Red ran close behind them. For creatures with such small legs, they were surprisingly fast, and the boy had to push himself to keep up. As they sprinted through the twists and turns, some of the insects also tried to move around the boy and go back to the way they had just come from.

The youth wasn't able to stop all of them, but the majority of insects were startled enough by his ridiculous display of intimidation to continue running down the path Red had prepared. After a long chase, he was able to see his destination farther ahead.

An irregular chamber, decorated with some large moonstone veins encrusted on its outer walls. It was mostly empty, except for a few stone pillars and three large pits in the ceiling. Even with all the noise he was making, the spiders still weren't coming out from their hiding spots. This was all bound to change in a few seconds.

The insects didn't seem to understand what awaited them ahead. Many of the beasts even started to speed up as they located some semblance of cover to hide from the mad human chasing them. Soon enough, the first monster made its way into the chamber. It managed to walk for a few meters farther before it suddenly clashed with an invisible obstacle.

It bounced back a bit, while whatever it had hit attached itself to its carapace. The creature struggled to get free, but much to its dismay it was completely stuck. Its siblings, who were not even a second behind, didn't have the time to look at what was happening. They all entered and spread through the chamber with no hesitation.

Red stopped running as he observed the results from a bit farther away. A lot of the creatures got tangled in the web threads near the entrance of the room, but some others made it farther in before suffering a similar fate. A few of them were still running around the chamber, lucky enough not to get caught in the trap.

The reaction from the pits in the ceiling was almost immediate. This amount of vibration coming along their webs alerted the spiders and none of their slow and deliberate gestures were to be seen when they got out of their holes. They turned their heads towards every corner of the room, seeing the large amount of prey that had fallen for their ambush, as their feelers waved in the air, registering the scents.

They almost seemed confused. However, that lasted for only a few seconds, and instinct took over quickly. Each of them pounced on the insect closest to them, sinking their fangs and putting an abrupt stop to their struggle. Even then, however, there were still many more of the small beasts in the chamber. The spiders held the dead prey between their mandibles before charging in the direction of the next target.

They repeated this process a few times, but it seemed the arachnids had far too much food to eat all at once. Their fangs had already sunk into a lot of the smaller monsters, and the beasts were struggling to add any more of them to the piles held together by their feelers. However, the number of creatures still struggling against their webs was quite substantial, and the spiders seemed bewildered about how they should deal with this unusual situation.

It was what Red had been waiting for. While the monsters wandered the chamber, the boy decided to make his way through sticking to the walls. This time, though, he was in quite a hurry. He did his best to avoid the threads, but as soon as he saw an obstacle that seemed hard to pass by, Red didn't hesitate to slice through it with his cleaver.

The spiders felt a few of their taut webs splitting apart and were quick to spot the human's figure. At that point, however, the youth didn't bother sneaking around anymore. With urgency, he started to cut apart any string that appeared in front of him, while making his way to the chamber's exit.

The monsters weren't very happy with his actions and started to stalk the boy. They didn't seem to be in a particular hurry, but Red did not dare spend a moment more than was necessary in this place.

Coming up to the tunnel exit, he found another similar blockade of threads. Without hesitation, the youth swung his cleaver against the webs and cut them apart like they were nothing. Dashing through the new opening, Red felt himself being pushed into the ground when a spider leg drove against his back.

The boy fell quite hard, but he was quick to get on his feet and continue running. A few meters in, he could hear nothing chasing behind him, and looking back, he noticed the monster's many eyes were impassively staring at his running figure. Holding three or more of the round insects in its fangs, the beast didn't seem particularly annoyed when it saw its human prey escaping its ambush. The spider turned back and continued to deal with the situation inside the chamber.

Red kept running down the tunnel for a few more minutes, while the spiders feasted on the meal he had so graciously delivered to their doorstep. After covering enough ground, he sat down against the stone wall to rest and took a long breath. However, his mood this time around was quite different.

He was pleased, although it didn't show in his emotionless expression.

Perhaps for the first time in this stretch of the journey, Red felt as if his imagination had played a pivotal goal in crossing over an obstacle. He didn't get complacent, but it was a good boost to his suffering confidence. Maybe in the end the boy didn't need to be as strong as Viran to make his way out of this place.

