Once he came close to his destination, the road veered away and would take Apophis no further.
He abandoned his motorcycle, then spent the next hour hiking towards his destination.
Finally, he arrived at the coordinates, a grouping of extremely uneven hills which looked suspiciously unnatural.
Yet, he saw no bunker, nor a building of any kind.
However, Apophis was certain that the Zetark books were accurate, and he carefully investigated the area. After several minutes of searching, he found a huge entrance into the ground, which was hidden under a rocky ledge on one of the hills.
To a casual observer, this opening would have been completely invisible. Exactly the sort of entrance Apophis expected for a secret military bunker.
He entered, observing the gradual downward slope of gravel and stone under his feet.
With this in mind, Apophis walked along the path for two hours, using a plume of chaos flame in his hand as a torch.
Finally, he emerged into a wide chamber which led to the shore of an underground lake that shimmered with luminescence.
But there, next to the lake, were several red-spotted spiders 50 centimeters high!
"Proto Spiders?!" Apophis gasped. He remembered them from his first life. They were powerful creatures, quite deadly to low-level players! They usually served as mini-boss encounters to guard moderately important locations underneath the surface of Planet Era.
He inspected these particular spiders.
╔══════════════╕
╟─╼<strong>ELITE MONSTER </strong>
║ ╰╼[Name]: Era's Proto Spider
║ ╰╼[LvL]: 13
║ ╰╼[Rank]: E+
╚══════════════╛
But in the middle of the rest was a Proto Spider twice as big as the others.
╔══════════════╕
╟─╼<strong>BOSS MONSTER </strong>
║ ╰╼[Name]: Proto Spider Queen
║ ╰╼[LvL]: 20
║ ╰╼[Rank]: E+
╚══════════════╛
Being just one player, Apophis was at a huge disadvantage. He couldn't rely on having teammates to help distract the monsters, nor to heal him.
However, his situation was far from hopeless.
First off, Apophis had incredible firepower at his disposal. The Proto Spiders didn't have stats as high as their levels would suggest, and while they could easily kill Apophis in moments if they attacked him in melee, their defenses and HP were quite poor.
In addition, Proto Spiders were deathly afraid of fire because it blinded their night vision and seared their eyes in an agonizing way that natural bioluminescence didn't.
And unlike tiny, normal spiders, they couldn't swim well unless completely unhindered, and they drowned easily if attacked while in the water.
Though they fed heavily on creatures who lived in freshwater, Proto Spiders used their webs like fishing nets to drag their prey onto land, rather than attacking their prey in the water.
A pack of Proto Spiders was supposed to be a threat for a large group of LvL 3 or LvL 4 players. As a single LvL 5 player, Apophis probably would have no chance of survival…
…If it weren't for his ~Chaos Flame~ ability granting him double damage and his many years of experience at Energy management.
After putting together a plan of attack for several minutes, Apophis performed the first step: he drew a simple knife and slashed his forearm, making sure to draw as much blood as possible.
The Preto Spiders on the other side of the lake, smelling the blood, rushed towards him! Only the queen stayed back, guarding her nest.
Apophis threw flames in a wide arc, spreading it over and around both sides of the lake. He used only a little Energy, maximizing the light emitted by the flames, rather than their heat.
After all, it was the light that the spiders were terrified of.
It worked!
Panicking, the Proto Spiders fled from the bright, chaos-infused flames and leaped into the lake to escape it! They could swim quickly, so long as they weren't wrestling with prey, Apophis threw a wave of low-heat flames over the water itself, forcing the monsters to dive underneath to escape it.
Apophis did not relent, continuously throwing low-heat fire everywhere.
One by one, the Proto Spiders stopped scurrying along the shore towards Apophis and dove into the lake.
Soon, the whole shore was completely consumed by bright flames!
And Apophis had hardly used any Energy, since he was creating flames which would deal almost no damage to any creature they touched.
Eventually, the Proto Spiders became desperate. They tried to stay underwater to escape the flames that their animalistic brains believed would slaughter them, but eventually they lost a lot of HP from drowning.
Their survival instincts forced the Proto Spiders to burst out from the water and run through the flames to escape drowning, but they were too terrified to do anything more than stagger blindly around until a few realized exactly where the flames were coming from.
Now that his enemies were severely weakened and blinded, Apophis changed his tactics.
He channeled a concentrated jet of super-hot flame and swept it like a fire hose across the spiders, causing them to burn in agony!
The water soaking their bodies turned to deadly steam in moments, cooking them in their exoskeletons like lobsters.
This attack lasted a very short time, but it was enough to finish off the last of the normal Proto Spiders. Though the low-heat flames had taken hardly any Energy, Apophis had channeled them for nearly half an hour, and it had added up. He ran out of Energy almost at the moment the last normal Proto Spider died.
Each kill earned him the same notification:
<strong>System:</strong> [Era's Proto Spider] killed. Gain 1235 EXP.
This wasn't as much EXP as might have been expected, but that was the result of the normal Proto Spiders being the minions of a boss.
Once the last of the normal Proto Spiders died, Apophis received a much more exciting notification.
<strong>System:</strong> Level 6 achieved. Gain 5 Skill Points for the Talent Tree.
However, the Proto Spider Queen herself was still alive, having refused to leave her nest. She was far more resistant to the blinding effects of the fire than her offspring, and had simply watched as they all died to Apophis's flames.
But now her only thoughts were for the survival of her eggs.
Resigned, the Proto Spider Queen spun a net of webbing around her eggs, picked it up with her mouth parts, and fled further into the recesses of the cavernous tunnel.
There had been a few side tunnels that Apophis had found on his hike down to the lake, and he assumed there would be more of them further on.
Hopefully for Apophis, the Proto Spider Queen would hide in one of these, rather than turning around and trying to fight him later on. Thankfully, she didn't seem to know that he was out of Energy—though he would regenerate a tiny amount of it every minute.
Apophis took advantage of this regeneration to sit down beside the water and rest with a good snack and some water that he'd bought in Omeya.
He was exhausted from that fight, but fortunately, his level up had allowed him to regain some strength.
Then Apophis resumed his journey, descending further and further until he must have been at least a kilometer below sea level. He didn't meet the Proto Spider Queen again, though he was prepared at every moment to hurl a—tiny—fireball into her face.
After another thirty minutes of walking, Apophis came across an enormous iron door several meters high. Closed, of course. Next to it was a control panel.
He entered the code that he'd obtained from the Zetark book...
…And smiled as the door of the bunker opened.
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