Her hand moved along his shaft. Martin lay on the bank of the pond, paralyzed. He was too aroused to remember that he should be panicking.

Ayla studied his face. Lust. So, this was what it looked like in reality.

His mouth was slightly open. His eyes had trouble focusing on her. A flush had crept up his neck. Experiencing it was meant to be different from watching it.

The feelings were more intense. Not for her, of course.

She had pulled his pants down a moment ago. What she found there was smaller than Jaxon’s memories had led her to expect.

Barely five inches. It twitched under her palm. A bead of fluid had already gathered at the tip.

"Aah. Don’t stop."

He made more sounds like that. Wet sounds. Desperate sounds. Ayla kept her hand moving because she was curious, not because she wanted to.

She was at the giving end. Perhaps that was why she felt nothing. Perhaps the feeling only came to the one being touched. She tested this.

She leaned forward and let him pull her down. His hands were already reaching. They slid up her bare back and pressed her closer.

His face found the space between her breasts and stayed there, breathing her in. His tongue dragged a slow line across her skin.

Ticklish, yes. Lust, no.

His hands moved lower, fingers pressing at the seam of her, trying to pry her open. He was shaking. She decided she was done.

A cold tendril slipped out from under her hair and found the soft cup of his ear. His hips were still moving when his vision went dark.

[Biomass Consumed: Human]

[Trait Acquired: Body Enhancement (E)]

Ayla sat on top of him and went through his memories. It was strange to see herself through his eyes. Her own face, floating in the pond.

Her own golden eyes opening. The way his chest had squeezed when she looked at him. He had thought she was beautiful. He had thought a great many things while she was killing his spiders for him.

"A woman I had only gazed up to. How good will her insides be?"

Ayla mouthed the dying thought because she was curious how it felt to say aloud. It did not feel like anything.

So, he had wanted her. He had wanted her very much. His whole body had been loud with it.

And she had felt nothing at all.

’So if I do not feel desire for anyone, there is no need to mate.’

The rule settled neatly into place beside the others she had written for herself. Humans needed both sides to agree, or at least to pretend to. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Monsters only needed one side to be stronger than the other. Mating was not a thing that had to happen to her. It was a thing that could happen if she wanted it to, and it seemed that she would not want it often.

Her eyes drifted over his body again. She found the word in his memories that described him.

"A retainer."

She said it aloud, turning it over. So humans kept other humans the way the Bloodnet Spider Mother kept her puppets.

Except humans did not have to kill first. They used rewards and promises. In a way, that was efficient. It fascinated her how the weakest humans came willingly and stood in front of the stronger ones to die.

Ayla slid off him and rinsed her hand in the water. The fluid he had left on her skin came away easily.

She stripped his clothes off him, piece by piece, and pulled them on. They hung loose on her thinner frame, the shirt sliding off one shoulder, the belt punched to the tightest notch and still slack. It was enough. It covered her.

She turned toward the tunnel the spiders had come from. More humans were somewhere down there; Martin’s memories said so. Weaker than the Spider Mother, all of them. She had no reason to be afraid.

She was becoming addicted to human brains.

Ayla shifted. The pressure came and went, and she was on eight legs again, tall and dark in the cavern mouth.

Her puppets lifted their heads around her. She moved into the tunnel, and they moved with her, a slow dark tide flowing into the dark.

Every dead spider she passed, she took. A thread of blood here, a thread there. The tunnel walls twitched as broken bodies pulled themselves upright and fell in behind her.

By the time she reached the far end of the passage, the place where Martin’s team had fought and lost, she had hundreds of them at her back.

The spider body was still new to her. Walking was one part of it. The eyes were another. Eight of them, each feeding her something slightly different, her brain weaving the signals into a picture that was wider and flatter than a human’s.

She could see behind herself without turning. She could see the ceiling and the floor at the same time.

And she could feel the air.

Small tremors traveled down through her legs from the stone. Larger ones came through the currents in the tunnel.

Footsteps, far ahead. Voices, muffled by distance but carried on the shake of the ground. She could not hear the words. She did not need to. She knew where they were.

Ayla turned her body toward them and began to walk. As she neared the sounds, the smell of blood permeated her nose.

It made her weirdly excited. The bloodnet spider was a creature that fed on blood. That explained her bloodlust. So, the form she equipped would affect her characteristics, Ayla noted.

She moved faster. Her puppets followed with skittering sounds. The tunnel narrowed and then opened into another cavern, smaller than the one she had left.

There he was.

A human leaned against a boulder at the far wall. His armor was scorched. One arm hung limp at his side. His head was tilted back against the stone as if he had given up on staying upright. His eyes were closed.

Ayla paused at the mouth of the tunnel. He did not move. If not for his chest rising and falling, he wasn’t any different from the dead bodies.

One of her eight eyes caught movement at the edge of her vision. A shadow, very small, where no shadow should have been. She turned her head slightly. Nothing.

The injured human coughed. A thin line of blood slipped from the corner of his mouth. Ayla stepped forward.

Her puppets stayed where they were, waiting for her signal. She wanted this one for herself. She wanted the brain fresh.

She crossed half the distance in three long strides. The human did not react. She crossed the rest in two.

Her front leg rose, sharp and fine, angled for the space between his ribs. She was already thinking about the taste.

The body on the boulder shimmered and was gone. Ayla’s leg cut through empty air. A blade came down on her back in the same instant.

She was ambushed. She learned it too late.