The three of us stepped into the opened zone, and came to a halt at almost the same instant.

“Well, that’s clever,” Briggs mused aloud, Endure on his shoulder as his pale violet eyes scanned the buildings around us.

They were overgrown with vines and plants and things, but there’d been some resistance from the stone streets, so the growths were shallow, basically rooted in moss and decomposed leaves. Still, the buildings were in surprisingly good shape, although showing signs of some explosion, eruption, or just plain age in their slow decomposition and the fact some of them had crumbled here and there.

Remarkably clean, too. No visible signs or hints of danger.

“Damn, isn’t it? Sure gets them a conga line of munchies. No wonder the Hags didn’t have much to worry about,” I agreed.

AA’s Helices swirled out, ancient blood, and seemed to caress some invisible lines in the air, which became momentarily visible as the living tendrils of his Helix draw swept through them. He looked back and forth with his crimson eyes. “Can you see them?” he wondered.

Mine and Briggs’ Masks activated with a surge of Essence flowing into them. Seeing the Invisible was the Mask of Clarity Mastery/3 alternate power, past Deva- and Devilsight. My black and white pattern contrasted nicely with Briggs’ more robotic/faceless warrior one, making it look like he’d donned a visor with only one cyclopean white eye glowing in the middle of his forehead. Very intimidating.

“They are all over the damn place,” Briggs informed him, eyes white in black now, same as mine from Devilsight and Devasight. “I count at least fifty, and needless to say they are coming in our direction.”

The sky was grey-blue, swirling with temporal wishy-washiness and the intrusion of the world behind, but it looked totally open all the way around.

If you could see invisible or ethereal items, or where the stuff was anchored, it was quite a bit more crowded.

Because every damn place everywhere was festooned in massive, wrist-thick spider webs!

“Well, start killing them, then,” Ancientaxe groused. “How much for me to get one of those Mask Tats?”

“The inks run about 2k in comps, but you have to Karma them up yourself,” I said, snagging Tremble and switching her to Firephasing. “They use the Weapon table, so getting them to Five is fifty k-days. You can fight-Invest because they are a Tat.”

He grunted, actually understanding all that, unlike 99.999999% of this world’s inhabitants.

Endure was in fire mode too, and the incoming spiders, all of them with bodies bigger than a horse, and legs going out much, much farther, paused for a moment despite themselves.

Then we began to shoot them down.

A mental touch was all we needed to coordinate. AA got everything within sixty feet, the limit of his Helix sensory capability. Briggs took the right, and I took the left.

He didn’t bother to throw the Hammer, just the Sharding, a big burning hammer shooting out as he swung it, and slamming into the nearest ether widow. The black hourglass on its crystalline white hide was clearly visible as 100+ points of fire damage plowed directly into its face and popped it like a steaming egg, even though it was still ethereal.

A Banestar swirled its way into the face of another on my side, spurted out its back. AA swept down with Zeitgeist, and a crescent cutting arc shot out, equal parts wind and force, and chopped halfway through another one.

Naturally, all the ethereal webs in the way lit on fire, even if they were ethereal. Banefire really didn’t care.

At first, the spiders were incensed. Ether widows are intelligent spiders, and there were rumors of web-cities of them on strange worlds and deep in the ether, where they waged war on formian ants, bee-people, thri-kreen, manscorpions, and other intelligent races of insectile creatures. Supposedly there was a section of Strife devoted just to the unending cycle of eating one another that the insectile and arachnid races indulged in.

As rapidly as we could swing our Weapons, the spiders died. They were shocked first at being seen, then at being hit, and finally at being one-shot. After all, they were far bigger and stronger than normal members of the giant spider family, used to snatching up intruders and dining on them out of sight of the main road by materializing the huge webs around their enemies and attacking from all sides. If they were too numerous or powerful, the spiders just let them pass.

The three of us were instead butchering them right out the gate, and in passing, their massive spiderweb was coming down.

I’d already conveyed all of this to the people behind us, who were creeped out by the idea of hundreds of giant spiders and a web big enough to swallow a small town covering the very sky above us.

On the other hand, Fido and Shirley were already bounding up here to do some serious house-dusting, totally unafraid of what the giant spiders might do.

We all felt the impact of multiple great legs coming down, and when the massive sword spider hove over a wall and got ready to come down on us with its glistening black barbed and razored legs, a scything Glaive-crescent showed it the tenor of the age, and ripped it apart instantly.

The ether widows did have time to run, as our range didn’t cover nearly the range their web did. On the other hand, we were burning that web down around them, so if they went up, it was collapsing about and under them.

Now, they were in the Border Ethereal, like ghosts, immaterial and coterminous, able to ignore many materials and move through them. They couldn’t actually attack us without materializing themselves, nor could they flee beyond the confines of the zone due to the temporal and dimensional distortion, they’d probably be ripped to shreds by planar pressure. They also couldn’t go below ground, so that left them going and hiding in the houses and buildings, trying to get out of our line of fire.

