The portal in front of Simon led into a dark wood. Well, he thought it was a dark wood. As soon as he whispered the words of lesser light, though, he saw it was something else. They weren’t trees he was walking through. They were stone pillars, and what he’d thought was leaf clutter, and branches were actually long spiderwebs. He wasn’t even outside, he figured out after a few minutes of walking. There was no breeze. 

That means I have to be, what, underground? He wondered. 

“I guess that means I finally get to find my first fantasy race?” he whispered to himself as he tried to search out any signs that these were, in fact, dwarvish and not human structures. He found nothing that said that definitively, though, besides the strange location. There were human sized doors in the structures, and the bones he saw seemed to be about the right size for men. All he could say for certain was that he was lost in a dark place with only dusty ruins and spider webs to keep him company.

Most of the webs that obscured the details of the structures were thin, gauzy things that he could push through easily, but some of the major strands that anchored the larger webs were thicker than a pencil, and a few of the largest ones were thicker than his fingers. He shuddered at that, but it wasn’t enough to make him panic. 

Indeed, after a couple of minutes, it became clear this would be an easy level to bypass, at least, if that’s what he wanted to do. This whole place seemed to be a tomb, and in the distance, he could see the bright light of an illuminated doorway. While it was possible that such a thing was a way to the surface or an occupied building of some kind, in Simon’s mind, it was almost certainly the portal to the next level. 

While he was still too far away to say for sure, he hoped that would be the case. A nice daylight level would do him some good after all the creepy dark places the Goddess had been sending him for the last few levels. 

Still, none of those pleasant thoughts were enough to take his mind off of just how dangerous this place felt. Here and there, he saw desiccated corpses hanging in cocoons, and occasionally, he would hear distant noises that might be the sound of giant spiders skittering across their enormous web. 

In his tiny receding bubble of light, though, Simon was alone as he made his way toward the light. Halfway there, he recast minor light, and when he was close enough to see waving stalks of grain through the portal, he smiled. It looked like a nice day, and it had been a while since he’d had one of those. 

That was also about the spot where the larger strands started to get really thick. The first two times he went down a ruined street that was blocked with more strands than he could maneuver between, he went back and circled around until he found a clearer route. 

Simon tried to tell himself that he had nothing to worry about, butno matter how well he kept his cool, he could feel his heart beating faster, and he had no desire to find out what would happen if he touched one of these things, and got something’s attention.

I just gotta stay fast and quiet, he told himself as he made his way toward the light. 

Eventually, that wasn’t an option, though. Eventually, less than 50 yards from the door, he found a wall of thick webbing that was knotted, ugly, and nearly impenetrable. 

Simon thought about burning it, but that seemed likely to attract even more attention than cutting one of the strands. So, after a few more seconds of study, he sliced through the smallest section that would allow him to squeeze his fat all through. 

The blade cut through it soundlessly, but as the strand whipped up and out of the way, it sent a warbling sympathetic vibration through this whole section of the web. This, in turn, sent a chill down his spine and triggered a whole cacophony of other skittering and chittering. He’d definitely gotten someone’s attention with that. 

Simon bolted toward the door, closing the distance recklessly. It almost cost him his life when a desk-sized spider pounced, landing close enough to knock Simon off his feet. 

He didn’t try to get up immediately. There wasn’t time. Instead, he rolled over, thrusting the cutlass up and slicing through the thing's soft belly and cutting it in half all the way to its mandibles even as it tried to bite him.

“Holy shit,” Simon said, unable to rise for a moment as he lay there covered in spider guts as he contemplated the horror of what just happened. 

Laying there, it was impossible to see the flickers of movement further into the darkness, so without thinking, he used a flamethrower. “Gervuul Meiren,” he spat, using the words of greater fire to lay down a huge curtain of flame to keep back anything that might be looking to take a bite out of him as he struggled to his feet on the slick ground. 

He heard the screeches of pain and the sound of monsters crisping and popping from the heat as he moved to the door, but he didn’t bother to turn around and look until he was actually standing in the gateway.  

The view from there made his jaw drop as he watched the scale of the destruction he’d unleashed. Simon had spent more time than anyone would care to admit watching the subsubsubgenre of videos on all of the various apps that he people called ‘oddly satisfying.’ He’d watched people powerwash concrete, knock over dominos, get unlikely hole-in-ones, and every other sort of inane activity there was, but he’d never watched a city burn.

He hadn’t given it a moment’s thought, but it turned out that the spiderwebs that decorated every surface of the cavern and buildings within were extremely flammable, and the fire traveled across them like a spreading wave, burning them off of every surface as it slowly crawled forward in an orange and yellow line of death. 

Not his death, though, but the spiders. They couldn’t move fast enough, and he watched dozens burst into flames in sizes that ranged from dogs to cars. 

