Alice had been stretching a single moment for an unknown amount of time. Alice guessed she had been holding her skill for a few hours, but since time was stopped that measurement had little meaning. Alice had used the time to plan exactly how she would survive the monster ahead of her, but even an eternity of planning wouldn’t be enough to offset the insane luck she would need. Regardless, Alice would have to leave eventually, and even if she could theoretically hide forever, Alice really disliked the thought of an eternity spent staring down a monster.
Alice steeled her nerves, and prepared for what she was about to do. She let go of the skill as she watched the world around her tick back into motion. Immediately terror gripped her as she looked into the spider’s rainbow coloured, pulsating eyes. The beast seemed to smile at her as venom dripped from its fang filled maw. It hissed as it took a single step towards Alice.
Alice tried to scramble away but found that she couldn’t move; she was back in stopped time. Her mind felt she should be hyperventilating while she felt like she was on the verge of tears. The fact that neither of those could happen sent her into an even deeper panic. Eventually, Alice calmed down enough to think and tried again.
The unnatural fear came back in full force and Alice scrambled to her feet. The spider looked a lot less pleased than last time. Its many eyes darted around in what looked to be confusion before they all settled on Alice. The beast let out another deafening shriek before launching one of the many chitin spears it called legs towards Alice.
Time seemed to slow down as the many eyed creature reached out to impale her. Alice knew she wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to avoid it so she simply braced herself for the inevitable pain. … The pain never came, and that was when Alice realised she had stopped time again. Alice started to wonder exactly how skill activation worked, as the first time she had used the skill it took multiple steps to cause this effect, but now she was at the point she could stop time subconsciously. She also wondered if she would ever get the chance to look into such a thing. As it was now, Alice either died here or spent an eternity trapped in her own mind. Neither option sounded appealing to Alice, and even though she had a plan that could potentially save her life, chances were she would die.
Thinking back on it, Alice should have realised this was coming back when she first used [Fate Vision(minor)]. The amount of times Alice died was simply unnatural no matter how it was looked at, and considering the skill allowed her to see fate, wasn’t she fated to die here? Seeing as she would die no matter what she did, why not just let it happen? Why stretch out the moment of her death when she could let it pass? It took a lot of thinking for Alice to get to a satisfactory answer: She was scared. She couldn’t bring herself to undo the skill when she thought of what was coming moments away. She couldn’t even humor the thought of taking the step into the abyss, and whether that was good or bad, Alice wasn’t sure. Of course she wanted to live, but if she was dying today then why fight?
Thoughts bounced around Alice’s head until she realised a simple truth. She was pathetic. A sorry excuse of a person that would waste the life she had fought for. And while a lot of her life was owed to luck, or fate, she had faced death many times before and come out in tact. Would she stop fighting just because she couldn’t win? Alice was disgusted with herself. If her mother were still here what would she say?
Well, in a way she already had. Alice remembered the story of Chaos the Beholden, Bringer of Death and Master of Fear. A simple story with a simple message. Ignoring fear or running from it would never end well, and neither would giving up. From the entire story, one line stood out to Alice: ‘Those who forfeit their hope forfeit their life.’ And Alice still intended to live.
Despite her newfound resolve, Alice was still stuck. The moment she unpaused time she would find herself impaled on a spider leg, and probably on her way to the inside of the spiders mouth.Unfortunately there was little she could do to avoid it other than hope.
Alice unpaused time but before she could let the fear overtake her she raised a wall of dirt from the ground. Miraculously, she actually managed to intercept the appendage, Alice chalked it up to the amount of practice she had put in with her earth magic. But despite the speed of her spell activation, the sharpened end of the spider leg still managed to penetrate the wall and dig most of the way through her abdomen. Almost on instinct she activated [Flames of Vengeance] as a counter attack. The blood mist surrounded Alice and instead of condensing into flames as it normally did, it was ignited by the blood leaving her gaping wound. The flames raced along the leg stabbed into her but were stopped by the wall. In response, Alice opened up the area of wall that prevented the flames fervent march and used the displaced dirt to form multiple stone tipped needles that she aimed at the creature’s many eyes.
The glow-web pulled its leg out of Alice before shrieking and thrashing about, the strange aura in the surroundings billowing around like mist in the wind. Alice took the small break as an opportunity to deal with her wound. She couldn’t afford the mana it would take to fully heal herself, so instead she opted to partially heal herself and focus on closing the wound as well as numbing the pain, this used about half of her max mana capacity While there was the danger of infection she would have plenty of time to fix that later if -no, when -she survived.
Seeing that the spider hadn’t recovered yet, Alice attempted to take advantage of that fact. Alice used a large chunk of her remaining mana on creating a swarm of mana lights that swarmed around its many eyes to add to its disorientation. She then hurled rocks at its eyes as they were the only weakness she had found so far. With every stone that landed Alice could feel minor scuffs and abrasions forming on her skin, she quickly realised her attacks barely even counted as an inconvenience. She would need stronger attacks to damage it in any useful way.
She started running away at top speed and managed to get about 50 meters away before the spider recovered and dispelled all the lights surrounding it. Alice had a small advantage in that the she was no longer bleeding while the spider was now on a time limit. Time was on her side, she just needed to stay alive long enough for it to matter.
