The freshwater swamplands to the east of the sheer spine mountain range, are a virulent breeding ground for infection and disease.

  A forested wetland whose malformed Cypress’s range between varying stages of decay.

  The taste of airborne rot contrasting the budding scents of life. A boot sucking mire utterly drained of its vibrancy. An undead thing, still alive and kicking, despite all evidence to the contrary.

  A damp, humid, miserable place where, for every two steps forward, you sank at least one foot deep.

  A single step closer or further from hell, depending entirely on your definition. The buzzing drone of insects an ever-present backdrop, although it was always somewhat variable in its intensity.

  The vast majority of the wicked biters restricted to the small pockets still receptive to their near endless proliferation. Rippling ponds of still water practically bursting with wriggling larvae.

  Terrible places where the incessant drone was near deafening, like taking a drill-bit to one’s inner ear canal. And the risk of protracting some unknown illness was great.

  At least the damnable spiders only poisoned you, fangs the size of small daggers able to melt the flesh from your bones. Traumatic? Undoubtedly. But for many of the infantry, jaded veterans and enlistees alike, quick and painful beat slow and agonizing any day of the week.

  Left to the mercies of the wet and the damp.

  It wasn’t a fate most would wish on their worst enemy. The ministrations of tent healers generally reserved for those severely injured in the fighting.

  Ultimately turning a simple insect bite into a protracted death sentence. To stumble, unwitting and uncovered, into their hellish little domains? A worse form of suicide than any devil or demon could devise.

  And wasn’t that the Queen’s honest truth.

  Not even mentioning their real enemy in all this. The signs as commonplace as the muck on one’s boots, or the silk in one's bedding.

  The tangled stretch of webbing was kind of hard to miss.

  A near constant companion all throughout their miserable march—more a disorganized slog across uneven terrain, than any orderly military procession they’d ever been part of, much to their officers’ chagrin.

  Draping the tree crowns up above like a string of interconnected bedsheets. Creating something of an artificial canopy, bridging the gaps between sparse woodland.

  The much-needed shade a pleasant boon.

  Until you reached the true heart of the arachnid’s territory, and you realized that the gift of its shade—mere accents layered over the swamplands proper, like little splashes of spider silk to liven up the ambiance—had merely been the precursor.

  Precursor to the confusion of winding white strands. The occasional slip of bark or flash of foliage peaking through, ever so rarely, and barely noticeable even then.

  The poster child for onset arachnophobia.

  If the swamp lands previous had been a series of open veins, what lay before them was no less than a severely clogged up artery. A silken fortress made of interlacing webs, several miles wide in radius and several stories high in scope.

  Less navigable than even the thickest jungle underbrush. As impenetrable as the sturdiest castle wall. An adage coined and quickly circulated. How it took nine women to carve a path, and another eight to detangle them after.

  And of course, it didn’t help matters any that the resident population took great offense to the advancing army’s presumption. The invasion of their silken territory. Less an army, than a never-ending tide of arachnids, ranging from barely above knee height, to looming twice the head height of a person. Swarming over swampy terrain like a sweeping black tide.

  An undulating carpet of skittering bodies, if that carpet also extended up and across any vertical surface their webbing could feasibly glom onto. A veritable cascade of bulbous bodies and twitching fangs.

  Dripping with either venom or acid, it was always hard to tell which.

  Coming in successive waves of varying strength, in irregular intervals, at all times of the day and well into the night. Within a week of this, constantly running on high alert, even high command began to show clear signs of exhaustion.

  Within a month?

  Not a soul in the army was sleeping a wink. A fact which only seemed to accelerate the rampant spread of disease, whilst decelerating recovery to an alarming degree.

  In a bid to cut down on the growing casualties, a number of preventative measures were taken. To… varying effects, all told.

  Mass quarantine, unconventional troop allocations, experimental insect repellents and more.

  A strict, round the clock watch was set, along with an even stricter sleeping schedule. Many learned to slip into unconsciousness at a moment’s notice. To sleep with their eyes open, with their blades in hand—always primed and ready for a fight.

  And yet, despite all of this, it was still barely enough.

  The rancid guts of the eight-legged blighter gushed forth in hot spurts, completely flattened beneath the heel of Dalia’s firmly planted combat boot. The feel of its bulbous backside going crunch then splat in quick succession as visceral as it was just so so satisfying.

