The Way Ahead

While the attack might have gotten Edwin off-guard, his sturdy leather gear- so useful for protecting him from alchemical experiments- proved its worth once more. While many of the hairs did strike the 'armor' in weak points, hissing and sizzling for a second while they tried to burn through to his body, those that struck the thicker parts just stuck in the jacket where they hit. A few even flew towards his face, and would have burned into his head if not for the apparatite helmet he'd made for himself.

Well there goes my perfect battle, Edwin thought ruefully. Fortunately, none of the wounds he took were too severe, though they did go a fair ways into explaining the method by which the unfortunate victims of the spider had been killed. Perhaps the hairs disintegrated naturally after a short period of time? It wouldn’t be the strangest thing Edwin had seen.

Still, it did put a slight damper on Edwin’s plan, predominantly because the spider had yet to emerge back out into the opening. Hm. He didn’t actually need the spider out, did he? Not for the first part of his plan at least.

Edwin returned to his tree, hefting his sword into a two-handed grip and planting his feet on the ground and anchoring himself in place with Flight, pushing Harvesting and Athletics as much as possible as he swung the blade at its trunk.

It worked much better than Edwin had anticipated- while not quite as smooth as butter, Edwin’s strike did pass through the entirety of the tree in a single stroke, though the reverberations traveled up the blade and into Edwin’s arms, predominantly his right thanks to his grip. Surprised, he released the blade and watched his weapon fly into the woods.

Well… he didn’t need that anyway.

Before the tree could fall to the ground, Edwin grabbed it, holding it with only a bit of difficulty thanks to Packing. The weight and inertia was a bit of a pain, and Packing didn’t help with rotational momentum so he’d need to be careful, but he could manage.

The spider tried another salvo of violet hairs aimed at Edwin, but with his own personal tree to hide behind, managed to stop pretty much the entire attack.

Unusually, the spider seemed to fairly quickly realize this tactic wasn’t working and reemerged onto the road with a flex of its spatial Skill. Unfortunately for it, it wasn’t able to properly identify the trap waiting for it.

Edwin hefted the tree as much as he could, then dropped it right where the spider was due to arrive- thank you, Numeracy- allowing the full weight of the trunk to crash down onto the spider, pinning it against the ground and slowly crushing its abdomen. It screeched, trying to free itself, but the tree wasn’t going to stop crushing the arachnid’s body just because it complained…

Edwin’s thought died as the tree was eaten through by the creature’s destructive magic. He readied himself for round two, but was unexpectedly relieved when the bottom half of the tree rolled off the side and onto the creature’s right side. Three of the creature’s legs burst immediately, revealing themselves as normal spider legs just disguised as those of a feline. The other was struck flat, and the monster splayed out, helpless and immoble as Edwin hefted the top of the tree and dropped it onto the monster’s body.

Within thirty seconds, the horrible hissing had finally stopped as the spider finally died.

Edwin sighed and dropped onto the ground. That had been… quite the fight, and he was glad he was still in… basically one piece. It was nothing a potion and a night of sleep wouldn’t fix, anyway, so he counted it as a win.

Congratulations! For slaying an Adult Titan Bear-Eater, you have unlocked the Titan Spider Hunter Path!

Level Up!

Skill Points 692→697 (Average level: 40)

Bomb Throwing Level 49→50

Flight Level 37→38

Longstrider Level 30→32

Numeracy Level 35→36

Ritual Intuition Level 25→26

Oh cool, another Trophy path. He idly wondered what sort of Skill it might grant as he fished out a general-purpose healing potion and downed it. The hairs stuck in his limbs had vanished at some point towards the end of the fight- he hadn’t noticed when- leaving him bleeding at a steady rate. Once he took the potion, though, his bleeding began to slow and he could feel the itching of skin beginning to scab over at high speeds. The apparatite container he’d kept the potion in dissolved away with just a flex of his will, and the glittering motes of light drifted to the ground.

He looked at the battlefield with unwounded eyes, coldly wondering what to do now. He should bury or burn the spider’s victims, of course- it was just the polite thing to do, if nothing else- but what about the spider itself?

The violet hairs still glowed slightly even in death, which suggested that it might have some kind of inherent magical properties. That meant alchemical ingredients! He really wanted to see if he could isolate whatever annihilation or desolation type mana the spider was using to delete stuff like sound or light in the area.

Well, he had a Skill for it- two if Alchemical Dismantling and Harvesting counted as different- and he may as well put them to work!

Edwin’s eyes caught the bodies of the spider’s last victims. Fine, he’d take care of them first.

