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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: FusionX
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Spider Queen Arachnae.
She was one of the bosses that had to be defeated in order to progress the main story in the Silver Dawn Knights route.
In the early game, Claudia had gone to subjugate her under the lord’s orders.
In fact, Claudia herself had no information and was only given a rough location, so she probably never imagined it would be this type of monster.
As the nickname “Spider Queen” suggests, Arachnae was a boss with the appearance of an enormously large spider.
To be precise, only her lower half.
Her lower half had the appearance of a spider, with eight legs and a creepy pattern, but she had the peculiar appearance of a human female’s upper body attached to the spider’s head.
She was quite pretty.
Even considering that her upper body was covered down to her neck with an exoskeleton, probably out of concern for the rating if a naked female body was shown directly.
Because of that, she had a cult-like popularity among certain groups who preferred monster girls, and even if they didn’t particularly like monster girls, she was one of the few beautiful females in Brightest Darkness 4, so she was quite popular.
Moreover, one of the developers was into that sort of thing, so even more so.
The patterns themselves were nothing special, befitting an early-game boss, with only around 10 even considering the Darkest Light Mod.
There was only one phase as well.
Considering that late-game bosses had an average of well over 20 different patterns, she was definitely on the easier side.
Except for one pattern where she summoned countless baby spiders.
This pattern appeared twice in total: once when her health was reduced to 60%, and once when it was reduced to 30%.
Arachnae could be considered the greatest challenge of the Darkest Light Mod.
In vanilla, she would just summon around 50 spiders and be done with it, so you could defeat them one by one while rolling, dodging, and attacking as you please.
If it was too bothersome, you could wipe them out with an area-of-effect magic.
However, it was different in the Darkest Light Mod.
The number of summoned spiders jumped up, with 250 appearing when her health dropped to 60% and a whopping 750 appearing all at once when it dropped to 30%. That’s why it totaled 1,000.
Computers that barely met the minimum requirements would often make a crunching sound as they became overloaded in the second situation, or they would crash altogether, unable to endure it any longer.
The health of the baby spiders themselves was low enough that they would die from just a graze.
Considering it was only 1 in the first playthrough and 11 even in the highest playthrough.
It was because their number was absurdly high and they swarmed in from all directions at once.
Moreover, they accumulated poison just like their mother, the Spider Queen.
Once you allowed the baby spiders to attack, you would either die groaning from the stun or die moaning from the poison, one of the two.
“That’s why I said I need a type of attack magic that can continuously sweep a wide area. Erica, you’re the perfect fit for that, right?”
Or you could use the magic obtained from defeating the Burning Golem.
To handle the baby spiders reliably, an attack that could “continuously” deal damage “quickly” over a “wide area” was essential, and the spell that perfectly matched those conditions was the reward for defeating the Burning Golem.
A magic that creates a ring of flames centered around the caster for 30 seconds.
The casting speed was fast, the duration was relatively long, and the mana consumption was low, but in exchange, the damage was miserably low.
However, even that miserably low damage was enough to one-shot the baby spiders, making it perfect for targeting the summoning pattern.
The strategy itself was to use the magic as soon as the pattern started and run around like crazy, burning the baby spiders until the boss room was completely cleared.
That’s all there was to it.
“……”
“……”
“……”
The expressions of Lizé, Erica, and Claudia gradually soured as they listened to my explanation.
Iris said it was a monster that didn’t suit her and that she couldn’t hold us back, so she opted out.
Someone had to stay and guard the castle anyway.
“Now I understand why Delta emphasized that we absolutely need to be able to attack a wide area. Baby spiders…”
“And you said their fangs and claws are poisonous too? We’ll have to take them out before they get close no matter what.”
“When you first said a thousand spiders, I wondered what you meant, but it makes sense now. There are swarm-type monsters among monsters, so I thought it was roughly similar.”
The knight commanders each made a remark.
Although they all seemed to grumble about how disgusting it was, none of them showed any fear towards Arachnae.
“Here. We’ve arrived.”
I stopped talking.
The knight commanders also stopped in place, following me.
We were at the entrance of a valley densely covered with trees.
Even though it was clearly midday, the inside was gloomy due to the excessive overgrowth of trees.
Only a few rays of sunlight managed to penetrate through the leaves.
“Even at a glance, it looks like a place that would have a lot of bugs.”
Erica said with disgust. I agreed.
I hadn’t noticed when seeing it with game graphics, but now that I was directly confirming it, it was no different from a jungle.
“Alright. Let’s review again.”
Sling, we each drew our weapons.
The horses were well hidden with the same jewel we had used when going to defeat the Rock Centipede.
“Where is the poison applied?”
“On the spider-shaped lower body. The human-shaped upper body is fine. You said to maintain distance except when attacking because getting hit a few times would infect us with poison.”
