My blood ran cold. There had been no mention of penalties for friendly fire, but since we entered the Trial as a team, the system might have certain limiters in place to prevent team killing. The fact that it was now directly referencing that had to be intentional. I had the secondary objective to keep the team alive. There was no way it would pit us against each other.

Unless it wasn’t setting out to pit “us” against each other. Just me, against them.

The elevator plummeted downward, its accelerating speed adding to the nausea in my stomach. I nearly asked Jinny if she’d received a notification before another popped up in my vision.

“Matt?” Jinny’s voice startled me out of my horror. “What’s wrong—”

A tendril of darkness snapped out of the wall and grabbed at me. I saw it coming and dodged, but it followed unhindered, turning on a dime, looping around my waist before I could get my saber out of its sheath. The tendril looped around my waist and slammed me back into the wall.

Talia bent down on all fours and jumped upward in a mighty leap that still only closed half the distance. Her jaws closed inches from where my leg had been before she plunged back down onto the waiting elevator and landed hard, sprawling onto her side. I watched, suspended in mid-air, as she did a little circle, desperately trying to figure out a way to reach me.

A million tiny threads looped over my arms, my legs, my torso, pulling me tight into the cold gelatinous substrate of the wall, until I felt my back slide into it. Frigid slime covered my neck, my ears.

There was a shrieking noise, and three charged crystals hit the wall next to me and exploded. Jinny was firing up from below. The tendrils loosened, then tightened again, twice as strong as before. I held my breath just before the wall consumed me.

It didn’t hurt, or burn, as I’d expected. Instead, it felt like I was being dragged underwater at an alarming speed, squeezing through a burrow of mud. With the tendrils binding my arms tight to my side, I couldn’t reach into my inventory. Same issue with my saber.

So, I did the only thing I could do. I began to summon. Wherever it was going, wherever it was taking me, it wouldn’t hurt to have a little extra firepower on my side.

/////

I emerged from the wall in a heap, gagging for breath as the liquid on the floor pooled in my mouth. It tasted foul, like putrified offal and something else. I pushed myself up from the floor in disgust and found that my hands and legs were pinned in something sticky. I twisted around until I could see what held me. The white pattern was unmistakable.

Spiderweb.

My surroundings looked much like a sprawling mess of stone ruins amid a bog.

Audrey landed a few seconds after me, collapsing rather pathetically onto the floor. She staggered upright, looking stunned and wilted, then bent down to sniff the dark liquid and audibly gagged. “No. No, no no no. Poor meat.”

“Audrey, help. Don’t get tangled.”

Her head snapped up, and she scuttled over to me immediately, stopping a foot away to inspect the threads. Experimentally, she bit at one of them, and barely managed to free her mouth. She worked frantically, with a combination of teeth and vines, growing more distraught as her efforts proved ineffective.

A hole at least three times the size of a person opened up behind her.

I’d been holding still, for fear of tangling myself further. The fear of being eaten by a giant spider won out, and I spun in place, bringing my hip to my hand and pulling the out of my inventory. As I’d previously feared, the movement further ensnared me in the web, locking me upside down, my hair drenched in the disgusting slush beneath. From my upside-down perspective, I sawed helplessly at my bonds as a massive, eight-legged silhouette emerged from the hole.

”Hide. Wait for my signal.”

Audrey hesitated, then skittered away, using her vines to scale a nearby wall and nestle into one of the many cracks.

There was a low-pitched, feminine chuckle that sent a chill down my spine. My wrist was chafing from all the movement, but it didn’t matter. I sawed faster, cutting myself more than once as the threads frayed.

“Ooooh… my…” The spider drew out the words unnecessarily long. “Is that an Ordinator in my web?”

From the combined shock of my class being mentioned aloud and realization that further struggle was pointless, I finally stopped. Even if I got a hand free it wouldn’t matter. Somehow, I doubted this was the type of creature to go down with a single crossbow bolt. Instead, I twisted around painfully to face her.

And immediately wished I hadn’t.

From the voice, I was hoping for something less—well—monstrous. More Quelaag and less Shelob. The reality was something far more horrifying than either. The spider part was black and as big as a tank, complete with eight legs and an abdomen covered in dark chitin. Where things went off the rails was the head. There was a woman’s head, upside down, attached to a long prehensile neck. Her dark hair dragged through the water as it maneuvered closer to my face. “Such a harmless-looking thing, for the catastrophe soon to follow in your wake.”

