The wall behind Aya moved. Not breathing. Moving. The wood grain rippled like water, patterns shifting, and something pushed through from the other side. Not breaking through. Emerging. Like the wall was a permeable membrane instead of solid matter.
A leg. Chitinous. Black as oil slick. Segmented at precise intervals, each joint ending in a point sharp enough to pierce stone. The limb was as thick as Everest's torso, covered in fine hairs that each looked like needles.
Then another leg. Then another.
The wall burst inward properly now, wood exploding into splinters that glowed green in the fungal light, and a spider the size of a sedan filled their sanctuary with too many legs and malice.
Everest's mind registered details in the half-second before survival instinct took over: Eight legs, each with seven segments instead of the proper number. Eyes—hundreds of them—clustered across its head like a field of black mirrors, each one reflecting the green glow in infinite regression. Mandibles the size of his forearms, dripping venom that hissed where it hit the hollow's soft floor, eating craters into the decomposed matter.
And inside its translucent legs: shadows. Moving. Writhing. Like the wolf's void-matter had infected the spider's biology, turned it into a hybrid nightmare.
"MOVE!"
Aya scrambled backward, her heel catching on something in the mulch. She went down, skirt riding up as she kicked away from the descending mandibles.
Everest's hand found her wrist—yanked hard—and they tumbled sideways as the spider's strike cratered the space where Aya's head had been.
The floor gave way. Not collapsed—gave way. Like it had been waiting for the right amount of weight, the right moment. The soft mulch opened like a mouth, and they fell into darkness that had texture and temperature and hunger.
Everest felt silk wrap around his ankle mid-fall—thin but impossibly strong, immediate tourniquet pressure. The black silk robe billowed around him like wings, catching air, but the spider's silk yanked him horizontal with bone-jarring force.
Aya screamed—high and sharp and young—as her own fall accelerated.
Then: light. Bioluminescent. Blue-white, cold as LED, coming from lichen growing on cavern walls that suddenly materialized below them. An underground river, stone worn smooth by centuries of flow, water churning white over rocks.
They hit. Everest sideways—his body vertical, one leg still tangled in silk, the impact driving air from his lungs in a burst of bubbles. Cold shock. The river was freezing, mountain-melt cold, cold that seized every muscle simultaneously and turned thoughts to static.
The silk around his ankle pulled taut. He was being reeled back up, back toward the spider waiting in the hollow above, back toward those mandibles and that venom and—
His gray hand found a rock underwater—smooth, river-worn—and he brought it up against the silk strand with desperate, uncoordinated strength.
The strand held. Of course it held. Mythborn silk could hang buildings.
But something in Everest's chest screamed that this was wrong. Not thought—deeper. Instinct. Certainty. The kind of bone-deep knowing that bypassed logic entirely. This shouldn't be pulling me up. This is WRONG.
He slammed the rock against the silk again. Again. Each impact doing nothing, achieving nothing, except—except the pull was slowing. Not the silk weakening. The momentum itself hesitating, like gravity had checked its notes and found a discrepancy.
One more strike and the tension went slack. Not broke. Just... stopped. Like the universe had forgotten it was supposed to be reeling him in.
Everest didn't question it. Kicked free of the confused silk and surfaced gasping, found Aya already flailing toward shore—a bank of smooth stone that gleamed wetly under the lichen-light.
"SWIM!" he shouted.
They swam. More drowning than swimming, really—desperate thrashing toward the bank while the cold tried to lock their limbs and the current tried to drag them downstream and the spider above them shrieked with rage or confusion or both.
Everest's boots touched bottom. He stumbled forward, grabbed Aya's arm as she slipped on wet stone, hauled her up the bank with strength he didn't know he still had.
They collapsed on the stone together, gasping, shaking, drenched and freezing and alive.
For exactly three seconds. Then the spider descended. Silk-thread from the hollow above, each leg tip precise as a surgeon's scalpel, moving with the patience of something that knew its prey had nowhere to run.
"Up," Everest gasped. "We have to—"
"Can't." Aya's voice was shaking so hard the word barely formed. "Can't feel my legs. Too cold. Can't—"
The spider was halfway down now. Its hundred eyes all focused on them, reflecting their terror back in infinite regression.
Everest's mind raced through options with the cold precision he'd been trained for:
Run—Maximum survival probability for him alone: 60%. With Aya: 15%.
Fight—Laughable. Zero percent.
Hide—Nowhere. The cavern was exposed. Split up—The wolves hunt men. The spiders hunt women. If they separate, the spider will focus on Aya, giving him time to—
The spider was twenty feet away now. Fifteen.
Aya was shaking beside him, lips blue-tinged, eyes—those dead crimson eyes—staring up at the descending nightmare with the blank acceptance of someone who knew they were about to die.
Leave her.
The thought was ice-cold and perfectly logical. She was deadweight. Hypothermic. Couldn't move. The spider wanted her specifically—it had hunted her from the beginning.
Survival probability for him alone: 75%. For both of them: 10%.
The math was simple. Brutal. Correct.
"We split up," Everest said. Cold. Clinical. "The wolves hunt me. The spiders hunt you. Together we're a beacon. Separately—"
"What?" Aya's crimson eyes went wide. "NO—"
"It's logical. The spider will focus on you, I escape and loop back—"
"I'M FOURTEEN!"
The words echoed off the cavern walls. FOURTEEN FOURTEEN FOURTEEN—
The spider paused. Its mandibles clicked—clack-clack-clack—in what might have been curiosity.
Aya's face was pure terror. Not of the spider. Of him. Of being left.
"I can't—" Her voice cracked. "Please don't leave me. Please—"
She's manipulating you. Fear is leverage. She knows exactly what she's doing.
No she doesn't. She's just terrified. Same result either way.
The spider was ten feet away now. Eight.
Everest's mind screamed at him: LEAVE. SURVIVE. MAKE THE LOGICAL CHOICE.
His body moved. Toward Aya.