Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? (LN) - Volume 14 - Chapter 7

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7 Showdown: Countless Spider Eyes

Innumerable sea urchins float in the air.

There’s a huge pyramid hovering in the center.

At this point, I feel like this battle should be taking place in space or something.

No waaay.

Look, I’m sorry, citizens of this world.

You gave it your best shot.

Really, how could anyone expect you to save up any amount of energy when some freak keeps spending it all to make stupid crap like this float in midair?

The amount of energy he must’ve needed for that single sea urchin was bad enough, but with what he must’ve stolen to make a whole army of ’em, you definitely could’ve saved a world or two by now.

If anything, I’m amazed this place has lasted at all with that bastard sapping so much energy.

It just goes to show how hard the residents of this world have been fighting.

Wow, you gotta give ’em an A for effort!

…That still doesn’t change what I’m gonna do, though.

But we can worry about that after this battle’s over.

First, I need to deal with that floating swarm of sea urchins and the pyramid thing.

Good thing I already told Mr. Oni to give the order to retreat.

Even the queen couldn’t take down one sea urchin without my help, and now there’s too many to count. Escaping is the best option here.

Those sea urchins seem to specialize in wide-range attacks, too.

With this many of them in one place, they could easily raze the whole forest to the ground.

The demon army and any other troops wouldn’t be anything but targets.

Even the likes of Mr. Oni and Vampy would be out of their league against a whole swarm of these things.

This is what you’d call a “strategic retreat.”

Mera’s doing great on that front.

He and his army have already withstood the elves’ attacks and safely retreated.

I did warn him in advance not to do anything crazy if things took a bad turn, but I’m still impressed he managed to withdraw so smoothly.

It can be tough to retreat with enemies at your back, but they still pulled it off.

In spite of everything, I think Mera might actually be the best commander out of any of us.

Meanwhile, Mr. Oni and Vampy are bringing up the rear, mowing down the elves before they retreat.

…Can you even call that a retreat anymore?

Kinda calls the definition into question if there’s no more enemy to retreat from.

Other than that…uhh, looks like the puppet spiders are fighting robots alongside a familiar-looking old geezer.

What are you guys doing?

Like, seriously, what?

Do I even want to know what happened there?

…Okay, whatever.

I’ll retrieve the geezer along with the puppet spiders, I guess.

I activate teleportation by way of the battle clones the puppet spiders are riding and evacuate all of them to safety with the old man in tow.

There. That’s one less thing to worry about.

Now I just have to deal with this swarm of sea urchins, and the pyramid, which kinda looks like the boss.

First the robots, then the mega-robots, then the sea urchins, and now this pyramid.

Deploying your forces in separate waves is a stupid plan, but I can see why they waited to send out the sea urchins.

Their best attack is carpet-bombing with those countless gun-spikes.

Which could easily take out the robots and mega-robots down below in the process.

That’s probably why they didn’t jump right to the sea urchins.

Although maybe the elves just thought the robots would be plenty.

Then the robots weren’t enough, so they sent in the mega-robots, and then I made quick work of those with the meteor bullets…

Yeah, maybe they were just rationing out their forces without thinking after all.

Or maybe they had no choice because the robots and mega-robots aren’t exactly designed to work well alongside the sea urchins.

Okay, but either way!

This time for sure! This has GOT to be the elves’ ultimate weapon!

There’s no way something even crazier is gonna pop out after this! Right?!

What I’m saying is, there better not be anything else!

I’m sick and tired of this gag already!

It was already getting old when tons of mega-robots popped out, and then the even stronger sea urchin, and then tons of the sea urchins popped out, too?! Are you kidding me?!

And now there’s even a showy-looking pyramid in the middle, like the cherry on top of this stupid weapon sundae!

That thing’s gotta be the last trump card for sure!

It is, right?! Please, tell me there’s nothing else!

I know I’m normally a mild-mannered spider, but if a whole bunch of those pyramids pop out after this, I’m seriously gonna lose it!

Argh! Aaargh!

Ahh, I feel a little better after ranting a bunch.

Seriously, come off it already…

No waaay…

Potimas, you’re something else…

At this point, even I’ve gotta hand it to the guy.

This is pretty impressive.

Now I get why he was always so stupidly full of himself.

With this much firepower in your back pocket, yeah, of course you’d be confident that you can’t lose…

I mean, anyone else would never be able to deal with this…

But I can deal with it, of course.

All right, guess I gotta get serious now.

Ughhh.

I really didn’t want to show my whole hand here, but it looks like I have no other choice…

You should be proud of yourself, Potimas.

You made me—a literal god, at least in a roundabout way—go all out to defeat you.

Honestly, I thought this was gonna be an easier win.

As I’m preparing to get serious, the pyramid makes the first move.

One of its corners starts glowing.

Is that a w*ve motion gun?

’Cause it sure looks like a w*ve motion gun!

Just as I suspected, after a moment, the light forms a dense laser beam and fires right at me.

Yeah, yeah, into my parallel dimension it goes.

Aaand now I’ll send it right back atcha!

A gate to an empty parallel dimension appears right in front of me and sucks up the laser.

Then I create another gate right next to it so that the laser comes flying back out toward the pyramid.

Any space manipulator worth her salt would think of a move like this!

The thing where you connect two portals to fire a long-distance attack back at your enemy!

The pyramid’s own laser beams toward it.