“You’re going to have to help me out, as I’m new to all this. What’s an Ordinator?” I asked.

Her joyous expression immediately cooled, her frown looking like a smile from the upside-down nature of her face. “So, that’s how we’re playing it? I had so dearly hoped that an agent of the blessed Allfather would treat a colleague with respect, but it seems that is not the case. To the web with you, then.” A strand of webbing struck me across my waist and pulled me free, holding me upside down in front of her.

“Now?” Audrey asked.

“No.” I sent back firmly, though it took every ounce of my self-control to do so. Then, aloud, I addressed the spider. “I misspoke. There was no way of knowing we served the same master. Though I am curious how you reached that conclusion yourself.”

Double-blind should have shielded me from any analysis effects. If nothing else, I wanted an explanation for how she figured it out, to avoid similar incidents. Assuming I actually made it out of this.

“Tales of the Ordinators have been passed down in my family for generations. I’ve been observing you all, of course. From the beginning, there was something about you that caught my eye. Your companions don’t know what experience looks like, a certain sheen of those tempered by combat, but I do. And the way you saved the little enchantress, well, there’s only one class capable of that.” The spider held a leg aloft and inspected the fine point at the end, a queerly vain action for a creature so hideous.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Well…” the spider spoke slowly. “There were several rules I broke to bring you here, only to discover that I mistook your intent. I thought the little lambs in your wake were intended as sacrifices, gifts delivered into my waiting web.”

“To what purpose?”

“Hard to say. To propose an alliance, perhaps.”

I blinked. “Why? Is that even possible? Would I be able to exit the trial without clearing the last floor?”

The spider raised an eyebrow. “It is possible. So long as you are the sole survivor, the alternative parameters are met. And while many creatures from the higher realms are less… civilized than I, many can be brought to your side, given the proper motivation. As for the why, we are kin in more ways than one.” She reached up with an arm to bring my head closer to hers. “We are both reviled by the grand order. Manipulators that work best behind the scenes, loathed and hated by all. It only makes sense that we band together, does it not?”

I felt my heart-rate finally slow. As I stared into her dark eyes, I recognized an emotion. A human emotion, one I could work with.

Loneliness.

I gave her a savage smile. “I already got the big one to give me some of his gear. He’ll be weaker than he would have been otherwise. He has a unique sword I’m interested in. The other two have more than a decent share of Selve and their items will sell for a high price. I was going to wait until we cleared the trial, and they were at their weakest to make my move.”

“Yet, you saved one of them,” she challenged.

“Do I look like a fool? Of course, I fucking saved the enchantress. The Trial was for four people. Letting someone die that early on would be wasteful, and potentially set me up for failure.”

The spider laughed. “Spoken like a true opportunist.”

I tapped into an old bitterness to give my words weight, one I’d been carrying for longer than I could remember. “It was unbearable, the way they treated me. Like I was the weakest of them. Like I was prey, rather than predator.”

“Unbearable and uncouth. You deserve so much better,” The spider agreed.

“Don’t rob me of the satisfaction,” My voice turned urgent. “Let me help you finish them. Their items are mine. Their bodies are yours. It will mark the beginning of our alliance.”

She studied me for a long time. Eventually, she seemed to find what she was looking for. “Greedy. But I have no use for items tailored to humans. Your proposal is accepted.”

The spider attached a thin thread to my arm. It was almost invisible and looked weightless. A small spider latched itself onto the back of my neck. “What—”

My captor turned ally loomed over me. “It would be foolish for a spider to blindly trust another of its kind. I have not lived this long without learning how to take precautions. We will prepare the chamber together. This broodling has a particularly potent poison, and little understanding of how to moderate it. If I see you deviate, even a little, or endeavor to sabotage our efforts, I will signal her. And you will not have time to regret your betrayal.”

“Seems like a rocky start, for what I was hoping would be a fruitful relationship,” I said, not bothering to hide my displeasure.

She hesitated, then reached out to touch my forehead, the pointed tip of her leg glowing. “Perhaps a carrot to accompany the stick.”