I moved back to put myself between the spiders and our back row, cast on my Inferno weapon, then before stepping forward and using the full reach of my battlestaff to thrust it at the closest of the two spiders. It ignited briefly, but kept coming towards me once it shook off the blow.

  “Weak to ice,” Sam called out.

  That explained why fire was feeling underwhelming. I switched to my Arctic staff and cast in its spear form. I had no confidence in killing like this. I just needed to contain them until the others could assist.

  The spiders grew more cautious of me now, while I was only scoring glancing blows; it was enough to impede them and keep them away from Daisy and Kelsey.

  Kelsey’s ice arrows whistled past me, hitting the spiders with an audible thud, and pushing them back a step. Each one of her hits also caused the one it hit to slow slightly. On her fourth hit, the spider froze for a few seconds, making it easier for me to get stabs in.

  Still, I was being forced to keep backing up. The burn grew in my arms with every thrust, confirming that this was a losing situation.

  Sam was suddenly behind them, his ice sheathed rapier skewering one of the spiders. The appearance surprised me. I almost skewered him when my lunge deflected off the spider's chitin.

  When Voice joined us a moment later, we managed to finish off the last of these larger spiders and pulled back once more to recover. I gasped when I turned to see four of the larger spiders’ corpses curled up near the cafe where my teammates had been fighting. No wonder I had been fighting alone for so long.

  “Elemental resistances?” I rhetorically asked after I had gotten my mana back up. Once I switched to , I had barely used any, so it didn’t take long. “I wasn’t expecting that…”

  “Surprised me as well,” Sam commented. “After we had put that effort into learning fire spells as well…”

  “I’m going to need to figure out to have a rank 1 ice spell…” I muttered.

  “?” Daisy said. “I thought the rank 1 arctic spell was .”

  “Err…” Shit, did I make assumptions in my spell choice just because I really wanted a cool-sounding ice spell?

  I pulled up the two Arctic spells I had and started parsing through them. I think I had located the part which made them Arctic when Daisy reported being full of mana.

  “Garage next?” Sam asked.

  “That would clear the last building near the front,” Voice agreed.

  “Should we be concerned there might be something flammable in there?” Sam asked as there was a thrum from Kelsey’s bow. She beat me to the punch and loosed a red, flickering arrow in through the open garage door.

  The joyful expression on her face faded into one of worry as she turned to look at Sam. “What?” she asked. There was a whoomph as the flame spread rapidly through the room’s webs.

  “DOWN!” shouted Voice, as he dived onto Daisy, taking her down and below the short wall. Sam took Kelsey down a moment later. I didn’t respond quite as quickly. I had time to see the closed doors buckle as the flame suddenly hit something deeper in the garage, and a humongous boom echoed around the area.

  The sound of my grunt as I hit the grass was followed by a loud ringing thud of something heavy hitting the ground and then the thunderous roar of a large open fire.

  “Anyone hurt?” I asked.

  “I’m good,” Voice responded.

  “Just my pride,” Daisy said before saying, in a quieter voice, to Voice, “thank you.”

  “We’re good,” confirmed Sam.

  I pushed myself up onto my knees and looked at the building. A torrent of thick black smoke was emerging from where the roof once was. The far right garage door was bent open as the explosion had blown it out on one side. I could see the flickering of fire coming through the gap underneath.

  The roof was now sitting upside down in front of the cafe’s door. We were lucky it didn’t come in our direction; we were about the same distance away.

  “Big badda boom,” I muttered.

  “I’m sorry,” Kelsey said.

  “Don’t be!” I laughed. “If it hadn't been you, it would have been me. You just beat me to it.”

  “Or me,” Voice said. “But, if it makes you feel better, I do accept your apologies for stealing my turn. What?” he said, at our looks in his direction. “I have as well. You aren’t the only ones who like a good explosion!”

  “Well…we do have one big problem…” Sam said. “We have a distinct lack of marshmallows…”

  Nothing moved from the burning building. If anything was fire-resistant in there, the explosion must have finished it off. There looked to be enough space between the garage and the other buildings that the fire was contained to it and happily burning away.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Voice did a quick check of the office building we had ignited after the cafe.

  “Couldn’t see anything,” he reported back.

  Behind the buildings, we found a rectangular-shaped car park, which stretched the full width of the buildings at the front. The two sides each had a simple building, which looked boarded up. At the back, about half the width of the car park was the comm station we were here for.

  We couldn’t see any way into the side offices short of breaking in, but a look between the boards at the windows revealed clear empty rooms. So we turned our attention to the tall tower and its huge cone-shaped web.

  “That certainly wasn’t here when I passed by…” Kelsey said.

  “Well Mr Veritas. All yours.” I said, waving my hand at it. “Let’s see what we are facing.”

  Voice concentrated while he raised his hand, and a small orb shot out, moving towards the cone. The flame shot out from the point of impact, generating a brief flash of light, accompanied by a distant whoomph and then the burning webs floated up into the sky before disintegrating into nothing. The ignition flowed down the tower, and a second whoomph occurred as the out-of-sight webs on the roof joined the tower ones.

