Dao Divinity 2 Chapter 10

“Like actual devils? Not a demon?” Dar wanted to confirm.

“Does that look like a demon?” Frank waved his ax at the Ettercap.

Dar didn’t want to admit that he still was learning all the differences, so he just took Frank’s word and focused on the issue at hand. Regardless of what it was, it was a danger to his village and did seem far more monstrous than any demon Dar had encountered.

The purple-skinned creature stood on two legs, with thin arms that ended in two claw-like fingers and the head of a spider on an otherwise humanoid body.

Wanting to insert himself before one of the crewman was injured, Dar jumped from the rocks and landed on one of the smaller spiders, crushing it underfoot. Whirling, he cleaved the head of another spider.

The rest of the men flowed over the rocks and joined him. They weren’t well armed; many had managed to bring a branch to use like a spear. So Dar left the smaller spiders to them and focused on the Ettercap.

The purple devil crouched low in preparation for a fight. Its mandibles worked over its maw, which was dripping with a sticky-looking liquid. Dar waited for it to move, but instead, it gave no other warning before spitting a stringy, sticky webbing out of its mouth.

“Eew.” Dar had the stuff plastered to his shoulder. “You’re going to make Sasha make me a new outfit, aren’t you?”

It just chittered back at Dar as it attacked with its two large claws.

Dar blocked the attack and spun to the side, dodging out of the way as the Ettercap stumbled through where Dar had just been. As it fumbled to right itself, Dar’s ax was already whistling through the air, cleaving off one of its arms at the shoulder.

The ettercap let out a wretched screech as its arm was separated. Dar felt a moment of victory before something wrapped around his neck and hauled him into the air.

Confused, Dar worked to reorient himself. The sticky thread around his neck was connected to another ettercap up above in the trees he hadn’t spotted before. It was pulling the sticky thread back like a garrote wire.

But before it could get very far, Dar blasted it and its thread with the dao of heat, cooking through the web and blasting the ettercap with enough heat to pop its bug eyes.

It joined the other in screaming ettercap, but it went quiet as Dar swung his ax back over his shoulder and slashed through its face.

Ripping the blade free, Dar noticed that instead of blood, it was covered in the gooey guts of an insect.

He nearly gagged at the smell of the oozing matter, but he didn’t have time to focus much on it as the other ettercap regrouped and moved towards Dar with its large mandibles open.

The others were fighting defensively in small groups. So far had managed to keep anyone from dying. After the ettercaps lost their advantage of surprise, they were far easier to manage.

The ettercap didn’t let him observe for long, leaping into the air. Dar met it head on, with a swing of his ax, but the ettercap moved strangely and ducked under it pushing itself up and into another lung. Dar’s ax and right arm were still overextended, so he gathered his hard dao around his left arm and punched the monster straight in the face.

The devil tried to sink its fangs into Dar’s arm, but it was only able to scratch him through his hardened skin. Dar connected with its face and through it, his fist sinking into the same gooey substance he’d dealt with on his ax.

Stepping back, Dar ripped his hand from its head and quickly looked around for any of the crewmen who needed help. But the rest of the group had fared well enough. Two men had been wounded and were being tended to, but nothing looked mortal. The final spiders were being dispatched by those that remained.

With the immediate concerns taken care of, Dar began immediately scanning the surroundings. That other ettercap had caught him off guard, and he couldn’t help the heebie jeebies from dealing with the spiders.

“We need to take these two back to the village. If they were bit, they need to rest and work off the venom’s paralytic effect.” Frank said.

“Sounds like you are familiar with these ettercaps. Care to give me the rundown?” Dar asked, kneeling on the ground and picking up someone’s dropped ax.

“Unfortunately, there’s never just one or two. Ettercaps breed like spiders. They have big eggsacks with hundreds of eggs. They work in colonies. Usually you see the webs before you see them. I hadn’t spotted any as we’ve worked, but we must be close to come across these two.”

Terick butted into the conversation. “They also absolutely hate fire. If you want to work in the woods, just lighting a fire and keeping it nearby is enough to keep them away.”

“Really?” Dar turned to Terick.

“Yep. I’ve been through woods where they lived and were plentiful. Didn’t come within twenty feet of a flame.”

