Chapter 358: Communication
Alex finished swallowing the remaining pieces of high-Rank monster meat, making sure they reached his stomach before closing the mouth section of his Fire Mana Armor.
Now, he simply needed to wait for his enhanced digestive system to process the nutrients and replenish the blood he had lost.
He immediately flew upward again, although this time, he left a narrow opening around his eyes. While Mana Vortex Spell was enough to handle enemies in close combat without relying on his eyesight, the current situation was different.
With hundreds of spiders surrounding him across an enormous area, Alex needed every bit of sensory information he could obtain.
Just as he reached the height of the surrounding tree branches, he noticed something unusual. A house-sized spider was standing between several enormous trees, holding two human-sized spiders against its front legs.
Both smaller spiders had orange cracks running across their armored bodies, and Alex immediately understood how the suicide bombers had managed to strike him at such extraordinary speeds.
‘So that’s how those bastards are launching themselves. The bigger spiders are throwing them!’ Alex realized, immediately preparing to defend himself.
Almost as though responding to his realization, the enormous spider swung its legs forward and launched both smaller spiders directly toward him. Alex didn’t bother attempting to stop them with Kinetic Mana, since their speed was far too great for him to absorb their momentum before they reached him, and they might be able to ignore his kinetic mana like the other spiders.
Instead, he completed the Fire Bullet he had already been constructing and immediately fired it toward the approaching monsters. The bullet struck the first orange-patterned spider, causing its body to explode violently. The resulting explosion engulfed the second spider as well, triggering another enormous blast that spread through the surrounding sky.
However, Alex didn’t wait for the explosions to disappear. He released a considerable portion of his accumulated Kinetic Energy, accelerating directly through the expanding flames while his Fire Mana Armor protected him from the heat.
Within moments, he reached the enormous spider responsible for launching the smaller monsters and accelerated even further. An explosive shockwave erupted as Alex crashed directly into its armored body, creating an enormous crater across its abdomen. Blood burst from the cracks spreading through its shell, and the impact nearly tore the creature apart.
Alex, on the other hand, remained almost completely unharmed. The Kinetic Mana filling the interior of his armor had immediately absorbed the force of the collision, preventing the tremendous impact from reaching his body.
He raised his sword, intending to finish the monster before continuing toward the hill, but suddenly noticed something happening around the enormous wound.
‘It can heal itself too? How many abilities do these spiders have?’ Alex wondered as he watched the damaged flesh begin regenerating.
Nevertheless, he wasn’t entirely surprised when he considered the circumstances. These spiders appeared to belong to a high-Rank species, and they occupied an enormous territory without many other powerful monsters nearby. Sustaining such massive bodies would require considerable energy, so possessing some form of Life Element ability made sense, just as it had with the Wild Orcs.
Alex pulled his arm backward before throwing his sword, simultaneously using Kinetic Mana to accelerate it. The weapon shot forward with an enormous shockwave and pierced straight through the injured spider’s head, killing it instantly.
Before Alex could retrieve his sword, however, his danger alarms suddenly activated. Three orange-patterned spiders crashed into the surrounding area almost simultaneously, triggering explosions that engulfed everything nearby. Alex immediately sealed the opening around his eyes and concentrated on absorbing the surrounding heat with Kinetic Mana before it could cook him inside his armor.
As he maintained the defensive spell, however, an interesting possibility occurred to him.
‘Wait, my armor is already made from Fire-Mana. The only reason I need ordinary mana inside it is to prevent the heat from burning me,’ Alex realized.
If he replaced that protective mana with Kinetic Mana, he could accomplish the same thing while continuously absorbing the armor’s thermal energy.
‘That means I wouldn’t need to waste computational power maintaining another protective layer. And the more heat I absorb, the more Kinetic Energy I’ll accumulate,’ he thought.
Alex immediately began experimenting with the idea while pushing Neural Overdrive Spell further than before. Unlike his previous Battle Instinct Spells, Neural Overdrive could provide an enormous improvement to his thinking speed and sensory processing. However, the greater the enhancement, the shorter the period he could safely maintain it.
Nevertheless, Alex continued increasing its output, gradually forcing his brain to process information at an increasingly ridiculous speed. The sounds of the surrounding battle became strangely muted, and a sharp pain began spreading through his head. Blood trickled from his nose, but Alex ignored it and pushed the Spell even further.
At the same time, he began using Life Mana to repair the damage occurring within his brain. Gerindas Wand had considerably improved his Life Mana attunement, reducing the risk of accidentally damaging himself while attempting such delicate healing.
That gave Alex enough confidence to continue increasing Neural Overdrive beyond the limits he would normally consider reasonable.
Eventually, the surrounding world seemed to lose its colors, becoming an almost featureless mixture of shapes and movements. Strangely, however, the colored cracks running across the spiders’ bodies remained clearly visible.
Alex could see the human-sized spiders rushing toward him, while the enormous spiders positioned farther away continued launching orange-patterned monsters through the air. Yet he didn’t move from his position.
His armor was continuously generating enough heat for his Kinetic Mana to absorb, providing more than enough energy to maintain his flight. With that problem temporarily solved, Alex concentrated entirely on observing the monsters.
He watched their movements, compared their attack patterns, and gradually began noticing something unusual about how they responded to one another.
‘It’s just like I thought. These spiders are coordinating far too precisely. They must have some method of communicating with each other,’ Alex concluded.
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