After checking this, Darius understood that Xela needed more skills, otherwise she would have no outlet for her soon-to-be-acquired SP. However, he also felt it was fine like this, because Xela's skills were already good enough as they were.
For the time being, Darius teleported them towards the center of the continent, where the main entrance to the underground was located. As they traveled, Darius thought deeply about how he would achieve his goal.
He needed to kill every Insect, but there was no guarantee that all of them were located on Pokterr. It was impossible that the Insect Egg from which his own Queen Bug had hatched had been the only one of its kind which had left the continent.
What he needed were methods to locate all the Insects instead of wasting his time searching for them on his own. Better yet, would be a way to remotely affect all Insects at once.
He knew it was possible to use the Spirit or Blood elements to track Insects down as long as Darius spent some time drafting a spell specifically for this purpose. He could also have Miranda create a device with the same purpose, though its potency might not be as far-reaching as the spells.
As for culling Insects remotely, that was one of Darius' go-to plans.
While the time limit of the Adept Quest was longer than the one for the Journeyman Quest, it was simply not enough to search through the entirety of Faust. That was not even accounting for the time it would take to go through each hive one by one in order to kill all the weaker bugs.
His current inspiration was to develop a Spirit or Blood element spell to achieve this method, taking inspiration from the method of the Witches to cull this race.
A Spirit spell could see him lock onto a unique soul feature of insects, and then spread a counter-influence that extinguished their souls.
As spirit-related attacks were truly difficult to defend against, this was a sure-fire method.
Alas, it still suffered from the problem that such spells had to be cast in the vicinity of the target, which once again led him back to the other problem of first having to find their locations.
In this sense, relying on the Blood element to mix it with the method of the witches would be better. Witches had a particular curse called the Curse of Withering, which would doom the target to slowly die out over a long period of pain and agony. The only requirement here was to be in possession of a personal item of the target or some DNA-related items.
This alone might not be enough, but what if Darius were to combine it with the Vampire's legendary trump card, the Bloodline Curse?
This spell was something that the Vampires had created through their adept manipulation of the element many years ago. As long as they had the blood of one family member they could punish the entire family tree, including all those related distantly.
This was exactly what he needed to deal with those pesky bugs!
Of course, the level of accuracy and the strength of the damage done depended on the spellcaster's proficiency and might, but Darius would find ways around that.
He believed this would work, as the Insects were all linked through blood as one giant family. However, to target the entire race would require some serious power, so Darius would have to place various limitations.
For example, he could try to target only those on the higher end like Grandmasters and above, configuring it in a way that they would slowly wither over a period of months. Not enough to kill them, as that was impossible given his current power, but enough to make them killable for him and his group.
Or, he could simplify his job and target weak bugs at the Amateur and Journeyman stage, stating that they would die off in a week or two. His power was more than enough to achieve this, however, the sheer quantity of them as well as the distance would put a strain on the casting unless he limited it again.
Obviously, there was also the alternative of using science instead of magic. Miranda and Darius could take samples of various bugs, analyze them, and devise a contagious disease specifically for bugs that killed them.
After all, the humans on Earth had been able to do this for each other, even daring to release it in public for testing and blaming it on animals. This kind of bio-weapon was not out of the question given Darius' past.
As much as he had appeared to be a 'clean' businessman, he had owned enough R&D companies to leave him quite knowledgeable after various reports and tours he had received from the enthusiastic scientists who wanted his funding.
He might have lacked the proper understanding in his previous life, but Miranda could easily dig out all that data, the metrics, charts, and detailed explanations sequence by sequence from his memory and piece together a data library, even cross-referencing it with the basic scientific education Darius had received on Earth.
Soon, the trio arrived at the entrance to the underground, which was a ruined city with a dungeon-like entrance in the very center. The city's architecture looked strange and was styled cubically, but Darius could tell that this was a Politan city.
In fact, it might have been their capital given the size, and the Insects must have popped out from underneath their city hall, thus beginning the end of this race as they struggled to fight back against an enemy that could reproduce in the millions and grow through devouring.
Darius paused before the entrance and had a solemn expression. Before he dove down there, he needed to choose his plan of action, as he could not afford to just wing it like he had originally hoped.
He had rushed to complete the Vault Event because he felt that with such a huge influx of stats, he would have enough power to challenge anything.
However, if there truly were Insects above the Grandmaster stage, then he would have to refurbish some of his old trick from the time he had ventured to Plains of Death with Gunner.
