Chương 37: Chapter 2-36 – Came a Spider

It felt like the whole Beast Plane had just gathered behind me and was pushing me at the Summoning Doorway in front of me. It was a big square, maybe sixty by sixty, capable of fitting multiple Wolves at one time as they charged helplessly into it, the silver void in space gaping open as if it was the most massive vortex, and drawing me in over and above the haplessly onrushing Green Thorn Wolves.

I felt some telekinetic hands trying to grasp at me, but they were like small currents in the thrashing flow of a thundering tsunami. There was a hole there, and the whole of the Beast Realm was pushing me towards it. No Void Magic from any of the Silver Foxes was going to stop this!

"Finish the job," I Said to Elder Winkle, and received just a blink of affirmation before I was drawn into the Summoning Portal, and the Beast Realm was left behind me.

There was the expected tumbling distortion of space-time going crazy. Then the shoving arms of the Beast Realm ejecting me were gone, and suddenly I was out where I belonged. I could feel it instantly. The constant background pressure, the sense of rejection, that I didn't belong there, was gone. I was 'back', despite never having been here, on the Mortal World - or one of them - connected to the Beast Realm!

I was also suddenly subject to King Gravity, my Disk had shattered on meeting the Portal, and I was falling through the air while the kidnapped/Summoned Wolves rampaged below me, howling and snarling and thrashing as their thorned hides all stood up, and scuttling masses flew in all directions as the Wolves charged through them... Okay, I couldn't recall ever seeing so many giant Tarantulas, ever. The smallest of them had bodies the size of a cow, their hairy legs with spiked fur making them look much, much bigger.

There were others even larger, to the size of cars, trucks, vans, and one monstrous thing over there the size of a semi, all of them rearing up in shock and surprise as the Wolves came out of nowhere and rampaged right through them. The Wolves the Green Thorn had brought were at least Great Warriors or Commanders, and most of these Spiders were simply no threat to them.

The Wolves' thorned hides made them living pincushions if the Spiders glommed onto them, and the lupines outmassed the Spiders considerably, standing over all but the very biggest of them. The Wolves rampaged right through them with the ferocity of surprise, yet complete coordination in their own way. I flicked up a Featherweight, reflecting that I was once again falling to the ground via entering from another dimension, just as I had when entering the Beast Realm.

However, I was falling into a goddamn horde of massive Spiders! There'd been a few Great Insects visiting the Breach, or helping in the war. I'd heard that the Ants under the Emperor Moltenheart were steady and implacable, feared servants of the Drake Emperor.

Most of the Insects I'd seen had been massive Moths or Butterflies, but there'd been more than a few Beetles, and one elegantly dangerous Serene Lotus Praying Mantis, stalking along graceful and true, and capable of moving with terrifying speed and vanishing in the next second after a strike seized its prey. It had been given a wide and cautious berth.

Spiders, now, I'd seen none of them, as many of them were naturals of Poison and susceptible to Shadow, and so had fallen easily into the influence of the Dark Realm. Now I was falling into a rolling, twisting carpet of Spiders, who were being impaled, trampled, crushed, bitten, and clawed apart by some frightened, angry Wolves brought suddenly into a combat situation and having no choice but to obey and defend themselves. I brought up my Shards, and noticed the difference in Mana intensity instantly.

This place had a third or less of the raw magical power of the Beast Realm, so the Mana didn't converge on me as easily or anywhere near as powerfully. That included my Valences. I could tell instantly I was not going to be getting free recharges off my Valences here, there was too much leakage into the ambient Manafield for that to happen. Indeed, I doubted I could manifest my Wrath at all here externally, as if the connection to Heaven was severely gimped or cut off.

Yet another reason I was dropped into the Beast Realm first, I deduced, instantly dropping into Combat Focus and gamer mode. I now had an ammunition restriction, a finite supply of firepower. I didn't even know if my Reserves would work correctly right now, but I was pretty sure that Windfire for archery wouldn't; I needed to be using the local Mana, and anything less was going to be disrupted.

That meant exactly three hundred and forty-three points of Mana in my Seven Stars, which incidentally were now pulsing excitedly as the restraining pressure from the Beast Realm was relieved. This was a combat zone! There were things dying! Vivus was ready to come, and I had been ready to break through!

I drove my Will at the invisible wall around my Matrix and Stardust, the absence of the restraint upon my Stars from the Beast Realm making it feel like the adamantine barrier had now turned into brittle stone, and I pounded on it once, twice as I fell through the air. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Goddamn, did that hurt! It felt like my mind cracked, and my entire nervous system jangled with diamond glass razors for a second. My Stars reacted instantly.

My 'Light' Star snapped forwards into my Matrix Core, glowing with Light. Shadows of it reached out in all directions, gathering in spare Mana and forming it from the scattered Void darkness within, condensing it into more Stars gathering about me... and the mirrored reflections of my Valences there. Each of my original Stars snapped out into a reflected Core, forming the start of a new Starmap Pattern in the Order of Cohesion there: Light, Lightning, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Ice.

