An angry chittering followed, and Jon wheeled around to see what had attacked him. He was not sure what he expected, but it sure as hell wasn’t the boiled-looking cherub creature he saw in front of him. It was like someone took one of those creepy angel babies and merged it with a lobster in some shitty A.I. program.

  The creature was significantly taller than Jon, though that wasn’t saying much. It had two stilt-like legs made from bone the color of ivory, which were about a meter long, and currently buried in the earth where Jon had stood a moment before. The top third of the monster had beat-red flesh, with a bulbous abdomen and a tiny head with two black rams horns curling to either side. There were two clawed appendages that were comically large, with large white feathered wings almost twice as wide as the creature was tall sticking from its shoulders.

  Jon had no energy for a prolonged fight. He needed to end this quickly if he was going to survive. He pounced on the creature, his pincers poised to strike one of the wings: at least, he attempted to. The cherub struck in a blur of motion, compressing its wing and batting him to the left side with one of the ridiculous claws. Jon flew nearly to the cliff’s edge. The monster wrenched one of the two bony legs out of the earth, and began flapping its wings to free the other, clearly intent on pursuing him.

  “Nope!” Jon thought, and dived off the cliff, a tether of spider silk trailing behind him.

  The chittering turned to an angry squeal as Jon dropped the fifteen meters, grasping his tether instinctively with his two back legs at the last moment, then clipping it as he began to run. He darted for the small cave entrance he saw earlier, but felt motion from above again, and jumped to the side.

  *whoosh*

  A claw sailed right where his body had been a moment earlier, and Jon heard a powerful wing flap as the cherub pursued him. He leapt again, towards the small cave opening. He felt the disturbance of the air as the creature continued to pursue him. Jon knew he was not going to make it to the cave if something didn’t change.

  The mental sense activated again, and Jon felt the light of the creature’s mind behind him. He put everything he had into another of those pulses. Jon’s vision swam, and he stumbled. For just a fraction of a second, he worried he had miscalculated, that he was about to lose consciousness; his vision grayed at the edges as he pushed himself to keep moving forward.

  The feeling passed, and as Jon recovered his footing the creature crashed into the earth, its flapping disrupted for a crucial second. Jon kept running, but he registered a tremor from a bush near where the cherub-lobster had landed. He hoped that meant the bush creature was attacking the cherub.

  Jon heard another squeal of rage, and felt several thumps in rapid succession. The bush-creature was in the find-out phase of the equation, but Jon ignored the one-sided conflict behind him as he found himself at the cave entrance.

  Jon shoved his front claws in and tried to drag himself in, but the bundle of bunnies on his back caught at the rim of the tunnel. He clipped the loop of silk on his abdomen holding the bundle on his back, and dived into the cave again. The bunnies and the bear leg slid off his back. As he scrabbled his way into the tunnel, he managed to grasp the draw-string and drag his bounty behind him with his back legs.

  The tunnel was quite narrow, the rock pressing in against Jon’s carapace even with his front claws ahead of him and his back ones extended fully. The walls were squeezing on his abdomen: it was squishier than his cephalothorax, but there was still segmented plating on the back, and to a lesser extent on the ventral (or front) surface. It was able to compress somewhat, but it was extremely uncomfortable.

  Jon managed to keep using his claws to crawl further into the tunnel, making his way a meter or so further in. The tunnel narrowed here and started dipping downwards.

  A primal fear woke in him as he began to slide forward, and his thoughts raced over the next few seconds as he made his way further into the tight space. He recalled a story of a young man who died in Utah, stuck in a cave when he got lost exploring a cavern. He was upside down for hours and hours, and finally died of suffocation after he fell further down during the rescue efforts. That man had been in training to be a physician, and had a wife and two kids. It was still one of the most horrible deaths Jon feared, though being devoured by a cherubic lobster did not seem much better.

  Jon was not sure if he would be able to move back out of this place with his new limbs. He figured the answer was probably yes, the angle was slight and his claws and the hairs on them were made for this exact task, but it would be harder with the carcasses behind him. Jon grimly considered if the quilled bunnies might not get a final revenge.

  *SLAM*

  All Jon’s thoughts and fears of the cave instantly dispelled as he propelled himself forward as quickly as possible, the tunnel shaking behind him as squeals of rage continuously rang out. He felt something tugging on his prizes from behind. He considered just dumping the bunny corpses, and for one dreadful moment he thought he would be dragged back out of the tunnel. Then there was a snap and he began sliding forward once more.

  Ahead of him the tunnel dipped further, and became slightly wet. He kept pulling further and further in. The angle steepened and now it was more a controlled fall than a slide. He used his claws to slow his descent as the tunnel curved and twisted down.

  Jon felt a rush of air in front of him, and jammed his claws into the sides of the tunnels. He stopped himself just before he could drop into the cave below, his remaining food supply colliding with his back.

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  Underneath him was another crystal studded cavern, covered in the same fungi as the initial entrance to the subterranean area. He studied the tunnel lit by the dim yellow light below. The air felt cool and dry, entirely different from the warm damp of the larger cavern behind him. He was in a curving section of tunnel, and based on the angle he was hopeful it didn’t connect anywhere the flying monster could easily access from the outside. The floor was only about four meters down from his location.

