Dear Mother,
We managed to come out of our first training mission with not one, but two new records under our belts. As of right now, we are the first adventuring team to slay a spider queen during training. We are also the first adventuring team to whose actions necessitated the creation of a new rule, regarding the slaying of a spider queen during training, that rule being, to not to. You see, the whole point of keeping breeders like spider queens is to breed monsters for rookie adventurers to fight. That becomes much harder when your main breeder and all of her spawn lay dead in a melted, congealed, mess at the bottom of a ravine….. Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
After making sure that all our gear was ready and cleaning up after a slight misunderstanding at the Artificer's Shop involving acid and floorboards, we headed down into the tunnels. We passed several groups of other adventurers making their way out, dragging along bags of loot and materials from their prey. Seeing what rewards could be waiting for us at the end of this definitely upped our enthusiasm. Perhaps a bit too much, but we'll get to that later. After a while, the cave tunnel forked. We had three paths to choose from, each labeled with a sign. One path seemed to lead towards a flooded tunnel, another seemed to lead back outside to some kind of wooded area, and the last seemed to go down, way down. The only thing on the sign was a picture of a bug. By some Merlinian feat of logic, majority vote said we were taking the bug tunnel.
We progressed a short ways before arriving in a small chamber. Most of us stopped dead in our tracks. Sam had a hard time seeing exactly what had us all spooked, her torch showing her much less than our eyes. Regardless, what we were looking at was long, so long in fact that it managed to stretch all across the walls, even the ones behind us. And it had legs, a lot of them. Only by squinting did I realize there was actually more than one. We were in a cramped cave chamber, with three giant bone centipedes. Sam was the first to attack, launching a sphere of fire at the first. Luckily, big as they were, these bugs weren't that tough, and they certainly didn't like fire. The first centipede fell to the ground, writhing in the flames before going still. The two others began to scuttle about and hiss. I called out Saphira, her normal blue scales replaced with a blazing crimson. She launched herself at the second one and bit the thing clean in half. The last one retreated up the wall. I was just quick enough to warn everyone that it was on the ceiling. We all dove out of the way as the centipede wrapped itself around a stalactite and sent it plummeting down on us. Sam decided she'd had enough and jumped up, grabbing the bug and yanking it down. The beast slammed onto the ground with a satisfying "thwak" and was no more.
Once we'd collected ourselves, we moved down the next tunnel. As we approached the next chamber, we couldn't help but notice all the webs. They were everywhere. When we made it to the next chamber, we realized it was far bigger, and there wasn't even a floor that we could see, just the start of a bridge of webs. I asked Sam to light one of my arrows with her torch. I fired the flaming arrow down into the darkness. This wasn't any old chamber; it was a ravine. It easily when down a good 70 ft. My arrow got caught in some webbing and that's when we realized the thread was flame resistant. Realizing this, Sir Bucket thought it would be a great idea to harvest some. Now ordinarily, I would've agreed and even helped him, but we weren't alone in here. And as he began cutting off and pulling webbing from the walls and out from the ravine, we realized that he was making all the webbing around us shake and vibrate, I rushed to tell him to stop but it was too late, one of them was already right above us.
A net of webbing shot out at us from the darkness. We all managed to break free of it in time, except for Becket. In an instant, he was yanked into the ravine and sent plummeting down into the depths. Luckily, he didn't fall all the way down. He merely sat there, about halfway down, hanging from a thread. Centurion fired his crossbow at the spider that had caught Becket. He managed to kill it and we grabbed the line holding Becket. While Sam and Centurion worked to pull him up, the rest of us held off the swarm. The whole place came alive. Once Becket was up, we made a mad dash across the bridge of webbing to an opening on the other side of the ravine. Just as Becket was about to clear the bridge, a very big leg jutted out from a hole in the wall to our side. It was the first time any of us saw her, the queen.
Now Becket's reaction to this could be seen as understandable. He had just nearly missed being impaled by a gigantic spider leg after all, so I couldn't judge him too harshly when he whipped around and sent a Guiding Bolt into it. The hairs on the leg burned and there was a great shriek as the leg retreated back into the hole it came from. And then, rumbling. Lots of rumbling. It felt like the whole cave would collapse on top of us. The wall crumbled away, and there she was in all her horrifying glory. This was too much. This thing was easily the size of a large house and had at least sixteen hatred-filled eyes that I counted. And it had several dozen live young clinging to its back; we couldn't take this thing. These were the thoughts going through my mind as, just before I made it to the other side, my leg got caught in webbing. The bridge collapsed underneath me, and Sam, I, and even Saphira, fell.
