There was nowhere safe to blip. The Matriarch spider moved so fast it filled Iris with a nauseating sense of wrongness -- something the size of a building shouldn't move like a spider the size of her thumb. Its brood were no different, crossing ground, canopy and web in blurry shapes the size of large dogs. They leapt from shadows and dropped from branches, sinking teeth and sharp legs into their prey.
The woods were alight with flashing explosions, bolts of magic, and unattended torches that merely seared the fire-resistant roots they had fallen on. Screams, booms and shouts echoed in odd directions off the bare redwood trunks, sometimes joined by thunder growing near.
Iris reappeared from a blip in time to get thrown aside from an errant blast. She slammed into a trunk and landed hard on the root-ground. She coughed and heaved as she pushed herself up to her hands and knees. A spider lunged at her face, and she blipped behind it. It landed deftly in the empty space she left, immediately scurrying forward after the next target it spotted. She panned around the battlefield in a daze, searching desperately for signs of her friends.
Elsewhere, Titus held a strong stance as he slowly moved a constant beam of light across a wave of oncoming spiders spilling from the webs. The beam lingered on each spider for only a second before they swelled and popped into a splash of purple guts. Beside him, Eli charged and released half-second blasts from his staff, each one just strong enough to punch through a spider's head and explode at the front of its abdomen, leaving the gored corpses to awkwardly tumble and roll.
To their left, an adventurer shot steady flows of rolling flames from either hand, panning them back and forth in front of him. To their right, another adventurer was crouched with both hands planted on the roots beneath him, conjuring spikes up ahead that impaled the charging spiders. Arrows, javelins and colorful bolts of magic flew overhead to slow the flood of spiders in the canopy, raining spider corpses all around them.
Ash Druga led a charge through the front line, flanked by a dozen high-level fighters and supported by several scouts. The orc whirled her hammer elegantly in an uninterrupted flow of movements, crumbling legs and smashing abdomens of every spider in her wake. The fighters by her side wielded swords, spears and axes, and cut down the spiders that passed outside of her reach.
Iris spotted the forward charge towards the web, and then the beam of light accompanied by flashes of red. She blipped through the battlefield, dodging leaping spiders, thrown weapons and explosions. One blip's distance away from her friends, she saw a spider sprinting towards Titus from behind -- he didn't see it. She snarled as she drew the rusty dagger from her bag and blipped again, appearing atop the spider's back and driving the dagger down into its head. The dagger stuck in the spider as it slumped and crumbled into the ground, tossing her forward into a heap between Titus and Eli.
"Glad you could join us!" Titus shouted as his beam petered out. He conjured a dozen crackling spears of light in the air around them, plucking one and hurling it forward to pierce through several spiders, which exploded in sequence an instant later.
"Watch your mana!" Eli shouted at Titus.
Iris climbed to her feet and threw her bag behind her, drawing the greatsword in a hurried, slightly awkward rendition of her practiced technique. At the sight of Iris's sword, Eli stepped aside and swiftly ducked behind her, reappearing on the other side of Titus.
"Hey!" She shouted, offended.
"Focus!" Eli replied, not taking his eyes off his targets.
Iris harrumphed, then surveyed the front. Pools of spider guts were forming in the crevices of the roots as the bodies piled up, but the unending flood was unimpeded. Spiders climbed effortlessly over the corpses of their allies and charged forward into death. The gap between the front lines of the adventurers and the bulk of the spiders was dwindling, and behind them the Matriarch still terrorized the rest of the battlefield.
Iris settled on a target, a stray that had broken through between gaps in the spikes that were still jutting up out of the roots. She brought the hilt of her sword to her waist and held the long blade out ahead of her, then dashed and blipped. She reappeared just in front of the unsuspecting spider, thrusting forward as the spider's momentum carried it into the blade. The sword sunk into the spider until the hilt slammed against its fangs and pinned them back against its face. She awkwardly stumbled back as she pulled the sword free from the now limp creature, the blade coated in slick purple fluid, then she blipped back beside her friends.
