The swarm of spiders continued to assail the enchantnts, while Alice tried to estimate how much ti they had left and how many spiders they had killed. It looked as if over two hundred of the monsters had died so far, which actually made a noticeable dent in the swarm of creepy-crawly horrors surging towards them. However, the damage to the upper echelons of the enemy was far below what she had been hoping for. Worse, the enchantnts weren’t the only thing failing. The Illvarian mages were running out of mana, Doll’s golems were starting to take significant casualties, and the spiders at the center of the horde didn’t look much worse for wear than they had been at the start of the fight. Things were starting to go wrong fast.
They hadn’t had any human casualties yet, but Alice suspected that at this rate, it was only a matter of ti. Unlike golems or Allira’s shadows, human casualties actually mattered.
As Alice was running the desperate math for how to actually win this battle, another spider leapt towards one of the power sources for the enchantnts. Like many of the previous spiders, upon contact with the power source it exploded, vomiting another surge of shadows into the power array and causing a few more components of the enchantnt to break. Alice felt a surge of frustration as she tried to repair the damage, only for the fourth evolution spider to exploit the opening and start twisting another, different part of the enchantnt to shadows.
Another two shadow spiders leapt at different parts of the enchantnt and exploded, and Alice used a surge of {Rapid Reconstruction} to force the enchantnts back into place - but even the near instantaneous reconstruction ability of the Perk couldn’t compensate for her waning mana reserves, the unnatural speed of the enchantnts breaking into pieces, and the increasing density of shadow enchantnts in the area. She was losing control.
Another three self-destructing spiders blasted into the enchantnt, and Alice felt a surge of panic. She realized that for the first ti, a path that the spiders coiled use to totally bypass the web of traps and enchantnts was open.
The spiders didn’t miss this opportunity. Several second and third evolution spiders imdiately leapt into the opened pathway, while Alice desperately tried to rebuild the enchantnts - but the fourth evolution spider and the third evolution spiders seed to have figured out how to stop her. The area quickly turned into a hazy ss of shadows and limbs, and when Alice tried to rebuild the enchantnts in the area, it felt like her mana ran into a concrete wall. She just… couldn’t interfere with the area. Her magic tendrils word their way into the wall of magic, but nowhere near fast enough to handle the dashing horde of monsters.
Monts later, the first third evolution spider slid past the final set of enchantnts, then leapt towards one of the Mages in the group. A few beads of tal ripped into the spider a mont later, nearly ripping off one of its legs. The spider kept coming. The mage that had been targeted panicked, and tried to back up, but he ran into the mage behind him. The corridor was too packed with people, golems, and materials - there was nowhere to flee. The spider’s maw opened up like a gate to another world - and then the world turned into a flash of heat and light, as Ethan used his father’s old sword.
Several spiders, as well as many of the shadow-based enchantnts, made hissing and popping sounds as they fried like oil in a frying pan.
On the bright side, this dealt with the imdiate pressure on the group. A third evolution spider, as well as several second evolution spiders, died from the blast of flas, coupled with a few careful shoves from Doll to finish off the surviving third evolution spider and a few stragglers in the second evolution.
On the downside, this blew a gaping hole in the wall of enchantnts. The fire had outright lted every single chunk of the enchantnts that had turned into shadows - and in the process, completely lted huge chunks of Alice’s work into slag. Alice was already starting to run low on mana, and she was rapidly developing a headache. Rebuilding the whole thing would take more of everything than she had available to her.
This was a problem Alice hadn’t even realized conceptual enchantnts would have. Most enchantnts wouldn’t react this way upon eting an ‘opposing’ concept, but conceptual enchantnts were clearly far more fragile when it ca to interference from other concepts. It made her wonder what the opposite of ‘death’ was, and how her death concept enchantnts could be dismantled. Conceptually, death was the opposite of life, so… could her death enchantnts be disabled by eting a strong enough form of life? Or would a sufficiently powerful [Organic Mage] be able to destroy her death enchantnts by ‘healing’ them with organic mana?
