1.15 At Your Command

Despite the initial eagerness to advance on the Brood Mother’s chambers and fight, the group had little choice but to resupply and rest.

After all, Harold concluded, the Brood Mother would be the most heavily defended individual, and in their case, Amber had already exhausted a large portion of her mana to cast her initial fireball. Fighting the hardest possible battle without every possible advantage? Maybe not the best.

Yet in the back of his mind there was a continuous nagging sensation, one that refused to go away no matter how much he tried to justify his choice with logic.

He could see his friends again. His family again. If only he could charge into the final chamber and kill the Black Widow Brood Mother. He could…

No. Not now, not ever. The pain of several days ago had given him perspective. Something was wrong, and he would not succumb. Not now, not ever.

He felt like he had when he was a child, trying not to be distracted. Regardless of how strong his will was, no matter the sanctions put on his TV time, it had only ever taken one lapse in concentration to send him spiralling into the depths of thought, unable to finish his homework.

It was much the same here, and he desperately needed something, anything to distract him. A day later, he found it.

Theorycrafting. In a world without a computer, phone, or book, his conventional interpretation of the word ‘distraction’ was incredibly limited. But this, this he could engage with for days. And better yet? He could see tangible results every time he tested a theory!

He checked his notifications.

[Congratulations, Level Up! Level 10 Gem Soldier]

[Skill learned: Armor Assimilation - As the sword of your noble lord, gain the ability to assimilate small amounts of their highest affinity substance into a set of armor, weight unaffected.]

[Congratulations, Level Up! Level 11 Gem Soldier]

[Congratulations, Level Up! Level 12 Gem Soldier]

[Congratulations, Level Up! Level 13 Gem Soldier]

“Huh,” he nudged Amber. “Honey, I got my next skill at level 10. Did you get a new one?”

She smiled and nodded. “Yup! I got a skill called [Concurrent Minds], but I think it’s a passive, like most of my other skills. It’ll let me cast multiple spells at once though.”

He picked Rocky up off his perch on his golem. “What’s your status looking like buddy?”

The little rock giddily replied. “Status.” Happily sharing it with the couple.

#####

[Rock Hard]

Age: ???

Race: Rock

Class: [Noble of Stone, Level 9]

Constitution: Rock

Achievements: [First Light]

Titles: [Progenitor]

#####

“Level 9?” Amber exclaimed. “Even with how much fighting we did a couple days ago, how is that even possible? His golem did all the killing, didn’t it? If it’s just the three of us, even with experience sharing, shouldn’t his levelling rate have tapered off by now?”

He shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.” Pausing, he nodded to himself. “We should take a couple more days to evaluate our new skills though. Wanna take me to that unused cavern so we can test some stuff?”

#####

Harold’s first discovery was that, in fact, normal everyday rocks were not the best for forming his armor.

His first attempt at forming his armor had seen Harold take off his leather equipment, and focusing on a pebble that he found. It was a relatively simple process to begin assimilation, all he had to do was to imagine the armor that he wanted, and the beginnings of a chest piece began to form on his torso.

[Armor Assimilation, Formation Progress: 2.3%]

To his disappointment, once Amber had applied a minimal amount of heat to the piece, it crumbled to dust almost immediately.

[Armor Assimilation, Formation Progress: 0%]

The gems littered all around the cave didn’t work either, though the system didn’t give any indication as to why.

“Either they’re too high level for you to assimilate, or you physically can’t.”

Just like that, three more days passed them by.

#####

On the fifth day of their break from battle, they received word that the Fang brood could not continue to sustain casualties at the rate they had been, and that their defeat would inevitably spell both Harold’s and Amber’s destruction.

The missive, dictated by the messenger spiderling in a long series of hisses and clicks of its fangs, was directly spoken to Rocky, who promptly translated it for the two humans.

“The other Brood Mothers are not intelligent. They will kill you as soon as they find you, because they do not understand your value. If my brood falls, you fall with it.”

