Despite the fear gripping tightly onto Kaldalis’s voicebox, his thoughts ran a mile a minute.

Ara wasn’t a player.

She was a monster.

Given her apparent intelligence, she had to be Infernal Horde. Then again, if she was, that meant that Bangen’s research was incorrect.

Ara was no mere force of nature. She had emotions, intelligence, and planning. She might not be a player, but she seemed as much a person as any of the NPCs he’d met. Was Bangen wrong? Or was she not Infernal Horde, but something new?

The existence of Lataxinans meant that there could be civilized races beyond those he saw during character creation. Perhaps she was not of the Infernal Horde, but another race native to the island, whose civilization had been crushed by the Infernal Horde.

“We don’t have to be enemies,” he croaked, his voice cracking as soon as he found it again. “We could be friends. There has to be some common ground that we share. Let’s… Let’s just talk a little more, okay?”

“The time for talking has passed,” Ara purred. The fangs poking out of her mouth slurred her words into a hissing sound. The yellow drop of poison hanging from her left fang dropped and fell on his cheek. He expected it to sting, or to go numb, but there was no immediate effect. That might mean that the poison was purely a cosmetic effect, but he knew better than to hope.

“You should have succumbed to my charms.” Her body moved against his, and the motion was inhuman in a way that made Kaldalis’s stomach roll. Whatever she had under that robe was not going to look anything like a human woman. As if to emphasize the point, the mysterious extra hands that had parted her hair planted themselves on the ground on either side of his head. He felt another pair grab his sides, even though he could still feel the ones digging into his shoulders. The force of her pushing down towards him redoubled against him, and his one pair of hands holding her back felt suddenly very lonely. Her many-eyed face resumed its descent, inching closer and closer to his. “You wouldn’t have even noticed my fangs until I took you. It would have been much more enjoyable. Maybe even for you as well.”

Another previously-unseen hand trailed up the inside of his thigh.

“Nope!” he yelled. “Nope nope nope!” Fear flooded his system with a volume of adrenaline that he’d never experienced before in his life.

The strength surged into his arms first, and he actually pushed her back an inch. He kicked his legs to the right, away from her body before she could move to straddle him. Running on instinct, Kaldalis let go of one shoulder and reached out, drawing his spear from his character page. He jammed the weapon in between the pair of them, shoving the haft between her fangs. The butt of the weapon hit the ground, and settled his grip just below the spearhead. The simple lever meant he could hold her back that much more easily, even if her slavering mouth was still only inches away.

Ara tried to wriggle her way around the spear he’d interposed between them, and fear forced Kaldalis to do his damnedest to keep it right where it was.

A pair of hands reached up to grasp the weapon, trying to pull it free, and Kaldalis used that grip as leverage of his own. He kicked his legs desperately, pushing up and away from her, scooting himself past her hands as he put distance between his face and her fangs. She managed to get his spear out of her face, but by then the only place she could reach was his metal-encased chest.

Ara hissed, the sound deeper and more animalistic than anything he’d ever heard out of a human throat.

He planted his spear and kicked his legs again, pushing away from her with his whole body. Many pale-white arms scrambled forward after him. As expected, there were eight total - though wouldn’t that mean that her legs gave her ten limbs and not eight? Some designer dropped the ball there, Monsoon. With all those arms, she moved with an eerie skitter that only intensified his fear-fueled adrenaline rush.

He heard a sound coming from his mouth.

Kaldalis decided immediately that it was a very manly and measured battle cry and not a wordless apelike hoot of terror. He was glad he was doing that on instinct, because it meant he could devote his actual attention on getting away from whatever stereotypical sexy spider-lady Monsoon had thrown at him.

Despite her strength when pinning him down, and despite her many arms, he was gaining ground. He told himself that her dainty human-like hands weren’t well-adapted to crawling on all eights like that, but the realist in himself knew that terror was giving him the speed he needed to escape her clutches.

For a brief moment, she appeared to be coiling to pounce, and he could see in his mind’s eye those fangs finding his flesh as she landed. Instead, he put up his foot and planted it on her shoulder. His weight met her momentum, giving his hands a single instant where they didn’t need to propel him backwards to stay just a few feet ahead of the oncoming death. He thrust his spear down at her face.

