Shilloh barreled in with Scotty not far behind. The sticky spider silk didn't yield to her knife.

  The little purple beast squealed piteously, limbs moving drunkenly as the wings made a massive racket.

  "Shh," she said, ripping her first aid kit off and getting the medical scissors out as fast as she could.

  Scotty watched discarded bandages flutter across the ground. A frown grew on his face.

  "Shilloh, can you see any shapes or patterns in the web?"

  "Uhh, fuck," she said, sawing at the spider web. "Fuck! Scissors aren't working."

  "Try a lighter," he said. "Do you see any square-shaped patterns on the web?"

  She dove back into her backpack, only pausing to pick up a handful of leaves and toss them at the web.

  Her lighter came out around the same time Scotty cursed and lifted his weapon.

  "We need to exit as soon as we can. That's an Angler Spider web. They're huge and leave juveniles like this as bait."

  "I have to get him out," Shilloh said. Flame was working. She moved the lighter along in as deliberate a way as her adrenaline shivers allowed. Slow was smooth and smooth was fast. Her heart dropped when she saw the web tangled across the body and base of the wings. That would make this much harder. "A flock of Wingins can be extraordinarily dangerous when provoked, and they have enough range that it might be a risk to the settlement and caravan."

  "The spiders don't stray far. They'll be here soon," Scotty said.

  "Yes, but no one can predict how far Wingins will go, and their mood stays bad for a long time."

  "Known weaknesses?"

  "The wings."

  "Anything to avoid?"

  "If you go for the wings or the young, they'll all go berserk."

  "Well fuck-a-dee do-da."

  "And," she said back in a sing-song voice, "a fuckedy day!"

  With a cry of exultation, she burnt the last critical segment, grabbed the scruff of the little purple critter, and hauled it out of the web. Its limbs were still bound tight, but at least they could get out.

  "Let's go."

  Scotty nodded over his shoulder, ready to cover the retreat.

  Until she took a step forward and found her left foot was caught on something sticky.

  "Oh, shi—"

  That was all the time she had before Scotty's pistol thundered.

  What she saw took her breath away. Every inch of her silly friend disappeared. He wore a rictus snarl, though the tension never traveled past his face. His body moved in a robotic blur. He fired so fast, but not a single magazine touched the ground. They were carried into the side pouch and came out in the same motion, replaced by one that was full. It was so smooth that it nearly qualified as sleight of hand.

  Even more impressively, his weapon changed at least three times in five seconds. Each weapon blasted with a slightly different sound as he switched ammunition, honing in on what worked best faster than she could have finished a proper round of obscenity.

  Spiders the size of basketballs exploded. He did not kill them in a wave, but rather anything that passed an invisible line seemed to spontaneously erupt.

  As he switched ammunition, some spiders burst, some were bisected, and a few even sent off bolts of minimally effective chain lightning as enchanted bullets found their targets.

  The beast in her arms thrashed and screamed. It was enough to snap her out of it. Frantically, she grabbed dead, dry leaves off the forest floor, pulled her leg tight against the stretchy, sticky bonds, and tossed the leaves on. As soon as she saw where the web was, she put her lighter under the dry leaves and used her other leg to kick as much underbrush away as possible. By the time the leaves caught, they were over bare dirt.

  By then, Scotty had also set off a massive incendiary burst that made her little fist-sized bundle of flame look like sparklers next to a phosphorus grenade.

  Smokey the Bear would have serious words with them if they didn't flee the scene.

  While she was freeing herself, Scotty once again cycled through several types of projectiles and decided on his approach.

  He called out a warning. "Big one inbound! Ware fire!"

  The dryad looked up as a truly massive spider, on big enough to ride, moved towards them, bobbing on the web that felt unbreakable to her, but bobbed under its weight like the surface of a trampoline barely able to bear it.

  Scotty pulled out something a bit smaller than a grenade. It was a similar design, but with pokey, triangular bits on he surface instead of the pineapple cross-hatching. It sailed through the air. Scotty subbed out his current gun for something new. The motion of plucking the weapon from an open zipper on her pack was so smooth that she could have sworn he was a video game character reaching into an invisible inventory.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Eyes!" he yelled.

  When the tiny grenade activated, it erupted into a cloud of foam that made her think of spray-on wall insulator. Scotty fired the flare gun in his hand, which let out a bright white and sparkling payload.

  When the burning flare met the sticky foam coating the spider and its web, it incandesced, not like a fire, but like flash powder.

  The surge of heat was so fierce and so fast that no flames touched the ground. They trash fried in an instant, every ounce of heat pouring out as fast as possible. Her skin dried in a second, and the pain in her eyes was almost enough to make her drop her potential familiar-to-be.

  She rubbed a forearm across her eyes, cursing as Scotty appeared next to her and hauled her to her feet. He even stomped on he smoldering remains of the leaves she had lit before dragging her towards a break in the trees.

  "Are we clear?" she yelled, holding a hand in front of her face and high-stepping to avoid tripping as her eyes recovered.

  "More will come,"

  "How many"

  "Too—"

  That was when Scotty stopped dead in his tracks, and she crashed into him.

  "Oh. Maybe not that many at all."

  "Scotty, your voice sounds weird. What's happening?"

  "That wasn't an Angler Spider attack."

  Slowly, shapes took form around the bright after-image seared into his retina. "Okay? Still worth running, though. Why aren't we running?"

