Not long after the Priestess came back in with a large bundle of meat, far more than they would need for just one meal, the skies opened up again, and a steady light rain began. Not enough to cause more flooding, but enough that it was quickly rinsing off the bus.
Then the wind picked up, which seemed to relieve the driver.
“The winds will push the storm away, and help dry out the ground faster. At worst, we might be stuck for one full day, but no more than that before the ground is dry enough that we can move again.” He explained, then tilted his seat back and pulled a blanket from the overhead bin, signalling that he was done with conversation for the night.
Bus seats wouldn’t be the most comfortable night’s rest, but they were dry. So, they split the group into four, giving each of them a three-hour night watch, and everyone did their best to sleep.
Karl’s seat put him on the last watch of the night, but he knew that Rae was watching what happened around them with keen interest. This spot might not be a bad one, she had decided, once Hawk got a chance to go out hunting.
Snakes were a pain, as they just slithered through and under the web, but there should be other things to hunt soon, and she hadn’t been ordered to stay inside. The night was her time, and if there was prey foolish enough to approach her den, who was she to say no to their kindness?
She got her chance just before Karl’s shift started at four in the morning. A small group of Venom Fang Lizards had swum across the receding floodwaters and were diverted from their path by the presence of warm bodies on the bus.
They were each about the size of a domesticated cat, and once they hit her web, they would be so completely tangled that they would never get free again.
The students on watch were startled and nearly shouted in fear when Rae landed outside the bus, but they quickly recognized her body, and that she was weaving a dome of web all around the bus.
It almost seemed like she wanted to cocoon it in the strings of spider silk, but once she had a loose net, she settled down under the bus and blended herself into the mud and darkness to wait for her prey.
The lizards didn’t have great night vision, so they never saw the thin strings of spider web running from the bus to the ground. So, when they ran into it, just as Rae predicted, they panicked and began to flail, tying themselves up even tighter with every movement.
Their poison fangs would do them precious little good when they were trapped in the web, and Rae waited until she was certain that she had trapped them all before she darted out in a streak of inky black motion and punctured their skulls to pull them into the beast space with her.
“Did you see that?” One of the students on watch gasped, waking Karl and a few others nearby.
“No, and that’s the part that frightens me. One moment they were in the web, and the next they were just dead and gone. I’ve never seen anything move that fast.” The boy beside him whispered.
“What’s happening outside? Should we wake the others?” A newly awoken student asked.
“No need. Rae, the big spider of Karl’s was outside hunting lizard monsters. I think that she’s back under the bus now.” The boy replied.
Karl smiled. They wouldn’t understand that the mental space could be accessed from some distance away, so they wouldn’t have understood how Rae simply disappeared once she had her loot. From their point of view it had to be absolutely terrifying to have seen the Bloodbath Spider launch out to kill her prey then simply vanish.
[It was impressive, if I do say so myself. I got perfectly blended while I waited, and I doubt that most of the humans could even see me, they just saw the lizards being pulled from the web.]
[The apex predator of the night.] Karl agreed.
“She’s definitely making fun of us for not being able to spot her. You can always tell by the look on Karl’s face when the beasts are talking to him.” One of the students on guard duty whispered.
Dana’s soft laugh caught the boys’ attention. “Of course she is laughing at you. She can camouflage herself, and it is dark outside. I bet you didn’t even notice right away that the lizards were gone. Rae is extremely fast, and in the dark, even I have a hard time spotting her, and I’m fairly used to looking for her.”
The boys chuckled, thinking that Dana was actually afraid of spiders. It would never cross their minds that the mage and the Bloodbath Spider both liked sleeping in hammocks on Karl’s balcony.
Karl wasn’t sure how much longer that would be feasible, though. Rae was growing rapidly, and once she got close to two metres long, it would be hard for her to create a large enough hammock out of her web inside the Gazebo. It needed room to swing and attach at either end.
Karl could feel the pride in Rae’s mind as Dana praised her. But what was more amusing was that half of the students hadn’t even realized that there was a spider web built over the bus. They had turned the interior lights off so that they weren’t a beacon on the hilltop, and for that reason alone, the very minimal evening light made the strands impossible for most of them to see.
But the sky was beginning to lighten in preparation for the impending dawn, and the students would start to notice soon. Hopefully before one of them stepped outside and got entangled in the sticky webbing, but it was tempting to just not say anything and see what happened.
Karl took his place by the window of the bus and waited for the sun to come up enough that he could send Hawk out scouting again and check on the flood water levels. As long as the levels were receding as expected, they could probably start digging the ramp to their makeshift bridge, to make up for what the flood had washed away.
But there might also be a better way than the first one that Hawk had found. Once the water went down, it would be easier to see what areas were stone or gravel, and therefore more likely to be solid enough to support the bus until they could get back to the high ground.
Hawk and Thor were both still asleep, and Rae was just about to doze off when the sun came up, marking the end of the night watches, and the beginning of the long wait for the sun to dry out the ground enough that it would be safe to move from the well-based roadway.
The last thing anyone wanted was to spend all morning working, then get the bus stuck five metres from where it was now.