Shirley and Fido came up to the edge of the zone, and did a very light set of One-Two’s. One target only, not cones. The fires and rime were oddly transparent and ghostly.

Heh heh heh...

By the logic of being elemental creatures who could breathe out monstrously powerful Cones of energy, why couldn’t they breathe out monstrously less powerful Rays instead? While they were swimming around in the elemental energies of the Yin-Yang pond, they were practicing changing the form of their breath weapons constantly, with Marked Casters demonstrating spells in Marktell to give them some guidelines and examples to go by.

As a result, they now had five different forms of breath weapons they could use, which was not a welcome surprise to these spiders.

The first and least powerful form was the equivalent of a Fan, a short-range swathe of fire or ice. Not powerful... but they could use it constantly. They could also instead concentrate it into their bite for a powerful discharge of energy in combat, if they so desired, just like an Energy Grasp spell.

The second form was a Ray, turning all that energy into a single target attack once every twelve seconds. Given how powerful they were, that was a 12d6 directed energy touch attack to the face, bound to be enjoyed.

The third way was a spattering of small exploding balls, minute meteors of energies that exploded every which way. They weren’t individually powerful, but when they came flying out at one a second for eighteen seconds, with the same amount of time before being used again, they could create some havoc.

Alas, no spitting exploding fireballs of great size...

Fourth form was the classic Bolt AoE, five feet wide, a hundred feet long, recharging every twenty-four seconds. The fifth was naturally their natural Cone attack, with the thirty-second recharge.

They were naturally bursting to make use of Metamagic Spell-Like abilities to grant additional power to their breath weapons on demand, and learning how to use them to power other effects, and were more than happy to collaborate with the Casters of the Ironblood on joint uses. Charging up a Fire Caster’s fireball with a little extra Hellpoodleness hello-how-are-ya got sinister little giggles all around...

The ether widows were getting the hot and cold end of the Ironblood’s universal loathing of incorporeal creatures. We hated the way they ignored armor, hated the way they used status effects, hated the way they moved through walls to surprise attack, and hated the way they did the same to run away or avoid retribution.

Ghostfire and ghostrime were indeed a thing.

Spectral fire pushed along the Veil, and right through material walls, burning and freezing its way through the ether, doing no harm to material objects. However, this meant that the spiders trying to find cover from our attacks literally had no cover.

Hell Hounds are infamous for their visual perception, and can see invisible and ethereal objects as casually as humans see normal things. Fido and Shirley could see these spiders everywhere within their range, and simply began to alternate breathing on them with punching out Rays of fire and frost.

From their collars were hanging six different Baneskulls apiece, adding a nicely somber air to their immaculate poodle-do’s. The lads had been happy to contribute them to the cause, and Vermin from the Dichromatic Plains were definitely among them.

They began to pick the spiders off heartlessly. The Rays burned holes right through them, or froze their thoraxes and blood solid. Burning, shriveled cow-sized spider corpses floated here and there, while others were stiff and unmoving as the hellpoodles, the Fire and Ice of the Ironblood, went to remorseless work killing off the spiders that had escaped us.

Of course, we were drastically thinning the spiders out, and fiery swathes were burning down their big web, much to their dismay. Whole sections of the gargantuan web were collapsing, and as they did, ethereal mounds of bones and shriveled corpses, literal hills of them, materialized in, on, and about the stone buildings, crushing some and starting several collapses.

I’m talking hills, fifty to a hundred feet high. These spiders had been preying on stuff coming out of the inner part of the city for a long, long time, which, given their numbers, was not all that surprising. There was enough prey to sustain so many of them...

Alas, they couldn’t get away, and they really couldn’t get close. Briggs and I were killing one every two seconds up to a hundred and fifty feet away, and AA doing the same if they got within sixty feet. They were trying to reach us ethereally, maneuvering around their webs, and weren’t able to gather in sufficient numbers to do so before they died... and then the dogs came up and added to their problems, Rays crossing the Veil to pick them off wherever they fled to.

Some actually decided to materialize to escape the dogs, popping inside buildings and houses out of line of sight. The poodles naturally noticed these malcontents who dared to not die helplessly, and their locations. It was a great excuse to set the stone on fire and collapse the buildings on top of them as they froze and shattered.

Ex-Nessian and Canian Warhounds are no joke.

I noted to the people we’d left beyond that the wealth of hides and ivory here was incredible. The place was already at a quarter normal time, time on the ethereal was a tenth that, so the corpses of the magical creatures these spiders had been slaughtering for years were still in pretty good shape.

There were shouts from behind as eager berserkers raced after the North Wind to wipe out the last of them and harvest poison and web glands for me, and maybe get stinking filthy rich on ivory power comps for their Gear...