"The way to make a bet is simple," Ashton started saying, smiling at Sabrina, "We choose a scenario together. You make a claim about that scenario, I make a counterclaim. Like, you say that I 'can not do this thing', and my counterclaim is that I, in fact, 'can do this thing'. We each offer up something to give to the other person, of a value that fits each side properly. There are limits to what you can offer, obviously, but those limits will increase with the 'Betting' skill's level."

  As she listened intensely, Sabrina nodded her head. She thought about the context they were in right now, and what they were each supposed to do.

  "So let's say I bet that you... can't clear out the casino in an hour, would that work?"

  "Yup, that would work. Seems like a decent challenge, too. The difficulty of the bet also changes what the value of the exchanged thing is allowed to be. But, for example... if you bet me that I can't clear the casino in the next ten seconds... the value of what you need to offer up needs to be much higher than mine, because the bet is skewed against me anyway."

  "Got it. So what do you want from me, then?" Sabrina asked, seemingly a bit worried about the answer. Ashton thought for a moment, but quickly found an answer for himself.

  "A coin from your 'Gambling' skill."

  "Huh? Does it work like that?"

  "Sure, why not? If your betting skill accepts it, then it works," Ashton said, "Since the bet seems pretty well-balanced, try to think of something of a similar value."

  Sabrina thought about it, and her eyes quickly fell onto the elementals, "They're also made from your skills, right? Could you give me one of them?"

  Ashton's smile disappeared, "No," he said bluntly. "They're not 'made from my skill', I called them here with my skills, that's all. They're real, living beings. Living beings that are in an equal contract with me to help me out. They're not something that I can 'give' to you."

  "R-Right..."

  Ashton let out a long sigh. Maybe he sounded a bit too harsh there. It wasn't like she could have known that beforehand, "But I what I can offer you would be... I don't know, a potion or something."

  "Potion? Like, some magic recovery stuff?"

  "Amongst other things, yes. I can give you about half a litre, and I'll explain how to best use it," he suggested. "Small cuts and bruises will recover in an hour or two, and bigger injuries will be fine overnight, so maybe seven or eight hours."

  "What do you mean with 'bigger injuries'?"

  "Like if you're stabbed or something," Ashton explained. "Doesn't really leave behind scars either, at least for the most part. For really bad injuries you might need to do some manual correction first, and sewing larger wounds shut first also helps recovery."

  Sabrina immediately and furiously nodded, "That actually sounds amazing!"

  "Alright," Ashton said with a smile. Of course, if things actually worked out well and he managed to increase his contract capacity through the Betting skill, then he would give her some potions anyway. He would want such a ridiculously useful person to strive.

  Not to mention, long-term, Ashton wanted to make sure that potions were a commodity anyway, and would try to teach people as much as he could whether through Sam's community posts or by just giving the recipes to people.

  He held his hand forward, "Then let's shake on it. If I can't clear out the casino within an hour, starting now, I'm going to give you half a litre of a healing potion. But if I do, I get a coin created by your Gambling skill."

  "Yes, let's do it!" Sabrina quickly shook Ashton's hand, and a light started surrounding their hands. A magical, translucent chain appeared, wrapping itself around both Ashton and Sabrina's wrists, basically tying them together for a moment. The chain disappeared just a moment later, but this was a sign that the skill activated properly.

  "Then I'll get started. Thanks again for the power boost," Ashton said, stretching lightly. Poppy used the cooled-down speed boost spell. It did feel a little more powerful than before, now that the small fairy was at level two, but it didn't seem to be worth a full point. Maybe 1 and 1/3rd of a point, if anything.

  Ashton started running forward, though his footsteps were silent. The silent step shoelaces still worked perfectly fine even like this. That was why Ashton only had to deal with spiders that actively saw him, or that noticed the large spiderwebs collapsing as he whipped at them with some water through the undine.

  But most of these guys were easy to take care of. Either through the earthen wisp or Ashton's staff, they were easily killed. Most of them were pretty small, though there were some big ones too. Luckily there wasn't another one of the giant spiders, though, because that would be a huge pain to deal with right now.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Though, he did spot one down the street, building a massive web-nest in a corner on the street.

  'All that spider silk... I can't wait to gather some up later," Ashton thought to himself, unable to suppress a smile right now. Silk from spider-monsters, particularly ones this large, was an absolutely amazing material. It was ridiculously sturdy, lightweight, and mana-conductive. If Ashton could, then he would love to turn it into fabric. He would need some materials like that sooner or later anyway, especially if he was going to try and find some more fairies. Particularly, the sort that he wanted to meet, a type of fairy dabbling in enhancement, was often interested in unique or special materials.

