The Kraken Gulf was a frightening expanse, a rolling mass of dark water and shadowy foam that spawned monstrous waves and violent storms with no advance warning. Icebergs hid in the trenches between the waves, ready to crush any ship foolish enough to attempt the seas, and sleepy monstrosities straight from the fevered pages of Lovecraft sluggishly plied its depths. No one sailed the Kraken; the very attempt was nothing less than a complicated form of suicide. No one fished the coasts; the entire "Krakenside," as the natives called it, was an unbroken line of sheer cliffs pounded into rocky fangs by the relentless waves. As a result, few people willingly lived along the inner coastlines of the Wolf's Tail Peninsula. The territories became a wasteland of the dying, the desperate, and the dispossessed.

Of course, even the dregs of society were not abandoned by the generous hands of the Great Temple. Many convents and monasteries peppered the Kraken's coastlines to offer stability, security, and purpose. Mendicant orders of priests and priestesses walked with the lost, enduring their poverty as equals and preaching of the benevolent Soai. By treating the sick, healing the injured, feeding the helpless, and offering opportunities to the hopeless the Temple was slowly turning the empty badlands of Kraken Gulf into contributing territories of the Kingdom of Diatom.

Aurora's Caul was one such success story. Fifty years in the past the area was nothing more than an empty patch of flatland surrounded by dark and brooding forests, the cliff walls to the north, and a small collection of thatched hovels mixed loosely with the southern treeline. The people were dull-eyed and spiritually broken, nothing more than husks of men too weak to even muster the strength to prey on each other. When the sisterhood arrived the slack peasantry was only days away from clawing up their own graves and throwing themselves in. The Sisterhood of Aurora's Caul turned everything around in just a few short months.

In exchange for fresh food, clean clothing, and real money the sisters employed the peasants to build their convent on the walls of the Krakenside itself. At the same time they shared their knowledge of farming and animal husbandry with the people; slowly, the empty flatland was developed into pastureland for sheep and plots for cold-tolerant produce. Ten years later the motley collection of shacks was replaced with a healthy hamlet. Population growth outpaced the death toll. Farmlands produced enough to start paying taxes to the crown, so the king consented to send a contingent of troops to establish a small fort. The hamlet became a town; its citizens unanimously agreed to name the region after the sisters who saved it. Twenty years later, a land that once stared death in the face began to look back on that time with a laugh.

The grim reaper will not be mocked.

"As far as the investigative team was able to get, everything started about six years ago." Janek drew Missus Dinkles to a halt, then mumbled a few soothing words to the big cat as she growled. "Some town boys were clearing out a large badger burrow on the western side of the fields and noticed some unusual deposits that turned out to be zinc. Both the town and the sisters got excited; they immediately set to digging." The two men were just outside of the limits of the town, but there was obviously no need to go in. Not a single chimney was lit, and the environs were silent as a tomb. They'd watched the town from the forest the night before, but not one candle was lit within Aurora's Caul when the sun went down.

"So, what happened?" Tesla frowned at the ghost town arrayed beside him; here and there some of the buildings were beginning to show signs of collapse. "The investigators went silent a month ago, but this town was abandoned well before that."

"They produced a lot of zinc, taxes went up, and the population grew; everything was supposed to be fine. Then, about five months ago, word came to the diocese from the sisters that a new area had been discovered in the mine. It was small, only about four or five rooms total, and clearly man-made: A ruin." Janek gently goaded Missus Dinkles back onto the road and pointed her to the north. In the distance sat a squat, brooding pile of stone that was still too distant to completely make out, but there could be no doubting it was the outer wall of the convent. "According to the letters sent by the abbess, there were a number of artifacts stored within the ruin that they were in the process of studying. Most of it turned out to be old coins or smashed pottery, but some of it sounded pretty interesting." The dwarf gave his ryujin companion a moment to catch up, then continued. "There were a couple of magically-enhanced swords, a few spell scrolls nobody had ever heard of before, some enchanted jewelry... and then, three months ago, the letters stopped coming. Then our regular contact didn't come back. We sent out a team on a fact-finding mission; we got one or two memos from them but, ultimately, they didn't come back, either."

"-And you think the Sisterhood of Aurora's Caul is responsible?"

"...I don't know. If it was a plain old monster incursion then the townspeople would've holed up either at the fort or the convent, but monsters would've levelled the city. A monstrosity would mow down the city, the fort, and the convent all in one go."

