The Undead Spider #90.
The Reaper moved around the first swing like the blade had never been a consideration.
Jake reset his footing and swung again, redirecting mid-arc, and the Reaper arranged itself out of the way with a single unhurried step. The room was large enough that the Reaper could move in any direction and had, and Jake had been tracking every repositioning without finding a pattern he could use. The scythe was slowing him. It also felt like the only thing he could properly use.
He drove forward, put his weight behind another swing, and the Reaper caught the haft one-handed.
The force of the catch drove Jake back across the floor. His feet found a ridge in the metal and he went down on one knee, both hands still locked on the haft, and the Reaper held its end without strain, without shifting its weight, looking down at him with the void of its hood pulled low and the cold of the room sitting in the air between them like something structural.
Jake pulled.
The scythe didn't move.
He got his feet under him and pushed upward with everything his legs had, shoulders burning, and gained maybe two inches before the Reaper's grip closed another fraction and he lost them. He stood there shaking against an immovable thing and understood, for the first time since he'd woken up in the cocoon, what he was actually in the room with.
The Reaper let go of the scythe.
Jake fired a web at the debris field behind its shoulder. The debris cluttered as a mass of stripped boards and old wire piled at the room's edge sprung into the phosphorescent light on pull.
The stack came crashing across the floor between them, and the Reaper's head turned toward it -- one beat, a single degree of attention -- and Jake released the haft and dropped, rolled across the scattered components, and came up with the scythe still in his left hand.
His elbow hit a hanging thread on the way up.
The cocoon connected to it swung out hard and collided with the debris field, and the seam split, and something inside shifted and spilled. Jake heard it. He also heard the quality of silence that came from the Reaper's direction in the half-second after.
He kept moving.
He found a thread he could use and climbed, hand over hand, ascending into the dark above the room while the Reaper tracked him from below. The thread frayed under his weight and he moved to another, higher, until the convergence point was above him and the room spread below -- the debris field, the hanging threads in every direction, the Reaper below with its head tilted up toward him.
He fired two web lines -- one to the debris field on the Reaper's left, one to a thread cluster on its right -- and pulled both simultaneously. The debris cascade hit from one side and the thread cluster swung from the other, and the Reaper moved to address the threads, which put its left side open, which was where Jake needed it.
He aimed and dropped.
The full weight, the full rotation, everything concentrated into the point of the blade, and it hit the Reaper's chest and the room inverted -- sound collapsing inward and then expanding outward in a sharp metallic ring that pressed against the walls and came back changed, the air between them taut and then gone, the silence after it total.
Jake held the haft. His arms were shaking.
The Reaper looked down at the blade against its chest.
"Inexperienced," it said. "Always go for the head."
Things rose from below its hands -- along its body, where the robes had hidden them -- and they moved with total intention and caught Jake at the arms and chest and lifted him before he could react, and the scythe left his grip and returned to the Reaper's hand, and Jake looked down at what held him and saw metal. Joints. Cabling. The dull shine of something built rather than grown.
He looked at the Reaper's face -- at the dark beneath the hood -- and then he looked at his hands, and he started firing webs.
Not at the Reaper. At the threads above them, the ones he could reach from where he was suspended, pulling them loose in sequence, the cocoons swinging out and colliding with each other and with the debris below in cascades of noise and scattered components.
"Stop," the Reaper said.
Jake pulled another thread loose.
The grip tightened and he rose, the room dropping away beneath him, the Reaper extending to its full height in the dark and looking up at him, and the cold pressed in from every direction and the light caught the Reaper from below and Jake saw all of it -- the height, the scythe, the dark where a face should be -- and felt the full weight of what he was suspended in front of.
He fired another web at a thread.
The Reaper caught the strand without looking.
Held it.
The room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound. The cocoons that had been swinging settled. The debris below stopped shifting. Even the phosphorescence dimmed a fraction, pulling back from the space around the Reaper like light making a decision about proximity.
The Reaper did not move. It simply held the strand, and the holding of it was the most deliberate thing Jake had seen it do.
Jake felt it land.
Not the grip on his arms. The other thing. The thing the room had been building since he'd woken up in the cocoon and heard the first question and started fighting before he'd finished processing where he was. The thing he'd been outrunning with motion, with the scythe, with the web lines and the debris and the drop.
The feeling of inevitability.
