The Way Ahead

Chapter 91a: Eightfold Strategy

There was something thrilling about willingly going into a dangerous situation prepared for anything. It reminded Edwin vaguely of the build-up to a rollercoaster, a hint of adrenaline spiking his bloodstream and shutting down extraneous bodily functions. If he turned his Perception inwards, he could actually feel his body directing blood to his muscles and away from his digestive system.

“I want to try and do this on my own,” he told Inion, who was poking her head over the side of the cart, “I’m not going to get sloppy like I did with that one bandit. I genuinely want to see how well I can handle myself.”

She shrugged, “’Kay, but if you get badly hurt that’s on you. Only so much I can do this far from water anyway.”

“Do you need to do something about that?”

“Hm? Nah, it’s fine. Doesn’t hurt too much, basically just itches.”

While ostensibly still steering the cart, Edwin left his stick sitting next to his hand and an array of alchemical weapons inches from his other. All he needed to do was figure out what danger was present, and he’d be all set for a proper alchemist strike. His first instinct, his firevine cocktail, was no fireball… but it would do. He also made for himself a helmet out of solid apparatite, leaving only a tiny slit by which he could breathe out of.

Edwin’s carriage rumbled along, and his eyes landed on the scene in front of him, immediately letting him know that he was right to be on guard. It wasn’t quite a massacre, but there was a lot of blood. From the looks of it, a group of four had been traveling along the road, only to be set upon by… something. Bandits, maybe?

No… not quite. All of their possessions seemed to be basically untouched, which wouldn’t match if they’d been killed by robbers. An animal, then?

Edwin disembarked from the carriage and signaled for Bill to wait while he investigated the bodies. Even the birdsong faded away as he got closer, the somber mood extending even to the wildlife.

None of them- one halfling, two humans, and something that looked like a human but didn’t register as one to Almanac- were slain by a weapon Edwin recognized. Or maybe, he realized, they were stabbed by needles and then allowed to bleed out. That was what Anatomy was telling him, anyway. What sort of creature killed like that?

Heck, what kind of creature killed its prey and then just let it sit out? They must have been killed some time ago unless they all died without a sound, which seemed… unlikely…

Edwin straightened as fast as he could, head whipping around as he prepared to confront…

Nothing.

Just the silence.

Was he being paranoid? He didn’t think so, but he cast furtive glances at the surrounding woods while he rapped upon the stone path with his stick. If he was lucky…

Nope. Not lucky.

The stick struck the stone without so much as the faintest clack, as Edwin’s suspicions were confirmed. Whatever was here, whatever was responsible for these deaths was still here, and it was dampening all sound to the point of near silence. He was literally deaf to whatever threat might be lurking nearby. What sort of creature was he dealing with, and what had he gotten himself into?

Edwin pulled out his firevine cocktail, ready to throw it at a moment’s notice…

A blur of motion caught his eye, and Edwin leapt out of the way as a barrage of reddish-purple quills flew through the place he’d been standing just moments before. Tracking them back to their source, Edwin didn’t see anything…

Until he unleashed a blast of Identifies, anyway. Then he at least found out what he was fighting, even if he couldn’t see it quite yet.

Adult Titan Bear-Eater

That doesn’t sound good, Edwin thought as he rushed to the side, Longstrider barely taking him out of the way from the next volley of missiles. He could see some sort of ripple in the air from where they originated, and he threw his prepared firebomb as hard and as accurately as possible at the spot.

There was an unholy screeching sound as the silence and invisibility effects broke simultaneously, unveiling a very large, very on-fire spider, covered with violet-red hair lurking just off the side of the road, barely ten feet from Edwin. Worse, it wasn’t a full spider either, but had legs that reminded him of a cat, long, lithe, and covered in thick violet fur. Its head wasn't the normal mandibles of a spider either, but instead had the head of a lion- no mane, though.

It reared back onto its back legs and hissed, the demonic noise screeching like so many metal rods being twisted and broken. Edwin recoiled on instinct, and retreated even further from the massive threat.

It dropped onto all eights, and Edwin’s mana senses informed him of the colossal amount of magic the creature was holding the moment he activated them. It felt like…. It felt like a dark, dry desert littered with time-bleached bones. It wasn’t hot, just expansive, dry, and desolate.

