Alice’s mind raced furiously as she tried to find a way to deal with the final third-evolution monster spider. The Immortals of the group might be able to scrape together their Perks and items to kill it if they kept fighting - but Alice wanted to find a different way to deal with the spider. Myra had already ‘died’ once this week, and was far more vulnerable than Immortals usually were. The other Immortals had also used a good deal of mental energy, Perks, and consumable items during this fight, and they were clearly starting to run out of everything. The one and only person who still looked largely unaffected by the battle was Ethan, since his mana reserves were ridiculous, but there was a huge difference between having four fresh Immortals ready for combat versus having one mostly fine Immortal and three exhausted Immortals ready for combat. Even if Alice didn’t think the monster would win either way, there was a huge difference between coming out of a battle with a few injuries versus coming out of a battle with a few dead friends. Right now, they were at risk of losing a friend if something went wrong, and that wasn’t something Alice wanted to see.

  However, killing the shadow spider was easier said than done. Third evolution monsters were far too much for Alice to fight on her own, even with her unusual and powerful build. The monster constantly wove and darted through the horde of weaker spiders. Each movement was so quick that Alice could barely even track it. Trying to pin it down and kill it was far beyond her regular means.

  Experimentally, she flung a wave of bracelet beads at the spider, but none of the beads connected before the spider disappeared in a manner reminiscent of teleportation. A moment later, it reappeared a few steps further away, and leapt at one of the exhausted Mages, who Ethan barely managed to yank out of the way with a burst of kinetic magic. The spider’s massive fangs whistled through the spot where the man’s head had been a few moments ago.

  Alice gritted her teeth, and turned towards Doll. Then, to her surprise, Alice saw Doll grab something else from her storage Perk.

  It was a humanoid looking golem, with shiny, metallic arms and legs, and a serious expression painted on its face. It had no real lips or facial muscles of any kind - just a light layer of paint added to it in order to give it a face resembling a human. It had two painted on, lifeless eyes, a mouth with lips and no teeth, and a nose painted on. The rest of its face didn’t have any skin painted on, which made the golem look rather odd - its face was half metallic and half painted features.

  Before Alice could wonder why Doll had painted the golem in such a strange way, Doll prodded the golem twice, and the golem began to radiate System mana.

  The painted, lifeless eyes on the golem’s body blinked once, as if they were real organs instead of paint. The golem stepped forward, and then leapt at the spider. The spider ducked under the golem’s attempted tackle, but the golem flashed with rainbow mana again, before its body bent and contorted like a snake’s. The metal joints creaked and bent, before the entire golem shapeshifted into something like a hoop. The spider managed to teleport out of the way of the golem’s second attempt at grabbing it, but got caught by a volley of lightning bolts from Ethan a moment later. The spider was stunned for a fraction of a second, which was just enough time for the painted golem to grab it.

  “It can hold it down for a few seconds!” Doll said. “Go!”

  Ethan whipped his father’s old sword out of his storage Perk one more time and swung. This time, the spider failed to dodge out of the way. A blistering, sizzling sound resounded through the room as a burst of flames tore into the spider’s side.

  The spider wailed in pain as two of its legs and a big chunk of its abdomen turned into crispy meat. It hissed at Ethan, and Alice saw a flash of mana burst through the spider’s body.

  Before it could finish whatever it was doing, Doll’s golem flashed red, and Alice saw a huge wave of thermal mana exit the golem’s body. The golem burst into flames. The flames crawled along the golem’s legs and arms, as it hugged the spider even more tightly - but at the same time, the golem itself began to melt into spare components.

  “Get it quickly! This type of golem is a consumable item, and it doesn’t last long once it starts heating things!” yelled Doll. “I don’t have many of them, either - the monster cores I use for this type of golem are way too expensive to mass produce them!”

  Allira gritted her teeth, and then started singing one last round of lyrics. It looked like the Immortal of Song and Shadow was on the verge of fainting - but she pushed through it. At the same time, Myra grunted with exhaustion, before she pulled a kitchen knife out of her pocket and sliced towards the spider. Alice joined in by warping the beliefs of the area a little bit, in order to enhance the attacks of the Immortals, and Ethan tossed in another wave of lightning bolts.

