by Ramy Vance
Robyn was still looking disdainfully at his sword. He finally sheathed it as he answered Lindsay. “Yeah, they’re kinda a big deal for us right now.”
“They’re gone.”
Dawn and Dakota both let out short yelps of fear as they leaned around the boulders they were hiding behind. Lindsay was right; the karuikagis were gone, and their web was empty. The only thing of note where they had been were the corpses of the adventurers who had come through the cave before, perhaps foreshadowing the fate of the writers who were now huddled together in fear despite their newfound armor and weapons. Even with all of the new toys, they were still very aware that there were at least four of the giant, deadly spiders crawling along the walls.
Dakota looked up at the ceiling as he crouched. “Do you think they’re hunting us?” he asked. “Maybe they just got tired of sitting around and decided to stretch their legs.”
Lindsay grabbed Dakota and shook him frantically. “We need to get out of here now!” she exclaimed as she turned to go around the boulder, pulling Dakota along with her. The other writers followed as well, crouching low to the ground while trying to move as fast as possible. It didn’t matter, though. No one knew where they were going. For a moment, they had all forgotten about the few powers they had already shown each other and that they had just discovered armor and weapons.
They did not feel like adventurers.
They felt like what they were—writers who were in over their heads.
Above, there was a noise like claws scratching rock, then the scuttling of feet and the eerie gnashing of teeth. It sounded as if something were stretching its jaws, preparing to eat. The sound vaguely reminded Dawn of old cartoons when the main character would scrape together their fork and knife in anticipation of getting chow on.
Was that what was happening above the writers at the moment? Dawn could practically see the karuikagis poised above them, their mandibles dripping saliva as they waited for the perfect moment to drop from the ceiling and tear into the prey. Then Dawn remembered that someone could see if that was happening. She leaned over to Dakota and asked, “Hey, Dakota, can you look and see what’s above us?”
Dakota, taken out of his own thoughts, absentmindedly looked up. He stopped walking, and his eyes widened as his lips trembled. “Oh, no… Oh, no, no, no!” he murmured.
“What is it?”
He pointed up. “They’re right above us, and I think they’re watching us.”
“What do you mean, you think they’re watching us?” Dawn asked.
“They have a lot of eyes, so it’s hard to tell what they’re looking at. But they’re right above us. Like, right friggin’ above us.”
Dawn looked up, and even though her eyes weren’t as good as Dakota’s, she could see the faint outlines of multiple large, many-legged bodies.
The bodies weren’t moving.
They were still as the corpses that hung from the webs, but there was noise coming from them. Dawn wasn’t sure if anyone else could hear it, but it was the wheezing breaths of the karuikagis. Calm. Collected. The breathing of hunters.
One of the karuikagis dropped to the ground. One moment, it was above, the next moment, it was in the middle of the writers, whipping its front claws around as they all tried to step out of its path. Robyn held his arms up as he backed away, shouting, “Maybe we can reason with it!”
Dakota ducked to avoid a blow to the face by the karuikagi’s back legs. “How the hell do you reason with a giant spider that wants to kill you?” he shouted back.
Robyn pulled his shield off his back and held it in front of him. “Maybe they’re just defending their territory! If we let them know we’re not threatening them—”
“This is not the time to be trying to gain paragon points, Robyn! Giant spiders are trying to eat us alive!”
Dawn felt something cold and sticky on the back of her neck. She touched it and felt fine silk thread, a patch nearly as large as her palm. She only had a second to look behind her before she was jerked into the air. “Someone help me!” she shouted as she flew up to the ceiling.
There was no one to help. Two more karuikagis dropped to the ground, dispersing the writers as they tried to avoid the flailing legs and mandibles.
Up above, Dawn was being handled by the remaining karuikagi. It was spinning her around in its hind legs, trying to wrap her in silk for a later meal. Dawn struggled, but now that she had thought of it, she had never been in a fight. She had never hit anything in her entire life. Now was as good a time as any to get started. She swung forward and kicked the karuikagi in the stomach, and the creature screeched and lost its focus for a moment. Dawn felt the silk holding her give, and then she was weightless. She reached out for the strand of the silk, instantly regretting trying to save her own life. Her reward was going to be splattering across the ground. From this height, she was certain there was no way for her to survive.
