Might as Well

Once again, he was in a position to stare directly into the monster’s eyes. They were rather diminished and covered with a fine layer of dark ichor, but the cruel intentions shone through it with excellent clarity. It promised unending pain as its fangs opened up to show that inside its mouth were several rows of dangerously sharp teeth ready to tear him up.

Thankfully, he had a plan.

The moment the sharp fangs would have closed in on his body, flying at impressive speeds, infused with both wind-natured and shadow-natured mana hefting the giant mana construct right at the salivating monster’s face.

Seeing his own multifaceted reflection in the balefully staring ruby-red eyes, Sam smiled and activated a power that he hadn’t found much use for yet.

‘Shadow Transformation!’

Instantly, his entire body turned into a shadow, simply phasing through the monster’s rather surprised face. However, thankfully, the spell only affected his body and left the giant mana construct around his sword alone. Maybe an oversight, maybe not, but he intended to make use of it.

His sword cut through the enormous spider’s face, slowing his speed considerably as the thick carapace gave away under the enhanced strength of his magical sword.

Ichor and flesh flew everywhere, mixed in with shards of the carapace as his sword cut through all material.

That lasted almost a second before the enormous size of the monster slowed him to a stop, his sword stuck in the body while the monster’s head was looking in two different directions. Thinking quickly, he took a stronger hold of the mana that made up the sword and, with a brief twist in the structure he directed the entire thing to be explosively released at the tip of the blade.

The same moment the energy was released, shooting a rather sizable hole through the monster’s body, he wrenched the sword free, canceled the Shadow Transformation skill, and let himself fall to the ground, landing on the ground and splashing in the disgusting mud mixture of perpetual dust and corpse liquids.

Scowling in disgust, he looked up, just in time to see a giant organ, its purpose unknown to him, falling toward his face.

Without a word, he launched himself backward with a small helping of a gust of wind, landing right in front of the teetering monster, dodging the falling organ only by a second as it landed with a great splash on the ground.

The giant spider, with its face cut in twain, teetered on its multitude of legs, twitching every which way, but it was pretty clear to his magical senses that it was dead. And the only question was: when would it realize it?

Seemingly sensing the destruction of their queen, the smaller spiders roared and chittered in anger, and Sam saw them rushing toward them with renewed vigor.

“On me!” he exclaimed as loud as possible, calling the others to him.

The next minute or so was spent frantically fighting the onrushing monsters as the giant spider queen drunkenly staggered over to them, either crushing careless spiders or causing the team to dodge around the giant legs.

Dan was busy keeping a constant circle of flame going around them, while simultaneously sniping down a few spiders that decided that getting to high ground and covering the team with sticky thread would be a great idea.

Katie was like a blender, surprisingly joined by Lucky, rotating around their small group. She went in a clockwise direction while Lucky went in the opposite direction, cutting up any spider that survived the flames and still decided to attack them.

Clarissa was busy in the middle, flinging buffs and heals constantly, the gentle white light seemingly falling onto them without end.

Sam used his control over the wind to fan the flames, having it lash out at daring or particularly stupid spiders while unleashing a constant stream of Wind Flurries, all the while keeping up a Wind Blade Storm.

He also made sure to keep an eye, with his Mana Sense, on the corpse above them, as it slowly leaked the mana that kept it alive.

After some time passed, he noticed an abrupt change in the corpse above them.

“Get to the entrance!” he yelled.

The team didn’t argue, instead as one, they began slowly walking towards the entrance corridor from where they entered the cavern. Sam didn’t really need to get there, only to get away from the corpse, as he had sensed the last vestiges of mana leaving the deathly legs of the spider.

CRACK!

They were only a few dozen yards away from the half-dead corpse when they all heard a disgusting crack sound behind them. The team turned around as one, and surprisingly the spiders besieging them also stopped as if the moment deserved all of their attention.

One of the legs of the spider queen, after losing the mana that reinforced it, gave up, no longer capable of supporting the weight of the giant spider monster. As the broken leg fell, the boss’s body tilted forward and also began to fall to the ground.

The moment the first part of the broken leg reached the gruesome mud on the ground, the frozen spider monsters let out a simple shriek, turned around, and fled wherever they could. It was pure chaos, with the bigger spiders crushing or even picking up and snacking on the smaller ones.

It strongly suggested that they only worked together under the direction of the boss monster.

