The moment Allira’s shadows pounced on the first third-evolution monster, the swarm of monsters acted like a kicked beehive. All the monsters in the room jolted out of their hunger-induced stupors and glared at the group. A primal, feral hunger swirled in their eyes.

  Alice shivered. Even the most powerful monster swarms she had seen before now hadn’t acted with this level of coordination and precision. It almost looked as if the monster swarm wasn’t comprised of individual monsters anymore - it was like facing one giant beast with hundreds of bodies.

  Still, that didn’t change what they had to do. Alice activated several of her bracelets at once, targeting two of the third evolution spiders, while Ethan added in a few dozen lightning bolts and projectiles.

  The other twenty Mages with them threw their own attacks at two of the other third-evolution spiders, with most of them targeting the one Allira was already ripping into.

  Only one of the targeted spiders died - the one that Alice and Ethan had surprise attacked. The second spider that Allira and most of the group had targeted lost half a leg, before it sank into the shadows. Then, the remaining third evolution spiders teleported towards each other. Alice realized that her earlier speculation wasn’t wrong - they were regrouping and coordinating attacks, as if they were a unified hive mind instead of disparate swarms. Worse, the leader of this swarm had some level of tactical understanding.

  The group immediately turned around and ran back down the corridor..

  Then, the distorted, unified shriek of hundreds of monsters bellowing at the group at once resonated through the hallway. A tidal wave of monsters surged out of the room - and immediately ran face-first into a pile of death traps. For a few moments, chaos reigned in the corridor, as spiders dashed into the traps and died by the dozen. Each death enchantment harvested spiders like a well-oiled machine, and the sheer press of spiders trying to get into the corridor forced more spiders into the traps with every single second that passed.

  Then, a ripple of coordination passed through the spider swarm. It was like someone had hit a button and turned off the movements of the spiders. The ones at the back stopped pushing forward, and the spiders near the front of the swarm began to find their footing and try to back away. Alice and Ethan’s projectiles continued to harvest lives, but the stronger spiders lay in wait in the middle of the spider swarm, watching indifferently as their peons were picked away.

  That was when Allira and Doll’s minions attacked. Allira’s shadows were the most well-positioned, since they didn’t need physical access to maneuver around the battlefield. From behind the spider swarm, a large group of shadows rushed into the spiders and started physically pushing them forward. There was no point in biting, or clawing, or tearing at the spiders, when a few shovers could kill a dozen spiders. Meanwhile, Doll’s golems leapt to the edge of the death enchantments and began physically pulling spiders towards the group. After all, golems weren’t alive - they had no need to fear the death enchantments, unlike everyone else.

  A few of Doll’s golems even leapt directly into the spider swarm. While they were quickly torn apart, they still helped shove and pull several dozen more spiders into the death traps. For nearly thirty seconds, the battle looked like it was swinging handily in their favor - while a few of Doll’s golems and Allira’s shadows got ripped apart, and Ethan was burning mana like it was free, the monster swarm was dying in droves. Ordinary spiders, first evolution spiders, and even second evolution spiders were dropping like flies.

  Then, the spiders finally managed to back up enough that the press of bodies was no longer threatening to them. They had found their footing, and the momentum of the horde was no longer enough to stuff endless numbers of spiders onto the death traps.

  Then, to Alice’s surprise, the spiders began to send out scouts into the death corridor. Spiders leapt onto the walls, ceiling, floor, and basically every inch of space as they tried to probe which areas were safe and which areas were trapped. Allira immediately pulled most of her shadows from behind the swarm back into the corridor, and began using them to mess with the spiders, pulling them into new traps as the golems also ran interference. Alice observed the battle for a moment, before she realized what Allira and Doll were doing.

  They weren’t just pulling spiders into the traps to kill them faster - they were also feeding the swarm false intelligence. Alice, naturally, hadn’t left a single inch of space uncovered by traps. The corridor didn’t actually have any gaps in the death traps - even if the spiders figured out how to fly, there was zero way to pass through the corridor without dying. The one and only way to get around the traps was teleportation - but with Alice and Allira, they had the ability to interfere with teleportation too. The spiders, however, did not know that the group had countermeasures for teleportation, nor did they know that there was no way to physically bypass the traps.

  Doll and Allira’s shadows were constantly trying to keep spiders away from certain random sections of the trap corridor - not because those areas were safe, but to provide the illusion that they were important. That way, hopefully, the swarm would take the bait and try to charge one of those ‘protected’ sections, only to run into a wall of more traps and death.

  However, even though the idea was sound, Alice started to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach as she watched the spider swarm continued to send out scouts.

  According to their assumptions, the higher level spiders should have shadowstepped past the traps and towards them, since the upper level shadow spiders could bypass the trap corridor entirely with teleportation. However, the spiders weren’t teleporting at all. That was unnerving, because Alice had no idea why the spiders were behaving unusually. All she knew was that the spiders were led by an intelligent commander, and that commander wasn’t behaving as expected.

