Chapter 184
—–
By checking the spider’s memories, I learned they all come from a single dungeon and that they were spoken by the spider mama, a typical giant spider queen that laid all the eggs and orders her spider children around… Yeah, this is becoming quite similar to another story I once read…
Naiwa…
It appears the spider mama can speak to her children through telepathy! And she can give them orders. But where is this spider mama, where did she come from, and what are her true goals?
I have no idea. But I can tell she’s into world domination or something like that… I think. She kind of wants to clean the entire forest of any “pesky little critter” before moving on to expanding her empire.
So I guess it probably is some very overpowered monster from a dungeon that gained intelligence and began to spread her influence through her own spider children? I suppose spider monsters might be quite dangerous, with a hard exoskeleton, fast, agile, deadly venom, strong physical strength, and all of that.
But wouldn’t that be to cliché, simplistic, and boring? Sigh, can’t things be more original? I saw the same plot in several other novels I read.
Maybe I shouldn’t judge the things I read and base them on my world… But what do you want from me? I was a big bookworm…
Perhaps there might be something more to these spiders. There’s no way it is so simple, right? What does this little spider want? To eat the world, and that’s it? If it were so simple, wouldn’t any other monsters similar to her have already tried to do something? What makes her so unique compared to others?
She faintly reminds me of Lucifer, but he was sealed into the dungeon and had no other way to get out than by infecting the nearby graveyard and making it into an army of Undead, hoping for one of them to come to help him out… And it was thanks to him. My soul turned into a ghost, and… here we are, going against overpowered spiders.
Well, they were not so overpowered, though? And we got our own army of zombie spiders to go against them.
So I guess what’s left to do is get on there and do it.
But what if they show up again while I am in the forest looking for people while trying to deal with the annoying spider kingdom forming here?
Hmm… What could I do? If I learn that they did something bad to the rabbit, I guess we’ll kill them and get all the EXP, so I guess this is just an EXP side quest… but if they end up being more intelligent than I thought and acted friendly after recognizing our strength, we could get some spider friends. I suppose that’s it! That will be my mentality.
I communicated my thoughts to my friends, as they seemed to agree with most of it.
“I see, so we just procure the rabbits first, and then we go search for the spider’s lair? We can burn them all using my breath attack and Silvio and Francesco’s flames, right?” Asked Lucifer.
“Ah… I guess we can do that too. Yeah, I didn’t think about it,” I said.
“Wait, you’re suggesting using the fire ghosts to just burn the entire dungeon and make it into a furnace?! Is that even possible? Can you guys conjure up so much fire?” Asked Emeraldine.
“We don’t know….” Said Silvio.
“We would need an insane amount of Mana to do that, to begin with,” Said Francesco.
“Insane amounts of Mana… I don’t know if I can provide that. My mana depends on if there are targets to absorb from. There is much I can get from the environment alone, but it won’t be enough, so we’ll most likely do it the traditional way. Don’t give us weird ideas, Lucifer,” I said.
“That wasn’t my intention… I was just sharing my thoughts,” Said Lucifer.
“It’s fine, it’s fine. If it works, we might try that anyway. I mean, I like the idea to an extent,” I said.
“Hmm, a furnace of spiders… all of these damn monsters crying in agony… while they burn alive… Doesn’t sound bad!” Said Syllis, suddenly becoming rather devil-like.
“A-Anyways, what should we do with the people here? Do we all go there?” wondered Partner.
“I will leave some of my stronger clones here,” I said before I quickly divided my phantom into large masses and even added tiny fragments of soul into them, making them stronger than usual clones, which shaped as loli versions of me, with the lower half of a snake instead of having legs.
“Ooh, little Marias, so cute!” Said Emeraldine.
“Can I adopt one?” Asked Partner.
“No, they’re literally me, don’t adopt me….” I sighed.
The clones waved their heads at the same time.
“For now, I will leave these clones here, and most of you guys will stay here too. I will bring Syllis, Pyro, and a few of the zombie spiders. Plus, there is more Undead, so I will leave them all here as well. Our mission is mostly stealth, so we’ll go pick the rabbits and then pull back to regroup again and then raid the spiders,” I said.
“Understood, so you’re going solo then?” Asked Lucifer.
“Yep, just me and the spiders for backup, and you guys are all strong, so I want you to stay here and protect the people as much as you can… My clones are here, so if anything too bad happens, they can pull the people into their shadows for safety while you guys deal with the threats. I would do this all the time if it wasn’t because the shadows can negatively affect people’s minds if they stay awake too much there… And well, it costs constant mana too,” I said.
“Alright, we get it,” Said Catarina.
“S-So we are going alone?!” Asked Syllis as he expected more backup.
“Yep, you and me, little rabbit~,” I said.
—–