Carefully, I moved along one wall of the tunnel, scanning my surrounding for any suspicious disturbance in the streams of energy floating around me. Luckily, everything was calm for the time being.

While the energy patterns around me didn’t show anything alarming, there was a subtle change in the dampness of the air and the echo from my walking stick hitting the ground, which made me believe that I had entered a vast cave. Even though it felt comforting to know that I was not necessarily any longer right in the path of anything that was traversing these caverns, a big cave area also brought the possibility of stumbling into the habitat of another scary monster.

Right about then, I would have given almost anything for some powerful flashlights and a machine pistol or at least a shotgun.

As I moved on, the surrounding slowly changed. Instead of just smooth, barren limestone rock, there were traces of dolomite, marble, and gypsum. And then I noticed a tentacle reaching out from the wall, pulsing with dark, green energy.

Screaming in a high-pitched voice, I jumped back and held up the truncheon in a defensive position. Heart thumping wildly in my chest, I waited for the inevitable attack, ready for fight or flight. Alas, somewhat anticlimactically, nothing happened. The tentacle was just reaching out into the dark and, as I noticed now, was not even moving.

Carefully, I stepped closer and tentatively touched the thing with my truncheon.

No reaction.

And now, as I was focusing my sight on the surrounding, I could make out more of those tentacles in the dark - they were all over the place, most just at the very edge of my vision.

Curious, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

A giant tentacle monster that was sleeping on the ground and raised its tentacles in the air? I would have noticed something on the floor then. Similarly, the tentacles didn’t reach up particularly high, the furthest perhaps reaching two yards, so it was not from a monster that was clinging to the ceiling either.

Which left… what?

A single tentacle as a monster? That would be weird even for this new world. Not out of the question, but just too odd. Then again, snakes were basically long narrow shapes that in the dark might look like a tentacle. But snakes would have surely reacted to me touching them with a truncheon…

So… plants?

It had to be. Nothing else made any sense. And if this new world didn’t follow at least some sensible rules, then I might as well shoot myself already… if I had a gun, that is.

Telling myself to stop being a sissy, I stepped forward and touched the tentacle with the back of my finger. The tentacle had a smooth, solid texture, and was relatively cool to the touch. Feeling braver, I moved my hand along the shaft, and quickly noticed small protrusions on all sides, covered with a sticky substance on top.

As I looked more closely, I could see small patches of purple, black, green, and grey energy slowly moving in those sticky patches, making me believe that this was some sort of plant that used glue as a flytrap and then subsumed those organisms, either using acid or perhaps mana.

With a sigh of relief, I wiped my hands on my pants and carefully made my way around the weird looking plants. While flesh-eating plants weren’t part of my image of an idyllic surrounding, their diminutive size and small sticky patches made me feel relatively safe.

It certainly beat giant bats and spiders!

And then new varieties of plants entered the picture. And insects… lots of insects, or small creatures, anyway. In fact, the further away I got from the tunnel, the more the cave was starting to teem with life, which made me somewhat uncomfortable. Not that I was afraid of bugs. Well, not as long as I could squish them. But the idea of being swarmed by those little buggers made me squirm inside.

Fuck. A fireball, that is what I needed. Blast this whole cavern empty. Scorch all this crap away and have it nice and clean. Of course, I would die in the process, if not from the blast in a contained space then from asphyxiation.

But still. Might be worth it.

Apparently, the cave was getting to me.

In addition to the bugs, there were mushrooms, parts of which glowed in a nice comforting amber color in my mana vision, whereas other parts had a purple shine to them. If it had been just the amber, I might have stepped closer and investigated, but the purple made me keep my distance — better safe than sorry or something like that.

And them shrooms got bigger by the minute. Whereas the first few were the size of a soda can, they quickly grew to the size of a small child and then to about my height.

Carefully, I navigated my way around them and kept on walking along the wall as best as I could. At least no zombies were shambling around in the dark. Keep fingers crossed for that one.

“Brrraaaains!’’ I groaned quietly.

At first, I had to chuckle a bit at my stupid joke. But then I got worried. What if… I mean, there was magic…

Fuck. Better not to think about it.

But by then, it was too late… I vividly imagined rotten corpses stumbling out of the dark chasing after me.

As if giant mushrooms, flesh-eating plants, hordes of little bugs and, worse, giant bats and spiders weren’t enough.

But my focus on the real issues I was currently facing returned in a hurry when I noticed a huge string of… something, stretch out into the darkness. Another plant? Perhaps, but it was enormous. And somehow it didn’t look like a plant. It was as if it had a different structure somehow, and it was not alive. In the mana spectrum if felt more like a rock, or a piece of wood… a small, yet noticeable difference in the amount of mana and its structure in the object. While in living things it felt somehow organic, twisting, turning, moving, in unliving objects it had more of a crystalline structure to it – precise geometric forms of tiny specs of mana.

