When Hans was reasonably certain his hideout wouldn’t be discovered, he slept. He dreamed for the first time, and this dream was of sitting on his rooftop deck in Leebel’s Rest drinking tea with Olza. She read a book and glanced up at him to smile with her dark hair in her eyes. Then he just sat there, watching the ferry slowly glide away from town and toward the tunnel to the surface.

  When he looked above himself, the sky was blue. There was no dungeon ceiling, just wispy white clouds and seagulls flying overhead. The sun was warm, and the breeze was gentle.

  Though he woke in the depths of a terathan hive, the comfort of the dream lingered. What did it say about him that he had to die to finally have a good dream? He tried to recall the last time he had one of those, and none came to mind. It had been years, maybe a decade, since he had a dream that wasn’t a night terror.

  Passing the time alone in a dark closet gave Hans too much time to think. He wondered if Bel and Lee got the chance to have one final quest, and if they did, he tried to imagine what it would be and if they’d gotten to do it together as sisters. Unless this was one of the hells, then he hoped they got to experience true peace instead.

  Hans forgot sometimes, even in life, that many people did not find joy in battles and danger. That was even more difficult to remember when he was in the midst of that fun, as he was now.

  He thought about Gret and Boden. He thought about what Devon and Mazo were doing in his absence.

  Hans couldn’t say how long he waited, but he listened until it seemed like the search of the castle had been called off. No patrols or search parties had skittered past in some time, so he waited a while longer to give himself more certainty before moving into the next part of his plan.

  Though he wasn’t a soldier, Hans had read a few books about war and tactics. He didn’t have any need for troop movements and formations and such, so he gravitated toward the philosophy of war more so than the intricacies of managing an army.

  One idea in particular had been in his mind since his planning to conquer the terathans began.

  This author likened an enemy army to bamboo. If you left it untended, it would spread and spread, eventually overtaking all of the plants around it, especially if it had invaded a part of the kingdom where bamboo didn’t usually grow.

  If you went through and cut down every last shoot of bamboo, it would grow back. Uprooting what remained of the plant underground was a monumental effort, as its roots were hardy, interwoven, and covered a wide area. If after the effort there was even one shoot that escaped the shovel, the bamboo would return.

  The most effective way to eliminate bamboo was to starve it.

  Chop it all down and wait for it to start to regrow. Just when the new shoots started to rise out of the soil, go through and cut them all down again. Wait until the next shoots sprout, and repeat the culling.

  The idea was to deny the plant sunlight, and the author warned that the process might take years before true success was achieved. With patience and diligence, however, the undefeatable enemy could be defeated.

  Never mind that the tactician was Haynu B. Dumas. He applied the bamboo culling metaphor to eliminating the aggressive door-to-door efforts of a particularly annoying cult, but the strategy was sound.

  Hans would give the terathans time to sprout new bamboo and attack again. For now, he snuck out of his burrow to observe the rebuilding process from afar.

  Activity around the vertical passage was high, but traffic up and down was not the consistent back and forth he observed when he first arrived. Any level of the castle would go long stretches without a terathan going by. Hans assumed that was because their attention was focused on what needed to be rebuilt rather than their daily routine of hunting for food and bringing it back to the hive.

  Hans eventually worked up the nerve to approach the curtain of silk. He had an old wall sconce in his hand, and he risked poking it into the web and rotating, wrapping the sconce in silk the way he might wrap the end of a torch with a strip of tallow-soaked fabric.

  He retreated swiftly and observed how the terathans reacted. A drone rushed to the location to investigate the disturbance of the web, but it didn’t linger long before returning to its work. Hans believed the chaos of reconstructing the highway muddled their ability to sense movement along their webs. There was too much activity to parse.

  Back in his hideout, Hans set the web-wrapped sconce aside and waited a few days for the stickiness of the web to dry, leaving behind a brittle bundle of spidersilk. He could touch it without his hand being glued in place, and he was delighted to find that it was still incredibly flammable even when it was dry. He cut off a small piece to test separately and grinned like a madman when it caught fire like a drought-stricken wheat field.

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  These would be firebombs, but Hans made a note to gather more tallow so he could keep them burning for a little while longer. The spider silk burned fast and bright but not for long.

  That was how Hans spent the next several days. He gathered as many bronze sconces from the castle ruins as he could and wrapped them in web one at a time before taking them back to his lair to let most of them dry.

  The ones he didn’t dry became his improvised twine. Though the web was a mess to manipulate, he used the silk to make caltrops out of sharpened bone and scraps of iron.

