Fia woke up screaming. In her defense, it was hard not to when you woke up to a spider prying your eyelids open, slipping between them, and touching your eyeball. Reflexively, she wiped her eye as hard as she could and then slapped her face in a panic after it skittered out.
Notice! A [Common Spider] under your control has died!
Notice! No experience gained for killing monsters under your control!
“W-w-w-what the fuck!?” She screamed, looking around. Then she noticed that the half-finished drapes were torn down and her web weavers were nowhere to be found. She looked around in a half-sleep, half-adrenaline fueled daze, and identified the threat before she actually saw it.
[Brown Bear]
Un-Awakened
A brown bear. Normally very dangerous to you at your current level.
“Oh fuck!”
She scrambled up in a skittering mess of legs and lunged at her loot pile, grabbing hold of the shield and sword. The bear turned, noticing her for perhaps the first time, and immediately let out a guttural huffing snarl, and swiped at her. It connected with her shield and might as well have connected with steel, the bear’s claws not even scratching the wood. It did, however, push her back, slamming her spider-abdomen into the ground. She retaliated with wild swings into a thrust of her sword, and a few of them connected.
Notice! You have slashed [Brown Bear], dealing 37 damage.
Notice! You have stabbed [Brown Bear], dealing 62 damage.
She dismissed and ignored damage notifications, pulling her sword away from the bear. The bear roared in its gravelly way and backed up a few steps before standing on its hind legs and swiping at the air between them. In the torchlight, the bear cast a massive shadow against the wall of the cave, and she was intimidated by her size, even emboldened by the safety of [Gestation Period]. The beast dropped back down onto fours and let out another chilling moan-roar, before taking a few startlingly fast steps towards her and attempting to bite her around the shield. She viciously tugged the shield to the side, and the rim made contact with the bear’s snout and teeth, breaking fangs and causing blood to drip between its snarling lips. This time, it backed up and turned sideways, seeming to regard her with more caution.
“No, fuck you, you’re not getting away.” She snarled back herself, before lunging at it in turn. This time, the stab missed as the bear stood up, then it came crashing down on her, pinning her underneath two massively heavy paws as her legs splayed out underneath her.
She felt liquid on her back as the beast attempted to gore her, and she felt the scraping of claws against her carapace. She managed to slide out, an action that would have been impossible if it had elected to keep her pinned, and awkwardly rolled to the side before standing up before a very confused bear.
The dance continued as she slashed at it, matting its fur in blood and painting the floor of the cave, while it threw her around with powerful swipes and even locked her shield arm in its vice-like jaw. With a final stab, her sword plunged deeper than before, feeling no Health resistance this time, and buried itself deep in the bear’s neck, the tip of the blade poking out of the other end.
Ding! Congratulations! You have defeated [Brown Bear]! You have gained 600 experience points.
Notice! You have unallocated experience points! Automatically adding 3,901 experience points.
Ding! Congratulations! Sufficient experience gained for you to reach level 2. +20 Health +15 Stamina, +50 Mana, +1 STR, +2 CON, +1 DEX, +3 AGI, +5 SEN, +5 INT, +2 WIS, +4 WIL, +0 CHA, +1 SOU
Ding! Congratulations! Sufficient experience gained for you to reach level 3. +20 Health +15 Stamina, +50 Mana, +1 STR, +2 CON, +1 DEX, +3 AGI, +5 SEN, +5 INT, +2 WIS, +4 WIL, +0 CHA, +1 SOU
…
Ding! Congratulations! Sufficient experience gained for you to reach level 7. +20 Health +15 Stamina, +50 Mana, +1 STR, +2 CON, +1 DEX, +3 AGI, +5 SEN, +5 INT, +2 WIS, +4 WIL, +0 CHA, +1 SOU
Ding! Congratulations! For reaching level 5, you have been offered the [Web Spinning] racial Skill. Would you like to accept?
Ding! Congratulations! For reaching level 5, you have been offered a new monster for [Spawn Monster]. Would you like to accept?
Notice! For defeating [Brown Bear] inside your territory, [Brown Bear] has been added to your list of available monster spawns.
