Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? (LN) - Volume 1 - Chapter 2

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A RENT-FREE HOME

I know—I’ll make a house. A totally break-in-proof house.

I’ve given up on escaping from this dungeon. If I keep wandering around randomly, the only future I can imagine is some unexpected encounter leading to a dead end. Monster or human, everything is my enemy now. And I don’t mean a frenemy or a rival or anything like that. I’m talking the kind that puts your life in danger.

Besides, this place is frequented by humans. It’ll be risky to use the exit even if I do manage to find it.

I mean, if anyone discovers me, they’ll kill me. And there could be a human settlement right outside.

Which is why I made up my mind to live in this dungeon.

So anyway. If this is my new home, what do I need? Food, shelter, and clothing.

Well, I don’t think that last one is necessary for a spider. The temperature here is comfortable enough either way.

The problem is food and shelter.

Q. What is a spider’s main diet? A. Other insects.

Oof… That’s true, isn’t it? That’s what I’m gonna have to do to fill my belly.

Although, given my absurd size, I don’t think my potential prey is limited to insects. For instance, I could probably eat other monsters, or… I don’t want to think about this, but…human beings…

Really, my siblings back there started cannibalizing one another as soon as they were born, right? The giant parent spider was eating her children like it was no big deal, too, so as far as I can tell, my particular species seems to regard all living beings as potential food.

In fact, in a cave like this, it’s probably the only option. Which means if I want to eat, I’ll have to take on some other monsters and chow down.

You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, after all, and I’m gonna starve to death if I don’t eat something, no matter how gross.

At present, I do have one thing that could potentially serve as a food source.

The butchered carcass of the spider I found earlier.

The legs and fangs and stuff had been taken, but most of the main body was still there.

Well, if I eat that, I probably won’t have to worry about food for the rest of the day. If I can bring myself to eat it, that is.

Honestly, suddenly having to eat a spider is pretty extreme, and that thing was probably one of my siblings…

Both ethically and visually, I’d really rather not.

So I’m going to hold off on eating the guy for now.

Besides, even if I do take the plunge, that’ll only be a temporary solution.

Considering that I’ll be living in this dungeon from now on, I’ll have to be able to procure food on a regular basis anyway.

But if I want to eat other monsters, that means I’ll have to beat them first.

How am I supposed to just jump into combat?

A frail girl like me, who’s only ever been good at games, won’t stand a chance in a real fight.

And so I conclude that I should start by making a house.

What’s a spider without a spiderweb, right?

Spiders create webs with special viscous thread and use them to catch prey, after all.

So if this goes well, my food problem and my shelter problem will be solved all at once.

I think this cave makes for a nice location, actually.

If nothing else, it should be easy to make webs all over the place.

Without further ado, then, time to create my new home!

Carrying the corpse of my sibling on my back, I seek out a good spot where people are unlikely to bother me.

What? Why would I take it with me, you ask?

Insurance. Hopefully it won’t come to that, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Eventually, I come to a T-junction with no human footprints in sight, so I decide to set up there.

First, I’ll have to produce the thread. From my butt, I guess? I’m pretty sure that’s the general area the thread should come out of, so let’s give it a shot.

But by the time I finish the thought, I realize I’ve already produced a thread somehow. Huh? I don’t remember this stuff coming out of me…

On top of that, it’s a really long one. Oh man, does this mean I’ve been walking around with a string sticking out of my butt this whole time?

Wow, that’s so embarrassing!

Maybe it’s like when you (redacted), so you (redacted)?

Okay, forget about the fact that I made thread unconsciously for now.

Now to make a home, for real this time!

Finished! I look over my work with satisfaction. A magnificent spiderweb is strung up across the cave passage, blocking the area off.

Man, did my natural instincts kick in or something? As soon as I started working, my body just moved on its own and constructed the web in the blink of an eye.

However, instead of totally completing the net, I left a little hole just big enough for me to squeeze through.

Why? For an escape route, obviously.

I’m settling in at a three-way intersection, which is now hemmed in by my webs over each passage.

But if I blocked it up completely, I wouldn’t be able to get out.

It’s possible, although I doubt it’ll happen, that some fierce opponent might slash through my net.

So I left a hole on purpose, so I can get away in case of an emergency.

Now I’m protected by webs in all three directions, plus, an emergency exit is in place.

The ideal den for a shut-in is complete! Ahhh, there’s no place like home.

All I need now is for prey to get caught in my net on a regular basis.

If I can pull that off, there’s no reason I won’t be able to hide out in this place for the rest of my life.

Awesome!

I did go to school, but other than that, I mostly lived my life on Earth as a recluse. I never talked to anyone at school, and once I got home, I always just played games or surfed the net. Most of my dinners involved adding hot water and waiting three minutes or heating something up on the stove. Occasionally I’d mix things up with a box lunch from the convenience store.

