It took a couple hours, but at last, she arrived at the deepest point she had dived to the day before.

Before arriving at the entrance of the tunnel, she had to go through where she had defeated the Queen and it seemed that the death of the ant's leader helped more than what Elena had expected, in terms of getting rid of the pests. The territory the ant's nest had occupied quickly became deserted, and soon the other insects became interested in claiming it as their own.

Now, a long tunnel, a bit wider than the others she had walked in, stretched before her up till her eye could see. Which wasn't all that much, considering there was very little light in the tunnel.

They walked for a couple hundred meters, the longest tunnel to last that long without a single side tunnel interrupting the straight passage, and finally arrived in a large cave, even larger than the Queen's nest.

The walls of the room were completely covered by thousands of webs, some not even reaching the size of Elena's hand, others so large that they could have contained the Queen and Ro together while leaving some space.

Hundreds of tiny spiders were tending to the cobwebs, consuming some unlucky insects that got stuck in the sticky strings, unable to free themselves and at the complete mercy of the arachnids. Other, bigger spiders were patrolling the room, walking around on the ground or on the ceiling, making sure nothing threatened the smallest of their own, while some spiders of seemingly different species were fighting in what seemed to be a turf war. In fact, it appeared the cave itself was divided into four small territories, defined by the kind of webs that covered the ground and crawled around.

The right side near the entrance where Elena and company came from, the ground was covered in thick, milky white webs, while the spiders themselves were at least three meters long, black in color and could shoot long strings of the sticky substance to the other spider species that threatened its territory. There were six such titans defending their own territory, though they didn't seem to be interested in attacking the other territories and just kept to their own. She named these the Titan Spiders.

The opposite side was covered in cobwebs glowing in a fluorescent green, and the spiders were much smaller, coming around a meter and a half and light green in color, almost transparent in the darkness of the cave. Still, they numbered in the tens and seemed much more aggressive than the previous specimens, always on the warpath. Also, their fangs and webs probably had some kind of venomous effect, as those who were touched by them seemed to experience intense pain and slowly died. These she decided was going to be called Poison Spiders.

On the right side, after the first spiders described, hundreds of small, twenty centimeters long green arachnids were trying to push back their neighbors and conquer their territory, without much luck. The rocky floor they walked on was covered in nondescript webs, similar to the ones normal spiders made. These she named the Critter Spiders.

The last corner was occupied by thin black spiders, around a meter long and numbering in the tens, who made blackish webs which seemed to merge with the darkness of the cave itself and released some kind of dark smoke. These, like the first ones, didn't seem to be too interested in starting a campaign and kept to themselves as long as no one disturbed them. They would be called the Dark Spiders.

At last, was the center of the cave, occupied by a small hill covered in grass, on top of which sat a ten meters long spider, completely white in color, which seemed to be completely detached from the fight going on all around it. It didn't move, seemingly asleep. This she would call the King.

Also, she didn't notice it at first, but it seemed like for each territory, there was a tunnel in the wall right behind it, from which every so often spiders would come from, to join their brothers in the task of defending their precinct or fight to gain terrain.

Elena thought for a while, trying to come up with a strategy to continue. It seemed that, as long as she didn't cross the entrance, the spiders wouldn't mind her presence, so entranced in their fight as they were.

Willingly to sacrifice one of her own for the sake of science, she ordered one of the Queens guards to invade the territory of the Poison Spiders. It complied, and as soon as it passed trough the boundary, it was attacked by the much larger spiders and torn to pieces.

Before it died though, Elena had the opportunity to note that it wasn't affected at all by the poison of the spiders, as expected of undead. Also, neither the other factions nor the King took notice of the event, and none tried to go trough the entrance to investigate where the ant came from.

After some thinking, she had some form of strategy down. She decided she would start by conquering the Poison Spiders territory, as their poison didn't pose much of a threat to her undead, and though they outnumbered them they were smaller than Ro, the Queen, the skeleton or even the Centipedes, so they were on par in terms of power.

Also, she wouldn't have to worry about attacks coming from the rear, as the Titan Spiders didn't seem like they would try to take advantage of her attack and come in to take the territory from under her feet.

The rest of her undead (namely, the Queens guard) would stay with her, cleaning up the glowing cobwebs as she couldn't touch them and to defend her from stray spiders.

She waited a couple minutes, looking for a moment of distraction in her foes relentless patrols. Finally, she spotted a breach in their border and ordered her undead to attack. As planned, all except for the Queen Guards assaulted the unsuspecting defenders, while the others started munching on the webs, quickly opening a safe path for her to traverse.

A couple of times, some of the Poison Spiders managed to come near her, but fortunately, they were low in numbers and the Guards were enough to keep them at bay while Elena delivered the final blow. This happened enough times for her One-Handed Combat skill to go up to level III, earning her a point in Strenght.

Some minutes in the fighting, they had managed to push back the Poison Spiders by little less than a half of their total territory (also freeing the space of webs) and killed around a third of the spiders. This didn't come without losses, three of the centipedes had died and Ro had sustained many injuries, forcing Elena to order its retreat.

As she didn't want to lose her advantage, she decided it was time to add some of the spiders to her army. At first, she thought of creating zombies out of the corpses, but then something convinced her to at least try and raise them as skeletons. And, surprisingly, it worked.

She only managed to raise one single skeleton and a zombie, but it seemed enough to continue the attack. The skeleton forced its own flesh out of its appendages, its entire exoskeleton lost color, gaining a bleached white color and it also grew a few centimeters, which was a nice surprise.

Finally, they managed to push back the Poison Spiders in their tunnel, completely freeing the area of their presence. At the end of the battle, Ro had recovered enough to join her forces once again, and it seemed it added that small bit they needed to gain the advantage, breaking the stalemate.

Looking around, a quarter of the enormous cave was now under her control, and almost completely free of the poisonous webs. She had decided to leave a strip of three meters large terrain covered in them, where her new territory met the other spiders, to act as a boundary of sorts. Fortunately, both her neighbors and the King seemed to be completely disinterested to her, so an invasion wasn't a concern, but she still took precautions.

Her next move would be to clear out the remaining Poison Spiders, and then move on to the next kind.

[ --- Status Screen --- ]

Name: Elena | Class: Necromancer – Apprentice | Level: 5

Condition: Battered | Mana: 0/31 (9 Mana/3h)

[ --- Stats --- ]

Str: 6 | Cos: 5 | Dex: 8

Int: 8 | Wis: 7 | Per: 7

[ --- Skills --- ]

Common: Basic Farming III | Reading II | Writing I | One-Handed Combat III

Uncommon: Raise Lesser Undead IV [Lesser Zombie, Lesser Skeleton]

Rare: Analyze-Self

[ --- End of Status Screen --- ]