After Alice’s ascension to Immortality, she spent a few hours helping everyone process their own System levels. After all, a few more Perks on their side could be the difference between victory and defeat. After that, the group was ready to scout the power supply again.
Alice felt her breath catch in her throat as the group returned to the original teleportation system for the System, and prepared for the next step. She realized that she was nervous. This seemed like one of the final steps before rebuilding the System. Alice found herself constantly worrying that something might go wrong, or that she might drop the ball at the final steps in purging the monster infestation and restoring the System.
A few weeks ago, they had been forced to flee from the power source of the System, due to the incredibly dense group of monsters inhabiting the inside. Now, Alice found herself desperately hoping that nothing had changed since then.
“How many golems do you have that are combat ready?” asked Ethan as the group set foot in the corridors leading to the power supply again.
“I have a little under one hundred that I made using the System’s machinery and are proper combat golems. There are also a few hundred more that are semi-combat ready, but are far less equipped to handle problems. I ran into, and then subsequently solved, several supply issues while Alice was messing with Immortality enchantments, and this was the final result I managed to pull together.” Doll made a face. “The resource growth times and constraints were really a hassle.”
Ethan nodded. “How about you, Allira? How many shadows can you control without messing up your ability to respond to other threats and react to proper dangers?”
“Several dozen. Maybe a hundred if I give up some of my other abilities.”
Ethan nodded thoughtfully, and Alice also considered their group’s overall strength. According to loose estimates, they had somewhere between two hundred and four hundred combatants on their side, depending on how much she counted each System golem as. That wasn’t including the actual human troops. Everyone here was a Mage or an Immortal, so they were all rather strong by regular soldier standards - but it was an open question how well equipped they were to deal with the monsters present in the power supply.
The four Immortals would need to do a great deal of heavy lifting during the fight itself if they wanted to succeed. Alice didn’t think four hundred regular troops had a snowball’s chance in hell of retaking the power supply against the massive horde of monsters. There were thousands of them in there. At least.
That notion made Alice a bit worried. Now that she was an Immortal, Alice incredibly aware of the massive combat power boost her ascension to Immortality had given her - and at the same time, Alice was aware of how many limitations she still had, even after becoming an Immortal. She was definitely capable of making a huge impact on the battlefield - the ability to convert shadow spiders back to solid objects instead of shadowdancing wraiths was a huge deal. However, even with four Immortals, Alice still couldn’t help but worry that they might lose. After all, the army of monsters inhabiting the System’s power supply was massive, and there were far too many larger threats sprinkled into the horde. That wasn’t even accounting for a fourth evolution spider that may or may not be present in the room. Alice hadn’t seen one last time, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there - it could be hiding somewhere in all of the other monsters, or it could have some way to evade her sight. Either way, Alice wanted to at least potentially be prepared for a fourth evolution monster, just in case.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t quite sure how they would deal with such a powerful monster. Even worse, while Alice wasn’t sure what the world outside of the System looked like, she suspected they were running out of time. Things had already been bad before they entered the System, and every minute cost more lives. They needed to retake the power supply now, before the situation spiralled completely out of control outside of the System. Besides, the world outside of the System wasn’t their only clock. The monsters within the power supply might also break through the containers and eat the artificial magic seeds that supplied power for the System at any time - and subsequently go through another round of upgrades and become dozens of times more dangerous. They needed to clear out the room before that happened.
When they finally reached the power supply room again, Alice scanned the room as her heart pounded in anxiety.
“I don’t see any signs of a fourth evolution spider. Do any of you have any indicators of one?” asked Alice.
“I see something a bit weird in the northeast corner of the room, beneath that pile of third evolution spiders. I don’t know if it’s a fourth evolution spider though,” said Allira.
Alice squinted at the spot Allira had pointed out, and then her heart sank. Allira was right. There was a large cluster of mana buried under several third-evolution spiders. It was hard to spot when she wasn’t paying attention to that spot, since there was already a giant pile of monsters there… but the mana on the bottom of that pile didn’t match up to a third evolution spider.
“That’s almost certainly a fourth evolution monster,” said Alice. “We’ll need to be ready.”
“Do we have any ideas how strong a fourth evolution spider is compared to a third evolution spider?” asked Ethan.
“I have no idea,” said Alice.
