As Zeref dragged Janessa out of the clearing, she uttered a soft grunt of pain.  She found herself lifted off the ground by his surprisingly strong arms, and as she did so she lashed out backward with a vicious kick.  Surprisingly, she connected it right into the center of a mass of eight beady black eyes, and even more surprisingly, that closest spider ended up dragging three others into a pile as she drove it back into them.  For a few moments, she ran with him, barely keeping up as he spoke to her, and her incredulity at his words was obvious.  Getting back to the clan, then returning here?!  It wasn't going to happen.  Already they had lost their entire hunting party... only The Cad might,<span style="font-style: italic">might</span>still survive this...<br/><br/>Of course, Janessa wasn't including herself as a possible survivor.  As a Retriever, it was her job to die to save others.  She didn't want to, and if it had been an option she would have tried to keep up with him, to guard him all the way back to the clan site... but it wasn't an option.  Already she could feel the burning in her veins, working upward from that one bite in her lower leg... already she could feel the muscles weakening in that leg as she ran, and The Cad was having to put more and more effort to pull her along...<br/><br/>They ran passed Zeena, then Marie, and then Rachel as they ran.  All three women looked like they had stopped headlong in their panicked escape... if it wasn't for their frantic, and apparently ineffectual, struggling, the nearly-transparent webs they had blindly thrown themselves into would be damn near impossible to see.  It seemed that all the noise Zeref had heard had been the spiders as they had quickly stretched simple webs from tree to tree to block any possible escape... and it had worked.  Now each girl had at least one spider standing right above her, intent on spinning fresh webs to wrap her up.  They didn't seem to even be bothering to bite and paralyze them... they were already helpless enough.<br/><br/>The Cad and Janessa, forewarned by the sight of what the other three girls had run into, were able to slip through an unguarded gap between the trees, and thus escape the main trap.  However, a glance behind them would reveal that the spiders weren't going to let them escape so easily... still three of them were in pursuit, and were apparently catching up.<br/><br/>Janessa's leg finally started to give out, though in truth only seconds had passed so far.  Adrenaline had helped resist the venom, but it had only delayed the inevitable.  Gasping, she put her weight on her still-good leg and skidded to a stop, and jerked her arms free of him.  She shot a glare at him at his inevitable, noble-as-always attempt to re-grip her.  "Go!  Go,<span style="font-style: italic">run</span>!  You have to escape,<span style="font-style: italic">have</span>to!  I'm dead already!"  she Jerked one hand at the small puncture wounds on her right calf.  She knew that if he tried to save her, tried to carry her, he would be caught.  "I'll distract them here.  Run!<span style="font-style: italic">Run</span>!  Let me die doing my<span style="font-style: italic">job</span>!  Run,<span style="font-style: italic">now!</span>"<br/><br/>And with a cry of rage and defiance, she turned and pushed off with her good leg, hurling herself at the three advancing spiders with both her bone knives drawn and slashing.  The first spider seemed taken aback, and emitted screeches as the knives found their mark in some of its flesh; however the other two moved around it and came at her from both sides.  The knives lashed out, but too slowly... fangs buried themselves into her thigh and arm...<br/><br/>She threw her head back at the pain, but the one word that came through her lips wasn't for her own sake.  She didn't even try to look back, to see if he was still there or not.  She threw out the word as an order, a plea... a prayer.  "<span style="font-style: italic">RUN...!</span>"