Understandably, the Delvers were a bit wary of Rita. And understandably, given the amount of weapons now pointed at her, Rita was a bit wary of them as well.

“Ya sure this thing isn’t gonna rip our heads off, Gora?” the slightly rotund man with the bushy beard asked.

“Yeah, she’s fine,” Gora replied between gritted teeth, more focused on the her burnt arm than the events transpiring not five metres away. One of the Delvers had immediately gone to her and started administering some kind of goo to her arm from a satchel at his side.

Rita herself was surrounded by a dozen sharp, pointy objects held by a variety of individuals who appeared quite capable of using them and was doing her level best to make herself as small as possible. When the big, scary man with the massive bow had pointed it right at her, she had very carefully, very slowly put her spear down and raised her arms as high in the sky as she could.

“Then why’s it holding it’s arms up like that?” one of the other Delvers, a weaselly looking man holding a pair of knives, asked in a nasally voice.

“Don’t ask me, ask her!” Gora snapped, wincing as her medic began wrapping bandages around her injured limb.

“Please stop squirming and hold still,” the man fussing with her bandages asked in an even voice. He was slender with brown hair and short stubble on his chin.

“It’s itchy and it fucking hurts!” Gora complained.

“Good. Means the salves are working.”

The man with the bushy beard cleared his throat, drawing Rita’s attention back to him. He looked older, maybe early fifties? But like, one of those men who’d aged well. His arms looked almost as muscular as Gora’s, though with less definition.

The bow in his hands was nocked, but not drawn.

“Can ye understand me?” he asked, slowly.

“Yes,” Rita said in a small voice.

“And ye can speak too. Why ye got yer hands up?”

“Umm… I’m giving up?” Rita tried.

“Givin’ up what?” he asked, confused.

“I don’t know! You’re the ones who are pointing all those weapons at me!” she replied, edging just a little bit into the hysterical.

“Alright. Fair ‘nough. So ye ain’t casting a spell, then?”

“No, Sir! Wouldn’t even know how to!” Rita said.

“In that case lower yer hands, Lass, it makes the lads nervous about possible lightnin’ strikes,” the bushy bearded man said, lowering his own bow.

Rita lowered her arms with a sigh of relief as one by one, the other Delvers lowered their own weapons. They very pointedly did not put them away, however. And the sheer number of wary eyes made her feel quite self-conscious.

“So Gora,” Bushy Beard Man asked conversationally after eyeing Rita critically for a few moments, “now I’m sure ye got a good reason for dragging one of ‘em Nightmare Spawns with ye, but are ye thinking of letting her into my fort?”

“Yes,” Gora simply said as she limped closer, leaning on the medic for support. He looked positively tiny compared to her. “Trust me.”

“I see. How about ye, Spawn, what are ye wanting here?” he asked, turning back to Rita, a question in his voice.

A rather transparent ploy. Rita suspected he didn’t really give a rat’s ass what she wanted. It was more about how she answered the question. The other Spawn were all crazy, the only question he wanted answered was just how crazy she was.

“A bath would be nice…” she replied, flashing him a quick, nervous smile. Nothing like a spot of humour to seem human.

For a moment he just stared at her. Then his eyes crinkled and he burst into a full-body laughter, soon joined by most of the other Delvers. Just like that, the tension broke.

“Aye, that we can do for ye. Alright lads, lets help ‘em inside. They’ve had a rough trip.”

As the other Delvers spread out to help the others, he stepped closer and grunted as he bent to pick up her spear.

“Me name’s Duncan Orrin. I’m the captain of Triskellion here.”

He handed Rita’s spear back to her.

“I’m Rita…” she started, then stopped.

She’d casually expected to tell him her surname, only to realize, she couldn’t remember it. It felt like the memory was at the tip of her tongue, but it just wouldn’t come. How do you forget your own surname?

“… just Rita,” she finished, lamely.

“Well, welcome to Triskellion, Rita. Some ground rules; no nestin’, no eatin’ my Delvers and no layin’ eggs, alright?”

Rita laughed… then slowly turned to staring at him in horror when she realized he wasn’t joking. “Uhh… o-o-ka-ay…?”. Laying… eggs?

“Good!” Duncan exclaimed, clapping her on the shoulder and nearly knocking the wind out of her. “Then come on inside, I’ll get the lads to get started on that bath for ye! All the folks who return get baths anyway, I’m certain Gora won’t mind waitin’ her turn in my office a spell.”

