Hans had four Nightsight potions, ten Cure Poison potions, and five Greater Heal potions. Every bottle had been improved with the Harden spell, but he worried one unlucky fall or blow could be the end of his entire potion supply. So he divided them up between belt pockets on both sides of his waist. That way, if he did take a tumble, at least a few would survive.

  The only other items stored on his belt were his knife and his matches. He could cast Create Fire, but he couldn’t do that quietly or quickly enough if an enemy actively pursued him.

  He emptied his pack and filled it with sconces wrapped in dried terathan web–which he now referred to as “web bombs”–his first aid kit, and one terathan arm machete for if he lost his sword somehow. Lastly, he hung his rope from the side of the bag for quick access.

  Hans hooked a chain to a metal spike, planning to hammer the spike in place at the lowest floor of the castle with his stone mallet. That was the closest to the bottom of the terathan highway as he could get without leaving the ruins. Those items were bulky, but he wouldn’t need to carry them for long.

  He would have preferred to use rope for the descent, but ropes burned. Chains wouldn’t. He hoped that increased his chances of a successful retreat if he needed to come back here. His greater hope was that he’d never see this fucking castle again.

  After a recheck of his supplies, Hans was ready.

  He stashed his bag near where he planned to attach the chain to climb down into the hive, and then he crept to the top floor with only his sword and the final piece to his plan: An improvised fuse.

  He made the fuse out of rope unraveled into strands, lichen, and lamp oil. To process the lichen scraped from castle corners, he gave it time to dry and then compacted it tightly. As he braided a thinner version of the rope back together, he wove lichen into it as he went. Lastly, he soaked the length in what lamp oil he had left. The very end of the rope was tied to a web bomb.

  That combination of materials should burn reliably at a controlled pace. Half of that was guesswork, and Hans was certain Olza would have done a better job. He was pretty sure, however, that this would go how he intended.

  All of Hans’ attacks and kills happened on the second floor, the highest floor to which he had access. That was a deliberate choice on his part. He wanted his enemy to be trained on the idea that problems started there and not anywhere else. In the short term, that was to keep them away from his hideout, but now, that was a key part of his misdirection strategy.

  On the second floor, he paused down the hall from the terathan highway. As soon as he deployed his fuse, the battle would begin, as would the final act of his fourth attempt at Diamond. Failing a fourth time would be an embarrassing start to the afterlife.

  He took a slow breath and crept down the corridor. He set the web bomb a hair away from the silk of the highway and ran the improvised fuse down the hallway.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Hans struck a match. He saw the end of the rope go up in flames, watched it for a moment to confirm it was moving down the fuse as planned, and then ran as quickly as he could to the bottom floor. His intention was to draw as many terathans out of the hive as possible. While they searched the castle ruins yet again for their mystery invader, he would enter the hive to begin the next attack.

  He reached his gear in minutes. Between memorizing the route and having a healthy, athletic body, the journey was simple enough that he wasn’t even breathing heavily. He pulled on his pack, tightened the straps, and edged forward to the bottommost edge of the terathan highway.

  Shadows of drones and warriors zipped upward, racing toward the fire at the top. When it seemed like the majority of the rush was past, which took maybe two minutes in total, Hans pounded the iron stake into the floor between two bricks. He set this section of web on fire as well, and as soon as the flames burned an opening in the highway, he tossed the chain through and quickly descended.

  Hans’ descent was more of a fall than a climb, but he had just enough control with his grip that he didn’t break his ankles. He risked a glance up the vertical shaft of the highway.

  Drones and warriors darted around the web, several of them already alight and screaming as the flames cooked their insides. A few of them noticed the flames traveling up from the bottom, but Hans suspected most of them would either be delayed by that discovery or outright burnt to death.

  As soon as he stepped inside the hive itself, walking through rounded tunnels dug out by terathan drones, Hans encountered two warriors. In their rush to respond to the cries for help, they hadn’t anticipated running headfirst into an enemy.

  Hans put a sword into the stomach of one and cut the arm off the other before removing its head.

  And his pace barely slowed. He glided through the enemy with the same ease of running a well-practiced escape route.

