A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Chapter 258

Alice felt {Adrenaline Rush} kick in, followed  by {Enhanced Senses}. Her perception of time slowed down to a crawl - which was exactly long enough for Alice to process just how bad the situation actually was. The group’s entire strategy had been built around killing the fourth evolution spider in a surprise attack. They had built equipment for this. They had prepared an entire battle plan for it. Their entire strategy was reliant upon handling the third evolution spider before it could actually join the battlefield.

Now, the enemy was right beneath her. It had been lying in ambush. Two Illvarian Mages were dead, and the enemy was seconds away from killing her too.

Her mind raced, as Alice looked for a solution. Anitmagic mana was too slow for it to be useful here - the monster was too fast, and it was going to hit her before she had time to put together anything truly dangerous. She also didn’t have the mana to reach into the monster’s biology and rip it to pieces using her magic - the monster’s biology was far too resilient and mana-rich to be vulnerable to something like that.

As glacial seconds ticked by like eternities, Alice’s mind discarded idea after idea. The monster’s body was already physical matter, so forcing it into a physical shape would do nothing. Moving herself out of the way was impossible - the monster’s maneuverability and speed were both too high. Even if she managed to rip herself in a certain direction by using all of her kinetic mana, the monster would be back on her in seconds, and Alice was not confident that Ethan and the other Immortals could kill the spider before it ripped her head apart.

If that was the case…

Alice’s mind seized upon a new, desperate idea. She had been flung a bit away from the rest of the group, and right beneath her, there was a vacuum of space where the spider had lain in wait to spring its trap. All she needed to do was hope that Allira detonated an artificial seed on time.

Alice’s mind stretched and twisted, as she began to chain together bursts of dimensional mana to create a series of portals.

The first portal formed. Alice immediately jammed her magic tendrils through the portal, enhancing her range. She created another portal, expanding her range even further. In a fraction of a second, a series of portals appeared in front of her, expanding her range into the power supply room. Each portal was also massive, extremely obvious, and would stand out like a lighthouse for any hungry monster - but they were past the point where stealth mattered.

Then, Alice waited as the monster’s fangs grew larger and larger. Right before Alice decided she might be about to die, she heard an earth-shattering boom erupt in the distance. Due to how much {Adrenaline Rush} distorted her sense of time, it felt like the explosion was erupting in slow motion.

Alice relaxed. Perhaps Allira had noticed her portals and realized what Alice wanted. Perhaps Allira had simply stuck to their original plan, with the hopes of doing as much damage as possible to the spider horde even if they couldn’t wipe out the fourth evolution spider before the battle started. It didn’t matter.

Her desperate gamble had a chance to succeed.

One of Alice’s magic tendrils reached over to the exploding magic seed in the distance, and then used most of her kinetic mana to fling it through the portal as fast as she could.

The exploding seed appeared right in the spot where the fourth evolution spider had originally ambushed her from, leaving the spider as the final and only barrier between Alice herself and the explosion.

Then, Alice’s vision went black as she was flung away.

The magic seed had already exploded before Alice pulled it over, so a big part of the energy from the blats had already been ‘wasted’ in the other room. However, it was still an exploding artificial magic seed. It had plenty of energy to spare. A shockwave of force and heat picked Alice and the spider up like the hand of an angry god, and then bodily hurled them both towards the ceiling. A few of the other Illvarians, who had ended up closer to Alice after the ambush, also got thrown around like leaves in a tornado. Alice felt a faint stab of guilt as she realized she might have hit her allies much worse than she had expected, but she pushed it down.

If the fourth evolution spider wasn’t dealt with immediately, they would probably die anyway.

Time suddenly seemed to speed up, as one of Alice’s bullet-time Perks ran out. Alice slammed into the ceiling and felt a bright blossom of pain tear through her body. Everything hurt. Instinctively, Alice tried to sew together whatever had just broken with organic mana, only to realize this was far beyond her ability to heal.

Her eyes had been ruined by the blast of light during the explosion. It had happened so fast that Alice hadn’t even realized her eyes weren’t working anymore until she had time to process the strange blackness in her vision. Her Perks still let her see, but her physical eyes were clearly ruined beyond natural repair.

