IWUAaDNW: Exploration 2.2, Growth 3.8, Party 5.2, 5.4

This hall, and its connectors, would be my way to carry my fast fliers around for rapid response in case of a threat. Whoever tried to invade me would be assailed by bugs coming from both sides, stored in that hallway until they were needed. Whoever tried to cross the pitfall would have to worry about bugs pouring out constantly from a hole while they were trying to cross the pitfall. If they fell in, they would have to climb out while under heavy attack. At some point, one of my venomous bugs would get lucky, and I’d have one less attacker to worry about.

—IWUAaDNW: Exploration 2.2



They ventured down the hall. At the first curve, which still had a pitfall occupying most of the floor, they stopped.

[...]

Gwen ignored him, raising her arm so her torch would illuminate the wall opposite the ledge that allowed passage to the other side of the pitfall. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted the ceiling-bound crack that led to my bug reserve hallway in this room.

[...]

When I let them get through unmolested, they seemed to release a unified sigh of relief. Then they spotted the second pitfall, and the bug crawlspace on the opposite wall of that ledge, and that relief turned into a deep and perceptible sense of foreboding.

“She’s going to sandwich us,” Cirys guessed.

“Probably,” Gwen agreed. “Same plan. Horzel, eyes to our back. Let’s hurry.”

She stepped on the ledge. That’s when I started moving.

[...]

I waited until Cirys had turned his head, then I popped a spider out of the crawl hole.

Gwen stared at it.

My ambushing spider raised its front legs and prepared its three back pairs.

“…Oh no.” Gwen muttered, raising her shield.

To her credit, her shield blocked the spider, and she managed to push it off before it could get a grip on it.

Unfortunately for her, the ledge didn’t give her much maneuvering room to avoid the wasps that followed that spider, or the beetle that came in to attack her from the other end of the hallway.

—IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.8



Along the way, I discovered an additional limitation of jumpscares, namely that the realism of the illusion and the rate at which my pixies got tired was directly dependent on the size of the illusion they were making. This meant that small illusions were more efficient than larger ones.

So I started creating tiny illusions directly in front of their eyes, like tinkertech goggles, and found that this barely tired my pixie.

And of course, this opened up an entirely different line of grief for my sparring partners. For instance, if I layered an illusion of the wall where one of my spiders was angling for a sneak attack at just the right moment…

“What the fuck, invisible spiders?!”

…and if I layered an illusion of a wasp preparing to attack while it was already in the process of attacking…

“Gah! Fuck!”

…and if I flashed them with a jumping spider while their actual target was an ant––

“H—Hey! That’s my sword! Let…go––OhfuckWasp!”

—IWUAaDNW: Party 5.2



I’d extended the room that followed the treasure room to make it as long as I could make it, then I’d created a hallway that dug down into the right side of the floor, which went straight down as far as I could make hallways before going back up and connecting to the same room along the left side of the floor, making a full, almost two hundred yard deep pit along the room's width.

Then I’d extended the “height” of that hallway until the entire room’s floor was nothing but that pit. The system had punished me, of course, and created a one meter wide strip of dirt and rock that spanned, in complete disregard of gravity, across the entire length of the room, but that was fine.

[...]

“There’s a hell of a lot of webs down there.”

Amir’ea had supposedly been able to survive falling down a cliff side and was still fine to fight a Wyvern on her own afterward; a simple fall wasn’t going to cut it against someone of her caliber. An entire network of nets would hopefully trap them long enough for my other bugs to deal damage.

“I can’t believe you see anything through that mist,” Gwen said as she glanced at Karjn, then her eyes widened and she stared down the length of the land bridge.

[...]

They took a few minutes longer, then Karjn raised herself to her feet without even touching the ground, somehow. “Okay, we should be good now. Thanks for not jumping us, Taylor.”

“No point,” Ulfric grunted. “She knows the two of us can handle anything she can throw as us unless we’re busy with something else.” He pushed himself off the wall and pointed down the slope, “Like the dozens of traps that are probably down that way.”

[...]

The next hallway was winding and had two pitfalls, a carbon copy of the hallway that had once led to my core room with one exception. Both pitfalls had bug chute entrances, but there was also another bug chute above the central section between the pitfalls, from which I made wax balls full of blue goop rain while also holding them back with wasps, spiders and a pair of nets made of webs. They made it out after Ulfric used his axe to slash through the front side net, but by the time they tried that I’d had more than enough time to tag them a few times.

—IWUAaDNW: Party 5.4