A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Chapter 259

With the fourth evolution spider dead, the rest of the spiders in the group fell into disarray. For several seconds, the spiders looked like they were having seizures. Many of them began twitching and twisting uncontrollably. More than that, several of the spiders looked lost, as if they had forgotten what they were doing. They simply stared at the walls, or the nearest person, and drooled.

Alice had never seen a monster swarm react this way to their alpha being killed. On one hand, this change made her feel a bit uneasy - clearly, there was some aspect of monster biology that she didn’t understand that had caused this strange reaction, and a part of Alice felt like it was a sign that the battlefield was slipping out of their control.

On the other hand, Alice knew that was probably mostly anxiety, rather than a real threat. The fourth evolution spider had been slain, and the spiders weren’t obviously powering up or preparing to deal a fatal blow to the Illvarians - they were just… stunned.

A moment passed, before Alice stopped thinking. The fourth evolution spider was dead, and the other spiders were vulnerable right now. No matter what, she should seize this opportunity to deal as much damage as possible to the remaining horde. Alice started to propel more pieces of metal, shrapnel, and other objects into the surrounding spiders, while Ethan and Allira joined in. Doll’s golems continued to rampage through the battlefield, and Myra took a kitchen knife and began finely dicing several of the closest spiders. Blasts of lighting, fire, and maws of shadows ripped into the horde of monsters, targeting the remaining third evolution spiders. Before the spiders could react, the remaining third evolution spiders died.

Right as the last third evolution spider died, the monster horde started to recover. Second evolution spiders, spider alphas, and regular spiders jolted awake, as if someone had injected coffee into their veins. A few of the spiders returned to fighting again, as if they were determined to drag the group down with them - but to Alice’s surprise, most of the spiders started to retreat. 

While Alice was surprised by the wave of self-preservation from the enemy, she felt much more relieved. The spiders would all die once they shut off the mana supply anyway - so fighting served no purpose. If the enemy wanted to flee from the battlefield, Alice was more than happy to let them withdraw. Five Illvarian Mages had died during the battle, and Alice didn’t want to lose any more of them. Not to mention, Alice was still missing a leg, and was pretty badly bruised from the ripping and tearing that had happened to her leg. A missing leg wasn’t that hard to recover from in this world, but it was still frustrating to deal with.

The group continued to fire attacks into the horde, until the last spiders were either dead, or had withdrawn from the battlefield.

“Alice, come over here. Let me regrow your leg,” said Ethan.

Alice hopped over, before she gave Ethan {Patient’s Consent}. Ethan grabbed her arm and sent a few waves of organic mana into her body, before her leg grew back. Alice sighed in relief as her limb returned.

After that, they quickly healed the Illvarian Mages who were injured but not dead. A few of them weren’t in a state to fight even afterwards, due to mana depletion, but Alice had a strong suspicion that it didn’t matter. There shouldn’t be too much fighting left, if things went as planned.

After everyone was healed, the group began jogging towards the power supply again. When they entered the room, they found several more swarms of spiders - but none of them were stronger than second evolution. Alice wasn’t sure whether the third evolution spiders had been wiped out by the first wave of the explosion earlier, or whether they had fled, or something else entirely - but it didn’t really matter. If they weren’t here right now, they were irrelevant to their plans.

The Immortals let loose with several rounds of shrapnel, lightning, shadowy maws, and golem attacks. In mere minutes, the room was clear of monsters, and several nests filled with eggs were totally destroyed.

“All right, what’s the plan for actually shutting down the power supply?” Asked Ethan, once the monsters were cleaned up.

“Well, we want to starve out everything in the System, while still preserving the artificial magic seeds. We can’t just blow up all of the magic seeds, and they don’t have off switches. I plan to use pure mana to create a sort of ‘wall’ that locks all of the mana into this room, and prevents it from reaching the rest of the System,” said Alice. “Most monsters die from lack of mana within about ten minutes, but there could be weird pockets of mana left over in the System after we shut off the power. Those might take a while for the monsters to consume before they run out of supply. I think that shutting off the power for two hours makes the most sense - just to make absolutely sure all of the strong monsters are dead. Then, I want Doll’s golems and Allira’s shadows to sweep through the System afterwards, just to finish off any stragglers that slip through the cracks. After all, weaker monsters require less mana to survive, and I have no idea how much mana spider eggs consume. If we just shut off the power supply, perhaps some eggs or really weak spiders could slip through the cracks, breed, and create a whole new infestation within a week or two. Obviously, we don’t want that. What do you think?”

“Sounds reasonable enough to me,” said Ethan. “I would actually recommend cutting off the power a second time tomorrow, if you don’t think that would harm the System’s mainframe more. That way we could catch any spiders that hatch between now and tomorrow and make sure to kill them off as well. Allira is probably tired after all this fighting, so I doubt her shadows will be anywhere near as fast and efficient as usual - and Doll’s golem army is also limited by movement speed and the number of casualties it took during the last few fights. Two days would give us a lot more wriggle room to make sure we catch every corner of the infestation.”

“Allira? How many shadows can you sustain right now?” asked Alice.

“Not enough. Honestly, I need to take a nap soon,” sang Allira. “I can hit a few nearby rooms, though.”

“Do what you can, and we’ll do another sweep tomorrow then,” said Alice. With how long the System had been half-destroyed, she doubted shutting off the power once versus twice would make a big difference in the integrity of the remaining System infrastructure. If Ethan said it was best to shut off the power multiple times to catch stragglers, she would do just that.

Since the group had come to an agreement, it was time to actually cut off the power. Alice looked at the several pipelines that led out of the room and towards the rest of the System, before she extended some magic tendrils towards the pipes.