My parents both worked all day and usually got home late. And even when they came home, we never saw each other face-to-face. We only did the bare minimum of chores. To be perfectly honest, it was like living with two total strangers. It’s kind of impressive in a way, that I can’t even remember what my real parents looked like.

Still, I wonder if they were a little bit sad about my death, at least?

Nah, probably not. Although they might be sad about losing what little income I contributed to the household.

I used to earn a small amount of rent money through stocks. If there’s anything they’d miss, it’s probably that.

That was how cold our family relationship was.

My lifestyle probably contributed to my extreme awkwardness when it came to communicating with others.

Or it might’ve just been the personality I was born with, not how I was raised.

As a result, I didn’t have anyone I could call a friend, and even in game chats I usually didn’t say much.

Likewise, my character in my favorite MMO had a reputation for being silent.

My avatar was a somber old bald dude, too. He was a real strong-and-silent type, the kind of good guy who let his actions do all the talking.

And his stats were pretty out there—I maxed out my attack power and speed and left everything else untouched.

But that didn’t matter as long as I didn’t get hit! I just avoided enemy attacks and plowed through everything with a hit-and-run strategy. The perfect plan, aside from the part that a single hit would probably kill me!

Hmm.

I don’t really care about not being able to see my parents or classmates anymore, but it makes me a little sad to think that I’ll never see that old bald guy again. I made him a legend for being one of the few free-to-players who could stand up against the pay-to-players, so it’s a shame to have abandoned his file like that.

…In short, I’m more attached to a game character than I am to my parents. I’ve got a knack for this being-inhuman thing, if I do say so myself.

Besides, it’s true—I’ve never been that good at being a person.

Although, I suppose believing it’s okay to be a bad person is the first step toward becoming one…

Well, since I’m already a bad person, I might as well say it.

Being a recluse is the best! Whoo-hoo!

A white thread is drawn between my two forelegs.

When I pull on it, it goops and stretches.

Then when I stop pulling, it gradually returns to its original length.

Okay. Nice and rubbery, just like I hoped.

What am I doing, you ask?

Experimenting with my spider thread, of course.

From now on, this stuff is going to be my lifeline, so I figured testing out what it can do should be my first priority.

I started by producing a whole bunch of it, experimenting with whether I could control the thickness, stickiness, strength, and elasticity.

Adjusting the thickness was easy enough.

I couldn’t quite make it invisibly thin, of course, but I could get it about as fine as a strand of hair.

In the darkness of this dungeon, that should be really hard to spot.

But when I followed up with a strength test, I discovered that the thinner I made the thread, the more easily it broke.

Well, nothing I can do about that. If you think about it, skinnier would obviously mean more fragile.

Conversely, thickening the thread increases its durability.

The fattest strand I can currently create is a little less than an inch around. Not that different from your average rope, I guess.

Of course, that’s only the maximum for a single raw string. If I really want to make a thicker one, I can just bundle together a bunch of them. Sounds like a lot of work, though.

To be honest, I wish I hadn’t experimented with the stickiness.

It’s easy to assume that all spider threads adhere to everything, but in fact, some aren’t sticky at all.

And apparently, the reason spiders don’t get caught on their own webs is due to their skillful use of these nonstick threads. I realized this when my instincts kicked in as I built my home.

So I decided to experiment to gain a deeper understanding of it, but instead I just tangled up my whole body.

Well…yeah.

Since you have to make proper use of the sticky and nonsticky fibers, it stands to reason that if you don’t, you’ll just get caught in your own threads.

And that’s how I ended up stuck in my own damn spiderweb like an idiot.

That freaked me out. But seriously, one more wrong move and I might’ve been permanently caught in my own trap and died the stupidest death possible.

Luckily, by some miracle, I discovered I could still alter the properties of a thread to a certain extent as long as it was still connected to my butt. After that, I tested whether this could also apply to detached threads and found it could, if only a little bit. I guess that’s a fantasy world for you.

I took a moment to regroup, then started testing the strength.

I already knew that thinner thread was weaker and thicker was stronger, but I wasn’t able to figure out the greatest force it could withstand.

Why, you ask? Because when I produced a maximum-strength thread, I failed to cut through it no matter how hard I tried. Alarmingly enough, I couldn’t even chew through it with my fangs.

If I got caught in a web like this, no way could I just slip out.

Even so, I’m sure there could be other, more powerful monsters able to slice right through it, so I have to be careful not to overestimate its strength.

And so, the final experiment, elasticity, has produced the thread that I’m currently manipulating with my clawed legs.

Okay.

This rubbery thread could certainly come in handy. If I fasten a stone or something to it, I could probably use it as a simple sling.

There’ll definitely be other practical uses for it, too.

Guess my experiment yielded some satisfactory results after all.