  "Because that wasn't a spider colony. That was a possessor using a host's brood and trap-setting instincts."

  Maybe it was all in her mind, but the moment he said 'possessor,' she felt a chill from the direction they had abandoned. The fluff ball in her arms also froze, no longer trying to wiggle its way free or nibble her with its dull, herbivore teeth that struggled to do more than pinch.

  "Ooookay. Then why don't we run, you know, even faster? Isn't that what you've been training me for?"

  Gently, he took her shoulders and guided her until they were at a massive tree. Then Scotty gently turned her around until her back was pressed against the trunk.

  "That's what they train you for. I have a few other skills and objectives."

  She blinked, "Can your objective be to save the cute, brunette civilian who can't see shit?"

  "Don't worry, I'll get to that one too. Also, look at this chump," he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder." Tell me if that looks serious to you?"

  Shilloh leaned around him and squinted, hoping that if she darted her eyes around, some details could leak into her brain from around the pulsing neon clouds still obscuring the center of her vision.

  Through watering eyes, she saw the ember-veined remains of a massive spider carapace rise into the air. Other pieces of chitin rose to form what looked like the suit of armor of a nine-foot-tall, snake-legged naga.

  Three quick bursts of gunfire hit the smaller, dog-sized spiders she hadn't even noticed, letting her know that Scotty was still on guard.

  That eased her mind and brought her a measure of comfort. More than she would have expected. That was why, when she turned to her friend, who was rubbing at a bit of ichor that had splattered on his gun, she was able to calmly say, "SHOOT IT. FUCKING SHOOT IT. OH MY HEAVEN-FUCKING GOD COCK SHIT MOTHER FUCKER! ZOMBIE FIRE SPIDER! BURN IT AGAIN!"

  "Calm down, look at the visual distortions. Pay attention to the charge in the air. That thing is on its last legs, and it's putting on a show to scare us."

  "It's working!"

  The undead mass of spider limbs picked up the limb of a tree and hefted it like a sword.

  "It's really working!"

  He casually extended his gun and popped off a shot.

  The arm holding the tree limb shuddered, but otherwise was unswayed.

  "Well, that's an asshole way to kill my dramatic moment," Scotty muttered. "Thought I had that arm. Would have been cool as shit." He quickly dug into his pack, pulled out something cylindrical that fit into the massive bore of what she had initially believed to be a flare gun.

  Shilloh had been wrong. She had been wrong about so many things. Not only had she been wrong that this was good idea—much like deciding not to immediately flee from massive fuck-you spider webs—she had also failed to identify whatever strange niche firearm her friend was loading. That was no flare gun.

  With a brisk snap, he brought everything into alignment, sighted, and fired what sounded like a shotgun into the creature.

  The arm holding the tree limb exploded.

  "There we go." With a nod of his head, Scotty calmly reloaded the gun and began digging into his backpack for something else.

  "See, Shiloh, this is a rare creature."

  "Make it more rare."

  "By killing it?"

  "Yes! Oh God, I hate this so much. I-I think it's moving. I can't see. Tell me it's not moving towards us."

  "It is. But it's slow."

  With effort, she clenched her fists and tried to speak calmly, "Scotty. I. Cannot. See. This is freaking me out, and I want to go."

  "I get it, but you'll be okay. If you could just give me a second, that would be swell."

  Her temper flared back up, and "Wouldn't it be swell if I fucked your mother, became your stepdad, and had her tan your pale little ass with a belt!"

  The fuzzy shape of a man slowly resolving in her light, stopped and looked at her with (what he guessed) was a perturbed frown on his face. "Hey. Too far. I'm just trying to do some battle quips."

  "I'm just going to do your goddamned moth—"

  "Anyway! It's slow, and rare, and I can distill it into an ingredient that will let me create a bullet that inflicts a fancy, woo-woo kind of soul damage. I've been wanting to make them for ages. But they need special materials, and have to be ritually held unfired in their gun for like two months sometimes."

  Before she could respond, he handed her what felt like a tent stake covered in tiny etchings and a light coating of beeswax.

  "I prepped these for incorporeal stuff," he casually fired four more times. Presumably killing more of the still-way-too-big spider minions.

  She looked down. The colors had shifted from greens, blues, and purples to more dark orange and sunset tones. Which, while good, still left her unable to tell exactly what was happening.

  "This whole big, final boss mode, fear display is incredibly slow. Good at crushing things so it can hop over into a new host, but too slow to grab me. I'm going to stake it real fast, and we can head out."

  His pistol thundered a few more times.

  "Why are you handing a stake to me?"

  "Just in case."

  "Just in case what?"

  "In case I'm wrong," he shrugged. "But don't worry. I doubt it, and even so, all it will take is a quick poke and you have a captive ghost. You'll be fine either way."

  By the time the little creature in her arms decided to stop playing possum and try to thrash free, Scotty was already bounding forward. Gun held tight, his not-a-flare gun loaded and ready.

  NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

  Piracy Notice: If you’re reading this anywhere other than Scribble Hub, Royal Road, or my Patreon then this is pirated. Please let me know by going to the Jeffrey Nix website’s contact area so I can get really annoyed, complain to my cat, have her tell me this never would have happened if I had just gone back for a Ph. D, send a takedown notice, and get back to writing.