  The unsettling feeling had only just had time to start rearing its ugly head before things changed.

  Alice felt the death-based enchantments start to wriggle and ripple, as if they were a pool of water caught in the middle of a turbulent storm. The mana contained within each enchantment started to expand and contract chaotically… and then a small sliver of one of the enchantments changed. Instead of an enchantment based around death, the enchantment started to collapse into an enchantment based around… shadow.

  Alice’s stomach sank as she realized what she was looking at.

  The fourth evolution spider leading this horde had realized the corridor was a death trap, and had likely also realized the group was ready for teleportation. So it was trying to find another way around - by dismantling the enchantments themselves. Alice hadn’t realized that spiders could do anything related to enchanting at all, besides gnaw at the core materials.

  Obviously, this monster had figured something out. Even if it couldn’t make raw enchantments from scratch, it was converting one kind of enchantment into another right in front of her eyes.

  Worse, the shadow enchantment wasn’t dangerous for the shadow spiders at all - shadows were practically their element. Alice watched with growing dread as a second evolution spider stepped onto the fragmented shadow enchantment. Instead of dying, the way it would have done if the enchantment were still a death enchantment, the creature seemed to grow minutely stronger and faster.

  The fourth evolution spider continued to try to convert Alice’s enchantments, and the concept of ‘shadows’ spread like a virus through Alice’s carefully built deathtrap. If she didn’t do something fast, the spiders would have free reign to pounce on the group and rip them to pieces.

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  Alice used her senses to scan her surroundings as she searched for a way to fight back against this growing disaster. Using antimagic mana was unlikely to do anything important right now - the fourth evolution spider would probably dodge out of the way if she tried to blast it with antimagic. It was too fast for her to handle. She also couldn’t get a clear line of fire on the fourth evolution spider itself - it was buried deep in the horde, and there were so many bodies moving around that targeting it was basically impossible. Allira and Doll’s minions were also occupied trying to keep the swarm from attacking the enchantments with their teeth, meaning they were occupied.

  A moment later, Alice’s gaze snapped back to the subverted enchantments, and Alice realized something.

  Part of the reason the spider was so good at converting her traps to shadows was the fact that, conceptually, shadows and death were adjacent to each other. While there were a whole lot of differences between the two as far as physics and biology went, at least when it came to symbolism the two were usually like twins - a bit different, but visually and conceptually similar. Thus, the spider seemed to have an easy time converting death into shadow and ruining all of Alice’s enchantments.

  However, that also meant the inverse was true. It was easy for the shadow spider to convert her death enchantments into shadow enchantments, since the enchantments were built entirely out of concepts anyway - but that should also mean it was easy to convert the enchantments right back. She needed ‘death’ in the area to help fuel the conversion back to death - but with the number of spiders that had died in the initial chaos, she had more than enough fuel.

  So Alice started drawing upon the dead corpses of all the nearby spiders to refine the concept of ‘death’ even further, and then tried to force the shadow enchantments to twist right back into fields of death.

  The fourth-evolution spider immediately noticed what she was doing, and started hammering away at Alice’s attempts at reconversion. Alice fought back against the spider’s maneuvering, and the two rapidly devolved into a tug-of-war. Alice immediately lost any focus on the battlefield itself - this was clearly the most important place she could contribute to the battle right now.

  While this took up all of Alice’s attention, it also meant that Alice was successfully distracting the most powerful enemy combatant, all by herself. As long as the spider was occupied in their battle over the enchantments, the rest of the group was safe from unexpected and terrifying attacks from the fourth evolution pressure. Meanwhile, the horde of weaker spiders continued to slowly thin out, although not by much. Alice estimated there had been somewhere between one and two thousand spiders originally, and now they had probably dropped about a hundred. There were still so many she couldn’t even accurately count them all, though.

  The fourth evolution spider finally seemed to realize it wasn’t making much headway in converting the enchantments. It hadn’t managed to open up any major gaps in the enchantment array, so it tried something else. A sudden spike of mana conversion suddenly hammered one very specific spot in the enchantment, and then a second evolution spider and four spider alphas leapt into the gap. The four alphas died instantly - but the second evolution spider twitched and writhed in pain for a few moments, before it collapsed.

  Alice didn’t think much of it at first, until she realized that a big chunk of the enchanting around the dead second evolution spider had gotten ‘polluted’ with the concept of shadows - and worse, the mana flow was weakening, and with it, the power of the enchantment she had set up.

  Alice’s heart started to pound. She realized that the third evolution spiders were now lending their own power to the war over control of the enchantment. The had somehow stuffed the five spiders full of shadows, and then sent it over to tear at the foundation of the enchantments. When it had died, it had also structurally weakened the enchantment a little bit. They had also clearly targeted one of the batches of monster cores powering the whole enchantment array, messing up the power for the rest of the enchantment.

