The portal in front of Simon led into a dark wood. Well, he thought it was a dark wood. As soon as he whispered the words of lesser light, though, he saw it was something else. They weren’t trees he was walking through. They were stone pilrs, and what he’d thought was leaf clutter, and branches were actually long spiderwebs. He wasn’t even outside, he figured out after a few minutes of walking. There was no breeze.

  That means I have to be, what, underground? He wondered.

  “I guess that means I finally get to find my first fantasy race?” he whispered to himself as he tried to search out any signs that these were, in fact, dwarvish and not human structures. He found nothing that said that definitively, though, besides the strange location. There were human sized doors iructures, and the bones he saw seemed to be about the right size for men. All he could say for certain was that he was lost in a dark pce with only dusty ruins and spider webs to keep him pany.

  Most of the webs that obscured the details of the structures were thin, gauzy things that he could push through easily, but some of the major strands that anchored the rger webs were thicker than a pencil, and a few of the rgest ones were thicker than his fingers. He shuddered at that, but it wasn’t enough to make him panibsp;

  Indeed, after a couple of minutes, it became clear this would be an easy level to bypass, at least, if that’s what he wao do. This whole pce seemed to be a tomb, and in the distance, he could see the bright light of an illuminated doorway. While it ossible that such a thing was a way to the surface or an occupied building of some kind, in Simon’s mind, it was almost certainly the portal to the level.

  While he was still too far away to say for sure, he hoped that would be the case. A nice daylight level would do him some good after all the creepy dark pces the Goddess had been sending him for the st few levels.

  Still, none of those pleasant thoughts were enough to take his mind off of just how dangerous this pce felt. Here and there, he saw desiccated corpses hanging in cos, and occasionally, he would hear distant hat might be the sound of giant spiders skittering across their enormous web.

  In his tiny reg bubble of light, though, Simon was alone as he made his way toward the light. Halfway there, he recast minht, and when he was close enough to see waving stalks of grain through the portal, he smiled. It looked like a nice day, and it had been a while since he’d had one of those.

  That was also about the spot where the rger strands started to get really thick. The first two times he went down a ruireet that was blocked with more strands than he could maneuver between, he went bad circled around until he found a clearer route.

  Simon tried to tell himself that he had nothing to worry about, butno matter how well he kept his cool, he could feel his heart beating faster, and he had no desire to find out what would happen if he touched one of these things, and got something’s attention.

  I just gotta stay fast and quiet, he told himself as he made his way toward the light.

  Eventually, that wasn’t an option, though. Eventually, less than 50 yards from the door, he found a wall of thick webbing that was knotted, ugly, and nearly imperable.

  Simon thought about burning it, but that seemed likely to attract even more attention than cutting one of the strands. So, after a few more seds of study, he sliced through the smallest se that would allow him to squeeze his fat all through.

  The bde cut through it soundlessly, but as the strand whipped up and out of the way, it sent a warbling sympathetic vibration through this whole se of the web. This, in tur a chill down his spine and triggered a whole cacophony of other skittering and chittering. He’d definitely gotten someone’s attention with that.

  Simon bolted toward the door, closing the distance recklessly. It almost cost him his life when a desk-sized spider pounced, nding close enough to knock Simon off his feet.

  He didn’t try to get up immediately. There wasn’t time. Instead, he rolled over, thrusting the cutss up and slig through the thing's soft belly and cutting it in half all the way to its mandibles even as it tried to bite him.

  “Holy shit,” Simon said, uo rise for a moment as he y there covered in spider guts as he pted the horror of what just happened.

  Laying there, it was impossible to see the flickers of movement further into the darkness, so without thinking, he used a fmethrervuul Meiren,” he spat, using the words of greater fire to y down a huge curtain of fme to keep baything that might be looking to take a bite out of him as he struggled to his feet on the slick ground.

  He heard the screeches of pain and the sound of monsters crisping and popping from the heat as he moved to the door, but he didn’t bother to turn around and look until he was actually standing ieway.

  The view from there made his jaw drop as he watched the scale of the destru he’d unleashed. Simon had spent more time than anyone would care to admit watg the subsubsubgenre of videos on all of the various apps that he people called ‘oddly satisfying.’ He’d watched people powerwash crete, knock over dominos, get unlikely hole-in-ones, and every other sort of iivity there was, but he’d never watched a city burn.

  He hadn’t given it a moment’s thought, but it turned out that the spiderwebs that decorated every surface of the cavern and buildings within were extremely fmmable, and the fire traveled across them like a spreading wave, burning them off of every surface as it slowly crawled forward in an e and yellow line of death.

  Not his death, though, but the spiders. They couldn’t move fast enough, ached dozens burst into fmes in sizes that ranged from dogs to cars.