Dar picked up a branch and used his dao of heat to char and eventually burn one end, ultimately creating a poor torch. “Then we should finish this up with a fire burning by each group. No one goes away from the group alone.”

Everyone nodded their agreement as Dar made two more torches for the groups to start their own small fires.

Dar looked at the corpses on the ground. “I’ll go ahead and drag these away. There’s not enough meat to them to warrant trying to cut them up.” The beasts seemed to mostly be chitin and guts. There were a few disgusted faces at even the thought of eating them.

“You should have company. No one goes away alone, right?” Frank frowned at Dar.

Dar felt guilty for breaking his own rule so quickly, but he needed privacy to do what he needed to do. “Hah, yeah. That’s fair. But I can just blast anything with my dao of heat. Don’t worry about me.” Dar grabbed the two spiders by their legs and started hauling them into the woods.

Once he was far enough out of sight, Dar pulled them into his inner world. He was curious what dao they possessed, but he’d have to wait until evening to bury them and watch what fruits grew on his dao tree.

While it wasn’t good for the village that there was a massive nest nearby, Dar was excited at the chance to get a lot of creatures that likely had the same dao. He’d need to go search for the colony and take it out, but he’d wait until he had a few reinforcements. Enough of these devils could be trouble to take on.

When Dar returned to the group, all the woodcutters had fires burning nearby, but he saw their eyes venturing up to the canopy above them as they worked. Everybody was a bit spooked.

“What are the fires for?” Bart asked, showing up midway through the morning.

“Ettercap.” Frank spat.

“Shit. You’re kidding me.” Bart seemed to have at least some knowledge of the devils.

“Unfortunately not. Fought two of them, and half a dozen dog-sized spiders.” Dar swung his ax over his shoulder. “I’m told the fires will keep them away, but that means we have a new problem to deal with, Bart.”

“Me? Naw. I’m pretty sure you and Rex have a new problem to deal with. I still have my old problem of a shortage of lumber. Quite frankly, I like my problem better.”

“They’re going to be all our problems if we don’t deal with them, Bart.” Dar gave him a level stare.

“Right, right. I was just sayin’ that it looks like you have things taken care of for now, so we should focus on the lumber piece.” Bart corrected.

Dar let the silence linger a bit before letting Bart off the hook. “I do have a couple ideas around the lumber issue. Let me catch you up.” Dar walked Bart through the process and explained the two biggest points he saw for improvements.

Bart didn’t have anything to offer for the first challenge of cutting through the back end of the tree more quickly, but he did when it came to cutting off all the smaller branches.

“Yeah.” Bart took Dar’s ax and tried to run the blade under a small branch. Trying to cut it that way for him wasn’t working. “I think we need something you could use like this.”

Bart put the head of the blade flat against the tree and grabbed the small nub sticking out of the top of the ax and the shaft scraping towards himself. “See? So you can get your full back into it. Two handles, one on each side and a blade in the middle.”

“You should probably make the blade shaped a little like a scoop, so you can use the rounded blade either around the curve of the tree or to get a more focused cut.” Dar added to the design.

“I like that.” Bart nodded. “I think I could work with the boys on the forge and mock up one today. Think you could help with the necessary enchantments?”

There was an excited look on the old blacksmith’s face. Enchantments weren’t getting old for him.

“Sure, I can put some on to make it tougher, but…” Dar trailed off, thinking of the sharpness he experienced from Neko. He was pretty sure she had the dao of sharpness, or at least something very close to it. “I’ll see if I can’t get something to make the blade sharper, too. No promises on that end though.”

“Your new friend?” Bart smiled.

Dar rolled his eyes. “I seem to have a lot of new friends lately.”

“But only one you bathed recently. Created a lot of rumors with that stunt.” Bart chuckled. “I hope you aren’t leaving Amber out to dry.”

Dar nearly choked when Bart mentioned his daughter. “No. Amber is fine.”

“Mhmm.” Bart gave him a judgemental fatherly hum. “That’s why she isn’t even sleeping in the same hut.”

Dar recovered from the blunt statement, turning it back on the man. “Yeah, it would be great if we had more stable housing. So when are you going to finish the first house for us?” Dar smiled as Bart harumphed.

“Well, I need some damn more lumber!” Bart threw up his hands, but then let out a chuckle and slapped Dar on the back. “Alright. I’m going to head back and see what we can get hammered out for this scooped blade today.”

