“You know who I am?” Vaile asked, his eyes constantly shifting between the hunchbacked man and the fuck-all massive spider behind him.

“Oh, indeed!” replied the leader of the cult, a hint of either over-zealous devotion or simply utter madness tainting every word that flowed from his lips. “Mother has taught us of you, the one who brought her up from the depths of pure animal ignorance and into the light of understanding.”

“’Mother’… huh?” Vaile asked. “Why, then, do I not remember having Tamed such a massive spider? This ‘Mother’ of yours has the power of a Raid Boss, and I remember every Raid Boss I’ve ever managed to Tame. Why, then, do I not remember ever Taming a Raid Boss by the name of ‘Mother’ who was a gigantic spider?”

At this, the cultist’s face twitched slightly, which unnerved the hell out of Vaile.

“Ah, but Mother was not always as She is now. Back in the past, many tens of centuries in the distant past, Mother was but a humble spider. However, through time, effort, and the consumption of many, She grew to become the God we worship today.”

Vaile was now utterly convinced that he was once again in mortal danger. It would have taken millions of deaths, not counting the lives claimed by proxy, for the colossal spider to have reached the size and level it was currently at. If what the cultist said was true, then the deviousness, malice, cruelty, and utter lack of remorse or scruples that the giant spider to end all giant spiders had was equal, if not superior, to that of the crazy rat ladies.

Vaile sighed internally as he came to the conclusion that he was once again wrapped up in what was likely to be another hostile takeover of a nation, this time not by the directions of a few members of the Races that were also Tamed Beings, but instead by a malevolent spider that styled itself as a god. Vaile put on the mask again and took a cautious look up at the face of the massive arachnid. He activated an old togglable ability that he had rarely, if ever, used back when he was galivanting around in the game, and hoped that this time he wouldn’t be forced to unravel a bunch of cryptographically garbled text.

“What is your name?” he asked the spider. “What did I name you? Please, refresh my memory so I don’t have to keep calling you ‘you’ all the time.”

Vaile could almost see the lidless eyes of the spider move upwards a bit. Despite what he had expected, the spider had a much wider range of expression than he had accounted for.

“You never gave me one.” The sound of a sinister, hissing and vaguely feminine voice flowed out from the maw of the stadium-sized spider. “I have no name, and that is why I am known as what I am.”

Vaile tilted his head in confusion. That claim should have been impossible to make, as he was damn certain that he had named every single being that he had Tamed, and if they already had a name prior to their capture, he would simply have named them the same name that they had borne while as an enemy. This was something that he had done since day one, it was something that was an almost obsessive part of him. It wasn’t OCD, not by a long shot, but it was a habit that he had, by his knowledge, never broken even once.

For the first time in what seemed to be an age, Vaile opened up the menu that he still had access to and began to scroll through the list of Tamed Beings that he had. He saw nothing but name after name after name, and he was about two thirds of the way through the list when he stumbled upon something that caused an increase of stress to affect him.

Sure enough, the spider was right. There was a single entry that had no name and was simply labeled ‘Giant Spider’, and in that same entry was a level connected to it that caused Vaile’s hair to stand up on end. For reference, he swiped on over to the entries for the five crazy rat ladies and compared the levels. The spider wasn’t nearly as high leveled as they were but given that she had not originally had the power of a Raid Boss and likewise had to gather all of her power on her own or via proxy, it was safe to say that the nameless giant spider was much more of a ‘go-getter’ than the rat women had been.

To grow that powerful so quickly… It was beyond scary.

Vaile shook his head as he dismissed the menu, opening his eyes and looking around. It was as his gaze swept over the area around him that his mask’s functions kicked in and his sight was zoomed in to distant things without his consent. What he saw along the walls and the various webs gave him yet another reason to try and GTFO ASAP. Lining the walls and held in place by webbing were thousands of people, young and old, male and female alike, all inflated with bulging spherical objects within them.

Some were crying, begging for death, while others were already dead, their bodies already in the final stages of having been eaten alive from the inside. Some that some would consider to be dubiously lucky, were not dead yet and were instead utterly delirious and smiling vacantly as the objects within their bodies began to move. What made things even more horrifying is that some people looked as though they had already been the host of the children of the myriad arachnids here several times over.

And what chilled Vaile even further was that the ones who were still alive even after that were being forcibly kept alive. The levels of these tortured victims were much, much higher than that of the ones who were left to be eaten alive, and this caused Vaile no small amount of distress because he figured that this spider would be all too pleased to use him in a similar, if not exactly identical, way.

Vaile felt cold sweat run down his back as he forcibly shifted his gaze back towards the cultist and his wannabe god.

“I certainly hope that their fate is not planned for me.” He quipped, trying to both lighten the stress he had building and to make sure that he wasn’t going to meet such a fate. Unfortunately for him, the cultist merely smiled widely and the spider behind him let out a light but altogether cruel laugh.

“We can talk about this, can’t we?” Vaile asked with a hint of fear. The two sentient beings before him seemed to talk via telepathy before something drew their attention away from Vaile and in another direction.

“Gah, not again!” High Confessor Gareth snapped. As he spoke, dozens of spiders crawled off from around the biggest one and seemed to be moving with all haste towards a distant point.

Vaile breathed a sigh of relief that he was not a target just yet. That would give him room to reset the spell he had used back when he was in the Solusand Dominion and would allow him to leave whenever he needed to, even if he had no way of knowing where he would end up.

“Mother certainly desires that you bear Her children,” Gareth said before his brows furrowed and his eyes looked up and away from the cave chamber that he was in. “but She in Her infinite wisdom will allow you to stay as you are if you can find a way for her to continue gaining power.”

Deciding to bite the bullet, Vaile asked a final question.

“Why does she even need more power at this point?”

The High Confessor shook his head and began to walk away. Vaile slowly turned to follow him, hoping to get an answer, but as they walked away there was naught but silence instead. Vaile was starting to get the feeling that trying to avoid what the giant evil spider wanted to do to him would be a Herculean, if not Sisyphean task in and of itself, to say nothing of trying to get the ‘how’ of it out of the High Confessor or the spider herself.