image [https://i.imgur.com/h1rlIMF.jpg]

After performing a Rest and Mend, we skinned the pardasaurus and removed a white core from its maw. Its teeth and claws might serve as ingredients since the game classified them as white-level rarity items.

When I began to harvest its meat, Fletcher stayed my knife. “I wouldn’t take it if I were you. Carnivore meat is gamey. Bigger dinos are okay, and your hydra had a good fishy taste, but you won’t enjoy pardasaurus.”

I wiped my blade and made a contented grunt. Any excuse not to clean a carcass worked for me.

Charitybelle belayed the decisions. “Let’s try it anyway. It might be a nice change from hydra and worm.”

I grunted noncommittally and bent to the task.

“Your opening move had panache.” Iris’s compliment constituted her first opinion that wasn’t germane to a conversation. Like Yula, she seemed impervious to humor—as if she’d outgrown the frivolity of jokes.

I took the praise with an appreciable nod, as I wasn’t comfortable grandstanding. Fabulosa acted as our resident show-off, not me. I only wanted to prove to the merchants that we could take care of monsters.

“I can thank C-Belle for giving me Hot Air. It unlocks Slipstream, which lets me zip around.”

Fletcher pantomimed applause. “Splendid, my friend. I’ve never seen such a move!”

Charitybelle beamed at the praise. “Pretty soon, all our camp’s top warriors will do it. We need to generate enough favor points.”

When we left, we had 111 favor. In a few weeks, Charitybelle could give Hot Air to our most creative combatant, Fabulosa, and when she did, I’d be able to double my duration in the air.

I pulled up my map and checked our position. “Hey Fab, did you see the spider in the dark pine forest area?”

“I never saw it, but I found webbing near evergreens. And yeah, it was dark and quiet—a perfect place for monsters.”

The merchants looked about for pine trees and seemed relieved to see none. Glenn broke the silence. “Does anyone object to stopping for the day?”

Fletcher clapped his hands. “That’s a marvelous idea. We made progress on our trail, and I would like to reset my cooldowns before running into anything nasty.”

I looked around to see what the others thought of the suggestion. “I went through a few of mine as well.”

No one objected to stopping. Glenn and Oscar stood next to me, and I realized they wanted me to throw up the rope around my waist, giving them access to the sanctuary of the Dark Room.

I gladly accommodated them.

We built a campfire and tried eating the pardasaurus, but its meat tasted so gamey we cooked fillets of hydra, whose tender and juicy fishlike slices went down easier.

Charitybelle frowned while she finished her portion of pardasaurus. “We’ll give this pardasaurus to Rocky when we get back. He told me he knew slow-roasting recipes for gamey meat.”

“I’ll get him his meat grinder. Maybe he can make sausages.”

Fabulosa and Iris talked about tomorrow’s assault on the spider. The best part of their strategy involved leaving the merchants inside the Dark Room. No one had argued with this decision, least of all the merchants. We would encircle the territory, sizing up the weaver’s domain. Scorch promised to be our primary tool. Fabulosa and Iris both had Fireball, but it hogged mana. I wanted to prepare for a sustained fight before committing to arson tactics.

Fabulosa told us the spider arranged curtains of metal into a round maze, so circumnavigating its lair would help prepare us—the first step to defeating a maze involved learning its size. Our interface map neutralized disorientation, giving us an ace up our sleeve.

Even though we built a campfire and ate dinner outside, the evening and night passed without incident. Charitybelle and Fabulosa acted so apprehensive about fighting a spider that I felt edgy. The pair made many declarations against spiderkind before going to sleep.

The following morning, we marked the Dark Room’s location before leaving. After breakfast, Oscar and Glenn climbed back inside and pulled the rope in after themselves. I harbored no misgivings that they might make off with the valuable item. They wouldn’t do anything but wait for our return.

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We hiked to where Fabulosa had seen zombies on her way to Grayton.

Charitybelle summoned Bruno. The badger quietly waddled by her side. We moved slowly and with caution, so Bruno didn’t have problems keeping up.

The conifer forest remained as I remembered. Evergreen branches had all but blotted out the sun, so the tree’s lower limbs withered, leaving underbrush nonexistent. The lack of low branches gave us unimpeded visibility despite the dark conditions. The closest tree limbs rose 30 feet from the ground, creating a ceiling-like canopy. Pillars of evergreen trunks stretched as far as we could see in the gloom. Pine needles carpeted the forest floor, making for soft, slippery footing that yielded to our weight like loose sand.

And it grew quiet. Whatever insects and wildlife lived there, they made no noise. The pine needles shielded the wind, absorbing sound like a recording booth. It produced a silence as alien as the Dark Room.

It wasn’t long until we spotted webbing. The first strands amounted to little more than frayed bundles of metal. They reminded me of bundles of wire lying around our garage when I was little. My mom’s boyfriend stripped insulation from the copper wire to resell. But these braided filaments had irregular thicknesses, giving them an organic quality.

