Over the next few days, Samual subjected Rita to a punishing exercise regimen. When he didn’t have her running laps, he had her practicing with her spear. Stabs, guards, parries, stances, he kept her at it until her hands were chafed raw and she had to run them under the cold water for relief.

And when he wasn’t doing either of those, he lectured her. Martial theory, fighting styles, weapon properties and techniques, exercise methods and a whole host of other things that went completely over her head.

At least in the area of nutrition she was fairly clued up.

This world had never had the convenience of food with nutrition labels. Some people knew that eating a balanced diet was important and that fruits and veggies were a must, but not the why. Rita hadn’t been a nutritionist or anything in her old life, but there wasn’t much Samual could teach her on this topic that she didn’t already know more of than him just from general knowledge.

While he’d listened carefully to her best explanation of vitamins and calories — she wasn’t an expert, so some of the details might have been a little fudgy — he’d merely nodded at the end of it and went on to another topic.

Rita wasn’t exactly sure how many actual days — twenty-four hour periods, that is — this went on. She’d lost track of time ages ago thanks to the static sun always soaring overhead, and the people here, Samual included, seemed to have a very loose association with the concept of a day.

Plus, she had a suspicion Samual was allowing her to cut the days short and go to sleep early to compensate for her lack of physical conditioning.

Oftentimes she laid awake, however, too sore to move and too tired to sleep. During such times, she did the only thing she still could: she explored her mindspace, the white, mostly featureless area where she’d left Alice after coming out of the Nightmare Tree. Every time she went in, she made sure to check on her first, and every time Alice was still there, exactly where she’d left her.

Except… not. Alice appeared to be ‘shrinking’.

Rita couldn’t exactly explain how she was shrinking, but she definitely was. She wasn’t getting shorter, Rita had compared them and they were still the same length. She wasn’t getting thinner either, Rita had compared their forearms widths and they still looked identical in every possible way.

Except for the missing bits from their struggle with the Tree, of course. Parts of her body still appeared to have been erased by the Tree’s attacks, with pieces of limbs seemingly detached but still floating unneringly in the exact position where they would have been had the connecting pieces not been missing.

Her injuries also weren’t getting any worse. None of the missing pieces appeared to have grown any larger, yet they also did not appear to have shrunk any either. They were just still there, same as before.

And yet, looking at her, it was undeniable that she just seemed smaller somehow. For the life of her Rita just couldn’t figure out how.

Could the whole be somehow smaller than the sum of the parts in this place? Rita didn’t know. Perception was a bit off, here, as she discovered in the times that she left Alice’s side and wandered around for a bit.

It wasn’t quite an infinite expanse of nothingness as she’d first thought. There were definite boundaries of a sort to this place. When she went just a few short metres away from where Alice lay, featureless, white barriers seemed to suddenly appear in front of her. Not in the sense that they materialized into being or slammed down from above or anything that dramatic. Rather, it was rather like seeing a doorway from a distance and going closer only to find that it wasn’t a doorway at all, but just a painting of a doorway. Nothing had changed, except perception.

It was like one of those line sketches that changed from being a picture of a young woman sitting on a bench to an old woman with a shawl just by turning the picture around. One moment her eyes were telling her it was featureless expanse stretching off into the distance, the next the outlines of the wall were clear, all without anything ever actually changing.

The walls didn’t just enclose them, however. It had maze-like passages leading off the central area. When Rita followed them for a distance, however, they simply ended back at the central area where Alice lay after a few twists that seemed to be in complete violation of basic geometry.

She also found what looked like white, featureless pillars scattered about the area, equally invisible until she came close enough to pierce their camouflage, that stretched upwards as far as she could make them out before they blended into the background whiteness again.

Much like the changing picture, however, once she saw the barriers and the pillars, she couldn’t unsee them. Even stepping back into the center of the place, next to Alice, she could still clearly make out the walls and pillars around, at least where she’d explored and knew where to look. As if they’d always been there, just waiting for Rita to wander close enough to realize it.