He expected to hit her and get a damage readout. Probably just before she turned and bit his foot off. Instead, her coiled muscles launched her backwards, moving away from him instead of towards. She dodged the attack? Had any monster ever really done that? Especially the first attack, before he’d even properly started combat?

He didn’t have time to think. He wasn’t consciously aware of standing up, but he was on his feet as soon as it was physically possible, finally giving him a moment to think about what to do.

“Dalgaard!” Kaldalis yelled, surprising himself by the shout actually sounding like a manly call-to-arms instead of a terrified shriek. “Dalgaard! Wake up! We’re under attack!”

The adrenaline in his system gave speed to his legs that he didn’t know he was capable of as he rushed to the sleeping healer.

When they didn’t move at his yell, he heard himself internally praying: Please don’t be dead please don’t be dead please don’t be dead.

He dropped to his knees on the grass and slid the last two feet to Dalgaard’s side. Kaldalis grabbed them by the shoulder and rolled them towards himself.

As soon as he saw their face, he realized that “don’t be dead” wasn’t specific enough.

Their eyes rolled around in their head, locking onto his own after a second. Their face was frozen in a look of terror, except for their mouth. Their lips were parted in a way that sent a chill up Kaldalis’s spine in recognition of how Ara had looked in the moment before he stopped her from kissing him. Blood had dried down the side of their face, leading towards two open puncture wounds on Dalgaard’s lower lip. The wounds were smaller than he remembered Ara’s fangs being, but he figured that meant she had only barely needed to form them before sinking them in and injecting her venom.

“Not sure if you can hear me,” Kaldalis said. His voice was shaking, but that was because his body had been pumped full of so much adrenaline he was pretty sure his heart was about to explode. Definitely not fear. “But I’m going to get us out of this. Do you understand? We’re going to be fine. I’ve got this.”

Dalgaard could make no response besides their panicked eyes looking around wildly. He supposed this meant that Ara’s venom was paralytic. Kaldalis wasn’t sure what debuff that was, since it didn’t match anything he’d seen or heard about. But considering the healer was still unmoving after however long it had been, it would be a death sentence in combat.

That animalistic hissing noise came from behind him, and Kaldalis whirled, leaping to his feet. He thrust his spear out to try and ward his attacker away, but she wasn’t attacking yet.

Ara had completed whatever monstrous transformation she’d begun when she’d sprouted fangs and eyes. Only the uppermost portion of her robe was intact, still clinging tightly to her neck, shoulders, and chest, her arms still tightly wrapped in the sleeves that now visibly strained against muscular biceps. The fashionable “cold shoulder” openings at her shoulders now accommodated one of those new pairs of arms.

It suddenly made sense to him why the bottom of her robe was a complex arrangement of sashes. They were all unraveled and dangling loose around her now.

Two more pairs of arms emerged there, one from around her waist, and another from just above her hips. The dangling sashes and strips of cloth parted here and there, revealing not a pair of shapely legs as he’d expected, but a serpent-like body that emerged from the bottom of the robe, coiled up beneath her. He guessed that it was at least thirty feet long, and while rippling with muscle, it wasn’t that much thicker than her humanlike body was at the hips.

The scales running down the snakelike body were greyish black, save for the very tip of the tail, which was about three feet of bright fire-hydrant red. It flicked back and forth as he watched in a nearly hypnotic rhythm.

Her “human” body had undergone transformations as well. Instead of dainty human hands at the end of each arm, her limbs ended in twisted five-fingered claws, each one scaly and bright red like the tip of her tail. Her arms’ proportions were all wrong as well, each freakishly long with a second elbow. The joints looked segmented like those of an insect, coated in a chitinous shell rather than either skin or scales. Her face had undergone the least transformation from her initial attack to now, with only the six extra eyes and dripping fangs, though her silky-smooth raven hair now looked thick and coarse as it hung around her face, neck, and shoulders.

“What are you?” Kaldalis felt the words ripped from his mouth by her monstrous appearance. It turned out that an unholy merging of snake and spider with a woman’s head was about where his mind drew the line for things he was psychologically able to tolerate.

Despite his reassurances to Dalgaard, he was pretty sure this wasn’t going to end well.

“I am the reason your kind stays indoors at night,” she rasped. Her body swayed back and forth for a moment as she sized him up before the serpent part of her body started to uncoil and slither towards him.

All eight arms raised in a ring around her with claws ready to tear.