Luckily for me, I didn't have to wait long for Mel and Abel. The two of them were fast, and when told they were looking for a giant ass cliff, it wasn't exactly tough to find the right spot. Of course, the two of them didn't come down the waterfall, as we watched, the two of them slowly descend from the sky, held aloft by Mel's flames as they blazed up from underneath them like some kind of rocket booster.

"I didn't know she could do that." I said to Callie. "Did you know she could do that?" Seeing the two of them slowly descend from the sky on a cloud of fire was breathtaking...and also extremely aggravating. We'd had to fall down a fucking waterfall. I wasn't ashamed to admit watching them leisurely floating to the ground was pissing me off.

Abel grinned cheekily as he touched the ground, looking us all over critically. "Wow, you all look like shit. No wonder you decided to wait, everyone looks like a drowned rat." He paused. "Well, not Lament, she seems fine. But the rest of you look like something that was clogging my sink."

"First of all." Said Callie. "Shut up. Second of all what took you so long? We found a nest of some kind of gem eating spiders down here that is supposed to have a stockpile of valuable Ascendant materials." She grinned over at our Beast Lord Garden friends. "We're just lucky Sloane is a huge animal nerd, or we might have just decided the creepy spider cave was more trouble than it was worth and left." I hadn't mentioned the details on call, there were far too many valuable things in that cave for me to trust bringing it up on a scan ring.

That got a nod from Mel. "Understandable. Spiders are gross." She looked around with interest. "Seriously surprised nobody found this place before. It's pretty out of the way, and flight at our rank isn't common, but still. You'd think SOMEONE would have ended up down here like you guys."

Lament laughed lazily. "They probably did. That spider was sneaky as hell, if I wasn't so well trained it would have completely blindsided me. Sloane said the venom turns people to stone too. They've probably killed dozens of G-rankers down here. I'm guessing other than the bones which apparently they wanted, the rest of the body gets petrified and destroyed."

My face paled slightly. "There...there was a lot of gravel in that cave. Not at the entrance itself but further in. It might have been bodies." My stomach turned a bit at that. Fuck, every time I forgot how dangerous it was down here someone reminded me. "Plus there's a potentially F-rank adult spider down there too. Even before the babies were born, I have no doubt it would be able to easily kill the few stragglers who showed up."

Now I was even more glad that I'd waited for Abel and Mel. Who knew how many G-rankers had died in that shitty cave. Thinking about it, if we hadn't had Lament with us we might have gotten bitten, and even if the venom hadn't killed us, there were bound to be more of those things in there. If we'd been swarmed we would have been fucked.

I didn't know if Fantasy was the reason we'd found this place, but if so, I'd need to be way more careful of that sense. Sure, it would guide you toward things that would grow your renown and help you ascend, but things that helped you advance could also kill you. I wasn't afraid of a good fight, but it might be prudent to be a bit more cautious going into that kind of thing.

After we discussed what to do next, we settled on having Lament as the advance guard, with Abel following behind. Mel would bring up the rear for a wider view of the field. Her fire abilities made for great crowd control. I was pleased to see her carrying the orb we'd picked up for her too, I was glad to know it was actually useful.

Finally we began our trek inside. I grimaced at the gravel once we got a bit further in now that I knew what it was, but stayed focused. Apart from having my cane up and ready to swing, I also kept a close eye on the nearby area with my Seek Hidden skill. Granted, it worked better on larger things, but I could still see the spiders if they got close, and was able to point several of them out for Lament and Abel to kill.

More than once I had to act directly when one of them dropped from the ceiling at Callie, or was saved by her quick thinking when they tried that on me. Not every part of the cave ceiling was close enough for the skill to work perfectly, and some of the rooms with higher ceilings had multiple nasty surprises. This pattern went on for about twenty minutes, until we came to a new room with a fairly low ceiling, and I froze in place at what my skill was picking up.

The others all came to a stop when I did, the ones in front turning to look at me in confusion. I swallowed and set my feet. "Twenty. On the ceiling. They seem like they might be sleeping, but there's no way they won't notice us walking below them. Starbreaker, can you fry them?" Avoiding combat sounded boring, but fighting almost two dozen venomous spiders sounded like a huge pain.

Sadly, it wasn't to be. Mel shook her head. "Not in here. I'd fry the rest of you with them. They're G-rank, and the amount of power I'd need to use would be enough to injure most of the people here. Your armor might protect you, since you're pretty much entirely covered, but not the others." I cursed, but wasn't surprised. That had definitely been too convenient to work.

