'Then, in your oh so humble, magnificent opinion, how worthwhile is it to continue my little exploration we have going on here?' 6 asked sarcastically.
[Not very. The further into the nest you venture, the more likely the odd of you encountering something which can cause the teleportation to fail is. However, I cannot remove you from this world without your consent, so it is ultimately your own decision.]
'You don't say.' 6 thought, not even stopping to consider that she might be able to hear the snide remarks he makes in his head.
6 continued stretching his sore body, ignoring the slight hunger that had begun creeping upon him. 'Hey, can you hear my thoughts when I don't want you to know what I'm thinking?'
[No.]
'Jokes on you, I didn't want you to be able to hear that. Anyway, I'm gonna head deeper into the nest.' Trivrium remained silent once he affirmed his intentions.
Though Trivrium suggested he leave, honestly he didn't much feel like it. He would rather get a little bit more out of this mission while he could, and only teleport away when he truly needed to. If he died because of that, so be it.
As he headed out of the room he awoke in, he was pleasantly surprised to find a few spider corpses just outside of the room, pulverized to almost nothing with their goo splattered all over the hallway.
'What do you think, can these spiders not smell or something? Surely this many bodies should've alerted them, if the fight that evidently took place here didn't. Why didn't any show up while I was unconscious?' 6 asked as he continued walking down the passageway he had already been through while in the state he had been placed in by the spider.
With how far into the nest he had gotten by now, in addition to his delirious state that caused him to lose control of himself, he had absolutely no idea which way led deeper into the nest at this point. He simply picked a random direction at every turn he ended up at, hoping to stumble on something helpful.
[The longer you remained in that state, the less spiders pursued you, and the less you came upon. It is possible that they have left this area to deal with something else going on.]
With a nod, he stomped on the head of the body of a spider that was still moving, though most of its body was entirely destroyed.
'There seems to be a lot of that going on around me lately. Am I lucky or not? I keep getting mixed signals on that.' 6 thought, mostly to himself as he knew Trivrium wouldn't care to answer his meaningless chatter.
Trivrium, on the other hand, had been raising the danger level of this mission with each new major discovery 6 ran into. The initial presence detected from the nest was the first large spike, one which brought it beyond the difficulty level that a beginner level adventurer like 6 would be allowed to accept.
Even if it were a group of experienced beginner level adventurers, anything which had a level of presence would be enough to entirely decimate them, without even a hope of resistance.
It would be like a elephant stomping on an ant.
It was important to note that beginner level adventurers didn't mean they weren't skilled, or that they hadn't been on many missions. It was a denotation that indicated their level of strength. Beginners were those that could roughly be compared to an ordinary being, one without any special traits.
Any well trained individual could put up a fight with a beginner level adventurer, but an intermediate level adventurer would easily destroy tens, or even hundreds, of beginner level adventurers.
Yet intermediate level adventurers would still lose in a one on one fight against the weakest beings with presence.
Despite her telling 6 all of this as he ventured through the nest, confirming that it was now difficult to run into any spiders for some unknown reason, he ignored her warnings, saying something along the lines of 'meh, I'm already here though.'
Internally, 6 was thinking that since this was such a massively dangerous area for him to be in, the same enemy which would be worth a reward for killing elsewhere should be worth even more, right? It had to count the fact that he was in danger just for being here.
[Death is almost a guarantee for if if you get caught by another spider on the same level as that one. You have only just breached the outer edges of the nest. It is likely that a being with much higher presence presides in the inner level of this nest. There is no way for my teleport to save you from a creature of that level.]
'Yeup, you've told me so a few times now. I'm pretty content with this. Look, there's hardly even any spiders here. If something happened to make all these spiders leave to deal with it, don't you think those higher level spiders would be there to?'
6 thought this as he entered another massive cavern, one that looked very similar to the first one he found that had been teeming with spiders. It may even be the same one, just a different area of it, but it was impossible to tell just from a glance.
There were now only a few hundred spiders scattered about, most of which seemed to be a weaker variety, though some still seemed too dangerous for even 6's inflated ego to believe he could kill them.
