With a sharp gasp, Johanna fell into the darkness below. Her heart raced as she tumbled downward, the rush of air whistling past her ears. Instinctively, she reached out, grasping for anything to slow her fall, but her fingers found only empty air.
Seconds stretched into eternity as she fell, the ground nowhere in sight. Panic threatened to consume her, but Johanna fought against it, focusing on keeping herself calm since panic was the only reason she fell in the first place. She knew that panicking wouldn't help her situation.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Johanna crashed into the ground below with a bone-jarring impact. Pain shot through her body as she lay there, dazed and disoriented. Gradually, she became aware of her surroundings: the cold, damp air of the cavern, the faint echo of dripping water, and the dim light filtering in from above. Noah, who was able to crawl back fast enough, yelled down in the cave to ask Johanna for her well-being. She answered that she was fine and would take a look to find an exit. Noah told her that he would get help and a rope to get her out of the cave again.
Slowly, Johanna pushed herself upright, shaking as she tested her weight on her more injured leg. It throbbed painfully, but she knew she had to keep moving. Glancing around, she realised she was in a vast cavern, much larger than the goblin cave she had fallen from. Stalactites hung from the ceiling like sharp teeth, and stalagmites rose from the ground like sharp blades; luckily for her, she didn't land on one since even she would have died.
As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, Johanna noticed something glinting in the distance. Curiosity piqued, and she limped towards it, her footsteps echoing in the complete silence. As she drew closer, she saw that it was a pile of glittering gemstones scattered chaotically across the whole floor.
Excitement flowed through her veins as she realised the potential wealth lying before her. Despite the pain in her leg, Johanna began to gather the gemstones, carefully tucking them into her pockets. Each one was more beautiful than the last, and she couldn't help but marvel at their brilliance.
But even as she collected the precious stones, a nagging sense of unease gnawed at the back of her mind. She couldn't shake the feeling that she wasn't alone in the cavern and that something was watching her from the shadows.
Suppressing a shiver, Johanna forced herself to focus on the task at hand. She needed to gather as many gemstones as she could carry and find a way out of the cavern before whatever lurked in the darkness made itself known.
What Johanna soon had to realise was that the gems she was thinking she was collecting weren't actual gems, since they started moving in her pockets, and once she took a closer look at the gems and held them towards the only light source, she saw an eight-legged little dark silueth in the gems. Johanna realised that these weren't actual gems; they were some kind of egg, and the lingering feeling of getting watched was confirmed by what she thought was one of the parents walking out of a thin slit in the wall.
A giant spider, at least 7 feet tall, surprised Johanna and sent shivers down her spine. Johanna wasn't a big fan of spiders if they had a normal size, but this giant spider was too much for her, as she nearly couldn't contain a loud scream. But that wasn't her only surprise since multiple more spiders began crawling out of small slits, and behind the stalactites, which varied in size, some were smaller than a chihuahua while others were taller than horses. Most of the spiders were small, like dogs, but that wasn't too much of a help since they started to swarm at her in the hundreds.
As the waves of spiders swarmed towards Johanna, they carried multiple humanoid bones and skulls with them, and that was the moment when Johanna recognised that these spiders probably fed on humans dumb enough to stumble upon the big cave network she had found herself in.
Johanna knew that killing them wouldn't help out in her situation since she was still injured from the fall, but she still didn't want to get eaten by these spiders, so she still resisted to her full power. She didn't even try to kill the small ones since the quantity of them was simply too big, but she rather focused on the big ones since they were easier targets to hit and were still easily killed by her.
She was bitten by multiple small spiders, but she simply marched past them, squiching them between her hands or stomping them to death while pushing onwards to the big spiders. As she grabbed the huge spider's leg, she ripped at it with full power, yanking the leg off of the spider while also sending it flying through the air. The spider flew through the cave at an impressive speed and splashed against the wall, dying instantly.
Johanna was getting more and more desperate since she was begging to drown in the lake of the spiders who were still trying to bite her, even though the bites were only able to penetrate her skin very shallowly. Soon after, she started to feel dizzy and realised that these spiders strength indeed did not lie in their physical force or even their quantity; it lay in their poison.
The poison was slowly making Johanna lose consciousness, and as she was going down, she lashed out with her hands a few more times until she collapsed from all that poison, hoping that she could somehow be rescued and not have to die.