When faced with a horde of spiders filling the area directly above me, I responded in a calm, reasonable, and unhurried fashion. That is to say, I immediately spat out a cone of fire.

It blasted through the air, spiralling outwards as it rose, taking up more and more space. It lost power before it reached the ceiling proper, a wave of hot air nudging the matriarch to move, but failing to damage her.

The flame had done significant damage to the other spiders, however. Countless tiny spider corpses rained down around me, along with a few of the larger, fist-sized ones, and I had to step backwards slightly to avoid a spider corpse the size of a Labrador braining me. Bits of dessicated husk fell from above as well, the damage to the webbing knocking loose what looked like very old chunks of human(oid?) remains.

All of the remaining spiders took a certain amount of umbrage at the fire and death, and started scuttling their way down the wall at surprising speeds, much to the consternation and panic of the other people in the room with me.

A spray of radiant, scintillating colour shot into the air from just behind me, to absolutely no effect. The arrow that followed it was slightly more effective, failing to hit the matriarch but skewering one of the tinier arachnids to the wall behind it.

Things dissolved into chaos from there. The spiders swarmed from basically every angle, and the presence of my party members prevented the obvious response of sweeping out another cone of fire, forcing the fight into a close melee.

The enormous matriarch was swiftly interrupted by Julie charging towards it, as Zahri engaged a number of the dog-sized ones, Lidda dropped her bow, drew a dagger, and started stabbing spiders, and Sabrina made a bee-line for the door, stomping on one of the fist-sized ones on the way.

I had two major advantages when it came to spider killing. The first was the fire breathing, capable of wiping out a number of the little bastards in one go. I had to stick to the line form, rather than the cone (something I discovered was simply a matter of how I held my mouth as the flame roiled out), due to the presence of the rest of the party, who I could only assume would complain about being set on fire, for some reason.

The second was the ability to completely ignore the spiders crawling over me. While the others needed to repeatedly dislodge the ones that had crawled up them and started biting, the ones on me couldn't get through my skin. They were irritating, yes, but their failure to be able to actually inject their venom meant that I could focus solely on the larger, dog-sized ones.

Combat went more slowly here than it did the previous couple of times. No, that wasn't quite true. Combat went at about the same speed, but the fact there was something in the range of twenty to thirty spiders, even if a great number of them were smaller and weaker than the undead, made it drag on.

I was attracting a lot of attention from all of the spiders, which was something that I didn't actually mind, as it took pressure off of the others. It did make me wonder about the complete lack of anything resembling survival instincts from them, though, as they threw themselves at me in what I could only assume was an attempt to smother me to death, given how little their fangs were doing.

The rest of the party wasn't doing quite as well as I was, although that wasn't to say that hadn't killed a fair number of their own each. Lidda had been darting in and out of the area around me, stabbing the spiders going for me in the abdomen (or was it the thorax? Whatever), and then getting out of dodge before they turned around. Our resident cleric, on the other hand, had moved to cover the back of Julie, keeping some of the bigger of the eight-legged bastards away from her while occasionally sweeping the smaller ones off of her, letting the fighter focus on trying to take out the horrifically large abomination of a spider. I was pretty sure even Australia would look at this thing and consider it a step too far. Even Sabrina had killed a couple, having retreated to the doorway and started using her quarterstaff as a combination spear/golf club, hitting the fist-sized ones away before they could reach her.

Unfortunately, none of them had had the protection granted to me by my skin, and all of them had been bitten at some point, ranging from the small bites on Sabrina's ankles to the chunk taken out of Julie's arm.

I burnt the last of the Lassie spiders to death at about the same time Julie stabbed mummy spider in the face, taking it down. From there, it was just polishing off the rest of them, which given they were mostly on me, was a simple task of grabbing one, pulling it off, and letting it get stabbed. I briefly considered just hosing myself down with fire, but while I knew I was immune to it, I didn't know if my clothing was, and being naked in a dungeon seemed like a bad idea.

By the time all of the spiders were dead, we were covered in blue ichorous blood, and surrounded by loose legs and spider parts. The extended fight had just ramped up my adrenaline, although at least I had something I could do with it, namely making sure to burn out all of the webbing by the ceiling.

As I started walking to one of the corners (I'd have to use the line to reach the top of this place, and that wasn't the widest thing. Might as well start in one corner and work my way across), Zahri tapped me on the shoulder.

"Bites?"

I couldn't help myself. "It does, doesn't it?" At her unimpressed expression, I relented. "I'm good, none of them made it through."

She raised a single eyebrow. "Really?"

"A knife bounced off of me, I can deal with spider bites. I'm more worried about the rest of you, I'm pretty sure those things are venomous."

Tilting her head to the side, she considered for a second, and then nodded. "Thank you." At that, she turned on her heel and went back to the others, poking Julie in her bitten arm before the smell of lavender filled the air again.

