Once Goldie had thought about it for more than a moment, the choice became obvious.

You have to start with the Brown Recluse Spiders, she thought. If you leave your eggs alone to fight them, at least you know that they are occupied with you.

If she attacked the Common House Spiders first, she would be worried about her eggs the entire time.

With that decision settled, she opened up her Status. She would make some improvements before she went hunting.

User: Goldie, Willful Golden Hourglass Spider

Age: 15 months

Sex: Female

Status

Health: 750/750

Mana: 298/298

Strength: 130

Agility: 159

Perception: 129

Dexterity: 200

Constitution: 151

Intelligence: 90

Will: 208

Charisma: 140

Skills: Claustrian Language Comprehension, Identify, Mana Manipulation I, Shed Skin III, Silk Lasso I, Silk Manipulation VI, Silk Weaving VI, Venom Manipulation IV

Evolution Points: 2470

Biomass: 200/450

There were meaningful changes through Evolution, she thought with satisfaction. All of my numbers are much higher than they were, and my Skills improved too. I never had Mana Manipulation before…

The Goddess must have sensed how Goldie longed to keep up with her friend and shaped her new form to better accomplish that task.

Thinking of Adon, a part of Goldie wanted to go and check on him again before she committed to warring with the spiders, but she resisted that urge. He would almost certainly be in his chrysalis still. She had an idea of how long it might take for him to emerge, and though her notion was vague and lacked much basis in experience, she felt it was unlikely he had finished.

She knew how to find him now, but she also knew he was far away if she navigated through the pipes, and it would probably take hours to make her way down the correct path again.

And Goldie also had the sense that she might be shucking off her responsibilities if she tried to run to Adon at this moment. She could win this fight. She had no reason to try to drag him into it.

I am just trying to rely on him to fight another of my battles, she told herself. I have leaned on his strength too much already. Through no fault of Adon’s, wasps attacked my web, and I was unprepared to defend it. That is why Red died. This place is going to be my home now, at least until the children are big enough to fend for themselves in a few weeks. I have to be able to defend it.

To manage that effectively, she should take a leaf from Adon’s book. Diversified her abilities and worked to actively hone new powers. As she searched the Evolution Store, those were the ideas that occupied her mind.

Things seemed to have become more expensive since her Evolution, though happily, many Skills and Adaptations that had not been available before were now a possibility. Telepathy was the obvious example, but not the only one.

She bought the Magic Perception Adaptation and upgraded the Mana Manipulation Skill to Mana Manipulation III. Most importantly for the battle to come, she purchased the Venom Projector Adaptation. There was another Adaptation that she was interested in, called Venom Sense, which would allow Goldie to sense the location and Health condition of a creature she had afflicted with her venom, but she could not afford it with the other, higher priority purchases.

Important to have something to strive for, Goldie thought, thinking of Adon.

When she finalized her selections, the world seemed to spin.

Her head pounded, and the flesh around her fangs burned, as the Adaptations modified her body. Sensory information rushed past her while her brain adjusted to the new ability to perceive Mana. Goldie endured the pain and confusion quietly.

And she reveled in the new knowledge she was receiving.

As she stood in place, her senses overwhelmed with her newfound ability to sense a form of energy inside herself that she had never interacted with before, she also felt her knowledge of magic and Mana deepening. Mana was an energy that flowed through all things, but that only some organisms could access and manipulate.

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For most life forms, it simply flowed out through the core and was lost in the atmosphere, like water evaporating from a puddle and leaving for places unknown. The transformative power of this energy was staggering. She had thought of it as simply something that allowed Adon to destroy physical barriers with pure power, or to boost his and Red’s existing Intelligence temporarily, but new uses occurred to her.

I could strengthen my webbing with Mana or use it to better protect my body.

At the same time, she noticed that as her fangs reshaped to be able to spray venom, she had also gained a sudden awareness of how to use the ability by squeezing certain muscles. This was less conscious than the magic information, which felt much more alien to Goldie’s mind and consumed most of her attention, but it was still a big deal.

She had not felt so transformed by Evolution Store purchases since her first big investments in silk and venom, over a year ago now.

I will experiment with Mana later, she thought, recalling that it had taken her friend time to master Mana to the degree that he had. Perhaps I will do it with Adon there to guide me.

For now, she tested her Venom Projector by aiming a spray of venom at the lower half of her web. With a few bursts of venom, she got the hang of aiming and shooting.

Then Goldie adjusted the composition of her venom. That was what her Venom Manipulation Skill was for. She had tinkered with it many times in the past, before she arrived at her pre-Evolution venom. She knew intuitively that it had improved in potency since her Evolution.

As a higher tier organism, her body was now capable of producing more toxic substances than it ever had before. In order to maximize the utility of her venom, she increased the toxicity as much as she could bear for the mission. She did not want a single enemy spider walking away from this.

