The swarm of spiders continued to assail the enchantments, while Alice tried to estimate how much time they had left and how many spiders they had killed. It looked as if over two hundred of the monsters had died so far, which actually made a noticeable dent in the swarm of creepy-crawly horrors surging towards them. However, the damage to the upper echelons of the enemy was far below what she had been hoping for. Worse, the enchantments weren’t the only thing failing. The Illvarian mages were running out of mana, Doll’s golems were starting to take significant casualties, and the spiders at the center of the horde didn’t look much worse for wear than they had been at the start of the fight. Things were starting to go wrong fast.
They hadn’t had any human casualties yet, but Alice suspected that at this rate, it was only a matter of time. Unlike golems or Allira’s shadows, human casualties actually mattered.
As Alice was running the desperate math for how to actually win this battle, another spider leapt towards one of the power sources for the enchantments. Like many of the previous spiders, upon contact with the power source it exploded, vomiting another surge of shadows into the power array and causing a few more components of the enchantment to break. Alice felt a surge of frustration as she tried to repair the damage, only for the fourth evolution spider to exploit the opening and start twisting another, different part of the enchantment to shadows.
Another two shadow spiders leapt at different parts of the enchantment and exploded, and Alice used a surge of {Rapid Reconstruction} to force the enchantments back into place - but even the near instantaneous reconstruction ability of the Perk couldn’t compensate for her waning mana reserves, the unnatural speed of the enchantments breaking into pieces, and the increasing density of shadow enchantments in the area. She was losing control.
Another three self-destructing spiders blasted into the enchantment, and Alice felt a surge of panic. She realized that for the first time, a path that the spiders coiled use to totally bypass the web of traps and enchantments was open.
The spiders didn’t miss this opportunity. Several second and third evolution spiders immediately leapt into the opened pathway, while Alice desperately tried to rebuild the enchantments - but the fourth evolution spider and the third evolution spiders seemed to have figured out how to stop her. The area quickly turned into a hazy mess of shadows and limbs, and when Alice tried to rebuild the enchantments in the area, it felt like her mana ran into a concrete wall. She just… couldn’t interfere with the area. Her magic tendrils wormed their way into the wall of magic, but nowhere near fast enough to handle the dashing horde of monsters.
Moments later, the first third evolution spider slid past the final set of enchantments, then leapt towards one of the Mages in the group. A few beads of metal ripped into the spider a moment later, nearly ripping off one of its legs. The spider kept coming. The mage that had been targeted panicked, and tried to back up, but he ran into the mage behind him. The corridor was too packed with people, golems, and materials - there was nowhere to flee. The spider’s maw opened up like a gate to another world - and then the world turned into a flash of heat and light, as Ethan used his father’s old sword.
Several spiders, as well as many of the shadow-based enchantments, made hissing and popping sounds as they fried like oil in a frying pan.
On the bright side, this dealt with the immediate pressure on the group. A third evolution spider, as well as several second evolution spiders, died from the blast of flames, coupled with a few careful shoves from Doll to finish off the surviving third evolution spider and a few stragglers in the second evolution.
On the downside, this blew a gaping hole in the wall of enchantments. The fire had outright melted every single chunk of the enchantments that had turned into shadows - and in the process, completely melted huge chunks of Alice’s work into slag. Alice was already starting to run low on mana, and she was rapidly developing a headache. Rebuilding the whole thing would take more of everything than she had available to her.
This was a problem Alice hadn’t even realized conceptual enchantments would have. Most enchantments wouldn’t react this way upon meeting an ‘opposing’ concept, but conceptual enchantments were clearly far more fragile when it came to interference from other concepts. It made her wonder what the opposite of ‘death’ was, and how her death concept enchantments could be dismantled. Conceptually, death was the opposite of life, so… could her death enchantments be disabled by meeting a strong enough form of life? Or would a sufficiently powerful [Organic Mage] be able to destroy her death enchantments by ‘healing’ them with organic mana?
Alice shook her head. Now wasn’t the time to be distracted by these thoughts. Things were going wrong fast, and she didn’t have time for idle speculation.
Ethan grabbed her and started dragging her away from the battlefield, while the other Mages and Immortals also started to distance themselves from the enchantment network. The spider swarm started to pour into the gap in the enchantment’s defenses again - Ethan may have pushed back the swarm, but it was far from enough to halt their advance. In fact, he had opened up several new gaps in the defensive network that they needed to guard against. Allira had started creating concentrated beams of illusory light, which she coordinated with Doll to weaken third evolution spiders so that the other Mages could finish them off - but with the swarm of spiders protecting the higher evolution monsters, dealing with even the weakened enemies was starting to become nearly impossible. Worse, Alice felt something strange happening in one of the corners of the battlefield. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she could tell the fourth evolution spider was doing something, and she doubted she would like the results when it finished.
Alice searched for a way to turn the tides of the battlefield back in their favor, and a moment later, she locked onto a new idea.
The shadow enchantments had literally exploded and melted away when Ethan had hit them with a burst of fire. Alice already knew she could manipulate concepts and turn them into enchantments, and she could create new enchantments in record times by using her new Perks. {Rapid Reconstruction} meant that Alice could speed through the enchantment creation process in a way a regular enchanter could never match.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Seeing the explosions from her enchantments gave Alice a certain amount of inspiration. She couldn’t make a bomb out of technology from Earth. Not that she understood the mechanics behind bomb-making in the first place, since she had never had a reason to look it up. Even if she did understand how they worked, {Rapid Reconstruction} wouldn’t have supported the creation of a non-magical item, and Alice needed speed right now. However, that didn’t totally cut off any way to slow down the spider horde.
