1.17 Home Free

Foreshadowing is loosely defined as a situation in which the audience knows what will occur, but the characters within the story do not. In this case, the audience is filled with dread, awaiting the reveal that they know to be coming.

Harold wondered if he was one such audience member, trapped within the confines of his own imagination. Perhaps he was already insane, plotting the course of this fantasy with his subconscious mind. Or maybe he was some amalgamation of actor and audience, aware of it all, yet unable to stop the inevitable.

Nah, probably just unlucky. He readied himself to fight the frenzied brood with nothing to lose.

#####

A deafening silence followed the death of the Brood Mother. Harold supposed he would have mourned the generations of knowledge that had been lost in a single, silent kill. That is, if she wasn’t ordering her brood to kill him.

The double cross had not come as a surprise. The spider mother had not retained her large wealth of knowledge by being stupid after all. The possibility had come up in discussion, but they had never expected her to make herself so vulnerable in the process.

To stage a double cross while still in the room was the epitome of pride and foolhardiness. Yet, she would have succeeded if not for… something? Killing her while she ordered their deaths.

It was in such a situation that Harold now found himself, still surrounded on all sides by Fang spiderlings, though they had thankfully stopped moving in the time following the Brood Mother’s death. ‘Thank God for small mercies.’

They would have to leave. ‘But not yet.’ There still remained the matter of the strange being who had saved them. Harold couldn’t see their saviour, his view obstructed by the large, bulbous body of the late Fang mother, but he could make out the beginnings of the wound that had killed her. A puncture to a major organ, perhaps?

But his group had no time for further considerations, ordering them to fan out, they slaughtered the Fang spiders as they stood, either unwilling or unable to move. They knew full well how deadly this brood could be if they allowed them to get to the frenzied state that they had seen the remaining Black Widows had fallen into.

Black blood stained the cavernous expanse as the motley group of humans, a rock, and three golems exacted their toll. Hammers sounded against the earthen floor, and yet more broodlings fell before them.

Amber summoned her [Wall of Ember], this time in a relatively small form. She slowly maneuvered it around the room, burning the broodlings alive as she went.

Harold and the golems were considerably more direct. Though he might mix in a shield bash here or there for flavor, hammer blows from overhead were the name of the game here.

Rocky was the only member who sat out the slaughter. First, because Harold decided that his participation in such a grizzly act, even against monsters, was hardly a good learning experience. Second was because, well, despite his overwhelming powers that had buoyed them to victory, he lacked direct offensive options with which to kill the immobilized spiderlings.

They managed to clear the entire cavern with nary a mishap. The strongest spiderlings, that had shrugged off the shock the quickest, had found themselves face to face with death itself, shaped in the form of a hammer.

Now, all that was left was their unknown benefactor. Gesturing for the rest of the group to keep back, Harold scaled to the top, expecting to find some answers.

The sight of a spiderling, its fangs buried into the skull of the Brood Mother almost sent Harold scrambling back down the Fang mother’s corpse.

#####

The [Fang of the Stone Noble] was neither awake. But nor was he asleep. His siblings, he knew, would have been rendered immovable by now, frozen in place by the Brood Mother’s dying mental scream. It would reverberate through the minds of the brood, much like it had when their Black Widow foes had lost their mother. Then they would turn.

They would ravage one another with a total lack of concern for their own health, such was the survival instinct that would overtake them following the mother’s passing. His mother had told him that they reacted in this way to maximize the level of the final, lone survivor, who could once again become a Brood Mother, restarting the cycle.

But the mother’s death had come, the wave of mental anguish never reached him, half conscious as he was. The spiderling laid flat on the corpse of his dead mother, waiting for the Rock’s party to come do… something.

He didn’t know whether to expect death, as one of the Fang brood, or whether they would take him in, he who had saved the rock. He didn’t know if he cared.

The sounds of combat broke out once again, though the ever-present skittering and shrieking of a brood at war were strangely absent. From his limited point of view, he saw a wall of fire rise from somewhere on the floor. It moved somehow, likely charring the remnants of his brothers and sisters.

Did he feel remorse? He couldn’t say. But he did feel relief. Relief at having accomplished his final goal. The rock was safe, at least for a time.

As the tall human crested the Brood Mother’s corpse, the spiderling’s eyes struggled to stay open. They had been fighting for days, first against the accursed Black Widows, and then now, in the very chamber of the Fang mother.

And as the human moved slowly, cautiously to him, his eight red eyes closed, bathing his vision in darkness.

#####

He awoke to a rhythmic thud that seemed to loop over and over again. Never ceasing, never tiring, always moving onward. Thud. Thud. Thud.

The spiderling opened its eyes, not having expected to live this long. He drank in his surroundings like he always had.

The tunnels were a constant in the spiderling’s life, and they were with him once more, glistening gems emitting the same green glow of his birthing chamber. The consistency of the stone walls, their unchanging nature calmed him.

What didn’t calm him was the vice grip that one of the golems was currently holding him in. Its non-hammer hand was grasped firmly on his torso, as if looking to crush his carapace at any moment.

