Lia’s plan hit a snag at the same time she hit level four. After that point, the rats no longer gave her any experience whatsoever. Still, up until that point, there had been a suspiciously large number of rats about. The first rat she looked for took at least five minutes to find, but every rat after took less than a minute to find.
She was guessing that Amelia was teleporting them in for her to catch, and she didn’t really have any objections to that. It really was just a matter of reducing the time she wasted looking for the rats, so she didn’t mind Amelia babying her in that regard. And she would have spent a lot of time looking, she had to kill twenty or thirty before she got to level four.
Even so, she didn’t feel ready to take on the goblins, not in a straight fight.
| Name: Lia Mios | ||
| Race: Young Lesser Swarm Battlemaster | ||
| Level: 4/7, 0/30 EXP | ||
| HP: 39/39 | Stamina: 39/39 | Mana: 25/25 |
| Strength: 19 | Defense: 19 | Dexterity: 17 |
| Magic: 5 | Magic Defense: 7 | Mental Fortitude: 21 |
| Title: Conqueror of Death | ||
| You have died and lived to tell the tale. Your life signature becomes undetectable by effects that only search for living or undead creatures, though you may still be sensed by effects that sense both. Provides immunity to instant-kill effects, and any blow that would bring you to 0 HP instead brings you to 1 if you had more than 1 HP. | ||
| Titles: | Skills: |
Her stats were probably on par with whatever the goblins had, and that was the issue. The goblins had equipment, and it was highly likely that more goblins would come to aid the first if she couldn’t kill it in time.
So, she had to make do with what she had. She hadn’t gained any more Skills, but most of hers had leveled up, most notably Presence Detection, Power Attack and Venomous Sting. Presence Detection and Power Attack had just gotten stronger, but Venomous Sting had gained quite a bit more.
| Venomous Sting |
| Level 3: 8/400 EXP |
| Applies venom to your sting attacks. |
She had been making a point of practicing with her stinger, and she had gotten to the point where she could hit the moving rats about three quarters of the time. That would probably be fine for the much larger goblins, though she would need to try and hit parts that weren't armored.
And Spiderclimb would actually come in handy for that. She had leveled it up twice, and with that and her new, larger pool of Stamina, she regenerated Stamina just as quickly as Spiderclimb drained it, and she would be able to use it to climb up onto the goblins and find a good target.
Her last acquisition was a title, “Ratbane”. It…just doubled her damage against rats and rat-like enemies, which was completely useless in the situation she was in.
She surveyed the field of corpses she had made. There were a lot, and it seemed like such a waste to leave them there. She couldn’t store anywhere near all of them in her Dimensional Storage, didn’t have a good way of transporting them, and had already eaten more than her fill.
Something itched in the back of her mind, much the same as it had when she had wanted to make the wizard that killed her part of her swarm, but hadn’t known she could do that. There was something else she could do with all of this that she wasn’t realizing, and that bugged her.
Well…she was full up on Mana and wasn’t planning on using more in the upcoming fight, so it was Analysis level two to the rescue! Hopefully. There was a real possibility it ended up being useless information.
| You and your Swarm have the ability to create “nest” material out of raw matter. |
Alright, that explained what she could do with that stuff, but didn’t explain how or why this qualified as information she “knew or once knew”. Did her new instincts qualify as information she “knew or once knew”? That had to be it, right? And why were there quotation marks around “nest”?! What did that even imply?
Lia paused a moment to take stock of her situation. She currently had a bunch of corpses, little in the way of Mana, instincts that were screaming at her to make “nest” material, and no idea how to do so.
In essence, she had nothing. And, when in doubt…she figured she may as well try everything and hope something worked out. So, she began to experiment. Her tail-slash-stinger was up first; it had venom, so…maybe something else could come out too? She had no idea how that or anything else worked, so it seemed…potentially plausible.
