Story Arachno-odia

Kazzymodus

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I hate spiders.

I really, really, really hate spiders.

I simply can not overstress how incredibly and enthusiastically I despise, loathe and detest those eight legged bastards. Them and only them, mind you; I like to think that I'm a rather peaceful and nice person. I never attack anything unless it attacks me first (which seems to be virtually everything in this world, but the point still stands). And I've seen a lot of things that others find scary (not to be confused with otters, which find everything scary), yet none of those even fazes me. Beetles? No problem. Jellyfish? Likewise. Spiders? Kill them. I don't know why, it's just an irrational urge to destroy. If spiders were Khwarezmians, I'd be Genghis Khan.

It's not fear. Admittedly, I'm scared of them. In fact, they terrify me more than anything in this world. But the fear I hold for them is nothing compared to the burning hatred I hold against them. I exclusively use fire based weaponry, combining both my desires of malevolent slaughter and keeping distance. Because when I see a spider, I leap as far away as possible with an agility I do not actually posses, and start firing whatever I can get hold of, even if it's a slingshot (although I always carry incendiary ammo for such situations). And those are just the small ones. Anything larger than an inch is met with explosive force (that means I attack them explosively, but I do occasionally use a dynamite stick or five).

I dare say that, even though the only thing I've told you so far (hello, by the way) is how utterly I hate spiders, I still think you haven't even scratched the surface of how utterly and psychotically I hate them.

But I digress.

You see, the largest spider I ever saw was as large as my fist, and met a rather gruesome (and satisfying) demise thanks to my trusty Flamethrower, but that was an exceptionally large specimen.

But one day the world changed. Strange metals appeared in the earth, great hives arose in the jungle, and stone turned into flesh. Lots of things happened, actually, it was all very messy and confusing and I just took it for granted at the time, because, hey, I'm an adventurer, I like new things. New people showed up in our settlement, which on the one hand is good, because the more the merrier, but on the other hand makes me reflect on if the time spent digging up all that gold for building bricks is worth the boost to my ego from showing everyone how ludicrously rich I am (or worth the incredible pain paired with a sixty pound solid gold brick, which is too heavy to be held in place by mere cement, hitting the back of your head from six feet up. I'd always thought that would kill you, but I don't question the physics of a land that has flying metal skulls armed with lasers and chainsaws (the chainsaw in question I also always thought lethal, but if I add too many examples I'll run out of brackets)). Anyway, I ran out of gold once again, so I had to go underground (which I still hadn't gotten quite used to, what with annoying beetles, burning wizards and naked girls appearing everywhere all of a sudden).

So here I am, wandering underground after taking a swig of Spelunker Potion (you know, the stuff that makes you see valuable stuff through non-valuable stuff. I actually used to think it was a hallucinogen at first), when I see a nice fat vein of gold ore below me. Both delighted by and nauseous from my tainted vision, I started mining the shinies, which resulted in a complex design of corridors and shafts. It was at the end of a particularly long corridor at the bottom of a particularly deep shaft where I hit the vein so hard it cracked the wall behind it. On inspection, I could faintly see dust specks whirling on the other side of the crevice I had created, indicating an open space. Trying to use my Spelunker enhanced vision to find any treasure was fruitless, but I'm not one to be discouraged by bad trips, so I started swinging my pickaxe at the rock instead, which was a nice change from mining gold, which you can't even look at while under influence. Although cracking the rock had proven easy, breaking through it had proven much more difficult, as if the rock was glued together somehow. Didn't think much of it at that time. To be fair, it would have been a rather far-fetched assumption to think what I now know.

Each of my hits enlarged the initial crack, until it covered the entire wall. A final, heavy blow completely shattered it, opening up a hole about my size. I stared into the dark cavern that I had uncovered, but all I could see was the very faint shimmering of what appeared to be a tangle of thick, white cables spanning my (very limited) field of view, absorbing what little light seeped in from the corridor behind me, and I saw ceiling nor floor. I lit a torch, leaned a little through the hole and looked down the wall I was standing on.

Less than ten feet away from me, I saw eight eyes the size of billiard balls and two chelicerae the size of wine bottles coming towards me.

I don't remember exactly what happened directly after that. I think it was the adrenaline shock hitting my system causing some sort of amnesia. Or perhaps my brain somehow rerouted all the brainpower to the part that makes you kill things as opposed to the part that deals with memories (the amygdala, among others, if I'm not mistaken. But I digress again).

What I assume happened (the keyword being "assume" here) is that I screamed a lot, backed up a lot and torched that whole damn nest to bits a lot. Impulsively, mind you, but as it happens spiders, much like humans, don't like it when their home is set on fire, and I must say that these spiders took a very assertive offense to my pyromanic assault (cobweb burns like a charm, by the way), and launched an en masse attack against my numbers, which were a massive total of one.

As they crawled through the opening that I made, I could see them in their entirety. And they. Were. HUGE. Just their bodies were larger than I am (not that I'm particularly tall for my sex, but that's not the point), and each individual leg was as long as their body, which would have been immensely satisfying for M. C. Escher, but considering I'm not, it was a particularly harrowing sight. Thankfully they shrink when you burn them, and eventually they crumble to ash, but for every one I killed, a new one would take its place. I didn't have time to run back to the end of the corridor, let alone climb out of the shaft. If I tried, they would surely get me, and... well, I'd rather not think about it.

I do actually believe that, for the first time in my life, my fear won it from my fury. I was standing there, petrified, convulsively holding down the trigger while bright flames spat out of the nozzle of my Flamethrower, the heat singing my eyebrows. I'm pretty sure I remained torching the cave for at least five minutes after I had incinerated the last spider, afraid that if I would stop, I couldn't use my trigger finger again and resume firing, would it be necessary. After another five minutes, I regained feeling of my digits. Another two minutes and I regained feeling in my arms and another one minute and thirty-eight seconds and I regained feeling of everything below my waist.