He let out a sharp shriek, more to force the humans to acknowledge his presence than as a cry of outrage. He noted with some relief that the rock was still with them. It’s glow was brighter than it had been in the cavern, and even the circuits running along the rock’s body shone with unusual brilliance. The brood was healthy then.

‘The brood? Why did I think that?’ The spiderling questioned himself even as the humans turned, examining him.

“He’s a [Fang of the Stone Noble],” began the short one, seemingly to no one in particular. “Does that mean you’re loyal to Rocky?” Ah, that was a question to him, though the contents of the question could have been any of a million possibilities.

He hissed to the rock instead. “I don’t understand the human tongue.” The rock nodded back, turning to the humans.

“He doesn’t understand you. Ask me the questions, and I’ll tell him.”

Now that the spiderling thought about it, the Brood Mo-rock didn’t really speak in the chitters and hisses of his brood. Instead, the voice transcended language, somehow simultaneously communicating in both the tongue of the humans, and the language of the brood. Strange.

“Why did you help us, spider?”

He thought for a moment. Honesty was best before the brood, right? “I don’t know. It felt as if you were my brood mother, like I needed to defend you from all harm.” He lowered his torso like a spiderling speaking to the Brood Mother.

“He says that he doesn’t know, that I seem to be a Brood Mother to him.”

“Hmm, strange. Maybe the evolution screws with his mind? We know that you got a class affiliated with Rocky, right? [Gem Soldier] is pretty clearly tied to him too, right?” The short human made sense, that is, after the rock translated it to him. It was only after his evolution that he had to worry about shifting loyalties.

The taller human looked thoughtful, or at least that’s what the spiderling guessed from the slightly scrunched up facial expression he could perceive. “But I don’t really feel a need to protect him with my life. Don’t get me wrong, I’d do it, but…”

The short one shook its head. “This is all baseless speculation until we meet someone who actually understands the system. Let’s just focus on staying alive and growing stronger, okay?”

That provoked a nod from both the rock and the other human. This was getting annoying. A brood had to have a clear leader, more than one Brood Mother was a disaster for a group of spiderlings. It meant war, ceaseless until one mother lay dead or dying on the cavern floor.

He said as much to the rock, who relayed it to the humans.

“They say that humans are not the same. We are a small group, we have no need for a superior, except in the most strenuous positions.”

It grated on the spider, but it knew better than to antagonize a group that had been killing its former brethren just a short while ago, its survival instinct having returned full force since waking back up.

The short one spoke again, clearly the planner of the group. “Hey Rocky, can you ask him if he knows a way for us to get aboveground?”

“Is there a way for us to get aboveground?”

At this, the spiderling bobbed its torso earnestly. “The queen’s chambers have multiple tunnels leading up to the surface, though none of our brood have ever spent long periods of time up there.”

The short one again answered, this time the rock conveyed a sense of confusion. “Why? Are they too strong for your brood to fight?”

“No. They are too weak, awful for levelling up the brood. Much better to fight in the tunnels.”

The party had a few more questions after that, but after seeing that this spiderling was far from the fount of knowledge the Brood Mother had been, the acquiesced, allowing the [Fang of the Stone Noble] to at last guide them towards the surface.

#####

The long trek had given Harold a lot of time to think. Outside of the possible mental influence that was keeping him primed for combat at all times, was the question of what was really happening to their world.

As far as he understood it, they had been moved to a sort of ‘proving ground’, a tutorial like the ones he had seen in those LitRPGs, where people could fight monsters and level up. ‘But don’t they usually have stat points that they can use?’

That was the other question. There were differences between the stories he knew and the reality he now found himself in. The monsters were semi-sentient. Well, some of them anyway.

That didn’t really raise a moral dilemma in him so much as a logical one. ‘If monsters are sentient, can level, and will evolve, the longer we stay in this tutorial, the worse it will be.’ The spiders were walking proof. They had waged a war of total annihilation while the humans were just getting started by getting their bearings.

Staring into the dark tunnels, guided only by the light of his hammer and the instruction of a spiderling, Harold came to a decidedly difficult question.

They were attacked multiple times on their journey. A sentient mole-like race, bats the size of men, and all manner of… others had come to kill them.

The group had beat them off with little trouble, but the onslaught of foes reminded Harold of a question he had not confronted since his paralysis. Would he give up the fight, to spite whatever was manipulating him? Or would he fight, despite their possible machinations in his mind?

No, he decided. It didn’t matter what they were trying to do to him. He would be the one to make the choice to fight.

This world was terrifying, he had seen this firsthand, and the closure from the brood mother’s death allowed him to ponder it. If the new Earth was anything like this proving ground, then the institutions would collapse the second a superpowered population was deposited back onto the planet. He needed strength, powers, and allies to match.

He imagined the foreclosed home of his childhood home, his forced parting with his little sister. Even the mountain of debt piled on for years of higher education. Each and every repressed memory, kept from his mind either of his own volition or with the powers of an arcane system, came flooding back. And as they stepped into the sunlight for the first time in days, perhaps weeks, he swore his vow.

He would have agency in this world, in the way he never had in his prior life. ‘Beware, all you anathema, all you serpents and snakes. I am Harold Sturm, I am the Storm, and I will brook no defiance from you.’