I hung up the call, and sighed. While she had doubtless been fed a load of heaping horseshit by the Askari, there would have been enough truth mixed in to give Ororo a very negative view of the Golden Land that had let the rest of Africa be overcome and dominated by Europe.

T’Chaka was a very conservative fellow in the original stories, but this world had the Askari, the Great Bear, and the Tribes. Wakanda was already far more involved in the world than it had ever been in the original stories.

Would he believe me? Well, he’d probably make some more calls... including, I was sure, to this very enclave, by one means or another. The idea that he didn’t have a local watching over the Rain Queens for him just didn’t make any sense at all.

I wasn’t surprised when Lady Muwa suddenly appeared at the edge of the clearing, but it wasn’t for the reason that I expected.

“Three of the followers of the Wasp have arrived near the village, Miss Dealer.” She did not need to say more. While she and her family would protect their guests, she would prefer not to have to result to violence to do so... and there was little doubt that the Wasps would be in an aggressive state if they came here.

“Quick, aren’t they? You may be getting a call from the King of Wakanda or one of his agents shortly. This matter has become something of interest to his people.”

“I... see. Why?”

“Because the red mist that was trying to stop the reading of Ororo’s past was done by the wielder of an artifact called the Ka-Stone, which seems to be worn by an individual claiming the identity of the Sphinx.”

Her eyes widened in alarm. “That is a very old name in the mystic world...”

“I see. So, his involvement with your granddaughter should reinforce just how dangerous and important she could possibly be.” I took a look around, and sighed. “Wasp Totems, huh? Well, I suppose I should go out and introduce myself. I shall leave you and your family to your business, Lady Muwa.”

“The Mother watch over you, Miss Dealer,” the elder Rain Queen returned calmly, but if she was unhappy to see me go, I was an avocado.

-------

Amusingly enough, the Red Eyes couldn’t feel them coming, despite their dark intentions. However, I had plenty of alternate senses to use and so feeling them coming through the night wasn’t hard.

They were trying to keep the buzzing of their wings subsonic, but I was aware of them on a magical level, and the anathema in their Totem aspects sang out to me like fires in the night.

They actually split up in an attempt to encircle me, which I found amusing. To make it more disconcerting for them, I was seated on a stony hilltop in the middle of nowhere, with no cover in sight.

Spiders fighting wasps in open ground is a disaster for our side of the equation. These Wasp people must have thought I was a fool, totally oblivious to the threat, or magnificently overconfident.

Well, they didn’t know I was a spellcaster, and there’s another truism: Don’t fight a prepared Caster.

They came zooming in on their wings, poisoned claws ready to do their thing, and ran right into the Stillflight Field.

They weren’t that high up, and didn’t really realize what was going on until they rather abruptly dropped out of the air, their magical wings unable to keep them aloft. Instead of zipping in on me with total surprise, they plowed into the ground fast and awkwardly, tumbling and bouncing as alarmed shouts escaped their lips.

“Let Raggador’s Roving Rings confine an insect’s deadly stings!” I Invoked in amusement as they hit the slopes of the hill with their faces. Out in the void of the many planes, an ancient and powerful Entity straightened at hearing His name Invoked so loudly and surely, and He answered.

The lights of the Rings rose over top of the trio, and then the Webs I’d tied to them went off, instantly encapsulating all of them and fouling them all up. Fortified by the magic of the Rings, they were capable of giving Mr. Hill an annoying time, let alone some Totems the webs were basically designed to mess up.

Furthermore, the Rings were slowly spinning, drawing the Webs tighter as the spell grew and morphed with it, quickly cocooning the trio of them helplessly.

I strode down to the nearest of them, a brawny African man with a set of four wings, compound eyes, black stripes on him, and hands covered with hard black chitin and deadly points.

He thrashed desperately when he saw me coming, trying to get free, but he was stuck and wrapped up, and there was nothing he could do. I extended my Staff up to hook the Ring above him, and effortlessly dragged him after me, and not incidentally bounced him all over the place through the stones, dirt, and grass as I strolled towards the second one.

A couple minutes later, all three wrapped-up Wasp Totems, one woman and two men, were struggling in front of me uselessly, dirt and grime sticking all over them with the webbing, totally helpless.

They were also cursing me, challenging me to open fights, calling me a coward, asserting they weren’t afraid to die.

I gave some life to the Tattoo on my back.