  In Hans’ first two attempts at Diamond, he tried to hold his ground in one of the main tunnels and fight every terathan he saw. In his third attempt, he adjusted his strategy to instead drive directly for the matron from the start of his run. Neither approach effectively managed the volume of enemies Hans had to deal with as a solo adventurer. He got overwhelmed, which slowed him down and made him vulnerable to the venom of the terathan sorceresses.

  For this attempt, Hans was determined to sow as much chaos as possible before seeking out the matron.

  So when he entered the hive this time, he peeled off the direct route to the matron to find the egg chambers. That part of the hive was likely to be dense with drones with a few warriors protecting it, but Hans believed the warriors would prioritize defending the matron over her eggs.

  At least initially.

  Hans cut down four more terathan warriors on his way. His body seemed to know instinctually what movements to make and when, turning every encounter into a graceful dance where Hans weaved through attacks to get the kill. Then he transitioned effortlessly to the next. With the mind of Old Hans and the body of Young Hans, combat was exhilarating. His confidence was unflappable, and his energy seemed boundless.

  It felt so good to be this kind of adventurer again that Hans couldn’t stop grinning. The best of all of him was in this fight. He wasn’t compensating for an injury or working around some other kind of shortcoming. Perhaps this was his heaven, actually. None of the hells could be this fun.

  The drones managing the eggs–a task the matron delegated instead of doing herself–rushed Hans. Eleven of them sped down the tunnel in his direction, their numbers clogging the route he needed to take. Hans turned and ran.

  As he did, he fished for his matches and pulled two web bombs from his bag.

  The web-covered sconces turned to fireballs in an instant, and Hans felt the leather of his gloves begin to melt against the heat.

  He turned, catching the charging drones by surprise, and whipped each web bomb down the tunnel. The first hit a drone in the lead, setting it alight, sending it running and burning back through its allies. As it went, the flames it carried caught the little hairs on its hivemates, spreading the fire to other drones who in turn had the same panicked reaction.

  The second web bomb went over their heads, aiming to set fire to the drones toward the back of the cluster.

  As soon as the second web bomb was out of his hands, Hans rushed the drones. The bodies of dead terathans became individual bonfires as their corpses burned in Hans’ wake. He felt like an honest-to-gods hero as his blade cut through monster after monster, the smell of burning bugs and dark smoke filling the tunnel.

  He found the eggs.

  A series of chambers attached to the tunnel, akin to cells in a jail, and each was densely packed with terathan egg sacs. Hans giddily tossed a web bomb into each, slowing his run to a light jog to ensure he hit his mark with every throw.

  Now the terathans had three problems to address.

  The entrance to their hive was on fire, again. Dozens and dozens of unborn terathans burned alive in their eggs. And a lone adventurer ran loose in their tunnels, potentially endangering the matron.

  But known fires were more demanding of their attention than a possible threat. If Hans read the terathans correctly, many of them would rush to save the eggs, drawing the majority of their attention away from his true target.

  His path to the matron was not entirely undefended. He still had to cut through drones and warriors as he went. At one point, a glob of venom bounced off his shield, so he withdrew to hide behind the nearest corner. He hit one sorceress with a web bomb. His second web bomb missed the other sorceress, but that was fine. The flames gave him enough time to close the distance and get the kill.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  A few paces away, he felt the burn of venom running down the back of his armor and the growing sensation of liquid glass pumping through his veins. His vision began to blur, and his world started to shift and bend as if the tunnels had become waves.

  That was careless. One of the sorceresses wasn’t entirely dead and hit him in the back.

  Taking slow, controlled breaths, he quaffed a Cure Poison potion. He needed six full cycles of inhaling and exhaling for the potion to do its work. Then the pain subsided, and his focus cleared again.

  Onward.

  He couldn’t say exactly how long he had been running down terathan tunnels chopping drones, warriors, and sorceresses to pieces, but he needed to refresh his Nightsight potion twice. That combined with the one he started with meant he had been at it for about three hours. Sweat ran down his body, but his heart rate and breathing stayed steady as his feet ran to the rhythm of combat.

  Another sorceress blocked his path and cast Lesser Ice repeatedly in rapid succession, pelting Hans with a hailstorm of grapefruit-sized ice.

  He blocked most of them with his shield, but one chunk smacked into his thigh. The impact made him stumble. He brushed off the pain. He parried a slash from the sorceress, ducked a glob of venom when she spit, and brought his sword up under her ribs. The monster gasped and aimed an angry machete down at Hans. In one motion, he withdrew his sword, parried the blow with his shield, and spun, cutting the other arm off entirely before it could finish a swing.