Alice already had a decent understanding of how to create a manaless room, due to all of her experiments involving manaless rooms in the past. Creating a mana filter that stopped mana from exiting the power supply room wasn’t too hard for her. Then, to keep her from running out of mana as she sustained these ‘filters,’ Alice decided to turn it into a quick enchantment. She just grabbed some spider cores from the horde of monsters they had just butchered, borrowed a few materials that Doll had laying around from the reconstruction of the System’s production lines, and then used {Rapid Reconstruction} to create some plugs to shut off the power supply. After some thought, Alice also decided to create better, more sturdy versions of the enchantment later. She already planned to convert a lot of the System into conceptual enchantments rather than physical ones, which would make it a bit harder for monsters to invade the System in the future - but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t take other precautions against something like this happening in the future. This had been a total catastrophe, and she wanted to disaster-proof the System as much as possible. Perhaps she could build some kind of automated network that shut off the power supply for the System if monsters were detected inside, or something like that. It was a plan for the future, but Alice thought it was a good idea to mull over, at least.

After Alice enchanted the pipes that carried mana out of the power supply room, she also added a filter over the doors leading into the power supply. There was no point in letting any mana leak out of the room and go feed the third-evolution spiders that might have slipped away during the fighting, after all.

After Alice finished building her filter enchantments, mana stopped leaving the power supply room. More and more mana started to build up at the edges of the plugs, like a giant river being stopped by a dam. Alice felt some relief at the fact that they were only trying to stop the power supply for a few hours - if they tried to confine all of the mana produced in here for longer than two hours, there would probably be other problems. Fortunately, she was pretty sure her filtration enchantments would hold for a few hours, which was all they needed.

The group couldn’t see what was happening in every corner of the System, so they didn’t have a view of what was happening to the rest of the monsters here. Still, Alice could easily imagine it.

Monsters should be suddenly cut off from their greatest need. Spiders should be suddenly suffocating in various rooms across the System, as their bodies tried to absorb mana that was no longer present in their surroundings. Finally, spiders should start dropping dead, one after another, until there was nothing left in the System except for a few small pockets of mana, nests filled with eggs, and weaker spiders left behind.

After five minutes, the group heard a loud banging sound resonate from the doors leading into the power supply room.

Allira frowned, and began humming. A few shadows sprang into existence, and then melted into the walls.

“Third evolution spider,” she said, after a few moments. “Looks like a few of them did

slip away during the fighting. One of them must have realized we cut off the power supply, and it’s trying to make its way back in. It has a small horde with it - I see eight second evolution spiders, a few dozen spider alphas, and maybe two hundred smaller spiders?”Alice grimaced. That was something she hadn’t anticipated. A new mini-horde trying to storm the power supply once the spiders realized what she was doing was a problem - but probably not a huge one.

“Why didn’t it try to shadowstep in?” asked Doll.

“I imagine it saw what Alice did to the other ones that tried to phase through physical objects,” said Allira. “Or maybe it’s trying to make sure its underlings can join in the fighting. Either way, the door is already pretty badly damaged from all the spiders eating at it. If it keeps attacking it, it might break through before we finish starving it out.”

Ethan looked as if he had just chewed broken glass. He sighed.

“Let’s open the door and kill them. Fast. Before the noise draws in some other, less intelligent spiders - or breaks down Alice’s filtration enchantment and nullifies our plan.”

The banging from the door grew louder as Ethan ran over to the doors. A moment later, he opened it, and without wasting a single moment, pointed at the third evolution spider.

A surge of rainbow mana rippled through his body, before every single loose object in the area sprang to life, as if Ethan had used kinetic magic on all of them. They all surged towards the spider like a hailstorm of deadly shrapnel. Allira’s few remaining shadow horrors joined in a few moments later, followed shortly afterwards by Myra’s kitchen knife and a few attacks from Alice. Cecilia also hurled a few exploding monster cores into the horde, although she only managed to lob four in before she shrugged.

The group’s Perks and mana reserves were severely depleted, but it still proved enough to kill the third evolution spider. When it died, the spiders started to mindlessly hurl themselves at the group - but a final spray of shrapnel ripped them to pieces.

Cecilia groaned. “I’m out of basically every supply. I can’t scavenge from the dead spiders fast enough for another battle.”

“Let’s just hope that we don’t get any more attacks,” said Ethan, as the group slammed the doors shut again and enabled the filtration enchantments again.

This time, things went more smoothly. No new mini-hordes attacked the doors as minute after minute ticked by. After half an hour, Allira and Doll sent their golems and shadows to start sweeping through the System, to finish off whatever was left. By now, most of the powerful monsters should have starved to death. Alice sat there in silence, as Allira narrated what she saw through her shadows.

“The room about four hallways away is now empty. Lots of spider corpses. It looks like the plan has worked - most of them were dead already. However, a few of the spiders did survive. It looks like they ate the corpses of their dead kin? It makes sense - monster cores do have a reasonably high amount of mana inside of them. Not enough to sustain long term consumption, but it could keep a few survivors alive for a few hours. I think if my shadows attack I’ll run out of energy, so Doll, I would appreciate it if you could send some golems over to deal with that room. I also found a few smaller nests seven hallways away, in two different rooms. Those ones had no survivors, but they did have a few surviving eggs. I went ahead and wiped those out with my shadows - no reason not to attack. I also ran into a few rooms that are just empty - I suspect the monsters ripped apart all of the infrastructure a long time ago.”

Alice continued to listen, as Allira continued to scout the area. Her voice grew louder and louder as she sustained the songs that kept her shadows intact, but Alice grew more and more reassured as Allira’s scouting continued.

It wasn’t perfect, and there were still a few straggler groups they would need to wipe out - but they had done it.

The worst of the spider infestation in the System was gone. They could finally rebuild the ruined infrastructure in relative peace.