novelraw Chapter 38 : Chapter 38
Chapter 38 : Chapter 38
Chapter 37.Turmoil (7)
The Queen Spider’s spawning room.
One of the few advantages of this place.
That was the fact that there were no General Spider individuals inside this room.
The place where General Spiders resided was the periphery outside the spawning room.
Perhaps the Queen forbade entry into the spawning room due to the issue that they might step on the eggs because of their large bodies.
Then the disadvantages?
Everything else.
Spiders serving as guards and nursemaids roamed everywhere, spiderwebs were scattered on the floor, and the strongest individual, the Queen Spider, resided in the middle of it all.
Among these elements, the most concerning one was undoubtedly the spiderwebs.
Spiderwebs covering the floor of the spawning room and crossing here and there in the air.
Naturally, their function was the same as ordinary spiderwebs.
Used to notify of an enemy’s intrusion and to fix prey that stepped on it so they couldn’t move.
However, befitting spiderwebs created by a Demonic Beast, their adhesiveness and stiffness far exceeded ordinary spiderwebs.
To the level that one would be fixed to the spot almost from the moment of stepping on them.
Of course, spiders don’t get their feet caught in these webs.
Because the fluid secreted from their toes neutralizes the adhesiveness of the spiderwebs.
So if one entered the spawning room without preparing for the spiderwebs, a disaster would occur where they would have to face a swarm of spiders while stuck in place.
Then how do Hunters overcome these spiderwebs?
Surprisingly, the answer was simple.
Burn them.
Since spiderwebs are weak to fire, if one sears the floor once with fire, the adhesiveness disappears.
If they entered after that, they could no longer be affected by the spiderwebs.
But this wasn’t a method Riman could choose.
Riman’s target was the egg sacs.
The problem was that in trying to burn the spiderwebs on the floor, there was a possibility that the fire could spread to the egg sacs if things went wrong.
Since he was going through this trouble because of the egg sacs, he couldn’t just burn them.
So Riman had to choose a method other than fire.
Tssss—
Little by little, the temperature around Riman began to drop.
Chill began to flow from Riman’s body.
The mana passing through his body was being converted into cold energy.
Ice lineage magic.
This was the method Riman chose.
Thud.
Riman stepped toward the spiderwebs laid on the floor.
At that moment when the sticky texture of the spiderwebs was transmitted through his sole.
Riman deployed his magic.
[Freeze]
K-k-krack—
The spiderwebs began to freeze.
It wasn’t just the spiderwebs around his feet that froze.
The spiderwebs covering the entire vast spawning room began to freeze.
Because the spiderwebs here were all connected.
Riman spread his mana carefully as if tracing the shape of the spiderwebs with a pen.
Like fire on a fuse, the cold ran along the spiderwebs.
The grayish-white spiderwebs were dyed black in an instant.
Adhesiveness, flexibility, elasticity, stiffness.
All the advantages the spiderwebs possessed froze to death under the pitch-black ice.
At the same time, the warm spawning room filled with cold air.
The spiders soon realized.
That the traps and alarm devices they had painstakingly laid out were all paralyzed.
Riman drove a wedge into this.
By stomping on the spiderwebs with all his might.
Crash!
Clang-clang-clang!!
The massive spiderweb structure shattered all at once.
Like a skein made of glass shattering.
Because the solidly frozen spiderwebs had no leeway or flexibility to disperse the impact.
Rustle……
Fragments of broken spiderwebs fluttered like glass powder.
It could have been quite a romantic sight, but there was no time to enjoy it.
Because the spiders were swarming in.
From the moment Riman smashed all the spiderwebs, Riman’s location was as good as revealed.
Rustle-rustle-rustle!
Spiders guarding the Queen swarmed in.
They weren’t that different from the worker spiders seen outside.
Just moving a bit more orderly and having slightly higher intelligence.
But spider intelligence is all much of a muchness.
In the end, there was no difference.
Rustle-rustle-rustle-rustle!
Their weapons were numbers and organization.
