As the pale, dark-bearded, bare-assed Dwarf Lord pinned the captive woman to his bed, I spun the spear in my hands. It felt light, balanced, deadly.

Like a hero’s weapon.

The thought dashed through my mind and I almost laughed. I was no hero.

But my body was already moving, instinct and hundreds of hours of hunting coming to bear as I instinctively punched forward with both hands, using the shaft of the weapon like a quarterstaff and smashing the closest dwarf in the face with a length of darkly-forged iron.

There was a loud crack and he fell away, blood fountaining from a shattered nose. Movement beside me, and I spun away, hair whipping across my face. Thick, pale hair. Wait… Wha—?

A halberd slashed across my ribs, hot blood spraying.

I roared, twisted, thrust. The tip of my spear glanced off a chest plate with a ringing scrape, knocking the dwarf back a step. But I charged anyway, kicking out flat-footed. I had height, and my speed surprised the soldier. I think he was surprised that I was attacking at all. My heel connected, and I saw I was wearing supple leather boots that climbed up my calves. The soldier stumbled and my blade slashed, carving a red line across his open-faced helm and shattering his teeth.

Brutal.

But there was no time to waste on pity because there were more, crowding in, a clanking sound behind warning me to dive forward over my downed opponent. The spiked tip of a thrusting halberd passed through the space I’d just vacated.

I was going deeper into the room. And maybe that was wrong, because escape and survival… weren’t those the other way? But I wasn’t in Survivor Mode.

I was in Hero Mode.

The difference? I was charging toward the buff, grinning dwarf who spun to face me. His limp cock flopped between his thick thighs. In one hand, he gripped the luxurious, chestnut hair of the green-skinned woman, pulling back her head. I should have stopped when I saw him grin. It probably meant something bad. Very bad. But instead I spun my weapon over my head with both hands and swung for the fences, the gleaming edge of the foot-long spearhead cutting the air.

I leaped towards him, and for a single instant I knew, without a doubt, that I was doing the right thing.

The smirk faltered only slightly as he lifted his free hand and spoke. In a thundering, rumbling voice that could break mountains, the Dwarf Lord uttered a single ringing word. His hand swept across his body, a swift, grasping, slicing movement.

Magic.

It was like a gigantic fist had slammed me, flung me, my body spinning through the air and the spear ripping free from my grip. Crack. I smashed into the wall six or seven feet up and hung there, suspended like there was a massive vice grip squeezing me against the stone masonry. I couldn’t breathe, my body straining and about to snap under the massive force.

Only then the dwarf screamed hoarsely, and the invisible power that held me disappeared.

I flopped to the floor, flailing limbs barely managing to cushion my descent. My head lolled and my sight blurred, a literal red haze beating at the edges of my vision in time with my heartbeat. I didn’t know what it meant in game terms, but in real terms… It fucking hurt. My pulse sounded like the bassline of an EDM track that was pounding in my head. A shard of agony spiked through my brain.

“Shit,” I grunted. My ears twitched again — a strange, uncomfortable experience — and I heard the clanking and grunting of pursuing dwarves. These fuckers… I thought. All I wanted was to escape some mutants and now I have to deal with this crap.

My hand went to the back of my head, the origin of the pain spike. My fingers felt hot blood and matted hair. I brought them before my swimming gaze. Stained red.

I swayed to my feet, ducked under a swiping halberd, then fell to my hands and knees, vomiting.

Fast movements, I thought. Big no. But I couldn’t help it if I wanted to live. I lashed out with my booted foot, catching the inside of a dwarven knee. Crunch. A hoarse cry of pain and the clatter of a falling polearm followed by the louder crash of a toppling, armored soldier. I hoped his floundering body would give me a moment of space.

Falling back against the wall, I twitched my gaze this way and that. As soon as my eyes lit on it, I hooked my foot under my spear and flicked it up into my hand. I didn’t even question that I was already thinking of it as mine. Then, my eyes lifted to the biggest threat.

