Everyone looks up at the five-meter wide spider with legs that end practically in sharp spikes, green-gray carapace, and mandibles that drip with deadly toxins. It leers at them with hostile intent–if such a thing with eyes that can see every direction can. The way the eyes flex in directions that just don’t have any vertebrate equivalent is disturbing. “You might want to start fishing for crits on this one," Drenar utters grimly.
“My bad, I’ll call an exterminator next time,” the ancient dragon sage mutters from Drenar’s armband. This night is just continuing to go downhill as the giant monstrosity screams at them in rage. Coming into this room was a terrible mistake that they are all regretting.
“This one spits digestive enzymes, if you see it rear back, don’t be there,” Joey warns them just as Kyle unbolts the door. She’s already in motion and dives under the first swipe of a deadly leg to impale a target, and she slams an alchemical cartridge into the leg–an acidic one that should dissolve through the carapace. It shrieks and tries to land several more impaling motions, and it barely misses her. She swerves and runs through a set of legs while the others open fire, and she looks for a way out of here that isn’t going to lead back through the warehouse. The far side door behind the spider is–
Duck! She hears the screech and knows what is coming just as she throws herself to the ground. A straw-colored liquid sprays from its mouth and starts dissolving a crate that had been just where she was standing a few seconds ago. She responds in turn by flinging another alchemical canister of acid–she’s running out of those, she should have packed more!
In the meantime, Kyle has gotten the door open while combat lights up the room, and he smashes a spider aside with a weapon buttstock and then follows up with a smash to its head, and ichor drips off the weapon. Everyone is now reversing course and leaping over the assembled spiders, who don’t seem phased by the prospect of being murdered by the humans and humanoids that just wiped out dozens of their kin a mere minute ago, and are undeterred by a sunk cost fallacy. These monsters are hungry, and they will not stop until their bellies are full.
She has an idea and grabs an empty canister and a fire orb off Nick’s belt while he’s next to her. “Nick, were there any bottles of sparifor by the entry? Did you see any?!”
“I grabbed one!” He hands it to her in an instant.
“Perfect!” She knows her detonator compounds, and this is one of them in a liquified form of sheer deadliness. “Drenar, Angela, keep it at bay until I can get something cooked up! We’re going monster hunting!”
“You’re crazier than Nick, and I kinda like it!” Julia beams before throwing a grapple that allows her to slam a spider into a railing with immense force. The impact leaves a trail of fluorescent ichor smeared on the metal. It somehow smells even worse than how it looks, and nearly causes her to retch. So much of it is soaking in everywhere, and that smell is just nasty.
Volkir can send them the cleaning bill never for this one. She begins mixing the ingredients, and takes a moment to measure them out with precision into one of her graduated cylinders. She does a few calculations, and concludes she has just enough for the job at hand. They need a massive concussive blast that should shred that monster part, and not risk incinerating the room by mistake. Drenar lands on top of its back with a quick jump and starts slicing, but the problem is this specimen is already healing damage done to it, and the carapace wounds seem to be closing. The injuries Drenar is landing are too severe for it to heal quickly, but it tries to throw itself on its back to crush him.
He doesn’t fall for it and rolls to safety, wincing as his beaten-up body takes another round of punishment. She’s still too focused in a shady spot that Levine and Nick keep covered, and they are not letting these little monsters set foot into this room. She has…oh, she needs a fuse! She grabs some detonator fuse off Nick’s belt, and grabs a small utility dagger from her hopper system, and cuts it to length. It should be approximately a thirty-second fuse, More than enough time to get to safety and put this thing out to pasture.
“Joey, are you ready yet?!" Drenar shouts out when it rears its head and spits acid once more, and the corrosive substance dissolves the rust-spotted shelving in one location. The shelving starts buckling under the immense weight of what is stacked above it, and Angela tries to get a field of effect around it. She shunts the debris to the side with a massive kinetic blast, keeping them safe.
“Patience, young dragon-wan! Never rush the arsonist–alchemist! Never rush the alchemist!” she shouts over the sound of combat. Those skittering spiders are not helping with her focus, if she gets the measurements wrong, this bomb will be a dud, or detonate on her right then and there.
“Great, this is how I’m going to die! Alex was right, I’m gonna get set on fire by you!” he shrills. “He knew it, you’re a total firebug!”