Tesla scratched at one of his horns, then snapped his clawed fingers. "Undead? They'd probably focus on the people and ignore the structures."

"Too hard to raise. Ye know what happens to anyone and anything that dies in our world; it takes so much demonic energy to raise the dead from scratch that all of Diatom would be facing a major crisis, not just some village backwater sitting on the Krakenside."

"Disease?"

"A quarantine wouldn't have stopped our first contact from receiving the information and carrying it back to Diatom. Trust me, rube, every possibility was considered before the two of us marched our happy asses up here. Something strange is going on."

Tesla rolled his eyes and sighed. "So you do think the sisters are involved, somehow, else why would we be checking the convent first?"

"I never said they weren't. I am saying that the convent's the only place ye could squeeze the entire population of Aurora's Caul into in a short period of time."

"Now, this is pretty damn weird."

"How so?" Janek's mechanical hand gripped tighter to the haft of his splitting axe. The dwarf had already freed his heavy blade and had it balanced across his sloped shoulders. "I don't see anything."

Tesla's expression hardened. "Not seeing anything is the problem. Forget for a second about the people; we're riding through pastureland and unharvested crops. Where's the cattle, the sheep, the swine? Hell, with all this produce rotting on the vine, where's the damn deer? Not even the rabbits are out!"

"Yer bird up?"

"Way up." Tesla pressed booted heels into his ailuros' flanks, and the big cat obediently picked up its pace. "I can't pick out details at that height, but the only things moving out here would be us." Book's got no life signs on the minimaps, either; where the hell is everything?

The dwarf's shaggy eyebrows pulled down toward his nose. "Carnivores."

"Without damaging the fences by causing a stampede? What self-respecting animal meekly becomes prey to a wild predator?"

"People, then." Janek leaned forward slightly, and Missus Dinkles sped forward to catch up with Tesla.

"What kind of people take the livestock and ignore the vegetation?"

"The kind that ye and I may not necessarily consider people in the first place."

Tesla had no response; it was the kind of broad definition that anything and anyone would fall under, making it impossible to refute. The ryujin could only shrug his shoulders irritably and let it go. All the answers would be found soon enough.

The road shifted in quality the further north they rode; at the town it was a respectable, albeit punishing, rain-washed cobblestone street. In the pasturelands it devolved, first into a maintained country road of crushed white rock (much like the byways close to the capital), to little more than a pair of ruts formed by countless wagon wheels. The closer to the Krakenside they got, however, the roads improved once again. "Probably the convent's farms," Janek commented, "like the town, the sisters have the coin to spare for good roads."

Krakenside itself was a sight to see. The cliffs were chalk-white and twice the height of the real world's Dover Cliffs. High plinths of the same raw rock rose up from the churning, thundering seas below and presented a mixed image of both a pile of old bones and a petrified forest at the same time. The sun rose high into a painfully blue sky, but the northern horizon was darkened by the rapid growth of a swirling stormfront that inched its way toward the coastline.

A series of bridges leapt from one eroded pillar to the next in a cat's cradle of footpaths and carriageways. At first glance there didn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to the bridges' placement, but it was nonetheless possible to trace a tentative line from the cliff's edge to the thickest profusion of time-worn stone. There, in a painstakingly carved alcove in the lee of the largest pillar, squatted the walled fortress of the Sisterhood of Aurora's Caul.

"What were they expecting, a war!?" Both men were forced to shout over the noise of the crashing gulf below as they walked the linked footbridges toward the mighty convent; the ailuros gave the Krakenside one healthy look before the whole convoy of big cats laid themselves down in protest.

"Naturally! Ye didn't think it'd be safer out here in the boonies, did ye!?" The bridges between the great plinths were delicate in appearance, with a propensity for spell-hardened bronze ivy and tin flowers, but they did not so much as shudder beneath the pressure of the moaning and whistling winds. "There's no way a convent full of nuns is going to walk around with their bottoms figuratively hanging out of their habits shouting, "Any bandit that wants to plunge it in can have a free turn," like a pack of cheap whores!"

"...Still not very convent-like!" The intervening piles the bridges were linked to were not empty; through the years the sisterhood had capped them with decorative gardens, guest houses, and parlors for the viewing of art or public debate. Other pillars held cellariums and granaries, mills or scriptoriums, and the occasional workshop. Central abutments in the various groupings were inevitably built up exclusively for security purposes, but every structure had an underlying solidity that would be expected from a military installation rather than a home for holy contemplation.