“Grab a torch and bring someone with you. We can’t have you walking these woods alone after the ettercap. Pass word around the village as well. I don’t want others venturing out here to us alone.”

“Shit. Right. I’ll grab someone. Are you staying here?”

“I’d like to stay close for now. Tell Rex the situation when you get back and have him and a few others come this way to add some reinforcements. Ideally, I’d like to see if we can find this colony and get a sense of what we’re dealing with before it becomes a bigger problem. This is the first time we’re seeing them, so I’m wondering what started sending them this way.”

“Right, can do.” Bart nodded and grabbed a torch and a man to head back with, not wasting any time. Dar appreciated that about Bart. He was a man of action and took his work seriously.

Dar continued to work with the woodcutters as each group stacked up a newly trimmed tree every hour or so. Dar’s group had sped up with his help, but the limb trimming was still the longest part.

“Boss.” Rex approached with two of his wives, both carrying proper cloth-wrapped torches and armed with bows, as well as blades belted to their hips.

“Good to see you. We have an ettercap problem.”

Rex’s eyes narrowed. “So Bart told me. Which way did they come from?”

“We don’t really know. They snuck up on one of our groups. Come with me.” Dar dusted off his hands and picked up a branch from the fire, looping his ax in his belt. He figured his dao of heat was probably the better weapon in this situation.

Leading them up to the area of the ambush, Dar walked through the situation as he’d seen it. Rex surveyed the scene, his eyes scanning the tops of the trees, before heading off to the southeast. “This way.”

They only traveled for about twenty minutes before it became apparent that they were on the right path.

At first, the only signs were a few small, lingering spider webs in the lower branches of a tree, or a big funnel web spread between the tree’s roots. But then the area seemed to get gloomier as the trees became almost spooky with the number of webs spreading across them and their leaves becoming scarce. Fall had started, but leaves were still on most of the trees, not these though.

The worst was the silence. It took Dar a few minutes to notice the silence in the forest. It was unnaturally quiet, like nothing lived in them.

“Do we continue?” Dar asked.

“Yes. They won’t come near us with the torches.” Rex explained.

Terick had said the same thing, but it still gave Dar the creeps to walk, knowing they were likely being watched by spidery devils.

“It’s like nothing lives past this point.” Dar murmured.

“Like most devils, they do not live in harmony with nature. They destroy everything around them.” Rex growled.

“You mean they over hunted the area?”

“Like a plague of locusts.” One of Rex’s wives agreed. “Even the trees are starting to die.”

Dar looked more carefully. And sure enough, he could see that many trees showed a number of dead, decaying limbs, smothered by a canopy of webs.

Lifting his torch, Dar thought he saw something in one of them.

But the light caught on something deeper into the forest, and Dar saw a massive wall of white spider web that stretched across the forest. Round tunnels were built into it, like it was a massive fortress. His fears were only confirmed as he saw ettercap and spiders both crawling through the structure.

“Shit.”

“Yes, indeed. That’s big enough that we have more than ettercaps to deal with. They are hierarchical, like all devils. If you have a group this size, that means there’s something stronger holding the whole group together.” Rex backed away and looked over his head and around them. “We should head back. We need to discuss what to do about this as a group.”

Dar wanted to deal with the problem, but he also recognized Rex had the right amount of caution. This wasn’t a handful or a dozen ettercap to clear out; this was hundreds of them, and they weren’t far from their home.

“Let’s hurry back. This place gives me the creeps.” Rex’s wife said, before jumping backwards and slashing at the air above her.

Her blade cut through a giant spider that had been descending on her. It split in two and fell to the ground.

Chittering filled the canopy above them, and Dar realized it was already too late. “Go. Now.”

Their group ran through the ettercap woods as large spiders crawled around the trees, descending on their group despite the fire they brought with them.

Dar used his dao of heat to blast the air above them to drive off any descending spiders as they moved, but they only made it a few minutes before they were forced to stop.

“Did we get turned around? There wasn’t a web here before.” Dar looked at the funnel web big enough to catch an elephant.

“No. This is the way we came. They constructed this behind our backs.” Dar nodded. So they’d been led into a trap. Dar stepped forward, immediately blasting the web with his heat dao and smiling as the threads melted away. But there was still a good bit more.