“If a third evolution spider is a bit weaker than an Immortal but still poses some threat to us, I think a fourth evolution spider should be notably stronger than the average Immortal,” said Myra. “They probably lean even further into the ‘concept’ of shadows, based on Alice’s research, and probably have a lot more speed, stealth, and lethality. But that’s all I can really guess. I’m guessing we’ll want all four of us to be concentrating on the fourth evolution spider, at least until we get a better idea what to expect - which also means we have no good way to deal with the couple dozen third evolution spiders here. At least, that’s based on my nonexistent understanding of the abilities of a fourth evolution spider.
“So we have no idea and we’re going in completely blind? The only thing we can say for sure is that, not including Doll’s golems, we’re completely screwed?” asked Ethan.
“Pretty much.”
“Great.”
Alice wondered if there was a way to make this battle easier. Her first thought was to try to figure out what {Rapid Reconstruction} could be used to build, especially when it came to weapons from her home, or magic weapons that could wipe out a horde of spiders, she actually had a fair number of options. After all, {Rapid Reconstruction} would let her create any magical construct she understood and had the raw materials for. The problem was that she needed the raw materials and a blueprint, as well as a good understanding of what she was creating. That immediately ruled out laser cannons from a sci-fi novel, or even things like machine guns, since regular guns were not magical, and Alice also had no idea what ratios were needed for gunpowder or how modern gunpowder differed from the original ‘black powder’ beyond the fact that modern gunpowder had a very different chemical makeup… or something.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As for magical contraptions from this world, Alice had a fair number of options available to her. The problem was that Doll had probably already used up most of their materials - and had probably done a lot more with them than Alice could have. After all, Alice was mostly focused on a mix of research and enchanting, while Doll was a full-on production oriented Immortal with several centuries of hard work and experience that Alice did not have.
What unique abilities could Alice bring to the table to make this fight winnable?
“Is there any chance that some kind of poisonous gas might clear up the room with minimal casualties? Or perhaps a giant blob of light could clear out the enemy for us with minimal difficulty? Or perhaps just instantly kill the fourth evolution spider and wipe it out?” Alice asked. Since Alice could turn concepts into enchantments now, Alice could potentially whip up some kind of heavily concentrated light bomb, much like the physical versions Doll had used a few times in earlier fights. Before anyone could respond, Alice shook her head and dismissed her own idea. “No, nevermind. I doubt a fourth evolution spider can be killed with a regular light bomb - the fact that monsters get sturdier and more powerful with each evolution probably means that it’ll be resilient against that kind of attack. Perhaps it can weaken it, but I seriously doubt pure light would be lethal…”
“Rather than an up front confrontation, perhaps we would have better luck using traps,” said Myra. “Doll is already very proficient at making traps, and Alice can now make enchantments based around concepts. We could heavily trap the hallway, then lure the spiders in. That might work. We even have some dismantled traps from the original System. While they didn’t prove very effective and dealing with the spider infestation, they’re clearly better than nothing, and they also recognize us as friendly.”
“That’s true, but I’m having a hard time envisioning a few traps killing everything in this room,” said Ethan. “The biggest problem we’ll run into is sheer numbers. The moment we start slaughtering monsters, the entire horde will come at us at once. Fighting thousands of monsters seems very hard - especially when they can teleport, outnumber us more than ten to one even with golems and shadows included, and also have stronger upper-end combatants than we do. Traps can help even the odds, but a single trapped corridor won’t end a battle on its own. The crossbows, for example, have a limitation on how many crossbow bolts they can fire at once, and each requires a crossbow bolt to be supplied first. The electrified walls are also rather limited in how much damage they can deal - the shocks just don’t seem to have been strong enough to handle the spiders, and the spiders also have some ability to maneuver around walls once they realize a certain section is dangerous. Crawling on the ceiling seems to get them through the electrified walls just fine.”
Myra looked at the walls thoughtfully, before she grinned. “Those problems might not be impossible to resolve. Alice, based on what you told us about your newest abilities, you can turn concepts themselves into solid, concrete enchantments, right?”
“Yes,” said Alice. “I still need to experiment more with how exactly that works and what the results are, but I can definitely turn solid concepts into enchantments by using my rewards for ascending to Immortality.
