Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? Volume Chapter 9

The battle over, the fire dragon looks down at the magma sea it created.

Its monster lackeys are present, but no sign of the spider.

The monsters from its army have Heat Nullification, but the spider definitely didn’t.

There’s no way it could have survived a direct hit from the fire dragon’s strongest breath attack.

That’s what you think, idiot!

A giant blob of poison appears above the fire dragon.

This poison is nothing like the Weak Poison I wrapped myself in before.

It’s my lethal Deadly Spider Poison, mixed with the maximum amount of Paralysis.

The deadly poison lands a direct hit on the dragon, its defenses down after seeing an apparent victory.

The huge glob of poison breaks through the Flame Wrap and bites into the dragon’s body.

That’s when I throw in a full-powered scythe attack!

The perfectly timed blow lands right in the gap where the flames have been momentarily extinguished by the deadly poison.

I pour all my strength into that one attack.

It’s a double combo of Deadly Poison Attack and Rot Attack!

The Rot Attack shreds the dragon’s hard scales while the poison sinks deep into its body.

My ultimate physical attack is pretty amazing, if I do say so myself.

The fire dragon lets loose a roar of pain and falls into the magma.

I quickly pull myself back up to the ceiling with my thread.

I’m sure the fire dragon was convinced it saw me die.

It must be pretty confused right about now.

But the particulars of how I survived are simple.

For starters, I didn’t get hit by that breath attack.

In fact, I never came down from the ceiling in the first place.

This play was made possible by the Heretic Magic level-6 spell: Phantasm.

It’s one of the trump cards I’ve been hanging on to.

Phantasm is basically a spell that creates hallucinations.

I used the dragon’s momentary panic when it was about to swallow the poison I synthesized to cast the spell on it.

Without an opportunity like that, Heretic Magic could’ve been easily dispelled by Imperial Scales combined with the fire dragon’s high resistance.

To the fire dragon, it must have looked like I dropped to the ground, but I actually just kept clinging to the ceiling.

Then, when it let its guard down thinking the battle was over, I swooped in with the surprise attack.

Even a fire dragon is bound to take a lot of damage from my strongest physical attack.

For a moment, I consider using Phantasm to escape.

But I can’t bring myself to run away again.

Sure, I’ve spent a lot of time in my life as a spider just running away.

But if I keep that up, I’ll be no different from when I ran away from the humans who burned down my home.

To live with pride.

That’s the goal I swore I would attain.

But I haven’t truly regained my pride, even after all this time.

I can’t go on like that.

I am the Ruler of Pride, after all.

I have to live up to that title by living as proudly as I can.

So I won’t run away.

As long as I have the slightest chance of winning, no matter how slim that chance might be, I’ll never give up.

I’m going to defeat this dragon.

And in doing so, I’ll say good-bye to the weakling I was before.

That’s right. I’m better than some irritating dragon.

…?

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“Irritating”?

Say what?

I thought I was afraid of the earth dragon. Since when do I think of it as “irritating”?

Huh?

Where is this feeling coming from?

Well, that doesn’t matter right now.

I may have landed a huge hit, but I’m still at a disadvantage here.

I mean, my HP is at 1 now.

I’m surviving only because of Perseverance.

The dragon was whittling down my HP for a while, but the blowback from my big attack was the last nail in the coffin.

Rot Attack is very strong, but it comes at a price.

And that’s not the only damage I took just now.

Even after being extinguished by my poison, the Flame Wrap still inflicted damage on me.

I still have some MP left.

Which means I’m not going to die just yet.

But a single hit from any one of the fire dragon’s attacks is probably enough to do me in.

My decisive strike definitely did a number on the fire dragon, but it’s still got some strength left.

Avoiding the magma, I land on the ground for real this time.

The fire dragon is still sinking into the magma.

Now’s my chance.

I activate my second trump card, the one I’ve been preparing since this battle began.

My MP decreases at an alarming speed.

In my current situation, every point of MP lost means a point closer to death.

But activating this magic is worth the cost.

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Don’t you agree, magic brain number one and number two?

Sure do!

Count on it!

See, my Parallel Minds skill leveled up, so I’ve got a new friend: magic brain number two!

Now I’ve got double the brainpower for invoking magic.

Magic brain number two has been preparing this spell all this time, and now it’s ready to use, thanks to the help of magic brain number one.

Now I open thee, Hell Gate!

Immediately, the whole area goes dark.

Even the glow of the magma is swallowed up by the intense darkness rising from the ground.

It’s as if the darkness of hell itself is seeping into this world from below.

