“Wake up, Mister Teapot…”

Tarnish heard the command, but had trouble obeying. His head ached, his stomach felt as though it would implode at any second, and he had the lingering sensation that he was not one, but two ponies somehow stuffed into one tall, thin body. For a brief time, knowledge of things he had no memory of learning remained at the fringes of his mind, and then, like dreams, they began to recede into so much nothingness.

When his vision came into focus, he saw the messy remains of the shambler and then he shuddered. That had not been the first shambler he had battled, but it was the worst. Pink light flooded his vision and Flamingo came into view, just inches from his muzzle. She appeared fine, but she always appeared fine. Tarnish wasn’t certain if she could be damaged, or how.

“I just fought a pile of garbage,” Flamingo announced, “and it was super gross.”

“Yeah, it was.” Rainbow nodded her head, and then prodded Tarnish. “Get up, Tarnish, you have to start moving. I hear… things.”

Something about Rainbow’s words made Tarnish’s body react. Panic and adrenalin made everything work again, and Tarnish found himself up on his hooves once more. He lifted his shield, picked up the Bellringer from where it lay on the floor, and then began to listen for the sounds of danger.

Daring Do dropped into a defensive crouch unique to pegasus ponies and Vinyl seemed to be concentrating on something. Rainbow Dash remained close to Tarnish, who was still recovering. Flamingo’s sharp tip rotated around to point in the direction of what might be, and probably was, trouble. There was a tapping sound, many tapping sounds, and some of them appeared to be inside of the wall.

Shield ready, Tarnish moved forwards, cautious, and he angled his ears to get a better listen. The tapping sounds seemed to echo from wall to wall, and from inside the walls as well, making it impossible to tell which direction it was coming from. The swampy, acrid smell was strong now, it burned his nose and made him want to sneeze while making his eyes water from the pain.

“It sounds like Igneous tap-tap-tapping away on a stone to open it up so he can find gems,” Tarnish said to his companions while keeping his voice down. There was a peculiar vibration in the floor, and he could feel his nature-senses tingling. “You know, I have this feeling… like… when you get rid of some big scary predator, and then all of the little scary predators know it is safe to come out for lunch.”

Rainbow’s ears sagged. “Um, Tarnish… stop being a druid.”

Hearing something scritching against the stone above him, Tarnish looked up, squinting, and saw nothing. He wished that Maud was here, she understood stone and she would know what was going on. Maud would figure this out, she would have a plan of action, and this threat—whatever it was—would be neutralised.

With no warning, some of the wall crumbled away, and a metallic looking sword-leg came poking out, along with a stream of gravel. Tarnish watched in horror as more of the wall turned to loose chunks and fell away. One of the horrors of Skyreach came out, covered in dust and debris. It was a spider, but only in a loose definition of the word. Like the ones in the subway station, it had metallic legs and crystals on its back, but it did not generate darkness. It was smaller, maybe the size of Tarnish’s head, and it wasn’t alone.

More spiders came spilling out, each of them had pale yellow-green bodies and translucent crystals growing up out of their abdomens. Their eyes were a freaky red-orange, and they skittered about, moving sideways, scuttling to and fro while they sized up their prey. Tarnish could feel his magic fluctuating and he didn’t know what was going on.

Vinyl raised a shield, but it flickered a few times, crackled, and then fizzled out of existence. The strange spiders advanced, spilling out of the wall, and Tarnish knew that more of them were in the ceiling up above. Daring Do and Rainbow Dash retreated, moving backwards, and Tarnish leveled his weapon at a mob of spiders.

“I’ve got pegasus bumps!” Flamingo shouted and her voice echoed in an eerie way through the passages. “GAH! Spiders!” She floated ahead, off to engage a new batch that appeared, marching down the narrow hallway. “Spiders! They conspire against us through a world wide web! It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!”

Tarnish fired and several spiders were transformed into steamed spider-goo.

“Hey! Mister Teakettle! What do you get if you cross a spider and a squirrel?” Flamingo shouted while she chopped at a big spider that tried to fend her off with its front sword-legs.

“I dunno,” Tarnish barked. While he was reloading he saw the light of Vinyl’s horn in the corner of his vision and suffered a moment of distraction.

“A monster that will run up your leg and suck your nuts dry!” Flamingo lopped off a leg, then another, and smacked away another leg trying to slice her.

Tarnish’s telekinesis was fizzling, he could feel it, and his magic was getting more unreliable by the second. One of the spiders turned around, angled its abdomen at Vinyl, and shot a stream of sticky webs at her. Vinyl went down in a heap, tangled up in webbing, and her magic failed her completely. Tarnish panicked, realising that Vinyl was in real, serious trouble without her magic, and more spiders were pouring out by the dozens from the hole in the wall.