Not even a full second later, the main body followed the broken leg, landing with a giant thud that shook not just the ground they were standing on but the entire tree. Sam even felt the environmental mana shaking with some kind of emotion, but he couldn’t really pinpoint which emotion it was. Though based on all the evidence, he had a pretty good guess…

For an entire minute, they maintained their spells, with Katie and Lucky running around, killing some of the stragglers that were too wounded or too lost in rage to flee.

Finally, after sweeping through the area with his senses, he gave the command.

“Stand down!”

Instantly, Dan collapsed to the ground, with Clarissa following him, heedless of the mud, dirt, and other disgusting materials that littered the floor. Sam took a moment to raise a simple earth wall that was wide enough to sit on and plopped down on it, exhausted. Lucky soon joined him, laying on his legs, panting with a happy grin on his face.

They stayed like that for a while, just silently looking around and each other.

After a minute, all of them flinched as a notification screen showed up with a loud ding sound.

Sam smiled at the others as they excitedly began checking their own screen, then started looking over his own.

[Congratulations! You and your team killed the Gigantic Spider Overlady, the cancer that infested this most magical tree!]

[You’ve leveled up!]

[You are now Level 38!]

[Gained 2 unassigned attribute points!]

[Gained 1 VIT for surviving something not many would survive!]

Sam smirked a little, happy to see that all of his stats, except for Luck, reached 20. With that, he would be ready for a quest that would be another windfall that other players would find too late to profit from. ‘At least, there are some positives to this isekai thing…’ he mused as he added the other two points to AGI and MAG. Now that he had the basic foundation down, he could begin to specialize a bit.

Which meant mana and speed.

Conspicuously, there was no mention of the quest or finishing the dungeon. Though, he slightly expected it. Sam stood up, dusted his pants, and then walked up to the corpse of the giant monster that lay there like some kind of macabre hill. He could have sworn that some of the legs twitched a few times.

He stared at the gigantic corpse for a few moments before laying one hand gently on one of the ‘clean’ patches of the carapace. The moment he touched the coarse material, there was a brief pulse of magic and the boss’s body began to glow gently, and just like the monsters before in the dungeon, it began to flake off into light particles, starting from its legs.

Sam watched, slightly mesmerized, as the giant carcass vanished in a brief shower of light particles, leaving behind a veritable pile of loot.

The ‘least’ valuable were the monster materials, like carapace parts, fangs, bundles of raw threads, and even spider hair stalks. Around them were ores of gold and, from what he saw, silver. Dungeons in Magic Unbound didn’t really drop currency as how would the very fabric of dimensions know what currency was, thus instead dungeons provided raw ore. Though, in truth, it was just the developers’ way to slow down the devaluation of the currency, as it cost money to create gold coins from gold ore.

And inevitably, the taxes.

Following those was the important loot. Another few bundles of Phantasmal Spider Silks, granting them enough that they would be able to craft something for everybody on the team, and then some.

There were four books, based on the mana in them, they were skill books in the pile, and Sam didn’t even hesitate to pick them up.

There was a Shadow Cloud book, which showed how to conjure a cloud made of shadows, more than likely for him. A Spider’s Grace book, which increased the Agility of the user, probably for Katie. The next one was Baleful Fire, a fire spell with rather corrosive properties, which naturally went to Dan. Finally a gorgeous skill book, its white color shining and accented by silver trimmings. The skill book, Cleansing Light, was a very good AoE skill that, well, cleansed people of corruption. Smiling happily, he turned to Clarissa and threw the book at her.

Automatically, she snatched it out of the air, and when she took a look at the title, she could only gape.

Sam could understand that, even now, at the beginning of the game, there were several spells that gained notoriety. And among the healers, it was Cleansing Light. It was an area -affect spell that cleansed corruption one of the most common debuffs, and moreover, the spell was simple and cheap to cast. Also, thanks to the spell's rarity (the healer guilds and other organisations that could teach the skill were rather stingy with it), the sub skill options, some of which were OP, were not widely known.

While the others learned the spells, he also placed his hand on the cover of the skill book and absorbed it.

[Congratulations! You’ve learned Shadow Cloud!]

[Shadow Cloud: Level 0/20 (0%) (Active) Allows you to conjure a cloud made of shadows. The cloud obstructs the view of anyone that wants to look through it.]

[Thanks to your effort with shadow-natured mana, you gained the skill Shadow Affinity!]

