Chapter 82: 76: A Spider in the Night

“Hm, let’s try this one,” you say and click on [Offensive Trait] to acquire a new trait. [Summon Duration Trait] sounds tempting enough but in the end, you decide that you can live without it for now. You’re already too reliant on your summons as it is, so investing in some personal power only makes sense. The description of the trait is so vague and broad that it could be the most overpowered trait you could have or the most useless one. You hope for an increase in power to every spell you have: [Shadow Bolt], [Submission], [Aphrodisiac Mist], [Summon Imps]… the lot of it.

As you ride on your spider through the plains under the cover of night, you open up your spell tab for a quick inspection of what—if anything—has changed. The moon is nowhere to be seen, and what little light the stars provide is barely enough to see where the spider puts her feet, but the tab that you open up before your eyes emits light like a smart-phone. It doesn’t make your hands or the spider appear brighter, so you suspect you’re the only one who’s able to perceive this light for your own convenience. Which is convenient, since you don’t want to alert everything and everyone within a five-mile radius to your presence.

Anyway, the first spell you check is [Summon Imps].

[Energy cost: 120
Summons 8 Imps under your direct command. The imps carry daggers for melee attacks and can each unleash several fireballs.]

The fact that the energy cost did not increase is probably a good thing since it’s getting out of control quite rapidly. But even combined with the number of imps remaining unchanged, it still does not mean your spell did not improve. They could just be stronger after all. Your current spider didn’t grow bigger, meaner and faster, but you might just need to re-summon it. Later, you think. You need to conserve energy after all. You take a look at your main offensive spell.

[Shadow Bolt - lvl 3
Energy cost: 25

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Deals 4*X magic damage to a single target by firing a single bolt of dark energy at the speed of an arrow.]

“Not bad,” you smile. After doing some basic third-grader math, it appears your [Shadow Bolt’s] power increased by roughly 33%. At the very least your investment in this trait has not been a complete waste.

[Drain Life – lvl 2
Energy cost: 15
Deals 1,1*X magic damage to a single target, healing you for the same amount by firing three dark-green spiked claws at the speed of an arrow that tears life essence out of the target.]

By comparison [Drain Life] is doing much less damage, but it is a leeching spell, so that’s to be inspected. Not to mention that it’s still level 2. When you finally reach Ranville, you’ll need to find some… “volunteers” for [Submission] and [Aphrodisiac Mist] testing.

What if you don’t find your “comrades”? “Allies”? “Party members”? “Servants”? They’re certainly not your friends. You probably count on one hand the number of people you’ve interacted with and have not killed and/or [Submitted]. Ariadne (who’s gone), Pythia (who you sent away before you end up murdering her), and Chi (who attempted to murder you at least twice). The catacomb slaves hardly count, since you don’t even know their names, and as for goblins… They’re loyal to your sister, not you.

Now that you think about it, it is kind of depressing. Then again, is it? You are rapidly growing in power. And you’ve had more sex in the past week than you’ve had— On second thought, let’s not go there. It must be the delirium from the lack of sleep that makes you think about useless things.

“Get ready!” You shout to your eight-legged summon and then say, “[Summon Spider]!”

Your spider disappears and reappears, with you landing on it, with far more grace than back in the forest. By the end of the night you’ll either master this mount swap technique with the grace of an elf or end up with a broken neck.

Either way, if you don’t find your harem, you’ll probably just have to make a new one. And even if you do find them, you could still expand it! Some young and naïve adventurers—low in power but with high potential. Why not? You’ll have to be careful though. You don’t want to attract too much attention too soon. And the main goal is to find a way to acquire a reliable teleport spell to try and save your sister if at all possible. You can always return to this—or other cities for that matter—after that.

But what if you miss out on some cool ass-kicking ninja, that will end up dying in a dungeon without your intervention? Even if you literally [Submit] him or her and rob that person of their free will. Is that worse than if they went out and died? Chi, would no doubt say “yes”. Maybe it’s possible to make allies without [Submission]? Yeah, because the whole “Pythia” experiment was such a success… Well, she did help you in that fight against Chi. Though you probably wouldn’t have needed her help in the first place if she didn’t aggro the proud bunny. Pythia must have quite the body count to her name—

“Ah, [Summon Spider]!” you shout when you realize that you’re flying ahead without a mount. The tragedy is averted, at the last second, and you continue on. Why were you even thinking about all that? Well, it can’t be helped that your mind goes wandering in strange places. How many more hours of this? Ah, if only you could just put yourself on “autorun” function. Any decent mmo has it, why can’t this world have something similar. Having your mount disappear every twenty minutes? Who did quality of life control for this universe? Right—it’s not a game.

You see a single dim yellow light far in the distance. Ever so vaguely you make out the dark shape of a house. Somebody’s not sleeping. The area is obviously inhabited. If a big enough town exists in this area, it needs basic resources like food. Obviously there are bound to be farmers and ranchers. You never run into any, though. At one instance you might’ve saw a humanoid figure a couple dozen yards from you. But the speed at which your spider ran past it, combined with your rapidly decreasing attention span makes it just as likely that you simply saw a log. Or nothing at all.

As the horizon brightens, you see the stone walls of a town in the distance. If that’s Ranville, you’ll reach it with the first rays of the sun. All that’s left to decide is which inn will you sleep in for the next twenty hours. It's a good thing you still had some silver coins on you that survived your "revive". Though how much those coins are worth remains to be seen.

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