LeetCo: Enter the Spooder

"Very much so, you should have seen Simon and the girls in the lake yesterday." Sierra smiled. "You'd have thought it contained a sea monster and its spawn" she teased her wife as her girls coiled up in patches of sun nearby with their meals. Simon just blushed.

"Hey... you should have seen that fish!" Simon mock protested.

Sierra gave her an incredulous look "The one that got away from a twenty-five-meter long naga and her three five-meter long cute as button whelps?"

Arae just smiled and laughed. The engineers were precious to her, and she treasured every moment they spent with her.

The moon shone bright above as Arae moved through the forest, it's light dappling on her white skin through the leaves. Her current prey was a wolf that had somehow picked up Rabies. Normally she took a very measured approach to managing the conflicting interests of the shepherds that made up the majority of her subjects in this mountainous section of her domain. Predators were essential to any ecosystem and thus generally wolves were left alone. On bad years she would pay the shepherds to sacrifice a lamb or two to keep the larger flock safe.

But Rabies couldn't go untreated, the wolf risked spreading it to the rest of the pack and then to the flocks. Her rangers had alerted her to the problem early that morning. Tracking down the poor wolf hadn't been that hard. The rest of its pack had it circled in a clearing. The party had deliberately approached from up wind, giving the pack plenty of time to catch their scents and leave. The pack stayed close, however. The wolves were smart, and they knew what was coming.

Arae was uniquely suited to deal with situations like this, as she was effectively a minor demoness herself now. She was as a result immune to basically all mortal diseases. The pack kept the wolf cornered, so it couldn't run. Arae wished they'd leave to protect themselves. But this was their pack mate, and they were determined to see it through.

Arae made her way through the branches above the pack as the group cornered the rabid wolf under tree she was in. She quickly wove a net of sticky, high corruptive silk. She cast her net down on the confused and frothing beast. The pack immediately moving back out of her way and sitting almost like dogs as they watched her work.

Their pack mate never stood chance, the web caught them square on the back of the shoulders entangling its head and body. Arae lowered herself on a strand of silk, she used her forelegs to quickly wrap the wolf in a tight cocoon as her aft legs controlled her descent and fed her silk from her spinneret. The rabid wolf squirmed from the corruptive and the rabies as she bound it tightly. It's foaming mouth indicated it was far, far too gone to attempt to save even by the means she had at her disposal.

She quietly said a prayer for it and then opened her mouth, her lower jaw going wide like a spider's mandibles as her fangs flicked down. The pack howled in unison as the twin pure corruptive dripping fangs pierced the sealed silken sack of their fallen pack mate. The sound filling the night as Arae flooded the sack with pure corruptive venom. The pure corruptive didn't take long to work as the form of the sack changed from bound wolf into a container of thick goo.

The alpha of the pack brushed himself against her legs followed by the rest of the pack as she devoured the sack whole. The pack giving one final howl before disappearing into the dark boughs of the forest the solemn moment concluded. Her rangers had already dealt with the den of the source of the rabies. She'd found the pack was very good at training the rangers it seemed. Banditry was also generally short-lived in this section of her domain too. While she didn't have proof it was the pack; what bandits attempted to set up either surrendered quickly blabbering about the wolves or were never seen or heard from again. She'd not known them to attack people, but she still had a hunch on that one.

Arae smiled up at the moon as a howl rang out again over the forest, the other packs acknowledging the night's events. She subconsciously touched a locket with her mother's picture, the only item she'd had retrieved from the ashes of her old estate, and the only reminder of Kate she kept. She turned back to the hunting party "Good work" she acknowledged before heading back home.