Rita followed him a bit of a daze.

Fuck. Eggs? Was that what people thought when they looked at her?

“It was her. She killed the tree,” Gora said as soon as the door to Duncan’s office closed behind her.

They’d all been bundled through the big front gates of Triskellion Outpost with various degrees of assistance from the other Delvers. Samual had been carried, platemail and all, by several of them while one of the bigger guys had supported Gora as she’d staggered her way inside. Samual, at least, looked like he was doing better. He’d been conscious when they carried him inside, though he’d been his usual stoic, tight-lipped self.

As soon as her legs had stopped wobbling and the medic had given her another brief once-over, Gora had rushed off to Duncan’s office to make the report that had been burning in her mind ever since she’d entered the Wilderness Zone.

Duncan raised one bushy eyebrow from his big, leather chair behind his desk. His office was relatively spartan, with a few dust-covered trophies attached to the walls and a single bookcase overflowing with papers and only a few books that appeared to have barely ever been touched. The single, large oak desk occupied most of the floor space, with wooden chairs for guests positioned in front.

“Who?”

“You know who I mean,” she replied. “The girl you’re dying to discuss.”

His other eyebrow joined the first. “The Spawn? How?”

Gora shook her head. “I have no idea. Apparently she bit it, according to her. And you call her Rita, she’s sane enough, usually.”

“Aye, she seemed nice enough at first glance. Pretty unusual for a Spawn. Usually they’re all bat-shit crazy, even after ye take ‘em out of that shit-hole,” he said, nodding his head towards the window and where the Nightmare Domain used to be beyond it. “The question is, Gora, how certain are ye?

“About her sanity? Pretty damn sure,” Gora replied. “She’s been with us for… a while.”

“Aye, that too, but I mean about her killin’ the Tree. You sure she wasn’t… lyin’?”

Gora leaned against one of the office walls, ignoring the chairs meant for guests in front of his desk. They were made for normal sized people, not hugely muscular and heavy Cambions. She’d broken enough chairs while growing up to get a pretty good idea of when a sit was risky, so she’d stuck to standing. Duncan had never complained.

“Almost completely certain. Things got a bit… weird inside the tree. Not sure how much of that was her but…”

Duncan leaned back. “I assume ye mean weirder ‘an normal? Tree-Zone ain’t known for ‘normal’.”

Gora nodded. “My father was there.”

“That ain’t that bad. Tree’s been known to change things up every once in a while if you get too comfy runnin’ it. One time it threw my ex-wife at me. ‘Cept she had the head of a beetle. An improvement if ye ask me.”

“No, not a Tree-made copy. My actual father was there.”

Duncan stared at her in confusion for a few moments, then he glanced up at her horns and his eyes widened.

“Wait, yer mum’s not a…?” he said, pointing at the top of her head.

“No. My mom might be crazy, but she’s human.”

Duncan let out a long whistle as his eyes roamed across Gora’s muscular frame. “Fock, Gora. Wrath demon?”

“Greater,” she replied. “Name of ‘Nezzerorth’. Ever heard of him?”

Duncan shook his head. “No. I stay out of the Diabolist’s shite. But ye say he was actually there? In the flesh, so to speak? How?”

“He said he had a contract with the Tree.”

“Fockin’ ‘ell.” Duncan fished out a pipe from a pocket of his coat and walked over to the single window in his office, behind the guest chairs. “Didn’t know the damn Trees could make contracts. That’s… concernin’. But go on,” he said as he stared out the window, puffing on his pipe.

Gora related the highlights of what happened to her after she stepped through the portal at the base of the tree. She admitted that Nezzerorth had been intending to kill her, but not why. Some things were private, even to old friends.

When she got to the part where Rita shouted down from out of the clouds above, Duncan’s eyes widened in surprise.

“She entered yer trial?”

“Not exactly. My father said something about her ‘being let into the internal areas’ of the Tree. I have no idea what he meant by that, but it sounded like the Tree ‘knew’ she was there? I don’t know,” she finished with a shrug.

“Hmm. Interesting. And how was yer daddy plannin’ on killin’ ya?” Duncan asked, changing the topic. “Can’t die in the Tree.”

Gora took a deep breath. “Actually you can. The Tree takes half your soul if you die. Exactly half, according to my father.”

Duncan nodded momentarily before seeming to catch himself. Gora frowned. Perhaps that had been more well known than she had been let to believe.

