A BRUSH WITH DEATH
I thought I’d teleported to safety, only to find an ambush waiting for me.
This must be Mother’s work.
An army of spiders just coincidentally hanging around in the exact place where my home used to be is about as likely as a meteor hitting me square in the face.
It can’t be a chance happening, right?
What’s really scary is that considering how bad my luck has been so far, it wouldn’t surprise me that much if it were.
Still, I think it’s much more likely that Mother predicted I would teleport here and sent her forces to wait for me in advance.
I guess I might’ve underestimated her a little.
In terms of brains, not brawn.
With Mother’s huge body, there’s no way she could have chased me down while I was running around in the narrow passages of the Great Elroe Labyrinth.
All she had to do was wait for me to come out.
She must have predicted everything I was going to do.
Otherwise, she could never have arranged things to such perfection.
When I left the labyrinth, she came out to chase me down personally.
If she’d finished me off there, that would have been that.
Her sheer speed is higher than mine, meaning the only way I can outrun her is with Long-Distance Teleport.
And where else would I go but back to the Great Elroe Labyrinth?
Specifically, the most likely place I’d flee to first is the spot where my home used to be.
Sending an army there would be an easy way to catch me defenseless as soon as I arrived.
In short, that’s the current situation.
I went from using Teleport to kill those arch taratects to having it used against me.
I’m screwed.
I can’t even react in time to dodge the arch taratect fangs flying at my face.
Here are the facts: I let my guard down as soon as Teleport activated, then I totally froze up for a second the instant I realized that I was surrounded by a spider army, and the wounds Mother inflicted on me delayed my reaction speed.
All those factors combined prevent me from dodging.
The arch’s huge fangs bite into my tiny body.
They don’t break through.
I might not look it, but my defense stat is over 2,000.
I haven’t Appraised the arch taratect that’s chomping on me, which means I don’t know for sure, but if it’s similar to the ones I fought before, its attack is probably over 4,000.
It’s probably using Mental Warfare and Magic Warfare to buff that, too, but its skill levels probably aren’t as high as mine.
Even if it does break through my body and bite off a chunk, it won’t be the end of the world.
Still, the damage would be huge.
And that’s in addition to the severe damage Mother’s already inflicted on me.
My injuries are so bad that without Pain Super-Mitigation, I probably would’ve passed out by now.
On top of all that, I can feel something seeping into my body from those fangs.
I know exactly what it is, since I have the same move.
Poison Attack. Deadly Poison, to be precise.
Even with my high resistance, I can’t nullify it completely.
I have to get away from these fangs soon, or I’ll succumb to the poison seeping into my body and die.
That is, if the raw damage doesn’t kill me first.
In the midst of the biggest pinch of my life, I become strangely calm and quickly start activating some magic.
Specifically, Earth Magic.
An earthen spear bursts out of the ground and smashes into the arch’s head.
I’m not expecting it to do much damage.
All I want is for the impact to loosen the jaws clamped down on my body.
Just as I hoped, the attack makes the arch taratect stumble, loosening its grip for just a moment.
I seize the chance to hit the arch in the face with more magic and escape from its claws.
To my surprise, the attack seems to have weakened the arch more than I thought.
I guess it doesn’t have Dragon Scales or anything like that to ward off magic.
That skill is what’s prevented me from doing major damage to a dragon with a single attack in the past, but I guess without it, even stats equal to a dragon’s won’t protect an arch taratect from a big hit.
That’s only the defense side of things, though.
As far as attacking goes, the arch has stats and skills that are easily on par with the powerful Araba’s.
It might not have the power to cause a huge catastrophe like Mother does, but it’s still enough to do some serious damage to a corner of the labyrinth like Araba did.
And there are five of those powerful creatures here.
Isn’t that a bit of overkill?
I guess that just shows how seriously Mother is trying to kill me.
And I have to say, that plan seems to be going pretty well for her right now.
Mother’s breath attack decimated part of my body, the arch’s fangs put holes in the rest of it, and now poison is eating away at me, too.
It’s enough to make you wonder how I’m even still alive at this point, honestly.
Well, I know why. It’s thanks to Perseverance.
My HP already hit 0 a long time ago.
However, the Perseverance skill can substitute MP for HP.
As soon as my MP runs out, I’m dead.
Thanks to Height of Occultism, my MP regenerates faster than it can go down, so I’m not going to die that easily.
However, that doesn’t mean my wounds are going to heal anytime soon.
Perseverance really just passes off my MP as HP to delay the inevitable.
If I take enough damage that I can’t move anymore, I’m sure the archs will damage me faster than my MP can recover.