Dawn fell from the ceiling, peripherally aware of the beauty of freefall. She did indeed feel free. That was, until she became aware of how quickly the ground was coming up to meet her. She closed her eyes tight and prepared for the sound of her bones crunching as they broke.
She hit the floor with a sickening thud and lay there. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes. Her body definitely hurt, but the wind hadn’t been knocked out of her. Further, she felt like she could easily stand back up. She wasn’t sure if this was the delirium of pain, but she was quite certain she was not dead. Slowly, a little uncertain about the decision, Dawn got to her feet.
There was hardly any pain.
With that acknowledgment, Dawn felt better than she had her entire life. She had just fallen nearly twenty feet and didn’t have so much as a bruise. Smiling, she turned to the other writers, who were in the midst of struggling for their lives, and shouted, “Guys! I think we have superpowers or something!”
Lindsay was under a karuikagi, the spider snapping its mandibles at her face. “What are you talking about?” Lindsay shouted.
“Kick the fucking thing or something!”
Lindsay dodged another mandible attack and balled her fingers into a fist. She punched the spider in its abdomen, sending it flying off of her. She looked down at her hand in disbelief. “Holy cow, we do have superpowers!”
Both Robyn and Dakota attacked the karuikagis that harassed them, easily sending the spiders flying. Then the writers converged together in a circle, each of them marveling at their newfound strength. There was not much time to marvel, though, since the albino karuikagis had started to form a circle around them.
Dawn drew her daggers, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We’re fighting our way out of this,” she growled.
Dakota was at her side, drawing his longbow. He nocked an arrow and took aim as Lindsay took out her wand and pointed it at the karuikagi, static electricity sparking from the tip. Even Robyn unsheathed his sword and lowered his shield, his eyes bright.
Dawn sprang forward, her daggers raised, then slid under the spider in front of her, slicing at its abdomen. The creature’s exoskeleton was stronger than Dawn had expected, but the monster still screeched in pain. Dawn scrambled to her feet, for the first time aware of how gracefully she moved when her body was active. She had never moved like this her entire life. She had so much speed and dexterity.
Earlier, she had wondered what the HUDs were capable of. Now, she figured she wanted to find out what her body was capable of. She flipped through the air, sheathing her daggers, and pulling out her short bow.
It was no trouble to nock the arrow while upside-down, and she let off two arrows quickly. The first arrow hit the carapace of the spider, but the second landed straight in its eye. Dawn slipped into the shadows to prepare her next move. If there was anything she knew about thieves, it was that they did their best work from the shadows.
Robyn screamed as he raised his longsword and dove into the fray. He singled out one of the spiders and gave it a strong kick in the face. The karuikagi stumbl
ed backward, trying to keep from losing its balance as it screeched in pain. Robyn didn’t let up. A switch within him had flipped. His eyes went mad with blood rage, and he tackled the spider as it snapped its mandibles at him. He was able to avoid being bitten, and rather than using his sword, he pummeled the spider with his shield.
Across from Robyn, Lindsay was still backing away from the spider, which was intent on cornering her. She didn’t know much about the technicalities of magic within this world, and she wasn’t sure where to start. Did she have to choose spells from her HUD? Were they incantation-based? Did she have to use some kind of rune to get the magic going? When the karuikagi lunged forward, Lindsay instinctively whipped her hand in front of her face, and a crack of lightning came from her wand. She snapped it forward again, and the lightning came forth once more, this time transforming her wand into a sort of lightning whip. The spider backed away at the sudden change, and Lindsay went on the offense. She cracked the lightning across the karuikagi’s back, and the creature screamed in pain.
