Chương 126: Chapter 124: The Land Shark

I shoot an arrow at the land shark. The arrow snaps apart as it hits the thing's armored hide, doing no damage at all. That's not good. I backpedal a bit, trying to put some distance between myself and the monster. It's about thirty feet long and maybe nine feet tall at the shoulder, so it's not exactly a small target. But the armor worries me. I use Sniper Shot and take aim for the space between the armor plates. It should do almost two thousand damage. But it only does 1, 095 damage.

And there aren't that many spaces between armor plates. Most of them are overlapping, grinding against each other as it moves. Making it harder for grit to get to the more sensitive skin underneath, I suppose. Ash smashes her mace against the creature's snout, making it rear back in pain and let out a roar that I feel shake my whole body. There's a brief but terrifying instant where my body refuses to move, where all my muscles tense up, at the sound of that roar. I know that tigers can do that.

Their roars can literally paralyze a human being, if they're too close or too directly in the path or something like that. It's a hunting technique. Paralyze your prey, then attack them. But the paralysis doesn't last even a full second before dissipating. Much to my relief. I start casting Fire Bolt at the monster, hoping that my spells will have more of a chance of damaging it than my arrows. The Fire Bolt does the full 804 damage that I'm expecting it to, so I decide to stick with that kind of attack.

Meanwhile, El's axe is raising sparks as they ricochet off the thick hide of the creature. She cuts gouges into the plates, but seems to be doing very little actual damage to the monster. Monsters don't usually have armor plating, certainly not this heavy. I bet when we kill it I can harvest those plates and we can use them to make some armor. Maybe not as good as the armor that Ash has, but possibly better than what Gigi is currently wearing.

As for Gigi, she seems to be moving more carefully, weaving around and trying to get her sword to slide under and between the plates, trying to cut at its flesh rather than just trying to go through the armor the way El seems to be. It seems like a good strategy, at first. But as I watch, casting more Fire Bolts at it every time the spell comes off cooldown, I see the problem. Gigi stabs under a plate just before the creature moves its arm, shifting the plates again.

And when the plates shift, Gigi's sword is ripped out of her hand. If she'd held on to it, the sword probably would've shattered. Gigi doesn't chase the sword. She just holds up her shield to block the slash from the creature, and lets the impact of that slash push her back several steps. Once she's out of range, she goes into her spatial bag and pulls out a backup sword. Then she goes right back in to keep fighting. I wonder how many swords she has in there. I hope it's enough.

Ash keeps smashing against the armor, and El keeps slashing at it, but I don't think either one of them are doing any real damage. Its health bar doesn't seem to be going down nearly as fast as it should be. My Fire Bolts are ticking away at it, and the lava spears that Vincent sends at it seem to be doing some damage, but the melee fighters don't seem to really be doing much of anything. Even still, it's good that they're up there. They can keep it busy. They can keep soaking up its attacks.

I don't know how much damage the land shark does when it hits, but I have my doubts that it's an easy hit to soak. Those claws, those talons, are at least a foot long each, with three on each paw. It rends through Ash's shield, leaving long claw marks down it, and I'm suddenly very glad that every item doesn't have a durability rating. I'm sure if they did, this thing would be tearing through durability with a quickness. I'm hesitant to do it, but I do eventually cast Mab's Rage anyway.

It's much better used against groups, but it will do a significant amount of damage to this monster, and it will slow it down, which seems to be pretty important right now. It's moving fast, clawing at all three of the girls in turn as they pound away at it, no one getting anywhere really. Mab's Rage starts up, and the beast slows down. It seems to slow down more than the ten percent that the spell promises, but I'm not going to question such a gift horse.

It means that it can't hit my friends as easily or as often, and I approve of that. Vincent and I keep up the magical barrage, slowly but surely stripping away hit points. Mab's Rage is good for 27, 000 damage over the course of three minutes, and I don't have any doubt that we're going to need the full time. El roars in triumph just as the creature lets out another pained roar that makes my muscles question their activity.

She has torn away one of the armor plates, and is now chopping at the exposed flesh with abandon. Thing is, even the exposed flesh seems hardened. Which I guess I should have known; my arrow hit flesh instead of armor, and it still did only half the damage I was expecting it to. A minute passes. The creature has started to focus its attacks on El. Gigi is actually hitting it, but only very rarely, and Ash's attacks are just impacts against its armor. El is the one that is actually doing damage to it.

I watch her more than I watch it. I watch as it claws at her again and again. One of these attacks is eventually going to draw blood, and when it does, I'm going to yell at her to put her Shell back up. She might remember on her own, but she has a habit of forgetting about it, of not paying attention to herself. She's more focused on the damage she can deal out, and seems to forget about everything else when she's in her battle rage. Another minute passes, and I have to yell at El to put up her Shell.

