This was going nowhere. She was running out of energy at an alarming rate, and the weird entity before her seemingly was utterly unbothered by her various attempts to deal with it. If she had been hit with all the things that she had thrown at that thing, she would have already collapsed in a state of near-death by now. The blurry, whitish, distorted entity in front of her, on the other hand, looked to have, at most, gotten a bit of dust on it. And to make matters worse, even that dust was only there for a few moments before either blowing away or being destroyed on a fundamental level by the aura that the creature had around itself.

She was tired, scared, and losing her ability to even justify trying to fight. She couldn’t outrun it, she couldn’t damage it, she couldn’t even slow it down for more than a few seconds at a time! What was the point in resisting any longer? She could see the world around where that thing was simply being reduced to a state that was utterly unsalvageable, even by the power she had at the start of all of this, so what would that do to her when it finally made contact?

She felt the last vestiges of energy leave her, and she collapsed onto the ground. Her legs could no longer keep her moving, nor could they hold up her weight, and at this point, she was struggling to even get a decent breath in. She was an alpha predator, but right now she had merely become prey that had been worn down by a being with more stamina and durability than she could ever even dream of dealing with.

“Just get it over wi-.”

Her telepathic signal of defeat was cut short when something she did not expect happened. Where she had been just a moment ago was now empty space, with the only trace that she had ever been there being the massive dent in the ground from when she had collapsed. The glitch entity stopped in its tracks and just stood stock still. The presence of the nameless giant spider, its main target, was gone. And yet, at the same time, it was also still around, just… everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

This paradox caught the single-minded being in a logic loop, preventing it from going after its second objective and even kept it from moving to destroy what little remained of the former Republic’s holdings. And, while the glitchy kaiju stood stock still, a certain Tamer was beating a hasty retreat after his gamble had paid off.

…

Earlier, after realizing that he had no real way of adding to the fight, Vaile had decided to try something. Back when he had been in the game, you couldn’t have more than a few Tamed Beings out at any given moment. However, in order to avoid backlash from the Players, all Pets and Tamed Beings that were not active could and would be stored in a kind of parallel pocket reality when not in use. If a Tamed Being or Pet was released, then they would usually pop into existence in the place where they were last retrieved, and Vaile had decided to gamble that, of all the pieces of Neon Genesis Fantasia that survived, the “Tamer’s Box” would be among them.

From that personal storage, a Player of the Tamer class could apply things to their Tamed Being. This meant that, if it worked as it did in the game, he could begin to help the spider a bit more. The biggest part of this gamble (for him) was the premise that the glitchy kaiju thing was entirely focused on the spider for the time being. Depending on what happened to the thing’s apparent list of objectives after Vaile withdrew the nameless colossal spider, he would know how to go from there.

And so, when all seemed over, he had pressed a button on the menu and pulled the nameless spider into the Tamer’s Box. He waited with a decent mix of anxiety and apprehension for the glitch beast to do something, but the thing refused to budge. For Vaile, this was the second-best case scenario, and it gave him the time that he needed to begin to set about preparing one of his schemes.

The first order of business was restoring the stamina and mana of the spider. This was easy enough, as the Tamer’s Box had a feature that drastically increased ambient regen for anything inside of it, a feature which could be supplemented by potions, items, levels, achievements, and more. In only a few minutes, the nameless spider would be back to full and ready for round two. However, Vaile was keenly aware that merely sending the spider back in was an exercise in futility. She had obviously known that she was far out of her depth and trying to make her fight something that much stronger than her would just be akin to sending her to die.

Therefore, he only had a single, final option that, hopefully, would give the spider a fighting chance. The Tamer’s Box was not his final card, it was just something he had gambled on existing, let alone working. It wasn’t the thing he was betting on being enough, not by a long shot. Restoring her power to full did seem to put her at a higher level of fighting fitness than before, which was likely because of her centuries of lazing around being canceled by the Box, but he figured that would only be enough to draw the futile exercise out a fair bit longer.

No, he was going to break his promise and give the spider something she needed. If what he had been told held true, then this would be the boost in power that she needed to either fight the glitch beast to a standstill (which he would intervene in by popping her in the Box to recharge until eventually she won by that tactic) or prove to be the stronger of the two and dominate the fight from that point on.

But first, he needed a place to explain things to the spider. He would need someplace that the glitch thing couldn’t easily reach and yet was big enough to allow him to deploy the spider at its full size and then some. The pit that she had used up till now was busted beyond any hope of repair, and this left him with little option but to call down another Tamed Being for assistance. He only hoped that Higher-Tier Earth Elementals were not nearly as crazy, fanatical, or possessive as some of the other Tamed Being he had been forced to deal with.

While he was not a Dwarf, it was time to get to digging a hole.

A Diggy, Diggy Hole.