She should have alarmed when she sensed multiple presences but found only one injured human.

Alas, now it is too late. Humans are certainly cunning.

The blade made a cold line through her carapace as if her shell were made of paper. Something in her abdomen tore.

The pain was too intense; she cried out. It came out as a screech.

She lunged sideways, narrowly avoiding another slash.

The blade followed her. A second cut opened along her flank. A third took one of her back legs off at the joint.

"Clean work."

The voice was calm. Young. It came from above her. Ayla looked up. A boy stood on the boulder where the injured human had been.

He could not have been older than nineteen. His hair was dark and neatly cut; his coat trimmed with silver thread at the collar. A long sword rested in his right hand, edged in pale blue light. He was not breathing hard.

Behind him, four more figures stepped out of the air. They had not been there a moment ago. Ayla was certain of that. Her eight eyes had seen the whole cavern.

"Young Master, the trait worked," one of them said.

"As expected," the boy said. He tilted his head, studying her the way she had studied Martin. "A Feral. But not so smart."

"Sir?"

"Bloodnet Spiders hunt with their web. This one came forward on its legs." The boy’s eyes narrowed. "And the puppets stopped at the entrance. Bloodnet Mothers drive their dead in first."

Ayla understood. The injured human had been a projection. She was outsmarted.

She reached for the heat in the cavern. It was there, but thin, spread across too much space. The boy was warm.

The four behind him were warm. She gathered what she could and threw it at him in a compressed line, the way she had learned to throw Fire Bolts.

The boy raised his sword. The heat split around the blade and dissipated behind him. He did not move his feet.

"Mana signature is wrong for a spider," he said in surprise. "Pyromancy. Could the apocalypse tunnel have mutated it?"

He stepped off the boulder. Ayla shrieked and pulled on every thread of blood in the cavern. The puppets at the tunnel mouth surged forward.

All of them, legs scraping the stone, converging on the boy from every angle. He did not turn to look at them.

One of his retainers raised a hand. A wall of pale light rose between the puppets and their master; the dead spiders crashed into it and stopped. They clawed at the light. The light did not move.

"Contain them," the boy said.

"Yes, Young Master."

He kept walking toward Ayla. She tried to rise onto her back legs. She tried to burst her own abdomen the way she had burst the Mother’s, to take him with her. She reached for the heat inside her own body.

The boy’s blade was already at her throat.

Pain. Then cold. Then the strange, sinking feeling of her spider body coming apart around her. Her legs gave out.

Her carapace split down the center. The blood she had been holding in her threads poured out of her in a wave and soaked into the stone. Ayla felt her form collapse.

[Form 002 has been destroyed..]

Deep inside the ruin of the spider, her real body pulled itself small. A pale slime, no larger than a fist, curled tight against the inside of what had been her skull. The boy stood over the wreckage. He wiped his blade on a cloth one of his retainers handed him.

"Burn it?" the retainer asked.

The boy considered. "No. The corpse has value. Strip the core and the silk glands. Leave the rest."

"And the brain?"

"Crushed already. Look at the wound." He nodded at the split carapace. "Nothing left worth taking."

Ayla did not move. She held every part of herself still, pressed against the inside of a dead thing, while humans walked around her and spoke over her body as if she were already gone.

A hand reached into the wreckage near her. She flattened further.

"Where is the core?" one of the retainers said. The young man frowned.

"Strange..." he murmured. Ayla could sense his confusion. She had to escape from here before they found her.

If they destroyed her slime core, it would be the real end for her. Ayla thanked the heavens for the blade to miss her slime form. If not, she would already be dead.

She slipped out through a crack in the broken carapace, pale and small again, no bigger than she had been on the day she was born.

She slid down the side of the ruined spider and into the dark water at the base of the cavern wall. She pressed herself flat against the stone.

Her status screen flickered in her vision. This fight had taught her a great lesson. The constant wins in battles made her arrogant.

She thought she could win against the humans after she defeated the spider. That almost cost her life.

If she wasn’t arrogant and sent her puppets first to check the injured human, perhaps she could have had a fighting chance.

Ayla summoned her status screen.

Name: Ayla

Traits: Perfect Assimilation, Pyromancy (C), Bloodnet (B), Body Enhancement (E)

Rank: Iron

Level: 4 (100/400)

Available Forms:

Form 001: Human (Equip? Y/N)

Form 002: Bloodnet Spider (destroyed, biomass lost)

She watched with sadness as Form 002 grayed out and erased from her screen. The spider form was gone.

She would have to devour another Bloodnet Spider to get it back. Her small body trembled against the stone.

It was not cold. It was something else. Something she did not have a word for yet, though her acquired memories offered several.

Fear, one of them said. Humiliation, said another.

Ayla shifted into her human form.

She sat on the ground with her legs pulled to her chest.

She had been the predator in the cavern with Martin. She had been the predator in the pool of slimes. She had burst a Feral apart from the inside and felt nothing but interest.

And a human of her own rank had cut her in half without raising his voice.

She recalled what that human called her.

"I am an idiot..."

Something warm slipped out of her eyes. In the dark cavern, the sobs of a girl broke the silence.