I fled, certain I could bypass the spiders with ease, and found three leaping into my path. Dodging sent me a tree over, into striking distance of another. The reach of my blindsight filled with spiders, all of them striking swift and often.

  Before, when I'd been cutting at them, that had been a part of the trap, I realized. They had backed off to make me feel safe enough to go in. I wondered if that had been a tweak to the plan, if the design was to have me kill them and then approach. It would have made more sense, but I did too little damage for that to work.

  Whatever the plan, they had returned in force. They weren't landing blows on me, but I couldn't get past them. Whenever I got close to escape, one of Essilei's massive legs would jab at me. Or, the Venus Guy Trap, I guess, as Essilei was just a ruse. Those huge spider-legs of her terrified me. Once, she hit a tree as broad as my shoulders and split it in half.

  Hopefully she didn't do too much of that, as I needed the trees to jump between.

  I realized, eventually, that if I dropped my knife, it would come back. I wasn't in a position to throw it, but these spiders were everywhere, so repeatedly dropping it straight down actually resulted in quite a few bleeding spiders.

  At some point, it started to feel like the spiders were rarer. The trees were too, so it wasn't exactly open space, but something was happening. I went lower down, and realized that eye-spiders were piling up below where I'd been fighting, slowly succumbing to bleeds.

  Essilei, now that was something different. I'd managed to cut her leg on a jab, causing a bleed, but it had disappeared seconds later, as had her health bar.

  I wasn't about to finish her off, but I had thinned the others out enough that I might be able to escape. Waiting for a good opening, I leapt past, kicking off one tree and onto the next, barely halting my momentum in time to avoid a massive maze of webs.

  It wasn't just a barrier; I could have cut that. Beyond that was another layer, then another, and then who knows. If I tried to cut through, they'd catch me. As I sprinted along the edge, I finally got close enough to notice that Essilei was constantly spinning out webs as she turned, steadily shrinking the trap I was in.

  Interestingly, she was always turning the same direction. I made sure I kept going that way, and that I kept a good pace up, and she stopped jabbing at me, which made it easier to evade the eye-spiders.

  As ever, repeatedly evading their attacks also made it easier. They were predictable, even if it took me a while to learn the pattern. As a few more dropped, I had an idea.

  Digging through my inventory, I found the invisibility potion. Step 1, chug the potion. Step 2, dead sprint past all threats. Step 3, dive into the gap just ahead of where Essilei was spinning her web. Step 4, wait.

  I drank. A timer popped up, tell me the potion only gave me 3 seconds.

  Angry at myself for never reading the details, I ran for all I was worth, sliding past her webs and into a pocket, activating Sink Into Shadow just as the invisibility ended.

  Much to my surprise, I'd been right. She didn't notice me, and just kept right on spinning. I waited as she spun two more entire layers around me.

  I was expecting her to keep going, but she suddenly stopped, rapidly sending out new strands. Did she think I was dead? Had she just given up?

  Damn, she was beautiful. If I opened my mask and moved a few strands out of the way— I gripped the hilt of that blade harder, ticking my health-bar down a few points. That they could make this supernatural beauty thing work on my mind was absolutely terrifying.

  Unless Lacie got it. Maybe it was in some class, and maybe she took that class.

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  I gripped the knife, helping myself focus, then drank a potion to recover. I'd dropped nearly half my health in that bout of trying to ignore the spider lady.

  Properly focused, I realized what was happening. Opening the Hitai-ate, I saw the state of the space. Over half the trees were gone, but the ring of webs now reached almost all the way in.

  At the outskirts of that, slicing an eye-spider in half, was a massive toad-man with a battle-axe and steel armor. Crawler Dawa Tsering, Level 14 Grulke Lumberjack. Another pair of eye-spiders were blasted with flames pouring out of the sleeves of a robed man. The massive eyeballs popped, and the man turned towards Essilei Crawler Norbu Chophel, Level 13 Human Prism-Mage.

  Because I had kept her going so long, the webbing was really close to the "captured" Essilei, so they were already right in front of her.

