“Elias, what… what was that sound?”

  Rhea was still glued to me, her head down, refusing to look at the situation.

  “Elites, seven of them; you can just look, you know? Now the spiders moved away.”

  She opened her eyes, blinking a couple of times and looking around. The place was a disaster, with bodies and limbs scattered everywhere and fluids of many colours soaking through the cracks in the stone or pooling here and there. It wasn’t exactly an idyllic place for taking a stroll, but the carnage I managed to inflict on this spider colony was something I could be proud of.

  As she took in the surroundings with eyes as wide as saucers, the thumping of the elites' approach echoed in the cavern. Now that the cacophony created by their brethren stopped, I noticed the sounds bouncing and distorting, becoming extremely loud as they came back to us. The first of the armoured monstrosities was nearly on us. I continued to draw life force from the last spiders I hexed, then I hexed this one too, five times, all to reduce the durability of its armour. Between the effect of my hexes and my trait, Hexer’s Touch, the more I stacked them and the more my enemy was susceptible to my magic, meaning that it was in for a bad time.

  It screeched another time as it jumped from the lower level onto us, but contrary to what I thought would happen, this monster of a spider covered the whole barrier. I could see its limbs trying to pierce it; the spinning dart blades were ineffectively scratching its carapace, and the barrier was suffering extensive damage from its limbs and mandibles trying to break it.

  But it was holding, and that meant that I could outlast it. I started draining this one too, stealing its very life to charge a dart, if you could call this thing a dart.

  I willed it bigger and more powerful; the life force inside me responded weakly to my intent, but I felt it respond. That was a start. My aura managed to bridge the gap after all the time I tried, but the life force not being mine was making the process much harder. Well, there was no way in hell I would use mine to do something so stupid as overcharge a single spell; I didn’t have a death wish.

  As the dart started engrossing, looking more like a spear than a simple one-foot-long dart, I used Arcane Infusion, then I stored an arcane blast charge in the tip. Let’s see how you deal with this…

  I hexed the bastard three more times, then as it tried to clamp on the barrier with its mandibles again, I shot the spear of golden light into its mouth.

  The spell crossed the barrier as if it wasn’t there, then entered the spider’s mouth and launched it down the slope. It tumbled three levels before stopping, far less than expected given the power of that spear, and a detonation opened it in two, golden energy escaping from inside its fractured body and killing the spiders near it.

  I was still absorbing its life force; it lasted nearly five more seconds. I was impressed by its durability; that was something I really didn’t foresee. Then I read the notification about its death.

  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

  You have killed an Arachnid Royal Guard Lv74.

  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

  Damn, the levels were up to the fifties with the other spiders, and I thought the boss would be this high, or just a bit higher. Now I was fearing that Rhea won’t realistically be able to face it by herself.

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  My musings got interrupted by the other six elites. How to deal with something like these…

  I thought about what Rhea said about using the skills of my class. How would I go to kill these things while using my hexes?

  I analysed what I knew about them; even with my advantages, targeting their strong suit wasn’t really the best way, so I hexed them, but instead of targeting their resilience, I targeted their strength, their physical might.

  I saw an effect immediately; they sagged a little, then they were on us, trying to destroy the barrier. I stopped the spinning and dispelled the blades; against these, they were just an annoyance to me because the sound was like nails on a chalkboard. To them, it didn’t do anything in the slightest. With my attention freer and my multicasting calling to me, I started draining their life and using the energy to apply more hexes, then more, then more. As I reached a stack of nearly a dozen hexes each, the monsters' movements were slowing to a crawl; their limbs trembled, and after applying another, one of the spiders fell to the ground.

  I noticed before when I killed the first one that their weight must be insane, and while their strength matches their vessel, it wasn’t as high as their durability; if that were the case, the first one would have popped my barrier like a balloon.

  In a couple more seconds the spiders fell all to the ground; one tumbled down the slope into the lower level. Everything became quiet; the spiders around us didn’t make a peep since the royal guards arrived, and they were now too weak to even protest under their own weight.

  Rhea stirred from my side; she looked around again. “What did you do to them?”

  “I just hexed them enough to make them too weak to bear their own weight.” Even while sprawled on the ground, they were as tall as Rhea and many times her mass.

  I increased the radius of my barrier and included one of them: “Elias, it’s dangerous; be careful, please…”

  I nodded at her. “I just want to try something.”

  My steps echoed in the vast chamber as I approached the beast. It was extremely armoured, plated everywhere, with overlap too. No place was a clear weak point except for the eyes, but those too were little, and the chitin around them was thick, if it could be called chitin… It looked more like metal than any organic material.

  I took one of its mandible appendages with both my hands; the thing was as thick as a pole at the base, but it tapered off at a really narrow point. As I adjusted my grip, my stone armour sparked against the ridge as I started twisting it in a way that shouldn’t be anatomically possible. Even after putting all my strength against it and adding a couple of hexes for good measure, I couldn’t break it off, so I went back to my field of expertise, spells, and this time I made something really interesting…

  I created a circular barrier the size of my hand; it floated in front of me. The only difference from the usual was the myriad of tiny little teeth I shaped at the edge. Then I started to infuse it with more mana; the golden hue took on a tinge of blue in it. At the same time, it started to spin.

  Fast, then faster still, until it started to whir and create a sound that nearly made me flinch. I really didn’t want to find myself at the other side of this spell; it took a lot of preparation, so I don’t think I will be able to create it on the fly in a battle, but it was a matter of practice. Sooner or later this will become easier.

  As the circular saw descended on the mandible, a terrible sound deafened me and Rhea; sparks of metal and energy alike flew in the monster's face as my spell little by little proceeded to bite into its appendage. The spider twitched and hissed all the time, but after half a minute I nearly managed to sever the mandible, but my construct broke too, so I reverted to my previous plan and twisted and pulled, and to my immense satisfaction the mandible broke.

  As I took a step back to rebalance from the action, I looked at my new weapon. Yes… this will do.

  It was probably two feet long, and the sharp ridges ended in the most wicked point I saw; it was scary. And it was about to become even scarier.

  I roused my aura and made it pervade my new weapon. I felt it envelop it and then flow inside it, chasing away the remnants of the previous owner's aura and making it a vessel for my little experiment.

  I pointed the mandible towards its previous owner’s eye, one of the ten it has, then as it started to try and move about, I stabbed it as hard as I could. It screeched in pain. I felt something too, not pain, but a sensation coming from the part of the weapon which was buried in its eye socket.

  Let’s see how this works…