Chương 119: Chapter 117: Saviors of Bard

I start to focus on just one of the oni, knocking his club aside with my dagger and then running him through with my sword. The oni roars at me, baring sharp teeth that are more jagged and nasty looking than Ash's shark teeth. It tries to bite me, but I dip away from it, slashing across its face with my dagger for good measure. I keep up the attack, using Disarming Strike to knock the huge club out of his hands.

I then use Stinging Defense to deal half my strength in damage every time he attacks me with his bare hands. He attacks twenty times over the next minute, dealing himself about two thousand damage while my attacks deal around thirteen thousand damage. Between the fire storm that started this battle and the ongoing effect of Mab's Rage, he does not survive the minute, and I'm down to fighting just four of them. Four oni are much easier to handle.

One of them tries to grab me, and my Stinging Defense takes one of his reaching fingers away. Another tries to chop me in half from above with a massive sword, but I step to the side, turning my head to avoid the rain of dirt that comes up when the sword slams into the ground. These oni are strong. Not as strong as I am, but much stronger than most people. If I had to guess, I'd say that their strengths are in the one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty range. Which reminds me.

I need to get through these four so that I can go back to helping Gigi. One of them sweeps the club low, smashing it against my knee in an aimed shot that deals 247 damage to my Shell. I don't feel the impact, thanks to the spell, but I'm guessing that it would come with some kind of slowing debuff that would make this much harder. As it is, I'm fighting much faster than any of them, between my boosts to speed and the 10% slow debuff that Mab's Rage brings along with it.

Or will bring along with it for another thirty seconds. Things are going to get more dangerous then. When Mab's Rage ends, they speed up. I've got the one oni I've been focusing on down another seventy five hundred points, but from the looks of it, he's still got at least ten thousand hit points, meaning that the other three have close to fifteen. They're still just chipping away at my Shell, but it's down below half now. A spear of lava slams into one of the oni surrounding me, and I smile.

Good to see that Vincent is still at it. I don't know how much damage it's doing to the oni, but I'm guessing it's more than thirty percent of the maximum; Vincent has got to have a higher spellcraft than I do. I think his is in the fifties or even sixties, making their magic immunity more like a magic resistance. We keep fighting, and I keep an eye on my Shell. I know I'll have to recast it soon, but I'm not overly worried.

I don't think the four oni can do enough damage fast enough for me to need to cast it again before five minutes are up. And by the time five minutes are up, I'm certain there won't still be four of them. I have to stop using Killing Blow because of how expensive it is stamina wise, but I think I'll get one more shot with it. It's probably too much to ask for it to work a second time, but I activate it and try to decapitate the oni anyway.

It doesn't work, but the blow does score a critical hit, dealing double damage anyway. That's something, I suppose. I take another strike to the knee, and once again am glad that Shell prevents status effects. I just know that a hit that powerful, a hit that can get more than two hundred and fifty damage through my defense, brings a debuff along with it. I grit my teeth and keep fighting, focusing on dealing damage and just keeping an eye on my Shell, ready to cast it again as soon as it drops.

Maybe even before it drops. When it gets low enough, I might recast it just to make sure that they can't get through it. I thrust, I slash. I duck, I dodge, I side step. I stab. Soon enough, there are only three oni fighting me. With just the three of them, I'm able to spare a glance towards the girls to see how they're doing. They seem to be holding their own, to say the least. And the tide is definitely turning. The eighteen oni they were originally fighting are down below a dozen.

I can't take the time to get an accurate count of how many enemies they have left, but I can see several dead bodies that make me think that this battle is definitely leaning our way. The first oni to break and run for it comes just a few seconds after I glance at them. I notice that as he runs, he's clutching his stomach, as if trying to keep his guts inside his body. Once he breaks, soon a few more join him.

None of the ones I'm fighting, of course, but another two or three of them do run away from El's wild fighting style. I focus on the one in front of me. He's on fire, and not by choice; apparently the magma spear does that sort of thing. Makes sense. So he's taking damage every second, and is not looking too good. I slash at his arms, trying to cut into the muscles there to make him either drop his club or at least become ineffective with it.

He roars in frustration as much as pain, and tries to tackle me, but I leap to the side and let him knock into one of his companions instead. They go down in to a pile of limbs, and I briefly have just two oni to fight. I leap up and slash at the eye of one of them, slicing into the soft tissue and bisecting his pupils. He drops his weapon and clutches his eye, screaming in pain.

I could probably just ignore him now and fight one on one with the other oni, but instead I slice him across the stomach, trying to get him to spill his guts as the first one to run away did. He still has close to eight thousand hit points, so he's not going to die any time soon. But I'm hoping that if I do enough brutalizing, he'll lose his will to fight and will run away along with his companions. And if he doesn't, maybe the other one, the one I'm essentially ignoring, will.

I barely flinch when his club smashes against my shoulders, still slashing at the blinded oni's stomach, this time with a Bleeding Strike. That seems to have done it. I can see organs starting to slough out of his stomach, and he blindly reaches for them to push them back inside. Now he is essentially defenseless. Now I leave him to his misery and turn to the other oni. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The two that crashed into each other are back on their feet, but they seem to have lost interest in the battle. The one that is still on fire seems lost to his rage, barely paying attention to those around him and just lashing out wildly. He hits the other oni as much as he hits me. The one he knocked over seems to have had enough, and backs away, blasting me with another ineffectual Fire Bolt before turning and running, once he's sure I'm not going to chase him. The battle doesn't last much longer than that.

Once they start breaking, it's essentially over. All that's left for us to do is clean up those few who can't or won't run, and then the mass of oni that were heading towards the town are destroyed, and the little town is saved. I check my notifications. My bow increased to 39. Dagger went up two levels to 9. My dodge to 34. Shield went up to 16, sword is at 38, and Mab's Rage has leveled up.