I’ll be beaten to a pulp.
Or maybe just devoured.
Even Perseverance can’t do much if my body itself is gone.
I’m already just a step away from that line.
And I have no time to think about recovery, because all five archs are coming to attack me.
I definitely can’t worry about appearances now.
I dodge the oncoming archs and run for my life.
Instead of going down to the ground crawling with countless spiders, I use Dimensional Maneuvering to flee through the air.
Without all my legs, I can’t reach my usual speed.
Filled with fear and frustration, I intercept the huge amount of thread coming up at me with thread of my own.
My destination is the Middle Stratum.
I might not be overly fond of the place, but the spider army is even weaker to the heat there than I am.
The fiery environment of the Middle Stratum is terrible for spiders without resistance.
An arch or greater taratect can probably endure it, but anything weaker than that would probably die from simply being there.
But they’re still one step ahead of me. As I race toward the entrance to the Middle Stratum, something stands in my way.
It looks almost like a doll.
No, I think it actually is a doll.
It has a smooth, faceless head.
An inorganic body with spherical joints.
The obstacle resembles a mannequin that could be found at any department store.
Here in the labyrinth, something so obviously artificial seems strangely out of place.
But it makes sense once you know what’s inside.
Appraisal reveals to me that the doll is full of thread, with a tiny spider at the center.
And this spider is a horrifying monster whose stats all exceed 10,000.
According to Appraisal, this is a puppet taratect.
But I’ve never heard of such a creature.
Even the evolution tree that Wisdom showed me didn’t contain any monster by that name.
But my instincts tell me that this mysterious monster must be one of Mother’s trump cards.
The humanoid doll readies the swords in its hands.
All six of them.
Though the doll looks like a human being, it has six arms.
If you include the legs, that makes eight limbs: just like a spider.
While I’m being distracted by such a stupid observation, the six swords come at me.
Unable to dodge, I feel it summarily cut off my two front legs.
Monsters shouldn’t use weapons, dammit! I want to shout.
I don’t know if you stole them from humans or made them yourself, but that’s just not fair!
One would be all right, but six swords at once? How am I supposed to avoid that?
I’ve almost never lost to anyone in terms of speed.
The only exceptions would be Mother; the earth dragon Araba, which I encountered early on; and the fire dragon Rend.
With my amazing speed, Thought Super-Acceleration, and Future Sight, I’ve always been proud of my evasion abilities.
But now I’ve been outdone at the one thing I do best.
Thought Super-Acceleration and Future Sight can theoretically figure out how best to dodge something instantly, but that works only if I can get my body to do it in practice.
If the attack moves faster than my body can react, of course there’s no way I can dodge it.
I promptly use magic to knock back the doll, but the situation is only worsening.
The puppet spider in front of me, five archs behind me.
On top of that, I’ve lost half my legs, leaving my body in tatters and my mobility drastically low.
I can feel death closing in on me, even more keenly than the time I faced Araba.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die.
I don’t want to die!
I can’t just give up!
I’ll claw my way toward survival for all I’m worth, until my very last moment!
If I am gonna die here, I’m taking as many of them down with me as I can!
Half-crazed with desperation, I still try to check myself as I fire off a barrage of magic.
My main goal is quantity over quality, so the spells aren’t very powerful.
But since these spiders don’t have the skill Dragon Scales, it should still do decent damage.
Even if it’s not much, I doubt they’ll want to charge right into the line of fire.
Sure enough, the puppet spider and the archs all pause to defend themselves.
They use magic, swords, or whatever else to fend off my attacks.
But the other spiders, who can’t even counterattack my lowest-level magic, start going down from the direct hits.
Oh?
Maybe this desperate strategy could actually work?
While keeping the puppet spider and the archs at bay remains my top priority, I start aiming for the other spiders, too.
Especially the bigger ones that look like they’d be worth more EXP.
The little critters are dying from the aftershocks alone, anyway.
While I’m at it, I switch from Inert Evil Eye, which probably won’t work that well, to Jinx Evil Eye.
Leaving only one eye for Future Sight, I apply Jinx Evil Eye to all the others, stealing MP and such from my enemies.
Then I use that newly restored MP on another barrage of magic.
One of the archs gets fed up and tries to push through the barrage despite the damage, but instead of trying to counterattack, I only move away.
I definitely can’t risk trying to prepare other spells while producing all this magic by myself.
I might be able to ward them off, but I can’t completely stop the archs from moving.
Noticing this, the other archs start to charge, too, even if they take damage in the process.
I didn’t buy as much time as I had hoped.
If I had even one Parallel Mind available, things would probably be different, but there’s no point in thinking about that now.
