Rainbow Dash's Awesome Nightmare Night Haunted House Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Adventure

by TheDriderPony

You Have Nothing to Fear...

Dread courses through your veins like ice water. Less than a minute before you're back in the darkness with this army of legs. Only this time, they're not going to be kind enough to keep to the shadows. Already a few brave ones are advancing on your position, blocking the path out.

There's a small tickle on your tail and you lash out instinctively, catching one cheeky spider with a powerful single-hoof buck that'd make Applejack praise your technique. Its exoskeleton cracks and crunches like an eggshell, releasing a wave of green goo. The legs twitch for a second, bereft of a brain, before curling up and going still.

Cold dread slowly gives way to fiery determination as understanding dawns on you. The spiders may be huge and hairy and have fangs and too many legs, but they're also fragile. Unless that one was just particularly weak.

Another spider jumps at you from a shelf and you catch it midair with a swipe of your hoof. It too shatters into goo. Yes! They are all that weak. If all it takes is a casual kick to defeat one, you might just have a chance.

The death of their comrades seems to have triggered something in the rest of the horde, and they begin to advance on you en masse. A grin crawls across your face as your confidence returns, banishing away all doubt with the balm of cocky assurance.

"All right you eight-legged freaks," you announce to the gathered horde. "You can come at me all at once or form a nice, orderly line to get your share of flank-kicking in turn. Either way—" you crack you hoof-knuckles "—only one of us is leaving this room.

To a bug, they leap at you, and you return equal fury. Kicks and chops and punches and all manner of half-remembered karate moves rain down upon the the swarm like a torrential downpour. Legs go flying and guts burst in miniature fireworks of green and black gore, with every hit punctuated by a witty one-liner that helps keep your underlying fear (and your urge to barf) in check.

Punch. Squish! "Take that!"

Kick. Squelch! "Have some more!"

Smash. Goosh! "Your mama's gonna feel that one in her egg sac!"

Okay, maybe they aren't all super witty, but they help keep you in the right berserker mindset all the same.

The light of the lantern fades and you keep fighting, relying more and more on your sense of sound and feeling the moving currents of air to dodge their jumps and ensure that your blows land. Minutes blur into each other, just as one spider's guts blurs into another. Tendrils of dread start to wrap themselves around your buoying sense of confidence. Why do they keep coming? Surely there weren't this many when you started. Was fighting them the wrong move and now you're trapped, unable to either beat this room or leave it for your poor decisions? Doomed to keep fighting until you finally collapse from exhaustion and the spiders take you?

[A sense of dawning horror fills you. Add one (+1) to your Fear Meter]

Then, just as quickly as it started, the spiders stop. With one final stomp of your hoof, you realize that there's no longer any sounds in the room other than your own ragged breathing.

You've won.

With a little musical chime, sourceless light fills the room, illuminating every corner without shadow and unveiling the true level of arthropodal carnage you've wreaked. You stand in the center of a hill of death, gooey carapaces piled nearly barrel high all around. You'd thought the ones near the end had been jumping at you from above more often: turns out that was out of necessity. They no longer could reach you from the sides.

As you start to worry about having to dig yourself out, the bodies all begin to glow and fade away into magical sparkles. A relief twofold, as you were starting to feel a little concerned over how much killing you'd just done. Good thing it doesn't count if they're just magical projections.

As the bodies fade, you notice that they've left something behind. A boot. A bit weathered and worn, but with a thick rubber sole and a long forward bit to accommodate a dragon's claws.

"Geez," you mutter as you pick it up and put it in your bag. "Sure could have used that a few minutes ago."

The irony is not lost on you that you received a Squishing Boot as a reward for killing spiders.

Author's Note:

[Continue]