  Next, he did his best to improvise a deadfall trap out of castle rubble. Were his prey a woodland creature, he would have had no problems, but the size of terathans demanded a far heavier kill stone than he could lift. So he settled for crippling a terathan instead. He wrestled timber into upright positions behind a few doorways and used the silk as a tripwire. When a terathan ran through the door, the weight would tip over and likely land on their spider legs and abdomen.

  If they worked at all. Hans was dubious of his own craftsmanship but did his best.

  And then he burned the highway again.

  One of the traps killed a drone, so Hans had a new source of fat. He debated eating this one too, but he had to wait out the scrambled searches of the castle floors before he could harvest it. By then, the corpse had sat for some time, and Hans preferred crappy rations and stale bread to whatever spoiled terathan meat would do to his insides.

  After several more days, he returned to set another fire and saw that terathan warriors now stood guard while the drones worked, one for each floor of the castle, it seemed. They stayed near the highway and walked an endless patrol around and around the shaft while drones rebuilt the web.

  That was his first sighting of a terathan that wasn’t a drone. If the warriors were out, the hive’s frustration with the attacks was surely growing. No sorceress terathans had shown themselves, the next most dangerous variety of terathan, with the matron following after, so Hans didn’t have to worry about spitting venom just yet.

  But his opportunities to burn down the highway were now numbered. If they deployed warriors for this rebuild, they would be far more aggressive for the next. If they were too aggressive, he wouldn’t be able to sneak around the ruins as he had been, taking even more choices away from his survival strategy.

  For example, walking up and sticking a torch into the web was no longer an option and likely would not be again. So he tested his web firebombs. He chose the uppermost floor for his attack, still insisting on launching his assaults as far from his base of operations as he could.

  When the warrior on that floor wandered to the opposite side of the highway–putting the thick curtain of terathan web between him and Hans–the Guild Master executed a quick cast of Create Fire and ignited the web around a sconce. Hans threw it down the hall and smiled when he saw the bundle catch in the web, hang there, and then fall down the shaft as flames spread.

  The terathan warrior immediately charged him, shrieking its alarm to bring other terathans to its position.

  Instead of disappearing as he had done for all of the previous attacks, Hans risked a battle with the warriors to further whittle down their numbers. He had an escape route that ran through several chokepoints–passages too tight and narrow for a terathan body–and he could sneakily travel from one floor to another thanks to the steady decay of the old castle.

  That wasn’t a guarantee of success by any means. A few terathans in the wrong places could cut off his escape route, but risks were necessary for victory.

  So Hans stopped in front of a doorway all but blocked by rubble and fought.

  The first warrior didn’t expect Hans to suddenly turn and attack, so the adventurer was inside its machete arms before it could react. Hans drove his sword through a crease in the chitin and slashed at an arm. The terathans’ arm hit the floor. The monster staggered sideways as it bled out.

  That chitin was a pain in the ass. Not for the first time, Hans wished that the hells had Gruwalda iron. A weapon that effective had spoiled him for any blade that was forged from common materials. The difference between Gruwalda iron and normal iron was like the difference between a wood blade and a metal blade. But Hans made do.

  He left the first warrior to die slowly as he addressed two more. One of the pair ran across the ground while the other was upside down on the ceiling.

  Hans went low to fight the grounded warrior first. He slid across the floor, his shield blocking a bladed forearm as he went. As soon as he passed beneath the spider abdomen, he thrust. Breaking through that part of the spider was like piercing the shell of an egg—an outer layer of resistance and then nothing but goo on the inside.

  As that terathan stumbled and started to lean, its life quickly fading, Hans popped out behind the ceiling terathan and cut two of its back legs. The sudden loss of limbs didn’t bring it down from the ceiling, but the surprise made it dangle for a moment. That brought another leg and one of the machete arms into range. Hans cleaved those away as well before finding the terathan’s heart a moment later.

  Even in death, the terathan stayed attached overhead.

  And that was excellent. More bodies worked in Hans' favor.

  Hans killed five more warriors before making his retreat. He worried he had pressed his luck too far but only directly encountered one other warrior on his way back down to his lair. He passed by several others, warriors who searched the lower floors for invaders, but he never had to fight them. Dispatching the one went swiftly, and his escape continued.

  The search that followed Hans’ attack was the busiest yet and lasted far longer as well. On several occasions, he heard terathans linger near his tunnel for long seconds before moving on, but none discovered him.

  Satisfied, Hans decided to take a nap before he moved on to the next phase of his plan: Venturing into the depths of the hive to kill the matron.