The magic flared and it was extinguished, the flames burning on its back ceasing to exist without so much as a whimper. That... wasn’t great, and didn’t bode well for the fight ahead. Still, Edwin reaffirmed his mind. He wanted to redeem himself. So far, every single fight he’d been in on Joriah had left him critically wounded in some way, or close to it, and it didn’t matter how big the spider was, this time he was going for a clean takedown.

So… time for a plan. He was more mobile than the spider was thanks to Longstrider and Athletics, but it still could travel way too fast, as evidenced by the speed at which the monster leaped forward, its paws blurring into motion while it jumped at him.

It was only because he was ready for something that Edwin was able to get out of the way, and he pushed his physical Skills as much as possible to pull him off to the side, letting the spider jet past him and into the treeline on the other side.

Wait, what? It was way bigger than the space between the trees. How did it fit inside the forest?

It lunged back out at him, and Edwin caught a glimmer of the answer- a Skill surrounded its body, letting it squeeze between the trunks almost like it were made of liquid rather than legs. As it pulled itself into the opening of the road, the spider leaped at Edwin once more, and he had to pull on Longstrider to get him out of the way.

The process repeated a few more times, the spider not apparently learning that Edwin could easily dodge it, at least so long as he didn’t have anything else to distract him. He appreciated it, though, as it gave him time to properly formulate his plan.

So, should I focus on the legs? If I had slipstone, this would be way easier… Hm. I have magnesium now, I should probably make more lime. But okay. Legs. Chop, slip, or trip.

The legs were muscular and enormous, so he probably couldn’t cut them up. Slipping would be preferable, if he had something that might work for such. Also, Edwin was moderately sure that he had seen claws at the end of the catlike limbs, so that was a further complication. That left tripping, which suffered from the same problem as slipping, namely that he didn’t have anything to trip it with, to say nothing of the troubles that came with attempting to trip something with eight legs.

Unfortunately, he didn’t really have access to Sapper’s Apparatus. Oh sure, he had the Skill. But even though he’d brought down the time it took for him to use it, anything that would be large enough to go under the spider’s legs would take him a few minutes of concentration to make, let alone eight of them.

Okay, so its legs may not be as much of an exploitable weak point as Edwin had hoped. What about ways to kill a spider? It seemed more like a tarantula than a black widow, and Edwin hoped that similarity extended to any weak points it may possess. Which were….

He drew a blank. Tarantulas had never really interested Edwin, which meant Memory would have to do a lot more work to pull up any relevant bits of information than it might otherwise need to. Work that he couldn’t really manage while focusing on evading the enormous arachnid. He wasn’t going to have a repeat of his encounter with the Reaper, where he got so distracted he took a perfectly avoidable wound.

Well, spiders were arthropods. While it may have been half cat, the arthropod portions seemed to be basically the same. So, what did he know about arthropods?

Still not much, honestly. But, their exoskeleton was probably weak in the joints, and Edwin would do well to focus his efforts there. Maybe he could stab it with some kind of poison? Set it on fire from the inside?

Edwin’s brain kept racing at a hundred miles an hour, and he realized that despite all of his vague combat alchemy preparation, he’d never actually trained with or practiced actually using his alchemy in combat, and this was perhaps not the best time for a live run, but here he was and so he’d just make the best of it that he could. He’d make more definite plans after this fight.

He spared a glance at the carriage, and noticed that Inion, Bill, and the wagon itself were encompassed by some strange bluish-green Skill bubble, sustained by the fey. Huh. Was that why the spider didn’t seem to notice them? Still, he was kind of glad that the spider was focusing on him rather than them, as he was much more capable of dodging than his hard-working pony and slacker friend.

The spider rushed at Edwin once more, and he finally got a chance to really study it. The bottom side of the spider’s abdomen was free of the glowing violet hairs that shimmered across the rest of its body. Seemed a bit odd, given its size, but he wasn’t going to complain. While no giant glowing eye, it was, hopefully, still a weak spot.

Now, what would he use to hit it? He doubted that poking it with a stick would do much, and most of his arsenal probably wouldn’t be too effective… or he could try his firevine cocktails again, and hope that it could only extinguish itself where it had hair? Or maybe it would recoil again and Edwin could throw a rock at it or something. He did have some apparatite crystals pre-made for that exact purpose, after all.

