CHAPTER 16 PART 1 OF 2

THE BRAWLER

The rest of the afternoon Korah respected Lucas’s wish not to talk, but she continued to watch him with obvious concern. Lucas had used the Healing Nexus and a Fractal Mind to regrow his Combat Spiders Legs, then spend the rest of the afternoon hunting. Every time they paused, an intolerable tension began building in his Aura until he pushed on, so he kept as busy as he could.

After spending hours hunting and finding nothing bigger than a possum, Lucas sent his Combat Spiders off on their own. They could cover ground much faster, and had excellent instincts for sniffing out prey. The Arachs were getting better at reading Lucas’ intentions without any spoken communication. Hunting prey for their Broodlord was an instinct never far from the surface, so Lucas didn't have to try hard to get his intentions across.

His two new Ambush Spiders were different. When not given any specific instructions they began trailing one of the Scouts wherever it went. Their hunting behaviour had been taken from a totally different species than the Combat Spiders, despite looking the same. The Ambushers had their behaviour derived from the same species as the Scouts, one that used spotters to set up ambushes. Lucas supposed that the Ambushers were trailing the Scout in the hopes it would act as their spotter.

Lucas called over the Scout in question. Seeing them together made their relationship clear. In the presence of the Ambushers, the little Scout’s Aura had taken on an air of authority. As the spotter, the Scout would usually lead its own squad of Ambushers when hunting. Although Lucas had shrunk the Scout to the size of a rat, the social structure of the original Arach species was still intact.

Lucas contemplated freeing the Scout from its ‘Scouting’ duties so it could hunt with its Ambushers outside of the Scouts hundred metre roaming range. With the Combat Spiders all off hunting, that would leave Korah and himself exposed without any backup if they ran into something dangerous. He decided, instead, to keep the Scout performing its usual duty and thus, keep the Ambushers nearby. That way they would be a maximum of a hundred metres off if needed.

The authority structure of their relationship got Lucas thinking about making combat squads of spiders with their own captains. If he could isolate that behaviour and combine it with other species, it could be an important tool if his army of spiders ever got large enough to require internal leadership structures.

It was late afternoon by the time one of his remaining scouts flashed a warning. It turned out to be some kind of massive, warbling, turkey-ostrich type thing. Almost as tall as Lucas, it looked strong enough to fight but ran for its life when it saw Korah coming. It was fast and surprisingly good at hiding. They spent much of the afternoon flushing it out of hiding spots and trying to corral it into a corner. It would have had no trouble escaping under normal conditions. However, the Scouts found every one of its hiding spots and always seemed to be able to predict the direction it would bolt, fanning out in that direction ahead of time.

Lucas used its energy, along with his own, to hatch his third Combat Spider. His entourage of spiders now included: 3 Combat Spiders, 2 Ambushers, and 4 Scouts. One Scout was perched on his shoulder acting as a set of eyes, while the others scanned the nearby forest. Lucas had managed to open his eyes a little despite the glare. It was uncomfortable, bordering on painful, but it was the only way he was going to train his eyes to withstand the daylight again. The headache from eye strain was gradually easing now that twilight was setting in.

Korah began setting up camp and Lucas started pacing. Decided that they needed even more firewood, he went to look for fallen trees. It was getting harder to prevent his teeth from clenching, and his hands kept balling into tight fists on their own. A horrible sensation kept building until he felt like hitting his head on a tree to get rid of it. Darkness gradually took hold of the shadowy forest floor, and in the silvery light innocuous collections of bark or leaves began to resemble eyes, pleading desperate eyes, that girls eyes

Something was very wrong. This was not just guilt. It was the way she had looked at him before she died; she had refused to believe that he would betray her hope, her trust. He felt betrayed too. Where was that person? The person he had always been. That was who she had reached out too. Was he so weak that a fear of being alone was enough to totally undermine his sense of right and wrong? He thought he knew himself, and the ‘Lucas’ that he knew would simply not be able to do that. She must have seen that in his Aura, and clung to it despite everything.