It was not. The stinger decidedly could not make nesting material, and after half a minute or so of straining, she felt foolish for trying. So, that being out…what was next? Did she just…poop the stuff out? Did she have some organ similar to what a spider used to make silk? Wait…could she even poop? She hadn’t felt the urge to go to the bathroom once, so…
She did a quick check. Yes, she definitely had some hole in her behind that felt more or less like it would be used for expelling waste. But…at the same time she also felt a sort of disgust at using her own excrement as building material, and that probably meant there was some other way of doing what she wanted.
She didn’t have any other conspicuous holes on her body, though, which was leaving her stumped. But the time spent waiting and experimenting was not time wasted. During her self-experimentation, her Mana had slowly been ticking back up, and she now had enough for a use of Analysis level one!
| There is one very conspicuous opening you have not checked. |
If she could physically interact with the window, she would have stung it then and there. She had figured that much out herself. Of course there was an opening she hadn’t checked, where else would the “nest” material come from, her sweat?!
No, that was wrong, she definitely didn’t sweat anymore. Still, what had she not checked? She probably couldn’t cry the stuff out, as that seemed incredibly inefficient, so what…oh, right. Her mouth. Could she…regurgitate whatever this “nest” material was somehow?
She tentatively tried, and found, to her surprise, that a stream of something smoothly slid up and out of her mouth. It wasn’t like throwing up, it felt like…like she was spitting out water that she had been holding in her cheeks.
The “nest” material was an odd sort of off-brown, and she was pretty sure she could make out bits of fur and bone inside of it. Had she…eaten that without even realizing it? She thought back and realized that, yes, she had, and she had enjoyed it, too. It tasted no worse than the meat had, so she really hadn’t paid it any attention.
She took a moment to process that before turning her focus back to the “nest” material. It had a consistency similar to clay, but she knew that wasn’t necessarily something that would hold true forever. She felt like there was some way to harden it, but she didn’t know what yet.
But that was fine. She would have time to experiment later, and having a bunch of hard material on the ground was little better than having a bunch of corpses around.
Speaking of which, how was she going to process all those? She’d still have to eat them, and she wasn’t hungry, so…
Wait, that wasn’t fully accurate. She wasn’t hungry, but there was something else that she hadn’t quite been able to separate from the sensation of hunger before. A sort of…emptiness that she couldn’t quite put into words.
But…that got her wondering. There was little to no meat in the “nest” material she had made, it was mostly stuff that she would normally think was inedible. So, if she could process that sort of stuff, what else could she process?
She skittered over to a nearby tree and used her mandibles to peel some bark off of it, then began to chew. It didn’t taste nearly as good as the rats had, but it also didn’t feel like something she couldn’t eat. She swallowed, and that emptiness abated somewhat.
But she could also tell that it hadn’t been immediately turned into “nest” material; there was still some sort of processing time. Furthermore, though she couldn’t put her finger on why, it didn’t feel as efficient as the rat materials had either. She was going to get less out of bark than she would an equivalent amount of rat hide and bone, and it would take longer to boot.
She lowered her head and scooped up some dirt. It, too, was sent into…whatever was processing stuff to make “nest” material, but it was even less efficient than the bark, so she abandoned the prospect of using dirt as an easily-accessible building material, not unless she was desperate.
Unfortunately, as enlightening as this little experiment had been, it didn’t give her a solution to her corpse problem. It would probably take hours to convert all the rats into “nest” material, and then she’d be stuck with a huge pile of material that she didn’t know what to do with.
Actually, could she eat the “nest” material and transport it in that secondary stomach or whatever it was? She scuttled back over to the “nest” material she had regurgitated earlier, grabbed some with her mandibles, and began to chew.
It went down easy, fortunately, and she was able to fill the rest of her secondary stomach using most of the stuff.
And then it hit her. If she could figure out how to get it on her body and harden it…couldn’t it be used as armor? Right, that would definitely help close the gap between her and the goblins, she just had to figure out how to harden the stuff.
And she had a little pile remaining to experiment with, too. She hadn’t been able to fill up completely due to the bark and dirt she had eaten, so she scooped the remainder into a small pile and began to mess around with it.
