By Hatred's Light

It took me a moment to comprehend what had just happened, my mind too addled by pain, fear, and blood loss to make any swift deductions; thinking hurt, breathing hurt, existing hurt. I watched the black webs fall and slice into the stone around me for a long moment, my mind too full of cotton flavored pain to even comprehend the danger every falling strand posed.

Male Crystalline Cut-Web Spider Slain +250 Exp

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

You have leveled up! +10 stat points.

Apparently the spider had succumbed to whatever ingesting my flesh caused. Though, frankly, my hazy thoughts were far more focused on three details that stood out in my lethargic thoughts: that creature was labeled as male which implied the females both existed and were noticeably different, my knowledge of spiders telling me the answer was usually larger and more dangerous. The creature was by far and away the most dangerous thing I’ve slain if the Exp it awarded was the indicator of threat it appeared to be. And the one that immediately drowned out the others, I have points to spend.

Were I thinking clearly and not able to feel my body growing colder with every shallow beat of my heart, I may have put more careful consideration into where I put those stats, arranging them in such a way as to best ensure my continued survival. As is, I was not doing much thinking at all aside from mild curiosity over how much blood I had left in my body. My long term concerns were overshadowed by the extreme likelihood that I don’t have a long term to speak of.

I dumped every single point into Endurance immediately.

Adding eighty points to a single stat was the single most intensely pleasurable feeling I have ever felt in my life, as if every cell in my body and my very soul were being tenderly massaged by the vagina of a god of joy that had spiked my drink with so much ecstasy I couldn’t even feel my mangled body. It was not a soft sensation; in fact it felt so fucking good it almost hurt, like the pleasure center of my very soul was being lit up so bright it was scalding the phantasmal not-flesh around it. I’m sure that were I not paralysed by my whole body seizing up, I would be writhing about and howling my euphoria to the world my suffused senses couldn’t even perceive.

As it was, an indeterminate time later the pink light of unthinkable pleasure faded from my flesh, leaving me with only the feeling of having fallen out of a spiralling river of eternal stars, and several full body tremors. Oh, and having regrown at least the meat and bone of my lost paw. It seems the health I gained from boosting my Endurance resulted in the holes in my torso shrinking, my back scabbing over, and not being wholly without half a foot. Of course, there was still an uncomfortable whistling noise whenever I drew breath and I didn’t have skin on my new paw; but those are problems that probably aren’t going to kill me right now.

It’s disturbing how often I’m forced to prioritize things that are going to kill me immediately over things that will probably kill me later.

Shaking off both the thought and my paralysis, I slowly got back to my feet. The first thing to meet my gaze was the endless, intersecting lines freshly carved into the ground where the webs fell; the sheer amount made the structural integrity of the tunnel questionable at best.

I began taking slow, deliberate steps across a floor more air than stone at places; every careful movement aimed for sections that my Paranoia told me were best supported. The fact that I couldn’t actually see just how deep the threads had cut into the ground did not alleviate my concerns of being buried alive in thousands of tons of magically altered stone in the slightest.

Walking with a limp across unstable, crumbling ground as the aftershocks of mind warping pleasure faded into the remembrance of just how fucked I still very much am was not so much like having a bucket of ice water dumped over my hopes and dreams, and more like slowly realising the warm milk you’re bathing in has gone sour, the flowers have rotted long ago, and the whole building is long abandoned. A creeping realisation of wrongness and misery overtaking nonsensically whimsical joy.

My slow hobbling walk towards anywhere but here allowed the adrenaline of the past however many hours to fade, allowing crushing despair to overtake racing terror with every step. For the first time since I woke up I felt reasonably sure that nothing was going to immediately kill me, save perhaps the whole fucking tunnel coming crashing down on me or the floor giving out from the thousands of cuts nearly turning it to sand. The lack of an obvious pressing threat allowed my heart to slow, my mind to calm, and misery to overtake fear.

Misery, is a far less useful feeling than terror. Thoughts of never being able to escape this hell hole, of there not even being a surface at all, of it being even worse up there than it is here, of running out of oxygen and dying cold and alone in this fucking place raced through my mind. I’ve never much cared for leaving a legacy or being remembered, but something about the prospect of dying and never even having my body found, not having anything in the world that would even testify to my existence… I hated it.

I hated the roaring flames in the distance. I hated the fear wriggling through my mind. I hated that I’ll probably die down here. I hated that I nearly succumbed to despair. Hatred fueled me to move forward, to ignore the slow dripping of my own blood onto the floor of a tunnel that would likely not exist in hours let alone years, to drive out the feeling of the walls crushing against my mind. Hatred is a far more useful emotion than despair.

Hate and rage drive action! Where my growing sorrow hammered away at my will to take the next increasingly painful step, made every drip drop of blood hitting the stone into a pulsing drumbeat driving hope from my mind, hate turned them into war drums. Hate drove me forward out of sheer fucking spite. I took each step more aggressively than the last, recklessly grinding my paws into the stone in anger at the mere idea that it might betray me. Fuck you stone, how fucking dare you even consider collapsing on me you rocky shit?!

Of course, for all rage is useful in driving action and ignoring pain, it also makes one reckless. My stomping march through the tunnel heedless of the danger inevitably led to exactly what my rational mind told me it would; crumbling the stone beneath me. One poorly placed and far too hard step dislodged a stone and set off a cascade, the ground rapidly crumbling into grey sand that seemed to leech the heat from the paw stuck in it.

And of course, panic rapidly overtook anger. Getting emotions strong enough to register for me is difficult to begin with, anger luckily being something easy to fake hard enough to get my blood stirring until my body starts producing the right chemicals and I actually get suffused with red hot rage. Fear for one’s life however, is one of the basest instincts one can have, even more integral to any lifeform than anger.

Fortunately for me, fear also drives one to action. The fear that filled me as the ground beneath me crumbled apart was strong enough to send me leaping back and away with all three limbs free of the sand. Fear had me totally ignore the pain that shot through me at pressing the raw flesh of my back right paw into the ground hard enough to lift me from the earth. Fear had me desperately leaping over and over until I latched onto a wall that was still visibly beginning to almost melt under the weight of the innumerable lacerations carved into from the death throes of that vile spider. Fear had the racing of my heart sounding like the pounding drums of someone else’s war drums.

Fear, while perhaps even less pleasant than anger, was at least useful in driving me to once more run for my life.