Spending My Retirement In A Game

The group stood there, just looking at the ego-castle and the three ego-walls, slithering around the area. This might become a bit more bothersome than Eisen expected it to be. The only good thing was that the only one of the ego-walls that would be able to be a direct, actual threat to them when it came to being attacked, was the smallest of the three. The other two weren’t even completely in the area, the ends of their bodies still reached out of town.

The smallest of them, however, was completely inside of the area surrounding the ego-castle, and as such had a lot more mobility. The other two would just be a bother by blocking the routes that the groups could take.

The Ego-Mansions that were under Eisen’s control quickly went on the defensive against these ego-walls, while Askr, Eisen, and the elemental spirit were preparing to attack the walls whenever they got close enough to be actually damaged.

Eisen got out his multitool in its hammer form just for this, and once it seemed like they were close enough, the old man called out to these seven giant figures that were under his direct control.

"Form a wall in front of me!" He exclaimed, and soon reached his hand out toward Askr, having Sal come out of there so that they could work on a quick and easy plan to get through this.

"You’re ready, right?" The old man asked, and the spider-boy slowly nodded his head, "I’d think so, yeah. I just need to be close enough to attach my thread, and then I’ll be good as long as I’m not too far away from them." He explained. Eisen slowly nodded his head and watched while Sal moved his hands around and slowly started spinning some threads together into something that was basically a silk-rope.

Just then, one of the ego-walls slithered toward the group. Like Eisen had anticipated, it was the smallest of the three. All the ego-mansions as well as Askr properly prepared for the impact so that they may be able to hold it down for a bit, but they simply had their arms bitten off immediately.

Eisen was rather annoyed at seeing this, but at the very least the snake slowed down a little for this. The old man managed to get Sal close enough to it, and the spider-boy just swung the silk-rope in his hand around before throwing it toward the ego-wall. The moment that the tip touched its head, it fused with the rock, and Eisen activated his mana-sight to make sure everything was working alright. Sal was trying his best to push his elemental mana through the rope and spread it throughout the snake’s body, and relatively soon he managed to take control of the front third of its body. The rest was still a bit bothersome, but at least it wasn’t able to attack as easily anymore.

Eisen placed Sal down on top of that snake so that he could keep working on taking it over like this by using his special element. Now that one of the four enemies was basically put out of comission, and the most troublesome one at that, the others could get out of Askr as well.

By using the ego-wall that Sal just partially took over together with the ego-mansions, Askr, Eisen’s elemental spirit and the minotaur combined with the light spirit, they were able to cut off the path of the biggest of the ego-wall-snakes. Melissa sent one of her bees into its mouth, and confirmed that deeper down, the soul core could be found relatively easily and there weren’t really any enemies inside of there. The bothersome part was really just that everything inside of the ego-wall was shifting around and was creating uneven footing. The only times when it would be able to realy damage anyone was by pressing everything inside of there shut, but the group had more than enough to make sure that this couldn’t happen.

And of course, one of those things was Brody with his Maroon-alloy weapons. If the ego-wall-snake would try to press its body shut inside, Brody would just stab one of the walls and practically cut up the mana to give the snake something like a physical reaction that made it stop.

But for now, a small group of people just made their way inside of the largest of the three snakes, all the whilst all the others tried their best to hold it down while defending against the ego-castle throwing boulders at them while the second-largest ego-wall-snake was trying to stop them from moving around the area as much. But it would be fine once the group inside of the largest ego-wall-snake was able to take it over. That would definitely make things a lot easier then.

Since this ego-wall was really just something like a long tunnel, as long as the group had mounts, they were able to get through it relatively quickly. But considering how fast they were going for this long, it already seemed like they were technically outside of town again when they saw the large rock sphere floating in front of them.

Xenia, Morrom and Eisen got started taking over the soul core as soon as they could, using the exact same process as for the ego-mansions.

It took a bit longer than they would have liked, considering that they couldn’t work all too fast because the ground was constantly shifting around and moving, contracting all over the place while Brody tried to make sure that the ego-snake would just stop doing all that.

