinner if one ever came, but that hasn’t happened till now,” he said.
Is he Satan or Angel? He took pity on people and gave them such a beautiful home to live in. On second thought, he definitely is Satan, since of all the races out there he took pity on giant spiders, no offense to spiders, but yeah, he definitely is Satan.