Have you ever coughed so hard it felt like some of your lungs might come up with it? I fell to my knees and crawled forward, determined to not let my own damn attack be the cause of me failing the trial and letting down every last one of the people I cared about. I placed one hand forward, coughed, slid a knee up, then hacked up a thick goopy something and spat it out, before reaching forward with the other hand and dragging my last knee ahead.

I finally made it into the clear air within a couple of meters of the edge of the deep scolovian-filled chasm, I still wasn’t even sure what a scolovian was. Yet whatever they were, it was hard to tell how high they had managed to climb going off of my map.

I tried to rush my coughing, still feeling that deep itch and tickle inside of my chest, and the unconscious clenching of my diaphragm warned me of the next round. I threw my conscious effort behind the action, drawing in a deep breath and really pushing at my next couple of coughs. I was rewarded by another glob of sooty lungbutter that flew from my mouth mid-cough and saved me the need to spit it out. I was rewarded with a full breath of clean-ish cavern air and a feeling of relief, plus the break from the irresistible reflexive coughing came with the chance to finally look around the cavern.

Max manipulated the map for me on the edge of my vision, turning it at an angle and rotating around the room we were in to give the translucent image a sense of depth. It showed the pointed red circle markers slowly swarming up the walls, but that they had only made it halfway up the vertical walls of the gorge in the seconds I had been incapacitated.

I pushed myself up onto unsteady feet and shook my head, trying to throw the tears from my eyes so I could finally see. I’d already learned the lesson about trying to rub my eyes while wearing the gauntlets and wasn’t about to try that again. I’d need to come up with a solution for that, preferably some kind of helmet with a life support system that would protect me from a blast of smoke or bad air in the first place.

I was met with limited success, and was able to get a blurry picture of the situation around me lit by the bright beam of my little acetylene lamp. Fifty feet above me, the top of the cavern was covered in a rolling mass of black smoke spreading out from the tunnel exit at my back. Without further hesitation, I enacted my plan to get across the thirty foot gap.

I brought both of my gauntlets up and opened the information screen. I pressed the pause button before setting the pressure and nozzle sizes, cranking both of them up high and knowing I would blow through the six little bottles rather quickly. I punched in the mix of different chemicals and compounds that needed to be mixed together, pointing my palms out to the far side of the room.

I gave the pause button my intent and began the reaction, causing a pencil-thick blast of steaming and sticky foam-like rope to blast out from my palms and arc across the chamber. The compound we had come up with hardened and congealed as it mixed and met with the cavern air, rapidly reacting to create something between expanding foam and spider silk. I changed the angle of my aim, still blinking away the tears from the smoke that was filling the top of the chamber more and more and starting to flow down the walls as the stone cooled the dark cloud.

The initial blast missed the edge by a meter and fell down to splash against the far side of the chasm wall, but as I angled it upwards and tightened the nozzle diameter to increase the pressure, strands of it reached the floor of the far side of the cavern. I let out a triumphant, “Hah!”

Max marked the angle, providing a gauge along the side to show me the proper 35 degree angle to maintain the distance. I clenched my hands into fists that quickly filled with globs of the material, before intenting on the pause button again and cutting off the stream. I took a couple of steps back, pulling on the stretchy ropes of expanding material to create some tension in the lines, then kneeled down and jammed the globs against the floor to stick them in place. Only then sparing another glance at the map.

The scolovian mass had risen up to the three quarters mark, and the cavern was starting to fill with a sort of crackling rushing sound. The sound of thousands of hard carapace coated crawling bodies swarming over each other, claws scraping hard stone and loose tumbling rocks drowned out even my ragged breathing.

While the guide ropes were hardening, I deselected the enzyme that caused the rope to be so sticky, then repeated the process. I used the hovering sight that Max had given me, again bringing my hands back up to the 35 degree angle then deactivated the pause button on my gauntlets. Another stream of silk arced across the gap. This time I crisscrossed the substance back and forth over the already laid out frame into a crude sort of netting.

The six stone bottles of reagents I had prepared lasted all of 10 seconds, but by the end of it I had a rough webbed bridge that I really really hoped would support my weight when I tried to cross it. The red tide of enemies was only meters from the top of the cliffs now, and I couldn’t give it time to set or harden. I had to act immediately.

I surged forward, choking back the rising urge to break into another coughing fit. The webbing held as I dashed onto it, but the thin steaming ropes bounced under foot and threw off the cadence of my steps. Forced to slow down, I made the mistake of looking down at the horde of insects clawing their way out of the depths.

It was difficult to make out individuals within the mass, but I instantly recognized the things. They were giant centipedes, like the one that had nearly ruined my first field foray with Jozoic and Sallis. Nearly 15 feet long each, with flattened and flared carapace. They sort of looked like a speed bump with large claw-like teeth and poisonous stingers. The wave of predatory insects made it to the top of the cliff just as I finished crossing the bridge.

I turned back to focus on my goal. The open tunnel entrance was only 15 feet ahead of me but something caught my foot and yanked it backwards, causing me to fall flat onto my face and crush the lantern clipped to my chest. The force of the fall knocked the breath out of me and sent me into another coughing fit as darkness took over the room and the swarm spread out over the wide ledge on this side of the gorge. They didn’t come for me directly, almost like they could not see or smell me, but they still came closer as the first to reach the top spread out and explored the cavern.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Dark memories broke into the surface of my thoughts. The previous fight with a single one of these things in the cave that had left me unconscious and nearly sent me to respawn, and the moment Max had ripped Kazzad’s mask off of her and forced me to see the dwarves side of the game. I let out a wordless howl of terror with my first breath, panic overcoming me as I kicked at whatever was holding my foot. I clawed at the ground, trying to drag myself away. Yet no matter how much I kicked or pulled, whatever was holding me held firm.