I’m done with the level, he told himself. I can just leave now. He couldn’t, though. The image was too captivating. It gave him a sense of scale about where he was for the first time, and he watched building after building briefly illuminate before the crawling fire moved on, he was left wondering what it was that had happened here. It had clearly been a large city at some point, and even though they were obviously underground, it wasn’t how he imagined that people would build things underground. 

It was only when he heard a roar that sounded like it belonged in a Godzilla movie that he looked up. There, he saw something that sent a spike of terror right through his soul. There were many pillars scattered throughout the city that didn’t seem to have a purpose, but it turned out that the 8 largest weren’t pillars at all. They were attached to a giant fucking spider that was the size of an office building, and even as he watched it, it turned its eight red eyes on him and began to turn slowly, one step at a time, in his direction. 

Simon slammed the door shut on what turned out to be a small shed. He staggered back in terror. Moments later, a young man wielding a hoe like a club came around the corner and yelled, “I found him, Pa!”

Simon let his gory sword fall from his hand onto the yellowed grass as he raised his hands in a show of surrender. “I’m not here to cause any trouble; I just—” he started to say. 

“What in the hells are you doing on our farm, creep?” the boy demanded as he looked at him suspiciously. “If you think you’re getting any more of our chickens, you can—”

“Aaric, that’s enough,” an older man said, coming out from behind the other side of the building. He was only wielding a pitchfork, but unlike his son, he looked like he knew how to do some damage with it. “Don’t antagonize men with swords. Besides, he doesn’t look like the chicken stealing type.”

“You’re right,” Simon said. Slowly raising himself to his feet but leaving his sword where it lay. “I was following some goblin tracks, and I took a good chunk out of one, but he got away from me, and I was just making sure it hadn’t taken to hiding in any of your outbuildings.”

“Goblins?” the man asked, raising an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen any around here in years.”

“Me either,” Simon said, gesturing to his gory outfit. “I forgot how messy the little bastards can be, honestly.”

“Well, pick up your sword. I’ll open the door, and we can—” the farmer said, reaching for the door. 

“No, no, no, that’s okay. I already checked and…” Simon protested, imagining that giant dread spider lurking just behind the thin wall of wood, even though he was like 99% sure the portal was closed now. 

The man gave him a strange look and opened the door anyway. It was a tense moment for both of them, for different reasons, but the small shed proved to be empty. Instead of goblins or vengeful spider gods, there were just some shovels and other tools that had been decorated with rust and cobwebs. 

“Looks like it must have given me the slip,” Simon said lamely. 

“Well, we can’t just leave it out there. One goblin turns to ten before you turn around, and we have more than enough problems on this farm anyway,” the man answered as Simon sheathed his sword in a scabbard that was a little too big for it to fit right. 

If either of them noticed, they said nothing. Instead, the three of them spent the next hour on a fruitless search for an imaginary goblin while Simon made up a story about being a part-time mercenary and a full-time monster hunter. “Most lords will pay at least a couple pence an ear. More if the people are in a panic,” he assured them.

It was a waste of everyone’s time, but he did get to see the area at least. They traipsed through a nearby wood and several meadows looking for goblin sign, and Simon saw that they had many neighbors scattered along the mild sloping plains with similar sized farms decorated with similarly thatched roofs. 

Eventually, when they couldn’t track the little bastard down, Millen had his boy Aaric lead Simon to a nearby pond so he could wash the spider goo off. By then, Simon’s stories had won the young man over, and while he scrubbed and dried his armor and weapon, the boy peppered him with questions about the wider world. 

“I’d love to become a warrior and fight for the King, but Father would never allow it,” Aaric confessed. “It’s not like my sisters could do all the chores in my absence anyway. Not with everything there is to do around here on the farm, anyway.”

Both the boy and his father seemed relatively down on the farm’s prospects, but to Simon, everything looked great. The wheat seemed ready to harvest, the soil looked dark and fertile, and both the surrounding forests and the more distant mountains bordered on the picturesque. 

They were near cities called Darndell and Mietere, which meant nothing to Simon, but based on the way they’d reacted when he’d mentioned Liepzen, they were a fair distance away from the places he’d explored most. 

Still, to him, this looked like a good life, and once he was all cleaned up, and he was invited to stay for supper, that only reaffirmed his earlier observation. Millen’s wife and daughters were lovely, and even though the meal they shared with him was nothing but thin soup and dark coarse bread, it was as picturesque a family as he’d found in the pit. 

That night, they let Simon sleep in the barn, though he found out he had to go in through the side door because the main door led to a spooky nighttime forest when he opened it. 

At least I found the gateway, Simon thought as he lay down in the hayloft and tried to decide what he could do to pay his hosts back for their hospitality. He fell asleep before he’d decided on the right answer.