This did raise an uncomfortable question, however. Had she discovered existing walls and pillars by nearly running into them and could now see them because she now just knew what to look for, or had she somehow brought them into existence by going out there, thereby making them visible?

Somehow, something about the whole place made her think it was the latter.

Eventually, she’d told Samual about the ‘big, white, open space in her head’ to see if he knew anything about it, reasoning that perhaps it was a common occurence in this world? It wasn’t. He’d given her a long, calculating look, briefly asked about any potential dangers and whether she could do any training in there — no, not really — then shrugged and changed the topic, apparently losing interest in it.

At her urging, he did at least help her do some tests on the place while she rested between exercises. By having Samual time how long she was unconscious for, Rita determined that there indeed was some kind of time dilation effect going on there. Time passed approximately ten times as fast inside her mindspace than it did outside. For every ten seconds that passed for her while she was inside, only one second passed in the outside world.

Whether that was actual time dilation or just a difference in perspective — moving at the speed of thought, so to speak — she had no idea, but she shuddered to think what that meant for Alice. Had she been lying there for subjective months?

What if it was too late to save her? What if there was nothing even a demon could do for her? What if an actual cure required a hundred more steps and she was wasting time, waiting for Gora to come through just so that she could have a chance of figuring out what was wrong with Alice?

She briefly considered sneaking out while Samual was sleeping but quickly discarded that idea for the naive foolishness that it was. The city was dangerous. Demons were dangerous. Leaving behind the one person dangerous enough to protect her from the other two just seemed like complete lunacy.

Besides, Samual rarely ever slept.

Samual was up early, as usual.

Sleep was a waste of time. When you only had a few years to live, you simply couldn’t afford to spend up to a third of that time on your back with your eyes closed. So Samual had conditioned himself to get by with only three hours of sleep a day. Two, in a pinch.

This left him plenty of time to work on his own training and do all of the other things he had to get done while Rita slept.

Right now, he was inspecting the damage to his armour. It had been a couple of days since they’d arrived back in Grailmane, but he still hadn’t gotten around to visit the smith to fix his armour.

Partly, that was because he was two districts over and both leaving Rita behind on her own or taking her out into the city were unnecessary risks. But mostly, it was because he doubted he had enough money for the repairs.

He’d always run on razor thin margins. Savings were unnecessary fat on his plans, and had always been ruthlessly cut. Each of his expenses were always carefully planned out and budgeted, so he’d always tried to earn just enough for what he needed, without wasting time earning money he might never live to spend.

He’d scoffed at the idea of ‘unexpected expenses’, considering them a failure in planning. Now he had spider-girl that ate like a horse and broken armour from tangling with a Mitlan Inquisitor. Sometimes it just wasn’t possible to plan out every contingency.

Samual dropped the mostly-bisected pauldron on the pile of armour pieces with a disgusted huff. At least three of the pieces were absolutely going to need to be replaced, among them the breastplate and pauldron, with two more pieces being damaged, but marginal. A decent blacksmith would be able to repair them, but whether the enchantment that empowered his divine connection could be salvaged in the process was anybody’s guess.

Honestly, after arriving with Rita, he’d originally dismissed the armour as unnecessary to his future plans and put it out of his mind. Fixing it was going to be expensive, and he couldn’t see what he was going to need it for. He had planned to sit tight and make sure Rita stayed alive for three months so that he would be in the clear.

At least, so he’d believed.

He’d basically banned her from leaving the Pious District, figuring that if she just had to live for three months, they could just bunker down. Even if some Magelord was after her, she was safe here; anybody trespassing on Krutus’s holy ground without permission would have to deal with an angry god and even the most powerful entities in the city would think twice before picking that fight.

The only trip they’d taken outside was a short hop to the closest tailor to pick up some new clothes for Rita, after she’d insisted on getting some of her own clothing instead of loaning more of his.