Her saliva didn’t seem to harden it, which made sense; if it did, then the stuff would thicken up as soon as it left her mouth, and that obviously didn’t happen. Her next guess was the venom from her stinger, so she positioned the stinger over the small mound and willed some of her venom to drip out.
The moment it touched the “nest” material, there was a visible change. A sort of…smooth shine appeared across the stuff, and when she poked at it with a limb, she found that it was as hard as a rock.
It stuck to what it was on, too; when she tried to move it, a clump of dirt came with, held together by the grass and weeds that it was on when she had hardened it.
Alright, time for a test, then. She furthered hollowed out the hole that had been left by the material before regurgitating a large amount of “nest” material inside, so she had a sort of bowl. She then poked in a limb, and withdrew it.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t coated in the stuff like she had hoped. It seemed that the clay-like substance didn’t stick with her body, which…also made sense. It would get really frustrating if she was trying to shape stuff and it just stuck to her.
That also meant, though, that armor was out. Or, at least, it was out until she could figure out a way to keep the stuff on her.
She looked at the “nest” material for a few moments more before deciding to just leave it there. She would eat another of the rats and get her secondary stomach filled, and start processing what she could, and after she had killed a goblin and come back, would repeat the process.
So, she got to work, and a few minutes later she was on her way back to the market, heart pounding. She wasn’t going to get more ready than this, so she had to just do it. She slipped her way back into one of the stalls, and proceeded as she had before, carefully moving through the area.
And, after five or so minutes, she found a goblin. She hunkered down in the stall she was in and studied the goblin carefully. It wasn’t particularly watchful, and it didn’t seem like it could see well in the dark, either; it stumbled about, occasionally bumping into stalls or tripping over the uneven ground.
Good. She could work with that. She slowly began to move closer to it, utilizing the times it stumbled to make larger movements without as much risk of being detected. And, soon, she was within a few feet of the thing, and it was none the wiser.
She used Spiderclimb to get up one of the stalls, then jumped. She soared through the air and pulled out her wings, using them ever so briefly to extend her jump so she could land on the goblin.
Unfortunately, as much as the thing had poor night vision, its hearing was just as good as normal, and her wings weren’t exactly quiet. It whirled around just in time to get a face full of Lia, who wasted no time activating Spiderclimb to cling onto its face.
And then she activated Power Attack and stung, aiming for one of the eyes, then going in to bite the nose. Her aim was off, and she only managed to hit the area below the eye, but it was enough.
| You have dealt 17 damage to Goblin Sentry! You have envenomed Goblin Sentry for 16 seconds! |
The goblin screeched, hand flying to its face as it attempted to squish the thing that was clinging onto it. Lia was already moving, but the goblin was fast, and managed to clip her leg on the way.
| Goblin Sentry has dealt 8 damage to you! |
Lia grit her metaphorical teeth, and chomped in on its ear as she came in for yet another sting.
| You have dealt 9 damage to Goblin Sentry! |
And then, as she clung onto the goblin’s ear, the “nest” material began to flow. She hadn’t meant for it to come out, but she had really latched on tight, and instincts took over. As the odd material made contact with the goblin’s skin, it flattened out, spreading so it was covering as much of the goblin as possible.
She didn’t have time to process what that meant. She could already hear scrambling and yelling in the market beyond, and the goblin she was on was still thrashing about.
| Your venom has dealt 6 damage to Goblin Sentry! |
She moved about to the back of its head, avoiding the now-slower hand that tried to swat her. She hadn’t stung that hand, either, so it was odd that it was moving so strangely. Was her venom having a reaction to the body as a whole because of how close to the brain she had stung it?