  The matron had to be close. Hans had never gotten this far in real life, so this was no longer a nightmare of his own making, it seemed. Something that knew what the center of the hive looked like would have had to build this. He didn’t have the memory to do so himself.

  He set a sorceress’ corpse on fire and continued down the tunnel. The passages widened here as though they were meant to accommodate something larger. Like a matron.

  Hans was so giddy he had a bounce in his step. He felt like a children’s book character, prancing down a golden road to a magical castle. Gods, he even felt like whistling.

  Ahead, Hans heard the familiar hissing of terathans communicating. They were joined by a singular noise that was part wolf’s howl and part harpy screech. With a shrug, he dropped his pack and removed his final three web bombs. He refreshed his Nightsight potion. He had a good bit of time left on his present dose, but the world going dark in the middle of a fight wasn’t worth the risk of him estimating the time incorrectly.

  He took a fresh inventory of his remaining potions. He hadn’t lost count, but the certainty of knowing he checked and had recommitted their location to memory eased his mind. He strapped the terathan machete to his back with an improvised sheath crafted from bedroll scraps.

  Hans uncorked a Cure Poison potion and poured the liquid into his mouth but didn’t swallow. This was an old trick he took from one of his Hoseki instructors. There were a few tournaments where Hans’ mouth went dry as soon as a match started, and that sensation distracted him for the rest of the match. The instructor told him to take a mouthful of water and wait to swallow it until the match began.

  No more dry mouth.

  That instructor was old when Hans was young and passed away years ago, but maybe he would be hanging out with Gret in the afterlife, and Hans could see him again soon too. With a content smile, Hans removed his last three web bombs and set them on the ground, keeping one of the contraptions away from the other two. He lit that one with a match and left it burning on the ground as he picked up the unlit pair.

  Fourth time’s a charm.

  Hans sheathed his sword and used the fire at his feet to light two more web bombs. One stiff kick sent the first burning web bomb down the tunnel and into the matron’s lair. Hearing the terathans yell in alarm made him smile, and he almost spit out his potion as a result, but he managed to keep his lips sealed.

  The matron’s lair was one giant hollow sphere about a quarter the size of the gazer throne room in the Gomi dungeon. The walls weren’t completely coated in webs but rivers of the sticky silk wrapped around much of the room, with bare dirt showing through from beneath. The matron hung upside down from a strand in the middle, screaming at Hans as he entered.

  Lesser terathans had the torsos of a large person, while the mid-tier variety of warriors and sorceresses were more akin to the tall ones in the Tainted Caves.

  A matron, however, had a torso the scale of an ogre’s and a spider body to match. She was well fed and pampered, her fat draping down around her as she watched from her inverted perch. Two sorceress terathans flanked their queen. One cast Ice and spit venom at Hans while the other attempted to douse the burning web with a water spell. The web bomb had done its job, and Hans doubted the fire could be contained at this point. It had already burned along three or four separate paths of silk and continued to spread.

  He blocked the Ice spell with his shield, the size of the projectile hitting him with great force. A sharp pain went up his shoulder from the blow, but he didn’t falter. He threw one web bomb at the nearest sorceress and the second at the matron.

  The sorceress swatted the bomb off course while the matron watched flames splash harmlessly against her Barrier spell.

  Hans drew his sword. He rolled to the side to dodge another burst of venom. He blocked a Force Bolt with his shield and sidestepped a second toxic glob.

  The matron spun upright and looked over her shoulder as her abdomen sprayed web at Hans. He could dodge the silk or the continued barrage of venom. Not both.

  He swallowed his Cure Poison potion the instant he felt the venom clawing at his skin. The pain was still blinding, but Hans had come too far to be slowed by simple suffering.

  Gritting his teeth, he stabbed his sword into the ground and drew the terathan arm from his back. He blocked two more spells and chopped at the matron’s stream of web with the machete arm. As he expected it to, the sharp edge cut through the silk and wrapped the arm at the same time. With one end of the web attached to the matron and the other to the arm in his hand, looking like an overwrapped unlit torch, Hans charged the terathan who had given up on smothering the flames.