Oh wow… I thought with disbelief. She didn’t…

My heart thumped with admiration for the strange, captive woman. The naked dwarf was bleeding from his thigh, where a bloody mess couldn’t obscure obvious bite marks in his pale skin. To distract him from flattening me against the wall, the woman had taken a solid chunk out of his leg.

But not without consequences.

Fuck.

The dwarf hadn’t let go of her hair, and now he had yanked back her head, his huge fist rising to pummel her upturned face.

Not if I can help it. My arm was going back and then forward, my shoulders bunching and my entire body uncoiling like a loaded spring. As the naked lord’s fist paused for a second at the zenith, my weapon flew through the air. I’d never thrown a spear in my life, so it must have been beginner’s luck that the six foot length of iron and steel skewered through his side and punched several inches out his stomach.

The ashen-skinned dwarf belched out a jagged, guttural scream of surprise. He stumbled on the mattress and the woman wriggling free from his grip. She shoved him behind as she struggled my way. I winced at the blood mist that covered her lovely features, but she was already bounding toward me across the bed.

I tried to ignore the incredibly inopportune twitch of my eyes that took in her bouncy, athletic movements. Behind her, the dwarf was coming to his feet, turning awkwardly with a heavy iron-shafted spear dragging behind him.

As I stared at him, suddenly realizing I’d surrendered my only weapon, a notification popped up. I flinched in surprise, expecting it to block my vision, but it was just a line of text that unfurled above the dwarf’s head.

????

Level 9 Duergar Lord

Only then the remaining guards were closing in around me and he was blocked from my view. One of them was bleeding heavily from a broken, mashed-up nose, and all were snarling.

I backed up, hands held up in useless defense. Then, in a blink, all of them had similar text boxes.

Duergar

Level 7 Soldier

I wanted to know what the notifications meant — what the hell was a duergar? — but a brief flash of movement distracted me. One guard suddenly tripped forward as he was barreled over from behind, and then a sprinting green figure was tackling me backward.

I wondered why.

Crash.

And then I remembered the only other way out of the room.

The window.

Shit.

* * *

Have you ever tried screaming for more than a few seconds at one time?

My lungs were tired. My vocal chords ached. My jaw felt ready to unhinge. My head pulsed with pain.

And we were still falling.

Falling through the darkness, away from the shattered arch of light and the room that had marked my abrupt entrance into the world of Thorr’un. A stone wall raced past us on one side, the only thing I could see through the long, whipping hair that obscured my vision.

The woman clung tightly to me, her body on top of mine more by default than by any desire of mine to protect her from the fall. If I’d thought of it, I probably would have tried to get her underneath me. In more ways than one. As it was, though, I was almost grateful I couldn’t see where we were going. It meant that I had no sense of anticipation as—

Crunch.

Our tangled bodies smashed into something, my bones letting out a wonderful crack before we bounced off wildly. I saw a snarling stone gargoyle as we spun away into the gloom. I screamed again, my voice rough, and then we were flipping over and over and I had no idea how long we were falling or why in the world the ground didn’t rush up to break my neck.

I couldn’t hear if the woman was screaming, too. I couldn’t hear much outside the bubble of my own terror.

I knew I was about to die.

And then something caught us, our limbs tangled and our bodies wound together in all sorts of ways that would probably have been interesting if I hadn’t been terrified out of my mind. The something that caught us was hard, rough, sticky and elastic. A net of some sort, it felt like. It folded away beneath us and then bounced back into place.

The net had a grip on me though. On my clothes, on the skin of my back, tearing at it as my body tried to bounce free. I stopped yelling my head off from sheer surprise.

Not dead.

I lay on my back for a moment. My body was in agony. My mind was in ecstasy. I coughed, tasted blood.

Not dead.

Far above, in the gloom, my eyes could somehow make out part of the silhouette of the massive structure we’d just escaped. The woman groaned as she tried to move, dark fingers flexing against my chest and struggling to push her body up. I could feel her lithe thigh between my legs. I wanted to curl up and vomit again from the pain as my shoulder and back and wounded side all cringed and begged for mercy at once.

But pain was okay. Pain had a meaning.

