Acromantulas. Of course. It had to be acromantulas. Heath had faced them once and had no desire to do so ever again, but he was more worried for the girlfriend than he was for himself. He instinctively looked at Claudine with concern. He knew how hard this had to be for her! Then his dark eyes suddenly burned with determined fire as he looked around the forest, as if half-expecting an acromantula to appear at any moment. And if it did, he would be ready for it! Granted, he didn’t expect to face an actual acromantula because when had Headmaster Trent ever put them against a real monster? For that matter, how would he get one to co-operate even if he was so inclined? Never mind, it didn’t matter. The acromantulas might not be real, but the trauma was.

As Heath heard the next question, his thoughts again turned to that lesson under the fake headmaster. Honestly, the scariest thing about that day had nothing to do with the spiders. In his mind, the scariest part was the way everyone argued and were unable to agree on a strategy… but that wasn’t the question the headmaster asked. He considered the acromantulas’ size, numbers, poison, pincers, but in the end, his thoughts went in a different direction. There was one quality that he found more dangerous than all the others combined… a quality that they shared with the man who brought everyone to the Forbidden Forest that year.

“They’re dangerous because they're ruthless,” Heath said after raising his hand. “They will stop at nothing to kill you if they think it’s in their best interest, and there's no reasoning with them.” In his opinion, that was the most dangerous quality in any opponent, human, creature, or otherwise.