Chương 28: Squishing spiders

I need three more levels of tracking so that I can complete the Tracker class requirements. It will be my sixteenth class that I've qualified for, and is the one that I want next. I'd really like to be able to get it before the end of the tutorial session. Which means I have about eight hours to gain three levels of tracking. Which means I need to find a trail and follow it somewhere. Maybe with my Find Path ability.

That should make it easier to follow the trail once I find it, which I'm hoping will increase the skill as we go. Ideally, I want to find some spiders. The last place we saw those was at Dunwoody university, so I decide to head there. I don't know if I'm going to find their spawn point or not, but I want to find a group of them. Once again, they are there building webs. I stick to the shadows and move around the group of them, looking for the trail that leads them into the parking lot.

I make sure that I get close enough to get some credit for sneaking around them. Y ou have successfully sneaked past Giant Spider x31. You gain 500 experience. That's enough for the level, but I still want to find where the trail begins. Once I find it, I activate Find Path, and the steps of the spiders begins to glow in my vision. It's a soft glow, but utterly unmistakable. All I have to do is follow it backwards, and we'll see where the spiders come from.

As I'm moving along the path, I decide to spend my eight stat points. I'm going to put two each into agility, presence, willpower, and charisma. Charisma is currently my lowest stat, at a 12, but I have no idea what good it will be, so I'm not sure that it matters. Even still, with my agility topping 52, it felt odd leaving something that low. I mean, my next lowest stat is manipulation, which I also don't know how to use yet, and it's at twenty.

The path of the spiders leads me towards the main building of Dunwoody university, leading me into a broken doorway. As I'm moving, I see a spider coming out. Giant Spider. Advanced Rare monster, level 12. HP 1200/1200. I can kill it, but I'm not sure I can kill it quickly and quietly enough for it to matter. If the spiders are spawning as fast as the wolves were, I'll only have twenty seconds to do all that damage, and I don't think I can pull that off.

Honestly, even if the spiders are spawning slower, at a rate of one per minute, I'm not sure I can take the spider out fast enough. So instead of killing it, I slip off to the side and use Camouflage, sneaking past the spider close enough that I could have reached out and touched it. I get a full 600 XP for sneaking past it, and I continue into the building, looking for somewhere that I could possibly hide while the other spiders go past me. I manage to duck into a side room and count as the spiders go past.

Seems a new one is spawning once a minute. Even if I find the spawning point, I can't do enough damage to destroy it in one minute. Can I? I can shoot fifteen arrows in a minute. Each arrow does 84-94 damage. Let's say 84 just to be safe. Fifteen times 84 is 1260. That's about half the damage that the shadow wolf spawn point needed before it was destroyed. So no, I can't destroy it on my own. But maybe the others will want to do another big battle before the end of the tutorial session. We've got the time for it.

There are still seven hours left before we need to be in the park. It shouldn't take us that long to fight through all the spiders and get here. Just in case, I keep Camouflage up and sneak my way closer, wanting to see the spawning point before heading back to get the others. If we can fight our way through and take out another of the spawning points, and get the treasure that comes with it, that can only help us. Realistically, we should be ahead of the game, so to speak, for ending the tutorial period.

When we finished the first time, I was level ten. I'm more than double that now, in the same amount of time. If we take out the spiders, I'll almost certainly hit level twenty two. That's a lot higher than we were expected to be when going into the new world, I'll bet. The tutorial is supposed to have a constant challenge, and the monsters still left aren't a challenge except in the number of them. I'd go toe to toe with one of the giant spiders without any fear. I just don't think I can kill one in sixty seconds.

Maybe if I saw it coming and was able to just shoot it I could, but I don't trust that I can do it fast enough. But I wouldn't be afraid of one of them actually harming me. I don't think they could get through my Shell and do any real damage to me. Not one on one. I'm probably a more advanced class than I was expected to be, too. We're all so much better off than was probably intended by the tutorial period of only three days. Even if the tutorial ends and we're reset to level 1, we'll still be ahead of the game.

That will suck, but we'll have the skills and the equipment to make a huge difference even at level one. We'll regain the levels quickly. There it is. It's a giant spider web. Of course it is. An an egg sack. Giant spider generator. Basic Legendary spawn point, level 18. HP 4500/4500. Definitely more than I can do in a minute, but not so much that it's a real problem for the five of us. I should sneak my way back out and go back to the sculpture garden.