Harold had never been more glad about anything than he had when Rocky first picked up contractions and conjunctions. The couple had been teaching the little rock for the last few days, and he had learned abnormally fast, even compared to a human, and especially so for a rock. In this case, it made the message comprehensible.

But the message itself was sufficiently ominous, clearly ordering them to attack the Black Widows as soon as possible.

“I wonder why she thinks she’s the only intelligent Brood Mother,” Amber mused. “Actually, they probably start out as dumb, despite being leaders, but she was able to accumulate experience over all of those resets while the others weren’t.”

Harold tentatively agreed. “Though I don’t want to take anything she says at face value, it would explain why there’s so little structure in the Black Widow brood, at least compared to the Fangs.”

But the discussion was over, and as new Fang spiderlings flooded the cavern to aid them in their endeavor, they both knew time was up.

Harold felt his face set in a determined, serious expression, and he redonned his leather armor, hefting his heater shield with his left arm. His hammer in his right, they began the arduous march towards Black Widow lines.

#####

Strangely enough, the tunnels that the group had traversed five days ago were clearer of foes than they had been when they first fought their way to them.

The egg chambers were still noticeably empty, likely relocated after their last attack, but it made little sense why the Black Widows would be so lax on security when it came to the tunnels they now definitely knew were under threat.

They kept going, taking the same twists and turns they had gone through last time. The brood holding chamber still contained the mutilated corpses of the many low levelled Black Widow brood tenders and spiderlings they had slain.

Stranger still was the presence of guards in the corridors leading to the remaining egg chambers, because once their troop had reached the chambers themselves, they found naught but the smashed eggshells and broken remains of their attack five days prior. Curious and curiouser.

The tunnels were beginning to become difficult to fight through, each new winding hallway found them dancing off against more and more spiderling guards as they wound their way forwards.

Harold ordered half their spiderlings onto the ceiling. The fall was short enough that a fall probably wouldn’t even wound them. Besides, he had seen how effective airborne, er, ceiling borne attacks had been in the past, and now that he had sufficient forces, the shoe was now on the proverbial other foot.

They came to a stop at an intersection. Well, intersection would not have done the place justice. What looked like around 8 tunnels all converged on this one location, forming a small open area right in front of an opening.

From the outside, Harold could only gauge the size of the cavern by the amount of light flooding out of the opening, and what was a minute felt like a century as he slowly moved ahead to try and get a look inside.

With just a peek inside, he could see a large group of spiderlings, some of them more developed than others, all crawling about. This didn’t feel like another brood growth room. This felt like… like something familiar.

He quickly looked once more, catching a quick glimpse of a large, black, bulbous shape. The Queen. He motioned to the veritable small army he had brought with him. The Fang Brood Mother really did not skip out on support for his endeavor. Though, he supposed, the fate of her entire brood did rest on their success.

He retreated back to a previous corridor, as to not be overheard or seen by any of the cavern’s occupants.

A good distance away, he noted that their first order of business was getting all of their forces into the cavern in the first place.

The opening was large enough that a spiderling could crawl on the ground, one on the ceiling, and one on either wall of the opening, with room to spare. He split the Fangs into four groups, each to entire as quickly as possible.

After that, hoping all went well, only simple tactics would do. The Fang spiders, though slightly more organized than the Black Widows, were no genius architects of war. Theirs was a fight of attrition. A neat orderly grinding war at best, a disorderly brawl at the absolute worst.

Telling Rocky to keep them together in organized lines, he delegated a group to follow him to assault the queen.

Amber, he decided, would hold onto Rocky, both to give him an advantageous position with which to order their troops around, and because his golem could not be spared to ferry him around. They would need it to break the line.

And that was it. Harold took a deep breath, and charged through the gap.

Behind him scuttled a tide of Fang spiderlings, ready to end this war for their brood.

He heard Rocky’s discordant voice echo in behind him. “CHARGE. FIGHT TO THE DEATH.”

#####

Harold’s first extended impression of the room was that it was… large. Larger even than the Fang Brood Mother’s own chamber.

Its inhabitants were fewer in number than he had feared, but any feelings of relief he might have felt as he charged headlong into the tide of foes was lost when he gazed upon the Black Widow Brood Mother.