“Do you think cobwebs happen when spiders eat too much corn?” Flamingo asked as she stabbed herself between some flailing pedipalps. “SO GROSS RIGHT NOW! SQUISHY SPIDER BITS!”

Together, Daring Do and Rainbow Dash were dancing with spiders that were trying to flank them, and the two mares did their best to avoid being cut to ribbons by the razor sharp sword-like appendages the spider’s possessed. Tarnish knew they were in trouble, and he ducked when a spider squirted some webbing at him.

With no idea what else to do, Tarnish improvised, because that was what he did best in a crisis. Struggling to make his magic work, he made the pressure inside of the Bellringer rise to dangerous levels, scary levels, and the metal tank began to make ding-ding-ding sounds, the manifestation of metal fatigue.

“A fear of spiders wearing raincoats is called ‘anoraknophobia’ and I think I have it!” Flamingo’s shrill voice sounded muffled as she cleaved a big spider in two.

With a snarl, Tarnish tossed the Bellringer into the now gaping hole in the wall. Knowing his time was limited, he then turned tail, grabbed Vinyl by the nape of her neck with his teeth, and began his retreat while Flamingo held off the invaders coming down the hall. The spiders swarmed the Bellringer, which vibrated while the pressure continued to build.

Vinyl recovered a bit, enough that she could walk, though she had extreme difficulty just doing that. One foreleg was covered in sticky, clinging webbing that stuck to everything. Rainbow Dash danced a complicated can-can dance with Daring Do, trying to avoid slashing spider legs. When they saw Tarnish retreating, they disengaged as best they could and began to back away as well. It was only with a great deal of effort that Tarnish was able to hold on to his shield.

With a smooth stabbing motion, one of the spiders pierced the Bellringer with one sword-like leg…

Everything was far too chaotic to process. There was a sudden silence that was interspersed with roars of furious sound that came and went in waves. All over his body, Tarnish felt as though he had been scalded, everything stung and his skin felt far too tight. Every nerve just under the surface of his skin sang out in pain, and spots danced in Tarnish’s vision. Even his eyeballs felt scalded, and there was a peculiar crinkling sensation in and around his eyelids when he blinked his eyes.

The air was hot, steamy, like being in a boiler room. The tang of hot metal lingered in Tarnish’s nostrils, along with the scent of burnt hair, parboiled flesh, and cooked spider. Tarnish realised that he was wet, so very wet, drenched in fact. Water dripped from the ceiling and trickled down the walls. Dozens and dozens of little spiders were scattered around them, legs twitching, and the remains of dozens more were scattered about willy-nilly.

“There was a boom,” Flamingo said, and nopony heard her. “There was a big boom that blew up the room and the spiders suffered their doom.”

“Sssssssss—OW!” Rainbow’s hissing cry was another sound that nopony could hear, deafened as they were.

Vinyl’s horn lit up for a brief second, then fizzled out. She was still covered in webbing, which had a strange crystalline sheen to it, and she was also soaked with water. Beneath her pale yellow pelt, she now looked as though she had suffered the worst sunburn ever, and her skin was a bright, vivid red.

Though nobody could hear it, the sound of spiders scurrying away could be heard, retreating, what few survivors there were hurried off to the swamp biome to recover and rebuild their numbers. A chunk of the ceiling broke free, then another, and then even more. Curled up bodies cooked by steam came tumbling down, along with a dense fog of condensed water vapour.

“I have made an error,” Tarnish managed to say, but he could not hear his own words and he did not know he was shouting. At the moment, he couldn’t hear anything, but that was changing and he knew the roar would return in a few seconds. When it did, he winced, and doing so made all of his skin stretch out in painful ways. “Oh sweet Celestia, what was I thinking?”

As awful as it was, everypony was alive, and Tarnish struggled with wondering if he had done the right thing or not. One spider, half alive and missing a few legs, it scurried off, dragging its abdomen along on the floor behind it. Not wanting to blink—it hurt far too much—Tarnish watched it go and was sympathetic to its pain.

His improvisation had gone wrong, he knew that, and it would now cost him and his companions a considerable amount of pain. Vinyl would suffer most of all, which made Tarnish feel terrible, and he wondered for a moment if any of them could sleep standing up. He felt as though he had the mother-of-all sunburns and he was absolutely certain that his skin was going to split, crack, and begin to peel away at any moment.

One careless action had such terrible consequences.

Author's Notes:

That pun... is UNACCEPTABLE! **shrill voice**