She continued. “The payment for his contract was the other half. I assume he would have grabbed his share first, then killed me and let the Tree take the rest. It would have been like having gone inside soul-ripped.”

“And how’d ya survive?” Duncan asked quietly. “Ye kicked his ass?”

Gora shook her head, then rested it on her one good arm on the windowsill, staring outside. When she spoke, there was a tremor in her voice. “Not a chance. He was faster, stronger, more experienced… he had me beat in every way imaginable. But instead he toyed with me, made me believe I had a chance as long as I fought just a little bit harder, just a little bit longer. That I could beat him.”

She swallowed as Duncan regarded her silently.

“He could have killed me any time he wanted to,” she said, voice turning to a low rumble, remembering how fast he’d moved at the very end. Like he’d gone from standing several metres away to having skewered her into the ground without having bothered to cross the intervening space.

“Finally it starts to dawn on me,” she continued, “that no, even fighting harder than I’d ever fought before… he was still holding back. It was still a game to him.”

Duncan waited patiently as Gora cleared her throat and wiped her eyes.

“And then suddenly it wasn’t,” she continued, her voice back to its normal rumble. A soldier reporting to her commanding officer. “Something happened, some kind of explosion or something. The next thing I know there’s this big flash of white and he stabs me through the chest, screaming about how he wasn’t done yet. Then everything disintegrates and the next thing I know I’m tossed out through the portal alongside the rest of the team, soul intact.”

A pensive silence descended over the two of them. Duncan took a deep drag on his pipe and slowly blew his smoke out the window, staring outside at the rolling patches of Wilderness Zone biomes stretching off into the distance. Only now that the tree was dead and the ever-present mist surrounding its lands had cleared up could one truly appreciate the fantastic view from here.

For some reason, Gora just couldn’t get Nezzerorth’s facial expression at the end, after he’d stabbed her, out of her mind. He hadn’t looked angry, or upset, or resigned. Instead he’d looked… proud?

The silence stretched as Duncan kept smoking his pipe, deep in thought.

“We know about the soul thing,” he finally spoke. “That it takes half.”

Figures. “Then why haven’t I ever heard of it before?” Gora asked, straightening up and making as if to cross her arms in front of her chest before wincing in pain as she brushed against the bandaged one. She just letting them hang awkwardly instead.

Duncan shrugged and tapped his pipe against the outside of the window to empty it before heading back to his desk. “Wasn’t talkin’ bout the Guild. ‘Course we didn’t know it was exactly half, good of yer da’ to confirm for us. But we suspected.”

If not the Guild, then who?

“Who is ‘us’, exactly, then?” she asked. Belonging to other groups wasn’t strictly forbidden among Delvers, but good luck moving up the ranks to being the Captain of a Delver fort if it was known you served another master.

Seated behind his desk again, Duncan fished a handkerchief out of one of the drawers of his desk and cleaned the inside of his pipe.

“Don’ worry ‘bout that,” he replied quietly, then changed the topic. “Tell me more ‘bout this spider girl. Rita. Where’d she come from?”

Gora felt a brief stab of frustration at having her question brushed off, but she trusted Duncan. He’d been a mentor to her when she’d first joined the Delvers and they’d been friends since. Not exactly the ‘father she never had’, to use the old cliche, they weren’t quite that close. But if he didn’t want to talk about it, she wasn’t going to push him. Instead, she nodded and began her tale about Rita.

“We were camping at the Campfire near the Big L building. Inside one of the block towers. Up to that point things had been going well. The group was reasonably competent and we’d filled a couple of vials of essence. We were busy packing up for what I had planned as our second last day before we reached the Tree itself, when we spotted movement on the ground outside our window…”

Rita wiggled herself a little deeper into the warm, soapy water and sighed happily.

The bearded, old man, Captain Duncan, had been as good as his word; after only a brief medical check to make sure she wasn’t injured, she’d been led straight to her bath.

They’d even had a bath that fit her! Barely. It was a big, round, Gora-sized tub made of wood with a large linen cloth laid inside to protect from splinters and circled by bands of iron to hold it together, kind of like a giant, squat, open-topped barrel. With a bit of squirming, Rita had managed to squish all three parts of her body inside; abdomen, thorax and human torso, so that now, as she lay back against the side, only her shoulders and head stuck out above the deliciously hot, steaming water.

And yes, there was indeed hot water, despite the size of the tub. The Delvers, the wonderful scoundrels, had a little tronic that someone had found at some point and decided to keep, that could rapidly heat up even a bath-full of water for only one or two drops of some bright orange essence.