A cold field of dread swept out into the night, and everything went absolutely quiet in total fear. That included the three Wasps as something with many legs, dark, and horrible from the depths of the Underweb, rose up off of my back, a blood-red hourglass on the swelling abdomen, and death was lurking in many, many eyes as it loomed over me and stared down at the utterly terrified prey sitting in front of it.

“Good evening,” I told the absolutely stricken Wasps, whose bravado had totally failed them under the working mandibles of the terror staring down at them. “Any Wasp who wants to become the prey of the Widow of the Web, raise their hands.”

Oh, right.

“Oh, didn’t think you people had that much sense. Let me give you a little life lesson.”

I walked forward, grabbed a poison stinger-finger, bent it back so it cracked, and as the Wasp screamed in pain, I jabbed it into my arm.

Ignoring the sudden numbness, I repeated the same move from the woman and the man, who all had subtly different banding patterns.

Three different poisons. Mmm, good stuff!

I also cut off their cute little antennae, one from each of them.

“Now, I’m only going to say this once, so listen up.” There was a hot rush from my arm as my alchemically-boosted Totem poison resistance overcame their venom and turned it into healing energy. “I will let this attack of yours slide once, and only once. If you come after me or my friends, you’re dead. I’m going to make a little token out of these antennae of yours, and with it I’ll be able to track any of you Wasp Totems down across the entire world.

“I will hunt you down and feed you to the Widow of the Web as a snack, and she’ll take you all.

“I am a Spellweaver of the Web, and you are insects to me, no more.” The ground began to shudder behind me, and their compound eyes could see it clearly even in their position as the ground shuddered, split, and the whole hill began to rise behind me.

Rise, in the form of a spider.

It was made of stone, and big enough to eat them, me, and the Widow’s image in one bite. It rose up and up, boulders dropping down off it like sand, legs spanning hundreds of feet, thicker than the greatest trees, the plants growing on it looking like some odd, patchy fur over stony hide right now.

If it put one foot down, they’d all be squashed flat.

It bent down and squealed at them.

The volume of sound plastered them against the ground and nearly congealed the blood in their veins. They were spasming, and went unconscious from the fear and force.

I waved the earth spider away, and it returned to its resting place, mostly going back to where its components had been before... except it was clearly obvious from above that this hill was now a massive spider-shaped thing, not a rough natural circular thing. They’d see it when they woke up, the webbing dissolved, and they could fly away.

-----

I left them there on the ground. If they died to some passing hyenas, that would be their own damn bad luck, but anything with any sense of self-preservation had fled wildly when the two Spiders manifested, and likely wouldn’t come back for a good long time, so I thought that was unlikely.

And if they stuck around here, that spirit might just wake up and eat them, forgetting my order to ignore them. So they’d best run when they woke up, and they’d know it.

I was going to head home, but instead found myself sighing.

I was near Anasazni’s Temple. “I suppose I should at least visit it so I can get a Teleport lock on it,” I muttered to nobody in particular.

The Land was pointing out the direction helpfully. The Earthmother could only be aware of the root of my real powers, as opposed to this inherited stuff with the enormous spell pool backing it. I looked in that direction, getting an ominous feeling from the Red Eyes, and Linejumped for the horizon.

--------

The second Linejump brought me down five miles away from the temple, the magical Wards about the place being very unkind to all forms of magical flight. I smirked at the thought of the Wasp Totems buzzing their way in here and abruptly falling out of the sky. I looked at the towering trees of the jungle, which looked like they came from another time and age, and the broken stone hills jutting up sheerly about this place.

Broken terrain with lots of ups and downs. A perfect place for Spider-Totems to fight in. Any Wasps trying shit here were going to be in for a very bad time.

Of course, I was an actual spellcaster of the Web, not just a normal Totem, and that was before le Fey decided to get cute and paid the price for it.

Going in by pure foot wasn’t hard, given my agility, and I didn’t mind showing it off here, switching over to my Dynamo duds so I didn’t seem so out of place... and you know, for the first time, I actually did some serious webswinging.

Okay, okay, I had to admit, it was damn fun.

Seriously, it wasn’t as fast as flying by a long shot. Lots of wasted motion and travel with all the continuous arcs and looping and stuff. From an efficiency standpoint, it was totally meh.

From a fun standpoint, it totally had it.

Powering through a falling loop at over a hundred miles an hour, and being able to hold onto a dinky little webline while doing it, was fun. Letting go and doing quadruple somersault full layouts as spider-born spatial awareness turned the world into a mass of potential web-points, perfect dexterity and impossible flow latched the webline onto one of those spots, and a fall became a sweeping arc towards the next possible point...