  I’m doh the level, he told himself. I just leave now. He couldn’t, though. The image was too captivating. It gave him a sense of scale about where he was for the first time, ached building after building briefly illuminate before the crawling fire moved on, he was left w what it was that had happened here. It had clearly been a rge city at some point, and even though they were obviously underground, it wasn’t how he imagihat people would build things underground.

  It was only when he heard a roar that sounded like it belonged in a Godzil movie that he looked up. There, he saw something that sent a spike of terrht through his soul. There were many pilrs scattered throughout the city that didn’t seem to have a purpose, but it turned out that the 8 rgest weren’t pilrs at all. They were attached to a giant fug spider that was the size of an office building, and even as he watched it, it turs eight red eyes on him and began to turn slowly, oep at a time, in his dire.

  Simon smmed the door shut on what turned out to be a small shed. He staggered ba terror. Moments ter, a young man wielding a hoe like a club came around the er and yelled, “I found him, Pa!”

  Simo his gory sword fall from his hand onto the yellowed grass as he raised his hands in a show of surrender. “I’m not here to cause any trouble; I just—” he started to say.

  “What in the hells are you doing on our farm, creep?” the boy demanded as he looked at him suspiciously. “If you think yetting any more of our chis, you —”

  “Aaric, that’s enough,” an older man said, ing out from behind the other side of the building. He was only wielding a pitchfork, but unlike his son, he looked like he knew how to do some damage with it. “Don’t antagonize men with swords. Besides, he doesn’t look like the chi stealing type.”

  “You’re right,” Simon said. Slowly raising himself to his feet but leaving his sword where it y. “I was following some goblin tracks, and I took a good k out of one, but he got away from me, and I was just making sure it hadn’t taken to hiding in any of your outbuildings.”

  “Goblins?” the man asked, raising an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen any around here in years.”

  “Me either,” Simon said, gesturing to his gory outfit. “I fot how messy the little bastards be, holy.”

  “Well, pick up your sword. I’ll open the door, and we —” the farmer said, reag for the door.

  “No, no, no, that’s okay. I already checked and…” Simon protested, imagining that giant dread spider lurking just behind the thin wall of wood, even though he was like 99% sure the portal was closed now.

  The man gave him a strange look and opehe door anyway. It was a tense moment for both of them, for different reasons, but the small shed proved to be empty. Instead of goblins or vengeful spider gods, there were just some shovels and other tools that had been decorated with rust and cobwebs.

  “Looks like it must have givehe slip,” Simon said mely.

  “Well, we ’t just leave it out there. One goblin turns to ten before you turn around, and we have more than enough problems on this farm anyway,” the man answered as Simohed his sword in a scabbard that was a little too big for it to fit right.

  If either of them noticed, they said nothing. Instead, the three of them spent the hour on a fruitless search for an imaginary goblin while Simon made up a story about being a part-time merary and a full-time monster hunter. “Most lords will pay at least a couple pen ear. More if the people are in a panic,” he assured them.

  It was a waste of everyoime, but he did get to see the area at least. They traipsed through a nearby wood and several meadows looking foblin sign, and Simon saw that they had many neighbors scattered along the mild sloping pins with simir sized farms decorated with simirly thatched roofs.

  Eventually, when they couldn’t track the little bastard down, Millen had his boy Aaric lead Simon to a nearby pond so he could wash the spider goo off. By then, Simon’s stories had won the young man over, and while he scrubbed and dried his armor and on, the boy peppered him with questions about the wider world.

  “I’d love to bee a warrior and fight for the King, but Father would never allow it,” Aarifessed. “It’s not like my sisters could do all the chores in my absenyway. Not with everything there is to do around here on the farm, anyway.”

  Both the boy and his father seemed retively down on the farm’s prospects, but to Simon, everything looked great. The wheat seemed ready to harvest, the soil looked dark aile, and both the surrounding forests and the more distant mountains bordered on the picturesque.

  They were near cities called Darndell and Mietere, which meant nothing to Simon, but based on the way they’d reacted when he’d mentioned Liepzen, they were a fair distance away from the pces he’d explored most.

  Still, to him, this looked like a good life, and once he was all ed up, and he was io stay for supper, that only reaffirmed his earlier observation. Millen’s wife and daughters were lovely, and even though the meal they shared with him was nothing but thin soup and dark coarse bread, it icturesque a family as he’d found i.

  That night, they let Simon sleep in the barn, though he found out he had to go in through the side door because the main door led to a spooky nighttime forest when he ope.

  At least I found the gateway, Simon thought as he y down in the hayloft and tried to decide what he could do to pay his hosts back for their hospitality. He fell asleep before he’d decided on the right answer.