“What the fuck.” Fia sighed, showing off her amazing and varied vocabulary, before collapsing into a heap on the ground next to the corpse of the bear. Sighing, she looked back at the entrance of the cave, where the curtain door had been finished and then subsequently torn down. It was still pitch-black outside, so she was sure it’d only been a couple of hours since she fell asleep. Checking her [Message History] she saw that all four of her Web Weavers had been killed, probably automatically attempting to defend the dungeon. She’d need some muscle now, and hopefully her new mana pool would allow her to summon something better. Before that, though, she would check her new skills out.
[Web Spinning]
Cost: -10 Mana/second, -10 Stamina/second
You are able to naturally secrete webs from compatible parts of your anatomy.
The skill wasn’t particularly descriptive, so she wasn’t entirely sure of its limitations. Would it be a good attack? In all likelihood, probably not at all. What would the quality of her webs be? How much would come out in a second? Testing would be required, but she didn’t see a real reason to turn it down. Similarly to her unused-thus-far [Spider Climb] ability, it would only cost mana and stamina upon activation. The dual-cost of the Skill suggested it was at least somewhat decent. She mentally accepted the skill.
Next up, [Spawn Monster] had apparently been offered a new monster, but checking out the skill she didn’t see a new monster in the list. Slightly confused, she accepted the notification and was greeted by a new one.
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Notice! List of available monsters is affected by your dungeon’s theme. Your dungeon currently does not have a theme. List of available monsters will be generated based loosely off of a suggested theme. Suggested theme: Arachnids.
Available Monsters: [Cave Fisher], [Clockwork Spider Thief], [Clockwork Weaving Spider], [Common Scorpion], [Desert Scorpion], [Giant Scorpion], [Giant Spider Queen], [Giant Wolf Spider], [Hairy Spider], [Hairy Hunter], [Red-Banded Spider], [Skith], [Skitterhaunt], [Steeder], [Sword Spider], [Tarantula]
Interesting. She had thought that the only way to gain more monsters would be to lure them into her dungeon to kill them. Turn out you can just be handed freebies. This complicated things greatly. For one, decision paralysis was a real concern here. She’s only allowed to take one of these for now, and there’s no telling how the list will look next time. Is it randomly chosen? Will all non-taken choices persist for her to take in the future? Will all of these choices except one be lost forever? She didn’t know, so for her choice she would have to decide between future use and immediate use. She could take something immediately useful now, but that could become obsolete later on, or she could invest in the future and take something less useful now and more useful in the future.
After reading all of the descriptions, which were really short ones admittedly, she found that she wasn’t interested in the scorpions at all. Maybe it was part of her Fated Arachne mindset, but they didn’t call to her. Sure they’d probably be a bit tankier than spiders, and claws and a stinger would be better for straight combat, but spiders could also have venom, some spiders could stab with their legs, scorpions couldn’t spin webs, and spiders just… called out to her more. The hairy spider and the tarantula were both common unawakened regular old spiders, and she felt that she was fine on that front. The skith was a really interesting choice, as it was an aquatic creature that lived in the ocean, though it could also breathe air. They were also technically crustaceans instead of arachnids, so she wondered why that got offered up. Though having a water-abled creature might be a boon to her, as she suspected that literally none of her current lineup was great in water. Then again, she also lived in a cave. Then again again, she could probably trap rooms to fill with water in the future. She put the skith in the maybe category.
Similarly to the skith, the cave fisher was not a spider, though it was an arachnid, and a subterranean one at that. Living in a cave, that was an obvious choice. They had spinnerets near their mouth that they could produce sticky filament from, they had claws like a scorpion but a thin whip-like tail, and they were apparently extremely sensitive to vibrations in the ground and air both to the point that they didn’t need eyes. They were also really strong and she wasn’t sure she could even summon one yet.
Steeders were giant spiders used for hunting and as beasts of burden by some subterranean races. Apparently males and females were different enough that they performed different roles. That would basically give her access to a utility monster and a combat monster for the price of one, but they were otherwise boring. Sword Spiders were on par with cave fishers in strength, but they were more just spiders with sharp spiky carapaces. Giant wolf spiders were as advertised, large burrowing hunters good at running and bad at webs. Giant spider queens were slightly stronger giant spiders.
The skitterhaunt was another very interesting choice, being a species of slime that possessed the empty carapace of large insects, spiders, arachnids, crustaceans, and other chitinous creatures. Though they apparently could not survive long outside of a shell. They also were very acidic, and the strongest monster on the list so far.