Now it will last for three minutes, doing my willpower in damage every second in an area around me at a radius of my awareness. And then there's the notification of the battle itself. You have defeated oni x24. You gain (672, 000/5) 134, 400 experience. You have gained a level! Level forty. That means I have twelve stat points to spend, and it means I get another talent. I just need to find a talent that either makes me immune to poison or that helps with status effects.

Maybe something along the lines of toughness. I could ask El what she has. First, though, the stat points. I put three each into strength, agility, and vigor, then put the remaining three into presence.

"That was fun," El says. She's covered in blood, but none of it is hers.

"And I think we saved that village."

"Yeah," Gigi says. Her shield is a bit dented, but she looks none the worse for wear.

"Also, I just gained three fucking levels." Then she frowns.

"Damn it, I was so close!"

"What's wrong?" I ask. She points over her head.

"See for yourself," she says.

"I'm a hundred fucking points away." I look at her, and I see that she has 9900 hit points. Not quite in the five digit club.

"You'll get there next level though, for sure." I say.

"Right?"

"Yeah," she says.

"Still annoying." I smile at her, then look at El.

"Hey, El. Do you have a talent that lets you ignore status effects and debuffs?"

"Ignore them? No. But Rugged cuts their effectiveness in half. And Hard Skinned cuts their damage in half." Of course she has both. It's not enough to have all the hit points. You also have to be able to reduce the amount of damage you take in the first place. I briefly wonder if it's a good idea to take one of those. I mean, status effects only come into play when my Shell is down, and that almost never happens. I'm almost never worried about my natural hit points.

But then again, when it does come up, it's a huge deal. That poison did like five thousand damage to me. And it kept doing damage to my natural hit points even after I recast Shell. I decide to go with rugged. That should cut down the amount of time that any debuff effects me. According to the description, anyway. All debuff counters are cut in half when applied. That's pretty impressive. My whole sheet is impressive at this point.

I take a long look at it and just appreciate all the changes that I've gone through, all the achievements that I've made. Caleb Strong, level 40 wolf blood ranger. XP 93174/200000. HP: 15040 MP: 5480 Stamina: 6000 Defense: 347 Magic Resist: 130% Strength: 188+10 Agility: 278 Vigor: 188 Manipulation: 104 Presence: 137 Willpower: 150 Charisma: 131+5 Awareness: 130+4.

Skills: Animal Harvesting 18, Alertness 26, Bow 39, Climbing 5, Cooking 3, Dagger 9, Detect Traps 6, Disarm Traps 4, Dodge 33, Haggling 6, Intimidation 8, Meditation 15, Negotiation 12, Pick Lock 15, Riding 8, Scrounge 13, Shield 16, Sneak 44+4, Spellcraft 39, Subterfuge 11, Survival 17, Swimming 2, Sword 38, Throwing 12, Tracking 30, Trap making 14. Secondary skills: Armorer 19, Bowyer 7, Fletcher 5, Scrapping 12, Smithing 24.

Talents: Darkvision, Exemplar (Agility), Polyglot, Regenerate (stamina), Fast Reflexes, Toughness, Resist Fire, Rugged. Hunter (copper): 60/360, Adventurer (copper): 275, Scout (copper): 200/300 We search the oni for treasure, and I harvest their horns, completing another quest that I can turn in at the hunter's guild. The oni didn't seem to have that much on them that was worth taking, but we put their weapons in our spatial bags, figuring we can probably sell them.

It's not like our spatial bags are in danger of getting full any time soon. I collect my arrows from the corpses as best I can while Gigi gathers the money that they had on them. Again, not very much. A few silver, a few gold, a few copper. She puts them into the pouch that she keeps the party fund in; it apparently isn't even enough to be worth distributing. Once we're done with the enemy, we head to the village.

There are people there waiting for us, unsure of what just happened and uncertain of what our intentions may be.

"Thank you strangers," one of them says as we get within shouting distance.

"You have saved our village." I smile and wave to him.

"It was our pleasure," Ash shouts back.

"We were passing through, and couldn't let those oni harm any innocents." There's a palpable change in the villagers as she says that. They seem to relax a bit, as if a weight had suddenly been lifted. They let out a cheer, and their faces break out into smiles. Were they worried that we were going to attack them? That hey had been spared one group just to fall victim to the next? Maybe they just didn't know our intentions.

"Welcome to Bard," the villager who first spoke to us says.

"We welcome you as heroes!" I don't know what a hero's welcome really is. So I guess I can't say anything bad about how they treat us. They welcome us into the town and provide us with a gigantic meal, bringing tables out into the street and then covering them with platters of food. It seems like everyone in the village brings a different dish. We dig in at their insistence, as as we start to eat I realize that more food is being brought all the time.

It's like every time I finish tasting one dish, three more materialize on the table around us. There's a lot of patting on the back, a lot of words of thanks, and a lot of encouragement to eat. So I gorge myself, putting away more food in one sitting than I think I ever have in my life. There is meat, but most of the fare is vegetables and cheeses and fruits and breads. More simple than anything else, but I appreciate it all.

I keep putting away food far past when Vincent pushes himself away from the table and begins to politely decline every morsel that they try to tempt him with. I keep eating longer than Ash can keep tearing at her food with her shark teeth, longer than Gigi can keep filling her gullet. The only one who seems able to eat anywhere near as much as I can is El, and I'm once again struck by how similar wolves and bears actually are, or at least how similar the traits we inherited from them respectively are.

But after a solid two hours of eating, even we two tap out. We wish the people of Bard luck, tell them that they should really invest in a wall of some kind, and move on down the road.