  I didn't actually think. Thinking might have been good. Instead, I screamed, "It's a trap!" as I sliced through webbing and leapt into the open.

  Norbu looked up at me, a calm smile on his face. Essilei opened her head into a massive maw, the teeth reaching all the way across her shoulder. She pulled Dawa up, and I recognized the way she was gripping him as how she had held me as she implied she was about to kiss me.

  The top half of his head disappeared with a crunch.

  Blood splattered across Norbu, who began to look around in confusion.

  "Run!" I screamed, even as I had to close my hitai-ate again to resist the eye-spiders that had turned my way.

  I threw my knife at Essilei, not at the spiders. The roar of a fiery gout sounded, followed by a screech that could only come from the maw of Essilei. More flames, and a sickening crunch. His dot turned to an X on the map.

  "No!" I screamed, starting to hurl the knife at the spiders. I never hated spiders until that moment.

  Inside my sealed hitai-ate, my eyes were running freely, a horrid mixture of pain and rage. This trap would just keep eating people if nobody did anything about it. These things had to die.

  And still, most all I could really do was run. Not that it was really running, anymore. The place was mostly webs, and I was struggling to move. As I circled, I threw some sticks at the webs to test my instincts. The tosses confirmed that the wet-seeming webs were sticky, but the dry bits were not, which made fleeing the eye-spiders far easier.

  As I leapt about that space, I kept throwing and throwing and throwing, until I figured out how to get a wind-up the dungeon would accept while still in midair. Soon, I could leap away from a spider and send a fastball dead center into its bulbous eye-body without missing a step.

  I just kept going and going, until all the eye-spiders were dead, the webs slick with blood all about me, and that horrible Essilei tying off a web and rising higher on her legs than I'd known she could.

  I still had no plan to kill her.

  All the same, when she lunged, I threw the Extremely Sharp Knife while sliding aside. It was a good thing I didn't leave myself airborne while leaping. Now that she wasn't spinning webs, she reared up on two hind legs, grabbing onto some webs she'd strung across above with her human—elven, I guess—arms, and could jab at me with six of her spider legs.

  I couldn't get in good throws, but I figured out how to take little swipes at her while I dodged, putting nicks in her tree-trunk-legs. She sometimes started to bleed, but the debuff always vanished swiftly. Her health fell, but it would take a week to kill her like this, and one misstep from me would spell death.

  Of course, I also had no way I out. I'd checked. The route they'd cut through the webs had collapsed.

  As I evaded her, she started also tossing strands across the space, but those were trivial to cut and would spring away. I had to be a bit careful, and once got one stuck on my foot for a few seconds, but the webbing that fell on the ground got covered by dust and gunk from our movement swiftly enough that it stopped being sticky.

  I slowly cut away her life, and just as Essilei reached 50% health, I saw what I'd been missing that whole time. I'd just done a broad slice on her legs as I dodged between a pair, luckily triggering a bleed on both hits. Moment's later, she darted those legs behind her.

  The bleed disappeared. I'd seen bits of web on her before, but had assumed it was just from all the gunk on the ground. No, she was just bandaging herself up with webbing whenever I cut her.

  The next time I scored a bleed, I got enough space for a throw—I could, it just was much quicker to slash at her—and sent a slider around her body. And again, and again, and again. The bleed remained, and I just kept pitching that knife at her spinnerette.

  As bleeds began to stack up, her health sank into the red. As the sun rose, her coordinated strikes turned to wild flailing. I sprinted up a tree and threw from the top, out of her now-restricted reach. I kept sending fastballs down into her until she died.

  And the winner is, Madison Pomegranate!

  My face popped up in the middle of the screen with Winner! stamped on it.

  Quest Completed. The Sexy, Sexy Spider.

  Down at the bottom, alongside Corpse of Venus Guy Trap, Level 21 Spider Demon were Corpse of Crawler Dawa Tsering, Level 16, Killed by Venus Guy Trap and Corpse of Norbu Chophel, Level 15, Killed by Venus Guy Trap.

  "I hate this place."