But sooner or later, the group managed to even take this core over, and the snake’s interior stopped shifting around.

"Perfect..." Eisen sighed in relief, and Jyuuk slowly turned toward the end of the long ’tunnel’ that they needed to get through to reach the others again, "Alright, let’s hurry it up now." The monkey beastperson suggested, "We need to do this same thing with the other two snakes as well, and I don’t know how long the others can take care of them on their own."

"Don’t worry, I already have a small idea how I can easily send you back there." Eisen pointed out with a light smile on his face. He waved his hand around and created something like a large metal tub that everyone in the group would be able to sit in relatively comfortably, at least when it came to the size of the tub. Using Magic Craftsmanship, Eisen quickly turned that tub into an actual metallic item, and then flipped it over.

He started to immediately enchant its underside with a gravity enchantment combined with a magnetism enchantment that was supposed to repell the ground underneath it. Morrom quickly understood what Eisen was going for and helped him out, so within a matter of roughly two minutes, they managed to finish it.

"Now, everyone get inside of there." The old man said with a light smile. It seemed like Brody and Jyuuk still didn’t fully understand, and the fact that Xenia was acting rather anxious and nervous and that Morrom was rather excited most likely didn’t help them all too much as the metal tub started floating after being supplied mana by the two of them.

Eisen looked at the mana-representation of the snake’s body using the Magic Inscription skill, and then simply started to slowly change its shape to make it press its body shut in just a few certain places. And the next moment, the group, excluding Eisen, was pushed toward the exit as if they were surfing on a wave. They were speeding up rather rapidly, and it didn’t really take too long for them to reach the exit again.

Once Eisen was sent a message comfirming that they were outside again, Eisen continued and chose to start changing this snake’s shape a bit. Because Eisen was sure that there was a way to make it more efficient and powerful by giving it a body that was more representative of what its actual soul was showing.

And when Eisen looked at the shape of the soul, he was rather surprised to see what he did. It wasn’t the shape of just a regular snake. No, instead, it was the body of a Lamia, a being with the upper body of a person and the lower body of a snake. Immediately, Eisen tried his best to shift everything around. He thickened some parts of the body, but mostly just moved most of the mass toward the front to create an upper body.

Rather rapidly, the body of the ego-wall-snake changed, soon towering over everyone outside. It wasn’t nearly as long anymore, but in return, it was roughly the same height as the ego-castle right now in its ’Base’ state. It seemed like the ego-castle was still more powerful, but either way, this ego-castle-Lamia would be incredible help to Eisen and the others in holding the Ego-Castle down.

The Lamia that Eisen formed this ego-wall into was created rather far away from the actual battle right now, because Eisen was trying to move things toward the middle from both of the snake’s ends to change its form as quickly as possible, but at least the Lamia was able to quickly get back to the ego-castle, albeit destroying whole blocks of buildings while it was at it. But that was fine, they could have it repaired rather easily later on.

Soon, Eisen reached the ego-castle’s place again, and jumped outside again. Eisen was flying around there, and saw the confused expressions of all the others that were staring at this giant Lamia.

Brody, Jyuuk, Xenia and Morrom had already been preparing to get inside of the second-biggest ego-wall-snake’s body, but even they stopped for a moment to figure out what exactly was going on.

Eisen chose to, for now, just not say anything about it. They probably understood it anyway and were just surprised. So was Eisen, it didn’t really seem logical to give Lamia-souls full snake-bodies, after all. But either way, luckily, this giant Lamia was already able to help out, and grabbed the second-biggest ego-wall-snake to let the small group get inside of it rather easily. Once they were inside, Eisen commanded it to hold down the ego-castle for now, so that it wouldn’t be able to throw those huge boulders at them anymore. It seemed like some of the people outside of the ’main group’ were already injured heavily, and had to rely on some of the others for emergency-treatment using healing or support magic. Of course, Eisen, Xenia and Morrom had prepared an extraorbitant amount of recovery potions for something like this beforehand.

They wouldn’t let anyone die during this fight. Even if it was a little harder than expected, considering that nearly everyone else beside Eisen was bug-sized compared to the enemies this time around.