If the Harry Potter 2 spider chase scene scared the shit out of you as a child, you could likely imagine the way Dante felt seeing all these spiderlings lunge at him while screeching, their mouthparts dripping with some sort of venom.
However, at a certain level of power, certain things that would frighten you before would not faze you. To Dante, these spiderlings were moving in extreme slow motion, the kind that made you impatient to see what happened next.
If he wanted to, he could charge into the army and crush them all using his power, but way the heck would he do that? Rather, Dante cast out his palm callously, sending a huge wave of potent hellfire towards the spiderlings rushing at him.
When the spiders met the wave of blackish-red flames, they immediately turned into charcoal without a chance to screech or make any death throes. Hellfire was not like normal flames, it was in the list of top ten fires.
Even Lara Sanguis had been impressed by it, but lamented that it was still at the mortal level and yet to become planetary, much less galactic or universal.
But my brother in Christ, that was Lara Sanguis, the only woman Beatrice considered a foe in the entire universe. Her power level was at the peak of what could be achieved, and these lowly F rank Spiderlings were as far from her as the earth was from the edge of the universe.
The wave spread out for 500 meters, which was exactly Dante range of spirit sense, before dying out. It wasn't that it couldn't go further, his total range for his flames should be about 5000 meters, or 5 kilometers.
The reason he limited it to this range was that he discovered that as long as he kept his flames within the range of his spirit sense, he could retrieve them and achieve no loss in Internal Force. As such, the hellfire he cultivated could be used almost endlessly within this range.
However if it went out of that range, it could not be retained and would count as a normal usage of internal force, which was expended. This might seen broken, but it followed the common sense of the True Martial World.
That world cultivates the body and vitality, not the mind. It was not an immortal world so it did not have soul cultivation techniques. Even if a person became a peak Martial God and had an Immortal-grade Internal Art with up to 10 levels, they would still not have more than 100 points in Intelligence at the 10th level.
Even if they could retain everything within 100 meters, they usually would not encounter foes who would enter such a close range for that very reason. Not to mention that not every Internal art, even at the Immortal grade, comes with Spirit Sense.
Spirit Sense was something that only Foundation Establishment cultivators in the immortal world unlocked. Even Qi Refinement fellows didn't have the right to have it, so a wuxia world having a technique with one showed how special the Inferno Ascension Art was.
And the balance with this was that Internal Force, once consumed, could not be auto-recovered like it was some mana bar in a game. You had to leave battle, sit down and then run your internal art to turn your internal energy into internal force.
Of course, the leeway was that recovering spent internal force was far faster and cost less than increasing the level of your technique by cultivating new internal force to increase your total.
Dante didn't need to think so far though. He considered using some of his spatial element spells so that he could train his proficiency in them, but changed his mind and continued to lance the incoming spiderlings with fire the moment a sufficient amount entered his range.
It was not just that his Internal Force was technically 'finite' while being used like this, and it also wasn't the fact that using it continuously in an intense situation helped train his familiarity with it in combat, but also the fact that spiders deserved to be burned by fire.
It was fitting.
Dante stood in one spot for a full 30 minutes, burning every spiderling that charged at him. He waited until they were merely 15 meters away and could leap at him to release the fire in all directions, turning the densely packed monsters into instant ash.
So 485 meters worth of spiderlings that were no larger than a small suitcase were burned every round and at the speed they moved, Dante could clear a section every 3-5 seconds. Despite this, it took a whole 30 minutes to clear out the entire cavern, so that should tell you about the sheer quantity of them here.
Dante wasn't surprised, these spiders had probably been here for years without being cleared. After all, this was clearly a dungeon-like area similar to that laboratory since there was a strong concentration of monsters of various levels in one place.
Also, none of the spiderlings dropped mutation cores, which was another tell. This meant that his Absorption was still at the F Rank and could only take 10% of stats, but he would manage like that.
Since the spiderlings had been numerous, he had burned them away, so there were no corpses to absorb. Anyway, Dante targeted the E Rank and above spiders for absorption and wouldn't dare burn them away.
After patting himself down, he glanced behind him to the entrance of the cave, which leads to a lush forest outside that had countless pieces of spider webs coating the trees. Yeah, it was not likely that anyone would come here after seeing that.
This was definitely not a flag. Besides, if it did happen that someone did miraculously come here, Dante was not worried. With his spatial element spells, he could just send them out or lock them in a pocket dimension while he did his thing.
Dante descended down the cavern. How he was able to tell the complete layout despite only having 500 meters of spirit sense was that his spirit sense was 3 dimensional. It wasn't just horizontal, but vertical as well, so the 500 meters could go up in the air or down below in the earth.
He went to the cavern with the E Rank spider warriors who were training hard while feeding on processed corpses. Dante initially should have been brought down here, but his avatar had been captured and yet to be proceeded, which was why he could escape.
In fact, back in the cavern above, there were other unprocessed people who were unconscious in the webbing, but Dante didn't free them. It was not necessarily because he didn't care, but because he felt that they might introduce unwanted variables.
Who knew if one of the cocoons had a beauty with a princess syndrome that caused him trouble with her foolishness or a dumb arrogant guy who thought he could do whatever he wanted and ruined everything?
They were safe in those cocoons anyway with the spiderlings who were tasked with processing them dead. Since he was about to deal with the spider warriors and keep going down below, they should be fine.
If something did happen, like the spiders sent out on capture emissions coming back from the forest entrance and taking a bite out of them for afternoon snack time, ah well. Too bad.
The spider warriors immediately detected Dante who did nothing to hide himself and seemed to freeze. Dante scanned the room with his spirit sense and saw that it was not large, and the number of Spider Warriors did not surpass 5,000 in number.
Spiderlings were easy to mass produce since they had no sentience and were small, but Spider Warriors were E Rank monsters with initial intelligence and were about the size of a one seater sofa. Even a B Rank Spider Queen could not achieve the impossible unless she had thousands of years to grow.
The Spider Warriors seemed to activate as one at this moment as they stretched and raised their two front legs before leaping over. With their power, they needed only to leap like this to reach Dante immediately rather than run over clumsily.
Dante simply cast his 1st Rank Spell, Gravitational Grip.
Immediately, a tiny black spot formed in the center of the area about 150 meters in front of Dante, enveloping everything within a range of 1000 meters with a strange wave of imperceptible energy.
The moment this energy contracted, everything within this range of 1 kilometer in all directions except Dante was dragged over to that spot and then crushed by the force of the suction as well as the multitude of bodies and items rushing over at high speeds.
The Spider Warriors that were initially full of vigor and charged at him with malice were now squished into pulp, a large amount of nasty smelling body fluid leaking in the ground around the black spot as it was not pulled over.
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