The Reaper was not angry. It was not threatened. It had watched him exhaust every variable in the room with the patience of something that already knew the inventory, and it was still here, and it was still holding the strand, and the quality of its attention had not changed once.
"You're still fighting," it said. "Even when there is nothing left to fight for."
The words came down from above him and settled in the cold.
Jake's jaw tightened. Something underneath the sentence was trying to get in -- the specific shape of it, the angle of it, the fact that it wasn't wrong in the way he needed it to be wrong. He'd heard things like it before. People deciding he was finished and were explaining why. Those times he'd been able to point at the thing they'd missed, the variable they hadn't counted. The door in the wall they hadn't seen.
He looked at the room.
He'd pulled every thread he could reach. He'd collapsed the debris field. The scythe was gone. The mechanical appendages held him at a height where his webs couldn't find purchase on anything that would matter. His legs couldn't find a surface. There was the Reaper, and there was the dark above, and there were the cocoons -- still hanging, most of them, the ones he hadn't displaced, pulsing with that slow not-quite-biological rhythm that he hadn't looked at directly since he'd woken up because looking at them directly meant asking what they were and he hadn't had the processing to spare.
He looked at them now.
Different sizes. He'd noticed that. Different builds. He'd noticed that too. He noticed them properly now. The specific distribution of size and shape. The particular pulse of one on his left, slower than the others. The one below it, smaller, the web around it thicker at the seams like it had been reinforced. The one further back in the dark he could barely resolve, hanging lower than the rest, the thread above it visibly strained.
He looked at the Reaper.
The Reaper was looking back.
"You are wrong," Jake said. It came out rougher than he'd intended, something below the sentence breaking the surface. "I'll still get to the end. Won't stop until I do."
"You are already at the end." The grip tightened, pulling him half an inch higher, and the Reaper's voice came from directly below him now, from the space between his feet and the floor. "Nothing lives beyond here."
The cold pressed in. The phosphorescence pulled back another fraction.
"If there wasn't," Jake said, "you wouldn't be keeping bodies alive in cocoons."
The room held that.
The Reaper didn't respond. It stood in the dark below him and it didn't respond, and the not-responding was its own kind of answer, and Jake felt his mind catch on it because it mattered.
He looked at the cocoons again. He looked at the threads, all of them leading back to the convergence point above where his own had been. He looked at the one with the reinforced seams and the one whose thread was strained and the one in the back whose pulse was slowest.
He looked at the Reaper.
"You know this isn't it, and that's why you can't keep me," Jake said.
The Reaper lowered him.
Not all the way. Halfway. Set him at a height where his feet could find the floor if he stretched, and held him there, and the mechanical appendages loosened their grip without releasing it, and the Reaper stood at its full height and looked at him and the dark beneath its hood was steady and total and completely without indication of what it was going to do next.
Jake's feet found the floor. He took the weight on his legs slowly, feeling what they had in them, which was less than he'd have liked. He straightened as much as the grip allowed.
The Reaper released him.
He stood on the floor of the room and the Reaper stood across from him and neither of them moved. His spider-sense was running its low trace, the same one it had been running since he'd woken up -- no urgency, no escalation. He'd been making decisions in that gap for the entire fight and he was still making them now.
"And in the end, what do you hope to find?" the Reaper asked.
Jake looked at it.
"Freedom? Power? Ownership?"
"A reason," Jake said.
The Reaper was still. "A reason for what."
"For any of it." His jaw worked. "That it was worth it."
"And if it wasn't?"
"Then I drowned for nothing," Jake said, voice laced with bitterness. "And that, was a mistake."
The Reaper said nothing. It held the scythe at rest and it said nothing.
Jake was shaking. He noticed that it had been going on for a while when the motion stopped -- a fine tremor in his hands, in his legs, the accumulated cost of the explosion and the pool and the cocoon and the fight sitting in his body all at once. He was warm, which was strange. The room was cold. He was warm anyway, the warmth coming from somewhere inside the shaking rather than from anything the room was providing.
The Reaper was watching him.
He became aware of the interface. Tried to summon it. Nothing appeared. But he was aware of it. The timer. Still there. Still running, even without display.
He looked at the Reaper.
"Whatever's left of my time -- I'm not spending it here." Jake said. "I want to go back."
"You are not prepared."
He met the void beneath the hood and held it. "I'm going anyway."
He pivoted.