It engulfs the magma, the ground, the enormous fire dragon.

The overflowing darkness swallows everything.

Abyss Magic level 1: Hell Gate.

An extremely dark and powerful magic that heralds the opening of hell.

That’s what I unleashed into this world.

The darkness engulfs everything, converges, and abruptly absorbs back into the ground and disappears.

As if it were sealed away.

As if the gates of hell had closed shut once more.

All that remains is the beaten, battered fire dragon and me.

Seriously?

You survived that?

But the fire dragon has precious little HP remaining.

And its MP and SP are virtually gone.

It must have converted them into HP with the help of its skills.

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That’s the only way it could possibly have survived Hell Gate.

My own MP is rather low after using Hell Gate, too.

I’m in pretty rough shape myself.

Basically, both of us are struggling to stay on our feet.

The next blow will decide the victor.

The fire dragon’s chosen attack is also its most primitive one.

Namely, a body slam.

Yeah. It’s a good choice.

With virtually no MP or SP, it’s the fire dragon’s most effective means of attack.

And given its enormous size and stats, it should be the winning move.

If it were up against anyone else, that is.

I’m a spider.

What is a spider’s greatest weapon?

Poison? Claws? Fangs?

No, none of the above.

The fire dragon’s body stops.

It’s hit my Utility Thread, imbued with Fire Resistance.

Even with that resistance, of course, I can use it for only a moment in the Middle Stratum.

But that’s all I need.

With its Flame Wrap gone, my thread can stop the fire dragon, even if only for a few seconds.

In that short amount of time, I swing down my scythe.

One of them was destroyed when I used Rot Attack before, but I still have one more left.

And it’s that scythe that strikes the fire dragon with all my strength.

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The Divine Voice (temp.) resounds, and the stats disappear from the fire dragon’s Appraisal display, its name changing to “Fire Dragon Corpse.”

Only when I see that do I finally exhale.

My status has been fully recovered with the consecutive level-ups, but mentally, I’m still exhausted.

Once again, it was another tightrope walk of a battle.

The fact that I won seems like something of a miracle.

I mean, any one of that fire dragon’s attacks could’ve killed me in one hit.

Just a graze or an aftershock was enough to put me on the verge of death, y’know?

If it hit me straight on, I’d be dead, Perseverance be damned.

Also, if Parallel Minds hadn’t leveled up right before I ran into the fire dragon, I would’ve been in big trouble.

Now, I have two magic brains.

That’s the only reason I was able to use Abyss Magic, which I could never get to work before.

Actually, to be honest, that was my first time even trying it.

I mean, I gathered from its structure that it was some kind of wide-range annihilation-type magic, but frankly, I’m still a little freaked out by how destructive it was.

Checking out the area, I can tell the ground in a three-hundred-foot radius around me has sunk about fifteen feet lower.

The area where the darkness all converged and got sucked in at the end has become an especially deep hole.

Staring into the opening with Appraisal, I see it’s so deep that it goes outside my detection range.

Does this go through the Middle Stratum right into the Lower Stratum?

I guess I don’t even know if the Lower Stratum is below this area.

Well, looking at this hole, I wouldn’t be surprised if it really does go straight down to hell.

I guess it’s not called Hell Gate for nothing.

I still can’t believe the fire dragon was able to survive that, but I guess it was simply that strong of an opponent.

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Well, thanks to that, my level went way up.

Ahhh, but…only up to level 19, huh?

If I just went up one more level, I would’ve been able to evolve now.

So close.

…Oh, crap.

What is it, information brain?

Since our Abyss Magic made the ground sink, magma is starting to flow into it.

What? For real?

Yeah, like actually.

Body brain, let’s grab that fire dragon and get out of here before the magma floods this place.

We’re taking that huge thing with us?!

Of course we are, duh.

Yikes. Don’t blame me if we get sore.

And so, I laboriously escape with the enormous fire dragon corpse in tow.

The magma isn’t moving particularly quickly, but since transporting the fire dragon takes so much time and effort, it ends up being a pretty close call.

Any longer, and we both would’ve met our ends in the magma.

I know, I know—why didn’t I just leave the fire dragon, then? But after all the pains I went to defeating it, it would be downright rude not to eat the thing!

Defeat, eat, and thank you very much!

It’s a package deal, dude!

Whew.

Anyway, body brain, you know the drill. De-scaling time, please.

Wooo. Lucky me.

Guess it’s time for my usual skill check.

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All right, let me see here.

It’s important to make sure I thoroughly investigate every skill.

Really, really important.

Why, you ask?

