Book 2 Chapter 5 - This Time We Mean It 1/3

Lillia skipped over a lot of the explanation about how the Knighting worked. Firstly, she didn’t know exactly what would happen to the girls and didn’t want to promise something she couldn’t deliver to people who were still considering eating her. Secondly, she still wasn’t 100% sure how it all worked. Most of her skills gave everything away upon introspection, but the ‘Rulebreaker’ part of [Emergency Knighting] had retained a sparse description from the moment she’d gotten it.
The twins—though Spinna was very clear that she was the older of the two—listened to the entire explanation, nodding along and occasionally interjecting with their own commentary. Throughout, Lillia kept trying to guess how old they were. It was unclear whether they were younger than she was or if she’d acted exactly like them before getting tossed into the dungeon.
Or was it until her aunt had taken over?
Then, right at the end, when Nicole had taken a leg off the Black Beast—ew—and they’d agreed to join Lillia’s party and receive a class, they hit a snag.
“I name you knight—”
“You name me WHAT?” Spinna asked, slapping away Lillia’s hand mid-ceremony.
Lillia didn’t finish her incantation. The skill never activated.
“I told you what was going on. I was giving you a class. That was how you were going to get the Princess Class and get all the pretty dresses that I have.”
“A gross knight?” Spinna asked. As she spoke, Nicole had stopped eating and snapped her attention back to the conversation. “I don’t wanna be a gross knight. I want to—”
“No! It doesn’t make you a knight. The first person I used it on became a blacksmith.”
This would have been so much easier if Havoc were here. He’d have a way to explain this to someone who didn’t get it. He’d had to explain a lot of things to Lillia like that.
“That’s even worse. Those are those guys who taste like soot,” Nicole said.
“Yeah.”
“At least that’s what Mom said.”
“Yeah!” Spinna echoed as she scuttled back from Lillia, pulling some of the thread off the wall and weaving it between her fingers. “Why are you trying to trick us into becoming not-princesses?”
“I’m not.”
“We thought you were nice.”
“I am,” Lillia said. “I just didn’t say that it was called knighting because—”
“Because you want to be the one princess,” Nicole said. “You don’t like that our Mom is a queen and you wanted to—”
“What? No.”
“Yeah, she’s just jealous of Mom and was trying to trick us,” Spinna said.
“I’m not jealous of your Mom. I just—” Shoot, shoot, shoot. She was losing control of the girls fast. She’d been making so much progress. If she got Nennia’s daughters into her party, then she would have to let them through. She’d been so close.
“Spinna, Nicole, I was just bad at explaining things. It happens. It—”
“You’re lying. You just wish you were as pretty as Mom, and so you were going to try and make us gross,” Spinna said.
“Yeah. You’re all covered in webs and dirt,” Nicole said. “You might not be a princess at all.”
“Hey! I was just falling down a dark hole, and I’m not supposed to be in a dungeon like—”
“Mom lives in the dungeon, and she’s beautiful! You’re just jealous of—”
“Why would I be jealous of Nennia? She’s a scary, gross, weird spider.”
Two gasps were hardly a chorus, but they were a majority.
Lillia slapped her hands over her mouth like she could somehow catch the words and shove them back inside. She didn’t even mean every part of that. Nennia was weird and certainly a spider, but she couldn’t call her gross, not compared to the rest of the dungeon and—
“MOM!”
“Wait, no!” Lillia said, but it was far too late. Just like she couldn’t shove her argument back down, once Nennia had been called, there was no putting that…spider back in the box.
The metaphor broke down, but so had negotiations.
“We were only eating that yucky beast instead of you because you were nice!” Nicole said.
“But you’re not very nice at all,” Spinna added.
“I didn’t mean it.” Behind Lillia, the threads of silver glittering in her robe’s firelight twitched as something above moved along them. “I was just angry at the fight and—”
“Mom! She’s down here!” Spinna called.
Lillia whirled with the summons, twirling around as Vianaffir manifested in her hand. Just as the pommel brushed against her fingertips, the blade struck chitin. Spinna had raised one of her front legs to block the attack.
“Hey! See? You are mean!”
“Girls.”
“Come here!” Nicole said as she leapt off the web behind Lillia, careening through the air with her arms outstretched. Webbing billowed out behind the young spider as she flew, spinning into a net on command.
“Oh, shoot.”
Lillia dove to the side, but it wasn’t enough. The net spread out wide as Nicole threw it, and the sticky strands of silk snatched each of Lillia’s limbs, coiling around them in a hundred little impossible ways as the young spider directed them.
With her legs suddenly bound, Lillia wiggled on the ground, trying to force her way out.
“Got her!”
“Woah! That was so easy.”
“I don’t know why Mom likes fighting so much. That was boring.”
Spinna lowered the leg that had blocked Vianaffir and scuttled over to Lillia, scooting in close to leer over her. “Maybe she’s just really bad at it. I don’t think Mom ever fought her.”
“Your Mom is gonna be really upset if you don’t let her fight me,” Lillia said. There was no logic to the argument, but she didn’t have many options.
“Come on. If she wants to fight you, she can just let you go,” Nicole said.
