Aside from the sewing zombies, which, funnily enough, were mostly zombies of muscular bearded men, the room had two more doors, one on Sofia’s right and one straight ahead, while the wall on the left was obscured by a stockpile of messily piled up silk coils.
Sofia decided to simply keep going forward, walking awkwardly in between the sewing stations under the zombies’ empty stares. Entering another corridor, she closed the door behind her with a weary sigh.
“At this point it might be less stressful to just fight them… Hey, candle’s on this side this time,” she noticed, looking at the lit candle on a small stand right in front of her, while the other side of the corridor was only complete darkness.
Now that I’ve seen those guys sewing it makes me wonder…
Should’ve started with that… Sofia grabbed the candle, which instantly extinguished it, and she identified it.
[Candle]: Just a candle, there is nothing very special about it.
Really now? What is it that’s suppressing every other source of light, then? Some kind of large area passive magic?
I’m of half a mind to activate the Winter melody and kill myself a few times to see if the soul damage gets rid of whoever is doing this.
That’s dangerous for Cinthia and Everelle if they are in the effect area, though, so I’ll have to hold myself back… Anyway… I was wondering about the wax, care to tell me more about that? Sofia asked Mr. Scribe as she identified the candle again.
[Strange wax]: The candle wax seems to burn very slowly and is surprisingly brittle, provenance unknown. Might contain diluted traces of magical ingredients.
So there is some bit of magic in there after all. This is where we would have benefited from a higher level [Identify] isn’t it? Well, whatever.
Sofia let down the candle and was about to leave but she had a sudden urge to pick the candle back up and bite into the wax. She chewed it a bit before spitting it back out.
“Tastes like sap. I guess they grow trees somewhere here…”
Her curiosity satiated, Sofia dashed forward in the dark. She was already getting bored of walking slowly and carefully through the pointless corridors, and had two runes up to save her skin if her carelessness got the best of her somehow. The long bone tendrils of her armor touched the door first, warning her to promptly stop by slamming her dragon armguard’s claws into the wall. She managed to stop with her face almost touching the door.
Taking a step back and opening the door a little, she was surprised to not see anything, as the room was also in complete darkness.
Another trial room? She wondered as she carefully stepped in. but unlike the previous time, there were no candles lighting up one by one, instead, just strange clicking sounds coming from many directions, and quickly coming closer.
Oh hey, now that’s a tune I recognize. I see, I see. Perfectly logical that this would be here. Sofia thought as she jumped back and charged an explosive bolt in each hand. They should consider themselves lucky, I’m not going to eat their heart this time.
Not waiting much, Sofia released the bolts when she estimated she had backtracked through about half of the corridor.
The bolts exploded much sooner than she expected, blowing her back slightly, which meant that either the creatures were following much faster than Sofia’s hearing suggested, or that her aim was ass and that she hit a wall.
Through the violent explosion, she heard many loud screeches, but got no kill notification.
I managed to miss a shot in a straight line…
Annoyed, Sofia turned back and jumped straight into the lingering flames of the explosion. The pained screeches of the creatures revealed their positions, and Sofia blindly struck with her scepter.
When the scepter didn’t hit a wall instead of its target, it broke legs and burst open the heads and bodies of the creatures, which fought back by spitting stick strands at Sofia and biting at her armor.
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.221]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.214]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.233]’
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‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.207]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.249]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.248]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.236]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.186]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.212]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud prowler - lv.241]’
‘You have defeated [Silkbud Matriarch - lv.299]’
Covered in sticky stuff in spider entrails, Sofia read the notifications.
I expected more of them. Sturdy for their level, I can’t believe they survived the bolts. And no wonder that last one took twelve scepter hits before it died. It’s the only one that got through the armor. She thought as she felt the hole in her armor near the waist, which was quickly closing itself.
Shallow wound but it feels a bit hot. Not strange for spiders to have venom, doesn’t seem to do much to my mana-weave muscles, though. I’m not losing any life from it either.
Sofia was trying to clean herself from all the web that was on her, but it was quite sticky and hard to get off.