The sight of them swarming in droves and biting and tearing the target in unison was reminiscent of well-trained infantry.
And they also possessed the disadvantages of infantry as is.
Specifically, low survivability.
Tzzzz—
Cold air began to be forged once again inside Riman’s body.
A much deeper and darker cold than before.
The condensed cold begins to stretch as the magic guides.
This too is an Ice lineage magic.
The essence of ‘freezing’ is the same as [Freeze] just now.
But in terms of scale and cooling speed, it far surpasses [Freeze].
‘Silenced sea, white coffin, broken tin.’
Overlap of images, extraction of meaning, manifestation of will.
The icy magic uncoils its crouched body.
“Screeeeeech!!”
At that moment when the distance to the spider swarm narrowed to 1 meter.
The magic exploded.
[Frozen Earth Critical Point]
Crack-crack-crack!!
Centering on the caster’s body, a bitter frozen earth descends.
The cold bursting out from Riman swallowed the spiders.
In addition, the abundant moisture content in the air explosively accelerated the diffusion of the cold.
Rapid cooling.
The spiders swallowed by the cold froze in place as if a pause button had been pressed.
The spiders that had swarmed in pitch black froze black.
Like that, their advance froze coldly.
But they didn’t die from just this.
Under the coldly frozen carapace, their hearts were still beating.
He had to finish them.
And that wasn’t very difficult.
[Weight]
Gravity crushed the spiders.
Clatter!!
The spiders crumbled down in an instant.
A sight like watching hundreds of plaster statues falling from a shelf all at once.
Fragments of shattered spiders scattered onto the floor and mixed with the fragments of spiderwebs.
It was instant for a corps to become a heap of debris.
Riman stepped onto those fragments.
A crunching texture was transmitted through his soles.
No one would be able to imagine spiders or Demonic Beasts looking at these pieces.
Of course, when time passes and the moment of thaw comes, the truth will be revealed.
Ice shards will return to squishy flesh and the trapped stench will seep out.
But Riman had no intention of being here until then.
Thud, thud—
Riman walked to deal with the last target.
Now 99 percent of the spiders inside this spawning room were annihilated.
But 1 percent still remained.
And this 1 percent was responsible for 99 percent of the spawning room’s combat power.
The Queen Spider.
“Screeeech……!”
The guy let out a roar mixed with a metallic sound toward Riman.
The emotion contained therein was clearly hatred.
However, Riman didn’t even care.
Since it was in a state where it couldn’t move, pierced by the stalactite anyway.
Just struggling in the spot where it was stuck, the guy couldn’t approach Riman.
Of course, he had driven the stalactite into its back precisely so it would be like that.
‘Because I can’t handle it either if something like that goes wild.’
A guy bigger than an elephant going wild with the speed of a lion or tiger.
No matter if it was Riman, he couldn’t handle such a situation alone.
So he had forcibly fixed its position first.
Just as he was passing in front of the screaming Queen Spider.
Hisss!
The Queen Spider spewed green vapor from its mouth.
It was poison gas.
A technique it rarely used because of the presence of the eggs.
But spewing poison gas wildly meant the guy was driven to the limit that much.
Of course, it didn’t even reach Riman.
[Gust]
Whoosh!
Swept by the wind Riman created, the poison gas rose high to the ceiling.
And by escaping through the ventilation holes in the ceiling, the poison gas disappeared without a trace.
After dealing with the poison gas like that.
Riman approached a corner of the spawning room.
There was a small spring there.
A spring where clean water gushed out.
It was the Queen Spider’s water source.
However, now……
‘It’s my weapon.’
Tzzzz—
Ripples spread on the water.
Along with the ripples, black energy spread creepily like ink.
Riman’s mana seized the water of this spring.
Pulling the mana spread in the water as is, upwards.
Splash—
Tens of water streams soared above the surface of the spring.
The water streams soon took the shape of arrows.
[Water Fragment Arrow]
Before, the material was merely the amount of one canteen, but now a whole spring was in his hands.
Ammunition was sufficient.