I was pretty confident that I had killed all of the spiders, and I wasn't trying all that hard to convince myself otherwise. I felt like I had done enough for a day, and taking another look to confirm my suspicious (or hopes, as you might call them) was something I could always do tomorrow, if I really needed to for whatever reason. So I prepared myself to board up the entrance to hell that I had so merrily opened. And just as I was about to put a quickly fashioned wooden board against the opening, it happened.

Had it happened just a second later, my story would have ended right here. Wouldn't have been a very exciting one, and in all honestly I wouldn't have bothered relaying it to you. But for some reason, fate, on that very moment, the moment I'd least expected it, decided to give me a metaphorical break, and it happened.

I heard her calling for help.

'Calling' might not be the right word, as being covered in spider webs muffles your speech somewhat, but it was still loud enough to hear it. And while my entire spider-sense was tingling me to, quote, "GET OUT OF THERE, YOU IDIOT", I am, and always will be, a hero. And while what heroes do is a rather vague area, helping people who are trapped in a nest belonging to the animal that you hate most of anything in the entire world is definitely a heroic thing to do in my book. So with, I admit, huge reluctance, I put down the board and sneaked back to the cave entrance. During my assault, I managed to combust a large portion of the spider webs in the cave, which remained glowing after the flames had died down. This didn't give much light, though, so I broke a glowstick and tossed it down.

According to a muffled yelp, I hit my target.

I looked down, and about twelve feet below me I saw her. Somehow the inferno had avoided her, as she was lying against the wall in a patch of thick, white spider web, which also covered everything but her eyes.

But the eyes were all I needed.

I have felt hatred and fear so often in my life they have become meaningless. They're just queues for my body to get my brain high on certain hormones, so I can kill. They appear whenever I encounter spiders, and they disappear with them. What I felt back then was something new, something that I never felt before, something that my brain wasn't used to. It was either this love at first sight, or my brain entering confusion mode, which made me lose my balance and fall down those twelve feet, right next to her.

As soon as I hit the webbing, my brain regained its composure, and I knew things were very, very wrong. The main reason I thought this was because I had just fallen in the stuff that the things that I have been systemically genociding for the larger part of my life use to immobilise whatever gets into contact with it. Another reason was that I felt the webbed up girl next to me struggling desperately to break free. The final, decisive reason was that I heard something massive coming towards me. I managed to free my head and turn it towards the general direction I heard the thing coming from, and immediately wished I hadn't. Mostly because I already knew what I would see, and even more so because I had underestimated the size of what I would see.

It was the size of a shack.

I didn't actually know spiders had a queen, or even a basic social structure. One of the very few advantages of my condition is that you learn a lot about what you kill, and if I learned anything it's that spiders are solitary animals.

Yet now, I was looking at a spider queen. Whose entire offspring I had just cremated.

...

And for the first time in my entire life, there was nothing.

No hatred, no fear, no desire to kill and no impulse to run away.

I just conceded.

I was cornered, stuck in a spider web, my Flamethrower nowhere to be found, at the very limited mercy of a spider who was as big as all the spiders I had ever killed combined.

Truly this was how it was supposed to end, I thought, as I closed my eyes. I was tired of fighting, tired of hating and tired of fearing. I just wanted to lie down while the venom spread through my system, my limbs grew heavy, my mind grew clouded, my vision grew blurry...

And then I heard it again.

I heard her calling for help.

I saw her eyes in front of me, as large as life.

I opened mine.

I ripped myself free from the cobwebs and stood up.

I took my final torch.

In a fluid turn, I scraped it against the wall behind me as fast as I could.

And just as it caught fire, I thrust it in the open maw of the giant spider lunging at me.

...

It died. Messily.

I didn't even watch it run around desperately as it perished. I turned my back on it and started freeing the girl. As soon as her arms were free, she kissed me. I'm still not sure whether that was because I freed her or because she loved me as well, although I can assure you I've had my fair share of the latter since then, thank you very much.

We didn't waste much time standing around the nest. Turning what little cobweb survived my firestorm into ropes (which works surprisingly well), we climbed out of the cave, boarded it up and put down about twelve do-not-enter signs. Finally, we were free.

I asked her her name. She told me it was Kati. She thanked me. I told her no the mention it.

I really did mean that. Because when I was lying there, ready to die, there was no anger. But when I got up, when she rallied me, so to speak, there was anger. But not the irrational, burning hatred I'm used to. It was a calming, almost soothing form of fury, all of it expressed in that burning flame I shoved down that abomination's throat. Finally I had cause to hate them. Namely, her.

But I digress.

And this story is getting too cliched, and somewhat too long, so I guess I'll wrap it up (no pun intended).

Kati is completely fine. I'll spare you the details as to how she ended up there, but I can assure you I showed up just in time. We've been together since then, and I'm planning to propose to her some day soon. Don't tell her though. Or anyone else, for that matter. Not everyone is completely happy with our relationship. But we are, and that's what counts.

I still hate spiders. With the burning hatred, not the soothing one, so the whole experience didn't necessarily better me as a person. But I don't fear them anymore. Because they have brought me together with someone who I love more than I hate them. Not intentionally, of course, but even when it comes to those bastards, credit where it's due.

They still deserve to die, though. So if you'll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do...
 
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I love this.

I really, really, really love this.

I simply can not overstress how incredibly and enthusiastically I love this. Your descriptive writing works almost too well, and doesn't affect the fluency of the story whatsoever. You manage to get the reader involved and allow them to relate to the phobia, or at least in my case. You're a damn fine writer Kazzy, and this is a damn fine story. Well done.
 
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