The hairy hunter was another tarantula, but much larger, much better at hunting, great at camouflaging, and very strong to boot. She found it profoundly boring, and it seemed to do much better in forested environments. The red-banded spider had potent venom and pounced at prey after shooting webbing at them. It wasn’t the strongest on the list, but she could potentially summon it.
The two clockwork spiders seemed interesting, but she wasn’t sure that constructs were what she was looking for at the moment. Maybe in the future.
Her three main choices were the skith, the cave fisher, and the skitterhaunt. The latter two were very strong, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to summon them quite yet. The skith was more suited to water environments but could still function on land. The rest, she felt, could probably be covered by monsters she already had available, at least for now.
In the end, she chose the skith.
[Spawn Monster]
Cost: Varies
Effects: Spawn a monster from your list of available monsters. The monster spawned is classified as a Monster, not Fated or Freewilled, regardless of what the species usually is. The monster obeys all commands to the best of its ability and cannot harm or attack the Dungeon Master unless explicitly and clearly ordered to do so by you. The monster does not need to eat or drink, and is sustained by mana provided by the Dungeon Core.
Available Monsters: [Arachne], [Aranea], [Arrack], [Brown Bear], [Common Spider], [Ettercap], [Giant Spider], [Skith], [Silent Spider], [Sorrow Spider], [Web Drake], [Web Weaver], [Werespider]
The brown bear was also available for summoning, though she wasn’t interested in it at all. Sure, it could help, but the branding would be all wrong. She needed something that skitters, and a skith would skitter just fine. She hoped. If it was different from what she was imagining, she’d be profoundly disappointed in herself.
She activated [Spawn Monster], watching as the rainbow-colored flame grew in her palm, bigger and bigger until it was about the size of her chest. Then, it left her hand and floated to the ground, sprouting legs and growing a long, long tail. She felt her mana points plummet to nothing, then she felt more mana begin entering her before also being channeled into the spell. Then the flames began coalescing into the creature, the skith.
It was about a stride and a half long, or about five feet. One foot of that length was its body, a carapace that looked very similar to a horseshoe crab with some forward-facing holes inset like small tubes with eyes set inside. It had six legs, two pedipalps, and two smaller mandibles, all of which ended in sharp stabby points. The pedipalps in particular looked like the most dangerous weapons it had, having larger dagger-like ends, though every single one of its limbs would clearly puncture your gut. Where its carapace ended, a thick tail began, though it was unarmored and smooth it was clearly muscular and powerful. The tail slowly tapered off towards the end where a single vertical triangular tail fin sat at the end.
She felt fully and entirely mentally drained, ready to take a nice long nap, but the mana thing she felt bugged her a lot. Checking her mana, she saw that her new cap was a little over 350 mana points. And it was sitting at zero, now. She pulled up her dungeon status and was surprised to find out that it had pulled mana from the Dungeon Core also, instead of fizzling the spell. In total, the skith seemed to cost about 400 mana points to summon. She pulled up her own status next to the dungeon’s status, but before she could make a serious attempt to look at all the changes, her low-mana headache and fuzziness started to do her in.
“Guard me and the core… I need to take a nap.”
[Dungeon Status] Name: Unnamed Dungeon Master: Fia Rush Theme: None
Core Vitals:
- Health: 172.2
- Mana: 303.76 / 351.88
Floors:
- [1: The Cave]: 1x [Skith]
Rooms:
- [1: The Cave]: 1x [Skith]
[Status]
Name: Fia Rush
Species: Arachne
Age: 19
Level: 7
Class: Dungeon Master 7
Vitals:
- Health: 172.2
- Stamina: 35.1 / 141.9
- Mana: 0 / 351.88
Stats:
- STR: 16
- CON: 22
- DEX: 56
- AGI: 33
- SEN: 45
- INT: 40
- WIS: 22
- WIL: 34
- CHA: 10
- SOU: 16
Titles:
- [Dungeon Master]
- [Reincarnated]
Perks:
- [West Firnian Language (Human)]
- [Labyrinthine Understanding]
- [Acrobatics]
- [Insight]
- [Webweaver]
- [Lowlight Vision]
Skills:
- [Status Check]
- [Identify]
- [Spider-Climb]
- [Spawn Monster]
- [Web Spinning]
Spells: [None]
Resistances: [None]
Status Conditions:
- [Gestation Period]
Affinities: [+]