Around the danaris’ head, the flames become brighter by an order of magnitude, from their previous relatively cool orange and red, becoming yellow and almost white. I push mana into it, cutting it off when I’m down to only two hundred units.

With the severing of my mana, the connection I have to the fire goes too. But that’s OK – I still have the torch flickering on the ground back a way. If necessary, I don’t even have to rely on creating my own fire: I can use Fire-Taming to build a Bond with the one back there.

Surely it can’t have coped with a fire that hot, no matter how good its chitin is. If nothing else, won’t its brain – or whatever it has that passes for one – have boiled inside its head?

The danaris is frozen even as the fire starts to die, and my Bound take full advantage of that.

Hades beats a hasty retreat, his head hanging low and his chest heaving even while the others move in. Bastet and Lathani snap at the thing’s legs, trying their best to crack the chitin. River joins them in striking at the joints of the danaris’ limbs. His impact is almost immediately felt within a few moments as his flint-tipped spear manages to pierce a thin bit of chitin. Liquid jets out of the hole he makes and that leg goes limp.

Persephone darts in and out, her toothed maw not finding much purchase on the defensive layer, even now. Sirocco is the only one of my Bound otherwise who doesn’t fly in, but I understand: with the fire still wreathing the creature’s head, there isn’t anything she can really target right now. I feel her frustration and try to send soothing feelings down the link. Ultimately, she’s not the strongest combatant, but she makes up for it with her scouting abilities and being able to get a – literal – bird’s eye view.

I join my Bound in striking at the danaris’ legs, pulling out my mace and leaping down from Hades’ back to run in. The stone head of my mace crashes into the chitin with an audible thunk, but my weapon rebounds off the armour without leaving more than a small mark. I frown and strike again, aiming for a joint this time. The knee joint or ankle joint or whatever it is is the closest, but it’s still above my head, limiting the amount of power I can bring to bear.

Still, the added damage of Blunt Weaponry helps and this time I hear a bit of a crunch. Another blow later and I too see a jet of liquid escaping, a second leg going limp. Heartened, I set to striking the next leg.

Only a few moments later the fire wreathing the danaris’ head and keeping it frozen dies completely. In its wake, it reveals a sight which both gladdens and frustrates me. There is damage, but not nearly as much as I’d have liked. The danaris’ eyes are gone, burnt and evaporated orbs now leaving only holes where they used to be. Its mandibles have been eaten away too, the substance they’re made of obviously not quite as fire-resistant as the rest of its body. That’s all good.

The issue is that the material making up the structure of the head isn’t nearly as damaged as I would expect it to be with a fire as hot as the one that’s only just died. There are scorch marks visible against the dark grey of the material itself, but little more than that. And from the way the danaris is now moving, it most certainly hasn’t done sufficient damage to its internal organs to kill the creature.

As the fight progresses, though, the spider’s movements make it clear that there has probably been more damage than immediately obvious. Where before it was moving fluidly, each of its limbs moving perfectly in relation to the others, now it is moving jerkily, far more uncoordinated.

That doesn’t remove its danger. Indeed, in some ways, it might actually be increased as its movements are a lot less predictable than before. From what I saw of the battle from Hades’ back, the main issue so far has been that it’s fast – the blow that hit River is one of the few that was truly not foreseeable.

Now, though, it might suddenly drop a couple of feet on top of me or one of my Bound, or its tail might flash in to stab at the air suddenly. One of its legs might flick out at a strange angle or curl inwards unexpectedly to strike at one of my Bound snapping at the underside of its abdomen.

Few, if any, of these movements appear to be intended; if anything, they look more like the kind of abrupt shifts that might characterise someone having a fit.

Perhaps the fire has done some internal damage to its brain, I think to myself as I back away. I bite my lip as I stare with narrowed eyes at the scene.

Even worse than the unpredictable movements of its legs and sting, though, is the fact that the webbing weapon which the description warned about has started to come into play. In the same abrupt and unpredictable way as all of its other movements, sticky white webbing is being shot every which way. Sometimes, it even entangles its own legs in the material, but since its chitin seems to be as resistant to that as anything else, it doesn’t impede itself too much.

The result is that the surface below the spider is becoming increasingly treacherous, with my Bound having to have eyes in the backs of their heads to make sure they’re not about to be stuck to the ground at the worst possible moment.

I only know that the webbing is sticky because Lathani accidentally steps in a patch and then almost takes a blow from the sting because she can’t jump out of its way. It’s only because Persephone bodily collides with the segmented ‘tail’ and pushes it off course that it slams into the ground rather than the nunda.

I manage to get her free a moment later by essentially forcing her paw to ‘shed’ the outer layer of her skin and fur – and the webbing with it. She’s much more careful after that to avoid the gleaming patches of white dotting the rocky ground below their feet.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Back away, everyone, I order and they quickly obey. Even once they’ve gone, the danaris still jerks around, proving that this is more of a seizure than a directed attack. My Bound eye the danaris warily, taking the moment to have a breather, but clearly ready to jump back into the action as soon as I give the word. Don’t go back in until it’s stopped seizing as much, I tell them.