'Only the weak ones are left, which just further proves my point, right?' 6 thought, trying to find a group of spiders he could try to kill before leaving the area, just to get the credit of killing them.
[You'll get more information on the outside of the nest, investigating the different happenings among the villages than you will down here, and it will be by far less dangerous.]
'Yeah, but I can get rewards from killing stuff down here. I've yet to get anything cool from learning any juicy gossip, so I'll pass on that. Besides, I'm not really the best talker, and eavesdropping just seems so dirty.' he thought, his eyes locked upon two spiders which were giving each other a death stare.
It seemed they both wanted to lay on the same web, but couldn't accept the presence of another spider on the web that was already too big for them.
Importantly, the web was near the ground, making it easy for 6 to reach them, and they were relatively isolated from the larger and the more dangerous looking spiders.
[You receive rewards for the information you gather once the mission is complete.]
'Eh, I like now more than I like later. You gotta admit, I've learned a lot down here, even if I have nearly died twice already.'
Nearing the squabbling couple, 6 threw his knife at one of the spiders, killing it instantly, before jumping up to the other, grabbing its leg and ripping it down. With the spider in his hand, he slammed it against the floor twice, before discarding the flattened corpse and running to grab his knife.
Once he had collected his knife from the spider's corpse, and wiped the goo off of it, he quickly made his escape from the cavern before the spiders could even register what had happened.
On the way out, he killed another spider with a stomp, taking this little excursion's kill count up to three before he disappeared from the cavern without a scratch.
[You have, but these things should have been uncovered by one prepared for these situations.]
'Perfect! That means its worth more, right?'
[I do not decide that.]
Seeing Trivrium's words, 6 tripped over his own feet in his confusion.
'What the hell do you mean you don't decide that? It's your fucking mission, on your fucking world. What, do you have some fuckin council of bastards who are gonna screw me over at every opportunity??' 6 thought, bewildered.
[No. Rewards for missions assigned to adventurers are decided upon by the entity which granted you the adventurer's blessing. I can grant more rewards beyond that as incentive, but i cannot control the base reward given to you for successful completion.]
'How the hell does that work?' he asked.
[I ask the entity to generate a mission which I can assign to an adventurer. Then, that entity oversees the mission and decides how successful you were. It grants rewards based upon that decision, and then I receive the results. There are some exceptions, but that is the general idea of it.]
'That feels like the kind of thing that should have a disclaimer about it before you accept a mission, but yeah okay.'
[Does it change anything?]
'Okay, okay, fair enough.' 6 relented.
Throughout the abnormal period of talkativeness from Trivrium, 6 took note of her different behavior. Previously, she most spoke in third person, and only spoke when it was necessary.
Now, much opposed to her previous behavior, she was volunteering information of her own accord, and even warning him and trying to get him to leave for his own sake. Not to mention that she was now suddenly speaking in first person, which was a large enough difference to question on its own.
If he was forced to guess, he would probably say she was previously only devoting a fraction of her attention on him. He wasn't so self absorbed as to assume the entire planet that was Trivrium would be focused on him.
No, it was likely that she just had some sort of automated information function that he was speaking to, or something of the sort.
Once he entered the nest and 'presence' was detected, whatever she meant by that, she likely turned her eyes toward him, and once he ran into the spider that had presence she probably turned a good bit of her focus here, meaning he was no longer talking to an automated Trivrium, but at least part of her actual being, maybe a bit of her own 'presence' was here or something.
He could only guess, but whatever it was, she was sharing a lot of helpfully information that he appreciated. As such, he made sure to so something he didn't usually do, either in hopes of getting into her good books or simply because he felt like it.
'Hey, thank you for caring about my wellbeing, even if it is for your own reasons, and thank for you telling me these things. I appreciate your willingness to share this information, more so because I doubt I could learn some of these things from others.' 6 thought, being as genuine and kind as he could, even showing a trace of humility. 'I'll make sure to credit you for my success when I have museums in my name.'