Dakota was having a much better time than the rest of the writers. It wasn’t that he was excelling during this odd turn of events. Rather, he was enjoying himself. Dakota was sprinting the length of the cavern, using his speed and dexterity to fire up to four arrows at a time. He was nearly as nimble and fast as Dawn and showed no signs of tiring or slowing down.
One of the karuikagi turned its head toward Dakota, screeched, and came scuttling after him. Dakota laughed, pulled back his bowstring as far as he could, and let an arrow fly that sent the karuikagi hurtling back and pinned it to the wall. “This is so fucking awesome!” Dakota shouted.
The impaled karuikagi was not done, though, and it spat a giant blob of green acid that sailed in Dakota’s direction. He would have been hit if Dawn hadn’t leapt out of the shadows and knocked him to the ground.
Dawn got up to her feet, slipped back into the shadows where she was invisible, and ran up to the karuikagi, slipping out only for a second to sink her daggers into the creature’s skull. She felt the exoskeleton give, and she drew her daggers out and brought them back down into the monster until it stopped shaking, death finally taking it.
Looking over her shoulders, Dawn saw that the rest of the writers were still battling the karuikagi. It looked like Dakota had taken out the runt of the litter. “Sure, are you just picking on the babies?” she chided Dakota before slipping back into the shadows to disappear from sight.
Robyn’s karuikagi had slipped out from under him and was running toward its web. Without hesitating, Robyn sprinted after the creature, grabbing it by its back two legs and ripping them off. The karuikagi screeched in pain as it struggled to keep running, but Robyn didn’t back off. He leapt into the air and brought his sword down into the monster’s chest. He pulled it out and decapitated the karuikagi for good measure.
A gust of wind blew everyone down and threw the remaining karuikagi through the air, and everyone turned to see where it came from. The culprit was Lindsay, who was blushing awkwardly. “Sorry,” she muttered. “Didn’t know it was going to be so much wind.”
She whipped her wand around again and two small tornados blew through the cavern, tossing the last two karuikagis up into the air and suspending them. She looked at Dakota and then searched for Dawn. “Uh, you still there, Dawn?”
Dawn stepped out of the shadows, her short bow drawn. Lindsay pointed at the two albino spiders floating in the air. “Would you two like to do the honors?” she asked.
Dakota and Dawn looked at each other and smiled. “Gladly,” they said as they nocked their arrows.
Dakota let loose a powerful shot that nearly exploded the karuikagi’s skull, and Dawn shot a couple more well-aimed shots into the eyes of her target.
Then Dawn leapt into the air and brought her daggers down on the creature’s skull. The tornados dispersed, and the creatures fell to the ground.
The writers walked up and admired their handiwork. Dawn didn’t know what to say. She looked at her daggers again, surprised by the amount of power that was in her hands now. Nothing in her life had ever compared to this, had never been this exhilarating, had never been this damn fun before. There was no shadow of doubt in her mind. She knew that they were in Middang3ard. This was what Myrddin and Craig had been trying to prepare the world for—this place.
Dakota knelt beside the corpses of the monsters. “Aren’t we supposed to get loot or something from all of this?” he asked. “Like you kill the bad guys, their bodies pop open and have cool goodies inside?”
Lindsay took a seat on one of the rocks. She seemed to be overwhelmed by what had just happened and was breathing heavily.
Dawn wasn’t sure if it was from being exhausted, using so much magic, or anxiety. She doubted Lindsay had overextended herself.
Dakota, Robyn, and she had just done marathon levels of physical activity, especially for writers. Lindsay was probably just having a hard time wrapping her head around everything that was happening. Dawn sure as hell knew she was having a hard enough time. If it weren’t for the sheer exhilaration she felt, she probably would have been sitting right next to Lindsay, trying to make sense of everything.
Despite Lindsay looking like she was going to pass out, she spoke calmly and collectedly when she finally decided to. “It’s not a video game,” Lindsay explained. “Video games are based on reality, not the other way around. If we’re going to find anything worthwhile, it’ll probably be like before—off the bodies of someone who died. Unless, I don’t know, maybe we can craft stuff from their remains, if anyone’s interested in finding out. Crafting was never a big thing for me.”