Despite the danaris not actually actively ‘fighting back’ against my Bound, it’s still a difficult opponent. It’s not only because of its unpredictability or the way it’s turning the battleground into a minefield. The main reason is the same as always: its incredibly defensive exo-skeleton. Fenrir, ironically, would probably do a better job than any of my other Bound thanks to his powerful bite pressure.

But although the lair is probably left unguarded right at this moment, I’m not inclined to go inside to find him right now: we don’t know what might be waiting for us in the cave and all of us are needed here. Well, Sirocco not so much, but she doesn’t do well with caves as a general rule, nor does she have particularly good vision in the dark.

No, there has to be another way. Ideas flick through my mind, but are summarily dismissed. A trap with rocks or tree trunks falling onto the spider – too long to set up. I don’t know if the issues the creature is experiencing are temporary or permanent, but don’t want to wager on it being the latter.

I catalogue each of the weapons I’m carrying, but dismiss all of them. The one that has proved to have a decent effect is my mace; I doubt any of the others would work that well right now since I still don’t have a proper spear. My bow might be good if I had the accuracy to hit its joints, but as it is, I’m far more likely to miss than hit it, despite my increased Dexterity. Using my mace, however, would require me getting a lot closer to its flailing legs again, so is definitely not the preferable plan. I’m slower and much squishier than River, for example, and he already came off worse from making contact with one of those powerful limbs.

No, although I’m not as loaded with mana as I would like, I think that magic is my only real option here. And at least I have a way of quickly replenishing my pool.

Explaining my idea to Hades, I feel his consent. Pulling almost all of the mana in his body back into mine, I refill my mana pool to overflowing. Then, leaping onto his back again, I take a different position from before.

Crouching with my feet on the joints of his wings rather than securing my knees there, I’m rather precarious. He keeps his head up and I use his neck to help me balance. He trots into the action, choosing to come up from behind the danaris, heading towards its flailing and twitching tail. This reminds me of nothing more than a dying wasp’s sting, the way the abdomen pulses and its sting emerges convulsively. However, it’s also the area where we’re least likely to encounter a leg flying through the air and threatening to take our heads off.

There, Hades pauses. I pour all my power into my legs, pushing myself up explosively. Jumping into the air, I grit my teeth as I focus on where I want to go. A directed airblade from Hades helps me move just a bit further. He softened the air from its usual cutting edge, but it’s enough to carry me to land right between the tail section and the round body section to which all the legs are attached.

I hit the danaris’ back with a thump that it can surely feel. If it can, though, it shows no sign. I stay tense for a good few seconds as I wait for the tail to flip up like a scorpion’s to stab me, or for a leg to twist to slam me off its back.

Neither of those happen. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t know I’m here. Maybe it does, but it can’t control its limbs enough to rid itself of my presence. Or maybe its joints don’t even work like that.

Either way, it looks like I might be able to have an effect here.

I place my hand on the spider-creature’s back, focussing on sending my mind into its body.

Unlike with my Bound, I meet with strong resistance as soon as I push my mind through my skin. I grit my teeth as I set my Willpower against the resistance. We struggle for what feels like an eternity, but is probably only a few minutes.

Refusing to let myself entertain the idea that I might be outmatched, that I might lose this battle, I keep pushing. An inch, a centimetre, a millimetre…ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much progress I make, as long as I keep moving forwards.

And then the resistance gives way, like my opponent has decided to give up this battle in order to win the war. Because what I sense is that I now have a certain amount of freedom to roam, that I can scan the body in the way I can do with other bodies. But I also sense that if I try to do anything to the body, the resistance which faced me before will be back, and more intense besides.

Still, being able to see inside the danaris’ body is a step towards actually being able to do anything. The battle took over half my mana – and that includes the overflow which seeped into my mana pool slowly as I emptied it – and a good bit of my mental energy. I take the break with just as much concealed relief as the danaris itself.

The creature’s body, at first glance, is completely alien. I struggle to identify any of it. Then, as I spend a little more time going over what I can see and sense, I realise that most of the organs are actually relatively familiar, just different shapes and with slightly different functions. I thought spiders had to drink the liquified remains of their prey? I find myself saying mentally as I see the horror of a toothed throat that lies behind its mandibles.

Then again, as much as it is comparable to an Earth spider, it really isn’t. I see the organs which obviously produce the silk, the venom glands which lead to the tail spike. I see weird shaped lungs and an elongated stomach and intestine. Ouch, that looks like it hurt, I almost wince as I see its stomach and digestive pockets – they appear to have taken the bulk of the damage caused by the fire as they’re ruptured in multiple places.

I’m pretty sure I can see brain damage too, explaining the odd convulsive movements of the creature. However, it’s not all good news: as the resistance showed me, the danaris is very much alive and kicking, and the damage is already noticeably healing. We need to end this before it recovers its health.

Pulling almost all the way out of the body, my mind works busily over what to do next.

Trying to give it an aneurysm is out of the realms of possibility. I instinctively know that the more integral an organ is to the functionality of a creature, the more it will be defended. That eliminates its lungs too, though I do send a quick message to all of my Bound about where their openings can be found: if River or someone can block them, that might do the job for me.

Frankly, any attempts to change anything are likely to be met with high resistance. But what if the thing I’m changing isn’t actually a part of the danaris at all?