  While he had this thought, Ashton jumped up and over a spider, putting his entire weight onto his staff to crush its body underneath him, vaulting over the monster like that. And within barely two minutes, Ashton had reached the entrance to the casino.

  The door was completely ripped out, and the walls around it had been carved away and were now only a circular entrance framed by spider silk. The inside was dark and smelled musty, though Ashton wasn't totally set on blaming the spiders for that fact.

  He quickly ran inside, and hoped that Sabrina was doing her job. Obviously, she was going to run away if she was in danger. Considering where Ashton had found her, and also because the unlucky de-buff she experienced was over now, she should be able to handle herself pretty well. Especially if she had been all alone until now.

  Ashton looked around. This place was deceptively large now that he was in here. Yeah, there wasn't anything special about it, but a lot of different things were fit inside. There were a fair amount of tables for different games, but the majority of what you could see in here were tons of random, old slot machines. Or at least, those were the things that peeked out from under the massive amount of cobwebs that were covering basically every surface in here.

  But Ashton didn't have the time to look through the casino, either. Before he knew it, he was assaulted by a number of spiders. But they were far smaller than the ones from before. They were the size of tarantulas, or maybe twice the size at best for the larger ones. But most importantly, Ashton could crush them pretty damn easily with just a strike with his staff or by slamming his feet down on them.

  Their fangs weren't all that big either, and mostly barely seemed to get through the fabric of his clothes. The only problem was that they were trying to climb up the legs of Ashton's trousers. They weren't super wide, but wide enough for one of these fuckers to force their way in.

  Quickly, Ashton decided to go for something else. He released the asphalt fused into the wisp, and instead had the elemental pull in air from the surrounding. The wisp was a lot lighter, but it could move a good bit faster and was more 'agile' in the way it moved, following the exact path that Ashton wanted it to and lagging behind much less.

  But that wasn't all. As Ashton slammed the wisp into the mass of tiny spiders, a gust of wind shot outward. It wasn't super strong, but it was enough to push away the small spiders and get them tangled in their own webs.

  Usually, spiders moved around in the webs in a pretty simple way. Not all of the threads they spun were sticky, and spiders usually just remembered which ones they could step on and which ones they couldn't. However, in this scenario where they were thrown onto the webs involuntarily, it was much harder to avoid the sticky threads.

  Once he put some distance between himself and the spiders, Ashton started spinning his staff around and channelled the wisp through it, precisely hitting the spiders one after another.

  He actively tried shrinking his channelling range whenever he could to improve his precision even more, but it was really damn hard to do something like that while focusing on where the spiders were in the first place. It was so dark that, without the wisp's light, it would be almost impossible to find them all.

  Before long, most of the smaller ones seemed dealt with. Ashton used the undine's magic to whip through some of the webs blocking his way, and used the wisp as the main combat force.

  Sometimes, when some of the smaller spiders kept gathering around him, he would gather some air and push them away. There were really so many of them that it was hard to take them all out.

  'I'm not going to lose the bet, am I..?' Ashton thought to himself, but he probably didn't need to worry too much. An hour was plenty of time.

  He continued taking down the spiders. Due to the space restraint here, there weren't any of the giant specimen in here, so no individual spider was hard to take down, but the massive amount of them that were attacking from all the dark corners were horribly tough to deal with.

  From above and below, from every corner and nook and cranny, the spiders were just coming at him to try and take Ashton down. He got tangled up in web sometimes, and since these threads weren't that easy to snap, it was pretty annoying to try and get out of some of the more densely weaved-together ones.

  But Ashton still managed to get out each time, fighting his way through and soon reaching the side of the building where all that mana was gathered in the picture.

  And this place really did look a lot different. The entire floor was carved out into a massive hole that was covered in a dome of web. Ashton could tell from just looking at it that this was where the spider queen was.

  He tore away at the webs to break open the dome, whipping at it again and again to cut open a path, no matter how small.

  In the centre, there was a massive spider. It was larger than all the other ones. If those were cars, this one here was a van, with spikes covering its entire body.

  And there it was, laying in a puddle of its own thick, blue blood. The one standing before the body was a man, tearing into the spider with his bare hands.

  He slowly turned his head all the way around, barely even moving his body as he did, and stared at Ashton.

  Even in the dim light of the wisp, Ashton could tell that he wasn't fully human anymore.

  He had four eyes pressing against each other and sharing space in each eye-socket, and small, blood-covered mandibles protruding from the corners of his mouth. From his back, under his shirt, Ashton could see small lumps trying to force their way out. Clearly, some additional legs that he was currently in the process of growing.

  The man grinned, and Ashton couldn't help but shudder a bit.

  "Gordy, I assume?"