Yuki was staring at what appeared to be a normal rock wall, but then she turned to me with a puzzled expression. So a monster ran into my spear and then just fell down the cliffside? Was it a suicide bomber or what?
“Actually, if you examine carefully, there’s some spider silk here,” said Natsuki.
“Oh, really? Whoa, you’re right,” said Yuki.
I followed Natsuki’s finger. There were indeed some strands of gossamer clinging to the wall where the spider had been concealed.
“It’s very thin,” said Metea. She squinted and snatched at the thread. From just a short distance away, it would have looked as if she were grabbing empty air. “I can barely see it.”
Touya pulled a face. “So if we’d walked by it without noticing, it would have knocked us off? Yikes!”
The impact of the spider’s body on my spear had been pretty powerful, so even someone as large as Touya would be at risk if a rock spider caught him off guard.
“It even made a lifeline for itself,” said Haruka. “I wonder if it’ll crawl back up to us.”
I carefully peeked over the edge of the cliff, but it was hard to spot the rock spider—it looked no different from any other part of the wall—so I was only able to locate it after tugging on the thread. Man, it’d be impossible to tell it apart from the rock if it didn’t have legs.
Touya was standing beside me. “Holding on for dear life, huh? I’m gonna cut the thread.”
He gave the gossamer lifeline a forceful tug in an attempt to break it, but it was strong enough to support the monster’s full weight, so he had no luck.
“Damn it!” His frustration was audible. “Time for some fire, Nao!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
In spite of its high tensile strength, the thread seemed likely to be weak to heat. I casually cast the Ignite spell and burned through it with ease. The wind carried the rock spider out of sight into the mist below the waterfall.
Touya smiled and wiped his brow. “Whew. That was pretty satisfying.”
Haruka gave him an exasperated glance. “We didn’t gain anything from this encounter, however,” she pointed out.
We had defeated a rock spider, but we hadn’t been able to obtain a magicite or any other materials from it. All we’d gotten was the small amount of gossamer still stuck to the wall.
“Honestly, I don’t think it would have been worth it to pull it back up and kill it here,” said Touya. “Looks like the only things worth any money that you can get from these guys are magicites and spinnerets.”
That was a pretty detailed rebuttal. Touya must have used his Appraisal skill on the rock spider earlier. Their magicites, apparently, were worth about three thousand Rea apiece, so maybe they weren’t a terrible source of income as long as you detected them ahead of time and had the ability to slice through their rocklike bodies. It would come down to the value of the spinnerets, but...
“Spinnerets? Those can be useful,” said Haruka. “Right, Natsuki?”
“Indeed. We’ve seen for ourselves how strong their thread is, so I’m certain we could use it in alchemy to enhance our casual clothes—perhaps even to the point that they could even double as armor.”
“But the thread was super weak to fire, so we’d have to make some adjustments,” Yuki noted.
According to Natsuki, it was true that the thread was weak to fire, but it wasn’t significantly more so than conventional fibers like cotton and silk; it was just inadequate as armor. There was apparently a special process for addressing this weakness when extracting thread from the spinnerets, so they would be valuable materials after all. In addition, the thread was, even in unmodified form, more durable and longer lasting than cotton as well as being highly elastic—as we’d already seen when Touya had failed to snap it. Clearly rock spider silk was an extremely useful fiber.
“We might even be able to make some runproof stockings,” said Yuki.
“Fine as the thread was, Touya-kun couldn’t break it, so that seems plausible,” said Natsuki.
“Well, that settles it,” said Haruka. “The next time we run into a rock spider, we’ll beat it and take its spinneret.”
“Got it,” said Touya. “I just hope we can manage that before it falls. It’d be annoying having to haul it back up here. I didn’t detect that last one, so I’m counting on you, Nao.”
“Yeah, same here,” said Yuki. “It had really good camouflage.”
“I couldn’t smell it either,” said Mary. “I can smell things like animals just fine if they’re as close as the spider was, but...”
Mary and Metea were sensitive to the presence of monsters in the same way Touya was. In the past, there had been a couple of occasions when one of them had noticed monsters before I was able to detect them with my Scout skill, but their sixth sense hadn’t worked in this case, whereas my Scout skill had at least helped me to notice that something was off. It hadn’t been accurate enough to identify the spider as a hostile presence, however, so maybe rock spiders had something on the order of a high-level Camouflage skill.
“They’ll undoubtedly be difficult to identify with the naked eye,” said Natsuki. “But perhaps, once we’ve encountered more, we’ll learn the trick of it.”
“I hope so,” I said. “I’ll do my best to point them out as early as I can. Just give it your best shot, everybody.”
★★★★★★★★★
Less than a minute after we resumed walking, we ran into another rock spider. They must have been common in this area. This one proved just as difficult to detect as the first. All of us looked in its direction, but no one was able to spot it, even after we had some detailed telemetry from my Scout skill. That was unsurprising, since not even I could spot it with the naked eye. Luckily, if I trained my skill on a target at close range, it would display its location in detail, so...
“Take this!”
Touya smashed his sword against the rock spider. The hard clang of metal echoed through the dungeon as the monster collapsed with its legs curled up. Not even one of Touya’s powerful swings had been enough to crush it instantly, so it definitely lived up to its name. Still, he was able to kill it with ease by running his sword through its soft belly. Apparently its back was the only part of it that was actually rock-hard.
It was easy to break it open too if we worked outward from the belly. Even Yuki had no difficulty extracting the magicite and spinneret. All that was left after that was the rock spider’s hard exoskeleton, which had no value to us, so we simply tossed it over the edge of the cliff. It was quite literally as hard as rock, and even its softer parts seemed to be composed of chitin, so unlike other monsters, it seemed unlikely to be compostable.
“Rock spiders actually seem kinda similar to things like limpets that cling to rocks,” said Yuki.
“Makes sense,” said Touya. “They’re pretty weak if you can detect them ahead of time and just smash ’em.”
“That takes a lot of strength, though, so probably only somebody like you could pull it off, Touya,” I said. “Actually, maybe Mary could too...”
Mary and Touya used the same type of sword. None of the other members of our party had weapons suitable for clubbing monsters. Any of us could probably achieve similar results with a blunt weapon, and there was also the option of casting a spell like Stone Missile, but there was no point in wasting mana when Touya could handle it for us.
“Would you like to give it a try, Mary?” Haruka asked.
“Are you sure about that, Haruka-san? I don’t think I can figure out exactly where a rock spider is on my own...”
“I suppose you’ll have to level up your Scout skill a bit,” said Haruka. “In that case, give her a hand, Nao.”
“Sure.”