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I don’t want to die.

I don’t want to die!

I can’t just give up!

I’ll claw my way toward survival for all I’m worth, until my very last moment!

If I am gonna die here, I’m taking as many of them down with me as I can!

Half-crazed with desperation, I still try to check myself as I fire off a barrage of magic.

My main goal is quantity over quality, so the spells aren’t very powerful.

But since these spiders don’t have the skill Dragon Scales, it should still do decent damage.

Even if it’s not much, I doubt they’ll want to charge right into the line of fire.

Sure enough, the puppet spider and the archs all pause to defend themselves.

They use magic, swords, or whatever else to fend off my attacks.

But the other spiders, who can’t even counterattack my lowest-level magic, start going down from the direct hits.

Oh?

Maybe this desperate strategy could actually work?

While keeping the puppet spider and the archs at bay remains my top priority, I start aiming for the other spiders, too.

Especially the bigger ones that look like they’d be worth more EXP.

The little critters are dying from the aftershocks alone, anyway.

While I’m at it, I switch from Inert Evil Eye, which probably won’t work that well, to Jinx Evil Eye.

Leaving only one eye for Future Sight, I apply Jinx Evil Eye to all the others, stealing MP and such from my enemies.

Then I use that newly restored MP on another barrage of magic.

One of the archs gets fed up and tries to push through the barrage despite the damage, but instead of trying to counterattack, I only move away.

I definitely can’t risk trying to prepare other spells while producing all this magic by myself.

I might be able to ward them off, but I can’t completely stop the archs from moving.

Noticing this, the other archs start to charge, too, even if they take damage in the process.

I didn’t buy as much time as I had hoped.

If I had even one Parallel Mind available, things would probably be different, but there’s no point in thinking about that now.

I’m on my own.

I’m going to have to manage this myself.

I give up on the magic barrage and switch to higher-powered magic, aiming it toward the archs as they charge toward me.

Realizing that this will cause more damage than they’re willing to sustain, the archs stop to defend themselves again.

I use that chance to put some distance between us, using slightly weaker magic to fend off the other spiders while I’m at it.

The puppet spider alone moves to the entrance of the Middle Stratum, simply standing there to prevent me from fleeing.

I can’t say that’s particularly good or bad.

Impatiently, I check my status.

I’m fending off the archs’ attacks with magic and thread for now, but I know all too well that I can’t keep that up for long.

Given the archs’ stats, it’s only a matter of time before they push through my pathetic attempts.

Especially since there’s five of them.

And that moment comes all too quickly.

One of the archs’ sharp claws catches my torso.

As soon as I hit the ground, it pins me down.

Unable to move, I see the other archs closing in.

This is a serious crisis.

But I still have a final ray of hope.

Checking on my tattered body, I look at one of my status items again.

Experience points.

I check the amount I gained from shooting down other spiders while I fended off the archs, then the amount I need to level up.

It’s close.

I’m insanely close to the number of points I need, and I’m terrifyingly close to death, too.

It’s a gamble, but the only other option is certain death.

I have to try, no matter how terrible the odds.

I quickly Appraise the archs and lock onto the one with the lowest HP.

Annihilating Evil Eye, activate!

This is a skill I gained when I evolved into my current race, Ede Saine.

An insta-kill attack that uses Rot, the attribute associated with death.

Of all my skills, it’s currently second only to Abyss Magic in terms of killing power.

However, it comes at a high price: I take a huge amount of recoil damage when I use it.

That amount will be especially severe for my currently beaten-up body.

I’d say the odds of me surviving are about fifty-fifty.

Even if I do live through the self-inflicted damage, there’s a follow-up fifty-fifty bet as to whether it’ll kill the arch.

And after that, the gamble of whether it’ll be enough EXP for me to level up.

My odds of winning all these bets are one in eight at best.

Looks like I won.

My attack killed the arch, and the resulting EXP raised my level.

I undergo molting, which fully heals my wounds.

The missing part of my torso is restored, and my lost limbs grow back.

However, my HP doesn’t recover completely.

Turns out there’s a limit on how much I can heal by leveling up.

Still, this is a turn for the better. I can even see a chance of pulling through this.

It’s a small one, but it’s there.

The arch that I hit with my Annihilating Evil Eye disintegrates into dust.

This development seems to surprise the one pinning me to the ground, enough that its leg slackens a little.

I use Cutting Thread to slash at my captor’s leg and slip from its hold.

At the same time, I clamber up that leg and latch onto the arch’s torso.

The arch tries to shake me off, but I dig in firmly with my sharp claws and sink my fangs into it.

Moments later, it’s writhing around in agony.

The arch slams its body against the ground, trying to knock me off, but I hang on through sheer determination, continuing to inject it with poison.

The other archs are powerless to intervene, since they can’t attack me without attacking the one I’m stuck to as well.

The arch thrashes around, I hang on, and the other spiders watch, unable to do anything.

The only one to get a clue is the puppet spider, which I probably should’ve expected.

It charges forward, fully prepared to slice me in half even if it means killing the arch, too.

But it’s too late.

Time is up.

Long-Distance Teleport, activate.

The puppet’s blade swings toward me, but my body disappears just before it reaches me.

My spell moves me into the Middle Stratum with the unlucky arch in tow.

Really, with the arch’s obscenely high Status Condition Resistance, my poison would never be enough to kill it.

Biting into it with a Poison Attack was just a way to stall for time.

In those stolen moments, I started preparing the Teleport spell.

My goal in that situation wasn’t to wipe out the spider army.

It was ultimately nothing more than survival.

My odds of surviving by fighting to the bitter end were next to nothing.

The four remaining archs would’ve been enough of a challenge, never mind the puppet spider, which was leagues above all of them.

To be honest, I couldn’t have beaten that thing even in a one-on-one situation.

I’ve got no desire to participate in a battle I can’t win.

That’s why I focused all my efforts on getting away.

Though I guess I also got this arch as a souvenir.

I release my fangs and grapple with the arch above the magma.

Now the tables have turned.

I have a certain degree of heat resistance, but the arch has none.

Instead, it gets to take the brunt of my anger for putting me in such a deadly position.

A few minutes later, the charred body of the arch drops into the magma, defeated by the Upper Stratum.