Alice shook her head. Now wasn’t the ti to be distracted by these thoughts. Things were going wrong fast, and she didn’t have ti for idle speculation.
Ethan grabbed her and started dragging her away from the battlefield, while the other Mages and Immortals also started to distance themselves from the enchantnt network. The spider swarm started to pour into the gap in the enchantnt’s defenses again - Ethan may have pushed back the swarm, but it was far from enough to halt their advance. In fact, he had opened up several new gaps in the defensive network that they needed to guard against. Allira had started creating concentrated beams of illusory light, which she coordinated with Doll to weaken third evolution spiders so that the other Mages could finish them off - but with the swarm of spiders protecting the higher evolution monsters, dealing with even the weakened enemies was starting to beco nearly impossible. Worse, Alice felt sothing strange happening in one of the corners of the battlefield. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she could tell the fourth evolution spider was doing sothing, and she doubted she would like the results when it finished.
Alice searched for a way to turn the tides of the battlefield back in their favor, and a mont later, she locked onto a new idea.
The shadow enchantnts had literally exploded and lted away when Ethan had hit them with a burst of fire. Alice already knew she could manipulate concepts and turn them into enchantnts, and she could create new enchantnts in record tis by using her new Perks. {Rapid Reconstruction} ant that Alice could speed through the enchantnt creation process in a way a regular enchanter could never match.
Seeing the explosions from her enchantnts gave Alice a certain amount of inspiration. She couldn’t make a bomb out of technology from Earth. Not that she understood the chanics behind bomb-making in the first place, since she had never had a reason to look it up. Even if she did understand how they worked, {Rapid Reconstruction} wouldn’t have supported the creation of a non-magical item, and Alice needed speed right now. However, that didn’t totally cut off any way to slow down the spider horde.
Alice’s thoughts drifted towards Cecilia’s blast crystals. Unlike bombs, she understood exactly how those worked. After Ethan’s fire slash, there was plenty of the concept of ‘fire’ lingering around in the area. Fire was strongly associated with the concept of ‘light’, which had already proven to be effective against the spiders. Doll also had her light cannons, which had similarly proven effective against the shadow spiders. Alice felt she could weld all three together to create a weapon to fight them out of this ss. It might be a ssy and horrifically inefficient weapon - but it would help safeguard a retreat while they regrouped and prepared for a second battle.
“Cecilia, give your blast crystals! Doll, give any objects you have that produce light!” Yelled Alice.
Cecilia imdiately handed Alice several blast crystals from her storage Perk, and Doll gave Alice a few of her light cannons. Alice imdiately got to work.
The first thing she did was turn on the light cannon and the blast crystals - in Alice’s mind, she wanted to create an object that literally ‘radiated’ its conceptual frawork outwards. The blast crystals were inherently ant to be consumable enchantnts, which ant that they weren’t built to drip-feed their mana to another chanism - they were ant to release it all in one big flash of energy. That wasn’t what she needed, so Alice did her best to draw upon the concept of fire from the remaining embers of Ethan’s attack. Fire consud things like a raging inferno - but it didn’t consu all of its fuel instantly. Most fires could burn for several minutes unabated. Alice tried to weld the concept of fire together with the blast crystals and the light cannons, in order to create a ball of light and heat that would constantly shove its own conceptual frawork into their surroundings.
After several seconds of utilizing {Rapid Reconstruction} while the mages and Immortals fought to buy her ti, Alice squinted at her work. It was a terribly ugly, inefficient ss of enchantnts and concepts, all mashed together in a way that would have made any competent [Enchanter] cry. Even so, there were certain parts of her creation that borrowed from more elegant enchantnts Alice had seen - in particular, she had taken a great deal of inspiration from the Artifacts she had seen, and how they perpetually powered themselves. As she inspected her work, Alice realized that she had created sothing like a very limited version of the power sources that fueled the System - but her knockoff creation had nowhere near the infinite lifespan of a proper artificial magic seed. Instead, it just burned through energy and burned through its environnt. It would probably only last a few minutes - perhaps five or six at most.