Finally, she turned back to focus on her eggs. Obviously, she would not be taking her babies into what she knew would be the thick of battle. She looked hard at them and noticed how their exterior covering had become more translucent, so that she could see the tiny but fully formed spiders inside. She knew this meant the babies were almost ready to emerge from their shells.

I am so excited to become a mother, she thought. I wish Adon could be here for this. And Red…

She tried to push those thoughts away. She had a mission right now. She would spend more time mourning Red once she had secured her hold over this secret room, just as she would spend time with the hatchlings.

I will tell them all about you, my strong, silent protector. That was how she would honor her lost mate.

Returning to the present situation, she produced the thickest, densest silk of her life and used it to web her eggs to the beam she was using as one of the support structures for her web. In the corner they now occupied, the eggs were protected by both shadow and the dense application of webbing.

Satisfied with her work, Goldie crafted more of the ultra-dense silk and wrapped it clumsily around her body, creating the closest thing she could manage to armor.

Finally, she set out to hunt the hunters.

She climbed up the wall where the Brown Recluse Spiders made their ugly, asymmetrical disorderly webs. Goldie climbed above their position to approach from the spiders’ blind spot. The element of surprise would probably only last for one or two spider ambushes at best, but she wanted to make the most of it. These creatures had been living in relative peace with Goldie. They would not expect this.

Goldie crossed over a beam and passed above the middle of the nearest of the Brown Recluse Spider’s web, to stand directly over the shelter where she knew it would be. This was the most tangled, densely woven part of the web. The most disorderly, to her distaste.

A little cubby hole designed to make any predator that entered it stick midway through, allowing the web’s owner to defend itself.

She let go of the wall and allowed herself to drop straight down. There was activity as soon as she landed. The Brown Recluse Spider that occupied the web immediately came rushing out of its shelter, and Goldie sprang into action, sinking her fangs right into the side of his head.

She released her grip and thrust the dying creature away from her, then threw her body up and out of the web, leaping onto the wall just above. There was some activity, she could see, as the other two Brown Recluse Spiders sensed motion and moved out of their shelters to see what was happening.

Goldie took advantage of their confusion and sprayed venom down into the nearest spider’s eyes. The accuracy of it was apparent as the Brown Recluse Spider twitched and writhed under her attack. The third Brown Recluse Spider moved out of its web and toward the second one that was wriggling in pain—whether to take advantage of its weakness or to offer some protection, Goldie would never be certain.

She leaped down onto the third one and latched onto it as it was stepping onto the wall, and the two tumbled down together, locked in a deadly wrestling match, both biting at each other. Goldie quickly managed to inject her venom into the center of her opponent’s mass, while it tried and failed to bite through her dense silk covering.

The Brown Recluse Spider stopped moving before they landed. When they struck the floor, it bounced and rolled until it struck the wall again. Then its body lay still on the ground. Goldie walked up to it and bound it up tightly with silk, in case it was only playing dead.

Then she ascended the wall again. The second Brown Recluse Spider saw her coming halfway, and rather than trying to fight her as the others had, it ran up the side of the wall, forcing her to give chase.

Goldie half-galloped up the wall and held the final Brown Recluse Spider tightly in her forelimbs while she injected a more-than-sufficient dose of her newly improved venom into its body. Then she turned and dropped it back into its own web. She would clean that spider up later.

She returned to both the webs of the spiders that had died there and bound them up with silk.

Then she dragged all three of the Brown Recluse Spider corpses back to her web and left them beside the rest of her mound of food.

That was much easier than I expected, she thought. Maybe I prepared more than I needed to.

Goldie went around to the Common House Spiders’ webs, and she repeated the treatment she had given to the Brown Recluse Spiders. They put up even less fight than the Brown Recluse Spiders had.

She felt a little bad about killing the mated pair of Common House Spiders, especially after she invaded their web and found that they had an egg sac of their own. Just like her, they had tried to hide it by webbing it up in a corner of their home. With her newly improved Perception, she easily saw through the deception, though.

Goldie banished her regrets and reminded herself that these little ones would only have been competitors of her own hatchlings one day if they had been allowed to live. She dialed up the acidity in her venom to the maximum she could.

And she bit into the egg sac and injected the highly acidic venom until she heard the slight sizzle of the eggs dissolving into fluid.

While their parents would become food for Goldie’s baby spiders, she ate the unborn creatures herself. She did not want to force her little ones to try to digest something so intensely acidic before they reached maturity.

I won, she thought. The secret room is all mine and the babies’ now.

It felt like a bittersweet victory, slaughtering her own kind like this.

But it was the victory that Goldie’s animal nature had told her she needed to pursue. For the hatchlings.