Her other injuries were much worse. The lower half of her body was just gone. Her legs, about half of her stomach, and a good amount of her intestines had turned into charcoal. Due to her unusually resilient flesh and body, the top half of her body seemed a lot less charcoal-y, but Alice was still in terrible pain. Alice felt something tearing into her lungs when she tried to breathe, and she was pretty sure that it was a fragment of her ribs. Most of the bones in her body had shattered, and Alice felt a surge of darkness and dizziness when she tried to look around. Alice was just glad that she was still conscious. The blast had hit her far harder than she had expected, and Alice wouldn’t have been surprised if the blast had simply killed her on the spot by shattering her brain. Luckily, the worst case scenario had been avoided.

A moment after she sustained such obviously lethal injuries, she felt mana surge and buck in her body, like an engine churning into overdrive. Then, the lancing pain in her body started to untwist itself around her body. Within a few fractions of a second, Alice felt as if her body had simply been reset. Bones knit into place where they had previously been broken, flesh appeared where stumps had been before, organs and intestines rebuilt themselves from scratch, and her body rewove itself back together from the mana and half-conceptual chemistry it had been made of before.

As her body wove itself back together using her once-per-week restoration from being an Immortal, Alice caught a glimpse of the aftermath of her bomb.

The other two Immortals that had been closest to her, Ethan and Allira, both looked injured. Ethan had lost a leg, although it was already growing back, and Allira had some severe burn marks on her arms. Doll and Myra seemed to have mostly shrugged off the explosion with few ill effects, perhaps because they were further from the blast.

The Illvarian Mages closest to the explosion couldn’t be found anywhere. Alice felt a twinge of horror at the thought that she might have just killed them, but she did her best to shake it off. She hadn’t had much of a choice, or at the very least, she hadn’t been able to think of a better plan on the spot. There was also a chance they had simply been flung out of her sight. She would have to check later.

The third evolution spiders that had been ambushing the party were mostly fine, unfortunately. The fourth evolution spider had shielded too much of the blast, both for the spiders and for the Illvarians.

The fourth evolution spider had taken the brunt of the damage, since Alice had placed the exploding artificial magic seed right underneath it, and it had been covering most of the explosion for the other living creatures in the corridor. The blast had hurled it into the ceiling, only a few meters away from Alice. Three of its eight legs had turned into mush, and its abdomen looked deformed, as if part of its body had been caught in a hydraulic press. A few of its eyes had popped, either from the blast or from hitting the ceiling. Dark, sludgy blood dripped out of its wounds, even the cauterized wounds - which indicated that the spider’s biology was even more strange than Alice had believed. The way mana circulated through its body was… distorted. It was as if the channels of mana that it usually used were broken or messed up. The spider was still twitching, so it clearly wasn’t dead - but it had sustained a massive amount of damage from the blast.

Alice eyed the seriously injured fourth evolution spider, and then gritted her teeth.

Perhaps it was because the ‘initial’ blast had happened before Alice could pull the artificial magic seed through her portal, but the damage was nowhere near as severe as she had been expecting. Instead, the spider had only been hit by the brunt of a secondary explosion - much less powerful than the initial blast. Even so, Alice had been really hoping the blast would just turn the spider into a splatter on the wall, and it was clearly still alive.

Another burst of pain wracked Alice’s body, before her missing limbs and organs finally rebuilt themselves. Alice gasped in pain, and gravity reasserted itself. Alice fell from the ceiling and plummeted back towards the ruined, torn up corridor below. 

She landed on the uneven floor of the System with the grace of a cat, as her post-Immortality reflexes kicked in and boosted her agility to levels it would never have reached beforehand. Alice ignored it, as she glared at the fourth evolution spider. It still hadn’t moved, but Alice doubted that would remain true for long. Alice immediately activated another round of projectile bracelets, and dozens of beads whizzed through the air and cut into the spider’s body. A moment later, Ethan and Allira finally seemed to recover from the blast. Ethan hit the spider with several rounds of lightning attacks, and Allira’s surviving shadows pounced upon the fourth evolution spider a moment later.

The spider, shockingly, survived the round of attacks, even with its missing legs, crushed abdomen, and severe injuries. It melted into shadows and tried to shadowstep through the ceiling - but Alice wasn’t going to let it get away. She waited until it was partway into the metal of the System, before she used {Conceptual Manipulation} to force the spider back into a physical existence instead of a shadow existence.

The System metal broke as it contested the spider’s body, and the spider also screeched in agony. Alice blinked in complete and utter bewilderment, before she realized what the problem was.

The previous spiders had exploded when she forced them into a physical form because their bodies were weaker than the metal of the System. The System’s metal had thus won when the two came in conflict, ripping those spiders to pieces. The fourth evolution spider’s body was not the same. It was ridiculously hard and strong - and that, apparently, allowed it to survive the conflict between flesh and metal with injuries, but without getting turned into a smear within the wall.