While all four of the travelers had a coin pouch at their belt, it was predominantly filled with ves and ager, not a single grai in sight. Still, it was money and Edwin didn’t have any better alternatives to dealing with it, so he pocketed it all. The halfling wore a small, nonmagical silver pendant in the shape of an upside-down ‘V,’ and the not-human had an intricately carved wooden bracelet, filigreed with silver as well.

They were both probably a bit valuable, but they just weren’t terribly helpful to Edwin personally, and he felt awkward about looting bodies for personal artefacts besides. Money was one thing, but he just wasn’t comfortable with taking semi-valuable trinkets to pawn off at a later point.

The rest of their belongings fell in a similar situation. None of the humans or the halfling had any weapons beyond a knife on them, not counting the lost not-human’s sword. Beyond that, other than some food, which Edwin gladly took, they predominantly just had some miscellaneous travel gear and their clothes that wouldn’t be that helpful to him. He just didn’t need bloodstained clothing with holes in it. He’d be spending enough time repairing his own outfit after this fight, and he didn’t want to take on even more.

The burials were easy enough. Inion didn’t help, unsurprisingly. Instead, she spent the time poking at the spider, making inane comments about whatever flitted through her mind. Well, she also spent a bit of time supervising his digging efforts, but it was primarily spent at the spider.

By leaning on his old trick of reframing his digging as ‘harvesting dirt,’ he could get the Skill to engage with his task and make every single shovel cut through the ground and even tree roots with ease and help him quickly grow the size of the pile of dirt next to the hole. Stamina helped even more, and meant he could continue at nearly full effort for the half-hour it took to dig out enough dirt that his eyes were level with the ground.

Properly dug, he set each of the bodies inside gently, spending a moment of silence for each fallen, and filled the hole back in. Edwin was glad he’d done so first- they were already attracting flies.

He made sure to be fully geared up when he finally approached the corpse of the spider, gloves, goggles and hood covering every inch of exposed skin. It was basically inevitable that he’d poke himself with one of the spider’s hairs at some point, but he still wanted to minimize the frequency of that occurring.

And so, armed with an apparatite knife and box, he began to slowly try and cut through the hairs.

At first, it was slow going, as he needed to angle his hand in an awkward angle to shave away the pokey quill-like protrusions, but as he kept at it, and felt his Dismantling skill level more and more, he fell into a bit of a rhythm.

The spider was large enough that he would never manage to get all of the hairs cut away, but it also meant he’d have more than enough for pretty much any purpose he could think of. In the end, he filled up a good-sized box with them, and they found a nice corner of his carriage to live in, casting their faintly sinister glow through the crystal.

After the hairs came the venom, and while Edwin wasn’t entirely sure if the spider had venom, given its lion-like mouth, he was glad that he had checked (and wasn’t bitten). There were no less than six fangs which had a channel for toxins to run along, and a corresponding venom gland hooked up to them. Getting to the venom gland was a bit of work, but Edwin managed it in the end via careful use of Flying to hover above the spider’s body and cut into its carapace after it had been cleared of hairs (which he naturally added to his box). It actually required him to Infuse Dismantling to get it to work properly, much to his surprise.

The Infused skill cut through the carapace like butter, and he seriously wished he had made the discovery during the fight, rather than afterwards. Well, next time he fought an enormous magical creature he could try to use his Dismantling skill as a weapon.

…That was probably why he’d gotten it from Alchemical Warrior, wasn’t it? Seemed kind of obvious in retrospect, if he could use it as a weapon to pierce magical or alchemical defenses. Ah well, now he knew for the future.

Getting the venom out was… tricky. Normal tarantula venom wasn’t particularly potent from what Edwin could recall, but he didn’t trust that information in the slightest. Beyond the issues that might arise from him misremembering, it didn’t necessarily apply to lion-headed 10-foot-tall monster spiders whose hairs could just straight-up destroy stuff, and he wasn’t keen on experimenting on himself for this.

What he ended up doing was creating a bit of a closed syringe with Apparatus and using Improbable Arsenal to expand the interior of the container, pulling in the venom as the space expanded. Cool! He hadn’t expected that to work.

He repeated the process another dozen times, until he had a respectable collection of the gray/purple liquid stored away, the syringe replaced with a more appropriate sealed container.

He also checked to see if the monster spider had any silk glands. Sadly, at least as far as Edwin was able to tell in his limited experience, it didn’t. It was a shame, because if he had been able to get giant spider silk it would have been amazing.

