I sensed it in the air.

An incursion was coming.

I knew it as soon as the scouting team on the edge of the ravine drew back, packing up their camp and vanishing down the tunnels. My rats followed them as they hauled their way up, out of the sewers, and to a dingy little tavern where they handed over their maps to a team of four. No, five- the last member sat in the corner of the tavern playing a violin.

A woman with sapphire eyes took the map and unrolled it, smiling. She passed it off to a young man with a hideous wriggling mass of scars on his arm. Coin was exchanged across the table.

And that was all, for an hour. For two. I waited in tension, checking over the the minutia of my Dungeon, rousing the creatures from their dens with waves of caution and alertness. The whole of my territory swum in a sea of wary paranoia.

Then, on the eastern shore, things began to move. Men in shining armor stormed through on horses, shouting and pointing, and the masses of common-folk huddled at the edge of my lake stirred. They took to the ships they’d been building for the last weeks, the rough-hewn rafts and slim canoes, strapping on what cheap weapons they owned and dipping their oars into the water. It was a mass rush for my orchards.

It was a distraction.

They came in droves, the prows of their ships cutting holes in the thick layer of florid waterlilies I had woven over the lake, a blanket of pink that lay over the swaying waters, rising and falling with the waves.

I watched as the harpoon spiders crawled up from their dens, beautifully horrible creatures. Their carapace was a rough, bruised red color, with numerous small spikes decorating their broad legs. With a hiss their mandibles snapped open and they spat out long barbs of bone, going sailing through the air trailing silk lines.

Men died in that first volley, their impaled bodies ripped from their ships and dragged through the waters. The lucky ones died from the shock of finding a spear of bone thrust through their guts, rather than suffering the pain and confusion of being reeled in like fish thrashing on the hook. Struggling limbs spread a pink froth of blood and water across the surface of the lake.

Boats began to tilt and overturn as reelfish smashed their battering-ram skulls into the undersides, setting the little vessels lurching in the water. The huge swarm of bright, bronze-scaled bodies beneath the shallow green waters congregated on anyone who fell overboard, dragging them down to a silent death.

Blood and froths of airbubbles surfaced, rocking the waters.

Still they came, as the men in armor set up along the shore and lifted their bows, turning any ship that tried to change course and retreat into a pincushion. Arrow after arrow pierced the retreaters, urging the rest forward.

It was a death march.

I could have licked my lips. The small souls of creatures wandering into my Dungeon had long since ceased to count towards my advancement. To keep moving forward I needed human lives.

Or in this case, have them served up on a silver platter.

But something concerned me. Dragged my attention away from the slaughter. From Cabochon, fighting his own battles.

My little ratty spies had lost sight of the adventuring party. They were nowhere to be found, and this was a distraction, it had to be. Nobody would use the lives and bodies of the common folk as fodder like this if they seriously intended a successful mission.

Not unless there was a real assault coming from another front. I watched and waited, but nothing.

The boats had reached the shore of the mangrove orchard now, and people were rushing ashore, swinging with axes and crude blades mounted on long poles.

The fisherman spiders were overwhelmed, pressed back. Bone-harpoons continued to fly from within their numbers, claiming lives, but even the sight of their comrades being hauled like broken dolls into the swarming limbs of the arachnid host did nothing to hold back the human tide.

Men fell screaming, shaking, foam bubbling from their mouth as the little jeweled spiders sank their teeth in. Boa constrictors silently dropped their tails from the branches, coiling around throats and squeezing with the strength to crush bone.

It was chaos. It was carnage. They cut the webs ahead of them with their polearms, and fought tooth and nail to keep the spiders scuttling back on thin, hairy legs. Boots stomped through the shallow water and mud between the mangrove trees, and men climbed and clawed each other down from the branches, all trying to claim the fat golden fruit.

It was the ones who’d hung back, hoping to let other men clear the way, who met the horror first.

Drawn by the blood above, the abyssal shark shifted off its mantle of mud. It rose with a tremendous beat of its tail, a sleek bullet rising through the waters.

The waters exploded up as it surfaced in a thrash of endless teeth and glimmering, pale-grey skin.

A ship was left broken down to splintering timber, the crew holding on to shattered spars. A tail and dozens of tendrils coiled through the air as the beast retreated down, down, down, a man clutched half-broken but still living in its jaws.

The ones left alive didn’t get to breathe- tendrils coiled around their legs, seized them by the throats. They hung, corpses from a noose, kicking their limbs as they fought to get free.

Making it to the orchard was one thing. Making it back to shore, that would depend on their luck.

But I couldn’t sit and watch them try to make it past the prowling shark. I was still waiting for the axe to fall, for the real invaders to make their entrance through the ravine.

Why weren’t they here?