My sneak goes up to 17 on my way out of the building, and I notice that my tracking has gone up to 8 for following the spider trail. I decide to track myself back to the basilica and then back to the sculpture garden. I'm not sure that everyone else went back to our home base while I was spending an hour scouting out this other enemy, so I keep an eye out for their tracks, noticing where they left tracks that diverged from mine and getting my tracking up to 9 by the time I find my four friends.

Strange that the quest demanded five, but I've only found four. There haven't been any other people in the tutorial section. Maybe there will be more in the new world. I mean, there will have to be, right? Maybe I can make new friends after tomorrow. Anyway, I gather the four of them together and tell them what I've found.

"It means fighting through another hundred spiders or so, but there'll be loot to be had after we do, and think of the experience." I don't have to do much in the way of persuasion. Everyone is on board, even Vinny, though he is a bit tired of all the fighting and wants to just keep practicing his magic. After we defeat the spiders, we'll come back and spend the rest of the time in the park, not wanting to risk screwing up and having to go through this tutorial period for a third time.

Though that is tempting, if only for the question of whether or not we can get to an even higher level now that we know what we know about the way the monsters spawn and the way that stats work. And now that our spells are so well spread out and our classes are so advanced. But no, I'd rather not start over again. I want to see what the new world has in store for us. A week in tutorial is plenty long enough. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

When we get to the parking lot at Dunwoody, we lay out our plan.

"I'll cast fire storm on their webbing," Vinny says.

"That'll send them scurrying towards us. I'll drop an ice storm in their path, and that will make them come at us straight on. Caleb, you and Gigi shoot at their right flank to keep them coming down the center, and then we do the fighting retreat thing again and let them stretch themselves out. We head back to the underpass and create a killing field."

"How long is the cooldown on your firestorm spell?" I ask.

"An hour," Vinny says.

"We're not going to be able to rely on it twice. But I'll catch as many of them as I can in it the first time, and we'll freeze out as many of them as possible. I should be able to take out at least ten of them just with those two spells. Do you think you guys can handle the rest?"

"What's the range of your spell?" Ashley asks. We have enough bows now that she can shoot too. She doesn't need to be that good of a shot if they're swarming towards us. She basically just needs to be able to get the arrow into the swarm, and it'll do its job from there.

"Line of sight," he says.

"So I can start it from pretty far."

"Let's start it from far away, and I'll start with the Sniper Shot," I say.

"Maybe we can take a few of them out before they find us. Then we pepper them with arrows until they get close enough for melee." We line up at the edge of the parking lot. There's a gateway there that will limit their movement, with a little bit of wall to give us some space where they can't attack us. It's not as good as the underpass where they'd have to crawl over cars to get to us, but it'll buy us some time and tilts the battlefield in our favor. Vinny casts his spell, and I use Sniper Shot.

I get off a sneak attack on the first shot, and it does enough damage that it will kill a spider with the bleed. 921. I think that's a new highest damage with a single attack. If I could trust myself to do that much damage every time, I could've probably done a fair amount of damage by myself. But I don't mind sharing experience when it comes to something like this.

I have the time to shoot a few more careful shots, and my companions will help when the rest of the spiders eventually spot us and start coming towards us. They chitter and make noise, and I briefly wonder if I'll understand them thanks to my polyglot talent. But either they aren't speaking in any form of language or they're too far away for me to understand them or the polyglot talent doesn't apply to giant spiders, because it just sounds like chittering to me.

I let loose another Sniper Shot, then start firing generally. Gigi and Ashley join in, with El throwing her five javelins with deadly effect. Vinny shoots ice spears into the midst of the monsters, and it's not long before they are heading our way. The gated entrance to the parking lot is big enough for two cars to drive through at once, so we can't exactly force the spiders to come at us one at a time. But even five at a time is better than nothing.

We keep shooting at them as they draw closer, planting arrow after arrow into the mass of chitin and legs heading our way. The ground is on fire where the webs are burning, but that doesn't seem to stop the spiders from moving, and I doubt it's really hurting them. Maybe a little bit. Every little bit helps. El stands with her axe in hand before the rest of us stop firing. Gigi and Ashley each had twenty arrows to fire. I had thirty, plus my twelve throwing knives.