Alice felt a trickle of sweat. If the artificial magic seed explosion hadn’t been designed to convert most of the blast into heat and light, both of which didn’t damage the System’s metal, then Alice suspected her little explosion might have torn open the ceiling of the System and dropped an entire ocean on top of them. The water pressure alone would have probably instantly killed the entire party. The System probably had ways to deal with leaks, but it wouldn’t have mattered to them at that point.

The monstrous spider squirmed and wriggled as it tried to tunnel deeper into the System’s walls, even as more blasts of lightning and shadows pounced on it. Alice flung another round of metal projectiles at it - and then screamed as something tore into her leg. She looked down, and realized that the first of the third-evolution spiders had recovered. One of them was latched onto her leg, tearing and gnawing at it as if the spider wanted to eat its last meal. Six of its legs had been totally wiped out by the blast, and half of its body was melted into slag. Even so, under the command of the fourth evolution spider, it had crawled over to her and started gnawing at her. The third evolution spider’s contained raw, unbridled fury and malice. The absolute determination to take Alice with it as it sank deeper into the void of death.

Alice gasped in pain and flopped backwards. Her leg was gone again. Blood streamed out of the severed stump that ended just above her knee, and the dying spider spat out the other half of her leg and crawled towards her again. Alice raised a hand, and fired another round of bracelet beads at the spider’s face, finally ending the nearly dead monster.

Alice gasped in pain, and then used organic magic to cut off the blood flowing out of her stump leg. She could regrow the leg later - she just needed to keep herself from bleeding out first.

Three more third evolution spiders leapt at Alice, as if the enemy commander had realized Alice was the most efficient at stopping its escape. However, Alice knew that if they let the fourth evolution spider slip away, they would face an even more bitter struggle to kill it next time.

“Keep me alive!” Yelled Alice. Then, trusting that at least one of the Immortals on her side could protect her for a moment, Alice converted the escaping fourth evolution spider into flesh once more, which caused the spider to wail in agony. Its body once again fought with System metal, only to win - but at the cost of pain and blood.

Three spiders leapt towards Alice’s throat, and crashed into a pair of Doll’s golems. While the golems got shredded into pieces within seconds, they bought enough time for Myra to paint a new wall right between Alice and the spiders. The painted wall blocked the actions of the spiders even more effectively than a real wall - at least, for the moment. Myra’s painting bought Alice enough time to solidify the fourth evolution spider’s body again, right as Ethan tore into it with another round of lightning. The fourth evolution spider howled in fury, before it gave up and leapt at Ethan. Despite its missing legs, the monster still sailed through the air like a fuzzy missile with too many legs and overly large teeth. Ethan grinned, and activated the sword of the Sun Knight one more time.

A blast of fire ripped into the spider’s body, tearing an even greater wound in its head. The spider still wasn’t dead, but Ethan wasn’t done yet. A surge of rainbow mana tore through his body, and he pointed at the spider. A moment later, a torrential blast of heat tore out of his fingers and into the spider’s body, as thermal mana melted an entire section of metal, spider, and shadows into slag. The spider crashed into the ground as it hissed in pain, before Doll’s light beams carved into the creature’s body again. A giant, shadowy maw ripped into the creature’s abdomen from beneath it, as Allira set off another round of attacks. The spider still wasn’t dead.

Alice got another idea. She used her kinetic mana to drag out all of the cores from the nearby dead spiders. Plenty of weaker spiders had been killed as massive attacks ripped through the battlefield, and they had enough cores to fuel a quick enchantment. {Rapid Reconstruction}, along with all of the ‘death’ floating around in the air nearby, meant that it was incredibly easy to create the enchantment she wanted - and with the fourth evolution spider exposed in the open and nearly dead, she doubted it would be as fast as before when it came to unraveling her enchantments.

Right on top of the creature’s head, Alice created a new death enchantment.

The spider spasmed once more, and collapsed to the ground. Another round of shadow maws, lightning, and metal projectiles tore into the spider’s head, as it jerked and tried to escape, but at last, four different Immortals pouring wave after wave of attacks into the creature proved too much for its ridiculous vitality to handle. It spasmed one more time, and then fell silent.

The spiders on the battlefield jerked to a stop, as if they had been shocked by something. Alice let out a tired, exhausted gasp of relief as the three third evolution spiders that had been hellbent on killing her froze in confusion.

They had finally killed the fourth evolution spider.

The enemy commander was dead.