The feeling when she’d sunk down into the warm water could only be described with one word: heavenly.

Now, three thorough scrubbings later, one of them before she even got into the bath using some spare rags, Rita could finally feel some semblance of her humanity returning.

Again, she sighed happily and rested her head on the edge of the bath, feeling the warmth soaking into her sore muscles.

Rita idly ran a hand through her hair and sighed again, this time less happily. Her hair was still a matted mess, despite getting washed twice, but that was going to have to be a later problem. Hopefully after some soaking loosened… whatever concoction it was that had formed there. Either that, or she was going to have to cut it all off.

The door creaked open and Rita scrambled to cover her chest with her arms. Then she relaxed as Justine, her ‘guide’, peeked inside.

Justine looked mostly human, but her skin’s odd shade of tan, a slightly pronounced lower jaw and two small, pointed tusks protruding up past her lips made it clear she wasn’t.

“Hey, everything okay?” she asked as soon as Rita grabbed her translation tronic off a nearby table.

“Er, yes, thank you. Everything’s wonderful. Thank you again for getting the bath ready for me,” Rita said, smiling.

“Oh, no problem at all! All part of the job. I managed to find a bunch more rags for you, as well as the new shirt you asked for,” Justine babbled as she pushed into the room, a pile of cloth in her arms. “Well, it’s one of my spare shirts, but I figured, hey, it’s not everyday you can lend a Nightmare Spawn your clothes, right?” Then she giggled.

She wasn’t sure whether it was just the tronic’s translation, but Justine’s voice was unexpectedly feminine and girly. Because, you see, Justine was ripped.

Not huge and bulky like Gora, who seemed to have rippling muscles over rippling muscles, but like one of those wiry gym-bunnies that made you feel fat just by being in the same room.

If Rita hadn’t seen Ava’s pasty complexion and skinny limbs, she would have thought women in this world were just naturally muscular.

“It might be a be a little tight,” Justine continued casually as she walked past, which let Rita catch a glimpse of chiseled abs just barely peeking out from under her shirt as she dropped off her load, “since it looks like you’ve got bigger boobs. But even if its uncomfortable, it should be fine to last you until you manage to scrounge up another shirt that’s more ‘your size’.”

She gestured to her chest in accompaniment of the final phrase, her hands miming a pair of very large breasts as she giggled.

“Thank you?” Rita tried again, herself not quite sure whether it was for the shirt or the compliment. If it even was a compliment. Had she just been mocked for having bigger ‘assets’?

“Hey, it’s no problem! Captain Duncan told me to keep an eye on you and make sure you’re okay so I’m just doing my job, really!” Justine stated with an innocent grin.

Right. ‘Keeping an eye on her’. Rita hadn’t missed the hand axe hanging from her belt. She had no doubt that, despite being all smiles, the muscular woman wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to put that axe through her skull if Rita did anything… monster-ry.

She shuddered as she thought back to the conditions for her access to the fortress. No nesting? No laying eggs? What did people think when they saw her? What did they think her capable of?

Rita looked down at the bottom of her thorax and abdomen, visible under the water, to the flexible joints where her legs attached, at legs that were even now folded up and somehow squeezed into the bath alongside her body in what in a human would have been an impossible contortionist’s act. She took in the variety of textures, ridges and folds across the bottom of her body that she had been so far too scared to explore much beyond scraping off some caked on mud from the swamp with a piece of wet cloth.

What was she capable of? The truth of it was, she had no idea what else her body could do. She had already discovered that it could spin webs, just like a real spider. For all she knew, all she had to do was squeeze a couple of muscles she didn’t know she had yet and out would pop a torrent of spider eggs! She was not ready to be a mom! Especially not to a horde of crawling spider-babies…!

The thought of a bunch of eight legged babies crawling all over her nearly made Rita sick with revulsion. She shuddered and resolved to smother any further thoughts of eggs and babies in their cribs. So to speak.

Yet the fact remained, she wasn’t human anymore.

Actually, scratch that, she had never been human, had she? She just had the memories of one. One Rita… something. She couldn’t even remember her surname for goodness sakes!

No. It was time to move on instead of clinging to a past that never really existed. Alice had been right. She had to stop being disgusted by what she was and embrace her new form. And that meant getting over her squeamishness about her spider parts and figuring out how they worked and what they could do.

