Goldie watched from behind Frederick's eyes as he and his brother sent forth another combined burst of lightning.

That attack had chopped through a number of the assassins the first time they unleashed it in the relatively confined space of the cave. The space was relatively large for a cave, in Goldie's mind. There was enough room for eight men to stand shoulder to shoulder. But it ended up being quite cramped for a large gang of trained killers like these to make full use of their numbers.

This would seem to give the defenders the advantage.

But now Goldie could see that something had changed. In the seconds since the first barrage of attacks, many of the assassins had drawn large objects that had been hidden behind their backs. They were so dark in color that Frederick's eyes didn't properly make out their details, only their shapes.

Goldie recognized what they were as the assassins took the lightning attacks on the objects they had brought out. The bright light illuminated strange black stone shields.

The lightning struck, and it seemed to be absorbed into the material. Two dense lightning bursts dissipated completely in a second.

The assassins carrying the shields seemed to hold onto them more firmly in the moments following, having seen that they had worked. Goldie guessed that these were experimental weapons for them, or at least they were unused to carrying shields generally.

The front line of assassins advanced slowly, shoulder to shoulder, carrying the stone shields, stepping carelessly over the bodies of their fallen comrades. The shields were quite large and protected from nose down to thighs. From behind, the rest of the killers hurled bladed weapons, forcing Frederick, William, and Carolien to dodge and deflect instead of aiming further attacks of their own. Baltazar switched to fully focusing on shielding his younger siblings rather than participating in the carnage at all.

Frederick's eyes took all of those events in rapidly, allowing Goldie to get a good grasp of what was happening. She wondered dimly where Samson was, but she also didn't see herself in Frederick's field of view. That was probably good news. If the two spiders were outside Frederick's immediate notice as his vision darted around the space, then Goldie and Samson had probably escaped the assassins' attention too.

Goldie sensed that her own vision had begun to recover, so she jumped back out of Frederick's head and returned to herself. She began preparing another burst of venom and looking for who she should target next. It didn't seem as if she would be able to make much of a difference, but she would do what she could.

Then she spotted Samson's position. It was a burst of red that gave him away. He had managed to crawl up the wall and move all the way to the middle of the ceiling above the assassins. She saw him as he was preparing a fireball to attack them with.

Is he crazy? Goldie had time to think. He's right in the thick of them!

Then Samson fired his attack.

It splashed over the few assassins closest to him, and to Samson's credit, at least he was aiming from an unprotected angle. The flames actually hit their targets, they inflicted damage, and they were not intercepted by one of the black stone shields—but they were painful, not fatal, to those struck. They caught the killers' masks on fire and singed their hair and skin, but none of them even suffered blindness as had happened to the one Goldie struck earlier with her venom shot.

More than any other effect, the fireball got their attention.

A handful of assassins stopped and looked up at the ceiling as their neighbors fought fire that had taken hold of their masks.

Goldie loosed a large globule of venom aimed at that group of assassins specifically, but she knew in her heart it would be far too little to stop them from going after her son.

An assassin bent over double as the venom burst took her in the side of the face, some of it clearly getting into eyes, nose, and mouth, but the rest of the killers who had been focused on Samson attacked him at almost the same moment. Bladed weapons swept across the ceiling near him. The young spider had cloaked himself with mana for self-defense, but Goldie saw it flicker slightly as Samson's legs were swept out from under him.

He fell toward the ground, and Goldie had a frantic few seconds of watching as the assassins attempted to kill him down there. They stabbed and stomped in the area where they had seen Samson drop, but the movements were oddly slow and careful.

Goldie realized after a moment that they were having trouble coordinating. With the noise of fighting and marching all around them, it was hard to verbalize directions. And considering that Carolien had said their weapons tended to be dipped in poison, perhaps they had to be careful about how they use them, lest they accidentally kill each other.

The spider was aware that there was more fighting going on to her other side, that Frederick and William were still hurling their big lightning attacks, forced to aim for extremities rather than the center of mass now in the hope of getting around those big shields, but Goldie was focused almost completely on the situation around Samson.

She had created another big lump of venom as she watched the assassins try to stamp out her son, and as soon as she felt there was enough there to simply create an impediment, she shot out a big burst of not particularly powerful or concentrated venom, aiming for wide dispersal, hoping to cause temporary blindness or at least difficulty seeing who they were aiming at.

It's a dark cave already, she thought. Hesitate! Have trouble getting your target right. Remember, if you stab at the ground blindly, you risk stabbing each other…

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Those thoughts were her inner monologue, but the assassins acted almost as if they were some sort of strong hypnotic command. Over the next thirty seconds, a couple of them stabbed at the ground, completely missing where Samson had fallen despite the fact that he glowed with his protective covering of mana.