[Level ??? Black Widow Brood Mother]

The system highlighted her title in red, and he knew that meant she could very well spell his doom.

He charged anyway, but to reach her was another matter altogether. For though the large cavern had allowed the Fang spiderlings to bring all their forces to bear, with yet more still flooding through the opening, it had also allowed the Black Widows not near the door to form into lines of their own, ready to repel the invaders.

#####

The Fang Brood Mother waited, hoping. Whenever she spoke to the nobilis and its pet… humans, was it? She had put on a veneer of confidence. Her forces were expansive, still holding their tunnels and caverns without too much strain.

Of course, that was a lie. Of the tunnel systems and expansive caverns her brood had held, few remained. She had pulled back more and more of her forces, until she had been forced to call a general retreat to their five primary caverns, abandoning any other choke points in favor of fortifying the areas directly connected to her chamber.

At this point in any other reset, she would have already brought another brood low, conquered their tunnels and integrated their assets into her own expanding domain.

But she had truly drawn the short straw this time. The nature of her brood had never changed, she had not lied to the humans when she said her body remained unchanging so long as she evaded death in these rests. That being what it may, it also meant that her staple broodling would never be able to surpass the Black Widow brood’s larger, venomous foot soldiers, at least not at first.

And there were so few. Her hand in this reset had been limited to the smallest batch of broodlings she had ever seen in any start.

Later on, she might have variants of her brood, assassins and bulkier tanks to add to her lines, but progress on having her children reach the threshold to evolution had been slow, and only one had reached that stage so far. From what she had gathered, it currently fought on the frontlines, effectively, and as an assassin variant.

Thus, as the smartest queen with the smartest brood, she was at a disadvantage almost immediately, without the ability to utilize her spiderlings’ higher intellect and greater autonomy in this war.

Ideally, she would never have fought the Black Widow mother, but mindless as ever, her counterpart had not even considered the possibility of coexistence, and had launched her attack almost as soon as the first of her brood reached maturity.

Then it had been a long, grinding war, until she had met the Nobilis and his pets, a light at the end of the tunnel. Yes. They would kill her enemies for her, and supporting them, she would gain the favor of the Nobilis and his caretakers.

Admittedly, her spirits had been a little dimmed at the notion that the young noble was, in fact, young and incapable of speech, but she had brightened considerably since then.

That is, the Brood Mother brightened until she realized that she did not have nearly as much time as she assumed.

The Black Widows had pushed her to her present state, and she knew well the cost of defeat for an Arachnae brood. The death of the mother and the assimilation of what parts of the defeated remains that still retain their faculties after the fact.

The notion that she might die, that all her progress over the myriad lives might be lost. It was unacceptable. UnacCepTablE. UNACCEPTABLE.

No, those events could never be allowed to pass.

And so she had sent a large portion of her forces with the Nobilis, in hopes that he would bring down her foe. If not, well, perhaps she could hold out until the next reset.

Maybe

#####

Harold swung his hammer, uncertain if he was even hitting a live foe, or just one of many corpses lay strewn about the cavern.

The battle had begun fairly normally, with both sides drawing up lines and attempting to break the other. But as soon as he had gotten close to breaking the line, the Brood Mother emitted some sort of psychic… thing.

At first, it was unclear what it had even accomplished. None of his allies dropped dead, and his forces continued to batter their way through, undeterred by the mental noise.

It was only when another force appeared at the entrance that Harold began to worry. ‘Maybe they’re friendly.’ He couldn’t see from his position at the front.

A Fang spider’s head came flying over his head. ‘Or maybe not.’

He yelled to Rocky. “GET THEM TO PLUG THE DOOR”

His little friend’s voice came booming back “HALF OF YOU HOLD THE DOOR.”

Half of their forces turned to face the new threat, but that only made the slog through the front that much more difficult.

Immense pressure pushed him down, and he turned his face with great effort to see his allies falling to the ground as well, Fang spiderlings forced to the floor.

