Villainess is being pampered by her beast husbands

Cutie ignored her. He let out a stubborn, rumbling growl, grabbing a descending spider by two of its legs and literally ripping the creature in half with his bare hands. He threw the bleeding halves into the encroaching swarm, buying them three seconds of space.

He turned, grabbed Kaya by the back of her tunic, and physically threw her toward the narrow, spiraling stone staircase that led up to the main fortress.

"I’m not leaving you!" Kaya yelled, scrambling to her feet on the first step.

Cutie didn’t follow her. He turned his broad back to the stairs, planting his massive, bleeding feet firmly on the stone. He let out a roar that shook the very foundations of the canyon, challenging the entire swarm to get through him. He was the bottleneck. He was going to hold the line so she could escape.

"No!" Kaya screamed. She looked down at the glass oil lamp she was still clutching in her left hand.

She didn’t run up the stairs. She reared her arm back and hurled the glass lamp directly at the stone ceiling above the encroaching swarm.

The glass shattered. The highly flammable lamp oil rained down over the front line of the Rot-weavers. Before the oil could even settle, the open flame of the wick ignited the fumes.

A massive fireball erupted in the confined subterranean hallway.

The Rot-weavers shrieked in absolute agony as the fire caught their hairy abdomens and the flammable, dry silk they had been spinning. The flames created a temporary, blazing wall of intense heat, forcing the front line of spiders to scramble backward in a panicked, burning frenzy.

The sudden wall of fire gave Cutie the reprieve he needed. The giant bear-rabbit stumbled backward, his breathing ragged, his body covered in smoking, bleeding burns. Kaya grabbed his massive, uninjured hand and hauled him forcefully up the first flight of stairs.

"Move! Up! We have to get to the courtyard!" Kaya ordered, her voice cracking with desperation.

They ran.

The spiraling obsidian staircase felt like an endless, suffocating tunnel. Cutie was limping heavily, his massive weight slowing them down, but Kaya refused to let go of his hand. Behind them, the sounds of the Rot-weavers recovering from the fire echoed up the stone shaft. The clicking of their legs grew louder, faster, more frantic. They were climbing the walls of the stairwell, bypassing the stairs entirely to catch their prey.

As Kaya and Cutie burst through the heavy iron doors onto the third subterranean level, Kaya’s heart plummeted into her stomach.

The entire level was already overrun.

The Snake servants and guards who usually patrolled this sector had been completely slaughtered. Desiccated, shriveled husks in polished armor littered the hallways. The beautiful, glowing emerald torches had been extinguished, replaced by thick, suffocating layers of corrosive white webbing that hung from the ceiling like a canopy of death.

And standing at the end of the long obsidian corridor, surrounded by a legion of his nightmare spiders, was the architect of the massacre.

Kaya stumbled to a halt, her breath catching in her throat.

It was Lord Siss, but he was completely unrecognizable. The flawless, celestial beauty that had once defined the Snake Lord was entirely gone. His human torso was a twisted, weeping canvas of raised, white scar tissue. His long, silky black hair had fallen out in patches. But the most horrifying change was his lower half.

He no longer possessed the majestic, iridescent black tail of an apex predator. Instead, a sickly, translucent, bone-white serpent tail coiled beneath him, covered in jagged, uneven scales that looked like they had been glued on by a madman. He looked like a flayed corpse that had been stitched back together in the dark.

Siss looked down the corridor at Kaya. His jaw, still mangled from where Veer had severed his neck, unhinged in a horrific, crooked angle.

A wet, clicking hiss escaped his throat, but the words were clear enough.

"Welcome... to my new home... little human."

Kaya gripped her hunting knife, her hands trembling violently. She was a tactician. She was a project manager. She understood logistics, ledgers, and supply lines. But looking at the resurrected, mutated monster at the end of the hall, her modern logic completely shattered. How do you fight something that refuses to die? How do you outsmart a nightmare that has no rules?

"You should have stayed in the swamp," Kaya spat, her voice trembling but defiant.

Siss let out a wet, gurgling laugh. "You took my head. So I took... your utopia."

He raised a pale, scarred hand.

The ceiling above Kaya and Cutie suddenly groaned. The Rot-weavers had been busy. They hadn’t just been hunting; they had been melting the structural supports of the fortress with their acidic silk.

The massive obsidian ceiling cracked, and massive chunks of heavy stone began to plummet downward.

"Jump!" Kaya screamed.

She shoved Cutie forward, diving into a side corridor just as a ten-ton slab of obsidian crashed down exactly where they had been standing. The impact shook the entire fortress, sending a massive cloud of dust and debris billowing down the halls.

They were separated from the main staircase. The only way out was to climb the outer maintenance shafts that led up to the high balconies of the central keep.

"We have to get outside! We have to warn Veer and Sarn!" Kaya coughed, waving the dust away.

Cutie grunted in agreement, though he was leaning heavily against the wall, leaving a streak of dark blood on the polished stone. He forced himself upright, his loyalty overriding his agony, and began to rip the heavy iron grate off the maintenance shaft.

The climb was absolute torture. The shaft was narrow, dark, and slick with condensation. Cutie had to use his massive claws to carve handholds into the stone, essentially carrying Kaya on his uninjured shoulder as he hauled them both upward. Below them, the clicking of the Rot-weavers echoed in the shaft. The spiders were pursuing them vertically, completely unhindered by gravity.

Kaya looked down into the darkness. She could see the glowing red eyes rapidly ascending.

"Faster, Cutie, please," she whispered, her heart hammering.

Finally, Cutie’s massive fist punched through the iron grate at the top of the shaft. They spilled out onto the polished marble floor of the highest command tier, just one level below Kaya’s personal balcony.

They burst through the heavy double doors and out into the open night air of the upper courtyard.

The scene that greeted them was apocalyptic.

The Free Clan’s golden age was burning.

The Rot-weavers had bypassed the lower levels and poured out of the ventilation shafts directly into the bustling marketplace and the barracks. The unified army that Kaya had so carefully built was in absolute chaos. Sarn and his elite Snake guards were fighting valiantly, their steel broadswords flashing in the moonlight, but they were trained to fight rival beastmen, not a swarm of highly acidic, wall-crawling arachnids.

Every time a Snake guard struck a spider, the resulting spray of acidic ichor melted their armor and burned their flesh. Bram and his recruits were trying to form a shield wall, but the Rot-weavers were dropping from the high canyon walls directly into the center of their formation, breaking their lines and slaughtering them in the confusion.

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