No time for that. She stung and bit once more, praying that this was the end.
| You have dealt 6 damage to Goblin Sentry! |
A soothing warmth filled her as the level up healed her wounds and restored her resources, and she quickly hopped off of the goblin and began to sprint away. After about a minute or so, she was clear of the site of the battle, and a window popped up in front of her.
| Spiderclimb has leveled up! |
| Spiderclimb |
| Level 4: 153/500 EXP |
| Allows the user to stick to walls and ceilings. |
Ah, right. Skills that weren’t directly relevant to the fight taking place were filtered from awareness, and their levels didn’t show until the user thought they were ‘out of combat’. She was slightly surprised to see Spiderclimb level up, though. She wasn’t even halfway to level four before starting that fight, and here she was about a fourth of the way to level five.
It just went to show how much better for experience it was to use Skills in a stressful situation like combat. Especially a combat with an enemy that was stronger than you were. Which…the goblin actually counted as being, due to its equipment and reinforcements. If that fight had gone on any longer, things would have gotten ugly.
She was lucky she had been able to get such a good shot in on the face. Damage dealt to important bits like that was increased, and she certainly wouldn’t have been able to get through that armor. But…still, what was going on with the “nest” material?
She paused, thinking through that. It…if it had managed to cover all of the goblin before it died, then…then she would apply her venom. And it would…she mentally frowned, her instincts telling her that this was something important.
It took only a few more moments of focus to realize what it was. The “nest” material wasn’t just for building, it was for conversion. That was how she made something part of her swarm, she covered it with nest material and then hardened it, forming a cocoon of sorts around the creature.
Right, new priority. She was going to find another rat or two, and she was going to convert them. If the goblins were going to band together, then she just had to make a bigger band and overwhelm them that way.
She grinned inwardly. Now that she knew how to do it, her instincts were screaming at her to get a swarm going, and she was more than happy to oblige.
Fighterman481 Does hardening material using a single drop of venom as a catalyst make sense? Probably not, at least in terms of how things work IRL, but...well, this isn't supposed to really make sense so I just ended up rolling with it.
Anyway, that's all for me for this chapter, as always, thanks for reading!
(P.S. we get a better name for "nest" material next chapter, so don't worry about it being all awkward like it is now for a long time)
Lia’s plan hit a snag at the same time she hit level four. After that point, the rats no longer gave her any experience whatsoever. Still, up until that point, there had been a suspiciously large number of rats about. The first rat she looked for took at least five minutes to find, but every rat after took less than a minute to find.
She was guessing that Amelia was teleporting them in for her to catch, and she didn’t really have any objections to that. It really was just a matter of reducing the time she wasted looking for the rats, so she didn’t mind Amelia babying her in that regard. And she would have spent a lot of time looking, she had to kill twenty or thirty before she got to level four.
Even so, she didn’t feel ready to take on the goblins, not in a straight fight.
| Name: Lia Mios | ||
| Race: Young Lesser Swarm Battlemaster | ||
| Level: 4/7, 0/30 EXP | ||
| HP: 39/39 | Stamina: 39/39 | Mana: 25/25 |
| Strength: 19 | Defense: 19 | Dexterity: 17 |
| Magic: 5 | Magic Defense: 7 | Mental Fortitude: 21 |
| Title: Conqueror of Death | ||
| You have died and lived to tell the tale. Your life signature becomes undetectable by effects that only search for living or undead creatures, though you may still be sensed by effects that sense both. Provides immunity to instant-kill effects, and any blow that would bring you to 0 HP instead brings you to 1 if you had more than 1 HP. | ||
| Titles: | Skills: |
Her stats were probably on par with whatever the goblins had, and that was the issue. The goblins had equipment, and it was highly likely that more goblins would come to aid the first if she couldn’t kill it in time.
So, she had to make do with what she had. She hadn’t gained any more Skills, but most of hers had leveled up, most notably Presence Detection, Power Attack and Venomous Sting. Presence Detection and Power Attack had just gotten stronger, but Venomous Sting had gained quite a bit more.
| Venomous Sting |
| Level 3: 8/400 EXP |
| Applies venom to your sting attacks. |
She had been making a point of practicing with her stinger, and she had gotten to the point where she could hit the moving rats about three quarters of the time. That would probably be fine for the much larger goblins, though she would need to try and hit parts that weren't armored.