"Like some rube Spark straight out of... wherever the hell ye come from would know what a proper holy site would look like anyway! In Diatom, an undefended land is a dead land!" The primary structure of the convent, the abbey, was likewise no soaring monument to the Soai. Instead, it was a forbidding pile of layered stone and blackened metals eternally shadowed by the half-cavern it was set into. Tesla was sure that, as martially impressive as it was, all he was looking at was a facade; the true abbey was likely composed of a warren of tunnels and rooms worming throughout the plinth its "mask" was carved from.

The main gate was imposing... or, rather, it should have been. It had to be said that just about any defensive portal loses all its intimidation value when its thrown wide open and the hinges are allowed to rust in place. Tesla dug a claw into the corroded metal, then arched an eyebrow when the tip punched through the material. "Iron rusts fast in a salt water environment." The roar of the waves died down a great deal once Tesla and Janek passed through the tarnished portal and into the broad inner courtyard on the other side. There wasn't much to see save for broken statuary and a thick patina of dust.

"Not that much iron in just a couple of months. Something was used to accelerate the process." Janek pointed to the abbey facade with his axe, indicating the double-door entranceway that, once again stood wide open. "That's what concerns me."

"A whole lot of things are starting to make sense." Tesla nodded in agreement; the grand doors were slumped open and damaged by dozens of claw marks, but all the marks seemed to lie upon the inside panels. The passage inside was choked with debris until it was half its original size, but by far the vast majority of that debris was composed of uncountable numbers of thick white threads that reduced the hallway beyond to a simple cylindrical tunnel. "Some of those cables are as thick as my wrist, Janek; that's one big spider."

The dwarf shook his head with a rueful snort. "At least now we know what happened to all the livestock."

"-And the villagers."

"Damn it; I was trying not to think about that."

It was hard to tell what the interior of the abbey once might have looked like. Just about everything was choked with webbing in order to create those tight tunnels, but some particularly large interior spaces were left semi-open for no apparent reason except to remind the visitors they were in what was once a holy place. Strange torches burned without heat at random intervals throughout the convent's interior; their bluish-purple fire lit the tunnels with a shadowy half light that increased the surreal nature of the environment. The soft webbing consumed sound; not even footsteps could be heard.

"Now, that's really offensive." Janek whispered as he glanced between the rails of the banister in front of him. The two were in the main hall of the church and overlooked the sanctuary from an upper gallery. The scene below was one to fill a man with a welter of emotions.

"What, pray tell," Tesla whispered sarcastically, "the inverted icons, the rows of eggsacks planted in the pews like they're attending service, or the eight-legged sluts trying to wear the nuns' habits?"

"All of the above," the outraged dwarf snarled, "all of the above." It was easy to see why Janek was angry. He was a Temple Guard, and the sanctuary he was sworn to protect had been defaced in a visceral fashion.

"They've been corrupted." Book was identifying them all as along with their comparatively high levels, but Janek didn't need to know that much. "It's the only possible answer. Something from the mine, something they were busy studying, took hold of their bodies and minds... remaking them into that."

That turned out to be any variation of the fusion of spider and woman. Some walked on two legs and had six arms, with a spider's abdomen projecting from the base of their spines like a ridiculously fat tail. Others had a lower body like a spider with four arms and four legs in a centauroid fashion. Still more took the image further, having only two arms and six legs.

The variations went deeper than that. There were those modeled after "true" spiders, to be sure, but there were also cave spiders, camel spiders, "true" scorpions, book scorpions, whip scorpions, and even ticks. Their bodies were naturally armored, and the rags they wore didn't fit at all. Despite this, their appearance was...

"Why do they have to look like that?" Tesla's voice was slightly pained, as he pretty well already knew the answer. Once again, the spectre of Mystletayne Electronics' game development division was rearing its pink, one-track-minded, head; every last debased sister on the floor below was a study in exotic "hent-eye" candy, as if their primary purpose was titillation rather than monsters to be slain. Even their ruined habits were erotic; dirty enough to lead a man's thoughts down dirty paths, and torn strategically to reveal and conceal their licentious bodies with every movement. Tesla had no doubt how at least the men of Aurora's Caul were captured.

"Because it makes it easier to hunt, I'd reckon. It's probably supposed to stop me from killing them at the last moment, too." The tone of Janek's voice told his companion there was no way in hell that was happening. "Who knows? Maybe they have no men, so they have to put the make on us before they eat us. Those egg sacks have to come from somewhere." The dwarf shrugged as though he didn't particularly care, but Tesla could hear him grinding his teeth somewhere behind his profuse beard. "So, how do ye want to go about it?"