  The cascade of attacks slammed into the spider, and while the creature managed to drag the golem along as it tried to leap for safety, but the golem and its injuries stopped it from dodging everything. A wave of shadows from Allira latched onto the creature’s legs as Myra’s kitchen knife sheared through another leg and part of its face, while the spider managed to dodge most of Ethan’s lightning bolts. The seven-legged spider began to slow down as a few of its remaining legs spasmed uncontrollably. It turned towards Myra and leapt at her, as if it were determined to take her down with it.

  Alice finally saw a chance to intervene. Alice could still use the {Reflection} Perk - and even though the Perk didn’t typically work against other life forms, Alice suspected she might be able to bend that.

  She used every single shred of her mana, her ability to manipulate beliefs, and her understanding of the System to bend the way the Perk worked, while at the same time, she used her dimensional mana to teleport a few tendrils closer, then stuffed one into the spider’s body. Then, she forced all of the momentum in the creature’s body to reverse direction completely.

  The spider, which had been about a quarter of a second away from ripping Myra’s head off, suddenly soared in the exactly opposite direction of its original lunge - with all of its momentum perfectly preserved. The spider seemed stunned.

  Alice felt a splitting headache, as if she had just had someone slam a hatchet through her skull. Since only her beliefs had fueled that attack, it had felt like she was trying to start a fire using her own brain as fuel - but she had succeeded.

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  Before the spider hit the ground, Ethan fired another volley of metal into the spider’s brain through the opening in its face left by Myra’s kitchen knife. The spider twitched once, slammed into the ground, and stopped moving.

  Alice resisted the urge to let out an exhausted cheer. The third evolution spiders had proven far more dangerous than she had hoped for - Alice wasn’t sure if anyone else would have been able to save Myra at the last moment if she hadn’t intervened. Myra’s eyes had been widening, but Alice hadn’t seen the telltale System mana that activated when someone used a System Perk. While there was a change that Myra still had a trump card up her sleeves, Alice wasn’t sure if that was the case at all.

  Alice shuddered at the thought of Ethan losing his mother in this expedition, before she turned her attention to the lower level battlefield. While Allira and Myra both looked like they were spent, nobody was dead yet. Then she grimaced.

  The Mages on their side had held out admirably well during the battle against the higher level spiders, but they were starting to buckle. A few of the mages had suffered rather severe injuries during the time the Immortals had focused on the higher level spiders, and Alice noticed that one of the Mages had even lost an arm. It would be easy to grow back after the battle, but the fact that someone had lost a limb spoke to how dangerous the lower level battlefield was becoming. Soldiers were running out of Perks, and the monster tide was still nearly as endless as before. The highest level threats were dealt with, but the spider horde still numbered at least a hundred.

  Alice had already spent her{Adrenaline Rush} and {Enhanced Senses} Perks already, Allira and Myra looked dead on their feet, and Doll also looked tired and had spent several gadgets already - including an apparently rather expensive golem. Alice and Ethan were the only two higher level combatants that were still in a combat-ready state. She glanced at Ethan, and relaxed when she saw him confidently move into the battlefield and start flinging bits of metal around. Alice quickly joined in, and began spraying weaker spider monsters with beads in order to wipe them out.

  This time, there were far fewer intense maneuvers and threats - just careful manipulation of the battlefield. The Illvarian expedition fought conservatively, as the battlefield slowly ground through the reserves of spiders. With Alice and Ethan joining the battlefield, there wasn’t anywhere near as much risk of mages dying.

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t anywhere near as much progress as Alice had been hoping for, either. The higher evolution shadow spiders were much harder to kill than Alice had been anticipating, and in the center of the room, Alice noticed that a new group of spider eggs would occasionally hatch and then sprout a few more spiders. The eggs were constantly replaced, and the spiders continued to drink in the mana and resources from the area. Alice suspected they had come near hatching time - which meant that the spider reinforcements would eventually slow down, but she had no idea whether someone would make a mistake and get themselves killed in that time.

  After five minutes of fighting, Alice’s mana reserves were starting to run out. Ethan’s mana reserves seemed just as inexhaustible as usual, but Alice was starting to wonder if they could really make it through this battle with no deaths. A minute ago one of the Mages got his throat half-ripped out by a surprise attack from a spider, and only Ethan’s quick intervention saved the man from bleeding out. The Illvarian mages were basically out of mana by now, and things were getting very dicey. The golems that were assisting them were also starting to die out. While new golems were constantly entering the battlefield, it seemed that the limited resources available to the production lines was starting to become an issue.