There was no one to blame but himself. When it happened he was full of adrenaline and on the edge of panic, but now he was left feeling disgusted, so revolted by himself that it made him physically nauseous. That was bad enough, but something had happened to his Aura that made it much worse. It felt like a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding. It constantly stained through any attempt to mask it, and was repeatedly taking him back to that scene, over and over. In fact it was getting harsher and more cruel each with every repetition, like a brand was being drilled into him; hypocrite, betrayer, murderer.

By the time he made it back to camp, Lucas felt frayed and raw. It felt like his emotional ‘skin’ had been rubbed off and even the slightest touch now would be impossible to tolerate. Korah continued to mind her own business, but she looked worried as she pulled feathers out of the giant turkey.

The moment he sat down Lucas delved into his Brood Nexus, determined to focus on working out a new spider design. He needed new ways to diversify his arsenal, not knowing exactly what Caleb would throw at them. The Combat Spiders were based on the Cave Arach template. By default they had Chitin Scythe martial-arts and good fighting stats. That made them powerful in direct confrontations against a single opponent. To counter this, the Deep Arachs had hunted Cave Arachs using defensive group tactics; a shield wall, or a kind of spider ‘Testudo’. Groups of humans could do something similar quite easily, which could leave him at a disadvantage if Combat Spiders were his only weapon.

To solve this he needed to create a ‘wall breaker’ type. A massive Arach with oversized Chitin Scythes to act as a shock trooper. Its job would be to break open defensive formations, allowing the Combat Spiders access to isolated enemies. For that it would need massive strength and size, thick armour, and self healing. Lucas got to work on one of his eggs, customising the little embryo inside.

The first problem was that the Mana cost of the design increased exponentially with the Arach’s size. This effectively put a cap on how large the spider could get. He stopped when the design had reached the size of a minivan, then started bulking out its armour. He made it front heavy, sort of like a battering ram. The Cave Arachs had four Scythes by default. Lucas extended the foremost two, creating massive blades for heavy sweeping strikes. The second set, he reverted into proper legs to help with balance. Next it was time to add self healing.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

For that, he summoned a Fractal and gave it the Regeneration Nexus he had won from the Rock Bone bear. The Fractal fed the data patterns from the Regeneration Nexus to Lucas, who used the Brood Nexus to apply them to the embryonic spider. Doing so increased the Spirit stat of the design, which would help it in other ways, but also increased the cost by a further 2 Mana. With the already extensive modifications, and increased size, it was set to cost a formidable 37 Mana to hatch.

Lucas closed his interface and withdrew himself from his Nexus. Korah had lit a fire in a deep pit and skewered the turkey-creature with a lance of wood. It was currently roasting over fire and letting off wonderful smells. Lucas figured he should learn how to cook, or maybe find a way to do something else useful to help Korah. It was completely dark now, thankfully, so he finally closed his Map ability and looked around with his own eyes. Doing so felt like setting down a burden that he had been carrying around all day. He supposed that meant he was giving his Spirt stat a workout. A quick glance at his Character Sheet showed that he was 47% of the way to 7 Spirit. He knew from his other stats that past 50% progress went much slower, but still, that was impressive.

Having 7 Spirit would mean he could give another ability to his Scouts and hatch them using just his own Mana pool. It also meant he could modify his Combat Spiders to have self healing capabilities, using the Regeneration Nexus, and still be able to hatch one a day without needing any sacrifices. That would drastically increase the capabilities of his forces.

Lucas watched the little embers from the fire spin up into the night sky, they shone like tiny suns to his night adjusted vision. The serine innocence of it somehow felt like a lie, a lie to mask something cruel and repulsive. With a disgusted groan he realised it was his own Aura he was sensing, it was tainting everything. Refusing to give it a chance to take hold of his emotions, he delved back into his Brood Nexus. The immersion of the Nexus absorbed all his senses as he started to watch the new Wall Breaker in the dreamscape training.

The little embryo went through various dreams designed to hone its instincts. The creature's modified body was reflected in the dream, which resulted in a number of unusual outcomes as it was subjected to the usual Cave Arach training. When trying to learn the Scythe martial art it found all of the usual systems quite useless, and resorted to pulverising its opponent from above. The poor creature was repeatedly frustrated as its smaller and more agile opponents consistently dodged its big obvious swings. The build up of frontal armour limited the ways its Scythes could move, making its attacks easy to predict and avoid. Usually the duel ended up with its back legs getting crippled, compounding its mobility issues as the opponent attacked its vulnerable abdomen. Lucas was sure he could do better.