I was far from the person I'd been months ago though. Not just in terms of stats, but my Skills and combat standards were both much higher. Reaching into my store of attacks I triggered a shadow attack along with Sucking Mud, forcefully synergizing the two skills and pushing them to activate as fast as possible. Just like the last time I'd used that move, tendrils of dark mud lashed out from the ceiling the spiders were crouched on.

Five of the damn things actually got caught, the rest squealing with distress and hurling themselves off the rock before they had a chance to get grabbed. With fifteen spiders in free fall, their overwhelming advantage of having a bunch of legs and being skittery fucks was pretty much neutralized.

Wren, Lestri, and Lament, picked six of them out of the air, two stabs each finishing them off before they even hit the ground, while Abel smashed three with a series of massive punches. Mel couldn't carpet bomb the place but she was free to shoot condensed darts of flame. The blossom shaped attacks landed on the spiders as closed buds and then consumed three of them in flames as they opened.

Callie was focused on the ones on the ceiling, targeting the five I was holding with ease thanks to the abundant shadow energy already condensed into the area., she shredded them easily even as Sloane, Beric, and Croll lashed out at the last three, each taking one and reducing them to ribbons within seconds.

All in all, the whole fight took about thirty seconds tops, and we were all left staring at the absolutely decimated cavern in shock. Well, not all, Abel, Lament, and Mel seemed to be pretty calm. The rest of us though, were in shock how dangerous our combined assault had been. My head was a bit sore from the soul weight of launching that attack so quickly, but still, this had been almost no effort.

Megan, instead of looking shocked, just looked annoyed. "Damn it!" Yelled the tall blonde. "I wanted to kill some of them! Did you guys have to hog all the kills?" Turning to Sloane, she demanded. "Are there going to be more of these things? That's like thirty counting all the ones we killed on the way here, if I don't get to fight anything I'm going to be pissed."

The dark chuckle Sloane let out was anything but comforting. "Minimum egg laying size for Rockjackers is a hundred. Some of them can lay twice that many. You don't need to worry about having targets. Still, this was a good thing. Killing the bastards before they could bite us was important." She brandished her knife. "Of course, not as important as scavenging their venom sacks and checking their stomachs for gems. Anyone care to help a girl out?"

To the surprise of literally no one, Callie gleefully volunteered to help disembowel dead spiders looking for magic jewels. She and Sloane made excellent time tearing into the bodies, and managed to dig up a whole bunch of half digested gems. Some of them had apparently been swallowed recently enough that they hadn't degraded much, and even more amazingly one of the intact ones had a functional lightning rune on it.

Since this trip was turning out so lucrative we decided to sell off the proceeds and then split the credits after, so everyone was just passing their stock to Sydney, who apparently had an honest to gods spatial ring on her. Even as the heir to powerful sect that was pretty impressive and it made the whole trip way more convenient.

Once we finished with that we moved forward again, taking out the odd spider here or there as we swept through the cave, until finally we came to one absolutely massive chamber that was much different than the others.

The inside of this cavern was brightly lit. The other caves hadn't had more than a few of the crystals on the ground, so the ceiling was cast in heavy shadow. This room though, the ceiling was festooned with huge spikes of blue glowing crystal.

More than that though, between the crystal hung strands of glittering crystalline material, spun into delicate patterns and traceries that it only took a minute for me to recognize. "That's web." I said in awe. "The lake water dripped down the web and crystallized it. I don't know how it isn't breaking, but it looks like it retains its flexibility. Maybe it's the spider? I don't see i-" I stopped talking as my Seek Hidden skill finally picked up the adult spider in its spot off in the back corner.

Calling looked at me with concern. "Solomon? Everything alright?" Despite my sometimes distractable nature, stopping mid sentence wasn't a habit of mine. She'd noticed before anyone that I was distressed, but that wasn't a shock given how attuned we are to each other. I didn't have any words to respond though, I was too busy pointing up at the monstrous arachnid crouched back in the darkness.

Well, where there should be darkness. In reality, the spider was glowing too, its monstrously huge form coated with a thick chitinous armor shot through with veins of the same glowing crystal as the web. Eight abominable eyes blazed blue as they fixed on our group, not advancing or attacking, but waiting. "Step into my parlor." Murmured Abel, before grunting at an elbow from Mel. I appreciated that. I'd have done it if I was close enough. Like this shit wasn't horrifying enough.

Of course, that wasn't what caught Callie's attention. When I pointed, her eyes fixed on a much denser weave of web directly under the spider, which was covered with multicolored gems of varying sizes suspended on the same crystalline strands. The light from the spider shone down through the gems, creating dancing auroras on the cave wall behind it. I recognized the frenzied look in my girlfriend's eyes as she looked at it and sighed, drawing my cane. "Alright. Who has a battle plan?"