((Warning for gore and ow and ow and ow and ow.))
Caving? Boring. Mud, rocks, mud, rocks, mud, rocks. This is half his Army experience, right here in a hole in the ground.
He’s waiting for the part where something with more jawed heads than most creatures have teeth lunges out of the darkness, but it’s not happening. There’s not even a smell out of place.
He has his headlamp on, but he doesn’t exactly bother to climb. It’s jumping up or jumping down, as he thinks the ledges will take it. And there’s a drop here-strong updraft from below, cold and smelling dry-that looks like a promising change. He glances down. Floor looks sturdy, so he drops.
He turns and shines his light up the wall, so he’ll recognise it coming the other way, and sees the webs, laced and crosslaced over the cliff wall.
--
That didn’t go according to plan.
No.
Krauser picks himself up, touching the radio at his belt. “Come in.”
That wasn’t according to plan, either, since the thing was completely dead. He felt it a little further-oh, part of the case was gone.
He was at the bottom of a very long drop at the end of several hour’s worth of persistent travel, and now he was stranded without light or outside contact in the depths of a cave.
Sure. Survivable. What was really getting him was the way he’d heard cracking from below just as he’d dropped; something was waiting for him to jump.
The plaga isn’t panicking, and it’s that calm that clues him in. It knows something. He waits for a long moment, trying to sense what it’s thinking. He can. . . wait, he can see? The rock shapes around him are gray, but he’s seeing three-dimensionally-
--oh.
Oh.
The plaga’s either using echolocation, or it’s detecting vibrations; it just got stronger when a few more rocks fell. It must have tied these nerves into his optical nerves, or his visual cortex, and it’s just feeding the new sensory data in now that his sight’s totally useless.
He realizes he shouldn’t be surprised; these things are killed by strong light, so they must be dark-adapted, right? It still weirds him out just a little when he finds something new. He snaps out of it immediately. This is what he can do now? Fine, it’s useful. He’ll take it.
He starts moving.
--
He sees light and movement, and freezes. For one thing-ow. The plaga coils in discomfort before his eyes adjust.
It looks like. . . like a drifting ball of tinsel and floss, long-stranded, flickering and glittering. It’s drifting through the air. Its main body is membranes, bulbous and thin as the membrane between onion skins. Threads weave and flicker around it, either helping it to propel itself or sensing something in the air. It’s delicate, so delicate it looks like it would fall apart at a touch. The filaments he can see only when they catch the light drift through the air like spider silk.
It looks like a flying jellyfish. After that one run-in on an offshore mission a few years ago, Krauser’s not the kind of man to fuck around with jellyfish. He picks up a rock and scoots to the side, in a small tunnel opening. It drifts along. He watches it mistrustfully, checking his six once. He’s over a ledge, but its filaments are filling the room now, fanning softly. It keeps bobbing in the air, then rocks away from him, then towards-
--the light catches silvery hairs flying towards him. He dodges, but three foot-long, spear-like filaments sink point-first into his arm.
The pain is instant and indescribable, a rush of fire straight through every nerve of his arm. His skin feels like it’s gone tight and icy all over his body, and he bites off a scream as his arm drops, paralyzed.
He throws the rock, batting it across the room with its body torn open and useless, but he’s already seen that it throws its. . . nematocysts? Was that the word? He already has an image in mind of all those filaments whipcracking his way. He throws himself off the ledge, throwing his grapnel, intending to climb once he’s swung to the point of reaching the wall.
There’s a web in the way.
And that’s when he finds out the jellyfish-things made the webs.
The strands are wire this time, and he hears his clothing split and that’s his flesh being cut open and it feels like it’s going down to the bone before it’s all just overwhelming, indiscernable pain. Then they break under his mass.
He falls.
By the time he’s conscious again, there are more descending from the darkness above, but he’s paralyzed. The pain is one long chemical scream running through his body. He can see flickers across the way, and he can’t move.
The plaga’s recovered enough to start working, easing the pain and battling the neurotoxin. By the time they’re halfway there, he can drag himself up. The flickers to his side haven’t been approaching. They’re glints off metal edges, he sees now. It’s a grille of some sort.
He hauls himself towards it until he can stand and run, with shambling, lurching strides. He throws himself through it, hears and smells the bar, and crashes to the floor again.
He doesn't feel the impact. He's too numb.