And Spiderclimb would actually come in handy for that. She had leveled it up twice, and with that and her new, larger pool of Stamina, she regenerated Stamina just as quickly as Spiderclimb drained it, and she would be able to use it to climb up onto the goblins and find a good target.
Her last acquisition was a title, “Ratbane”. It…just doubled her damage against rats and rat-like enemies, which was completely useless in the situation she was in.
She surveyed the field of corpses she had made. There were a lot, and it seemed like such a waste to leave them there. She couldn’t store anywhere near all of them in her Dimensional Storage, didn’t have a good way of transporting them, and had already eaten more than her fill.
Something itched in the back of her mind, much the same as it had when she had wanted to make the wizard that killed her part of her swarm, but hadn’t known she could do that. There was something else she could do with all of this that she wasn’t realizing, and that bugged her.
Well…she was full up on Mana and wasn’t planning on using more in the upcoming fight, so it was Analysis level two to the rescue! Hopefully. There was a real possibility it ended up being useless information.
| You and your Swarm have the ability to create “nest” material out of raw matter. |
Alright, that explained what she could do with that stuff, but didn’t explain how or why this qualified as information she “knew or once knew”. Did her new instincts qualify as information she “knew or once knew”? That had to be it, right? And why were there quotation marks around “nest”?! What did that even imply?
Lia paused a moment to take stock of her situation. She currently had a bunch of corpses, little in the way of Mana, instincts that were screaming at her to make “nest” material, and no idea how to do so.
In essence, she had nothing. And, when in doubt…she figured she may as well try everything and hope something worked out. So, she began to experiment. Her tail-slash-stinger was up first; it had venom, so…maybe something else could come out too? She had no idea how that or anything else worked, so it seemed…potentially plausible.
It was not. The stinger decidedly could not make nesting material, and after half a minute or so of straining, she felt foolish for trying. So, that being out…what was next? Did she just…poop the stuff out? Did she have some organ similar to what a spider used to make silk? Wait…could she even poop? She hadn’t felt the urge to go to the bathroom once, so…
She did a quick check. Yes, she definitely had some hole in her behind that felt more or less like it would be used for expelling waste. But…at the same time she also felt a sort of disgust at using her own excrement as building material, and that probably meant there was some other way of doing what she wanted.
She didn’t have any other conspicuous holes on her body, though, which was leaving her stumped. But the time spent waiting and experimenting was not time wasted. During her self-experimentation, her Mana had slowly been ticking back up, and she now had enough for a use of Analysis level one!
| There is one very conspicuous opening you have not checked. |
If she could physically interact with the window, she would have stung it then and there. She had figured that much out herself. Of course there was an opening she hadn’t checked, where else would the “nest” material come from, her sweat?!
No, that was wrong, she definitely didn’t sweat anymore. Still, what had she not checked? She probably couldn’t cry the stuff out, as that seemed incredibly inefficient, so what…oh, right. Her mouth. Could she…regurgitate whatever this “nest” material was somehow?
She tentatively tried, and found, to her surprise, that a stream of something smoothly slid up and out of her mouth. It wasn’t like throwing up, it felt like…like she was spitting out water that she had been holding in her cheeks.
The “nest” material was an odd sort of off-brown, and she was pretty sure she could make out bits of fur and bone inside of it. Had she…eaten that without even realizing it? She thought back and realized that, yes, she had, and she had enjoyed it, too. It tasted no worse than the meat had, so she really hadn’t paid it any attention.
She took a moment to process that before turning her focus back to the “nest” material. It had a consistency similar to clay, but she knew that wasn’t necessarily something that would hold true forever. She felt like there was some way to harden it, but she didn’t know what yet.
But that was fine. She would have time to experiment later, and having a bunch of hard material on the ground was little better than having a bunch of corpses around.
