The great felled beast lay within a pool of its own fetid bilious hemolymph; its eight legs splayed out in a star-like formation, like it had been stepped on by some great, monstrous boot. It adopted a similar posture to its diminutive cousins, possibly due to some quirk of arachid biology that persists throughout the family, despite scale.

Surrounding this pool was a small pack of black and green striped hounds bouncing around its corpse—rows of serrated teeth gnashing and gnawing loudly against the tough exoskeleton of the titanic octoped—as they tried to tear off pieces of chitinous shell to reveal the soft, gooey flesh that eagerly awaited, inside.

Yipping sounds of twisted pleasure rang out between the dozen or so little underbitten mongrel mouths as they chattered back and forth in their stupid little feral language. They leapt avidly from thorax to abdomen to coxa to pedipalp to metatarsus in these elegant aerial gymnastic flourishes— so effortless, and coordinated, that one might think it were a trained performance they were displaying.

Rilah peeked over my shoulder at the assembled menagerie, and gaped; drinking in the sight of the bleeding behemoth, slashed so raggedly at the base of its head and bled dry for all the forest to witness and plunder. "What under the great big blue happened here?"

I shrugged. "I won." She didn't reply, but her eyes went wide, at the scale of the battle I seemed to have casually overcome.

Janny just smiled. "Told ya that you had nothing to feel ashamed of. Look at the size of this thing! Is that why you're sliced up?"

Fimbs remarked, "Zoel, you killed that thing?"

I couldn't even respond. I barely survived my encounter with that creature. It didn't seem right to brag about a fight that I very nearly lost. Seeing their reactions to something I was so ashamed of was not something I could have prepared myself for. The ennui mixed with dissatisfaction threatened to be overcome with new feelings of self-aggrandization, and pride.

I scoffed. "Hardly. It's not so strong a creature. Any other spelunker would have no difficulty taking on something like this. It'd have been embarrassing if this thing did me in. That would have meant that I had no chance of making it out here at all."

Janny just scoffed back. "Are you even listening to yourself? Look at the size of that thing, and tell me that there's nothing impressive about getting in a bare knuckle brawl with it and coming out the victor."

I could only shake my head, and look at Rilah. "Can you believe the fuss he's making about a spider? He clearly doesn't understand what dangers lurk unawares in the forest's shadows."

The junior diver smiled nervously, and tried to nod, but admitted to my chagrin, "Yeah, bugs are pretty common in the sunset, and most adventurers can overcome these without even a scratch, but most adventurers aren't ten foragin' years old. He's got a point."

I rolled my eyes, turning back to the ruckus going on ahead of us. It was clear that nobody understood what I was trying to say; not even Rilah. She thought I was beneath her, and this performance of being so impressed was just her way of telling me that I could match a fraction of her power. I didn't want to hear it!

She touched my arm, and put some weight behind her words. "Zoel, I'm serious. This is kind of a big deal!"

I wrenched my elbow clear of her grasp, and shouted "Enough, okay?! I'm trying to think of our approach. Maybe you could waltz in there and grab my gear, but I have to worry about everyone around me getting caught in the crosshairs! We aren't all 'special,' like you."

Shocked to silence by my outburst, she opened her mouth to respond, but closed it silently, and scowled; angrily leaping into the fray before anyone's hands could stretch out to stop her.

"Is that it?" she bellowed; grabbing the attention of all the nippers dismantling the arachnid. Not one to be outdone with one show of recklessness, she turned her back to them, and looked at me. "I'm too diving powerful for you to measure up to? Is that what you want me to say?!"

"Rilah, what are you doing?!" I hissed, trying to calm her down before they pounced. "Get back—!"

"No, Shut up, Zoel! You're going to hear this!" She chided, as a nipper bounded directly for her; but she side-stepped its trajectory without even looking.

Several other, less audacious specimen dove in her direction, but she picked up her legs and twisted her hips just barely enough to miss both of their lunges. "Would it be easier for you, if I didn't have these gifts? Would you feel like the big foragin' hero if I were reliant on big bad Zoel to come show me how to explore the scary, dark, dangerous Stalks?!" She belted, ducking under a handful who had vaulted for her torso at once, in hopes to overwhelm her.

The other three had turned around, and were aiming for her head, but she swatted the first so that it crashed into the path of the other two. It was sent careening head over tail, with a couple of nasty bite marks on its wide flank for good measure. She kicked another one who had tried to go for her ankles, and she glared at our perch with enough vitriol to melt solid stone into fulminous slag; then continued her speech. "Well, tough! I am who I am, and you can either use me to your advantage, or get out of the way."

The entire horde was upon her now, circling about, diving for her body, and missing by an atom's width. She ducked, and bobbed, and weaved, and sidled, and cartwheeled her way out of every offensive strategy that they could throw at her; in smooth, practiced ambulations—like she could sense what they were planning, before they even knew it themselves.

It was a graceful dance of life, and death, and that is the specific window where she does her best work. I could only watch, slack-jawed, as she kept all their attention trained on herself alone; and punished any member of their pack with a rough kick to the snout for letting their focus go unawares.

She was a machine of purpose, and their desperation only grew more fervent as the number of near-misses climbed through the great blue, and beyond.

Even with all the overwhelming, extraordinary powerful focus she had on display, it looked like she was able to slowly work her way toward the dangling fork, at about the same pace as a casual stroll. Canine yelps of pain mixed with growls of frustration, as their own fury was turned against each other; and none were able to even graze the hair of the human which was as tangible as a ghost.

Before long, she was directly under the vine where I had lost my tool, and just as I was about to wonder how she would make that jump, she baited them by exposing her carotid artery to a pair approaching from the front. Then, she lifted both legs enough to only barely clear their fangs, and firmly planted both soles onto the crown of their heads, before spring-boarding off of their skulls into an overhead backwards salto that deposited her delicately onto the vine.

She tipped backwards, trying to cancel out her momentum as the ravenous teeth chomped at the open air beneath her heels. We all held our breath, as we all pictured with white-knuckled anxiety what would happen to her body as soon as she fell to that crowd of riled-up land piranhas.

She regained her balance shortly, though, and planted her feet on one side of the pitchfork's handle; which had become tangled up in the vine's structure. "Do you want me to feel sorry for you, that I'm the best spelunker since my grandatha? Does it burn you up inside, that I'm effortlessly better than you could ever be, at this?!" She grunted, kneeling dexterously on the tight rope-like limb, and gripped its diameter with the tips of her toes.

She grasped the shaft of the farming tool, and heaved; spinning it in a circle that unbound the vine from its hold, and lowered the tension enough that it dropped another six inches. It sprang free from the verdant clutches of the unthinking overlord, and bound into the air, where she snatched it with a sensational flourish. The beasts only grew more voracious now that she was closer, but she wasn't bothered. "Do you think I asked for this skill? Do you think I wanted to drive everyone away, by getting put on a foragin' pedestal? Do you think it makes me happy to see you suffer?!"

With an arm raised, she plunged it between the eyes of a nipper; slaying it instantly.

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