“HATE.” The mental message through, forcing him to his knees, then he dropped his shield and hammer, forced to support the pressure with his arms as well.

The force mounted. “DEATH. DIE. DYING. DEAD. YOU DIE. VICTORY FOR MY BROOD.” The Black Widow Brood Mother was nowhere near as eloquent as her counterpart, but the mental pressure alone assured Harold that she was no slouch in the mind department.

Face first against the ground now, he could only watch from the corner of his eye as his allies were slaughtered, torn apart limb from limb as casually as a human might tear apart a rotisserie chicken, the flesh and bone simply falling apart under the onslaught.

He felt his eyes closing under the pressure as well, and felt something warm flowing out of his nose. Blood.

He made another futile effort to rise to his feet, to no avail.

#####

No. No no no no no no no.

His friends were falling. The two that had brought him up and to this place fell last, but fell nonetheless, unable to withstand the pressure.

Upon the first sign of the mental assault, he had run to his golem, to be lifted up on its shoulder, surveying the situation.

It was bad, this he knew. Even the friendly spiky things, spiders, Harold had called them, they had fallen. And they were dying, torn apart as the bad spiky things bit into them.

He had to do something, right? He thought back to his lessons with the two humans. Language, culture, history, all useless. What he needed now was what had always helped him in the past.

“Status.” He proclaimed, still relishing the word as much as he had when uttering it for the first time. But there was no time for that.

He brought up the notifications.

[Congratulations, Level Up! Level 10 Noble of Stone]

[Nobilis Skill learned: Words of Power - You are Nobilis. Your words have meaning, as they will evermore]

‘What does that even mean?’ He had a mostly solid grasp on the English language after his lessons, but this was no battle skill, it didn’t provide him any way to combat his enemies.

Did it?

‘Words have meaning? Then I’ll just speak.’

“Rise”

His allies stood, as if the force forcing them down had suddenly disappeared.

The bad spiky things looked surprised. Scared even. Yes, scary thoughts for the bad spiky things were good.

The opposing Brood Mother tried again

“DEATH. VENOM OVERTAKES YOU. DYING-

“Fight.”

They surged forwards in response. Harold bellowed a war cry, Amber called for fire at the top of her lungs, and all around, the hisses and fearful chittering of the Fang spiderlings turned to warcries of their own, shrieking in their own, otherworldly, angry voices. Rocky could hear them all, he could understand them all.

They cried for blood, for death, for victory. He would give it to them.

“Kill them all.” The call was met by a cacophony of approval, as both spider and human howled their cries of victory.

Rocky directed his golem into the fray, and standing atop it, bellowed out a command that his enemies would remember, even after their memories were reset. This time, he spoke to the foe.

“DIE FOR ME.”

The Black Widow spiderlings balked at the command, feeling the same pressure that had been exerted by the Brood Mother. They fell flat against the floor as his friends cleaved their way through the enemy number.

Behind him, Rocky heard Amber call out a spell, three fire lances appearing above her staff as she channeled her mana into three simultaneous attacks with her [Concurrent Minds].

She let fly, and three white hot lances pierced the Brood Mother’s carapace. One pierced her eye, another buried itself deep within the beast’s stomach, and another severed two of her right legs.

With that attack, Amber collapsed, having been slinging spells for the vast majority of the fight. In her place stepped Harold, who he would call dad had he known that the word existed.

He leapt forward, towards the maw of the giant spiders, his hammer dematerializing even as he began to lift up from the ground.

As Harold reached the halfway point, in his hand began to materialize a spear, slowly being materialized into existence with his [Gem Manifestation]

The spear point did not grow in until his arm, outstretched, had reached the opening of the Brood Mother’s mouth. With his hand pointed upwards, only then did the sharp end of the spear materialize, already embedded within the spider’s skull.

Harold rolled away as the remaining Fangs still with them swarmed her heavily wounded body, cutting, biting, and rending any exposed flesh, until eventually, finally, the behemoth of a spider fell dead.

[Congratulations, Evolution Requirements Met! Please Choose an Evolution]