Instead of replying Sarah was more interested in the barrier. For one, she wanted to make sure that her souls actually couldn’t pass through, which was unfortunately true as it seemed. However another question was, whether she could use the barrier against the boss.
Slowly walking closer to the entrance of the room where the barrier appeared, she examined the surroundings as far as it was possible with the spiderwebs around. Simply wiping them away wasn’t possible, as they stuck to the surfaces of the dungeon.
Being around the area where the barrier appeared, she tried to fire another soul.
It was again blocked by the barrier.
Throwing the shaft of one of the arrows inside the boss room didn’t cause any reaction however.
Acting based on that discovery, the mage slowly moved a part of her spell formation over the area where the barrier first appeared and again accelerated a soul.
The first barrier obviously couldn’t intervene, but apparently whoever created the dungeon system did add a fail-safe as another barrier appeared, now closer to the boss.
Those barriers were an issue, though if Sarah prepared everything in advance, she could probably fire two or three souls before the boss managed to attack her. Yet it was also clear that, if the [Elder Grotto Spider Lv 19] ever managed to attack her, she would probably die. Her physical attributes were basically useless.
She checked the time.
[44:09 remaining.]
Going in with a minute would be more than enough. So the mage decided to further examine the barrier.
Sarah would have spent her time on her soul spell, if the barrier was something imposed by Eas and independent from magic, but she felt the change related to the mana around her once she was closer and triggered the defensive magic of the dungeon.
Following the mana flow as far as her mana sense skill allowed, it seemed to be linked to the dungeon. Unless she got rid of the dungeon or somehow managed to overpower the structure she wouldn’t be able to get rid of the barrier.
But was it necessary?
Experimenting with the barrier further and losing more souls, the scientist came up with a theory. Running the barrier permanently would require a lot of mana. Also, regardless whether it’s enabled in case attacks were detected or disabled in any other cases, some form of control unit would be needed.
The controlling spell was probably buried somewhere deeper in the folded space of the dungeon. With that spell being out of reach, her next point of attack was the barrier itself. The mana in the environment where her projectile hit the barrier increased, so she would assume that the controller created a spatially limited barrier in those cases. That idea was further proven as she placed headless arrows in the area where the barrier would normally appear, which remained unaffected by the barrier.
The control unit probably deployed a barrier spell in the area affected by her attack.
Just to be sure Sarah placed a small spell to test for other spells in the area where the first barrier normally appeared and fired a soul. Adjusting her test spell to the new environment was harder than she expected, as the natural mana flow as well as the spell itself, now made from mana instead of an engraving, were creating false positives.
Though having fixed the issue by reducing it’s sensitivity, and finding the existence of the assumed spell, she got to work.
It would have been easier, if the barrier stayed active for longer or had some other color as a blinding gold which made looking at it very hard. But she wasn’t planning on doing the impossible like completely changing the nature of the spell.
The mage quickly outlined her goals in her mind and created a spell for it. A few interesting ideas came into her mind during the development, but without time and a limited amount of tests, she had to go with very basic spells from her old world. At least the risks would also be reduced.
An important factor, especially as she was basically working with the magical equivalent of a virus.
[5:62 remaining.]
It was getting closer than she liked. If this approach failed, she had maybe another try, after which she had to use brute-force.
Clearing her head, Sarah let her team-members step back and out of range of whatever might happen soon. The parts of her virus were already tested, but there was still a certain risk of accidents. Having someone stand by and ready to rescue her should help minimize the dangers.
Her spell in place, she fired another projectile at the boss. Again the barrier intercepted it, but this time more happened.
Using the mana of the dungeon, her prepared spell created additional spells inside and outside the shielded region. For one a copy of itself, then on the outside matter accelerators. The latter wasn’t big enough to do much damage, just enough to accelerate some small rocks or air to trigger the barrier. That in turn triggered the newly created copy and generated a loop which would hopefully end with the death of the spider.
Lastly, the barrier, which instead of protecting the elder spider now collapsed moments after appearing and crashed into the boss.
That the second barrier would simply block her “attacks” had been a concern from Sarah, however in the end it was just the barrier of the dungeon itself, so she had hoped it would react as it did by staying inactive. She could have probably found a fix for that non-existent issue, if she had more time.
Stationary barriers without any supervisors or additional guards were very easy targets for someone who could alter spells. Well, in this case some beasts did appear from time to time, but the mage had a team which could take care of the intruders.
More and more of the golden barrier covering the spider was triggered and flew at the roaring beast which had at some point awoken from its stasis. With all the lights of the barrier flying around the three soon had to shield her eyes.
The question of how to stop all this slowly started to creep into the mages mind. She had hoped that her virus would slay the beast, which in return would deactivate the barrier generator. In case of issues, she would have entered the room and gone with her initial idea of throwing souls at the enemy. But entering the space with the barrier projectiles still active seemed like a very bad idea, especially as the volley of those grew more intense by the second.
Though those concerns became irrelevant only moments later as the barrier suddenly vanished. The still existing projectiles still flew to the spider, however Sarah was at that point already occupied with different thoughts.
[You have entered the boss room of the Foggy Grotto!]
The walls around her simply vanished.
Many of the spiderwebs came loose and fell to the ground, though the ceiling didn’t seem to be affected. Though Sera and Nia were still outside of the chamber.
Not that Sarah paid any attention to those facts.
She had already prepared her soul acceleration spells, just in case. However with her barrier virus halfway working and the now very wounded and angry spider much more active than before, some alteration in her spells’ trajectory were needed.
One of the spider’s legs was missing. Two of its eyes seemed to be damaged, according to the red blood trails running down from them. Too bad a spider had eight of both. From numerous holes further red liquid was leaking. The question of why the spider had red blood came into her mind; also dread!
Dragging its wounded body, the beast slowly closed the distance between itself and the mage. The unsteady walk didn’t make aiming easier.
Sarah had already witnessed her share of mentally scarring events, not the beyond kind, more the human kind with knives, guns and forceful reemployment. Unfortunately those hadn’t prepared her completely for fighting a spider more than double her height, which was maybe or maybe not interested in eating her, but regardless wanted her very very much dead.
Fighting back the creeping in panic and fear as she usually did with useless emotions, she quickly fired her first soul at the spider.
Apparently a miss, as the beast still moved.
So she continued on with the second and third, just for good measures, before she started to reload her three prepared mana constructs and fire again.
Slowly placing one of its seven feet in front of each other, the monster staggered closer.
And reload.
And two heavy steps from the spider.
Sarah was about to fire her next rounds when the spider finally fell. That it still managed to move after having its soul blasted out of its body was somewhat unnerving to her, though she tried to explain it with the body simply executing the final commands before breaking down.
Looking at the logs the mage noticed that she could have just checked there, whether the spider was dead or not. Maybe the emotions got her more than she had expected? She pushed the thought to the back of her mind for the moment.
At least she didn’t take any damage in the fight.
[Your Mana Efficiency skill has reached Lv 6.]
[Your Mana Sense skill has reached Lv 6.]
[Your Spell Hacking skill has reached Lv 4.]
[You annihilated the Elder Grotto Spider Lv 19, boss of the Foggy Grotto.]
[You have cleared the Foggy Grotto.]
[You have cleared a Quest.]
[Your Searcher of ##### class has reached Lv 22.]
[You have reached Lv 7.]