I started burning the shite out of the webs. All of these spiders were far too large for my comfort, and I was perfectly happy making sure that they never saw the light of day, and if I had to personally scorch every section of the room to make sure that happened I would do so. The undead weren't nearly as bad, they were human-shaped, human-sized, and I was familiar with the concept. I'd fought humanoid enemies before, although admittedly in sparing. But there's something about a spider as big as you are rushing towards you at speed to really set off that caveman part of your brain that wants absolutely nothing to do with anything like that. And so I slowly burnt the fuck out of this place.

By the time I'd finished my self-imposed task of arson, a number of dessicated corpses had smouldered and collapsed, raining body parts down to the floor to mix in with the spider parts. I poked one of them with my foot, and it simply disintegrated into dust.

Zahri had finished patching up the others as best she could. The chunk taken out of Julie's arm had been healed magically, from the looks of things, but the rest were wrapped in some kind of poultice laden bandages. A level of wooziness was evident in all of them, but they seemed game to keep pushing, so I wasn't going to say anything.

Lidda, on the other hand, was not so silent. "Not a fan of spiders, huh?" She seemed quite sanguine with regards to all of the arachnid fragments surrounding her, actually picking up one of the larger legs and absently toying with it.

"I'm fine with spiders." I said. "I'm perfectly fine with your average spider. Spiders like that, though?" I wandered towards the biggest spider, and absently compared sizes. The main body of the thing was about the size of my head and torso together, with the legs adding two to three times that.

"Spiders like this can fuck right off. If it can eat a horse, I'm not a fan of it being near me. You know how spiders eat prey?" I gestured to the remains of one of the husks. "They liquefy your insides and

then drink it. And they're big enough to do that to me. So I repeat, can fuck right off." I kicked the thorax (abdomen?) of the matriarch to emphasise my point. It twitched and bulged grotesquely.

I found myself a couple of steps away from the body with no memory of having actually moved backwards, much to Lidda's obvious glee.

"It's probably pregnant. I've heard they carry around thousands of eggs at a time, and they can all hatch at once, flooding out." She told me with barely restrained mirth.

I continued with my theme of rational, reasonable responses by blasting the corpse with another stream of fire. I kept this one up to the point where it was mildly uncomfortable, a lack of oxygen causing me to have to breathe actual air. The corpse itself, and the potential of a swarm of man-eating spiders, crumbled into ash. It was probably an overreaction, but I still felt perfectly justified doing it.

Lidda continued to find the whole thing hilarious. The other three seemed fairly casual about the whole thing, both the spiders and my heated reaction to them, Sabrina even picking at and analysing some of the spider remains, but Lidda was chortling to herself. "You're such a boy."

"Fire is an appropriate response to a wide range of situations, shite like this included." I retorted, to which she just shook her head.

A minute with the ring of Prestidigitation cleaned the blood and ash off of me, followed by cleaning everyone else as well. A raised eyebrow from Zahri had me point out the possibility of disease, a point she accepted with a nod, before going back to kicking through the ash with Julie, the pair apparently looking for something, but immediately dirtying themselves again.

This whole thing had prompted a couple of questions that I wanted to ask, though. "Have people gone missing from the village recently?"

Confused looks were my response. "We've not been there long, but not that I've been aware of, no. Why?" Julie seemed almost hesitant in her response, stopping rooting through the ash to answer me.

"Well, there were a lot of humanoid corpses up there before I burnt them all, and they had to have come from somewhere. The spiders will have needed to eat something, and there didn't look like there was any other wildlife around."

"Ah, I can answer that." Sabrina barely let me finish speaking before cutting in. "It's unlikely that the arachnids were preying on anything outside of the crypt in such large quantities, the seals that would have been on the doors would have stopped the larger of the creatures getting outside. The very small ones" and here she pointed at one of them I hadn't burnt, which was still tarantula sized "would have been able to escape and eat insects, or possibly small birds, but the larger ones would have probably been working their way through the preserved corpses in the crypt itself. I'm unsure if they would have fought the undead within, or just avoided them, it would depend on the orders the undead were under. Still, fascinating, no?"

Jesus woman, you can breathe every now and again, the words aren't going to escape from you. Still, that wasn't really polite to say, so I went for a "That makes sense, thank you." instead.

By this point our front-liners had found what they were looking for, a badly scorched but still intact husk of a human figure. Scraps of clothing had escaped my fire, but ash and charcoal covered most of it.

"This them?"

"It's difficult to tell now, Zar, but I think so, yeah." Julie replied. "I guess we can't really bring them back anymore."

"Bury them outside."

"We'll need to find a shovel, but it's a good plan. What do we tell her parents?"

"The truth?" Zahri's deadpan came to the fore again.

"What, your daughter was eaten by a spider and then burnt when we killed off the swarm? No offence, Mahz, better safe than sorry, but it's still a hell of a thing to tell people."

I shrugged. It's not like it would have looked that much better pre-fire, and at least this way there wasn't much of chance of it being full of spider eggs, an idea that was agreed with when I verbalised it.

The corpse was gently placed by the entrance to the room, to be picked up again when we left. Another round with the ring cleaned the ash off of us again, and we started pushing deeper into the crypt again. At least the spiders were probably the worst thing we were likely to face.

Ah fuck, that thought was just taunting fate, wasn't it?