  Before Alice could fix it, a third evolution spider leapt into the gap, grabbed two of the largest monster cores in the stockpile with its mandibles, and the threw them at its comrades. A storm of lightning and metal tore into the spider a moment later, as Ethan realized things were getting bad - but the spider only lost one leg before it managed to launch itself back into the horde.

  One section of the death enchantment began to flicker weakly as the spider danced back out of range.

  Two second-evolution spiders leapt towards the same spot. Alice hastily started to build a new enchantment on top of the spot where the old one was failing, while Cecilia threw a few monster cores at the places where new power sources were needed - but that also took away from Alice’s ability to contest the fourth evolution spider over control of the enchantments.

  “Let me!” yelled Cecilia. She immediately took over the spot where Alice was trying to build a new enchantment. She ignored Alice’s attempts to use the concept of death itself - after all, Cecilia couldn’t build enchantments out of concepts. Instead, Cecilia went for a simple electricity enchantment - nothing special, but good enough to blast down any more spiders that tried to take advantage of the gap and attack the power source. Alice immediately snapped her attention back to fighting over the greater enchantment network.

  However, the spiders had clearly figured out the right way to counter the enchantment network. The third evolution spiders started cramping more weaker spiders full of the concept of ‘shadows’ using their mana, before those spiders leapt towards the power sources keeping the enchantment running. Any time one of them started to buckle, swarms of second evolution spiders would leap onto the area and start trying to rip away at the remaining connections between the power sources and the rest of the enchantments. Even though they were dying in droves again, the regular mages in their group were also running out of mana as they tried to keep the spiders away from the area. Things were going wrong fast, and the horde was still way too strong for them to fight head-on.

  “Ethan, do you have any ideas?” asked Alice, as she tried to push down a wave of panic.

  “If things get bad enough, I can probably still get us out of here,” said Myra. “I did think that fleeing and coming back later for another battle might be needed, and the worse things get, the more I suspect we’ll need a round two to clean up this mess.”

  “We should at least try to inflict some more damage on the spider horde first. I invested a lot of materials into the golems, and if we don’t deal with a large number of the spiders, they’ll probably grow faster than our forces when both sides try to recover from this exchange,” said Doll.

  “Allira, swap to lights. Alice, can you force the fourth evolution spider to become more… shadowy?” asked Ethan. “You can convert concepts into enchantments, right? Can you also force the fourth evolution spider to become more clearly defined by its shadowy side?”

  Alice blinked in confusion. Ethan wanted her to enhance the shadow aspects of the fourth-evolution spider? Why?

  A moment later, she thought she understood what Ethan was planning. It was a gamble, but it might work. She reached out a magic tendril towards the fourth evolution spider, and after using some portals to fudge distances, she managed to extend a magic tendril into the fourth evolution spider. She expected the creature to dodge, since it was clearly capable of getting out of the way if it wanted to - but to her surprise, it ignored her magic tendril as if it were beneath its notice. Then, Alice tried as hard as she could to force the creature to convert from a semi-solid, physical monster into a being made entirely of shadow.

  The spider attached itself to her mana like a leech and began to drain Alice’s mana like a vampire.

  Alice panicked, and tried to tear her magic tendril out of the creature’s grasp, but it was like trying to pull her arm out of a wood chipper. The spider kept drinking and devouring every drop of Alice’s mana through her tendril, even though Alice was completely certain that wasn’t how magic tendrils were supposed to work.

  “Alice! Focus! Convert it, ignore the mana it’s taking!” Yelled Ethan. Alice gritted her teeth and pushed her way through the rising panic in her stomach, and began to focus on her new Immortal Perk again. The spider’s body became more and more shadowy and vague. Its silhouette seemed to blend into the air around them.

  And then… Allira’s light began to sear the creature’s body away. The light seemed to go from weakening the creature to outright killing it. A moment later, the monster seemed to notice it too. It panicked and let go of Alice’s magic tendril, and then dropped into the horde of monsters, but Alice noticed that it was a bit weaker than before. It looked like about a third of its body was gone from the few seconds of illusory light that it had been subjected to. Unfortunately, the creature had escaped - and it was nowhere near dead. Alice checked her own mana reserves, and realized she had lost about a third of her mana from the creature’s consumption and the previous battle to control the enchantments. Worse, the monsters were still battering the cores of the enchantment, and they were making very noticeable progress towards tearing a hole in the enchantment.

  Things were not looking good, and Alice had no idea how to reverse the tide of battle.

  Got half of my surgery stitches removed yesterday, since the area is healed enough that it no longer needs it. Quite happy with that. Other half will probably come out next post-surgery meeting. I look forward to it.

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