Banon fell, and he fell, and he kept on falling, the night sky above him and the dark jungle wrapping the world in every direction around him, every direction but one. Below him was the den of a mangrove spider, a massive spread of white silk between the trees and undergrowth large and dense enough to catch him gently, he hoped.

He’d wanted to do this for so long with a real living reed staff, ever since he began spider falling. He’d done spider falls like this hundreds of times before, using broken-off tree branches held above his head in each hand as extra surface area since his fall would not be slowed quite enough by his body falling through the web alone to come out unscathed. He had sprained his ankle many times, broken his arm once, and garnered many more superfluous injuries by trying this from heights not near as high as he was this time before realizing he simply could not do it safely without something to add extra drag when falling through the web. Branches, besides being annoying to saw off before each drop, were also unreliable and much more fragile, even if they did provide that much-needed extra drag. But now, with the extra size and surface area of his exceptional living reed, it should work just as well as a large branch would and hopefully better, since it was more regularly shaped, stronger and lighter and easier to hold onto thanks to the texture.

Less than a second before he impacted the upper layers, he activated his staff where he held it parallel to the approaching ground over his head, instantly doubling the area of drag for the webbing to latch onto.

Banon hit the upper layers of web with a strange mixed noise of the lingering whoosh of air from falling so quickly now blending with the stretching and tearing sounds of thousands of strands of thickly interwoven webbing as he fell through them, slowing with each passing foot. He made sure to emit a loud hooting noise as he fell, since the forest floor below him would be crawling with juvenile mangrove spiders and he wanted them all scared out of the way lest he accidentally land on one and alert the brood mother via the scent emitted from its child’s destroyed carapace.

Banon braced before he hit the ground, careful neither to lock his legs nor let the knees bend too much as he landed. He slammed down, fell into a roll out of it to preserve his joints and then began pulling all the excess web off his full twenty-odd feet of gradually shortening staff as the second chute sunk back within the main body. As the adrenaline in his veins and lingering hiss in his ears faded, he listened to the sound of thousands of tiny juvenile mangrove spiders skittering on the ground for dozens of staff lengths around him in every direction, never looking up from his task while he untangled stray webbing from all over his person. Then he set to walking. Even all around him, here at ground level, there was an ambient amount of webbing, though it was easily thin enough to walk through without getting stuck. Sort of like thin mist but… web.

Even Banon knew it was important to marvel at things like that every once in a while, let the spindly fibers play between his outstretched fingertips, gaze around at the living sea of head-sized white spiders running amok in the darkness all around him– though he saw them relatively clearly, since his eyes were meant for the night.

For all the time he spent feeling like he was constantly stuck, embroiled in conflict with the direst of consequences, Banon, even still, old as he was, often felt like a kid again in moments like these. He smiled, reliving the memories of his first time hearing the overwhelming background noise of a mangrove den as he approached it. To ten-year-old Banon, mangrove dens had felt like magic little worlds tucked away from everything, since from the inside all you could see was a thick sky of white thread in every direction.

After wading through the parting sea of juvenile mangrove spiders and web-coated undergrowth, cutting his way through the web in places it briefly thickened, he came upon the brood mother. She emerged from her underground den slowly as he paused to take her in, briefly surged forward, then halted to sniff the air around her. In Banon’s experience, brood mothers were incredibly intelligent when it came to dealing with Ooura and usually only became hostile if they smelled the pungent odor emitted when one of her babies was wounded or killed.

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The brood mother– which doubled his height and was many times his width, watched him pass by pensively while the smaller spiders skittered in and out curiously as if trying to draw a reaction out of him. Her dimly glowing eyes, he swore, twitched from his staff and then back to his face, as if analyzing both his intentions via facial expression and judging his weaponry as well, but Banon doubted she was really that intelligent. Then again, he was never one to underestimate any creature in the jungle, which was how he had lived this long. If he had been the kind of ten-year-old who, on first venturing into a goliath mangrove spider’s den, had the immediate urge to start killing its young in expectations they were the only threat, as some less well-taught boys unfortunately made the mistake of doing, he would have been claimed by the jungle just the same as so many young Ooura boys learning their limits were in their early years.

Life could be cruel, but when you finally allowed your identity to merge with that, you became the most effective version of yourself, and Banon had much proof of the effectiveness of that approach, as hollow as it left him at times. There was nothing triumphant about becoming a man, just the grand reward of too much responsibility for one soul to handle fairly and the building up of gradually more tolerance for sucking up the blood and shit thrown upon you by fate’s careless hand.

Watching the massive whitish-grey arachnid study him with her black-tinged purple eyes and with her forward legs poking at the upper dry mesa between them periodically, it was hard not to see her as intelligent enough to be assessing the various factors adding up to the threat he might pose her. Maybe she could even be communicated with in some rudimentary way. He just would never have a way to prove or disprove it unless he deliberately made an effort to interact with her and others like her further.

He parcelled that away as a point of research for another, less urgent time.

If the Pyathen could take their technology to its limits, perhaps he could find some deeper corridor within nature than ever thought possible, just like the Pyathen’s acid would once have been impossible. Just think, if he could harness the will of such a creature by any means, cruel or otherwise, what could it do on a battlefield with no precedent for such things, no known factor of what to do against it? Their acid might burn it, might, but the carapace of brood mothers was remarkable and could potentially hold out long enough to allow even a single well-directed goliath spider to disrupt an entire battle.

She surged forward to within a staff's length of him and hissed.

Or perhaps Banon was too optimistic.

Banon considered hissing back, matching her display of authority with one of his own, but playing games with her patience was clearly over with now.

So, instead, and without a shred of lost dignity– because it was a spider as big as a tree-house– he ran, sprinting for the edge of the foggy white barrier around everything.

Screeching and pounding and skittering followed behind him.

Banon drew his long knife and gauged the distance to, and thickness of the outer web wall as he approached it. He then glanced behind him, spurred even faster after seeing her catching up with him, placed the knife between his teeth, turned the staff in his newly freed hands, planted it mid-stride and shot himself for the lightest colored part of the webbing wall, plucked his knife back into his grip mid-air and swung it out in front of him in a long, flat arc, taking the bulk of the thickest web wall out and then burst straight through the rest carried by the obscene power of his staff into the bright and vibrant bio-luminescence speckled night-time jungle, and continued to fly for five more staff lengths before landing.

He smiled all the way, picturing the den of the massive Orux bull he would take on tonight in his mind, picturing the bull’s huge silhouette, his low huffs, and most of all, picturing how his skull would look once it was turned into a headdress.

But there was one more advantage Banon intended on seizing before heading there.

It was forbidden to use the aid of another Ooura during the process of undergoing this stage of the Kothai trails, but Ooura were not the only hands capable of helping in this jungle.

Before heading for his bull, he would be paying an old friend a visit first.