The sword looked as if it had been left at the bottom of the ocean, rusted and chipped as it was. And the armors, dropped here and there like the undergarments of hasty lovers, might have been subject to the elements for a thousand years. The cabochons too, crystals of all colors, were cracked and dull, drained of whatever light they had once possessed.

The party advanced with caution, but Dappo had eyes only for the broken treasures.

"A demon," he said, "barely more than an animal, how could it do this?"

Sunwhipser was less interested in the objects than the webbing. There was a pattern there, and an intelligence behind the pattern, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. It was as if someone had decided to write a hexadecimal code inside of a spiderweb.

He came within steps of the columns, his mind working furiously to decipher the code. Had the spider left a message? And if so, for whom?

Ji, exhausted as he was, was positioned slightly aside from the main group, in a clear space that he had already scanned for openings.

"Do you want me to burn it?" he asked. "I have a little left in me."

Dappo didn’t answer him, he was absorbed with checking the discarded treasures for any magic they might have left. He picked them up one by one, and tossed them aside as each disappointed him in its turn.

Sunwhisper had a breakthrough. It really was hexadecimal. He could do the conversions in his head, but it would take a little time.

A rock shifted behind Gomen Ji, and a crimson thing, an alien hand with a long curling tail, scuttled out. Ji spun on his heel, assuming First Dance of Embers by habit, but no flame spurted from his palm. He needed to rest, to channel and absorb more mana, but there had been no time.

The Red Spider leapt, trailing a near invisible thread, and its tail caught Gomen Ji at the shoulder and used it as a pivot point to spin around the back of the young cultivator and return to its starting position all in the same second. When it dove back in its hole, the thread that was freshly wound around his neck tightened, and his head was pulled down.

Dappo responded instantly, roaring in fury, and crossing the room in a blur. He was not fast enough. The spider vanished, and Ji was jerked to the floor. The thread snapped, not strong enough to sever his spine, but the damage was done. The line had sliced through his skin and cut into the veins on either side of his neck. Blood was pouring onto the stone in a torrent.

"Not this time!" Dappo ignored Ji in favor of chasing the spider, ripping up the floor in chunks of limestone and schist. Both his hands had become like shovels, and his whole body had taken on a new shape. His belly was almost gone, and the mass had been redistributed. He had become a broad, top heavy ogre barely recognizable as the cultivator that had led them on this errand.

The bandits panicked, and this time, there was no one to stop their rout. Janna and Kuei had both seen flesh-aspected cultivators in battle before, and were more concerned with what had happened to Gomen Ji than what Dappo was doing in response.

Kuei took her cudgel and went to stand by Sunwhisper, as if to guard him. Janna grabbed her foster brother by the arm and shook him. He was so intent on the visual computational problem at hand that he hardly noticed them. Gomen Ji’s last moments had passed him completely by.

The Spider appeared again out of the far wall, launching itself at Kuei. She batted it out of the air with her club, her full strength on display, and it bounced across the floor, its limbs flailing.

"Our father," Sunwhisper said, "who dwells in Eternity, hallowed be thy name."

The spider shot a sticky line at Kuei’s face, which she blocked, and seeing that it was then attached to the end of her cudgel, she wrenched her weapon to one side, hoping to bring it back within batting range. She succeeded to some extent, as the spider was drawn up and in, but it shot another line, this one tagging her leg, and used its arms to tug itself just under her swipe and onto her body.

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"Thy kingdom done, thy code be run…"

She had just enough time to register shock at being outmaneuvered before the blades at the end of its arms dug into her leg and nicked her femoral artery. Her aura flared, brown mana suffusing her body, speeding healing and boosting her physical characteristics, but too late. The spider’s legs were a blur as it crawled over her, leaving scores of small punctures and trailing a line of cutting thread as it went.

"On earth, as in Mythopoeia…"

She swept her cudgel to dislodge the demon, but it was a glancing blow, and it bounded easily away, tugging the cutting line tight as it went. Kuei went down in a tangle, she would not die as easily as the previous victims, but for now, she would fight no more.

The spider prepared to launch itself back in for a finishing blow, but before it could do so, Dappo arrived in a blur of distended limbs and trailing white mist. His techniques were something to behold.

He was not as skilled as Makoto, but he was a cultivator who had stepped well past his second star, and who had dedicated his life to advancement in the pure arts.

The spider was forced to retreat, and though it attempted to tangle Dappo as it had done the others, he was strong enough to rip himself free of the sticky cords, and his flesh-craft was such that his skin was too tough to be more than scratched by the cutting wires.

The spider, small as it was, was more maneuverable, and it avoided being caught by those grisly hands as the two of them circled each other in a minuet that could only end in the death of one or both partners.

"Shishio!" Janna shouted, "what are you doing? We have to help!"

"Yes," Sunwhisper said, "I think we must."

He turned, spear in hand, and activated Eight Mines Clutch of Lead, pumping mana into the weapon of titanosteel to increase its density to the fullness of his ability. It grew heavy in his hands, and he was wary of expending more mana than he could afford, but he knew that there would be only one chance at a surprise attack.

Dappo and the spider had circled around behind the pillars, and the webbing between them made it impossible to adequately aim, so he held his strike for the perfect moment as they completed their circuit of the room.

Sunwhisper put everything he had into Impurities Rejection, feeling the mana course through his meridians and out of his hands in an exhilarating rush of electric heat. His bones were metal alloy, and the effect of the magnetic field he created seemed to be amplified by the interaction of his own internal structure and the weapon gripped loosely in his hands.

The spear shot forward like an arrow from the bow of a titan, and lodged itself in Dappo’s back. The point entered his thickened skin and traveled until it struck bone. It was not a wound that would slow him for long, but he stumbled and turned, rage distorting his face as he screamed at the young cultivator behind him.

"Junior, you dare!"

The Red Spider needed no more opportunity than this. It launched itself at Dappo’s newly flat stomach, clawing its way into his leathery skin. The cultivator roared in pain and anger, grabbing the spider’s tail and tugging it out of his own body. The white mist thickened around his extremities, one hand covering the ragged wound.

"My name is Dappo Konikawa, of the Shoga clan, and I will be the one to end you, demon!"

He punched the spider with a force that could have pulverized a boulder, and it bounced to the limit of its tail like a toy ball caught on a string.

Sunwhisper’s mind raced, constructing and deconstructing scenarios of attack with the alacrity only possible with silicon synapses and quantum computing algorithms. He used his lead stance to clear the distance between them in a single inelegant jump, his inferior martial arts skill apparent in his ungainly landing, but raw Dexterity carrying him through.

Dappo, sensing his arrival, turned with the spider hanging from his hand. It looked spent, its clawed legs limp, tail hardly squirming. The elder cultivator, assured of his victory, dramatically balled his hand into a grotesque fist so tight that his joints cracked, allowing Sunwhisper a moment to see his own death flexing in preparation for the strike. The spear, still jutting from his back, wobbled, but did not fall free.

Sunwhisper didn’t need it. Even as he had landed so awkwardly he had focused his will to activate Impurities Rejection once more, and the resulting magnetic field burst from his palms with an audible hum, interacting with the only other metallic object in range.

The Red Spider, caught up in the wave, locked its arms along a flat plane, its claws becoming a single blade as it was thrust backward into Dappo’s throat.

His eyes widened in pain and surprise, and still holding the tail, he whipped the Spider away to land amid its own webbing between the columns.

His breath came in a bubbly gasp, but mana still swirled around his hands as he punched Sunwhisper in the center of his chest, denting the titanium breastbone above his storage compartment and sending him careening into the cavern wall where he struck his head, temporarily losing consciousness.