That gave the little spider the breathing room he needed.

In the relative darkness, even Goldie could not see what he did next. She knew he had withdrawn his mana back into his body, because she could no longer see him. But she had no idea where he had gone.

Fortunately, it seemed the killers had the same difficulty.

Goldie watched them looking around on the floor for Samson, increasingly frustrated at their inability to lock his position down. Then the small group who had been focused on him turned and resumed marching forward with the rest of their group.

The older spider heard the general thought process from one of them through Telepathy.

Feeble fire attacks anyway. Probably that mystic butterfly we were told about, but it is not powerful enough to make the difference. Not the top priority right now, when the whole Royal Family is right here for the taking.

Goldie relaxed for a moment. Samson was all right. He just had to avoid stomping feet, and he would be fine. He was more than athletic enough for that.

She started preparing another concentrated burst of venom to shoot out at the many remaining uninjured assassins. As she did, she finally turned to look at the assassins' front lines.

Oh, no!

The shieldbearers and those immediately surrounding them had closed the distance to the group, and by their sheer mass and numbers, they had broken up the Dessians' and Royal Family's defensive formation.

Now Carolien and Baltazar were in one corner, defending the little ones, while William stood in the center of the path through the cave, fighting a semicircle of enemies. Frederick was backed up against the opposite wall from the Royal Family, holding his own against his own gaggle of killers.

There were dozens of bodies littering the ground already, but the numbers were beginning to tell. Frederick, William, Carolien, and even young Baltazar had cuts all over their bodies where the assassins' blades had slashed or stabbed them.

Goldie could feel they were already beginning to slow down slightly. There didn't seem to be any escape for them. Not alive.

I have to help however I can.

She began charging mana for a burst of fire magic of her own. She had benefited from Rosslyn's tutelage just as much as Samson and Adon had. Perhaps more. She had leaned on magic less, because she was a spider and not a butterfly, but she still had it.

She launched her big ball of venom into the middle of the three assassins pressing most closely against the Royal Family, and there was a corresponding series of cries of pain. Carolien and Baltazar took advantage of their opponents' sudden distraction to stab at them with their blades. Even Baltazar was armed, though Goldie could not remember if he had been that way from the start. Perhaps he had simply picked up a dagger from one of the dead assassins.

But another three killers took the place of the fallen.

Goldie shot her fireball at one of William's attackers as quickly as she could generate a reasonably powerful attack, but even as she hurled it, she could sense that it would not be strong enough to make much difference.

Then she sensed rapid motion in the corner of her field of view.

She turned. A man was rushing toward her.

The glow of mana had given away her position.

The spider quickly crafted a mixture of venom and webbing and sprayed it into the man's eyes, and then she raced up the wall. She needed a change of position so she wouldn't still be killed, and she needed a new game plan. There had to be some way that they could all get out of there safely, though the light at the end of the tunnel felt more distant than ever by this point.

It was when Goldie was desperately crawling along the ceiling, wishing she had a plan for how to save herself and the others from this situation, that she heard Samson's voice inside her mind.

Guys, be ready to make a big move backward, he sent telepathically. I'm going to unleash a big attack, and I won't be able to discriminate in who I affect.

How? Goldie wondered. What big attack does Sammy have that I haven't seen before? What is he talking about?

Something about his tone also made her nervous. A ring in his inner voice that she would struggle to decipher later. Was it some kind of acceptance?

Mama. Samson's voice broke through Goldie's thought process. She sensed he was only communicating to her at the moment. I think I figured out what my purpose here is. Why I incarnated right before a war, why I've had the experience of magic that I have, and why the Goddess left me here in this moment. I just wanted to thank you for all the parenting. And to ask you to pass on a message to Adon. Just tell him that I love him, all right? And I'll see him next time. We'll be better brothers in the next life.

Goldie quietly began to panic.

What are you saying? she sent.

But there was no verbal answer. Instead, she felt a sensation she had experienced only once before. Something external to herself began tugging at her mana, pulling it forcibly out of her body. The drain on Goldie was very small but unmistakable.

She had felt this previously when Samson was trying to learn a new school of magic but had inadvertently made contact with the wrong figure in the black void.

The mysterious figure had begun draining Samson's life force away, and then it had paused or slowed in that task to go after the mana and life energy of those around Samson.

It seemed that Samson had decided the situation was dire enough to reach out to that thing again, but now there was no Adon to enter Samson's inner world and separate him from the power he'd made contact with. And Goldie wasn't certain of her own capacity to do the same.

Sammy, what have you done? she thought.

But she did not waste time in sending such a useless phrase telepathically.

Instead, she screamed at the Dessians and the Royal Family.

You have to get as far as you can from Samson! Goldie shouted. He's trying to destroy himself and take everyone around with him!

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