The thought loomed above me in cold anxiety, a stormcloud, an omen. I focused all my senses on the ravine’s slopes, thinking back to the maps I’d seen the scouts make, the routes they’d outlined as safe. Something was wrong here. Something was-

I paused, and then began to eat away at the spiderwebs above, cutting loose their moorings so huge sections of silver-pale silk came wafting down, drifting through the air like phantoms. I cut and cut, filling the sky above the canyon with a falling snowdrift of silk.

And then a long, tangling thread caught around something that wasn’t there.

Something invisible.

Something moving.

They were here.

As the adventuring team flickered into view, running now, running fast down the ‘safe’ route the scouting team had found for them. Thankfully I’d sabotaged their maps, adding unnecessary detours into the path.

Time enough to rouse my minions.

I jolted the sloths awake, and all around the five adventurers, hills of fur and mottled moss lifted up on long, trailing limbs. Huge faces with banded patterns of white and black and placid, sleepy eyes looked at them, and then an enormous paw swept out with a sudden burst of speed.

A bald man with a trio of gemstones orbiting his head lifted his staff. A wall of stone erupted, lifted from the floor of my Dungeon, and was shattered by the sloth’s might. Stone shrapnel flew at them, but the woman with the violin turned back and sawed a note, calling up a wind that shielded them.

The sapphire-eyed woman was in the lead, hacking away at the undergrowth of the dense, verdant valley with her sword, cutting them a route clear of pitfalls. Dozens of little birds lifted from the giant sloth’s back and a storm of cawing, discordant sound filled the air as they raised their voices in fury. The man with the scarred arm uncorked a wooden canister and hurled it.

Smoke, green smoke, puffed out of the opened container, wafting into the air. The birds fell like stones as a miniature explosion and a burst of flame shattered the canister and expanded its contents into a growing cloud. The sloth yawned, padding slowly after the team as they raced ahead.

I had brought the spiders out from their dens, flocking thick across the ravine’s far slope. It was only fifty or so feet, but a steep climb, and there had been no map made of this portion. The scouts had always retreated out of fear that their escape route would be cut off if they waited too long.

Now the real incursion would have to attempt the ascent blind.

The bald earth mage thrust both of his hands to the ground, setting off a minor quake that sent clouds of debris rolling down the slope. In only a moment the actual routes up were exposed, the patches of loose dirt and stone I’d left to go sliding underfoot knocked away, the pitfalls exposed as their thin layer of covering cracked and fell inwards.

It was a blunt method, but effective.

Better yet - for them - it caught many of the spiders in the rockslide, pulling their ranks into a disorganize tangle of limbs. The armored woman hit them like an elephant, charging through with sweeping blows from her long bastard sword. Just behind, the alchemist was lighting bottles with rags stuffed down their necks, hurling them to explode into flame and drive the spiders back in fear. The earth mage and the violinist moved together picking off the spiders that got through their vanguard and braved the flames. Last in line was a slim, slender man with a dagger in each hand, fighting off the spiders as they closed behind the group.

They covered the first half of the slope in seconds, but then it all began to turn.

A harpoon shot through the air, piercing the earth mage through his shoulder. Only the violinist saved him, catching his leg with some invisible force as the line snapped taut and tried to drag him back. In moments the armored woman was at his side cutting the silk reel- but in doing so she’d abandoned her post clearing the front.

The swarm of spiders had finally closed around them, encircling them. From behind, the sloth let out a long, lazy roar as it began to clamber up the slope after them.

They were bogged down now, with no quick route to escape, and the sloth outclassed any of them in sheer unarguable weight and brute force.

The alchemist lit his last bottle and hurled it. The fire struck the sloth along its muddy, mossy back, and couldn’t catch hold on the wet matting of fur and clinging plant fibres. It wicked out leaving the beast no worse than singed.

The earth mage, sweating, put his hand to the ground. As the sloth sunk its claws into the rocky side of the slope to climb, the earth underfoot gave way and sent it toppling back with an ungainly roaring. Trees were torn to splinters as it rolled downhill.

Ahead, a harpoon glanced off the woman’s armor, winding her. Spiders leapt to grab hold with their forelegs, to drag her down. The man with the knives lunged forward and cut at them, stabbing into eyes and hacking away reaching limbs. The three in the rear were left to fend for themselves as the two melee combatants joined together and cut a path forward.

The earth mage didn’t make it. He stumbled, nearly pulling the alchemist down with him, and I watched as the boy made a choice- letting go of his comrades hand. Fighting, actually, having to peel the man’s fingers from his own as the dying mage desperately tried to cling on, grasping blindly at his companion.

But he couldn’t keep hold. The alchemist sprinted after the violinist and the two fighters as they charged for the glass door to the Gardens, and the earth mage was pulled under by the tide of spiders chasing after.

The alchemist’s face was so pale you’d have thought he died himself.