The last thing to deal with was the carapace itself. It was fairly strong for its weight and thickness, after all. And while Edwin didn’t have the space to deal with all of it, he did still take a few sections of the material just to try and do something with it at some point.

By the time he had completed everything, it was late afternoon and he was tired. The fight had left him running on pure adrenaline, to say nothing of how sore his arm was. Then, digging graves for the victims and now dismantling the spider? Sure, he could keep going for the rest of the day thanks to Stamina, and if he had some talsanenris rations, he’d be even better off, but those were more crutches than a true solution.

He heard a clattering down the road, and he turned to see a wagon pass by him, pulled by a pair of horses and driven by an avior who looked around at the carnage- a downed tree, a massive spider, and Edwin standing in the middle of it all splattered with blood and spider-detritus, before wordlessly looking at Edwin with horror, then wasted no time in snapping their reigns and encouraging their horses to pick up the pace.

Edwin couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at the idea of the Gilded Feather trying to figure out what was going on, and was kind of glad that nobody had seen him earlier while he was still… engrossed in harvesting the carcass.

He had totally missed a bunch, hadn’t he? It wasn’t like there were that many people on the road, but he still tended to encounter one or two each day going the opposite direction of him.

“Inion?” he asked, slightly dreading the answer, “How many people have passed by us while we’ve been here?”

“Hm?” she yawned, “Oh, I don’t know. Five or six? I was napping for a while though, don’t know if I missed any there.”

Well, at least he wasn’t embarrassed at the time, and now he could just take and bury that thought as deeply as possible. Memory only worked with active recall, after all. It wouldn’t keep reminding him of the time he’d been so engrossed with dissecting a spider he outright missed a half-dozen people passing within twenty feet of him.

As tempting as it was to set up a temporary lab right there and start messing around with the spider venom and quills, Edwin knew it would objectively be better for him to work slightly closer to civilization. The massive spider carcass was bound to attract scavengers, and with the recent reminder that animals could be massive on Joriah, he didn’t particularly care to meet any of them. He could have burned it, but that seemed like it could relatively easily result in a forest fire. He settled for carrying the body off the road fully and propped up against the trees, its Skill allowing it to slip between the trunks no longer active in death.

So, he carried on. Once he was out of the light forest, he could revisit the proposition. It had already been a couple days, and surely he’d leave the tree cover soon, right? He liked the forewarning that the vast, open plains afforded him when it came to people approaching. Sure, the road may have been straight as ever, but the shadows and moving foliage in the distance meant that it was still tricky to see people far away.

His thoughts were, ironically, broken by the sound of light pattering on the road behind him. He spun around, expecting another attack and his hand finding its way to a firebomb. Lack of concussive force or no, most creatures would still probably run away if set on fire.

What he wasn’t expecting to find was a medium-sized brown and white dog running up towards him, short and clean fur gleaming even in the low light of the forest.

“Why hello there, pup. What are you doing out here?” he greeted the dog, extending a hand out for the canine to sniff.

Unexpectedly, it didn’t approach, instead holding its distance and looking at Edwin with keen, curious eyes.

Stalwart Defender

…Hold on, was that a Class? Dogs could get classes?

“Kyni! Kyni! Come on, boy! Where’d you go?” a young voice called out from a bit further back, and Edwin looked up to see a boy running in his direction. He was still a ways back, just barely approaching earshot, but the dog didn’t react immediately. Instead… ‘Kyni’ stared at Edwin, not baring his teeth or growling, or even hiding his tail between his legs, just… looking at him, before turning around with a bark and, with a clatter of nails on stone, dashing back to the boy, nearly bowling the kid over.

Huh.

Edwin gently pulled Bill to a stop. The boy must have been barely ten at most, and he wanted to make sure that he would be alright. Also, dog. He hadn’t been able to spend nearly as much time with the objectively best kind of living creature since he’d been on Joriah, and the Stalwart Defender was a riddle wrapped in a mystery.

Looking again showed there was a cloaked figure a bit of distance behind the boy and his dog, the two now walking side by side.

Okay, so they did have an adult with them. That was good, at least. As the trio reached his Identify range, Edwin caught a brief glimpse of gold from the adult, and a quick Identify confirmed his fears. With a sigh, he rubbed his forehead in preparation of a future headache.

“Edwin! It is so very good to see you, my friend! It has truly been far too long!” Lefi exuberantly called out.

Level Up!

Skill Points 697→720 (Average level: 41)

Watchful Rest Level 27→28

Improbable Arsenal Level 26→30

Anatomy Level 32→39

Alchemical Dismantling Level 18→27

Sapper’s Apparatus Level 46→47