But, as I probably should’ve guessed, the pyramid has a barrier that deflects the laser in a flash of dazzling light.

This one seems to be a combination of an anti-technique barrier with a reflector, maybe?

The laser bounces off the barrier and branches off in all directions, every scattered piece of light vaporizing whatever it hits.

…Yeesh, that thing is waaay too strong.

Seriously, what’s up with that?

It totally annihilated the ground wherever it hit…

I’m not even talking craters here; they’re basically just gaping holes.

Are you planning on physically destroying the planet now?

I thought it was a w*ve motion gun, but it’s basically the superlaser from the D*ath Star.

How much energy must it cost just for a single shot of that thing?

Man, I’m glad I didn’t try to just block that thing.

I don’t think there’s any way to defend against something like that.

Heh, but long-distance attacks don’t work on me!

I’ll just send them all flying right back where they came from!

I’m gonna sink this thing before it fires another shot, though.

First, I steal a quick peek at what Hyrince is doing.

Looks like Mr. Oni is hustling him away.

He looks back for a second, like maybe he noticed me spying on him, but then he faces forward again to focus on evacuating.

Guess he’s not planning to get involved in this battle, then.

That’s all well and good, but it still sucks that he’s gonna see the aces up my sleeves.

I don’t think I can get through this fight without going all out, though.

I mean, I could probably half-ass it given enough time, but this whole area will probably get reduced to nothing if I drag it out for too long.

Whew.

All right, here we go.

But first, I’m gonna throw myself into another dimension.

Heh.

No matter how powerful that beam attack might be, it can’t hit me if I’m in another dimension entirely!

What’s so unfair about spatial manipulation, you ask?

Well, it’s probably the fact that you can do anything you want to any opponent who can’t use spatial techniques without giving ’em any way to fight back.

Which is why gods need spatial abilities, I guess.

Although I seem to be especially good at it.

Anyway, guess it’s time to take the lid off my hellish cauldron.

A crack appears in space above where the pyramid and sea urchins are floating.

It spreads out in the shape of a spiderweb, covering the air above the elf village.

Then countless eyes peer down through the cracks.

Countless eyes, all gazing down at the earth.

It’s my clones, using Gluttonous Evil Eye.

The creepy-crawly crowd of spider eyes unleashes the attack simultaneously, devouring the energy of the pyramid and the sea urchins.

The pyramid and sea urchins all unload anti-aircraft fire, but they’re thwarted by the spiderweb-shaped space, preventing any attacks from reaching the clones.

Well, yeah. I used Spatial Separation on the whole setup.

Nothing’s getting in there.

Their energy drained, the sea urchins drop to the ground.

That’s what happens when I go all out.

I use my spatial abilities to the fullest, have countless clones hiding out in an alternate-dimension “home,” and suck up all your energy with Gluttonous Evil Eye.

Without their energy, even a god is just an ordinary living thing.

Having more energy than a normal creature could possibly contain is what makes a god a god, so if you take that away, you can’t even call them a god anymore.

This is the strategy I developed so that I—a newly made, half-assed god—could defeat the likes of Güli-güli.

I mean, what other choice did I have?

If we fought fair and square, I’d definitely lose.

So my only choice was to take the tried-and-true method I already had to the extreme.

Honestly, this is all I’ve got.

There’s so little I can actually do that you can barely even call me a real god.

But with this new “holing up at home” strategy that I polished to the extreme, I could actually take down a top-tier god like Güli-güli, at least in theory.

There’s no way it would fail against some stupid elf weapons.

I’ve got one million clones stashed in my cozy new subspace home.

So if they’ve got eight eyes each, that’s a total of eight million Gluttonous Evil Eyes.

I can only fully operate up to ten thousand battle clones at a time, but if all I have to do is activate Gluttonous Evil Eye, I can pull all this off.

It’s an incredibly simple strategy, but that’s what makes it so hard to defend against.

Still, that simplicity also means there might be a method for defending against it that I haven’t thought of…

Which is why I was hoping to avoid revealing this particular move…

I check in on Hyrince again.

Oh, geez. He’s totally staring.

Cut it out! Don’t look!

This is the only killer move I’ve got up my sleeve. If you figure out a way to deal with it, I’m totally screwed.

That’s why I didn’t want to do this!

C’mon, don’t come up with a counterstrategy for this, okay?

While I’m distracted with that, the last of the sea urchins fall to the ground, finally followed by the powerless pyramid.

Just like that, the elves’ ultimate weapon goes down.

Considering that the queen couldn’t even put a scratch on the sea urchin alone, this pyramid must’ve been even stronger, probably to the point where even the Demon Lord wouldn’t have been able to deal with it.

Taking into account the massive amount of energy I just sucked out of it with Gluttonous Evil Eye, I can estimate that the thing was insanely powerful.

But it still went down in a matter of minutes.

Just like Potimas confidently built up the elves’ forces, I had my own power saved up that could destroy anything he threw at us.

So this victory was the obvious outcome.

…Still, I gotta admit my heart’s racing a little.

I mean, c’mon!

Every time I thought that had to be it, even more reinforcements popped up, y’know?!

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole swarm of pyramids comes out next!

I mean, I’d be mad, but not surprised!

But you get why I’m paranoid at this point, right?!

Please, tell me there won’t be any more!

But as if to crush my dreams, the ground splits open, and something gigantic floats into sight.

…