“Oh is that absurd! I just happen to like to use the greatest means of entropy to deal with my recent problems, since it’s so efficient!” It’s like they think she's running around, torching everything in sight! She’s only torching the immediate threats.
“You make bombs, Joey! Too frequently for any sane human!” Kyle belts out before he smashes a spider in the face and then puts a bolt through its carapace at point-blank range.
“They are not bombs! They are alchemically exothermic reactions wrapped inside a hard outer container intended to fragment and scatter high velocity shrapnel!”
“That is the definition of a bomb!” he screams out. He can’t appreciate the delicate science of exothermic reactions, the transformation of ingredients, and the release of energy in an uncontained format–
Uh, I’m not an arsonist, am I? More spiders get splatted by Julia nearby, who has plasma whips lashing out and shredding these monstrosities–she has to stop and stare for a second at that spectacle, because she is utterly brutalizing these seemingly endless monsters, all while Drenar, Kyle, and Angela take turns trying to distract the giant brood spider. Julia roars like a dragon and seems to be utterly embracing the dance of doom she’s caught in, keeping them clear of threats and smashing these crawly nightmares to chunky goo.
Finally, Joey is done, and the reagents are active in the larger canister. She shouts out to Drenar to get his attention. “Make a big wound! Angela, use your telekinetics to slow it!”
“Got it!” they both shout in synch. She waits poised with the deadly explosive, and prepares the fuse. Thirty seconds should be enough, if she’s got the fuse length correct. These shelves are a deadly place to be caught in if the brood spider traps them and–
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Angela is a bit slow and is knocked aside by one sweeping leg, rolling and dodging away from those piercing blows. Joey dashes forward and flings out her locking foam at the body, to inhibit its movement for even just a few seconds. Angela manages to slice into the bulbous abdomen of this monstrosity, and dodges another lancing blow. It's now or never!
She lights the fuse with a charge of mana, and it starts smoking. It'll keep burning even if doused in liquid, and she quickly clicks her staff to its compact size and gets it in the holster. She slides between the legs of this chitinous horror and thrusts the canister deep into the wound!
Ew, spider viscera, gross, need to run and clean off! And not be blown into little chunky fox bits! She grabs Angela off the floor while Drenar blasts the spider with a kinetic shot that staggers it backward, and he hollers for them to follow him to the doorway.
Running from a giant spider with a bomb in its gut is not how she figured this day was going to go. She hears a hissing inhale, grabs Angela, and ducks into the cover of a heavy statue wrapped in dusty brown cloth. The blast of acid starts melting the statue in a sizzle of decomposing soft clay, and Angela grabs her arm–a tiny droplet has burned through her shirt sleeve, and she screams.
Joey has the answer in a second and her hopper whirls and gets her the relief she needs. A small canister of gray powder that she opens and throws a handful at the burn, neutralizing the acid, but Angela is still in pain. “Keep running!” Joey shouts out before running at full tilt. Of all the targets this thing goes after, it's her and Angela, and ignores the brave teen trying to jump onto its back and slice away. It buys them a second of space before Drenar gets flung, hitting a shelving wall and groaning as his spell barrier bursts.
“Up and over!” Angela points out another collapsed section of shelving and they scrabble upwards. The spider swipes laterally and misses them just as they get to the top and sprint along, hopping from gap to gap. The spider decides it's done playing around and knocks an entire unit down in a sound of shattering glass, twisting metal, and crackling wood. Joey dares a glance at the collapse behind them, panic setting in. There's a big gap ahead, and she and Angela leap, stumbling on the landing just as the collapse brings down a chunk of the storage row.
There's a hissing exhale and acid splashes on the support structure, and it begins to collapse underneath them. Angela manages to hang on for a split second before tumbling and hitting the floor along with Joey. She looks back in panic, seeing this deadly monstrosity chittering hungrily. Why hasn't this bomb blown up yet, did she get the fuse length wrong?
What a stupid way to die, she thinks as Angela grabs her and tries to hoist her out of the debris. That’s when Julia–partially into her dragon form despite the close quarters, throws a massive lasso of plasma energy around their foe and heaves with all her might, pulling it back and disrupting its aim. The acid splashes and sizzles dangerously close, and she flings the neutralizer compound before it can cause further damage and drip onto her. The spider turns around, legs trying to swipe at them, and Drenar climbs up on the top of the shelves and leaps down, plunging Luminari deep into the brain of the creature, slicing viciously. Except most of the brain is protected by that viscous goop that forms its blood and acts as a hydraulic fluid for its fast limb motions, and he leaps off before a swipe of one leg can impale him.