  It was a tricky thing then, pulling her foot from the muck of the stinking mire, but, then again, she’d had plenty of practice in recent days. Twisting her body just so, she made sure to place her free foot on solid ground, or as solid as they came nowadays, anyhow.

  Wouldn’t do for her to slip and snap an ankle in the tumble. That’d just be plain stupid, and everyone knew the healers wouldn’t treat stupid. Well, not the regular kind anyway.

  Only the heroic sort was worth their time, apparently. A right bleeding moron in the line of duty. Made all the difference really. Meanwhile a snapped ankle while out on patrol was your own damned fault. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

  As if they weren’t all idiots for hoofing it out here to begin with. Twice over for deciding to stay, the dumb bastards.

  She gave the foot a sharp yank, dislodging it with a sucking wet plop. She barely even noticed the way the motion caked her camo anymore. Covered up all that fancy camouflage with layer after layer of muck and grime.

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  “Bloody well defeats the whole damned point, now don’t it?”

  No helping it, she supposed.

  You had to come down real forceful like or the job wouldn’t get done proper. Fast and hard, that was the rule. Or the sucking wet slop would end up cushioning the blow, and next thing you knew, the little biter would already be halfway to safety. Leaving you to scramble after ‘em, liable to slip and break your own damned neck for your troubles.

  Well, not on her watch.

  You were supposed to put ‘em down where you saw ‘em, sergeant’s orders. And really, who was she to argue?

  High command had called it a “preventative measure,” whatever that meant. All she knew was, the little buggers needed to die. And so long as Dalia still got to smite the ugly fuckers to her heart’s content, it was good enough for her.

  She’d always hated spiders after all.

  Spotting another in her path, Dalia brought her foot down hard, grinning at yet another satisfying squelch. Once you really got into it, it really did stop feeling like a chore. Became a game of sorts, almost. A pass time for those saddled with patrol. You never ran out of harmless entertainment. Who else in the camp could say that?

  She practically had an unlimited supply!

  Spotting another on the way, she made a slight detour. Humming to herself all the while, she reached it, raised her right foot high, and once more made to bring her heel hurtling down.

  The patrolwoman never actually saw what killed her, the snapping fangs which easily severed her spine. Never bore witness to the offending creature, it’s emergence from the silk smothered brush reflecting off of blankly staring eyes.

  A hairy leg speared downward, piercing the skull of the dead soldier, and splitting it like a gourd. The spider-rift spawn hybrid, it’s top half nearly humanoid while its bottom half remained arachnid and pure, grinned—twitching palp’s heavily contrasting the glinting rows of pearly whites. With a gasping, raspy voice, as if it were still unused to owning vocal cords, the creature spoke.

  “Ahh… So… s-s-satisfying.”

  Behind it, several more of its strangely cobbled ilk emerged, squinting in the brilliance of the noonday sun. And behind them? The first demonic army to grace these lands in many a century. Millions of their smaller brethren skittered forth, brothers and sisters all.

  Grouping themselves in organized units, with each unit of a thousand headed by a senior officer—more often than not some colossus, venom spitter, or brute type variant.

  Meanwhile, the very first to emerge onto the open clearing, the matriarch’s self-appointed generals, straightened. Rising to their full heights of eight feet eight inches, the four divinely appointed generals shared a long, complicated look.

  Before, as one, they separated. Spreading out to see that their mother’s will be done. And in their wake undulated a rippling sea of black.

  An army readymade for all out war.

  All was quiet and subdued within the jungle expanse just west of the queendom’s capital.

  This was a statement that had never been true, and, most likely, had never even been uttered.

  The trilling of birds, droning of insects, croaking of frogs and so so much more. A raucous cacophony of attention seeking wildlife as densely packed and colorful as the tangled undergrowth they were, even now, being forced to savagely hack their way through.

  Lira, assistant director of the westernmost monarch class recon team, grunted as she once more brought the makeshift implement down. A long shovel, head sharpened to a razor's edge, acting as impromptu pruning instrument, bug swatter, and sometimes crutch.

  A versatile implement if ever she’d known one, if a bit unwieldy in its design.

  Lira stepped back from the backbreaking work, leaning on her shovel, wiping the sweat from her brow, and trying not to appear as exhausted as she felt.

  Catching the flash of something vibrant from out of the corner of her eye, Lira was quick to sweep up the shovel and bring it around hard. Bisecting the fourteen-inch-long centipede creature with a hand numbing thunk. Shovel head easily slicing through the long insect to bite into the thick wood of the tangled root system beneath.