Alice’s thoughts drifted towards Cecilia’s blast crystals. Unlike bombs, she understood exactly how those worked. After Ethan’s fire slash, there was plenty of the concept of ‘fire’ lingering around in the area. Fire was strongly associated with the concept of ‘light’, which had already proven to be effective against the spiders. Doll also had her light cannons, which had similarly proven effective against the shadow spiders. Alice felt she could weld all three together to create a weapon to fight them out of this mess. It might be a messy and horrifically inefficient weapon - but it would help safeguard a retreat while they regrouped and prepared for a second battle.
“Cecilia, give me your blast crystals! Doll, give me any objects you have that produce light!” Yelled Alice.
Cecilia immediately handed Alice several blast crystals from her storage Perk, and Doll gave Alice a few of her light cannons. Alice immediately got to work.
The first thing she did was turn on the light cannon and the blast crystals - in Alice’s mind, she wanted to create an object that literally ‘radiated’ its conceptual framework outwards. The blast crystals were inherently meant to be consumable enchantments, which meant that they weren’t built to drip-feed their mana to another mechanism - they were meant to release it all in one big flash of energy. That wasn’t what she needed, so Alice did her best to draw upon the concept of fire from the remaining embers of Ethan’s attack. Fire consumed things like a raging inferno - but it didn’t consume all of its fuel instantly. Most fires could burn for several minutes unabated. Alice tried to weld the concept of fire together with the blast crystals and the light cannons, in order to create a ball of light and heat that would constantly shove its own conceptual framework into their surroundings.
After several seconds of utilizing {Rapid Reconstruction} while the mages and Immortals fought to buy her time, Alice squinted at her work. It was a terribly ugly, inefficient mess of enchantments and concepts, all mashed together in a way that would have made any competent [Enchanter] cry. Even so, there were certain parts of her creation that borrowed from more elegant enchantments Alice had seen - in particular, she had taken a great deal of inspiration from the Artifacts she had seen, and how they perpetually powered themselves. As she inspected her work, Alice realized that she had created something like a very limited version of the power sources that fueled the System - but her knockoff creation had nowhere near the infinite lifespan of a proper artificial magic seed. Instead, it just burned through energy and burned through its environment. It would probably only last a few minutes - perhaps five or six at most.
It didn’t matter. It would serve its purpose, and that was all that mattered.
Alice hurled her creation at the horde of spiders. The moment it hit its target, it erupted into a blast of heat and light, ripping through the area like a clumsy bomb.
The dim corridors of the System lit up with a brightness equal to a searchlight from Earth. Several of the weaker Mages in the group cried out in pain, since their [Endurance] wasn’t high enough to protect their eyes from the intense blast of light, and a wave of incredible heat washed over the group. It wasn’t anywhere near high enough to kill anyone, but Alice heard and smelled some faint sizzling sounds, as a few of the Mages started to wail in pain.
Clearly, the ‘fire’ Alice had borrowed from Ethan’s attack had a lot more to it than regular fire. Alice had no idea how that worked, and didn’t have time to explore it right now - but she was grateful she had set the magic orb to slowly release energy, instead of releasing it all at once. Otherwise, she might have flash-fried a few members of their group.
A few of the spiders closest to the blast burned. The acrid smell of flesh and hair cooking pervaded the corridor as a few dozen spiders fried, including one third evolution spider. Then, the enemy responded with a blast of pure, conceptual shadows. The ground and air shivered, as nameless, unknowable things slithered towards the orb of light and tried to put it out. Alice’s death enchantments shuddered as the assault of light and heat burned through even more of the conceptual framework they relied upon to function, and Alice realized that her entire enchantment network would collapse within a minute or less.
She glanced at the other third evolution spiders that had been near the epicenter of the blast, and then grimaced. Even though Alice had specifically targeted a large group of strong monsters, only one of them had died. The rest were, at best, injured - and several of them seemed completely unharmed. The density of conceptual ‘shadows’ had been far too high for a single light-based enchantment to beat them down - a curious departure from how real light and shadows worked. Even as she continued to observe the spider swarm, Alice felt several smaller ripples of darkness and shadows emulate from the group of spiders and cover the few third-evolution spiders that had been injured but not killed. Clearly, the fourth evolution spider coordinating the enemy had deemed it too painful to lose its powerful swarm members, and had commanded a few groups of weaker spiders to work together and help shield them from further harm.
After that, the second pulse of light hit. Alice winced. She had clearly messed up some other part of her makeshift enchantment - it had been supposed to release a steady stream of light, not random, inconsistent pulses of light and heat. She completely lost sight of what the spiders were doing during the second pulse of light. When she blinked the spots out of her eyes and looked at the group of third evolution spiders, she realized that none of them had actually died, even though this pulse of light had been much stronger than the first one. The enemy’s coordinated control of shadows meant that they were practically one living, sapient organism with a massive mana pool. She grimaced. The fourth evolution spider that led the enemy was truly frustrating to deal with. If they could just kill it, this entire fight would have been much easier. Sadly, it was still hiding behind a wall of its kin.
Still, the spiders were stalled by the pulses of light, which made Alice feel somewhat relieved. Her tool would buy them time, which was exactly what it was supposed to do. Alice saw Doll launch a few more experiment bursts of light at the spiders, but quickly shook her head. The coordinated shadow manipulation of the spiders made them exceptionally resilient against Doll’s probing attacks. A few moments later, the third evolution spiders started to regroup. Whatever time Alice’s bomb had bought the group was quickly running out - and while they had inflicted major casualties upon the spider horde, they still had hundreds, or potentially even a thousand spiders left.
Before she could continue observing the spiders, Alice saw several of the Mages suddenly start floating in the air, as Ethan lifted them up using raw kinetic manipulation. Alice followed suit with her own kinetic mana, and the group rapidly retreated back into the depths of the System to prepare for the next engagement.
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