[Shadow Affinity: Level 0/100 (0%) (Passive) You have a good affinity with the shadows. Beings born of the shadows will be more favorable to you. The cost of the Shadow-type spells and skills is reduced and their power is increased by 0,5% for each skill level.]

He saw that he had a few more notifications, but there was something else they needed to do. Sam picked up the few pieces of equipment: a dagger, a shield, and a spear from the remaining pile, shoved them into his inventory, and turned to the others, who were still intently staring at their screens.

“We need to move. The quest is not done!” he exclaimed softly and the others, broken from their reverie, looked at him seriously.

“What do we need to do?” asked Dan, as he picked up his club from the ground and swung it a few times as if feeling its weight after his inevitable level up.

“Per the quest, we need to find a way to close down the portal,” he explained while simultaneously activating his Mana Sense. “Probably some artifact or glowing thingy.”

Katie immediately perked up at hearing that.

Sam just glared at her. “No touching glowing things. Only poke. With a stick! Understand?”

The poor girl seemingly melted under his stern gaze and her little familiar glared at him with unsettling eyes.

“Anyway, spread out and look for anything that doesn’t belong to the nest of a murderous giant spider!” he declared and instantly began moving, trying to feel the minute differences in the environmental mana, hoping to pinpoint the item they were looking for.

Clarissa sighed forlornly then with a great sigh stood up, and began sending out small pulses of white light as she walked around the muddy area. Katie simply began running around and using her sword to break stones and cut spider threads. Dan was, however, attempting the same thing Sam did, as in using his Mana to try to find whatever they were looking for.

Eventually, Sam arrived in front of the giant sack made of spider silk, from which the giant spider emerged at the beginning of the fight, and with a grunt, unsheathed his sword and let loose a weak but rather big Wind Blade.

The sack split into two, letting out a cloud of foul smell, originating from half-digested prey and who knows what. With a small application of wind mana, he sent the horrid smell away and bade the others to converge on him.

A few seconds later, the four of them stood in front of a deluge of waste and animal remains soaked in some kind of corruptive liquid.

Sam said only two words.

“Burn it!”

Dan let out a disturbing giggle, reminding Sam of Katie, and summoned his now familiar white-hot flame and flung it at the gigantic pile of filth in front of them.

Sam instantly had to weave a simple wind curtain in front of them to prevent the smoke and smell from reaching them. And within a minute or two nothing remained from the giant sack that was the home of the late spider queen. Instead, they were greeted with a small globe of weakly pulsating green crystal that was crisscrossed with cracks shining with the same technicolor light that they saw when the Fracture happened.

It hung from the ceiling via weak-looking roots as if it was a simple fruit.

Though based on the feeling he got from his Mana Sense, it was anything but that.

Scowling a little, he raised his sword, ran neutral mana, then wind and shadow-natured mana through it in equal amounts, and without saying anything he swung his sword.

The moment the blade came into contact with the crystal, there was instantly an enormous release of energy, bathing them in multicolored light. Strangely, it had absolutely no effect on them. No damage, debuff (or buff) appeared.

CRACK!

Then the simple crack he made grew and in the blink of an eye, the crystal was in two pieces and they saw nothing more. The technicolor light spilling from the magical artifact intensified enough that they had to close their eyes.

That lasted for a very long moment, with the explosion of the same light thundering in their ears, preventing them from hearing anything but their own wildly beating hearts.

Then the moment was gone, and they found themselves in absolute silence.

Which was naturally broken by a very familiar screech.

Sam opened his eyes, blinking out the spots, and took in the situation.

They were exactly where previously the now missing portal stood, with the giant tree behind them, and a very angry and hungry-looking wyvern in front of them. All around them, the same battle was still happening with groups of monsters clashing with desperate defenders.

Then the giant tree glowed in a cheerful green and let out a nova of green light that washed over the battlefield, vaporizing smaller monsters and wounding bigger ones.

Even the wyvern was blasted back a little, disorienting thus allowing Sam and his team to quickly read the new notification that popped up in front of them.

[You’ve completed the quest: Topping the tree!]

[You managed to destroy the portal’s anchor and freed the newly born tree spirit from its blight!]

[You’ve extensively bathed in the dimensional energies; you gained the skill Dimensional Mana Resistance!]

[As a reward for completing the quest, you gain 10 levels in the skill!]

[Return to the city of Ironwood to gain the rest of your rewards!]