  Behind him Jon could feel the tremors of the cherub’s rage. It was still impotently trying to reach him, but it had to be ten or fifteen meters back by now. He was guessing intelligence was a dump stat for the creature. It seemed to make zero effort at figuring out Jon’s destination, and he doubted even its significant strength would let it meaningfully dig through the rock behind him. Having said that, he wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

  He moved out onto the cavern ceiling as quickly as he could while maintaining his footing. His damp, muddy claws still found easy purchase on the ceiling, and he soon found himself suspended upside-down, breathing heavily. Then he felt the rope he still held with his hind-leg go taut. Three and a half bunny corpses fell to the ground with a series of wet thunks. The bear fore claw fell down a moment later, then rolled down the passage way.

  Jon sighed as he looked down at the remains. They were all covered in mud, and he guessed his next meal was going to be exceedingly unpleasant. He looked around the softly glowing tunnel, the echoes of his pursuer’s rage still continuing down the passage behind him unabated.

  Jon attached a length of webbing to the ceiling to allow for easy retreat, and dropped to the floor. He considered just standing there until he recovered, lobster-monster or not. With the long hours of his training to become a physician, he had thought he knew what it meant to be truly exhausted. He remembered a time when he fell asleep at a red light that went too long while he drove home. He had been woken by honks from behind.

  That was nothing on this bone-deep weariness. He froze as he had the thought, realizing bone deep was no longer any more meaningful than skin deep, and he would have let out a despairing laugh if he could. Instead, he shifted his legs and clacked his fangs. It wasn’t the same.

  He decided to continue to wander for a bit. If something was going to eat him here, he had an irrational desire for it not to be the lobster-thing. It seemed like a bit of a dick.

  After a few minutes on the move, he came to a branch in the tunnel and randomly selected the split to the right. As he continued down this path, the noises from behind faded. A few minutes later, Jon saw a blind passage on the left. It was small, perhaps two meters high and less than ten meters deep. It was partially hidden by a stalactite and an outcropping of larger crystals in a dense patch. Jon decided this would be home for tonight.

  He was not a huge fan of being stuck in a dead-end passage with no escape, but the corollary made it worth the risk: nothing was going to be coming up from behind him. However, there were precautions he wanted to take. He would make a web.

  There was an argument for leaving the passage he was in completely bare, attempting security through obscurity, relying on being ignored by any passing creatures. However, he felt it likely many of the predators in this area would be skilled in detecting occupied tunnels, and he doubted this would be successful. He wanted a web.

  Jon knew that many spiders, even wandering spiders like jumping spiders, would build temporary webs while they rested. He did not have the first clue about how to do this. He tried to concentrate in the hopes of prompting another spiderfact, and met with success after a few seconds.

  “Spider facts!

  Category: Behavior

  Subcategory: Web Construction

  Scientists have explored whether the complex webs of spiders such as orb weavers are learned behavior, or pre-programmed from birth. In one prior experiment on the subject, spiderlings were separated from their mother’s web early, provided with food, and then given opportunities to construct webs. The initial webs were of poor quality, but as the spiderlings nervous system matured over several days they gradually shaped into the meticulously crafted designs the family is known for. It has also been observed that older spiders generally create lower quality webs than younger spiders, indicating time and experience are not significant factors in web quality. There have been exceptions, with….”

  Jon cut the message short before it could continue. He was exhausted, and the gist of it was that web building was an inborn skill. He probably would have gotten inherent knowledge of making webs if he had chosen a different sub-species. Overall, he preferred his jumps and running, and he still didn’t regret his choice. With no haptic feelings in his head, he would have to work with what he had. He opted for a simple approach to his web.

  First, he stored his kills about half-way down the passage. Then he began laying down some sticky threads, different from any he had used so far. Making different forms of silk was strange, and he couldn’t really describe what he was doing differently than before. It was like describing to someone how you knew when you were moving a left foot or a left toe. You just did it. He suspected the knowledge was given to him in the message that helped him understand the different forms of silk from earlier. He could tell he was flexing a different set of muscles near his spinnerets, the tiny leg-like organs at the back of his abdomen that spun out silk, but that was about it.

  Jon laid down ten lines in a cone. He placed them on the ceiling, walls and floor, then pulled them tight as he moved into the passage. After, he lay down cross linking threads, strengthening the web and making it more difficult to traverse. He made these especially dense at the far end of the tunnel, covering the whole area save for a small window for him to crawl through or look out of. Finally, he placed a number of longer threads ten or so meters down the tunnel in every direction.

  Jon used his palps to toss a pebble down the passage, and it landed on the web five meters away. He felt the transmitted vibrations in his legs, and intuited the position of the vibration on the web instinctively. He internally shook his head, recognizing how dumb it felt to say that when he was literally staring at the spot it had hit, but he also knew in his gut he could have pinpointed the pebble with his eyes shut. It was similar to how you could hear something hit the ground in the dark and know which direction it was, how big it was, and about how far it away it was, but much more accurate.

  With the web preparations complete, Jon hunkered down for the night. This was as close as he was going to come to safety in this place.