“What about the spider’s web attacks?”
“It’s best to avoid them if possible, but if they come simultaneously with other attacks, you told us to avoid the others and take the spider web attacks. Since we can tear them off quickly if we get hit by one or two.”
“If we get hit more than that, we won’t be able to tear them off, so we have to be careful.”
“I’ve explained all the actions it will take… Oh, just in case, I’ll say this. The place we have to fight in might be a bit, or quite disgusting. Don’t be shocked. Got it?”
“…How disgusting are we talking about?”
“It’s hard to explain in words. You’ll know when you see it, so just prepare yourself mentally.”
It might as well be considered the enhanced version of the bug dungeon I would have to visit later.
In other words, the bug dungeon, which was the enhanced version of Arachnae’s boss room, was a truly unimaginable den of monsters.
With the final check done, we moved our steps towards the Spider Queen’s boss room.
I took the lead since I knew the way, and the other three surrounded me from the sides and back.
The path was extremely rough.
Tree roots were strewn everywhere, causing us to nearly stumble several times, and the path was full of weeds and plant stems that were so tough they didn’t cut properly.
If Lizé hadn’t frozen all the plants blocking the way and shattered them to clear a path, it would have taken much longer.
“…This is the place, right?”
“Somehow, I can already imagine what the interior will look like.”
We stopped in front of a path leading even deeper into the valley.
Instead of weeds, trees, and plants, it was covered in spider webs.
Lizé stomped on the ground once and lifted her foot.
Sticky spider webs clung to the bottom of her silver sabaton.
Even stomping her foot a few times didn’t make them fall off easily.
“Can we even move properly in this?”
“Try not to step on areas with a strong gray color if possible. It will be hard to move properly.”
Even in the game, rolling was fixed to the slowest roll in areas covered with spider webs, and you couldn’t walk or run quickly, so you had to walk no matter what.
It was best to avoid the areas covered in spider webs.
“But everywhere is gray?”
It was just more difficult to find areas not covered in spider webs.
“That’s why I said if possible. It can’t be helped.”
“Can’t we burn this?”
“Well… I’m not sure. Why don’t you try it once?”
Upon hearing my words, Erica infused flames into her sword without hesitation and swung it horizontally.
The flames swept over the spider webs, but they didn’t burn.
“It doesn’t work.”
Erica gave up cleanly and stepped back.
In fact, at first, I had thought about asking Lizé to freeze the ground and try walking on it, but I decided against it, thinking it would be better to fight on spider webs than on ice.
“Still, the inside should be relatively okay. Let’s go in.”
From now on, it was a straight path, so Claudia took the lead and entered the valley.
Lizé was next, I was third, and Erica was last.
Along the way, over a dozen spiders the size of my thighs appeared in a line, but Claudia swung her greatsword and wiped them all out.
The ones that just appeared were the baby spiders that showed up in the Spider Queen’s summoning pattern.
As we went deeper inside, the spider webs covering the valley walls gradually thickened, and in turn, the number of spiders attacking us decreased.
A musty smell wafted from all directions.
“…Ugh.”
Before long, we arrived at Arachnae’s boss room. As soon as we did, Erica let out a groan.
The other two didn’t show it outwardly, but they definitely didn’t seem to be in a good mood.
There were green eggs everywhere.
Not only the walls but also the ceiling covered in spider webs and the floor near the walls were densely packed with round-shaped eggs.
Through the membrane of the eggs, the silhouettes of baby spiders could be faintly seen.
The places without eggs were covered in spider webs, and the places not covered in spider webs had eggs. As a bonus, there were dried-up human corpses stuck here and there.
“Oh my, are you guests?”
An extremely seductive voice was heard from among the eggs, and the Spider Queen walked forward.
There were no footsteps at all, probably due to the spider webs thickly covering the floor.
As the distance gradually closed, we could finally see her appearance clearly.
Her lower half was a huge spider with an overall green color and creepy patterns, and her upper half was a pretty female attached to the spider body’s head.
It was unmistakably the Spider Queen.
Her dark green hair hung down to her waist, and her pale, almost gray skin was fully exposed as she wore nothing on her upper body. Her eyes and lips were green.
Upon seeing us, the Spider Queen spread her arms wide to the sides as if welcoming guests.
That movement caused her bare breasts to bounce greatly.
I was about to prepare for battle like the other knight commanders, but I stopped for a moment, thinking I might have seen it wrong, and looked at Arachnae again.
‘…Huh?’
Why was she naked?
[T/N: lmao this just keeps getting better and better ]
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Thx for chapter, and I’m loving this
Except the fact that they got him drunk and kind of manipulated him into saying stuff he didn’t want to, and that not having any kind of repercussion is leaving a really, really bad aftertaste in my mouth…
Except that, this novel is truly a good read, entertaining to say the least xD