The expedition, all seven warriors and ten explorers, settled finally on flat ground, much to the comfort of even those that had taken to climbing up walls like dancing. Ranma looked about the grey rock surrounding them suspiciously.
The higher up he got, the less he liked this trip. The land was healthy, mostly, but he could feel threads of corruption here and there that said there was danger more than mere wildness. And some of it was close.
"Okay," Megumi said. "Now, when we got that telescope working, this is about where I saw what we're looking for. Kaiyo, you're the geologist and Haruki, you're the miner, where do we go from here?"
Ranma let the speaking fade out a bit as the non-fighters made their discussions, pointing and comparing experience and study and trying to apply it to this place, which apparently had at least a few different laws of nature.
When they rounded a corner into a sheltered alcove, Ranma's attention, along with everyone else's was rivetted forward.
There before them was a cave, but it couldn't be said to be raw and natural. There carvings along the edges, and work was being done to straighten it out and, perhaps affix a door to it eventually.
All the kumojin instinctively seemed to understand the runes that had already been placed about the cave entrance.
"These caverns are claimed in the name of the Scourge of the Frozen Throne."
It took Ranma and most of the fighters with him only a moment to realize that this place would not be unguarded this way.
They looked up just barely in time to see the rotting forms of the spider creatures crawling out of crevices surrounding them.
The zombie spiders spit out their webbing, trying to seal the kumojin party's fate. They were only partially successful.
Most of the non-fighters found themselves covered in the sticky goo, but only two of the fighters were caught, and even they were merely entangled, they could still fight.
Ranma watched two kumos charge up the walls with urgency to brave the swarms of stinging insects streaming from the dead creatures. One was Sgt Kimi Hirsh, a Japanese-American and a marine stationed in Japan as an embassy guard. The other was Akinori, a yakuze enforcer. Both knew their business well and soon their alchemically treated spears were piercing the hide of their target.
Ranma had little more time to note the beginnings of that battle before the swarms started stinging him and he had to press forward to take his own target. Sheilding his face and batting away at the incoming insects, he reached the slow and creaky crypt fiend and smashed a chi-imbued fist through one of the eyes.
"You are abberant beings," one of the crypt fiends said as it tried to avoid the press of his own attackers.
"At least we're alive," one of the Arachne snapped bitterly in return, using the same sort of chittering speech somehow.
The three crypt-fiends did not last long in such close quarters, but there were still problems.
Ranma looked about as the last crypt-fiend went down, quickly analyzing the situation before any reinforcements could come. He saw Kimi looking unsteady on her feet and Akinori looked like he'd be sick. Of the other pair of fighters that escaped the web, the kumo, a large sumo wrestler looked perfectly hale, but the arachne ex-cop, Sei...Ranma couldn't remember her surname, was only barely conscious.
The webbing was dissolving, and the non-fighters were in a variety of health states, though most had been spared the brunt of the attack.
"Let's get out of here before more come," Ranma said.
"Right," Megumi said hurriedly.
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(Posted Wed, 27 Dec 2006 02:34)
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