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A spider fell from above and landed on Titus's back, dripping fangs poised to sink into his neck.
"Shield!" Eli shouted.
Titus responded by hunching his shoulders and conjuring a translucent shield of magic across his back between him and the spider, the fangs glancing awkwardly off of it. The shield flared slightly from the strike, then flared brightly when Iris swung her blade at Titus's neck, slicing through the spider and bouncing off the shield as it shattered into quickly fading shards of light. Titus looked at her in incredulous shock.
She blinked as if she was as surprised at her actions as he was, then changed the subject by shouting, "focus!"
Titus cut his eyes towards the oncoming spiders, plucked another spear of light from the air and threw it, "we're gonna talk about that!" he said with a finger briefly pointed at Iris before grabbing another spear.
Iris repeated her technique from before to take down stragglers that slipped through the front line's efforts, while Titus's spears dwindled faster than he could conjure new ones and the gaps between Eli's blasts grew longer. They were running out of mana and the flood of spiders showed no signs of slowing. The bulk of the horde grew closer, with most spiders coming within a dozen yards of the trio before being cut down.
A line of explosions popped off amongst the horde, blasting in sequence from left to right and sending chunks of spider flailing through the air. Cameron Cole landed in front of them. He uncorked a waterskin and slung it in an arc, spewing a stream of orange sand. He kicked off the ground and leapt backwards, extending a hand towards the sand as he did so. The sand erupted into roaring green flames, driving a wedge into the oncoming horde that forced the spiders to split and crowd on either side of the arc of flames.
Before Cameron landed, a hulking brute of a man in mismatched armor came down to the left of the flames with a heavy hammer strike. The spiders immediately surrounding the hammer were crushed with a blast of force that surrounded the hammer head, and those behind were shredded and blown away by an abrupt shock wave that shot forward from the impact.
To the right of the flames, Iris watched as a squirrel scampered towards the horde, then seamlessly morphed into a giant brown bear that ripped apart several spiders with a swipe of a paw, then beat another into a pulp with two rapid double hammer fist strikes. The bear continued in a frenzy, lifting a spider from the ground and shoving it into its mouth to crush it with powerful jaws, then falling forward and crushing several more spiders with its body. The spiders crawled around it, sinking fangs into its fur on its back and shoulders. The bear roared and rose back to its feet, ripping them off one by one, throwing some to the ground in splatters and ripping others in half.
Cameron slung more sand on the flames, erupting them into a fresh blaze, then shouted over his shoulder at Iris, Eli and Titus, "we'll hold this section, reinforce to your left!"
They darted to the left, sprinting behind the wall of adventurers that held back the horde until they found a break in the front. A group of low level fighters were being overtaken by spiders, several had already fallen and several more were screaming in delirium and swinging their weapons wildly at nothing.
Iris blipped into the air and brought her sword down against an adventurer's wooden shield, slicing through the spider that clung to it and slightly sinking the blade into the wood. She made eye contact with the adventurer behind it as she placed her foot on the shield, he nodded and braced himself as she pushed against the shield to yank her sword free.
A blast of red magic from Eli's staff exploded behind her, showering her with spider guts. She whirled around in time to catch another spider leaping towards her with a clumsy swing of her blade, half cutting it and half swatting it from the air. She blipped over to Eli, glanced at his staff and shouted.
"Can that still shoot fireballs?"
"Probably," he shouted back, "why?"
She pointed at the webs from which the horde poured. He nodded and leveled the staff at a gap between the webs. As he dumped the bulk of his mana into the staff, the runes along its length didn't glow red as usual. Instead, most of the runes remained dim, while a few glowed intensely with a fiery orange. The runes at the end glowed the brightest, turning to a blinding white hot light.
He was thrown back as the staff kicked and the blast fired forward. It resembled his usual bolts of magic, except bright orange and white instead of red, and several times the size of his strongest charge. The blast streaked through the air and punched into the darkness behind the front most webs, then exploded in a blinding white flash that cast long shadows behind the trunks.