Hans faked another pile of rubble. Though he loathed having to expend the effort, it was his best option for stashing his shield. If he went through all that trouble to disguise his base but left his shield sitting out in the open somewhere, the terathans would have a good clue of where to search.

  His second pile of rubble had a gap beneath it. Before he dove into the hideout, he could slide the shield underneath. That was a risk, but he was confident that the hiding spot was only visible if a terathan put their face on the floor to look, which was unlikely.

  The first phase of Hans’ attack plan was to perfect his retreat. He spent the next three days studying and practicing routes between floors, first with a torch and then in the dark. Making a wrong turn with monsters on his heels would be a fatal mistake, and the more distance between the point where he broke line of sight with his pursuers and his hideout entrance, the better. To that end, he identified several chokepoints where terathans would struggle to fit, and a few of them were near holes between floors.

  With some luck, the terathans wouldn’t realize he had changed floors entirely, making any further search efforts a waste of their time.

  The next phase was to study terathan reaction habits. Could he lure one terathan away or would they always travel in groups? If he killed a terathan, would any of its kin go looking for its corpse? Would the warrior terathans investigate any disturbance at the entrance, or would they leave it to drones?

  Starting his tests on the uppermost floor to which he had access, which was the second basement level, Hans hid down the hall from the terathan highway. Counting and timing the shadows of drones passing through the webbed tunnel, he learned that roughly four drones passed every minute.

  He waited for a group of four traveling downward and knocked his hilt on the stone walls. He saw the shadow of a drone stop. It punched a bladed arm through the webbing to create a hole and pulled itself through to access the basement levels of the castle.

  Drones were the smallest of the terathans. They were about as tall as a person kneeling with their butt off their heels, and their spider bodies were about twice the size of their humanoid torsos. Their bodies were covered in short, thin hairs, similar to the kinds spiders used for sensing movements and tremors around them, and their heads were like a human’s except they had pincers where humans had teeth.

  The more advanced terathans–the warriors and the sorceresses–had a stature more akin to a tall one than to a person.

  The drone came down the hallway alone to investigate. When it was clear it had committed to its search and wasn’t going to call for help, Hans hid around the corner, trying to be perfectly still. The drone skittered by, and Hans lopped off its head with one swift slash. The drone’s legs curled into itself like any other dead spider. The weight of its human torso tipped it sideways.

  Hans didn’t see any movement coming from the highway, so he dragged the body into a side room and hid nearby to observe.

  Three or four hours passed, and no terathans came looking for the dead drone. One drone paused at the hole in the highway, the one the dead drone used to pass through the webbing and into the castle, but it swiftly stitched it together and moved on.

  Satisfied, Hans drew his knife and processed his kill. He took both machete arms, found a layer of fat in its humanoid abdomen, and removed a spider leg. Lastly, he cut away several strips of the drone’s chitin.

  Though he had no desire to learn what terathan leg tasted like, Hans was tired of rations and bread. He needed more protein in his diet, and terathans were the only option. He had hoped to find mice and rats nesting in the castle to eat, but saw none. He guessed that they avoided going anywhere near terathans.

  Because he lacked actual fuel, rendering the fat was a tedious process of casting Create Fire over and over on the base of a clay pot. Eventually, Hans generated enough steady heat to separate the tallow, which he transferred into a second pot. He used a similar process to cook his terathan leg.

  Terathan tasted vaguely like crab if you had just thrown it up. Hans endured and ate his fill.

  Though he did his damndest to stop it, moments like this where he was sitting still and alone in the dark stirred all manner of thoughts. Hans thought about Olza and his adventurers in Gomi. He wondered if Devon or Mazo stepped up to be Guild Master. He tried to picture what his funeral would be like and how many people would be there. He pictured Kane, Quentin, and Gunther in Kohei reading the letter that announced his death.

  Galad, Luther, Charlie, Galinda, Terry, Tandis, Roland, Uncle Ed, Shandi–he thought about all of them. His life wasn’t perfect, and he had more than a few regrets, but he was happy at the end.

  Up until armorbacks beat him into hamburger, of course.

  And that’s what Hans thought about most. Over and over he relived what it felt like to die. When he slept, he didn’t dream. No nightmares or whimsical fantasy adventures. But as soon as his eyes opened, he was back in the jungle, counting the phantoms of armorbacks.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  How did a child make it all the way to the armorback jungle? Did the kid get away safe in the end? How were there so many armorbacks? Did Bridun’s party end up fighting them too, or did they retreat to get reinforcements?

  Hans knew what he heard. The voice was unmistakable, but he questioned his memory of the armorbacks. There should have never been that many. That section was culled regularly, and there hadn’t been a dungeon overgrowth in some time. There had never been a dungeon overgrowth limited to one specific section either. They always knew if the regrowth was standard or not the moment the core reset because it affected the whole of the dungeon.