We all lived, surprisingly. Sam and I were suspended upside down by threads in the middle of what seemed to be a giant tunnel of webbing. While I couldn't miss the giant, angry, spider queen directly in front of me, my first instinct was to check on Saphira. She was fine, stuck to one of the walls of the tunnel directly below me. She let out a small puff of fire to let me know she was still in this. This was the moment of truth, we weren't dead, but we were all but helpless. All this thing needed to do was swipe at us with its gigantic legs. It would either grab us and devour us in one fell swoop, or cut the lines we were hanging from, and we'd be sent plummeting to our deaths. I had one shot. So, I grabbed my last arrow, all the others had fallen out at this point. I aimed directly at the queen's face, and with a little bit of power I borrowed from Saphira, I fired.
I hit it! I couldn't believe it, but I hit it! My arrow found a slit between two plates in the queen's head. It sunk deep, letting Saphira's fire seep inside. Now I'm not sure what's inside spider queen blood, but whatever it was made her light up like a Fireball. Chunks of gore and exoskeleton went in all directions and all that was left was a gaping hole where part of the queen's face had been. It screeched so loud I could feel my ears bleed, but it didn't matter. I might not have killed it, but I managed to hurt it, bad. The others took their chance. Big T fired arrows, Becket sent out more Guiding Bolts, and Centurion sent bolts and a flurry of acid down into the weak spot I created. With no way to heal itself or get rid of the burns and acid, all the queen could do was flail and screech as it burned from the inside out. Sam and I managed to free ourselves and climb our way back to the bridge. I recalled Saphira and joined the others as we watched the acid filled, burning, husk tumble down with all its young to the bottom, crushing and burning webs and eggs as it went.
It took a while for everything to settle at the bottom of the ravine. Once we were sure everything had stopped moving down there, we rappelled down. We took what prizes and trophies we could and went back the way we came. When the officials at the guild heard what we did, they didn't believe us at first, it took them actually sending people down there to confirm our story. We got a pretty decent chewing out about just how long it would take them to find a new queen and for a new generation of spiders to be born, but they couldn't deny that we'd surpassed any and all expectations, and technically it's not like we broke any rules. They sent us off with a reluctant well done and told us to just go do some hunting jobs and try not to annihilate anything until they figured out what to do with us.
The next few days weren't very eventful. We hunted a bit, repaired and restocked our gear, and ran some personal errands. Becket went to a Taylor in town and presented the spider silk he managed to harvest. He managed to get quite a lot of it before things went sideways. Most of us trained and I went back to the Artificer's Shop to buy some magic stones. Chavelle was nice enough to give me a massive discount and sold me a whole bunch, as well as an inscription kit for them. I've seen some of the cool stuff these things can do. It'd be foolish not to give them a try. I've been experimenting with them for the past few days. From what I can tell, each stone has a type and a tier. Types pertain to the kind of magical power inside of them, and tiers pertain to how powerful the magic is. Inscribing symbols onto them brings out that power. I've mainly been trying to embed them into my arrowheads to give my shots a bit more umph, but progress is slow going. I wish Auntie Silva was here. She'd get a kick out of figuring out to make these things work.
Anyways, our new orders just came in, a mysterious land mass has appeared just off the nearby coast, not too far away from where I first made port a few weeks ago. We are to investigate and see exactly what the hell it is and what the hell it's doing there. My money is on giant sea creature that will devour us and spit out our bones. I'm hoping on getting the others in on this action. If nothing else, I'll be able to make some coin before I die. Jokes aside, while I'm not sure how confident I am in our team, or my ability to lead it, I do know this. We have a habit of getting into trouble far too easily, and yet, if out of nothing but dumb luck, we seem to get out of trouble just as easily. The time has come for us to come up with a new name for the group. Everyone has their own ideas, but as I look at us now, in brand new cloaks made of fire-proof spider silk, I think I know what I'm voting for... The Queenbreakers.
Love, your son, Fessiiv
P.S. I'm surprised we never visited this place when I was little. Tormund would've gotten a kick out of these monster tunnels.