Once, there was a world where the battle between Hero and Demon Lord repeated itself time and time again.

During this battle, an enormous space-time spell was fired and exploded in a certain classroom in a Japanese high school.

The spell hit everyone in the classroom, and all of them lost their lives in an instant.

The souls of these victims were scattered into another world, and each was born again in a new life.

***

STARTING WITH A BANG

Gwaaaaah!

I tried to scream just now, but I actually can’t even manage a groan.

Is my body messed up that badly?

Okay, calm down.

I don’t feel any pain.

The last thing I remember is the onslaught of sudden, monstrous agony in the middle of Classical Literature class.

I probably fainted because of that, but no part of me feels hurt at the moment.

That said, even when I open my eyes, everything is pitch-black. I have no idea where I am.

In fact, I can barely move at all, like something’s wrapped around my body.

No, not hypothetically. Like, I can literally tell. I really am bound in something, some material that’s hard but has a little give to it.

I can just faintly hear some rustling sounds from outside.

Okay, what’s going on here? Have I been kidnapped?

No, let’s be real.

What would anyone get out of kidnapping a bottom-of-the-barrel girl like me?

Well, regardless of how sketchy this situation is, I only need to escape.

That’s when I hear a loud CRACK.

Oh-ho! When I pushed my weight against the thing covering me, it started to break.

All right, time to finish the job and get out of here!

Putting more power into it, I burst right through, scrabbling out headfirst. Sweet freedom!

The view before my eyes is crawling with spiders.

Wuuuuuh?! Whyyyyyyyy?! Ewww!!

What is with this freaking army of spiders?! Um, excuse me, but why are they all as big as me?! Oh gross, more of them keep popping out of these egg-looking things! Is that what the rustling was coming from?!

Instinctively, I shrink away. My leg bumps into something, and I turn to look.

Hmm?

Is this…it? The thing I crawled out of earlier? Uh…why does it kind of resemble the eggs this spider legion was bursting out of? No, it doesn’t merely look like that—it is one, isn’t it?

I look down at myself more carefully. My neck won’t move. Despite that, at the edge of my peripheral vision, I can see what appear to be my legs.

……Spider legs.

Oooooookay, dooon’t paaaaniiiiiic!!!

Th-this isn’t what I think it is, right?! Is it, though?! The thing that’s super-popular online right now?!

No! Unreal!

This can’t be happening, right? Please, say it’s not happening!

I glance down again. There are thin, wiry legs, just like those of the spiders wriggling around me.

Concentrating, I try moving them. The spider appendages move accordingly.

Yep. I have to face the facts.

Apparently, I’ve been reincarnated as a spider.

Unreal.

But right when I feel ready to break down, I hear some crunching noises. Disturbing ones, actually.

Hmm.

It won’t do me any good to ignore reality. Right in front of me is a humongous army of spiders, probably my brothers and sisters. Whatever those sounds are, they’re probably coming from them.

I slowly bring myself to take in the scene before me. There, one of the spiders is noisily devouring its buddy.

Aaaack! The hell are these guys doing?! Seriously, they’re eating each other? Cannibalism?!

As I look on, my siblings begin a bloodbath in their fierce competition for survival.

No, no, no, no! This is bad, this is baaad!

Why should we have to fight one another like this, my brothers and sisters?! Ah, right—for food. I guess they’re hungry. Speaking of, I could use something to eat myself.

HUH?! That’s a scary train of thought.

Reality got away from me for a moment there. On a battlefield like this, an innocent high school girl like me could fall prey to the wicked ways of men in an instant! Metaphorically and literally!

Times like this call for running like hell.

Fighting? Not happening.

I’m a natural-born homebody. There’s no way I could ever challenge something so gross and violent. Ah. I just remembered that’s what I am now.

Okay.

Instead of wasting time thinking about stupid crap, I figure I’d better get a move on. But apparently it’s a little too late for that. The ground is ominously rumbling beneath my feet. Now what?! The sounds and tremors are coming from behind. Turning around, I find myself looking up at an enormous, giant spider.

Ooh, might you be Mother? Or perhaps Father?

Whatever.

I’m getting all confused again. Seriously, though—why is it so huge?! This massive arachnid has got to be dozens of times larger than me.

Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I feel pretty confident there weren’t any spiders this big on Earth!

Ah.

With a brisk snap, the titan skewers a smaller one of its kind with a claw and devours it.

Sort of like she’s having a light snack.

Et tu, Mother…?!

Well, I’ll think about all this later on. For now, my only goal is to get out of here safely and try to survive!

I run away at full speed. Only when I’m so tired I can barely move do I finally calm down. Luckily, when I turn to check, I find that nobody chased after me.

Oof, I thought I was gonna die. It would’ve sucked to get killed after only being alive for a couple minutes.

Anyway…now that I’ve come to my senses a little, I have a lot to think about.

First of all, why did I die?

Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t necessarily know for sure that my life ended at all.

I sort of decided on my own that I died and got reincarnated as a spider, but it’s not like I actually remember kicking the bucket.

Pretty sure my last memory is of the Classical Literature teacher, who we called Ms. Oka, reading aloud from the textbook.

I’d been dozing off a little when suddenly I was overwhelmed by crushing agony, and then I have no memories of what happened after.

If I did die, it was probably because of that mysterious pain, but…

…I have no idea what caused it at all.

At any rate, the most likely conclusion is still that I died at that moment and was reincarnated as a spider.

Other than that, I guess it’s possible that I’m alive, and my spirit is currently possessing a spider, or something similar.

Like, maybe my original body is in a vegetative state, lying on a hospital bed right now.

Or here’s an even crazier idea: Maybe I’m not the real me at all, just some total stranger who happens to have the memories of another person.

Maybe the real me is sitting in class like usual, even now.

Well.

It’s not like there’s any way for me to know for sure. How can I prove I’m not who I think I am, anyway?

I’ll end up spouting incomprehensible nonsense like “I think therefore I am” and stuff.

Besides, the most likely conclusion from the evidence is the ridiculous idea that I’ve been reincarnated, so I may as well throw common sense to the wind.

At any rate, better put all this aside for now.

In the spirit of “I think, therefore I am,” I’m just going to assume that I am in fact myself until proven otherwise.

So apparently, I’m a spider now. There’s definitely no denying that anymore.

While I was running away, I was able to hop and jump in ways a human never could.

So if I’m a spider, what was up with that hulk I saw before?

Hmm.

Given the circumstances, maybe it really was one of my arachnid parents? I don’t know the specifics of spider biology, but I don’t think it’s that unusual in nature for animals to eat their young. The other spiders were clearly cannibalistic right from birth, so the parent eating its children shouldn’t be all that surprising.

If that giant spider was one of my parents, I wonder if that means I’ll be that size, too, someday?

Thinking about it makes me feel a little sick.

Okay, forget that part. Let’s get back on track.

Let’s see. Really, there’s one thing that I’m particularly hung up on.

Specifically, the fact that I’m a monster.

The whole “reincarnation” genre is pretty popular in web novels and stuff right now, so I guess it isn’t that alien an idea.

Getting reincarnated as a monster, I mean.

So the question is: Am I a normal Earth species, or is this not Earth at all but a parallel world, where I’ve been reborn as a beast?

Judging by that huge spider from before, my guess would lean toward the latter, but then the difficulty level of surviving here would probably go way up.

This isn’t getting me anywhere. I don’t have enough information to parse what’s going on.

Is this Earth or not? Am I a monster or just a normal spider? If this is a different world, what kind of world is it?