  And everything seemed normal that day.

  When his mind could think of nothing else, Hans thought about who or what put him here. He tried to do that as little as possible. If they were watching somehow, or if they could feel thoughts that were about them, Hans wanted to provide them the minimum amount of entertainment. They would get to watch him die again, but he refused to give them a show of raging or wailing about the hell he was in.

  If a god or gods did come to mind for any reason, Hans wished that they sucked on sweaty ogre dicks.

  Served them right for being in his head.

  The next day–at least Hans thought it was the next day but had no real way to tell if he slept for fifteen minutes or fifteen hours–he ventured back to the floor where he killed the drone. He saw no evidence that any terathans had been through to investigate, and the body was as he left it.

  Good.

  Next, he used the tallow to grease the hinges of select doors throughout the castle. Each of those doors was on one of his escape routes, and he liked the idea of being able to open and shut them with some degree of stealth.

  The last of the tallow went into making more torches. His stash was finite, and a tallow torch was his only alternative if he didn’t want to waste lamp oil or Nightsight potions. He worried he would run out of fabric to soak and wrap before he ran out of tallow. He only had one spare set of clothes. Once that was gone, he would have to cannibalize his bedroll.

  Hans picked off three more drones to harvest their fat, and that was it.

  His initial preparation was complete.

  From egg to fully matured, terathan drones reached adult size in about a week. Hans knew that the matron was perpetually making more, so chipping away at the drone count a few kills at a time wouldn’t do any good. They would replenish before he managed to clear his way to the bottom of the highway. Small victories would not be sufficient.

  His hit-and-run strategy hinged on big hits. If the bulk of the drones were dead, there were no workers bringing food into the hive. The matron would lay eggs, sure, but there was a limit to how many she could lay at any given time, especially if she was not well-fed.

  Hans returned to the point where he killed the first drone and set up for his first strike.

  He had a torch and three tallow-soaked pieces of cloth packed into tight balls. He had his sword, shield, armor, and one Cure Poison potion. Carrying more potions meant risking them breaking, and that was unacceptable.

  If Daojmot applies to this, please give this bastard your strength.

  Hans waited for a gap in terathan traffic, a thirty-second window at best, to launch his attack. As he jogged down the hall as quietly as he could, he cast Create Fire on his torch. When he reached the wall of web running between floors, he used the butt of the torch–not the lit end–to jiggle the strands of silk as violently as he could.

  He heard the hive come to life, their movements and vocalizations sounding like an approaching storm.

  Hans waited there on the other side of the web. As expected, drones raced to the disturbance. As soon as one cut a hole to pass through and investigate, Hans thrust his sword. When he withdrew it, the drone corpse fell. When the next drone attempted to do the same, Hans killed it too.

  Watching through the dense silk, Hans could see the number of shadows in the highway passage growing in number, all fixated on the disturbance.

  Thrust. Thrust. Thrust. Thrust.

  The terathans grew wise to the danger and started to make multiple holes. Hans saw the points of spider legs bursting through the web highway in a dozen different places. He needed to wait as long as possible to attract as many as possible, but none of that would be worth it if he gave his enemy too much time.

  Hans picked up the torch and thrust it into the web. The flames spread across the silk as though it were paper. As quickly as he could, Hans lit each of the tallow balls and threw them through the burnt opening. He intended for them to start new fires farther down the highway, but he didn’t have the chance to watch if that succeeded.

  Drones burst into the castle and skittered toward Hans with swift anger, the tips of their legs clicking and clacking every time they touched stone. Some of them were already on fire, not yet aware that they were about to burn to death.

  Hans ran. He didn’t know how many there were and didn’t dare look back. He slid around a corner, then another. Then he ducked into a side room and shut and braced the door. He doubled back the way he came using a parallel hallway, dove into another side room, and dropped through a hole in the floor to the next level down.

  He zigged and zagged down two more floors, slid his shield into its hiding place, and hoisted himself into his tunnel. He yanked the rod out and made sure the stone covering landed like it was supposed to.

  Hans listened. He realized he was so focused on retreating that he hadn’t even heard the sounds of crackling fires and shrieking terathans echoing through the castle. Some hissed in anger. Some screamed as they cooked right there on the web.

  Ten minutes later, Hans heard terathans searching all around. He heard their tapping legs on the floor above him. He heard them pass his tunnel on five separate occasions, hissing and shrieking to one another all the while.

  He sat there for what felt like hours, ready to take down as many as he could if he was discovered, but he wasn’t. He never heard any of them attempt any sort of investigation of his rubble pile, nor did they ever linger in his section of the castle. They ran right by to continue their search.

  Good. This was really good. He’d get to kill more.