It had absolutely no magical value, but it had incredible profound meaning. One set of seven Stars became seven sets of seven Stars, with the Stars of my original Startrail forming the hearts of them, new ones coalescing in to support them. One Matrix at the center of six additional Matrixes, forming a perfect hexagon of support, the strongest geometric form to do so. Forty-two new untempered Stars, with no Mana in them!

The Adept-Level spells required spending seven Mana, which meant I could have done so forty-nine times with my brightly-burning and Boosted Tier-7 Stars. Alas, I didn't know any of the Patterns, and hadn't been able to learn any of them from the Great Beasts without my Starfield opened. Ah, well, such was life. My Novice spells were more powerful than a starting Adept's spells, anyway. Below me were a lot of Spiders.

Most of them were focused on the Wolves, given how many Spiders were getting mauled so quickly by them, but the thing with Spiders is that they have so damn many unblinking eyes, those eyes are attracted to motion, and I was literally an ideal-sized bit of prey falling slowly out of the sky right into the middle of them. Well, fuck them!

Noble pointed as a whole lot of different energies swirled over a dozen Shards, and I let them go, condensing them into a point, Spellwarping them into a Ray, Splitting that Ray with a force prism, and then Chaining that Ray through every damn Spider that was getting close to me. The Spiders were definitely not prepared at all for those Rays of Firefrost Force to burn through them and freeze them solid at the same time their innards were blasted apart.

Leaping Chains of energy connected over twoscore Spiders in a long interlinking web of Holy Banefire against Vermin. The Spiders convulsed, tumbled, leapt this way and that, and died. I hit the ground as gently as a leaf in the Hands of the Angels, swearing, every Spider within a hundred feet of me dead for the moment. But the tide of them covered literally hundreds of acres, and more were scrambling my way, completely undeterred by the way the others were burning.

Moreover, they were launching bristle-missiles at me! Hissing foot-long hairs as tough as steel began to cut through the air around me as I crouched and swore, spitting out my Flight spell and adding a point of Mana to it.

Sticking low to the ground as Air Magic bubbled happily around me, reacting incredibly well to the rigid strictures and forms of a Valence-Cast spell, I glanced towards the violent explosions of energy coming to my right as I tracked after the Wolves, who had cleared a good chunk of ground and thus the number of Spiders I would have to kill. Crimson fire and purple lightning were exploding over the crawling carpet of massive Spiders, blasting them open and charring them dead.

Great vines were whipping back and forth, clubbing more of the Spiders, while shafts of Light reflected off descending spikes of Ice and upthrusting spears of Stone, forming Walls of Light, Ice, and Earth to intercept and ward off the Spiders who relentlessly tried to climb them, or amazingly were tearing them apart with the spikes on their hairy legs or rapidly filling them full of bristle-missiles. And then there was me.

I flicked up my Darts now, not blowing a Valence, but attaching all the Metas I could to it, including the Holy Metas. Vermin were mindless Brown Neutral things, not the ideal targets for a full set, but Zealotry was designed with just these sorts of situations in mind. Not all situations where the power of Good was needed were against Evil, and natural forces and creatures were frequent obstructions of Goodness as it went about doing what it must. Nature didn't care, after all.

A Purified spell was only expressly useful against Undead and Fiends, so I was losing the die size increase. Still, when agglomerated with Banespell, the +5d6 Kicker damage being popped was Maxed to 30 by Consecrated Spell and increased by 50% by Blessed Spell. A +45 damage Kicker was enough to kill any of the Servant-Class Spiders outright, something like driving a Holy grenade into their guts and briefly illuminating them from the inside as it killed them.

If there were any that were too close, I could Chain the Dart to them, and although the base damage was almost nothing, the +45 Kicker of golden Holy force and clear-to-yellowish Vermin Banefire worked just fine, passing through multiple lesser Spiders and leaving explosions of Holiness inside them that made them curl up and die in midstep instantly. The Spiders seemed to want to run past and get at that furious display of magical defense behind me.

I didn't see who or what was putting it on, and didn't have time to do so, keeping up a constant rotation of my two Darts and employing them to make sure no Spiders got close to me, and that I was killing them fast enough to stay out of range of the bristle-missiles they were launching all around me. My Shields and Force Armor pinged and flickered into visibility occasionally as random hits bounced off them, while I wove instinctively through the random barrages, avoiding most of them.

Arcane Fist Class Levels were so damn useful, and the Intelligence bonus to AC as a mystical, spiritual time-sightish feel to avoiding damage in combat was definitely saving my bacon right now. One of the big Spiders was bulling its way towards one of the trailing Warrior Wolves, who had one on his back, another in his jaws, and was trampling on another.

I flashed a Dart into the Spider's head, drawing the Wolf's attention, and he brought down his head, a frill of spike-like thorns acting just like a braced spear as he suddenly lunged forward. The Spider with lights flaring inside its eyes from Holy Banefire smashed its chittering jaws and pedipalps into the thorns, while the Wolf's tough hide dealt with the spiked legs flailing at it.

It was the Wolf's turn to charge forward, using his greater mass to bowl over the Spider as he tore its head apart, ripping it open in passing and causing a fountain of greenish-yellow gore to settle over him. If it was poisonous, and I was pretty sure it was, the Wolf didn't even notice, which I ascribed to his Plant-enhanced body, and he kept on charging along after the rest of his pack.