From the three bats, James harvested one green magic crystal and two purple magic crystals. He remembered his lessons about the magical elements and their associated colors, but purple wasn't on the list.

[Material Identification: Purple Magic Crystal]

Well, that was a bust. In any case, leaving the carcasses there, he stored his new magic crystals in his magic bag and picked up his magic warding stakes and took his magic shield and magic hammer in hand and advanced out of the small room into the larger cavern.

"I swear," James whispered, "if I ever make it to a big city, I'm going to learn how all this magic stuff works!"

Not that he had much hope of that, given that he had been kidnapped from his home town, an isolated village that rarely even saw bandits at all. There were probably more and more bandits as one got to bigger and bigger towns, he imagined.

He shook his head inside his helmet. He needed to focus.

First, he peeked into the larger cavern to see if there were any monsters wandering around.

He didn't see anything in the gloom.

Then he set up three of his warding stakes in a triangle covering the exit to the small room and as much of the cavern as he could, to create a safe retreat. With over half a dozen passages leading out of this cavern that he had seen so far, he really didn't want to get ambushed.

James took a deep breath and started exploring.

To start, he walked along the wall to the right, with his shield in his left hand providing cover from the center of the room, [Reflect] active. Even moving carefully, his armor rattled as he walked, creating a quiet cacophony with each creeping step. James momentarily found himself distracted, thinking of ways to make the armor quieter, before he stopped and shook his head again.

He scanned the room, looking for anything that might be trying to sneak up on him.

Nothing.

He proceeded onward and reached the first passage leading out of the cavern. It was large enough for two men to walk abreast, with a rocky uneven floor and a ceiling high enough to be invisible in the gloom save for bright spots that must be more glowshrooms. James was careful to look up this time, but didn't see anything. With one last look behind him, he raised his shield and entered the passageway. Slowly, carefully, minding each and every step, he advanced.

The passageway proved short, and opened into a natural looking narrow cavern. James quickly scanned the ground (uneven) and the ceiling (also too high to see clearly) and then he looked further into the cave for monsters.

About twenty yards away was a web.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

A thick, silvery, tangled mess of web covering the entire cavern from wall to wall and floor to as high as James could see in the gloom.

And on that web were spiders. Spiders as large as a man, if you included their legs, crawling over the web doing James knew not what, because as soon as he registered that there were more than five that he could see he panicked.

He scanned around, first to the front to see any spiders advancing on him (he saw none), then checking behind him, towards the safety zone he had created.

He hoped to all the gods it worked on spiders like it did on mole and bat monsters.

The path was clear and James began his retreat, cursing the noise his armor was making. Attempting to back away, keeping his shield towards the spiders, his heel caught against a rock and he started to tip back.

With all the strength he could muster, James slammed the spikes of his shield into the ground and pulled on it, righting his posture at the last possible moment.

He scanned around again, double checking the walls and ceiling, then decided that walking backwards and falling over and getting mobbed by spiders was a bad idea. So he turned himself around and walked expeditiously out of the passageway and back to the cavern and with only a slight moment to scan for moles he power-clomped right back into the warded area.

He shivered violently for a moment, then took a deep breath, held it, and let it out.

He was back in the ward. It was fully powered. The spiders had shown no sign of noticing him. He had two big hammers and was wearing a full suit of armor.

He briefly contemplated somehow caving in that passageway and blocking them off forever before deciding it was too tall to be feasible.

James discovered that he hated spiders. He hadn't in the past, when they were little and mainly stayed in their corners of the house or toolshed or in the trees of the forest and when they were small. But big people-sized spiders? With a giant web bigger than his house had been?

After some time, James decided to move on, keeping a close eye out for spider webs.

Giving the spider passage a wide berth, he continued on to the next passage to the right. This turned out to be a short dead end, but the walls were rich with colored iron ores, including an especially fat vein of green iron and an unusual amount of blue iron ore.

James continued on.

The next passage was about halfway through the cavern and from this vantage point, James could see everything. On this side were five passageways, then on the side opposite his warded area was another large passage. On the opposite wall were only four passages. The floor of this cavern was littered with boulders ranging from small, only coming up to his knees, to big and taller than he was. Thankfully, there were no mole monsters that he could see, and he suspected that if there were any they would have noticed the noise he was making by now.

Figuring out how to make his armor quieter was quickly rising up James' list of priorities.

James set that aside and scanned this new passageway side to side and up and down. Flat ground, and flat walls, almost looking carved out of the stone. No ores present. At the end of the passage was an empty room. And a room it was, a nearly perfect cube carved out of stone and earth, but empty.

James moved on.

The fourth passage on this side was another natural looking cleft in the rock, barely wide enough for James to walk through with his shield and armor. The ceiling was blessedly low, and there were enough glowshrooms around to see clearly. In fact, there were enough that his shield was able to reflect enough of the light that James could see almost perfectly in the cramped space.

This passage, unlike the others, twisted and turned for quite some distance. At the end there wasn't even a room, the passage just ended with a small pool of water fed by a trickle from a crack in the wall. James scanned around, then removed his helmet, and took a cup out of his bag. As he was bending down to sate his thirst-

[Water Identification: Foul Water]

He stopped, cup inches from the water, and stood back up.

That was disappointing.

He put his cup away and put his helmet back on and put one foot in front of the other and put his mind to measuring how long the passage was.

Four hundred and ninety three steps.

James returned to the cavern, scanned around, and then turned to the final passage on this wall. He was feeling slightly relieved to have put some distance between himself and the spider passage when a mole monster poked its head out of the passage only ten yards away, hissed at him, and charged.

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