  Four months in this damnable forest.

  Four entire months!

  Three months, twenty-nine days, and twenty-three hours too many, if you asked her. And still, they’d yet to fully assess their resident monarch. Worse, they’d yet to even catch a solid glimpse of the thing.

  Due less to their own ineptitude, though often it felt that way, and more so due to outside interference. With the racket it and its ilk made wherever they went, they’d have been hard pressed not to know where it generally was at any given time.

  No, instead it was the presence of the monarch's extensive entourage itself which made studying the demon beast such a hassle. That, and the near constant meddling from on high.

  Of course, initially, they’d tried communicating their concerns to the top brass, to temper any reckless or outright suicidal behavior. And, of course, they’d immediately been shut down.

  Command refused to see sense, the forward vanguard marched, and they’d been relegated to general recon—effectively demoted, made into glorified scouts. That they hadn’t deigned to see reason was as predictable to Lira as it was disheartening.

  And, without a shadow of a doubt, their decision to press onward despite the recon team’s protests, would lead to many, many deaths.

  Because, like they’d tried to communicate earlier, the jungle was so unlike any of the other staging points throughout the campaign. In and of itself, it provided no real danger any halfway competent private couldn’t reasonably handle with a little training.

  Be sure to check your boots and bedroll before stepping into them.

  Don’t squat anywhere you haven’t personally vetted.

  Keep a tactical shovel on you at all times, and the mundane dangers of the jungle expanse could be navigated with relative ease.

  Indeed, it was, by far, the most human friendly frontier of the entire damned war. Until, that is, it quite suddenly was not. It lulled you into a false sense of security. Inuring you to the fact that death was quick and agile within the jungle expanse.

  And if you didn’t know where to look, didn’t recognize the signs, it was easy to get overrun, cornered, and summarily executed. That the danger, realistically, only came from one real source made it no less deadly when you found yourself on the other end of those honed claws and yellowed fangs.

  It was why they’d counseled extreme caution when traversing the expanse.

  And it was why, upon trekking back from their failed excursion and approaching the once central camp, they weren’t exactly surprised to find it in complete and utter ruin. Unsurprised, though thoroughly, genuinely devastated. They’d had friends stationed in the camp. Family.

  Many within their small unit fell to their knees, though, thankfully, they each maintained the clarity of mind not to voice such roiling emotions aloud. Instead, their inner turmoil could clearly be seen in the horror that painted their faces.

  Because what had once been the main camp of the westernmost front, the head outpost their leadership had maintained and fortified—very much against their pleas for a more nomadic like approach—was now a ruin of shattered logs and shattered bodies.

  A field of broken, mutilated corpses heaped atop the remains of tents, buildings, makeshift fortifications.

  Looking out over the scene of utter devastation, a small part of her mind recognized it was an image that would stay with her for the rest of her life. The larger part was too stunned to look away.

  Thousands of infantry, scouts, officers and generals… reduced to this…?

  A field of corpses—headless and devoid of extremities.

  Twisted, tortured, beaten, broken.

  Not for the sake of sustenance, merely the insatiable compulsion for inflicting cruelty. Many no longer resembled people. Were it not for the torn uniforms or the odd clumps of hair, it was unlikely she’d have been able to categorize the remains at all.

  It was a carpet of stringy red and awful, covered with scuttling insects and buzzing flies.

  Lira thought she was going to be sick.

  Promptly, one in her unit was sick.

  And it was only then that she noticed how fresh the “bodies” were.

  Too fresh.

  A jolt of uncontrollable panic shot through her.

  Above them, atop the branches of the dense canopy that loomed high above, there came a rustling, a snuffle. Lira tilted her head upward, only to find the grinning face of a primate staring back at her, yellowed fangs showing prominently on its demonic features.

  Then, without even breaking eye contact, it was with a visible pleasure—almost bordering on ecstasy—that the evil creature slowly inflated its chest, before letting it all out with an ear-piercing shriek. In the distance, not all that far, all things told, there came an immediate response.

  A series of howls which throttled the ear drums and set the very air to wavering.

  This time, Lira didn’t hesitate to voice her emotions. Her voice quickly rising to join the growing cacophony. Her stark terror drowned out by the arrival of a monarch. The Monkey King Howler and his rabid court of sycophants.

  Lira and her team were swiftly torn apart.