Tentatively, I touched the ‘thing’ with my hand. It was soft and slightly yielding. Deep in thought, I tapped against it a few times to see how it responded. There was something this reminded me of… And then it hit me. This was part of a freakishly huge spider web!

“Shit,” I cursed quietly. I was so toast.

Immediately, I turned around and ran back along the wall where I had come from. But it was too late – within seconds I could hear the noise of something large rushing after me.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I muttered while focusing on getting away as quickly as I could. Did spiders have a weak point? From what I remembered, they had less, if any, armor on their abdomen. And… well, that was about all I knew. Generally, you could stomp spiders with a boot, so it really was not much of an issue usually. But that was not going to work so well, with one that was as big as a huge cat or a dog.

The noise behind me was getting louder, and the hairs on my neck were starting to stand up. There is something particularly creepy about the rapid skittering noise interrupted by moments of absolute quiet… apart from my huffing and puffing of course and the sound I made stumbling over the uneven ground. Any moment I expected some giant bug exploding out of the darkness onto my back and devouring me alive.

A whimper escaped my lips. Why did it have to be spiders of all things? Fuck.

“Focus, Daniel. You can do this. C’mon!” I hissed through clenched teeth.

I needed some sort of distraction to get to the weak point, or a way to ambush the spider.

Vibration! Spiders were finely attuned to that, as far as I knew. So perhaps I could use that to my advantage.

Since running away seemed futile, I decided to make a stand behind the tallest mushroom I had seen so far, almost a full head taller than myself. I hefted a large stone in my left hand and readied the truncheon in my right.

And, holding my breath, I waited for the spider to get closer.

The spider approached slowly, almost cautiously, perhaps trying to sense my location now that I had stopped creating a plethora of vibrations.

Patiently I waited for the spider to get closer. For once, my lack of real vision might have been a blessing in disguise - all I could really see was the rough outline of a spider, mostly highlighted by the disturbance in the flow of energy around its body, and the black energy that seemed to pulsate through its body and, to a lesser degree, its legs. Seeing anything more, like the hairy legs, bulbous body, or weird eyes, might have freaked me out and make me lose my nerves.

When the spider was just a couple of yards away, I tossed the stone right behind it. Immediately, the spider whipped its body around, raising its forelegs to attack. Using the opportunity, I jumped from behind the mushroom and took a massive overhead swing at the joint of one of its hind legs, hoping to cripple and unbalance it. A long shot, perhaps, but the best I could come up with on the spot.

The spider noticed my movement, but despite its terrifying speed it didn’t react fast enough - with a dull thud, by truncheon impacted the leg and I could hear a resounding crack. Miraculously, the leg buckled, and the spider wobbled slightly.

But then it managed to turn around entirely and struck back with its pedipalps and fangs. And while the pedipalps were quite weak, the spider used them to try and get me closer to its choppers – fangs that very well might have been coated with venom.

I slammed my truncheon against the head of the spider, desperately trying to keep it at bay, but the rapid-fire hits by the pedipalps and the spider scurrying around kept me slightly unbalanced.

And then it happened. A particularly quick flurry of strikes hit me on my head, momentarily disorienting me, which the spider used to its full advantage - instead of striking again, it pulled me forward toward its fangs.

The feeling of the hairy pedipalps on my arms and back momentarily petrified me. Time seemed to slow down, until, with a jolt, my mind suddenly cleared – I knew that my next move, or lack thereof, would determine whether I was going to die or be able to fight back and perhaps emerge victoriously.

Freezing up was a death sentence, as was a purely defensive tactic. I had to face the facts… I was too weak and slow to outlast the spider, so I needed to do something unexpected that might gain me an edge.

And then I knew what to do.

Instead of resisting the move towards the spider’s fangs, I decided to use the momentum and go for where I knew I needed to go - the abdomen. Using the impetus provided by the spider, I dove forward while stabbing with my truncheon at the face of the spider.

Instinctively, the spider moved its head back, which was the chance I needed to get underneath its bulbous body. Trying to ignore my revulsion, I jammed the truncheon underneath the head, while crouching down underneath the chitinous abdomen. With my left hand pressed again the smooth and hard surface I abruptly pushed up with all my available force, flipping the spider on its back.

A temporary solution, at best, but the opening I needed.

With a ferocity that was fueled by, in equal parts, fear, and disgust, I repeatedly slammed my truncheon into the vulnerable abdomen. Whenever the spider managed to gain some traction with its legs and attempted to get upright, I redoubled my effort, hitting viciously at the same spot over and over. Soon, I could feel cracks developing in the carapace, and I started feeling more optimistic about me making it out of this situation alive.