Not long after we examined the wiring, we spotted zombies.

We saw around a dozen undead, but most had tangled themselves on tree trunks. Undead kobolds, levels 1 or 2, incapable of a respectable attack, fell to our metal and magic. The creatures dragged unraveled coils of metal. When they caught onto tree trunks, it anchored them like leashes. Some zombies could do little more than lean in our direction, wave their arms, and hiss in soft, papery whispers. They showed immunity to Shocking Reach, but several Scorches ended their suffering.

As we explored, we encountered more beribboned zombies—errant kobolds and goblins in various states of decomposition. The metalwork on their limbs restricted their movement as if someone consciously hobbled them. What horrors had these creatures witnessed? Dispatching the zombies filled us with a cathartic satisfaction—as if we served as the forest’s immune system, ridding it of destructive agents.

To distract Charitybelle from her nerves, I teased her, rubbing her shoulders. “You see? This isn’t so bad.”

Worry lines corrugated her forehead. “Yeah, right.”

Scolding her badger served as a better distraction. Charitybelle spoke to her pet with such maternal patience that it made me want to eavesdrop on their telepathy.

Everyone kept glancing up. The trees grew so tall that barely any sky peeked through the branches.

We approached a rusty mesh of wire webs. Thick and thin strands of metal formed irregular weaves, not porous enough to slip through but not dense enough to hide monsters on the other side.

The woven wall matched the metal curtains that Fabulosa had described earlier. It angled down from the treetops and plunged into the thick bed of needles on the forest floor. The curtain wasn’t vertical but leaned like a sail. The metal stretched ten yards across and many stories high, disappearing beyond the canopy of evergreen branches.

We saw other curtains of similar dimensions, all leaning toward a central location.

A second web wasn’t as rusty. We examined its ground anchors. Beneath the needles, the webs coalesced into a corkscrewed spike planted deep in the soil. The corroded areas had coats of unoxidized metal—as if something maintained its integrity. It tempted me to cast Mineral Communion, but I didn’t want to waste it too early until we knew how big this place was.

We followed Fabulosa until she gestured ahead of us. “This is as far as I got. I didn’t mind a few zombies or metal chiggers—but up yonder? That’s why I turned tail.”

When we looked to where she gestured, Charitybelle gasped, and Iris moaned under her breath.

More metal curtains disappeared into the depths of the woods for at least 50 yards. The layers collectively obscured vision at a distance. The curtain tops converged high above the ground, forming a vast conical shape whose apex disappeared in the canopy. It looked like a giant, upside-down tornado, and sprouting from its axis stood a pillar of spun metal.

Four enormous deciduous trees surrounded the central shaft. They framed the nexus, starkly contrasting with the conifer forest. Their old and gnarled branches looked thick and sturdy.

Fire wouldn’t affect these spiderwebs.

Fletcher moved forward as if to demonstrate optimism. He approached a curtain that wasn’t as rusty as the others. It curved in front of us for about 30 yards, but we could still see through it.

Iris examined the metal strands. She tested her weight on them to see if they could serve as a ladder. As she transferred her weight onto the metal, a few thin wires snapped and stretched, but they collectively held. She lifted to her other foot with similar results.

Fletcher stepped forward. “Careful, my dear.”

“This is solid.” Iris pulled out her longsword and waved it around, but the metal curtain barely moved. She climbed five feet higher, and the webbing held. She tested the tension by purposely bouncing up and down. It produced less slack than a rope bridge, but her motions had alerted something. A faint crackling of twigs emanated from the canopy above.

“Iris. You’d better get down from there.” Fletcher stood as near as he could to the webbing without touching it. Everyone looked upward, searching for the source of the snapping branches.

Iris returned to the ground. She had to be careful not to snag her cloak on the webbing’s metal spurs. She almost slipped when she landed on the soft bed of pine needles. Iris inspected her hands. Faint red flecks dotted her palm, and she rubbed her fingers.

Iris had lost no health but slipped on leather gloves. “I got little cuts from the spurs.”

Fabulosa, Charitybelle, and I didn’t have gloves. We pulled out leather scraps to wrap around our hands in case we needed to follow the Sternways up the metal webbing.

Fabulosa adjusted her hand wrappings. “There’s no need to rush this—let’s stick to the plan. We’ll circle this area to see how big it is.”

With my map interface up, I reconnoitered the area with the rest of my party. We moved clockwise, keeping the thick center of the webbing to our right. We veered away from the axis whenever we felt surrounded by the metal curtains. The branches above us sometimes shifted, shook, and bounced as if creatures moved across them. Whatever dwelled in the trees already knew of our arrival.

We killed more helpless kobold and goblin zombies along the way, but halfway around the structure, we caught the stench of rotting meat.

“No worries, my friends. That’s likely a bait scent.” Fletcher’s rationalization did little to settle our stomachs.