I’m on my own.
I’m going to have to manage this myself.
I give up on the magic barrage and switch to higher-powered magic, aiming it toward the archs as they charge toward me.
Realizing that this will cause more damage than they’re willing to sustain, the archs stop to defend themselves again.
I use that chance to put some distance between us, using slightly weaker magic to fend off the other spiders while I’m at it.
The puppet spider alone moves to the entrance of the Middle Stratum, simply standing there to prevent me from fleeing.
I can’t say that’s particularly good or bad.
Impatiently, I check my status.
I’m fending off the archs’ attacks with magic and thread for now, but I know all too well that I can’t keep that up for long.
Given the archs’ stats, it’s only a matter of time before they push through my pathetic attempts.
Especially since there’s five of them.
And that moment comes all too quickly.
One of the archs’ sharp claws catches my torso.
As soon as I hit the ground, it pins me down.
Unable to move, I see the other archs closing in.
This is a serious crisis.
But I still have a final ray of hope.
Checking on my tattered body, I look at one of my status items again.
Experience points.
I check the amount I gained from shooting down other spiders while I fended off the archs, then the amount I need to level up.
It’s close.
I’m insanely close to the number of points I need, and I’m terrifyingly close to death, too.
It’s a gamble, but the only other option is certain death.
I have to try, no matter how terrible the odds.
I quickly Appraise the archs and lock onto the one with the lowest HP.
Annihilating Evil Eye, activate!
This is a skill I gained when I evolved into my current race, Ede Saine.
An insta-kill attack that uses Rot, the attribute associated with death.
Of all my skills, it’s currently second only to Abyss Magic in terms of killing power.
However, it comes at a high price: I take a huge amount of recoil damage when I use it.
That amount will be especially severe for my currently beaten-up body.
I’d say the odds of me surviving are about fifty-fifty.
Even if I do live through the self-inflicted damage, there’s a follow-up fifty-fifty bet as to whether it’ll kill the arch.
And after that, the gamble of whether it’ll be enough EXP for me to level up.
My odds of winning all these bets are one in eight at best.
<Experience has reached the required level. Individual Ede Saine has increased from LV 29 to LV 30.>
Looks like I won.
My attack killed the arch, and the resulting EXP raised my level.
I undergo molting, which fully heals my wounds.
The missing part of my torso is restored, and my lost limbs grow back.
However, my HP doesn’t recover completely.
Turns out there’s a limit on how much I can heal by leveling up.
Still, this is a turn for the better. I can even see a chance of pulling through this.
It’s a small one, but it’s there.
The arch that I hit with my Annihilating Evil Eye disintegrates into dust.
This development seems to surprise the one pinning me to the ground, enough that its leg slackens a little.
I use Cutting Thread to slash at my captor’s leg and slip from its hold.
At the same time, I clamber up that leg and latch onto the arch’s torso.
The arch tries to shake me off, but I dig in firmly with my sharp claws and sink my fangs into it.
Moments later, it’s writhing around in agony.
The arch slams its body against the ground, trying to knock me off, but I hang on through sheer determination, continuing to inject it with poison.
The other archs are powerless to intervene, since they can’t attack me without attacking the one I’m stuck to as well.
The arch thrashes around, I hang on, and the other spiders watch, unable to do anything.
The only one to get a clue is the puppet spider, which I probably should’ve expected.
It charges forward, fully prepared to slice me in half even if it means killing the arch, too.
But it’s too late.
Time is up.
Long-Distance Teleport, activate.
The puppet’s blade swings toward me, but my body disappears just before it reaches me.
My spell moves me into the Middle Stratum with the unlucky arch in tow.
Really, with the arch’s obscenely high Status Condition Resistance, my poison would never be enough to kill it.
Biting into it with a Poison Attack was just a way to stall for time.
In those stolen moments, I started preparing the Teleport spell.
My goal in that situation wasn’t to wipe out the spider army.
It was ultimately nothing more than survival.
My odds of surviving by fighting to the bitter end were next to nothing.
The four remaining archs would’ve been enough of a challenge, never mind the puppet spider, which was leagues above all of them.
To be honest, I couldn’t have beaten that thing even in a one-on-one situation.
I’ve got no desire to participate in a battle I can’t win.
That’s why I focused all my efforts on getting away.
Though I guess I also got this arch as a souvenir.
I release my fangs and grapple with the arch above the magma.
Now the tables have turned.
I have a certain degree of heat resistance, but the arch has none.
Instead, it gets to take the brunt of my anger for putting me in such a deadly position.
A few minutes later, the charred body of the arch drops into the magma, defeated by the Upper Stratum.
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