An Unwavering Craftsman

"Everyone cancel your flight potions and form up," ordered Fleta. The party followed her instructions: Fleta and Shigeo at the front, Damien and Grace at the back and Lana and Greenhair in the middle.

The fog continued to thicken until the sun wasn't visible and the group could barely see their own feet.

"We can't travel at any sort of speed like this," observed Damien. "We could step off a cliff. Or into one. It would be far quicker to go around."

"Quicker, yes, but we're still not going to," said Shigeo. "No way in hell was the way this fog was expanding natural. If we ignore it, who knows how far it could grow? If you want to protect Sanctuary, this is a good place to start."

"I can see far enough," said Fleta, using her enhanced senses to pierce the fog.

"What's with the ominous whispering?" asked Lana. "I feel someone should mention the whispering."

"That's something using an active telepathic scan. Given that the range matches the fog, I'm going to guess the two are linked, and the source is a monster."

"Then this monster knows we are here?" asked Greenhair.

"Most likely, yes. But that's not necessarily a bad thing; it means we have a target we can stab to solve the fog problem."

"I'm more concerned about how hard it is to breathe," said Damien. "This is... oppressive is the best word I can think of."

"That's the unnatural magic of a monster," said Shigeo. "Best you get used to it. My danger sense doesn't think it's dangerous to us."

"Right, mind magic and fog means it'll almost certainly try to separate us," said Fleta, quickly strategising. "Retie your ropes. Damien to Lana, then to Shigeo. Grace to Greenhair, then to Shigeo. Me to Shigeo. If required, I'll cut mine for the mobility."

Everyone moved quickly, not giving their adversary time to do anything more targeted, then Fleta started leading them deeper into the mists. Her intuition had been spot on. Repeatedly, the party found a thick wave of fog obscured their view of the member in front for a second or two, yet in that time, they managed to turn far enough away for the rope to be pulled taut.

On several occasions, the whispers intensified, words on the very cusp of hearing, before fading back into the background. Fleta and Shigeo recognised them as attacks. A type of hypnosis, used to draw victims deeper into the trap. Thankfully, their enchanted equipment harmlessly shrugged off the assault.

Shigeo smiled the smile of someone who had very clear ideas about who was the predator and who was the prey.

Fleta drew her daggers and dropped into a fighting stance. "Monsters. Can hear them, but not see them. At least... fifty. More than two legs each. Probably eight."

"Oh, please don't be spiders," moaned Shigeo, likewise drawing his weapon.

They were spiders. A metre tall, covered in a bristle-like fur, and with enormous fangs glistening with green venom. Giving away their monstrous nature—if their size wasn't enough—was the black mist that rose from the ground wherever they trod, the grass of the meadow withering under their touch. They came from everywhere, the party completely surrounded.

Damien drew a dagger, Lana her trusty adamantite hammer. Greenhair had trained on a bow since long before gaining his class, but it was useless in the fog, so he was forced to use a long knife. Their boosted physical abilities filled in for their lack of skills, and the monsters died quickly under their strikes. Grace used no weapon, but when spiders approached her, they stopped, turned and attacked their neighbours.

"Try not to let their blood touch you!" shouted Fleta, but they'd already caught on to the fact that the blood had the same life-leaching effects as their feet.

The battle was over in under a minute, Fleta having efficiently ended the monsters with one stab each. The disturbance lightened the fog briefly, giving the group a view of a ring of black corpses, black smoke pouring from them all, and a wide circle of dead grass.

"Cursed spiders," spat Shigeo.

"You dislike spiders that much?" asked Greenhair.

"No. Well, yes, but in this case, that's their common name. Cursed spiders. Melltirryn, to call them properly. They curse the land they walk on when they're alive, and if you kill them, it just releases an even bigger curse. Nothing green will ever grow here again until someone purifies the land. Normally, that would be a priestess of Gaia, but with recent events... Let's just hope there are others with appropriate skills."

"I can imagine this fog and mind magic combination as a web of sorts," said Fleta. "We could easily be dealing with an evolved form of a melltirryn here."

Once a monster formed, it attracted further monsters. Left alone, they'd swiftly form a nest. Once the population of the nest reached a critical mass, the monsters would spill and rampage. That much was commonly known. What was less commonly known—mainly because by the point things got that bad there wouldn't be any living witnesses in the area—was that when a nest spilled, the monsters would fight among themselves for any food that was available. And a dead monster was just more food.

Once a monster began cannibalising its kin, it would grow stronger. If it survived for long enough, it could evolve into an entirely new species. When that happened, if the evolved monster was sufficiently weak, an expert party like Fleta and Shigeo could deal with it. If it wasn't weak, outside help would be required. Valerie Spiratine had cleaned up more than one evolved monster in her time. Her flames were a great match for the task; collateral damage simply wasn't important, because by that point, there usually wasn't anything other than monsters left alive on the island.

Sometimes, people had wondered what would happen if the nest was left alone beyond that. Could a monster evolve twice?

"I'd rather not think about it. Let's just keep going."