Speaking of which, how was she going to process all those? She’d still have to eat them, and she wasn’t hungry, so…
Wait, that wasn’t fully accurate. She wasn’t hungry, but there was something else that she hadn’t quite been able to separate from the sensation of hunger before. A sort of…emptiness that she couldn’t quite put into words.
But…that got her wondering. There was little to no meat in the “nest” material she had made, it was mostly stuff that she would normally think was inedible. So, if she could process that sort of stuff, what else could she process?
She skittered over to a nearby tree and used her mandibles to peel some bark off of it, then began to chew. It didn’t taste nearly as good as the rats had, but it also didn’t feel like something she couldn’t eat. She swallowed, and that emptiness abated somewhat.
But she could also tell that it hadn’t been immediately turned into “nest” material; there was still some sort of processing time. Furthermore, though she couldn’t put her finger on why, it didn’t feel as efficient as the rat materials had either. She was going to get less out of bark than she would an equivalent amount of rat hide and bone, and it would take longer to boot.
She lowered her head and scooped up some dirt. It, too, was sent into…whatever was processing stuff to make “nest” material, but it was even less efficient than the bark, so she abandoned the prospect of using dirt as an easily-accessible building material, not unless she was desperate.
Unfortunately, as enlightening as this little experiment had been, it didn’t give her a solution to her corpse problem. It would probably take hours to convert all the rats into “nest” material, and then she’d be stuck with a huge pile of material that she didn’t know what to do with.
Actually, could she eat the “nest” material and transport it in that secondary stomach or whatever it was? She scuttled back over to the “nest” material she had regurgitated earlier, grabbed some with her mandibles, and began to chew.
It went down easy, fortunately, and she was able to fill the rest of her secondary stomach using most of the stuff.
And then it hit her. If she could figure out how to get it on her body and harden it…couldn’t it be used as armor? Right, that would definitely help close the gap between her and the goblins, she just had to figure out how to harden the stuff.
And she had a little pile remaining to experiment with, too. She hadn’t been able to fill up completely due to the bark and dirt she had eaten, so she scooped the remainder into a small pile and began to mess around with it.
Her saliva didn’t seem to harden it, which made sense; if it did, then the stuff would thicken up as soon as it left her mouth, and that obviously didn’t happen. Her next guess was the venom from her stinger, so she positioned the stinger over the small mound and willed some of her venom to drip out.
The moment it touched the “nest” material, there was a visible change. A sort of…smooth shine appeared across the stuff, and when she poked at it with a limb, she found that it was as hard as a rock.
It stuck to what it was on, too; when she tried to move it, a clump of dirt came with, held together by the grass and weeds that it was on when she had hardened it.
Alright, time for a test, then. She furthered hollowed out the hole that had been left by the material before regurgitating a large amount of “nest” material inside, so she had a sort of bowl. She then poked in a limb, and withdrew it.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t coated in the stuff like she had hoped. It seemed that the clay-like substance didn’t stick with her body, which…also made sense. It would get really frustrating if she was trying to shape stuff and it just stuck to her.
That also meant, though, that armor was out. Or, at least, it was out until she could figure out a way to keep the stuff on her.
She looked at the “nest” material for a few moments more before deciding to just leave it there. She would eat another of the rats and get her secondary stomach filled, and start processing what she could, and after she had killed a goblin and come back, would repeat the process.
So, she got to work, and a few minutes later she was on her way back to the market, heart pounding. She wasn’t going to get more ready than this, so she had to just do it. She slipped her way back into one of the stalls, and proceeded as she had before, carefully moving through the area.
And, after five or so minutes, she found a goblin. She hunkered down in the stall she was in and studied the goblin carefully. It wasn’t particularly watchful, and it didn’t seem like it could see well in the dark, either; it stumbled about, occasionally bumping into stalls or tripping over the uneven ground.
Good. She could work with that. She slowly began to move closer to it, utilizing the times it stumbled to make larger movements without as much risk of being detected. And, soon, she was within a few feet of the thing, and it was none the wiser.
