I was glad I left the wagon back at the edge of the village. I should probably learn their names... let's just call the first one the 'darkling village' since that's what they made their bread and ale from, and this village the 'stream village'. I don't know what, if anything, they produced.

I stared at the leafy circles. Pit traps. They had to be! They were even wider than I was if I spread out my legs. I shoved a few images of something erupting from the ground to my children, and hefted my dirty, sticky, wooden swords.

Malas and Sting went forward first.

All of a sudden, the ground erupted, like I thought. The grassy circle lifted upwards like a lid (since it was one) and out jumped a huge black drider. It was surprising, but not anywhere near as much as it would have been! The spider went through Malas like he wasn't there, and Sting dodged awkwardly to the side.

Glints appeared at the cave mouth, and I knew it was more drider. Only a few of them, which was surprising, but more came from other directions- we were surrounded. This gave me more than enough of a sight of them- they weren't drider. They were spiders. Spiders that somehow, for some reason, attached the corpses of slain jumi on top of themselves with webbing. The spiders were alive, but the ripped up jumi torsos attached on top of them weren't. That's where the smell was coming from.

"Go for the thorax and abdomen! Ignore the people parts!" I screamed as the disgusting spiders lunged at us. Showing images in our minds would get in the way of what we were actively looking at, and I didn't want anyone risked more than we already had to.

...

It mostly worked. The battle was hard-fought, and the spiders that came out of the ground and surrounding area were killed. There were only six of them, but they were tougher than I thought- the jumi parts weren't decoration. They had sharp things- mostly broken tools and broken bones sticking out of their limbs, which flailed around as the spider moved. Kind of like they had whip-turrets!

We didn't get out of it without losses, though. Cletus lost an arm and two legs, Sun got some really bad fang wounds in her human torso right where there wasn't any stonescale. Shore's abdomen was cracked open and though Laina had patched it up with leaves and webbing, it... I didn't want to think about it more. Sting's tail wouldn't be poisoning anything for awhile if at all since it was partially eaten halfway up its length towards the stinger, and Lyre lost a hand.

We didn't even go into the cave mouth yet.