Editing/Standardisation: kubor04
Formatting/Extras: APM
Original Translation: Blastron
Additional thanks goes out to mae and Legit-rikk. Join our discord
My explorations of this labyrinth are going fairly well. In fact, everything’s going so well that I’d be laughing out loud if I had lungs. This part of the labyrinth seems to be the territory of the centipedes, so there’s a lot of them here. They’ve been super accommodating in helping me gather XP! Their reaction times are extremely slow, so I’ve had no problems at all catching them with my sneak attacks. Whether it’s from behind or above, my victory is almost always assured. Thanks to that, defeating them is easy!
I’ve killed a ton of these so far, and my level has gone all the way up to seven. Unfortunately I didn’t receive any level-up bonuses to my skills, but constantly eating this paralytic meat has brought my [Paralysis Resistance] up to level 2. This place is great! I can farm up XP, and I can even work on leveling my ever-useful [Paralysis Resistance]. What an excellent hunting ground.
Of course, it hasn’t been 100% perfectly easy. I’m still diligently trying to gain more practical combat experience, so I’ve been experimenting with variations on my sneak attack.
The biggest weakness of my threads is that I can only release it from my bottom. As such, if I want to stick any web onto my opponents, I have to point my butt at them. I have to pose propped up on my two hind legs and stick my butt way out, or otherwise face directly away from my opponent. This is, of course, a very vulnerable position to be in, so in order to compensate I’ve been either attaching my thread while I’m already on top of my enemy, or I bombard them with it while I jump overhead.
Even still, those are still pretty dangerous methods. Sure, if my threads hit, then my victory is basically set in stone. However, if I miss… there’s a huge chance it will seriously backfire. If I’m on top of my opponent, dodging their counterattacks is extremely difficult; likewise, if I’m soaring through the air, I’m at serious risk of being shot down like my idiot brother did back then. It’s not quite what you’d call a “high-risk, high-reward” strategy.
Well, once I’d acknowledged the problem, the next step was to come up with some new strategies to keep myself safe against enemies I can’t get my threads attached to. The solution is this, my new weapon: the portable web! Basically, I’ve got a tiny little web stretched between my forelegs. It gets rid of the vulnerable-pose problem, since I can easily hit with it while charging forward. Now that I no longer need to stick my butt out in that unbelievable stance to get my opponent stuck, this is going to be way easier.
Of course, there are drawbacks. While I’ve got one of these webs on standby, my forelegs are otherwise useless. Yeah, I’ve still got six more legs, but it’s still pretty inconvenient. The other problem is that I have to make these well in advance. Well, luckily for me, I’m a pro at building nets, so it wouldn’t be that bad.
This is quite a magnificent low-risk, high-reward tactic!
I tried a bunch of other things, but all of them ended in failure.
I wanted to come up with a strategy to protect me against the sneak attacks of others, so I dug up my old idea of an enemy-detecting thread. The basic idea is to have a whole bunch of invisibly-fine threads floating in the air. If they were to catch on something, like, say, an enemy, I’d feel the vibration and be able to react. This is a similar idea to how I had a bunch of fine threads strung up in and around my home, but, in practice… there’s a few differences between stringing something up and letting it float around.
My unattended seeker-threads had the unfortunate tendency to bump into either themselves or the wall. Of course, this caused them to constantly vibrate, one after another, which wound up being a huge distraction. I could probably sort it out in my head if I were to concentrate hard enough, but then I wouldn’t be paying attention to anything else, which is really putting the cart before the horse. For now, I have to put my plans for an enemy-seeking thread aside.
Next, I wanted to try making myself some silken armor to try to shore up my terrible defenses. The results, I have to say, were awful. It’s not like I can’t make any clothing, but wearing it is basically impossible. I’m a spider, you know? I don’t have usable hands like I did when I was a human, and my body’s got a really weird shape to it, so no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t figure out how to get anything on.
How about just wrapping myself in thread, you ask? That’s also no good. I can certainly get a bunch of thread wrapped around me, but unless I do it perfectly, it’s probably just going to wind up getting tangled around me and restricting my movements. My speed is my greatest asset, you know? If I were to do it, I’d have to wrap myself up super carefully… which doesn’t work for the same reasons that make it impossible to wear normal clothes in the first place.
Even still, if I somehow managed to get some sort of armor on, it’s useless if it’s not something I can take off easily. When I eat, for instance, my body tends to inflate. If I’m wearing any sort of restrictive clothing when I start swelling up like a ball, wouldn’t that be extremely painful?
Things might be a little bit different if I could borrow someone’s time to help me get in and out of my armor, but without human hands or even the ability to see most of my body, I’m going to have to abandon this idea.
Ummf. Now that I’m thinking about it, being a spider has its pluses and minuses. I can leap through the air and cling to the walls, but not having hands seriously puts a huge damper on my abilities. Human hands are superbly useful. I now understand this from the bottom of my heart.
Incidentally, all of this experimentation didn’t get my [Spider Thread] skill level up at all. Yeah, as I thought, a high-level skill has much higher proficiency requirements for advancement. Well, it’s not like I can really spend a bunch of time meaninglessly spewing out thread, like I was doing back in my home. Running around outside is way more dangerous than the safety of my home, so I want to make sure I’m in top form at all times. I could only really experiment as much as I did because there’s plenty of food around here in the form of centipedes.
This round of experiments was fraught with failure, but quite a few valuable things. In the future, I’ll keep an eye out for even more opportunities to try some new things out.
APM - Translation 