“Yeah, that was pretty clear. Plus, I don’t think she’s missing much,” Spinna added. She stepped up onto Lillia, triumphant.
That was going to have to be close enough.
Lillia snapped the two pieces of chitin in her palm twice, and her dress shot outward, the world vanishing into darkness as fabric transformed into the brilliant array of knives that was her second-level chitin dress.
[Chitterpede Waltzing Gown - Level 2 - Princess Class Exclusive]
[Provides a minor (+3) defensive bonus against slashing and piercing damage.]
[When a blow is narrowly avoided or absorbed by the Princess or a nearby ally while this item is equipped, the Princess gains a stack of Deadly Dance.]
[Deadly Dance - For a short time, attacks with bladed weapons are followed by a scale shooting from this dress toward the target.]
[Born in a process that discovered beauty the chitterpede didn’t know it had in life. In death, it demands attention, shimmering to attract all eyes to its wearer.]
The knife-like gorgets of the gown shredded through the webbing as Lillia thrashed on the floor, tearing apart the net that was holding her down. One of her wild kicks caught Spinna’s leg and knocked it out from under the spider.
Unfortunately, she had several others to keep her upright.
“Hey! Stop it!” Spinna said as she stomped down.
Lillia rolled as the spider spoke, unable to see what was going on but understanding that it meant trouble. At some point, she maybe should have stopped, but she kept going, end over end and side over side, with her knifey underskirt sparking along the floor.
Eventually, she reached the webbing beyond their little clearing, and slowly her rolls slowed. Layer upon layer of silk piled up upon each edge of the dress, turning her whirlwind stabbing tantrum into something closer to a ball of very gross yarn.
How far away had she gotten? It had to be quite a bit—she—
“Are you done?” Nicole called from somewhere out in the pitch darkness. Her voice bounced off the walls a hundred times, making it impossible to tell where she actually was.
“You should stop going that way,” Spinna said. “There’s a big pit over there. You’re just gonna fall again.”
“Yeah, you’ll die if you just run away in the dark.”
Were they getting closer? Further? Did the girls know where she was, or was Lillia safe?
Of course she wasn’t safe. There was a chance she was safer, though.
That said, the girls were right. No matter how far she ran in the darkness, she wasn’t getting any closer to winning this fight. She could accept her fate and die in the middle of Nennia’s lair, but she wasn’t keen on getting eaten and wasn’t confident that Nennia would allow her a quick death.
There was always the other way, but Havoc called it dishonorable and Lillia found the idea off-putting.
No, like usual, she was going to have to find a way to stand and fight.
Therein lay the issue, though. She couldn’t run or fight blind, and without the knives to guard her, she wouldn’t be standing for very long against the twins, let alone Nennia.
If only she’d charged the second-level Burning Spelldress before coming here, then she could have used [Backdraft] and set the whole place ablaze.
Which brought up a very dumb idea.
The girls had stopped talking, but Lillia could hear the click of their chitin legs against the floor. They were coming.
First, Lillia took a feather in her hand and snapped it in two. Her dress shrank away into the near-undergarments of the Ambusher Slip and Coat. Webbing tumbled off of her, falling away from the spikes that were no longer there as Lillia stood.
Second, she tore a piece of thundermite cloth and her shoes transformed into the pitch-black heels of the Thundersteps.
It didn’t change much; everything was pitch black in here.
Finally, Lillia took a deep breath, because she didn’t have many places to go, but she had to hope that Spinna had been lying about the pit.
Lillia dropped back down to the floor and changed back into the Waltzing Gown, returning to her haphazard impression of a meat grinder as she started rolling away from the girls again.
“Hey! I told you there was a pit back there! You’re just gonna fall.”
“Just stop!”
“Come on, that’d be no fun!”
Sparks flew, and Lillia saw the first echoes of bright yellow erupting across her heels. It was working.
By the wheat and silk, she was dizzy.
Lillia spun the other way, rolling toward the children—or at least where she thought they were—as fast as a princess could roll along the ground. Which, if Lillia could see anything, she would know was pretty damned slow.
Her triumphant whirling ended as a chitin leg stomped down in her path. The knife-like edges of her dress ground against it uselessly.
“Ow! Why is this dress so sharp? That’s dumb,” Spinna, her captor, said.
“Who made it? Is it pretty?”
“No. It looks all dumb and puffy.”
Oh, that was it.
Yellow flashed across Lillia’s heels. Even charged, the Thundersteps didn’t cast much light, but it was enough to see a leg beyond the one holding her in place.
“Big dresses are cute!”
Lillia lashed out with a swift, somewhat pathetic kick. Lightning crackled as she struck one of eight shins. As the thunderous boom followed, it didn’t even make Spinna flinch.
But crackling sparks scattered out in every direction.
And she only needed one to catch.
Lightning kissed a silver strand of thread that was hanging loose where Lillia had torn it from its place. That spark of lightning bloomed outward into light for a moment as the spark turned to a flicker, and a flicker became a flame.
Fire ran up the thread, slowly cutting through the pitch of darkness. Lillia locked onto all eight of Spinna’s eyes as they went wide.
Fire engulfed the first web, and there was an infinite number to follow.