WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Episodes 13 and 14 of So I'm a Spider, So What?, now streaming on Crunchyroll.
Episode 13 of So I'm a Spider marks a big change for the isekai series' nameless protagonist. The titular spider has escaped the Great Elroe Labyrinth and is now wandering free, above ground; a shift in setting that finally presents an opportunity for the show's monster and human storylines to collide. But before that can happen, the protagonist needs to wrap up a quickly escalating war of her own making.
No sooner does she make it out of the Labyrinth than the protagonist (also known as Kumoko) feels the telepathic tug of a being we'd yet to know even existed: her 'mother.' Not her original human mother, but the mother of her reincarnated species, taratects. This Shelob-esque monstrosity is one of five Queen Taratects, ginormous and rare creatures that even the most powerful of humans would prefer to flee from than throw down with. When the Queen compels all of her scattered children to come to her in Episode 13, the protagonist, with her human brain, resists the compulsion. Her refusal doesn't go unpunished. Mother sends an entire army of the protagonist's 'siblings' to fetch the wayward spider, which, being the high-level that she is, she easily dispatches with copious amounts of poison synthesis. However, a surviving trio of Dragon-level taratects causes her more trouble.
When her usual tricks fail her, the protagonist -- thinking on all eight of her feet -- ensnares her siblings in thick webbing and teleports them, one by one, back to the lava pits of the Labyrinth. Though they continue putting up a fight, she's eventually able to roast all three of them by dangling them into the molten lake... but doesn't stop there. True to her original Kin Eater title, the protagonist returns her cooked brethren to the surface world and tucks into their remains without even a second thought. If that weren't enough, on a full stomach, she then instructs her various parallel minds to hit her Mother at an obvious weak point: her own mind, which she opened a channel to by telepathically trying to lure her children home.
Episode 14 doesn't conclude their mental battle; rather, our protagonist becomes far too busy getting involved in humanoid in-fighting between vampires, humans and Elves, but a reckoning is no doubt on the horizon in Season 1's coming episodes. It's likely that our arachnid antihero will have to take the fight directly, and physically, to the Queen, which is a huge risk. Just recently, she barely escaped with her life after taking on an Earth Dragon at full power, and while she made short work of her Dragon-level siblings in Episode 12, the legendary monster that birthed them isn't just going to roll over and die.
The taratect civil war that's unfolding will be So I'm a Spider's next big, climactic event, and should our favorite isekai spider come out on top, her reputation as this world's "Nightmare" will be firmly in the bag.