It didn’t matter. It would serve its purpose, and that was all that mattered.
Alice hurled her creation at the horde of spiders. The mont it hit its target, it erupted into a blast of heat and light, ripping through the area like a clumsy bomb.
The dim corridors of the System lit up with a brightness equal to a searchlight from Earth. Several of the weaker Mages in the group cried out in pain, since their [Endurance] wasn’t high enough to protect their eyes from the intense blast of light, and a wave of incredible heat washed over the group. It wasn’t anywhere near high enough to kill anyone, but Alice heard and slled so faint sizzling sounds, as a few of the Mages started to wail in pain.
Clearly, the ‘fire’ Alice had borrowed from Ethan’s attack had a lot more to it than regular fire. Alice had no idea how that worked, and didn’t have ti to explore it right now - but she was grateful she had set the magic orb to slowly release energy, instead of releasing it all at once. Otherwise, she might have flash-fried a few mbers of their group.
A few of the spiders closest to the blast burned. The acrid sll of flesh and hair cooking pervaded the corridor as a few dozen spiders fried, including one third evolution spider. Then, the enemy responded with a blast of pure, conceptual shadows. The ground and air shivered, as naless, unknowable things slithered towards the orb of light and tried to put it out. Alice’s death enchantnts shuddered as the assault of light and heat burned through even more of the conceptual frawork they relied upon to function, and Alice realized that her entire enchantnt network would collapse within a minute or less.
She glanced at the other third evolution spiders that had been near the epicenter of the blast, and then grimaced. Even though Alice had specifically targeted a large group of strong monsters, only one of them had died. The rest were, at best, injured - and several of them seed completely unhard. The density of conceptual ‘shadows’ had been far too high for a single light-based enchantnt to beat them down - a curious departure from how real light and shadows worked. Even as she continued to observe the spider swarm, Alice felt several smaller ripples of darkness and shadows emulate from the group of spiders and cover the few third-evolution spiders that had been injured but not killed. Clearly, the fourth evolution spider coordinating the enemy had deed it too painful to lose its powerful swarm mbers, and had commanded a few groups of weaker spiders to work together and help shield them from further harm.
After that, the second pulse of light hit. Alice winced. She had clearly ssed up so other part of her makeshift enchantnt - it had been supposed to release a steady stream of light, not random, inconsistent pulses of light and heat. She completely lost sight of what the spiders were doing during the second pulse of light. When she blinked the spots out of her eyes and looked at the group of third evolution spiders, she realized that none of them had actually died, even though this pulse of light had been much stronger than the first one. The enemy’s coordinated control of shadows ant that they were practically one living, sapient organism with a massive mana pool. She grimaced. The fourth evolution spider that led the enemy was truly frustrating to deal with. If they could just kill it, this entire fight would have been much easier. Sadly, it was still hiding behind a wall of its kin.
Still, the spiders were stalled by the pulses of light, which made Alice feel sowhat relieved. Her tool would buy them ti, which was exactly what it was supposed to do. Alice saw Doll launch a few more experint bursts of light at the spiders, but quickly shook her head. The coordinated shadow manipulation of the spiders made them exceptionally resilient against Doll’s probing attacks. A few monts later, the third evolution spiders started to regroup. Whatever ti Alice’s bomb had bought the group was quickly running out - and while they had inflicted major casualties upon the spider horde, they still had hundreds, or potentially even a thousand spiders left.
Before she could continue observing the spiders, Alice saw several of the Mages suddenly start floating in the air, as Ethan lifted them up using raw kinetic manipulation. Alice followed suit with her own kinetic mana, and the group rapidly retreated back into the depths of the System to prepare for the next engagent.
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