“Good thinking, we’ll hold them off while you clear a path.” Rex stated, his blade already moving to cut through a nearby spider.

Dar pushed mana through his body and cooked the web off a section at a time, but it was a slow process.

The twang of bowstrings and the occasional screech of a spider sounded off behind Dar. But he stayed focused on getting rid of the web. The web never caught on fire, instead it just dried up and shriveled off.

Eventually, the maker of the web poked itself out of the center of the funnel and watched Dar angrily. At least, that was how Dar interpreted the big spider thrashing about in its web like it was throwing a fit.

The man-sized spider was black with orange bands running along its legs and bulbous mid section.

Gross.

Dar fingered his ax, ready for it to make its move. But as Dar continued to cook away its web, it disappeared back into its funnel.

Shifting back to hacking away at the web while waiting for the spider to reemerge, Dar began to see a tunnel further into the funnel. It looked like it led underground into some sort of hole.

“Steer clear of the hole in the ground, we have a big friend in there.” Dar called over his shoulder, hoping that the tunnel didn’t go further out, where more reinforcements could come at them. Feeling confident that he had at least a moment before he’d be attacked, Dar glanced at the situation behind him.

The torches were doing their job, keeping the spiders at least wary. Rex held both torches now and waved them at any spider that got a little too confident. Meanwhile, his girls had their bows out and were putting arrows in any spider that tried to rappel down above them.

Feeling reassured that they were safe, Dar focused back on the last of the funnel web, using his heat to cook away the wisps.

“Come on, we have a path.”

Dar stepped through first, giving the hole a wide berth and keeping his head on a swivel for another surprise attack. He stayed by the hole, wanting to give the others better cover.

Rex and his girls didn’t miss a beat, following directly behind Dar in the same path he had taken. Rex was still carrying the torches high and waving them about as a warning to any spider spotting a chance to attack.

Rex and the girls had just moved past the hole when the spider finally made its move. It emerged faster than Dar had expected, expanding out of the two-foot wide hole in seconds, its body seeming far too large to have fit within the space.

It flew across the ground and reared up to cover one of Rex’s women. But Dar had been prepared. He’d already been swirling his mana and was able to release a jet of heat straight at the spider.

The spider recoiled instinctively, buying the group an extra moment of time. Rex took the moment to strike.

He was a fury of a demon as he bit where the spider’s head met its midsection. The bite was met with a hard crunch as he tore through the exoskeleton. Rex ripped his head back until he tore away the spider’s own head. Dar had to admit it was a pretty fast and efficient kill.

The spider twitched, and its legs curled inward as Rex stepped away, his faintly avian features a mask of outrage.

Everyone had said that male demons were territorial and prone to fighting amongst themselves, but this was the first time Dar had witnessed just how deadly Rex could be.

Their whole group stood still for just a moment, but all snapped back into battle mode quickly. Based on the growing chittering of the spiders, something was coming. “Hurry up. Let’s get out of here.” Dar grabbed one of the torches that Rex had dropped when he attacked.

“I’m sorry boss.” Rex said, grabbing his own torch and keeping up.

They weren’t being cautious at all about their path through the woods this time. They were in full escape mode.

“It doesn’t matter. You can be as violent and angry as you want towards a spider attacking your dao companion.”

“But we are supposed to blend in with the humans.”

Dar scoffed. But they could talk more about it later. “The reality is that you aren’t human. I’m not going to ask you to be something you’re not. But right now, we need to get the woodcutters out of the woods. I think we just kicked the hornet's nest.”

Rex frowned, “Those are very clearly spiders, not hornets.”

“It’s a saying, Rex.” Dar muttered as he saw the first of the woodcutter groups looking up at them. They’d all paused in what they were doing, looking alarmed at Dar, Rex, and the girls charging at them.

Dar worked to snap them out of it. “Quick, grab your stuff. We are getting out of these woods for the day.”

A few of them nodded, but started to wrap up the task they were on.

Growling, Dar yelled. “You have a group of ettercaps coming. Get your stuff. We need to go now.”

That woke the last few up, who scrambled for their belongings and booked it out of the forest.

Dar was hot on their heels, breaking off to get the other two groups’ attention and hustle them out of the forest. They needed wood, but it had just gotten too dangerous to be in the woods.