“I have a new idea. What if you create some kind of enchantment based around the idea of ‘death’ itself, and then create a kind of invisible ‘wall’ that covers the entire corridor? Then, we can try to drag the horde of monsters into it. Of course, the stronger monsters will quickly realize what you’ve done and start trying to move around this trap - their teleportation makes it easy for them to squeeze past problems like this. However, if you can go fast enough, you could turn the monsters into enchantments when they’re midway through the trap - thus killing them instantly. Using ‘death’ itself as the basis for the trap should also resolve the lethality issue the previous electric traps ran into. If we combine that with some kind of light show from Doll, and then have me and Ethan as reserves to handle any problems that crop up, we might be able to even the odds that way. Then, Doll’s golems and Allira’s shadows could help force the enemy into the wall of death.”
“We could also create multiple layers of this enchantment,” said Ethan. “That way, teleporting past one of the death enchantments won’t be enough to save them.” said Ethan. “This kind of multi-layer trap would also help nullify their numbers advantage, since it’ll trap the weaker spiders on the other side of the wall. They can’t teleport, after all. This even has some mild potential to make cleanup way easier, since if the smarter spiders are all wiped out, the lesser spiders will stop being intelligent enough to dodge the traps. Weak monsters with no commanders are ruled by hunger rather than intelligence.”
“This could work, but it depends on how hard it is to create an enchantment literally centered around the concept of ‘death,” said Alice. “Let me try first, and we’ll make plans from there.”
Alice took a few moments to try to visualize what death meant to her.
Endless darkness. Stillness. Loss of everything. The end.
Alice tried to bring all of those concepts together into a singular enchantment, meant to inflict death upon anything that stepped into it - and failed. Fortunately, her new Perk gave her a good idea why her attempt at making a new enchantment had failed.
“I need materials,” said Alice. “Preferably a whole lot of recently dead things. By having lots of ‘death’ near me, I can basically extract it and use it to create new enchantments centered around the same thing.”
“Hmm… we could ‘borrow’ some monsters from other parts of the System,” said Ethan. “If we kill them all right in front of the doors to the power supply, could you use that?”
“Yeah, that would work. I could even use the monster cores as a power supply for the enchantment, since even conceptual enchantments still need power to keep functioning.”
“Got it.” The group quickly returned to the portal once more, before Alice targeted a small, out of the way room that seemed unlikely to house a big horde of monsters. When they arrived, they found a regular Perk library for the [Steel Blacksmith] Class - which was apparently a niche subclass of [Blacksmiths] focused entirely around making items out of steel. Sure enough, the monster horde in this location was quite limited - there were only a hundred weaker spiders, three spider alphas, and one second-evolution spider present. Now that everyone knew what to expect, Allira’s shadows, Doll’s golems, and Ethan made short work of the spiders present - in about a minute and a half, the entire horde was wiped out.
After that, the group targeted a few other small hordes of monsters as they went on a material-collecting rampage.
Six hours later, they returned, before Alice started her work.
Creating an enchantment from a concept felt fundamentally different from any kind of enchantment Alice had created in the past. It felt almost like she was trying to wrangle reality itself into a certain shape, while ‘muting’ all of the rich differences, concepts, and colors present in every single moment of time. Rather than creating a construct, it felt more like Alice was trying to erase all of the noise until one one thing was present - and in this case, that was a sheet of pure, refined ‘death’ right outside the door to the power supply.
She used her new skillset to create layer after layer of deadly enchantments, all placed under Doll’s advice. After all, Doll’s self-defense capabilities were mostly centered around traps and equipment. If anyone knew how best to catch unwanted intruders in a net of doom, it was Doll.
After nearly six more hours of layering enchantments, a glittering web of deadly traps now covered most of the corridor.
“Are the traps ready?” asked Ethan.
“They are,” said Alice. “There are at least enough traps that they should be able to slow down the monsters if we need to retreat - though hopefully that isn’t needed.”
“Let’s see how this goes, then,” said Ethan.
My surgery is on the day I usually post Budding Scientist chapters. If I posted this on Thursday, I hope the surgery goes well. If I posted this on Saturday, I can confirm that I am at least not dead. I may be in a lot of pain next week, so we’ll see how much work I get done. Hopefully there is no schedule disruption though. I can dream. If I posted this chapter on neither of those two days, I have no idea what happened and have a hard time simulating what future me is experiencing or why I have deviated from my expected behavioral patterns. Maybe I couldn’t get to this chapter done on Thursday for whatever reason, and then on Saturday I was in so much pain I couldn’t focus? That’s my best guess for what happened, but unless I update this chapter note your guess is as good as current me’s guess.
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