The thread of essence that was unravelling in front of us was meant to collapse the moment the spider died. I had always thought that the spiders could hear particularly well... but there was more to it than that. This was the alarm system. Whenever we killed a spider, a thread of essence in their den would unravel and let something know a spider had died. Then, more spiders would come.
And if we were attacked by a fresh group of spiders, we would die.
In that moment of panic, I found a solution. I could touch the strange, decaying thread with my mind, but I couldn’t ‘hold it together’ the way I needed to. It felt like trying to grab hold of a live eel. It was slippery, and difficult to touch with a mind that could only see regular geometry. Too much of the thread's existence was buried in twisted, eldritch bits of reality.
I couldn't touch it normally... but my clone could.
I resisted the urge to scream as I reached for my still-damaged soul, and ripped out another piece of myself from me. It felt like I had taken a hammer to my head, and I got the feeling that I was not supposed to be doing this. That my soul wasn't ready for more splintering. But I had no choice. If that thread called more spiders to us, we were dead.
Then, as I felt the pain start to lance through my soul, I felt Achievement rush to fill in the gaps. It was like I had nearly lit myself on fire, and then the Achievement had surged into to cool it down. The Achievement was like a soothing balm after a horrible sunburn. My soul stopped screaming in pain.
Then, I became two. My clone reached for the thread, and unlike my main body, it had no problem touching the unraveling thread. I watched for a moment as my clone wrapped its arms around the thread, and then sighed in relief. My clone had stopped the thread from unraveling. I grimaced as the last bits of pain in my soul subsided, and then checked my Achievement.
I had dropped from 9,177.67 Achievement to 8,155.09 in an instant. About a thousand Achievement was spent to create a clone that would only last a day or two. However, while it stung to lose so much Achievement, it was worth it. We weren't about to face a horde of angry spiders. I sighed in relief. Then, I checked the clone’s essence reserves, and winced.
Luckily, we didn’t run into any other spiders in the next hallway. Unfortunately, we didn't find anything useful, either. There was one room off to the side of the hallway, but it was filled with old administrative documents. All of them had crumbled to dust, so we couldn't even read any of them. I resisted the urge to sigh, as we left the room and continued on.
The next hallway had two rooms branching off from it... and a spider den right in the middle of the hall. The spider twitched the moment we entered the hallway, and I felt a rush of fear as I saw it stir. Was it an empowered spider? If so, we would have to flee.
Right as I was preparing a desperate extinguish, I realized the spider was moving slowly. It seemed hesitant. I breathed a sigh of relief, as I realized the spider was another of the weakened spiders.
That meant that Sallia and Felix could probably kill the horrid little abomination.
Since the spider wasn't coming out to attack us, we decided to take the same approach as we had the previous time. Felix set up blocks of metal at each exit to the spider's den. Then, Sallia prepared to start dicing the monster into pieces. After they were ready, they sent me a signal and I poked the spider with a weak extinguish.
The spider dashed towards the exit to its den. As it exited its pocket dimension and entered reality, Felix tried to squeeze it into paste with his block of metal. The spider cut its way through, then leapt towards Sallia.
Which was probably the worst choice it could have made.
Sallia burned essence, then cut towards the spider so fast that it nearly died right there. It managed to dodge out of the way, but lost two legs in the process. I took advantage of its distraction to blast it with a bolt of lightning. As the spider tried to recover, Sallia cut off three more of its legs.
The spider paused for a moment, then its exoskeleton started to fall away. At the same time, it seemed as if its missing legs were regrowing.
Sallia swung her sword at the spider, but hit managed to shuffle out of the way as its legs started to grow back. I blasted it with lightning again, but it seemed as if my lightning blasts had become less effective. Somehow, the little horror shrugged the blast off.
Anise hit it with a few {Magic Missiles}, tossing it into the air towards Sallia.
That was when the spider's regrowing limbs all disappeared, along with the rest of its legs. In seconds, it went from having three legs and five half-legs to having nothing at all.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
This seemed to enrage the spider. It stopped shedding its exoskeleton, and turned bright green. A moment later, the hallway started to turn green as little sprouts of plants and moss started trying to kill us. Anise stopped paying attention to the spider, and started using her dryad's eyes to stop the plant growths. Meanwhile, Sallia and Felix kept stabbing, cutting, and smashing the spider, to weaken it without killing it.
The spider fought back, but pain and rage seemed to keep it from realizing what our plan was. Two minutes crawled by, as the spider tried to regrow its missing limbs or kill us with plants. The spider didn't get any good attacks off - instead, it seemed to grow weaker and weaker as time passed.
I grinned.
It was working.
The four of us kept working to control the spider. Anytime it tried to kill us with vines, Anise held them back. When it tried to regrow its limbs, Sallia cut them off. Felix kept it contained when it managed to start moving. It was slow, careful work… but after a few minutes, it finally ran out of essence. I breathed a sigh of relief as I looked at the little fishing line in the spider’s den. It hadn’t unraveled and alerted the rest of the facility about our intrusion. It seemed like keeping the spider alive was a viable strategy.
Once the spider ran out of essence, Sallia whacked it a few more times with the flat of her blade, just to keep it stunned. Then, she took of one of her Market-made shoes, stuffed the spider inside, and had Felix seal the opening in the shoe with lots of metal. I had no idea whether that would serve as an effective prison, but it was better than nothing.
After that, we started moving again. We moved more slowly than before, since we needed to keep an eye on Sallia's boot. However, the spider showed no signs of escaping.
Finally, we made our way to one of the two rooms in the hallway. Felix carried me inside, before we took a few moments to observe the room we had found. Unlike the first room we had seen, this one wasn't filled with long-decayed documents. Instead, there was a single bed inside.
The bed looked… odd. Physically, the bed didn’t look much different from the type of bed most doctors used. There was room for patients to lie down in, as well as a few tools laying around. However, when I looked at the bed with my soul sight, it looked quite different. There were small bits of metal that only appeared in my soul-sight, which lined the edges of the bed. They looked… almost like robotic arms, except for the fact that they crackled with essence.
I looked at the metallic arms in confusion, while Anise, Felix, and Sallia also glanced around the room. I sent them an image of what I was seeing in my soul-sight, to make sure they knew what we were looking at.
said Felix.
We tried several vocal commands to get the bed to 'wake up,' but none of them worked. Finally, Felix frowned. he said.
I laid down on the bed, and a new System popup appeared. Unlike the usual Status Screen or random ads, this one was way more complicated.
As I read through the options, I grinned. Some of the options were baffling and confusing, but I was happy anyway. We had finally found a payoff for the risks we had taken in getting this far..
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