“Joey, why hasn’t that fuse gone off yet?!” Angela screams even as she hoists her out.
“It should have by now–”
Somewhere, in another universe, Joey realizes that she’d just miscalculated the fuse length by about fifteen seconds. That isn’t the universe she’s dwelling in, because that moment of panic is followed by a massive detonation that splits the spider in half, and bits of spider rain down in every direction. On the litany of rows of mothballed artifacts, all over Julia, Drenar gets drenched in blue-green goo, and more than a splatter hits her and Angela. The halves of the monstrosity twitch exactly once more before it finally realizes it’s dead, and the remnants of it scrunch inward.
Joey stares at the burning, disintegrating mass, down at herself, and then Angela, who is wearing colors of liquid that really aren’t attractive all over her face. Angela still looks like she’s in light shock–for a second.
“Joey I’m gonna be real with you, that was both awesome and nightmare-inducing.” Angela wipes a splatter of green off her face, and gags. “Oh, fates. This is so revolting.”
“Yeah. I feel that. I think I added a little too much nightshade acetate.” Julia is busy laughing even though her gold scales are spattered with green and blue ichor, and Nick is grimacing at the mess, as he hasn’t been spared a fresh coat of crimes against fashion, either. Levine fires his rifle one more time at a spider that had been too bold and refused to run like the rest of them.
“Joey, leave the explosives to me next time,” Nick sighs even as he hoists both her and Angela up. Drenar is in a funk and trying to wipe all the grossness off himself. It’s all over him, and he’s trying not to dry heave. “Drenar, that is quite a lovely color by the way! It suits you!”
“Well I’ve been blessed with my first monster kill assist, so there’s that, I guess–blech.” he spits a bit of ichor that had been on his lip, and he just sighs and wipes his hands on his jeans. He points to Joey. “You are teaching me alchemy.”
“Oh no. You don’t want me teaching you alchemy.” She secretly wants to teach him alchemy.
“Oh yes I do,” he grins, despite looking like he just escaped from a horror film. “Because it’s the alchemist that just saved our scales–uh, skin, again? Damn, I’m having trouble delineating what I am these days,” he mutters as an aside before smiling at her warmly. “Besides, I’m not going to be able to solve all my problems with brute force.”
“No Drenar, you’re good with stump speeches and beating up giant monsters! Play to your strengths!” Julia adds with a toothy grin. She’s not even bothered by the disgusting mess, and shifts back to her human form a few seconds later. “Also, James totally owes you his prized beta Shivan Dragon. Congrats on predicting we’d run into gargantuan monsters!”
He lets out a contented sigh. “This is not the bingo card I wanted to fill out for the occasion. I still wanted to meet a magical fox girl.”
You already have, Joey thinks with a heartfelt smile. Angela gives her a quizzical look and then her eyes widen. And then, she sends out a private thought that she and Samarina can hear.
Joey, your mic is stuck on with me. If you really want to keep that one quiet from him for a bit, you might want to fix your psionics, fast. Her leering smile turns into the most anxious smile she’s ever had. Also, sorry. I knew Sam was playing coy about something. Please don’t freak out, I can feel you freaking out, and you really don’t need to.
Well, that fox is out of the bag now. She does her best to not break out in panic and after a moment of cleaning off, she helps Drenar with a basic cleaner spell–a utility spell that most mages know to be rid of stains and unsightly messes. It gets most of the ichor off, and she tries to focus on the task.
Then it hits her. Her thoughts projected outward. That shouldn't have happened! She glances nervously at Angela, and dares to try something to confirm her dread. Uh...testing? Is the biological radio still working? She dips her head in response. I uh...might owe some explanations on that one...
Joey…don’t be afraid of what you are. You have stood against monsters and madwomen when so many others would have run. Who you are, matters so much more. She dares a glance over her shoulder, and Angela nods silently with a warm smile. Samarina does have that calming grace, the same as her host.
And that’s all the reassurance she needs.
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