Okay. So, grab a cocktail and set it off against the underside of the creature’s abdomen. When it recoiled backwards, he’d take one of his crystals and throw it at the section between its abdomen and… main body, whatever that was called. With luck, it would be enough to penetrate through its exoskeleton and he could go from there.

The monster lunged at Edwin again, and landed with all eight legs skittering across the ground, trying to hit Edwin. Fortunately, he was outside the creature’s (admittedly massive) reach, and was able to easily dodge even further away with just a tug on Longstrider.

With the creature’s next lunge, Edwin led the beast further away from the treeline and more onto the stone road. He didn’t want to set the forest on fire, after all. As it approached close enough… there!

A solid underhand lob of his weapon brought it slightly off-center of the spider’s body, breaking open perfectly and igniting the underside of the monster in a massive fireball. Edwin triumphantly waited for the spider to rear back again…

Instead of standing on its back legs, the spider hissed again, and the violet hairs seemed to vibrate. Within moments, the screeching had completely stopped, the sound vanishing alongside all other ambient noise in the area, just like the monster had been doing when Edwin had first approached the area. If that weren’t bad enough, the light around the monster began to shimmer and become hazily obscured. Within a few seconds, the spider was a shadowy blob. Fortunately, it didn’t become invisible, but it still made it hard for Edwin to properly track the creature.

Annoyingly, it extinguished his fire as well. Great. There went that plan, and that hypothesis. He couldn’t even properly throw his apparatite rock because of how shadowy and murky the spider was! No way he could pull off a precision attack when it was like that.

Okay, so what was plan B? There had to be some other great weakness that he could exploit. It was just so big, there had to be something.

Hmm. Square-cube law?

It was commonly known that spiders and ants were absurdly stronger, proportionally speaking, than a human. Except, that wasn’t actually a product of their biology, but rather the result of their size. Anything that small would be much stronger proportional to their anatomy than something of a larger size, and that was pretty much entirely based on the mathematical principle that was the square-cube law.

While magic may have messed with it somewhat, the basic premise should hold. Muscle, being functionally two dimensional, squared in size as a creature became linearly larger- length and width of the tissue expanded. However, volume of both the creature and their surroundings were all cubed­- height, length, and width all expanded.

Thus, it might be more accurate to say not so much that smaller creatures were stronger, than it would be to say that everything around them was way, way lighter. Lifting ten times their body weight simply wasn’t as impressive at those scales.josei

All that was to say, the massive spider in front of him was definitely on the wrong side of the square-cube law. The fact it could even exist was already something of a violation- the respiratory system of arachnids couldn’t scale to those sizes- but Edwin wagered whatever magic allowed it to exist didn’t extend too terribly far. Even from an evolutionary standpoint, why would an ambush predator that was already the size of an elephant need to be magically strong as well? No, much more likely that it couldn’t take that much more weight.

So the update to the ‘make it fall’ possibilities was ‘squish it.’ It… was probably easier than the others, if nothing else, and had the benefit of reminding Edwin of squishing a spider with a newspaper. He could drop his carriage on it perhaps, but that was an awful idea for so many reasons.

A gleam caught Edwin’s eye from where the fallen travelers lay. The one not-human of the group had a sword. It was still sheathed, and the hilt was somewhat obscured, but it might still work. He may not have any actual training with a sword, but he didn’t exactly need it for a direct weapon, did he?

Two steps with Longstrider later and the blade was in his hand. It wasn’t anything too special, but it looked well-made enough to serve Edwin’s purposes. He dodged out of the way from the spider attacking him once again, and a halfhearted attempt of swiping at its legs later, he was by the tree line.

He’d never tried something quite like this before, but Edwin had made sure to pick a tree large enough around that he could feasibly pick it up, but not so large that its diameter was longer than the meter or so his sword was.

The spider lunged at him, but Edwin dodged out of the way and the monster vanished back into the undergrowth. He prepared for its return, but was caught off-guard by, instead of a lunge, a volley of violet hairs being shot at him. There was a Skill involved, he could see, but it looked more like one for accuracy rather than a ‘give yourself the ability to shoot hairs as a projectile’ Skill, and wasn’t that something of a scary thought, that this was just something it could do naturally?

The quills slammed into an unprepared Edwin, seeming to burn as much as cut their way into his gear with a hiss while he looked on in horror.