[ WP ] Spiders are a species who made the noble decision to protect humans from small poisonous insects and disease carrying critters . However , with the amount that have been killed in fear or annoyance by humans , they have begun to leave us to our doom .

The day we discovered Arachne's Cavern was the beginning of our end. 
 
 Mankind watched, appalled, as explorers rappelled into a depth of endless webs and cocoons on live camera. Spiders, numbering in the billions, scuttled along the mottled walls and pillars in between, weaving their string between the stalactites and rock bridges. 
 
 All catching, all feasting. The webs, thin and slight yet massive in their immeasurable number, caught the myriad winged insects that constantly flowed from the cavernous maws of the abyss below. A constant scene of Hell on Earth, compounded by the death of the explorers to the cloud of winged plague that slipped past the arachnids' webs. 
 
 Scientists and dramatics were quick to name it Arachne's Cavern, but the public knew it as Tartarus, the pit of the damned. 
 
 People feared its existence. Scientists could n't find an end to Arachne's Cavern, nor even the slightest hint of where all the insects pouring out from the pit came from. Theories and speculations were wildly thrown about on the media, and the new idea was that miles beneath our feet laid a festering catacomb of carcasses, many leagues deep and long and just as many millennia old. A spawning ground for the insects, now known publicly as the Plague. 
 
 Yet more feared were the spiders. In a historical feat of oversight, we decided that the masses of spiders that had been feeding on the Plague for eons had to be equally massive. Even if the Plague grew and multiplied in the catacombs, they only fed the spiders awaiting above in Tartarus. How many spiders were there? How immune to poison and venom did they have to be, how venomous did they have to be? The footage of the explorers rappelling into arachnid hell caught us like a bear trap. 
 
 Scientists and biologists be damned; the spiders had to go. 
 
 We burned them. We burned them as only humans knew how. We dropped napalm in, but it did n't even touch the sides. It fell in like a single krill into a blue whale's jaws, terrifying us in our insignificance. So we dropped more, and watched as it illuminated the throngs of eyes and legs all the way down Tartarus. More and more, hotter and brighter, we bombed the Cavern with our technologies and savagery. 
 
 Eventually, the spiders disappeared. We rejoiced. The eight legged demon spawn were gone, and humanity had won. People celebrated on the streets and our fears of a spider filled underworld right beneath our feet were gone. In fact, people noticed that spiders were even gone from their homes and offices. Black widows, tarantulas, orbweavers, common garden spiders - all gone. All the better for humanity. 
 
 Until we realized that we forgot all about the Plague. 
 
 Now unhindered by the endless miles of web in the Cavern, they slowly amassed their numbers, crawling up the sides of Tartarus. They slid up the sides of the Pit in their untold numbers, a shiny black mass of terrible mandibles and venom. Unending death slid out from the putrid depths, and reaching our base of cameras and labs near the top, they flew. 
 
 The world could only watch in horror as the biblical horde flew unabated, blotting out the Sun. 
 
 Civilization as we knew it ended on that day. The Plague, rivaling the planetary sand storms of Mars in scale, ravaged half of the globe before we destroyed it in a panicked storm of atomic fire. Needless to say, humanity died along with it in the aftermath. 
 
 The last vestiges of humanity lie scattered over the globe, in deep bunkers and well sheltered forts, against the radiation ridden sky and the insects that still rode its currents. But humanity was never able to survive so scattered and disarrayed, and so as supplies ran out, our numbers quickly dwindled. 
 
 Earth as we know it now is a radioactive hell, ruled by the resistant insects that feast on the carcasses of whatever is left from the nuclear bombs and radiation. It might not be long before they die out too, as they quickly outgrow this dead planet's ability to feed them. 
 
 There's no longer anyone to tell this story to, but I write to record our folly. When I take my last breath, humans shall be extinct. I can only hope that no one repeats our mistakes. 
 
 Oh, the spiders. The spiders were masters of us all. 

