As I read the sign in front of the skill center, I thought about what we needed.
Removing Skills had potential, but also came at a cost. Removing an ability or part of an ability would weaken us. However, it would also free up more room for other abilities or Keyword abilities that we needed. It was also likely much cheaper than buying stats to create more glut. In addition, this downside wasn't as severe as it first appeared to be. After all, there were parts of some Abilities that I had no use for.
For example, I was pretty happy with most of {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}. However, it had an ability that let me collect Achievement from an enemy as if I had killed it whenever I drove that enemy mad. That ability… had yet to come up even once in two entire lifetimes. That was a pretty good indicator that I had little use for it. At no point had I even found a good way to drive enemies mad - and I had no real intention of finding one in the future, either. Right now, I was happy supporting our group with Extinguish, healing, spatial manipulation, and scouting. I would be more than happy to remove this part of {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}, especially if it gave me another Keyword slot and more Glut.
Similarly, {Echoes of the Deep} had a few parts of the ability that didn’t feel that useful to me. The ability to embody ‘life’ or ‘death,’ for example. Embodying death gave me several abilities, but the only one I actually made use of was empowering my Extinguishes. Embodying ‘life’ was nice… but I only used it when I wanted more [Fortitude]. It only gave me one Grade of Fortitude, which was nice... but I doubted it justified the coast of the ability. Especially since I had lost a rather useful-looking keyword ability last life. At the time, I hadn’t had enough keyword slots to take both abilities that I wanted. If I could free up a keyword, then I could get a much stronger replacement in the future. Not to mention, I had noticed last world that it was very difficult to get my Alteration ability to upgrade. Running into bottlenecks and problems while I was trying to research new abilities and grow had felt frustrating. Perhaps it would be easier to keep growing and improving if I had my abilities customized? If I could find a few useful non-keyword abilities, that would also be incredible. I had gained six more Glut after pushing [Absorption] and [Perception] to Grade 3. If I removed my Swordsmanship Ability as well, that would give me at least 11 Glut to work with. In addition, I would get an unknown amount of extra Glut from removing parts of my keyword abilities. Surely I could find something useful to do with all of that extra Glut.
I was sure that my friends would also find the Skill Center very useful. Market Abilities were powerful, but they also felt like lists of random, useful skills and magic effects tossed together. Having a more optimized, focused build would pave the way for a better future. We could always grab a few niche utility skills from non-keyword abilities if needed. We didn't need those random, minor useful effects to take up our precious keyword slots.
Then, I snapped out of my thoughts. I was hopeful that we could dramatically improve our future progression here… but we still needed to get in, use the facility, and leave with our lives. I needed to stop daydreaming about all of the things we could get out of the Skill Center. That could wait until we succeeded.
I glanced around, and started using my soul sight and spatial sight. I didn’t see any of the spiders in the area, but it was hard to see inside of the building. The walls seemed to have some sort of material that stopped my spatial sight and soul sight. I sighed. Hopefully the spiders were inside, so that we could finish what we'd started.
said Anise.
said Felix.
Since the others also wanted to go inside, I stopped hesitating. We probably wouldn't get another chance to scout out another building in the Spatial Fair before the spiders wised up to our tactics. I just had to hope that my friends and I were making the right choice. With our minds made up, we stepped into the building.
The first room we stepped into looked like it had once been some sort of reception room. There were a bunch of computers in front of a desk, which was near the back of the room. The computers had fallen into disrepair eons ago. There was also a series of moldy ropes, forming a convoluted line that led to the receptionist desk. Finally, there were a bunch of seats occupying half of the room, offering people a place to sit while they waited.
Dust caked everything, except for a few lines of clean wood that looked like spider tracks. I blinked in surprise. Why were the spider tracks so obvious? It made it rather easy to track down the hiding area of the spider. I followed the line of spider tracks, and, indeed, found a little spatial contortion underneath one of the chairs. The spatial contortion wasn't quite the same as an alternate layer of reality. Instead, it was more like a little pocket dimension. It was formed by bending the geometry of the area, to create a perfect den for the spider. I squinted a bit harder, in order to see past the twisted geometry. Then, I grinned.