  “I understand it!” Yelled Doll, nearly disrupting Alice’s concentration. Alice almost let a first-evolution spider snap off a soldier’s head before she recovered and sprayed it with a round of metal.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Ethan.

  “The production lines! I can modify them a bit, and I’m pretty sure I can get the line to use a few makeshift materials from my storage Perk! Ethan, open up a way for me to get to the golem production lines! I think I can break this stalemate!”

  “Got it!” Ethan said. He grabbed Doll’s clothes with his kinetic mana, and then hurled her over the mass of spiders. Doll shrieked as a few spiders tried to leap up and get a bite of her flesh, but Ethan blasted the spiders away with a few bolts of lightning. Allira also mustered up the last bits of her mental energy and her Perks in order to scrounge up a few final dregs of shadow monsters, then used them to hold off the monsters as Doll soared past the monster’s lines and into the production area for the golems..

  Alice held her breath as Doll moved through the wall of monsters.

  Then, Doll reached the other side. Without looking at the battle, Doll sprinted towards one of the production lines, before she started to tinker with it. The golems didn’t interfere with her actions, with made Alice breathe a sigh of relief - a part of her had been worried that the golems might respond to Doll’s attempts to help with violence, but the golems were either not programmed to harm humans, or Alice’s {Outworlder} Achievement was still pulling its weight and marking Doll as ‘friendly’ to the System. Either way, Doll’s Perks started to surge through the production line, and it started to warp and change. At the same time, Doll started to pull out piles of material from her storage Perk and stuff them into various parts of the System’s production line.

  Minutes continued to trickle by, as Doll started to hum. Her vocal hammer continued to reshape bits and pieces of the production line, before finally, a new wave of golems surged out of the assembly line.

  The new, rebuild assembly line was very different from before. It no longer mass-produced Golems that seemed optimized for mining and only has monster-hunting as a side ability. These golems were built for war. The four golems that exited the assembly line were nearly two meters tall, and had blades attached to the arms that glittered with mana. The golems had metal plating on their exterior that made it resemble a knight from the middle ages. They had no head - instead, they had two eye-slits attached to its torso, both of which glowed with eerie red light. Doll had clearly based the golem at least loosely off of the human form - but she had completely removed the head. Furthermore, with the thick arms, armor, and weapons of these golems, Alice almost wondered if Doll had taken inspiration from a mech in a sci-fi movie.

  “Alice, highlight which monsters have Perks so that the golems know which ones to target first! Put floating coins above them! And make sure the coins are made of silver - I set that to be their ‘attack this target’ trigger!” Yelled Doll.

  Alice immediately complied. Using her kinetic magic, along with her dimensional magic, she quickly moved some silver coins above every single Perk-wielding monster.

  The golems leapt into the fray like a whirlwind of death. Alice was fairly certain the golems wouldn’t have won a battle against a third evolution monster - but against the second evolution monsters, first evolution monsters, and regular cannon fodder, the golems were practically unbeatable. Alice continued to assist the battle for another minute, before she breathed a sigh of relief.

  With the addition of the golems, they finally managed to punch through the spider’s lines and shatter the eggs in the center of the room. Then, the golems started to mow down the rest of the horde. After four more minutes of careful fighting, the last spider died, leaving the human lines battered but alive.

  Alice breathed a sigh of relief, and then cackled.

  They had won the battle with no deaths, even if there had been some rather serious injuries and several close calls. Even better, Alice now had a lot of class mana laying around. Doll would probably need to spend several minutes reworking more components of the golem production line. Alice was more than happy to spend that time checking her new levels and seeing if she had gotten anything new.

  And thus, my vacation ends.

  I spent most of it playing Guild Wars with a friend of mine. We met playing Guild Wars a year and a half ago, then abandoned the game to play a bunch of other games together.

  Revisiting the game was a lot of fun :D. I had a dentist appointment the Monday after I got back though, and my dentist says that my gums genetically suck and I need surgery to fix it. -_-. Not the best return from vacation I’ve ever had. RIP my gums. Sigh. This issue really does seem to run in my family. :(

  Oh well. Not the end of the world, just annoying.

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