  Hanging from the top of the tower were several burning bundles of wrapped prey swinging from the platforms. There was an almighty crash as one of the threads holding one big enough to be a large mammal, burnt through and its contents crashed down into the level below.

  Movement caught my eye, something near the top.

  A long, spindly black line extended out from the central part of the tower. Then another. And another.

  Out of the shadow, the largest spider I had seen yet, finished unfurling its legs and moved out from a now visible alcove near the top. Its body was easily the same size as me and each of its legs must have been over six feet in length. Its body twitched slightly as it angled down, almost as if it was looking at us.

  “El!” Voice said with a tone of command. “Fireball that fecker!”

  “With pleasure!” I said as I swung my battlestaff to aim at it and released a rapidly moving ball of fire in its direction.

  “Kelsey, Ice arrows. Let’s assume it is not vulnerable to fire. Sam, get ready, I don’t think it will let us keep hitting it from afar.”

  It didn’t. My fireball was halfway to it when it swung its abdomen around to line its spinnerettes up with us, and squirted out a fast-moving gush of webbing. It passed through my insubstantial fireball but collided with Kelsey’s arrow, freezing the mass solid.

  The spider was in the middle of shooting a second stream when the fireball exploded with a humongous kaboom!

  I could see the surrounding framework of the tower shake, hear the rattling of the nearby windows from the blast, and then saw the spider fall from the glowing ball of heat as it lost its grip on the tower. There was a loud, bone-jarring crunch as it collided with the side of one of the jutting out platforms, spun over the edge, and continued falling, now back first. Leaving the tower above, quivering from the shock.

  We all heard the crash and the sound of breaking glass as the form of the giant spider hit the roof, and what must have been a skylight. Followed by a more muffled second crash a fraction of a second later.

  Flame must have followed the spider into the building below, because there was another whoomph sound, and the windows and doors of the building were blasted open from the explosive force.

  We pulled back further into the car park to give us distance when the swarm of spiders came cascading out of the building. We were far enough out that I dropped a second fireball into the middle of the flowing mass. Kelsey focused ice arrows onto the larger spiders, who came out almost entirely unaffected by my Inferno spell, while the rest used what ranged attacks they could on anything else that moved.

  This changed, though, when the giant spider’s legs started to emerge from the doorway. I switched my battlestaff and sent a to intercept. The spell expanded out between the spiders' fore limbs. It sent arcs of lightning at the exposed limbs and back into the corridor. The strobe effect from each arc revealed the creature, as it squeezed its limbs into the confined space just inside the door. The arcs bounced into the smaller spiders still emerging from the rooms behind as my ball of sparkly death earnt its upkeep.

  As the sparks continued, and the swarm abated, we slowly moved closer to the creature, as the lightning arcs hitting it seemed to leave it shaking in the confined corridor. Kelsey switched to alternating between her ice and fire arrows; none of us were sure which would be the most effective.

  With surprise, I was entertained to learn that they didn’t counter each other; every fourth frost arrow caused it to freeze, and the burning from the fire never stopped, just became more intense.

  Sam and Voice focused on mopping up the last of the swarm, while Daisy increasingly assisted with damage as her HOTs on our front line kept them topped off in health.

  The corridor trapped the spider; it couldn’t seem to back off and my kept it pinned. I was conscious of my draining mana. My pool was bigger since I hit Aether four, but not infinite. When I was down to about a fifth, Sam and Voice had both joined in in hitting the spider with ranged attacks, the swarm all but vanquished.

  “Low mana,” I called as I dropped the spell. I’d hit ten percent of my mana.

  With the orb gone, the spider once more resumed emerging from the building. Its long legs pulled it out of the door. It took two careful steps towards us. Rose up to tower over us… Well, some of us… Ok, me.

  I used the mana I had recovered to hit it with a .

  It brought its lower body around to line up its spinnerettes. The squirt of webbing shot out at a preposterous speed. Kelsey and Sam managed to dodge out of the way. I wasn’t quite fast enough. It hit Voice’s shield and splashed over my legs. It felt like slow motion when the creature launched itself towards me. I brought my staff up, so when it came down, it impaled itself onto it. Burying the end of my staff deeply into its snarling mouth, the force of it drove me down to one knee. Somehow, I managed to get cast in time so that the impale released the full force of my spell inside its body.

  Voice abandoned the stuck shield and swung his blade with both hands at the left side of the beast. Sam came in and with a series of rapid strikes, attacked from the other. Not sure what happened to Kelsey, but the constant sound of her bowstring snapping said she was somewhere behind me.

  Acid was dripping down from the spider's mouth. I could hear the growling from its throat. Smell the rotten meat in its breath. I kept one eye on my mana bar and the other on trying to avoid the drops of acid the best I could with my legs stuck to the floor like they were.

  As soon as my bar had enough mana in it, I hit it with another . This time, it flinched back away from me, dislodging my battlestaff from its mouth. With my focus no longer on its dripping fangs, I could now see that Voice had severed its middle two legs on the left. It’s right, bore the marks of several deep wounds from Sam’s strikes. Five of its eyes had arrows lodged in them.

  I tried to stand back up and found my knee was stuck to the ground.