She slowly unfurled one of her legs and lifted it up in front of her, and for the first time tried to count her ‘knees’.

It might seem strange to think that she didn’t know how many joints her legs had, but up to this point her approach to dealing with the fact that she was now a half-spider monstrosity had been to pretend that it hadn’t happened. When she’d initially fallen about her room, learning to walk with the things, she’d mostly been going with what felt right while doing her level best not to look down. Since then, she’d mostly been bouncing from one terrifying situation to the next, all the while trying not to think about her body below the waist for the sake of her own sanity.

Now her sanity was simply going to have to deal.

Five. Her leg could bend in five different places. Not all equally far, but it nevertheless made her surprisingly flexible. She could curl it so tightly that the final segment overlapped with the first, and when she stretched it out upwards, she could nearly touch the ceiling!

Gingerly, she ran her fingers over the bottom of her thorax, feeling at the bumps and bulges of the joints where her legs connected. She could feel her fingers on her body in a place that she had no mental reference of.

Her leg twitched involuntarily at the tickling sensation and and she chuckled softly to herself.

Surprisingly, it didn’t feel gross at all. It reminded her a little of rubbing Brutus’s belly, her old Staffordshire Terrier back when she’d been a teenager. He had also had a sensitive spot that made his leg twitch when you rubbed it.

Poor Brutus. He’d died, what was it, almost ten years ago, hadn’t he? Cancer or something. She missed him. Even if, technically, she’d never really met him in person.

“Wow, that is so cool.”

Rita nearly jumped out of her skin. She’d completely forgotten Justine was there! She turned to find the strange woman leaning against a table at the back of the room, staring creepily at her extended leg with a gigantic grin on her face.

“Your legs I mean. The way they bend and move and stuff! It’s just like a real spider, but the rest of you moves like a human. It’s looks kinda weird,” Justine went on. “But your toes are super cute!”

Rita’s leg immediately recoiled back under the water like a spring and she sank a little deeper.

“I… uh… don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I’m trying to have a bath, so… could I have a little bit of privacy, maybe?” Rita asked awkwardly, blushing as she subconsciously covered her chest with her arms again.

“Oh! Of course! Sorry!” Justine babbled. “I’ve just always loved spiders! Used to catch them in jars when I was younger and feed them flies!”

For a moment, the idea of being stuck in a jar while Justine fed her flies popped into Rita’s head. Ew.

“Let me just grab all this stuff for you before I go!” Justine said, and turned to the pile of Rita’s discarded clothes. To her credit, she hesitated for only a moment as she approached what Rita had mentally designated the ‘Burn Me’ pile.

“Are you sure you want me to burn all of this?” she asked, gesturing at the heap of clothes Rita had peeled off herself before she’d gotten in the tub.

When she and the others had been hiking through the Nightmare Domain (or skittering, in Rita’s case), potential danger around every corner, personal hygiene had been the last thing on anyone’s mind.

She’d been shocked just how disgustingly filthy she’d become.

Her clothes had already been pretty naff back when she’d put them on in the ruined wreckage of her apartment, but they had then been subjected to sweat from several days of hard hiking and bodily fluids - especially blood - from both herself and a variety of other monsters. They had been slept in on the ground, used as impromptu bandages and even thrown up on, not necessarily in that order.

When she started peeling them off, she’d found that a combination of sweat, blood, dirt and whatever crap had originally been in them when she’d found them had combined to become some kind of incredibly sticky goo that had basically glued them to her body in places.

She literally had to use her knife to undress in some places.

“Absolutely,” Rita stated with complete certainty. “Burn it all.”

“Even this?” Justine asked, holding up Rita’s bra. “It smells rank, no offense, but it looks pretty comfy. Maybe just a good wash…?”

Rita stared at the brown stains on the light pink cotton where blood had seeped through her sweater and shirt at some point. Her own blood or some other monstrosity from the Nightmare’s blood, she wasn’t really sure. Either way, the idea of wearing something that had been soaked in life juices almost made her gag.

Besides, the clasp had broken when she’d undressed.

“If you want it, you can have it,” Rita stated simply.

“Gosh, thanks!” Justine said, beaming at her before sticking the bra in her pocket, dried blood and all.

She quickly scooped up the rest of the discarded clothes in her arms and headed out the door.

“Remember! Just call if you need anything!” she said before closing the door behind her.

Rita sighed and dumped her tronic back on the table beside the bath.

Finally, she had a chance to explore her own body in peace.