Inside of the little spatial contortion, I could see a spider. However, my grin didn't last long. In addition to the spider, there was something rather unusual in the spider den. It looked like a fishing line. One part of the fishing line 'hooked' the center of the spider's den. The other half of the line extended far into the distance, in a series of broken fragments of space and geometry. I couldn't tell what the line was, or what its purpose was. It appeared to be made out of essence, although I couldn't identify which type. It almost felt like all four types of essence were rolled together, but... different.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
How strange.
I said.
I glanced at the spider. It was vibrating in tune with my singing, so I was pretty sure it could hear us. However, it wasn't making any move to attack us. It almost seemed afraid.
Was it waiting for its stat boost to return? Perhaps it was hoping that we wouldn’t notice it until it had regained its strength?
I grinned.
The Wanderer of Lost Silence didn't seem confident in fighting us. Once its extra four Grades of stats were removed, it seemed far less confident than before. When we were outside of the building, I had worried that the three spider monsters might recover and ambush us. Now, we had an opportunity to get rid of one of them.
I said, sending an image of the spider I had located to my friends.
I frowned. If we fought two of the spiders at regular strength... I didn't think we would live. But leaving without any gains would also make this trip a waste.
Sallia and Felix started shuffling their position in the room. Felix first moved me over to an open spot on the floor, so that I could wriggle around a bit if needed. Anise took up a position nearby, in case someone needed to grab me and flee. I raised myself up to a sitting position, and then aimed my umbrella at the spider den.
The spider’s little spatial contortion looked had three exits. Felix took the metal from the backs of each chair, and used them to form a few arm-sized cubes of metal. Each cube was positioned in front of one of the exits of the spider’s den, and had a small pocket for the spider to exit into. I waited with bated breath, to see if the spider responded to Felix’s preparations… but it didn’t move. Odd. Perhaps it could hear outside, but couldn’t see?
I hesitated, as I wondered whether we were about to spring an unknown trap. However, time was running out, and we needed to keep moving. So I slammed a low-power extinguish into the spider. Its candle of life flickered under the assault, before a bit of its life force disappeared. I prepared to teleport the spider away if it made for the thread of essence, but it didn't move towards it at all. Instead, it launched itself out of its spatial tunnel… directly into Felix’s block of metal.
Felix immediately forced the block of metal to collapse on itself. The spider’s body lit up with manifestation essence, and then I heard a horrible, grinding sound. It was the first time I had heard something in the Spatial Fair produce sound besides our group. It only lasted for a split second, but the sound drilled into my ears. Then, I blinked, as I saw the block of Metal Felix had used to seal the spider and try to squash it.
The block of metal looked like it had run through a woodchipper. Before Felix could reform it, the spider cut a passage through the block of metal, then dashed out.
It looked none the worse for wear, but Felix's metal block had bought time. Sallia swung at the creature, and the arachnid tried to spin out of the way. However, with four Grades of [Agility] missing, the speedy monster wasn't anywhere near as fast. Instead of dodging Sallia’s sword and counterattacking in a blur of motion, it barely managed to squeeze out of the way. It leapt towards her legs, afterwards, but its movements almost felt slow in comparison to before. I had plenty of time to track its movements and blast it with some lightning. The smell of burnt hair invaded the room as the spider was knocked onto a chair.
Then, before it could do anything else, Sallia swung her sword again, splitting the spider in half. The two halves tried to wriggle back together, as the spider's exoskeleton disappeared and it glowed blue. Sallia didn't give it time to regenerate. She started wildly hacking at the spider's body until the eight-legged terror stopped moving.
A moment later, I got a System notification.
Slaughter: Assist in killing a Wanderer of Lost Silence for the first time.
Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.
Achievement +80, Achievement +1.00
My Achievement went from 9,096.67 to 9,177.67 Achievement. I was gratified to see the increase… but more than that, I wanted to celebrate something else.
We had killed another Wanderer of Lost Silence, and this time it hadn’t taken us multiple limbs and several near-deaths to achieve. We had actually deal with one of the spiders, with minimal losses. We had entered the Skill Center and overcome the first barrier.
Moments after I started mentally celebrating, I saw the spider's den start to unravel. And with it, the little thread of essence in the center of its den started to unravel. If before, it had resembled a fishing line, now it looked like a fruit with its skin peeled off. My eyes widened in horror, as I reached towards it with my alteration essence.
My heart tightened, as I realized I had celebrated too soon. We had dealt with one threat, but killing a spider had its own dangers. And we were about to find out what happened when a Wanderer of Lost Silence died.