However, there is one problem that I can’t ignore much longer—spinning all that thread seems to have drained my energy.

In other words, I’m extremely hungry.

I’ve been wanting food for a long time, but now it feels like my life might be in danger.

Strangely, I’m not particularly thirsty, but the degree of hunger I’m experiencing is undeniably way worse than usual.

At this rate, I’ll starve to death.

I won’t even live to see the sunrise tomorrow. Although, I guess I wouldn’t see that anyway, since I’m in a cave.

If I want to avoid that fate, I have to eat something… And all I have on hand is the thing I brought along as backup…

Should I eat that?

Well, my only other option at the moment is dying, so…

If I’m going to live in a dungeon, I have to get used to eating monsters raw, anyway.

All right. Time to suck it up.

Eating my sibling’s corpse as my first meal after being born seems kinda irredeemably immoral, but I don’t have much of a choice.

Okay, here goes.

Whoa, this is totally gross. So bitter. But I force it down anyway.

I can’t exactly afford to turn up my nose at it just because I don’t like the taste.

So I press on and finish eating my sibling’s carcass.

This is enough to fill my stomach, so I don’t have to worry about starvation for a while.

Whew. Thanks for the meal, I guess.

Uh, what?

It’s the same voice I heard back when I gained the Appraisal skill.

Let’s just call this announcer the “Divine Voice” for now.

So what’s up with this “title” business?

Is this what I think it is? The kind of achievement reward you get after meeting certain conditions?

Probably, but either way, the one I just got is kinda bizarre and disgraceful…

I mean, just the phrase “Kin Eater” sounds terrible!

Other people can’t see this, right? No, I bet they could if their Appraisal skill was high enough.

Ugh…

If someone sees that, they’re gonna judge me so hard.

Although, seeing as I’m a monster and all, they’re bound to dislike me whether or not they can see my title.

But, aside from the unfortunate wording, this is kind of a big deal, isn’t it?

I mean, I even gained two skills at once.

So if you get a title, you can get a skill without using any points. Yeah, this is huge.

I’d assumed there was no way for me to acquire new skills with 0 skill points, so this discovery of other methods is pretty great.

So, my newly acquired skills are Taboo and Heretic Magic.

“Taboo” is a cool-sounding name, but I have no idea what it’ll actually do. I can’t even come up with any wild guesses.

Uh, excuse me, could I get an explanation, please? I can’t use this if I don’t know what effect it has.

Wait… By that logic, I won’t be able to use Heretic Magic, either.

What now? Am I supposed to utter the spell or something? Wait, I’m a spider, so I can’t even say anything…

All I can produce is some kind of…croak? More like a teeth-grinding sound, really…

Well, even if I could talk, it’s not like I know any spells, so I’m out of luck either way.

Just for fun, I try thinking [Heretic Magic] really hard.

………Yeah, nothing’s happening. Can’t use that.

I was excited about the chance to cast some real fantasy magic, aside from the worrying implications of the “Heretic” part, but this sure nips that excitement in the bud.

Maybe it isn’t possible to use magic skills right after getting them?

Is it just because I have no idea how, or do I have to study magic first or something?

I don’t even know the basics, here.

Huh?

I thought I’d struck gold getting these skills and the title, but what’s the point if I can’t use it?

Is Kin Eater totally useless or what?

Ahh, now that I think about it…if all you have to do to get the Kin Eater title is make a meal of your own kind, tons of my spider siblings probably have it, too.

It doesn’t change the fact that humans can easily kill us, then.

In other words, gaining the Kin Eater title had exactly zero effect on my battle capabilities.

So it’s ACTUALLY useless.

I see. No wonder the condition was so easy to meet. So the easier the title is to acquire, the lower its effect, basically.

Still, it’s good I learned about the existence of titles at all.

If I can score a bunch more, maybe I’ll be able to efficiently build up some skills. Maybe I should try a few things to see if I can rack up a couple more.

Although I don’t know what kinds of titles are out there…

And I don’t have any tools or anything, so there’s only so much I can do.

Maybe if I dance for a while, I’ll get a “Dancer” title or something?

Let me try for a second.

Within a few moments, a huge tremor runs through the thread I’m standing on and knocks me flat on my face.

Ouch. That hurt.

I didn’t get a title for my efforts, either. Just a painful new memory. So much for that.

Composing myself, I bring my attention to the still-vibrating thread. The other end is attached to the bottom of the web in the passageway to my left. Something must be caught there. My first prey.

I approach with caution.

When I get close enough to see the web, I notice something stuck in it with eye-searingly bright, rainbow-colored spots.

<Frog>

Okay. This actually is shaped like a frog.

It’s around the same size as me and shining with all the colors of the rainbow, but at least it still resembles a frog.

This is the first time my Appraisal skill assessed a monster other than myself with an acceptable result.