Recovering his breath, Red started to assess his situation. His left leg still was in the process of recovering, but he hadn't been involved in any long chases over the last few days, so at the very least his situation was not worse. Hunger had become less of a problem. The moss wasn't a nutritious meal in the first place, but it did enough to keep his stomach filled and the youth had even stored a few tufts of it in his pouch.

As for his thirst, Red was parched, but it wasn't to a debilitating degree. He could still hold on for a while more, and if he was able to cross the remaining spider territory then it wouldn't take long for him to arrive at the river. If he failed instead, there was no point in worrying about water.

In any case, more immediate matters required his attention. Red didn't know for how long he had been awake, but his mind and body were very worn down. Sleep would soon overtake him, and he was better off finding a safe bed before it did.

Getting up, the youth wandered off into the tunnel in search of a small and safe rock hole that he could call home for the next few hours.

...

'This is it then?'

Walking steadily through a gradually widening stone tunnel, the boy checked his surroundings. According to the map, there were no more small ambushes to worry about, and the youth was able to verify that over the past few hours.

Only the big one was left. This tunnel was a straight and long path leading up to the last obstacle between Red and the river - the main spider nest.

If the scale of the drawing was to be believed, then this chamber was much bigger than the centipede one. Merely thinking about the size of the room was something that gave the boy a preemptive headache. This lair connected to a lot of the other parts of the caves and all routes towards the tributary eventually passed through it. Viran had seemingly checked this fact thoroughly since a lot of other areas on the map were left empty and marked with a large red X.

As he was walking, Red also looked around for creatures similar to the ones he had used for bait. There were a lot of them and others Red was unfamiliar with, but the boy didn't know if his strategy would work. This tunnel became far bigger, and the beasts had a lot more burrows that were completely out of his reach to block. Not to mention, if the chamber up ahead was as big as it seemed, then who knew how many of those insects Red would need to agitate to pass by unnoticed.

Either way, their presence was still worth taking note of. The boy didn't plan to blindly rush into the spiders' nest.

After walking for another hour, he started to notice the green glow intensify around him. The passage began to widen, and the number of moonstone veins encrusted into the stone surfaces increased. Finally, the boy came around a bend in the tunnel where the passage looked to open up and lead into another chamber.

Red paused.

A feeling of imminent dread started to come over him. It wasn't the threat of being ambushed, though. It was something else. It was as if his instincts were telling him that he should not go forward, that whatever he was going to see would be harmful to him.

Hesitation entered his mind.

He trusted his instincts. They were what had kept him alive all these years and they had never lied to him. At the same time, what he wanted and what they told him to do wasn't always the same. If Red listened to them every time then he would have run away from the insectoid and left Viran to die alone. He wouldn't have risked his life against terrible monsters while looking for a way to escape. He would have taken the blob's deal instead of choosing the hardest way out.

His instincts kept him safe, but it wasn't safety that Red was seeking. Steeling himself, the boy took a deep breath and turned around the corner.

A cave chamber larger than he could ever imagine revealed itself before his eyes. Moonstones were encrusted in almost every wall and surface of the room. The veins joined together, forming long networks of interconnected green radiance that spread like roots all over the chamber. Their joint brilliance was stronger than any single seam in the underground and they bathed those who witnessed them with a magical and overwhelming light. Enormous rock pillars were spread throughout the cave border as if holding the ceiling up. Smaller stone spikes and growths cluttered around them, forming what looked like a forest.

For a second, Red thought that he had arrived on the surface, the magical scene overwhelming, his senses. However, as he looked up towards the ceiling his illusion was shattered.

Pits of all sizes and shapes littered the cave roof. More than a hundred of them. Too many to count.

But that wasn't all.

Spiders silently hung onto threads around these holes, looking at everything and nothing at the same time. They did not bother to hide. And in their midst, there was something bigger.

Another spider, double the size of the normal ones and with glowing green eyes, motionlessly hung from the ceiling and its large webs. However, there was not just one of them.

When the boy was done counting, he found four of those beings. There might have been even more hiding in the large pits, judging from the reflection of their gleaming bright eyes.

The concentration of the previously invisible threads was so high that their appearance became clear to Red. Stretching from the ceiling down to the ground below, the lines reached every corner of the room, forming an impenetrable prison.

The youth couldn't help but laugh at himself.

There was never any hope in the first place.