Because I didn’t realize you could imbue Utility Thread with resistances until now!

God, I don’t even wanna talk about this.

I’m such an idiot.

Why would I overlook something so vital?

One of Utility Thread’s effects is Resistance Conferment. As the name implies, it lets me add the effects of any of my resistance skills to my thread.

And that includes Fire Resistance.

There’d be no point in adding things like Poison Resistance to my thread, obviously, but Acid Resistance, for instance, would make dealing with frogs way easier.

I didn’t even notice this Resistance Conferment thing until I was randomly checking through my skills one day.

Talk about a surprise.

I was excited to learn about this effect, sure, but I also couldn’t believe how careless I’d been to miss it in the first place.

Ugh, if I’d known about this sooner, I might’ve been able to use my thread more often!

Still, even adding Fire Resistance doesn’t do much to stop it from burning easily, so I guess it wouldn’t have made that dramatic a difference.

It sure ended up saving my ass this time, though.

And that’s why I’m taking the time to look over my new titles and skills.

Man, dragons really are something else.

I can’t believe you can get a title like this just by defeating a single one.

So what does it do exactly?

Looks like an advanced version of Wyrm Slayer, then.

The skills are the same sort, too.

Sweet!

Finally, a skill to compensate for my low HP!

I guess Perseverance does help with that, but really, the ideal situation is to have lots of HP in the first place.

For one, there are times like this last fight when I need all my MP for its intended purpose.

Aw, but I think I leveled up before I got that skill, so that’s four levels’ worth of bonus HP lost.

If only title acquisition came before the level-up process, I could’ve done even better for myself in the growth department…

Oh well, nothing I can do about that.

Dragon Power is probably the advanced form of Wyrm Power, right?

That would make it a simple temporary status enhancement skill, which means I’ll have to test out how big the difference is.

This stuff is important. Very important.

I never had a chance to experiment with Abyss Magic, so it ended up being a bit of a trial by fire, but on the whole, I really need to make sure I know exactly what all my skills do.

Ahhh… Abyss Magic.

Really, I should test out what the higher Abyss Magic spells do, but…this stuff is no joke.

I mean, even the level-1 spell was powerful enough to permanently alter the terrain!

So what in the world would even higher levels do?

I have to be careful about wasting MP, too, so it’s not the kind of magic I should be casually throwing around.

No matter how huge it might be, this is still an underground labyrinth. The last thing I need is to cause a cave-in because of some Abyss Magic misfire.

At the moment, given how terrifyingly powerful level 1 was, I’m a little scared to try anything above that.

Unless I run into an enemy so strong that Hell Gate alone won’t be enough, I think I’ll avoid using Abyss Magic level 2 and up, until I get out of the Great Elroe Labyrinth.

Anyway, other than that, a few skills evolved or made new derivations when I leveled up.

Evasion and Hit both created Probability Correction.

And Spatial Maneuvering evolved into Dimensional Maneuvering.

I’ve seen Probability Correction before, on the eels and stuff.

Really, I guess I suspected this might be how the derivation would go, based on the skill organizations of the eel and its evolutionary line.

Both Evasion and Hit reached their max level, so now I just have to keep improving Probability Correction.

That should improve my evasion and hit ratios as well.

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Maybe this skill will even improve my luck in general?

Let’s take a moment to pray for that.

I’d like to have a more peaceful life from here on out, please.

Okay, moving on.

Now, I’m curious what the difference between Spatial Maneuvering and its evolved form, Dimensional Maneuvering, might be.

Let’s see…

Hmm? I dunno—it sounds kinda cool, but I don’t really get it.

Any space?

Like, air and stuff?

What, can I do a double jump now or something?

I’ll have to test this out later, too.

A lot of skills become much more useful when they evolve, after all.

Sometimes even a skill that was useless ends up suddenly becoming very handy when it evolves, so maybe Spatial Maneuvering will be like that, too.

If I can do double jumps and stuff now, that would really increase my strategic possibilities.

I think that’s about it, right?

Okay.

Overall, my skills powered up quite a bit.

I just wish I had leveled up one more time…

Then I’d get to make even bigger leaps forward.

“A dragon’s been destroyed? In the Great Elroe Labyrinth… Was this his doing? No, I don’t think so. We have an unspoken truce going on. I don’t think he would make a move like that. But what happened, then? Activate administrator’s authority… What in the world? A ruler? Of three, no less? What does this mean? I’ve never heard of this ‘Wisdom.’ Does that mean this is the work of D? But why? What is this skill? …I guess I’ll have to investigate.”

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