It hadn’t quite made sense to him why it was such a big deal to her — clothes were clothes, right? — but he’d figured that since they hadn’t needed to go far, the risk was minimal, and he was proved right, in that regard at least. The short shopping trip was uneventful, and while he’d spotted a few suspicious individuals, none were brave enough to try and get close to them. They had quickly returned with a bag of clothes for Rita and another bag of groceries that they’d picked up on the way, also at Rita’s insistence.

The only problem was, after having had some time to think about it now, he wasn’t sure anymore whether continuing in this way, practically locking Rita away for her own safety, was going to be enough to break his fate.

The Tree had said to ‘Protect the Spider.’ It had not said ‘Imprison the Spider’ or ‘Train the Spider’ or ‘Make sure the Spider survives’ or anything like that. And protecting someone generally did not mean controlling their every move. Rather, it meant making sure they were safe as they went about their daily lives.

What if it was the act of protecting Rita against some or other threat that lead to breaking his fate? What if protecting her as she walked her own path was what put him in the right place at the right time to survive? What if locking her up doomed him as certainly as if he did nothing?

He only had one shot at this. He couldn’t risk it. That meant he was going to have to let her out into the wider world. And protecting her there meant he was going to need every edge he could get.

Like his armour.

Training her had definitely been a good decision. Originally, it had been part of contingency plan in case she got caught out somewhere without him so that she wouldn’t be completely helpless. It had also had the added bonus of keeping her too busy and too tired to want to wander around.But if he intended to let her roam around as she wished in Grailmane, however, being able to defend herself was crucially important.

Unfortunately, she absolutely sucked at it.

She lacked strength, sure, but that was nothing a little physical exercise wouldn’t solve. No, the real problems were that her hand-eye coordination was just absolutely gods-awful and she completely lacked any kind of killer instinct, constantly pulling her blows at the last moment the few times she did manage to aim accurately.

She also seemed to have no fighting sense. She either completely missed or completely overreacted to every move he made! Against an inanimate dummy she could just about hold her own. But against anyone who actually fought back? Who feinted and adapted and learned and actually tried to win? Not a chance.

During practice, she kept smacking herself in the knees with the practice spear, and even managed to disarm herself once or twice by knocking her own spear out of her hands with those long, skittering legs. Theoretically, they were supposed to give her an edge in reach and stability, but in practice and in Rita’s hands, they did more harm than good!

Samual sighed deeply and leaned back in his chair.

No matter. Practice, practice, practice, that was going to be the trick. Even if she had a complete lack of talent in fighting, keep going through the motions and eventually they would become second nature.

A knock on the door startled him, his hand immediately going for the sword on the chair next to him.

Carefully, he stood up and went to check it out.

The door in question was the one that they’d come in by and just led to the inner temple complex of the Creutean Temple, so theoretically there shouldn’t have been anything on the other side that hadn’t already made its way through a set of guards and an entire temple full of warrior priests, but Samual was paranoid out of habit. He’d found it made it easier to shift smoothly to a contingency plan when the unexpected eventually, inevitably happened.

“Hey. Messenger dropped off a message for you out front,” the big Creutean cleric standing outside said once he opened the door.

“From who?” he asked warily, still fingering his sword despite vaguely recognizing the guy. Paranoia was a hard habit to break.

“How would I know? I’m not your secretary. I don’t read your crap,” the cleric scoffed. “Anyway, it’s your problem now. Here.”

He held out a folded note of cheap paper with the name ‘Samual and Rita’ written on the outside in big, crude letters, but Samual made no move to take it from him.

“Come on, I don’t have all day,” the Cleric grumbled, but Samual just pointed down.

“Just drop it. I’ll handle it from there.”

The cleric rolled his eyes but did as Samual asked, dropping the paper on the floor in the doorframe before turning and leaving, muttering under his breath about crazy Krutus-worshippers.