  Hans blocked venom with his shield, but the splash still soaked him.

  Hold out.

  Just before he came within melee range of the sorceress, still dragging the web along with him, he pivoted and dashed toward the fire. He stabbed the machete into the flames and felt it bite deep into the dirt wall. The fire leapt to the fresh silk immediately and ran up the threads toward the matron’s abdomen.

  Hans dove back toward his sword and rolled to his feet with the blade in his hand.

  The venom felt like his every fiber of muscle dripped lava, but Hans couldn’t pause. Not yet.

  He was back on the nearest sorceress a moment later. Something hit him in the leg, but he ignored it. He faked going low and then went high, swinging his blade with the underhand uppercut Devon loved. His shield cleared the way, parrying the same arm that the sword cut free immediately after. Another parry, and he twirled around the terathan. He cut a leg off and threw himself behind the monster.

  With his sword running through the sorceress's spine, Hans rode her body to the ground, where she lay on her side, dead and shriveled. Hans heard spells smacking into the corpse as he glugged a Cure Poison potion and then a Greater Heal potion just to be safe. He had felt a few different spells strike him in the chaos and suspected his adrenaline hid the worst of the pain from him, so an extra Heal couldn’t hurt.

  A long spider leg hooked the dead terathan and pulled to roll it away from Hans.

  It was the matron, half her body charred. Her chitin was cracked, and her flesh peeled.

  She lunged forward to strike at the adventurer, but Hans was gone. He had slipped around the dead sorceress before his position was exposed, and by luck, he went to the side where the matron was the most burned. He thrust at her spider abdomen with all his might and felt his sword penetrate flesh beneath the hard shell.

  A glimmer in Hans’ peripheral vision told him to duck. The still-living sorceress struck her own matron with an Ice spell, intending to hit Hans.

  The matron roared and spun hard to slash the human.

  He dove forward, rolled under the matron, and came straight up from beneath. When his hilt hit the drum, to borrow Boden’s terminology, he twisted and pushed, attempting to slice up as much of the spider’s insides as he could without withdrawing his blade.

  Thrashing to save herself, the matron flailed, trying to shake Hans loose. But he held strong. After the first explosion of fury, the matron hesitated.

  She was dying.

  Hans held fast and felt the matron begin to go limp.

  He slid to the side as he withdrew his sword to avoid being crushed by the massive spider body.

  The last sorceress pounced on him, and the sudden force knocked the sword from Hans’ hand. A machete bit into his biceps, and another surge of venom wracked his system.

  Hans didn’t bother getting his sword. He went at the terathan with only his shield. After he bounced against it with his charge, he punched the edge of his shield into the monster’s humanoid abdomen and then did it again. As soon as its head dipped low enough, he struck the terathan in the face.

  As it fell, he kept striking. Over and over and over until the monster finally shriveled up and died.

  Hans drank a Cure Poison potion and then a Greater Heal potion.

  He looked around. The room was quiet save for the crackling of fire and his own labored breaths.

  The matron was dead.

  He won.

  Final Quest Complete: Finish your Diamond quest.

  Laughing, Hans dropped to his butt as he heaved to catch his breath. He won. He actually won.

  Hans the Diamond-ranked. He liked the sound of that. Having that rank when he was alive would have been nice, but this was better than going to his grave a failure.

  “Looking forward to telling you guys about this,” Hans said as if Gret and Boden were in the room. “I hope you took care of Bel and Lee for me too. Did you give them a sendoff like this?”

  But nothing happened.

  The hive didn’t change. No being appeared to collect him. The quest was over, and he was still in this place.

  Climbing to his feet, Hans approached the matron. She wore the same calcite pendant he had seen with the tall ones. This one didn’t glow purple, however, so he wasn’t going into the afterlife with a Diamond boon.

  Did that matter?

  Probably not.

  While Hans pondered what to do, he spotted a circular stone in the middle of the room. Its diameter was a little smaller than the tunnel he had dug for his castle hideout.

  Mazo and Devon never said anything about this in their stories from the hive.

  Grunting to move it, Hans lifted the stone and pushed it aside to reveal a room below.

  With the aid of Nightsight, he saw another circular stone several feet down, an exact copy of the one he had just moved, and then a wooden box was off to the side. Gods, it smelled like death in there.