Now he just had to shoot.
Pew-pew-pew-pew!
It was the same as before.
The water arrows Riman shot flew toward the stalactites high on the ceiling.
Arrows destroy the roots of the stalactites, and the stalactites fall down.
Toward the Queen Spider directly below.
A shower of rocks pouring down like snow.
Fortunately, the size of the target was ample too.
Boom-boom-boom-boom!
Riman looked at the Queen Spider that had become a hedgehog.
The hard carapace the guy boasted was completely shattered.
‘If I had tried to break that carapace with magic alone, I would have suffered a bit.’
So he had committed murder with a borrowed knife, borrowing the mass of the massive stalactites.
It must have been absurd from that guy’s perspective, but anyway…….
“Blame the interior of your room.”
Who told you to hang pointy things above your head?
Riman looked at the Queen Spider.
Surprisingly, the guy was alive even in that state.
“Tenacious, really.”
At that moment when he let out a sigh.
Crunch—
The Queen Spider began to twist its body.
The sound of something tearing came from the guy’s body.
The sound of carapace breaking and muscles snapping.
It was the guy’s last struggle.
Snap.
The guy separated its body.
Tearing the abdomen fixed by the stalactite from its body, it charged the remaining half of its body toward Riman.
A de facto self-destruction technique, abandoning part of its body to charge at the opponent.
Even if this attack succeeds, the Queen Spider dies.
Nevertheless, the guy carried out the attack.
It was the sum of maternal love to protect the eggs, and hostility toward the enemy.
“Screeech!!”
Blue fangs flash.
A resolve to bite Riman to death even if it dies.
However, even though it abandoned half its body, the guy was still too heavy.
Squelch!!
The guy’s body sank deep into a sand swamp.
Riman had created a swamp on the guy’s charge path with magic.
[Quicksand]
A magic that turns designated ground into a sand swamp.
Making the ferocity of the charge pointless, the guy sank helplessly into the swamp.
“I knew you’d charge here.”
Did you think I’d fall for your self-destruct move twice?
“Hm but… is the swamp a bit shallow?”
Was it because it was a magic activated a bit hastily?
The depth of the sand swamp wasn’t deep enough.
So the Queen Spider’s head was still above the surface of the swamp.
“Well, it will die even if I leave it like this, but…….”
Trickle—
Water pulled up from the spring took shape by Riman’s magic.
“I should finish it properly.”
[Water Fragment Arrow]
The tip of Riman’s arrow aimed at the Queen Spider for the first time.
“You couldn’t possibly cover even your eyeballs with carapace.”
Where the arrow aimed was the Queen Spider’s eye.
The arrow left Riman’s hand.
Thwack!!
The arrow that burrowed instantly beyond the eye shattered the inside of the skull and ended its life.
The subjugation of the Queen Spider was completed.
* * *
“Ugh, my body…….”
Fatigue rushed into his whole body.
The fatigue that had been postponed due to adrenaline rushed in all at once as the battle ended.
In the midst of that, his broken left arm throbbed exceptionally.
“Once I get out of the spider den, I should rest well for a while. If I do anything more here, my body will really break down.”
Still, the harvest of this hunt was certain.
First, the magic stone lump that would be inside the Queen Spider’s abdomen.
Magic stones from a Demonic Beast’s body were much more expensive than magic stones mined from the ground.
Because they were lumps of mana refined once through the Demonic Beast’s respiratory system, so the purity was higher.
And the magic stones embedded all over the spawning room.
These magic stones also had much higher purity than ordinary magic stones.
Demonic Beasts are creatures born by mana.
So they instinctively prefer places with high mana concentration.
A boss individual’s room like the Queen Spider’s is naturally the place with the highest mana concentration.
This room became the spawning room because it was where the highest purity magic stones in this cave were concentrated.
“How much is it if I sell all this…….”
A faint smile rose on Riman’s lips.
But—
“...This isn’t what’s important right now.”
Shing.
Riman took out the Caterpillar Sword.
It was time to harvest the egg sacs.