Dakota shook his head as he kicked the spider’s corpse. “Too time-consuming. So many materials to hunt down,” he complained. “Like, do I want to spend thirty hours in-game looking for fluoride to build some stupid sword that only has a little bit more damage? Ugh, no, thank you!”
Dawn went over and sat next to Lindsay. “Guys, we are really damn powerful.” She sighed. “I mean, did you feel that? And it looks like we make a great team, too.”
Lindsay nodded in agreement. She was already looking like she was coping with everything better, only a little bit of anxiety still hanging over her. When she smiled, Dawn lost any doubt. There was excitement on Lindsay’s face. “Next is getting out of here,” Lindsay said. “Craig said we needed to undo a great tragedy. I don’t know what he meant by that or what we’re supposed to be looking for, but we should at least get started. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a standard dungeon. You know, we fight our way to the bottom or the middle or the top and find the final boon, take it home, give it to Craig, and become heroes.”
Dakota clapped his hands as he got excited. “Oh, you mean, we have a Hero’s Journey?” he asked. “Like, a classic one without all the unnecessary character development and extra plot lines? Just a straight mythic ‘you go here, kill this thing, bring this back’ kinda gig. I’m really hoping so. I love stories like that.”
Dawn sighed and tossed a pebble at Dakota. “Don’t you think the whole Hero’s Journey thing is kinda played out by now?” she asked. “I mean, really, how many times can we watch the same outline for a superhero story? That stuff might have been cool back in Greek days, but I’m hoping Craig sent us on something a little bit more sophisticated. Maybe a defining exploration of the fantasy genre or something.”
“You realize I’m talking hypothetically right now, right? Craig isn’t writing a book about us. I just like to, you know, imagine something pretty grand going on in my head.”
Robyn raised his hands as he walked between Dakota and Dawn. “All right, last time I checked, we weren’t in a book. But even if we were, it’d be about time we started moving again. Either something is going to come for us, or we’re going to have to go for it. Hopefully, that something can be reasoned with, and we don’t have to spend the entire quest trying to murder everything that comes in contact with us. But who knows? Looks like murdering things is how this m
ight go.”
Lindsay playfully pushed Robyn as she walked past him. “Always trying not to murder things,” she joked. “I can appreciate that. And Robyn is right. We need to get going. The longer we stay here, the longer we’re going to be a target. I just hope everyone on Earth is doing all right.”
Meanwhile, on Earth:
Tao Wong was the fastest of the writers. He slipped out of the conference and booked it down the hallway. As he ran, he noticed there weren’t nearly as many dead bodies as he’d thought there were. Some of the other writers must have slipped away. Thank God, Tao thought as he looked over his shoulder. No one was following him. He must have gotten away just in time. He frantically looked down the hall and opened the first door he saw.
Tao stepped into a kitchen and skidded on the pristine floor. He looked around, trying to find a place to hide. Then he saw the massive economy stove, complete with bottom drawers capable of holding propane tanks, extra dishes, and a body or two. “Dan would have loved this,” Tao murmured as he contorted his body to fit into the cramped space. He held his breath and hoped he would live through the attack. Then he heard a voice from inside the kitchen. Two, in fact. They were quiet, but not nearly quiet enough. Tao poked his head out of the cabinet.
Across the kitchen, two heads poked out of the walk-in freezer. Martha Carr and Dan Willcocks peeked around the corner of the door. They were both shivering and hardly able to talk due to their chattering teeth, but somehow, they were still managing to be extremely loud.
Martha slowly pushed the door open wider and stepped out of the freezer. “We gotta find a better hiding spot,” she whispered. “I’m freezing my ass off.”
Dan shook his head as he tried to pull Martha back into the freezer. “Nope, that’s a terrible idea,” he said. “Horror 101, lady. If you start trying to find a new hiding spot while you’re being hunted, you are definitely going to be one of the first to die.”