They did, soon reaching the boundary between whatever island they were on and the Isle of Mist. It had a beach, but the sand was grey. Beyond the beach was lifeless rock and bare soil. No dead plants, or husks of trees. The fog drew darker, and the air stung to breathe.

"This whole island is cursed, and it has been for a long time," stated Damien.

"Yeah. Those spiders must have lived here a while. Maybe chasing down whatever's at the centre isn't such a great idea."

"No, I think we should. We're back in the real world now, and from the hints we've picked up so far, monsters like this will be commonplace here. It won't be long before the natives discover the reappearance of our continent."

They continued onwards, enduring another couple of attacks from the melltirryn. The whispers grew louder as whatever was at the centre of the net deemed the approaching party worthy of attention.

"Incoming. Only one. Two o'clock. Bigger!" shouted Fleta, causing everyone to once more draw their weapons.

This time, the footsteps were audible even to those without Fleta's enhanced senses; a rhythmic thudding rapidly growing in volume. A looming black silhouette emerged from the fog, three or four metres tall.

"Great. A giant spider," muttered Shigeo, activating an offensive skill and launching a blade of force at the menace, messily bisecting it.

It had been moving at speed, and its sudden death did nothing to arrest its momentum. He rammed his shield into the ground and activated a defensive skill, the two halves of the monster corpse crashing into his barrier and rebounding. The black blood splattered into a semicircle.

"Well, that was anticlima..."

"Shush!" exclaimed Shigeo, clamping a hand over Damien's mouth. "No proper adventurer would ever dream of saying that! It's just asking for fate to bite a chunk out of your bum."

"Any monsters in the area are more likely to hear you than me," Damien grumbled. Shigeo's attack had been loud.

Normally, an adventuring party would prefer a hundred smaller opponents to a single one with a hundred times the power, unless they lacked a member capable of area attacks. However, it depended on the relative power levels. When the smaller monsters were so weak that the difference between them and something bigger wasn't significant, the bigger monster would be preferred simply because it takes less time to kill one than a hundred.

Shigeo had never dreamed that he'd one day consider the difference between a melltirryn and what was presumably its evolved form as insignificant.

The group had barely got back up to speed before Fleta halted them again. "The big ones again. Lots of them, this time."

With a swarm of monsters coming from all directions, Shigeo couldn't deal with them in one strike, leaving the others needing to defend themselves. These monsters lacked the hair of their smaller counterparts, covered in a black, oily chitin. Black fog rolled out of their mouths, pouring onto the floor like waterfalls, where it spread out, covering the party up to their knees. The normal, white fog grew thicker too, masking the approaching enemies, and even hiding the group from each other.

Damien dodged to the side as a spear-like leg flew towards his face. His movement tugged on his rope, dragging Lana sideways. "Sorry!" he shouted, slashing at the leg with his dagger, severing the tip and causing a spurt of black fluids.

"I can slow them, but I can't control them!" shouted Grace, the enchantments not making up for her lack of a feat to increase the tier of monster she could tame.

Fleta acted in silence, flickering from spider to spider and driving her daggers deep into their brains. Greenhair and Lana did what they could, while Shigeo used his defensive abilities to ensure no harm came to anyone.

Damien continued to slash, the black blood hissing as it splashed onto his clothing and it failed to eat through it. A spider successfully jabbed him, but his clothing resisted that, too. The sounds of battle faded away as he stabbed more and more of the monsters, soon learning the spots that guaranteed an instant kill.

He was still fighting when he realised it was too quiet. Not only that, but he'd moved a fair distance, and hadn't noticed Lana dragging him back.

He looked down at the rope. The rope, splashed with the cursed blood, corroded and frayed.

Damien swore.

"Dad!" he yelled. "Mum!" There came no answer but more of the monstrous spiders. "Grace! Lana! Greenhair! Anyone!"

He didn't panic. He still had his enchanted equipment that rendered him nearly invulnerable to the spiders. Strong enough to fight a combat-focused tier nine. Their curses and venom weren't a threat to him. Getting lost was more serious. He needed food and water, and finding out whether the spiders were edible was not on his to-do list. At some point, he would need to sleep. However good his mana-woven clothing, if one of those spiders came at him while he was sleeping, he'd be dead.

The last of the monsters fell, and he pondered what to do. He couldn't hear further fighting, nor voices. Calling out himself again achieved nothing. There was no way he'd drifted far enough away from the group to be out of earshot. Not without help. Either the fog was dampening sound, or something was messing with his sense of distance, despite him resisting the hypnotic effect of the fog.

Something bit at his ankles, failing to penetrate the mana-woven cloth. Damien stabbed down on reflex, taking out another of the smaller monsters, hiding in the black smog. Or perhaps even summoned by it.

"Fine," he muttered under his breath, confidently striding forward. If this was a trap, there was nothing for it but to spring it.

Elsewhere, five other lost individuals worked through the same facts and drew the same conclusions. And, in the centre of the island, where the fog was dense enough to blot out all light completely, leaving the land in pitch-black darkness, a massive mass of shadow twitched in derision at the bugs that thought they could walk its domain with such impunity.