“Wait, the matriarch was 299. Got a stone?”
Sofia kneeled down to blindly search the remains of the barrel-sized matriarch’s corpse which was already half mush. Wouldn’t be surprised if I broke it.
Plunging her hand inside of the creature’s entrails, Sofia probed around its soft insides. There were no bones, which would have made the search easier, but she quickly found what she was looking for anyway, a fist-sized rock-like thing near the middle of the spider’s busted abdomen.
[Inert Physikstone]: The Physikstone of a Matriarch Silkbud spider, might make for decent-looking jewelry.
After storing the stone, Sofia started channeling another bolt until the heat got rid of the sticky webs she was covered in, and she dispelled it before continuing on. The room the Spiders had been in was full of webs and more bolt heat was needed to clean it up and let Sofia find the one door this room had to offer, which was behind a pile of big and hard spider eggs that Sofia chose to not touch. If they had survived the heat then they’d have a chance at life.
There’s not even a candle this time…
Sending the bone tendrils from her armor to investigate, Sofia found out that this was directly another room, with no long corridor separation. The room seemed mostly empty, with a lone stone coffer in the middle.
Ohohoh… A treat, for me?
Sofia approached the closed tomb, eager to see what kind of skeleton she could pilfer today, sending some mana to probe the inside as soon as her fingers touched the heavy stone lid. Her mana failed to penetrate the stone.
Huh. Some kind of seal, maybe? Did they entomb someone alive or what?
Since her mana failed to penetrate the thing, identify would fail to produce any result, as such, she chose to just try and open it, holding her ring of Zar ready to absorb the mana of any released magical trap, just in case. She forcefully pushed the stone lid, expecting it to be held in place by the magic or at least to be a bit heavy, but it flew open as if pulled back on its own.
Wha-
Sofia heard a swift woosh sound, and before she could understand what had happened, the lid had closed back up, somehow separating her torso from her legs. She fell face first into a prickly bath of corrosive liquid.
A TOMB MIMIC?! ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?
Sofia quickly controlled the bones of her armor to completely close any hole that would let the corrosive liquid touch her, as it was actually strong enough to seriously hurt her, and the continuous burn did not let [Singularity Edict] negate the damage.
Even then, plenty of the liquid had already entered her otherwise empty veins, the light within doing nothing to stop the liquid from flowing in, and Sofia’s health was quickly dropping. At a glance, she had thirty seconds left before her first unlife rune popped.
She tried to start channeling an explosive bolt, but the mana was absorbed by something as soon as it left her body, making the spell fail and backlash into her scepter. She then punched up against the lid, but it barely shook from the hit. Next she tried to grab the admin dagger at her hip, but it had been part of the half of her which was left outside of the monster.
Shit.
Her next move was to try to hit the monster from the inside, as from what she knew about mimics, they had some internal fleshy bits which should be vulnerable, and with a bit of luck she might even be able to find and crush its mana heart.
However she found none of that. This was simply a vat of stone too sturdy for her to punch through fast enough, filled with a worryingly potent corrosive juice.
Almost all of her spells failed, except for the bone control of [Bone dominus], but that alone was not extremely useful at the moment.
Trying to store the corrosive liquid into her ring did not work, and Sofia was quickly running out of time and options.
Fuck… This is disgusting but it might work!
Sofia opened her helmet to expose her demon form’s large mouth, and, pushing her head toward the bottom of the mimic, she started drinking.
If she couldn’t leave the mimic, she only needed to make its insides safe, Sofia had thought. And what better way to get rid of a mimic’s stomach acid than her own Lumian stomach, from which the food she ate seemed to simply disappear, so much so that she had not needed to use the toilets once ever since her racial evolution.
The mimic’s acid was positively disgusting, and Sofia would have probably puked out some magical liquid if not for the acid eating everything inside of her faster than anything could possibly come out. Still, somehow, the level of corrosive liquid inside of the mimic was going down fast as Sofia gulped it down with her dissolving face and throat.
Only about a third of the liquid remained; then she died.
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