As soon as he was out of sight, Samual carefully prodded the paper with the tip of his sword. When it didn’t spontaneously combust or anything, he leaned down and winced in pain as he pushed a faint puff of divine power through it.

If there had been any enchantments or magical runes embedded in the note, he would have felt them as interference to his power, like pebbles in a stream, but it passed through cleanly. There was either no magic on it, or the magic was hidden to an extent that he could not detect.

Finally, he carefully inspected the outside for any stains or other marks of chemicals such as contact poisons. Only once he was satisfied there were no obvious markings did he grab a rag from inside to pick it up with.

If there was such a thing as too paranoid, Samual hadn’t found it yet.

The door to Rita’s temporary room creaked open.

“Rita, a messenger just arrived with a note…” Samual began.

Then he paused, staring about the room in surprise. It wasn’t hard to figure out why.

The entire room was covered in webbing. Thick sheets of the stuff spanned the walls from floor to ceiling, while long threads hung from place to place, attached to either the roof or the to other threads of webbing.

Above the bed, built entirely out of silk, hung what could only be described as a ‘burrow’; a long, silken cocoon, held aloft by thick strands of webbing attached to the ceiling, the floor, the walls, and even the bed itself.

It was like some gigantic spider had built itself a nest right in the middle of Krutus’s temple. A not entirely inaccurate assessment.

Rita groggily looked up at him from where she’d been sleeping in the middle of her silky burrow, resting on her stomach with her legs tucked in underneath her body and her head on a pillow stolen from the bed.

“Urgh, good morning…” she mumbled. “Is it training time already?”

Even if ‘morning’ did not technically exist in this weird place, the word still did and it seemed to function as a greeting similarly to what she was used to. Either that, or her translating widget was really going the extra mile.

She stretched, yawning sleepily. She was dressed in her new, wonderfully soft and baggy sleeping shirt that she’d bought for herself after Samual had finally allowed her to go shopping for some new clothes, after much nagging.

“What,” was all Samual replied.

Rita stared sleepily at Samual for a few moments, then her eyes widened as it clicked what he was talking about.

“Oh! I’m sorry! I was totally going to tell you!” she blabbered. “I’ll clean it all up before I move out, I promise!”

“But… why?” Samual asked after a few moments of stunned silence.

“Well, see, the room had a little bit of a cockroach problem,” she explained and pointed at a pile of black-dotted webs in a corner of the room while unfolding herself from her burrow. “And I was scared they were going to crawl on me while I slept. So I tried to build myself a hammock…”

“A hammock,” he repeated slowly, staring around at the sheer volume of spider silk that seemed to cover every available surface. “This… is not a hammock.”

“There were some engineering challenges, okay?” Rita pouted. “It kept swinging and tipping and dumping me off so I kept reinforcing it and before I knew it…” She just shrugged helplessly at the mess. “At least it’s really comfortable now.”

Samual shuddered involuntarily. He wasn’t particularly arachnophobic and he’d slept in a few pretty odd places before, but this was just a bit much.

“Alright, it doesn’t matter,” he finally said, shaking his head. “I received a message from Gora this morning. Apparently, she might have found you a demon.”

“What, really?” Rita exclaimed, searching through her pile of clothes resting on another webbing rack stretched between the dresser and the wall. “That’s great news! Wait, what do you mean ‘might have’?”

“Well,” Samual explained, “we need to meet with the guy who’s going to set up the contract first. She included directions to her place and said they were going to be there for the next few hours if we wanted to stop by.”

“That’s fantastic!”

It really was great news. After weeks of stressing about Alice she was finally going to get a professional to take a look at her. Finally, finally she could get Alice fixed up!

Hopefully…

“We’ll set off as soon as you’re dressed,” Samual said, turning to leave. “We’ll pick up breakfast on the way. And Rita?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t forget to bring your spear.”