I draw my scimitar when I'm out of ammunition, and throw a ball of flame at the spiders before they come crashing into us. The battle is brutal. The spiders aren't attacking in any kind of coordinated way, getting in each others way even as they try to bite us or slash at us with their legs. I dodge as best I can, slashing at legs and stabbing at eyes, but I start taking damage almost immediately. My Shell is good for 80% of my health now, which means it's worth 504 hit points.

I don't have as many, even with that, as the girls do, but it allows me to stay in the fray for a lot longer than I would've thought possible. Ashley crushes carapace after carapace with her mace, which seems to glow a little bit, letting her see what she's doing and possibly doing extra damage while she's at it. El's axe cleaves legs left and right, leaving the spiders less able to move and covering the ground with sticky blood.

Gigi stabs and slashes, bashes with her shield and kicks out every so often to push a spider off her. All in all, we keep fighting, but we don't give up ground. The spiders are only level twelve, and they aren't able to get through our defenses all that much. Vinny finally casts his ice storm spell, and I can feel the cold wind not ten feet away from me. We can't advance into it, but it catches a large portion of the spiders, leaving them nowhere to go.

They begin to freeze and shatter as they are battered with chunks of ice and hail stones the size of soft balls. I get hit a lot, but for very little damage. My defense is 85, which seems to be enough to keep me out of harm's way almost completely. I take 5 damage here, 7 there, and while it does add up, I don't know if I'm going to need to use Shell again before we get through all of these monsters. They can hit me fifty times and still not lower my Shell.

And in the fifty times that they hit me, I can hit them a lot more often. It seems like every time one of them hits me, I hit three of them. And while they are hitting me for single digits of damage, I'm hitting them for around 75 damage with each hit. My Shell does eventually go down, and I take 4 damage to my actual hit points before I can put up another one. The spiders don't last long after that, and soon enough we're heading into the building.

We run into two other spiders before we make it to the spawn point, but those are one at a time, and a single spider doesn't stand much of a chance against the five of us. Neither, it turns out, does the spawning point. You have destroyed the giant spider generator. You gain (4500/5) 900 experience. You have defeated giant spider x89. You gain (106, 800/5) 21, 360 experience. You have gained a level. You are now level 22. You have 8 stat points to spend.

I decide to put two points into agility, two into vigor, and the remaining four points into awareness. I haven't had to deal with magic resistance yet, but I want a better chance of resisting it than I have. Plus, it makes my ball of flame do more damage. My bow skill also increased to 19, and my sword skill increased to 20. That's the first time the sword skill has been higher than the bow skill. I wish my dodge had increased again, but it hasn't. Maybe next time we get in a bit battle it will.

Once we burn away the silk in this room, another chest becomes visible. This one is gold! I hope my lock picks will be enough to get it unlocked. I get to work, trying to be as careful as possible so as not to break any, but it's a difficult prospect. I manage to get the chest open with my last pick, letting out a breath of relief as I feel the lock finally click open and my pick lock skill go up 10. Getting closer to skill savant, but still a long way off. I'm up to I think 147 skill points, and I still need 200.

But first, let's look at the chest. You have opened a gold chest! You gain 5000 experience! You find 50 gold, 50 silver, and 50 copper. Boots of the Wanderer (recipe), Steel gorget (recipe), leather helmet (recipe). Boots of the wanderer, Knight's greaves, mace of the sun, sword of knightly virtue, dagger of the asp, main gauche. Ability scroll: empowered chop, ability scroll: rapid shot, ability scroll: strength of the earth lord, spellbook: fire bolt, spellbook: wind gust. 25 magic crystals.

I take the boots of the wanderer as my first choice. Ashley takes the mace, Gigi the sword of knightly virtue, and El the knight's greaves. Not surprisingly, Vinny takes the wind gust spellbook. Then it's back to me to make a second choice. I take the rapid shot ability scroll. Ashley takes the empowered chop, Gigi the fire bolt spellbook, El the strength of the earth lord, and Vinny the dagger of the asp. Then I take the recipe for the boots of the wanderer.

I also end up taking the other two recipes, as no one seems concerned with them, and El takes the main gauche. I take a look at my new boots, deciding to wait for the scroll until we get back to the sculpture garden. Boots of the Wanderer. Rare boots 4/20. +4 armor, +20% movement speed. That's a slightly lower defense than my current boots, but I'm sure I can take care of that once we get back to the park.