She used Spiderclimb to get up one of the stalls, then jumped. She soared through the air and pulled out her wings, using them ever so briefly to extend her jump so she could land on the goblin.
Unfortunately, as much as the thing had poor night vision, its hearing was just as good as normal, and her wings weren’t exactly quiet. It whirled around just in time to get a face full of Lia, who wasted no time activating Spiderclimb to cling onto its face.
And then she activated Power Attack and stung, aiming for one of the eyes, then going in to bite the nose. Her aim was off, and she only managed to hit the area below the eye, but it was enough.
| You have dealt 17 damage to Goblin Sentry! You have envenomed Goblin Sentry for 16 seconds! |
The goblin screeched, hand flying to its face as it attempted to squish the thing that was clinging onto it. Lia was already moving, but the goblin was fast, and managed to clip her leg on the way.
| Goblin Sentry has dealt 8 damage to you! |
Lia grit her metaphorical teeth, and chomped in on its ear as she came in for yet another sting.
| You have dealt 9 damage to Goblin Sentry! |
And then, as she clung onto the goblin’s ear, the “nest” material began to flow. She hadn’t meant for it to come out, but she had really latched on tight, and instincts took over. As the odd material made contact with the goblin’s skin, it flattened out, spreading so it was covering as much of the goblin as possible.
She didn’t have time to process what that meant. She could already hear scrambling and yelling in the market beyond, and the goblin she was on was still thrashing about.
| Your venom has dealt 6 damage to Goblin Sentry! |
She moved about to the back of its head, avoiding the now-slower hand that tried to swat her. She hadn’t stung that hand, either, so it was odd that it was moving so strangely. Was her venom having a reaction to the body as a whole because of how close to the brain she had stung it?
No time for that. She stung and bit once more, praying that this was the end.
| You have dealt 6 damage to Goblin Sentry! |
A soothing warmth filled her as the level up healed her wounds and restored her resources, and she quickly hopped off of the goblin and began to sprint away. After about a minute or so, she was clear of the site of the battle, and a window popped up in front of her.
| Spiderclimb has leveled up! |
| Spiderclimb |
| Level 4: 153/500 EXP |
| Allows the user to stick to walls and ceilings. |
Ah, right. Skills that weren’t directly relevant to the fight taking place were filtered from awareness, and their levels didn’t show until the user thought they were ‘out of combat’. She was slightly surprised to see Spiderclimb level up, though. She wasn’t even halfway to level four before starting that fight, and here she was about a fourth of the way to level five.
It just went to show how much better for experience it was to use Skills in a stressful situation like combat. Especially a combat with an enemy that was stronger than you were. Which…the goblin actually counted as being, due to its equipment and reinforcements. If that fight had gone on any longer, things would have gotten ugly.
She was lucky she had been able to get such a good shot in on the face. Damage dealt to important bits like that was increased, and she certainly wouldn’t have been able to get through that armor. But…still, what was going on with the “nest” material?
She paused, thinking through that. It…if it had managed to cover all of the goblin before it died, then…then she would apply her venom. And it would…she mentally frowned, her instincts telling her that this was something important.
It took only a few more moments of focus to realize what it was. The “nest” material wasn’t just for building, it was for conversion. That was how she made something part of her swarm, she covered it with nest material and then hardened it, forming a cocoon of sorts around the creature.
Right, new priority. She was going to find another rat or two, and she was going to convert them. If the goblins were going to band together, then she just had to make a bigger band and overwhelm them that way.
She grinned inwardly. Now that she knew how to do it, her instincts were screaming at her to get a swarm going, and she was more than happy to oblige.
Fighterman481 Does hardening material using a single drop of venom as a catalyst make sense? Probably not, at least in terms of how things work IRL, but...well, this isn't supposed to really make sense so I just ended up rolling with it.
Anyway, that's all for me for this chapter, as always, thanks for reading!
(P.S. we get a better name for "nest" material next chapter, so don't worry about it being all awkward like it is now for a long time)