"They're higher level than we are, but arachnids are ambush predators who typically work alone. Webbing, poisons, acids, enhanced strength, dexterity, and wall-crawling abilities. They probably fight like assassins. We need to throw them off, somehow, to weaken them overall and keep them from conveniently surrounding us... ah."

"What?"

Tesla reached into a pocket and pulled free the little tin bird. "How are dwarves at handling heat?"

"...That's probably the dumbest question you've ever asked me."

Tesla found that the blood of dragons rendered even the heat and smoke of a web-fueled conflagration to be tolerable in the pitched fury of battle, but he certainly wouldn't want it in his daily life. The fires, at least, didn't hamper any of his skills directly, though the fallen nuns' panicked state left his Nocturne Dust effectively useless. Janek cheerfully whistled as he whipped his beloved axe around his body, and occasionally commented on how the inferno reminded him of the forges of his homeland. The golems, of course, didn't complain but Tesla tried not to push their metal bodies too hard for fear of heat damage. As usual, Book was... Book; at least its read of a mob's HP was useful, though its lack of any map data in a dungeon wasn't.

The psycho spider sex fiends, on the other hand, were at a total loss. The former sisters would alternate between berserker rages as their ragged garments caught fire or soporific trances when they breathed in too much smoke. They would claw at their own bodies in the heat, attack one another, sometimes lash out at Tesla and Janek, or just stand around in an addled daze.

Larger, stronger spiders actually fell faster than the smaller ones; their big bodies had much more surface area to burn, and there was nowhere they could huddle to avoid the flame. Many sisters died with steam shooting from their cracked limbs as the hydraulic fluids that was the source of their strength began to boil within their armored carapace. Throughout the ordeal they made no noise; their screams were silent, their footfalls were soundless even against the stone flooring, and there were no shouts of encouragement or orders given.

Setting the webbing ablaze also served to open up the consecutive floors of the chapterhouse's interior. This not only allowed Tesla and Janek to slowly delve deeper into the plinth but also widened the choked tunnels back into properly broad hallways that allowed both men to fight in their characteristically "wide" styles. Tesla alternated between uses of his Dragon Claw skill and the two brass golems' cutting shears while reserving Tail Swipe for the final blow. Janek was equally brutish with the employment of his axe, though the only skill he used was a self-buff to increase the weight of his punishing blows.

"How deep have we come, do you think?" There was no way to tell by the appearance of the floors; what the former nuns hadn't already defiled was in the process of being burnt beyond recognition.

"About to the end of the cakewalk, I'd guess." Janek slammed a small tick-woman wrapped in the filthy folds of a postulant's robe into a nearby wall with his prosthetic hand, then crushed her skull with the hammer-like back of his axe head. She dissolved in a gust of noxious smoke before she even had a chance to bleed. "Records say that below this floor is where all the important stuff is kept, so there'll probably be protective spells everywhere."

Tesla drove his talons into the belly of a staggering tarantula-taur, then used Dragon Claw to rip upwards. He left the monster to collapse in a splay of twitching legs as the flames leapt hungrily onto her dry fur. "So, halfway?"

"Maybe we're a third of the way down, but it's only going to get harder from here. These unholy freaks are nearly dead from the fire, but they're still tougher than the kobolds from before. Imagine how hard it's going to be when they aren't burned to a crisp."

"This at least used to be a holy sanctuary, right? If there's a Reagan Stone here we could use it to level up; I'm sure we've gained enough experience to earn it."

"Depends on how many spiders we've killed. They're high-level, but levelling up is always a numbers game." Janek kicked open a door to reveal another staircase winding deeper into the convent, then began to trudge down it.

"What about the fire?"

"What about it?"

Tesla followed the surly dwarf down the stairs. "We set the fire; anything it kills is technically our doing, right?" The back of his mind entertained fantasies of respawning webs and mobs to feed a neverending flame, and an endlessly-rotating XP dial.

"How do you figure that? Besides, that's only for the weakest up here in the top levels and they'll be cleared out soon enough. Who knows how worthwhile an indirect kill is in the eyes of the Soai? Last, but certainly not least, I have no idea if there's a Stone here or not."

"Oh."

Janek chuckled with no sympathy whatsoever. "Get ready to slog, rube; an adventurer's life isn't about romance, glory, or the quick and easy path to success."