A wash of pleasantness engulfed me, Max flooding my system with endorphins and dopamine. “Not now! It’s just a stray bit of the sticky webbing. Reach down and cut it, or unwind your foot wrap!”

I dragged in a shaky breath, and did as he asked. I curled into a ball and felt for the knot that would unravel my crude binding as the nearest of the huge insects finally came close enough to brush a long probing antennae against me. I fumbled for the knot, my gauntleted fingers making it difficult to find purchase on the cinched ball of cloth.

I felt another antennae against my back, that was quickly followed by a quick, almost tentative bite. The long mandibles sunk into my shoulder blades, and I could feel the wriggling mouth bits of the creature as it pulled out a small chunk of my back. I bit back another scream and thrashed around, ripping the knot off of my foot wrap forcibly and finally kicking free.

The scolovian that had bit me chittered and clacked its jaws together when it discovered I was made of meat, and the meager defence the coating of tar over my body had provided was dispelled. The swarm around me shifted focus, and I was quickly piled on and wrapped up with clawing and biting slabs of unyielding carapace.

I think I screamed some more. I fought back as hard as I could, punching, ripping, jamming my armored fingers under chitinous plates and wrenching with all my might. The pain was one thing, sharp pinches and points jolting across my body, but the sensation of being crawled all over, pressed by a swarm of hard spikes and grinding plates of chitin, ripped by probing teeth that took small chunks of flesh, all embedded a seed of fear within my core. No matter the lowered level of pain, the experience was worse than anything I’d suffered before then. Some brand new and desperately wild part of me promised that if only I could escape, I would never allow this to happen again.

One of the mandibles raked down my face, scratching along my eye and mouth, right as an intensely strong stench of candied peppermint smacked me in the face like a bucket of ice water. The bugs swarming over me instantly forgot me and started to thrash and flail around, some throwing themselves back over the edge of their cliff in their hurry to escape.

“Kik, grab ‘em outta there!” Bomilik’s voice boomed across the chamber. Strong hands grabbed my shoulders and dragged me away from the centipedes.

“We got ya! Bones of the mountain, there’s a right landslide of these things.” Kikkelin’s voice added, and I uncurled from my own panicked little ball as the dwarven lass dragged me back into the tunnel. Bomilik let out a rumbling snort and hissed, spraying another fine mist of the peppermint stench from his mouth and nose over the entrance to the corridor to cover our retreat.

Kikkelin hooked her hands under my armpits and lifted me to a sitting position, then helped me back to my feet. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask, but Bomilik came up after us and pushed us back towards the vent room.

“No time. We have to get back to the others. Mentha breath will keep them for a time. Have you been stung?”

I shook my head and shouted back, “I don’t know!” before I turned to follow Kikkelin. Their shorter legs pumped in a furious sprint, while my longer strides felt almost casual in comparison. Instead of peppering them with questions, I enlarged the map to the center of my HUD and examined it, mentally prodding Max for more information as I did everything I could to distract myself from the horror they’d pulled me from.

Bomilik pushed me forward, “You still move well, so likely not. Good!”

The map showed the cavern we had just come from filling up with the red markers as the huge centipedes crawled up from the gorge but were blocked from exiting the chamber by the strange peppermint blast Bomilik had used and the remains of the burning tar fires I had set along the other side. House Bassaldourn had retreated from their earlier chase, moving back to their own territory and consolidating their forces. Even their main raiding party had begun to move away from our forge room as news of the final quest objective changed the landscape of the challenge.

Sallis was also returning to our headquarters, and when I zoomed the map out as far as it could go I could see the red swarm rising up from all of the dividing gorges that separated each of the territories. Only two of the deep chasm rooms were containing the scolovian swarms, while most of them were quickly spreading into the tunnels and caverns of the adjoining zones of control.

The far side of our own territory was quickly filling with the predatory insects, and from what I could tell by the map it seemed that House Hammerting had blocked off the tunnel connecting their own vent room to their closer divide. Houses Rocksturdy and Brightenjaw’s zones of control were both filling up with the insect hordes from both sides, while Bassaldourn was in a similar position to our own.

“What do we know about these things?” I finally asked as we neared our forge room. All I knew about them was that they were a dangerous and poisonous beast, and it had taken three of us to barely win a fight with one of them when it managed to get the jump on us. My breath was still ragged, but the burning fear in my veins was starting to lessen as Max flooded my system with pleasant chemicals.

“They…” Kikkelin panted out. “They are a blessing and a curse, their migration happens four times per year on our home world. They swarm up from the depths, deeper than we can go without special equipment, and scour the lower tunnels and talweg of waste and debris before laying their eggs and returning to the deep.”

We broke into the forge room, and I took in the changes as I struggled to catch my breath. There was now a tall structure of some kind near the vents, nearly as tall as the ceiling and made of dark metal and partially coated in cracked bricks. A number of new vats had been carved out and set alongside the others, as well as a few new piles of ores and minerals that had not been present before I had been kicked out of the Link.

Heaving in deep breaths, and leaning down with my hands on my knees, I shook my head. “W-what’s a talweg?” My voice was still shaky, but I needed to understand the monsters. Anything I could learn about them might help with the fear that had taken grip of my core.

“Hah, the talweg is the lowest part of a valley.” Bomilik answered as he looked over my injuries, looking for stings and ignoring the less dangerous but still damaging bites. “You were chewed up, but I see no stings. A good sign.”

Sallis was already in the room, standing near the elaborate map that had been scratched into the floor when I left but was now a meter tall 3D model of the explored area. After a few deep rattling breaths and some more coughing and adrenaline fueled shivering, I shook myself off and joined them over by the model.