Not dead, I thought again. And then my mind made the next leap of logic. Alive. My eyes twitched left and right, searching the gloom, and I slowly took in our surroundings.

We had gotten lucky, my strange companion and I. As my eyes adjusted to the pitch black — which should have been impossible, in and of itself — I realized that the open air above us was actually bounded by two ragged, stone ledges. We had fallen into a crevasse, our impact against the gargoyle deflecting us off a collision course with the implacable stone floor. The edges of the huge crack in the stone were some forty or fifty feet above and maybe half as far apart from each other, a slit in the underbelly of the earth that was both surprising and fortunate.

The woman was struggling still, pushing at my chest and muttering in a harsh language. She was just a shape in the gloom, and when I turned my eyes on her I realized that my vision was no longer in color. Everything was greyscale. I could see her full lips moving, watched her pretty face growing more and more desperate as she tried to pull away from me. I waited for the words to click, to clarify in my mind, but they didn’t.

I turned, trying to raise my head, to see what had trapped her. That was when I remembered that my back, arms and hair were stuck. I felt my skin beginning to tear from my shoulder blades, so I gave in to the pain, settling back down into the net.

What the hell? I wondered. What is this? That was when my survival sense prickled. And, of course, that was when I heard the scuttling.

It sounded like an old typewriter, dozens of tiny keys click-click-clicking down. Over and over. But sinister. Like a serial killer breathing on the other end of a quiet phone line. Or that one freaky as fuck clown who lives in the sewer like a goddam psycho.

My primal brain realized what was going on before the rest of me, and my heartrate shot through the roof. The rest of my brain was slower, but as I glanced left and right at the walls around us, and at the thick, sticky strands of rope beneath us, the only logical explanation clicked into place.

No…

We were in the middle of a giant web.

Fuck me…

And who but the web's owner was crawling along the wall, a dozen feet away.

Imagine a big spider. Like, really big. Fucking monstrously large. And then imagine that it’s even bigger — the size of a small car, in fact — with gigantic hairy legs and a dozen beady eyes that shine with the kind of glee that Satan reserves for his favorite tortured souls.

Okay, maybe there was no glee.

It was hard to tell in the dark.

But when the thing clambered down carefully, its thick legs plucking at the strands of the web, and bared its giant fangs — as long as my hand, at least — I swear it was grinning right at me.

I wanted to scream, to yell, but all that came bubbling out of my battered body was a low whimper. I wanted to struggle, but my body was smashed and pulped and bleeding and stuck. I managed a brief twitch. So much for Hero Mode.

My companion stilled as she followed my gaze. I’m not sure how well she could see in the dark, but I feel like the gigantic arachnid was tough to miss. I had to hand it to her, instead of my wimpy response she just hissed defiantly at the thing, baring her teeth.

Would it be inappropriate for me to say it was kind of hot? You know, in a barbaric, primitive sort of way. Yeah, probably the wrong time for that.

The spider leaped, springing from the wall with the kind of agility that reminded me of the old saying: When you’re feeling down, just be grateful that spiders can’t fly.

This one didn’t need to. It landed straddling us, its swollen abdomen dragging across my body. If I hadn’t already heaved up all the contents of my stomach, the awful, prickling sensation of giant spider hairs brushing across my face would certainly have pushed me over the edge.

It lunged suddenly, and there was a brief, strangled moan from my companion before her figure fell back limp, half across me.

Ohgod ohgod ohgod… I thought, but I didn’t know what god I was even praying to, or what I was praying for. I just wanted the pain and the terror to stop.

Only it didn’t.

The creature scuttled around, repositioning itself before staring down into my face with those huge, dark, beady eyes.

I couldn’t move. I was too scared to even close my eyes, to look away.

It lunged.

As twin daggers of pain sank in just above my collarbone, pumping venom into my body, the only thing I could think was that I couldn’t believe I’d given up death by mutant for death by spider. My worst nightmare. My head dropped back, chest burning and lungs struggling for air. My sight dwindled until it was just a dozen, sparkling eyes and a face that no one, not even a mother, could love.

I'd already died at least twice against my will. Now, I hoped it came for real.

Pretty please.