People always say that frog tastes like chicken, so this should be easy enough to eat.

At the very least, it won’t be nearly as awful as eating my sibling.

If I have one complaint, though, it would be that the color of this frog pretty much screams “poisonous.”

I mean, there’s no way something this obnoxiously colored won’t be toxic.

Besides, since I ate earlier, I’m not as hungry as I could be…

What should I do?

But, right as I’m taking it easy and mulling things over, the frog suddenly launches a desperate counterattack!

That’s right, it just spit some super-poisonous-looking liquid right at me!

Crap! Since my guard is totally down, I don’t have any time to dodge, so all I can do is mentally curse as the fluid splatters all over me.

Ngyaaaaah?! Hey, what the—?! Ow, ow!

Poison? Is this poison?! Man, it really hurts where that stuff hit me!

Wha—?!

A second shot?! Wait, seriously?! Gyaah! It got me again!!

Ow, hey! This isn’t funny! Retreat, retreat!

I force my tangled legs to move and somehow manage to get out of the frog’s range.

Wow. That really hurt. Is that what it feels like to have acid dumped over you? I’m not melting, am I?

I’m worried, but of course I don’t have a mirror, so it’s not like I can check.

Damn. This is embarrassing.

Even if it is stuck in a trap, my opponent is still a monster. I shouldn’t have let my guard down.

A cornered rat bites back. Even a frog caught by a snake won’t just roll over and let itself be eaten.

Man, that hurt, but it doesn’t seem like I’m gonna die, at least. The poison mostly just hit my left side and my back.

A little bit must have gotten into my left eye, too, since part of my field of vision is black now.

Hmm? If my eye isn’t working, why is only a small part of my vision missing?

Ah! Maybe I have a lot of eyes, since I’m a spider? That’s probably it. A new discovery!

But I have bigger issues to worry about at the moment. The pain isn’t going away.

What?

Inexplicably, the pain is now abating. Is it that easy to earn skills without spending skill points?

Huh?

Wait, what’s up with the points I spent to get Appraisal, then?

…Better not think about that too deeply.

Anyway, I’m now the proud owner of an acid-resisting skill. Presumably, this is the result of taking a hit from that frog’s poison attack. Oh, but… It didn’t happen right afterward, so there must have been other conditions.

It said something about proficiency, so maybe the prolonged acid damage is what did it?

Well, I can think about that later.

Thanks to my new resistance, the ache has mostly died down. In its place, rage toward that frog is bubbling up inside me.

That stupid amphibian thought it could pick a fight with me when it was nothing more than a snack?! Unforgivable!

I’ve made up my mind. I don’t care whether it’s poisonous or not. I’m gonna eat it if it’s the last thing I do!

With that decided, it’s time to charge!

As long as I don’t let my guard down, this thing is nothing more than pathetic prey caught in my trap!

The frog spits venom at me three times. Hmph, now that I know it’s coming, dodging is no problem at all!

I avoid the missiles brilliantly, then attack directly.

Eat my ultimate technique! Chomp! Bite down!

Bwa-ha-ha! You think this is just an ordinary bite?! I’m a spider! My fangs are venomous!

Just like when I produced thread before, this information somehow comes to me naturally.

Ha! Suffer and die at the hands of my venom!

But just as I’m thinking that— Splat! Another shot of poison at point-blank range.

Guhh?! Ow, ow, OW! Even with resistance, it still hurts!

And now I’ve even let go!

Oh, so that’s how it works. Wait, now’s not the time for that!

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me three times, I’m gonna kill you!

Stupid frog! Now I’ll never forgive you! Not that I had any intention of doing that in the first place, but still! No mercy!

Letting my anger take its course, I bite down a second time. The frog starts writhing in agony.

Bwa-ha-ha! That’s right, suffer! Now that I’m getting into this, I give it a few more chomps for good measure.

The frog struggles for a little while longer, but its movements gradually weaken, and eventually it runs out of strength.

Whew. I finally beat it. Considering how much I struggled with my first prey, my future is looking grim. But still, I did it! Sweet!

Might as well chow down! Munch, munch, munch. Schlurp, schlurp. Mmm…bitter. Ow.

Is the bitterness poison? And the pain is probably acid, I guess? Well, thanks to my resistances, it isn’t too much for me to bear. It isn’t exactly delicious, though.

Well, the taste may not be to my liking, but the skill increase certainly is.

Besides, this is a special occasion: my first catch in my new home.

Thanks to this fellow, I’m confident my spider thread is strong enough to hold up against monsters.

This level of creature, at least, won’t be able to escape.

Plus, now I know that prey will get caught in the web the way I hoped.

That information makes the whole ordeal worth it.

Thanks a bunch, frog!

I’m still holding a grudge over the acid-spitting thing, though.