“Absolutely not!”

  “Rhea…”

  “Are you crazy? I’m just level ten! A-and there are a million spiders in there! I’m going to die!” She was about to hyperventilate.

  I took her by the shoulders, looking her right in the eyes. “I won’t let anything happen to you, you know that…”

  She calmed down a little, but she was still adamant about not entering the cave.

  “First, this is a great way of overcoming your fear once and for all; you are already killing spiders left and right, so it will be good therapy.”

  I raised another finger. “Second, I will take on all the spiders from here to the boss; if this is anything like the gorg cave, it will be the last room, and there will be elites. You know I can take care of everything; they are pretty weak all considered; they ambush more than attack frontally…” She was thinking about it; good, maybe there was still a chance to convince her.

  “Third, you can set up your rituals way before facing the boss; we will set the terrain to your advantage, and as soon as you are ready we will face it. If something goes wrong, I will be there to bring you away or take the Baron down, whatever works best.”

  She was clearly not enjoying the prospect, but if she managed…

  “Rhea, if you manage this, you will get an enormous boost. While your rituals are not good for a direct attack, they are still very powerful when set up properly. We can harvest materials from the spiders we kill along the way. I’m sure you can take down a Baron solo; you just need to prepare right, and already you have your stats and rituals boosted by all your achievements. You’ll see, it will be a piece of cake.”

  She was looking totally unconvinced.

  After sighing for what felt like the millionth time, she nodded. “I will try… I know this could be a fantastic opportunity, but…” She punched me in the shoulder; it didn’t hurt at all. “Why does it need to be spiders?!”

  Her scream got the attention of at least seven of the nearest monsters. As I quickly dispatched them, many more came from the surroundings. I simply shot them all with darts as I defended her and myself by the ranged attacks. There were some globs of sticky webs, but in between some spiders had the capabilities of launching little chitinous spikes that I was sure were poisonous.

  I told Rhea to not waste her mana; I wanted her to be at full capacity when dealing with the boss. She will need it, but I trusted that she could pull it off. I always thought that Rhea had great potential, but this will catapult her to my new level, maybe not that much in direct combat, but she will become a great asset to the party, and to me… Honestly, I wasn’t really sure about what was happening today; it started with just the idea of exploring and possibly improving my skills, but it went totally another way, and the thing is that I didn’t mind.

  Not only did I not mind, but I welcomed it; talking about my curse with her had been cathartic, better than years of therapy, and now I felt like I needed to repay her back. Somehow… she had become important to me in the span of an hour. I need to get my head out of the gutter and focus.

  “Let’s approach the cave. Stay behind me for now; I will deal with them. I need to try something; I can’t let you be the only one making improvements, right?”

  She smiled, but it was strained. “Right, I-I’ll think of how to better optimise my rituals in the meantime; lead the way.”

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  With a nod, I started moving towards the cave; it was giant, at least twenty yards tall, and it was full of spiders crawling in and out. This will not be easy on my mana… better to switch tactics.

  I started with hexing some of the spiders close to me; they were already starting to converge on our position. I slowed them down, and then I started draining them. My arcane sense had become a constant in my life now; it was always running in the background, together with multicasting and an arcane barrier, only that now, I wasn’t alone, so I extended a new barrier around me and Rhea, putting us in a golden bubble. With the amount of spiders coming towards us, I won’t run out of life force to drain any time soon.

  As the spiders started to get sucked dry, I decided to lean on my aura. Rhea said that it was high-level stuff, but given the chance, I will try to use it as a conduit to impose my will onto the life force flowing into me, then use that energy to cast more specialised spells.

  As I went about trying to do exactly that, I killed with darts all the sliders in our way; there were a lot, a couple dozen already were dead around the mouth of the cave, and we were just getting started. What the fuck is this level of difficulty? How are normal people thrown into this tutorial going to manage fighting so many spiders and coming out on top? Maybe we weren’t meant to fight them? Or were the caves, like the shrine, meant to be for those who wished to challenge themselves? After all, we found the fruits in the gorg, the pond in the shrine… Here there should be something precious too, probably. Eh, it will be a boon for sure, but not the end goal.

  For now, I was spectacularly failing at using my aura to influence the energy coming from the spiders. I could use it for shielding me from the curses, but I didn’t get any feeling about touching other kinds of magic for now. So I changed my approach; I had something else to test anyway.

  As we entered the cave, the temperature dropped quite a bit; I could feel it but not get affected by it. Rhea instead shivered, and I heard her zip up her jacket, not that it would provide enough warmth; it was just leather. I reinforced the barrier around us; now it was functioning as a light source too, its golden shine enough for us to navigate the inside of the cave.

  I turned around to see her drawing a ritual with a finger, just to shake her head and retry a second later. I unclasped my cloak and put it around her shoulders.

  She looked at me while blushing a little. “It will keep you warm and help you regenerate your mana faster.” I told her.

  She adjusted it a little and then, with a smirk, said, “Do you have a habit of giving it to any pretty girl you find? Just yesterday Alya was the one benefitting from your chivalry… Is this how you make all the women fall for you?”

  I knew a trap when I saw one. “No,” I answered back. “Usually they fall for me only after they see me naked.” And with that I turned around and shot a couple of golden darts at a couple of spiders in a side corridor.

  I continued hexing and draining spiders when needed, and then I did something with my barrier. I thought of something already; doing it with life force instead of mana will be a bit more challenging, but I was certain I could make it work.

  If I could apply an arcane blast to an arcane dart… It stood to reason that I could apply an arcane dart to an arcane barrier, right? I tried already to make my barrier angular and sharp, but it wasn’t sharp at all; it didn’t hurt the enemies that much when I sent it their way; mostly they just got pushed back, but this could change things…

  As I tried to use my aura as a conduit to infuse my intent into the life force flowing into it, I created another barrier over this one. I stopped shooting darts and instead created them as an extension of the barrier itself, but just the tips.

  I felt quite the resistance from the spell I wanted to create, but after a bit of pushing the matrix accepted my modifications. I’m sure there was a better way to do that, but for now it worked! A golden barrier with exactly twenty-one one-foot-long golden blades appeared around us. As I maintained the spell, I started spinning the second barrier on top of the first one. After a bit, a current of air formed with us in the centre; we were literally in between a tornado of blades.

  And the best thing was that it not only worked, but it was literally tearing any spider that approached to shreds… It was beautiful and disgusting at the same time.

  I decided to activate my armour; it flowed onto me as it settled into its full plate mode, and I directed part of the life force I wasn’t using to replenish its reserves.

  I was really happy with how things were going.

  “Hey Rhea, what do you think about it?” I was genuinely curious about her opinion; she was really good at pointing out ways to improve my magic.

  As I turned around, she had her face lowered, the golden glow was bright enough to see that she was still as red as a tomato.

  “Rhe—”

  “Shut up…”