He made comprehensive modifications to the Wall Breaker, based on the weaknesses he witnessed during the dreamscape training. When he ventured back into the dreamscape the Wall Breaker had more evenly distributed armour, stronger legs, and much more mobile Scythes. The improvement did not come immediately. At first the dreaming spider struggled to get used to its new body shape. Lucas simply watched as it went through several iterations of its training sequence, growing more confident each time. The dreamscape seemed set on recycling the ‘duelling’ sequence over and over. Perhaps because it continued to fail.

The frontal armour was still impenetrable, but now it could sweep its Scythes across wide arcs. This made its attacks much harder to dodge when chained in quick succession. The real game changer came when the Wall Breaker added the power of its new legs to the attacks. Launching itself forward when attacking added tremendous power to its Scythes. This also greatly reduced the time the enemy had to react. Seeing the Wall Breaker develop a unique fighting style based on its new body design was a revelation. Giving his modified eggs time to dream before hatching would improve their performance significantly. If he had hatched this Wall Breaker before giving it a chance to go through this dreamscape-training, it would have to learn everything during real battles.

The Wall Breaker now was capable of beating its smaller opponents consistently in one-on-one duels. Most duels were over the moment they started, the Wall Breaker surprising its enemy at the outset of the battle with a sudden dash, followed by two sweeps of its massive Scythes. Agile opponents would typically avoid the low swing by jumping over it, which set them up perfectly for the second swing that smashed them out of the air. Feeling happy with the changes so far, Lucas withdrew his consciousness from the Nexus trance.

The night was quiet, the fire was getting low, and Korah was already sleeping. A bright moon filled the campsite with silver light. Korah had left some of the roasted turkey-beast next to him, but he had no appetite. His eyelids seemed to want to close on their own. He yawned deeply. Getting to sleep was going to be hard. His Aura was already trying to push another round of reliving the day’s events into his consciousness. Lucas doubted he would be able to escape it long enough to get to sleep. Even if he did, he felt too frayed and vulnerable to handle whatever nightmares awaited.

With a sigh, he picked up his Brood Nexus and got back to work. As if the Wall Breaker itself desired a greater challenge, its training sequences began including scenarios facing multiple enemies at once. That was exactly what he had planned for it, so perhaps it recognised his intentions somehow. The simulated fights against multiple attackers quickly demonstrated how unsuitable its current body plan was.

The Wall Breaker’s opponents could take it down easily by surrounding it and launching coordinated attacks from multiple angles. To combat this, Lucas moved the spider's eyes around its chest plate so it could see from every angle. Even with omni-direction awareness, attacks from the rear continued to be the most common cause of defeat. He did not want to add heavy layers of armour all over, so he added shield plates to the upper segment of its rear legs. These worked similarly to the Deep Arach’s; able to deflect attacks from multiple angles independently, or be pressed together to form large plates for heavy attacks.

Lucas continued to iterate the design with small adjustments between the dreamscape battles. Through trial and error he honed the design until it was agile and deadly, despite its immense size. The spider itself worked to develop a strategy that effectively made use of its unique body plan to take on large groups of enemies. This tended to involve a burst of action at the very start to eliminate as many enemies as possible before they started to coordinate. It would then change to defensive tactics, conserving energy and striking suddenly when one of its enemies became isolated or exposed.

Battles of attrition suited it perfectly. Wearing it down over time was nearly impossible due to the Regeneration ability, which allowed it to recover to full fighting strength four times before exhausting its Mana supply. Best of all, the changes had made it more cost efficient, bringing the Mana required from 37 down to 29.

‘Yeahh, I’m gonna go into mass production on these. But a new name is in order… Brawlers’.

Happy with his work, Lucas got out several eggs and modified them to the Brawler design. The little embryonic spiders could spend their time dream training until he was ready to hatch them. Exiting his Nexus again, Lucas saw that the sun was bathing the forest in dawn light. No food and no sleep. His thoughts felt fuzzy and his Aura was trembling erratically. He still had no appetite, but forced himself to eat some of the cold turkey meat. Korah was already up, about to fill in the fire pit she had dug the night before.