When the creature hits her, it rips away about a thousand points of damage from her. Most people her level would be badly injured by that, but she's still above twenty five thousand hit points. Still, she doesn't hesitate when I remind her, and she casts Shell again. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. But there's a real problem I'm seeing here. It only took the thing two minutes to get through her Shell. She doesn't have five minutes for it to go back up.

If it takes two minutes to go through her Shell, then it only takes two more minutes to go through her health. That leaves her a minute shy of putting Shell back up. If she's not careful, that thing might kill her. Assuming it has that much time. By my reckoning, it's already down below ten thousand hit points. It might not survive the next two minutes. As Mab's Rage ends, I notice that Vincent casts it himself.

His is still level one, so it will only last for thirty seconds, but that's another thirty seconds of the creature moving at a slower speed, and it's thirty more seconds worth of damage. I don't think Vincent has the same level of willpower that I do, so it's probably less damage, but every bit helps. We do kill it before it takes El's Shell down again, but I'm guessing it's a near thing. Two of those at once would be really dangerous. One of them is more than a match for most adventuring parties at our level.

You have defeated land shark. You gain (45, 000/5) 9, 000 experience points. It's not much, but it's enough. I go up to level 41, and I have twelve points to spend. I do the same thing I did last level: three points each into strength, agility, vigor, and presence. That puts my hit points up to 15, 662, my MP up to 5, 740, and my stamina up to 6, 150.

"I did not like that," El says as she catches her breath and examines her axes.

"I was afraid that was going to dull my blades." Then she runs her finger across the axe blade.

"Oh, it did dull my blades! What am I going to do now?"

"I don't know," Gigi says, working at where her sword is still wedged between two of the armor plates.

"Use your giant ass sword instead?"

"But my sword skill sucks," El whines.

"I'll try to sharpen your blades again," I tell her.

"But first, help me harvest those plates, will you? They'll probably make good armor."

"Or a good shield," Ash says, looking down at the ruined remains of her shield.

"And I need to repair mine, so if you can make one out of those plates, I'd appreciate it." Harvesting the plates is not easy. The skin between the plates is covered in thick scales, and they resist my skinning knife pretty well. I really have to force it through to get anything done, using a lot more strength than I normally have to with this sort of thing. I do get a few plates off, but it's hard work to do it. My animal harvesting actually goes up by three points, all the way to 21, in my determined work.

But I probably shouldn't have been able to get at the flesh at all.

"I wonder how the meat tastes," Ash says as I finish prying one of the armor plates away. She then waves away my incredulous look.

"Don't worry," she says, "I'll get it. You work on the axes and my shield. I'll make dinner." It's earlier than we would normally stop to camp, but it's as good a time as any, I suppose. I sit down in the sand and start going through my spatial bag, trying to find something that will help with crafting a shield. The only recipe for a shield that I have is the knight's shield, which is supposed to be an uncommon shield.

But as I bore holes in the armor plate for the shield straps, shave the edges of the plate into the shape of the shield, and finally put it together on the frame of Ash's old shield, I get a pleasant surprise. You have crafted Knight's Shield. Rare shield. 1/20. +11 armor. You gain 10, 000 experience. I didn't know that a rare item could be made from an uncommon recipe. I guess the ingredients have an effect. I also didn't know that I could gain experience from crafting items.

And that's not all; my armorer skill also goes up to 20. I use what I can of the other plates and the scales of the creature to upgrade her shield to level five, where it adds +15 armor. It's not as good as her old shield, but it's better than not having one. Gigi has me repeat the process to replace her old shield, which is also pretty badly torn up by the land shark. It's still intact enough that I can use it as a frame for the new shield, but I understand why she wanted it replaced.

I wish I was skilled enough to put something on the front of the shield, like a crest or something, but I don't really know how I would go about doing that, other than gouging one out of the shield. And that seems like it would be counter productive to the shield being thick and able to withstand hits. So I don't do that. I get hers up to level five as well, getting another point for my armorer skill and another ten thousand experience. All told, making the two shields takes me about four hours.

"Now I just need to do that another twenty two or so times, and I can level up," I say, wiping the sweat from my brow. No one laughs at my joke. I thought it was funny. Although, now that I think about it, it's probably more accurate than anything else. That must be how the crafters level up. I don't want to level up that way. Just making two of the same thing eventually got boring. I don't want to mass produce them.

"Can you fix my blades?" El asks.

"After dinner," I promise. Ash managed to get a fair amount of meat from the land shark. I've never had actual shark meat, but I imagine it tastes pretty similar to this. It definitely has that fishy tang, that mild almost sweet flavor, and a very firm texture. It's kind of hard to chew. Ash seems to have a good time tearing it apart with her shark teeth. My teeth, while sharper than a human's, don't really help in that regard. By the time I'm sated, my jaw is aching from the force it took to chew that meat.

All that said, it was still good. Delicious, in fact. Ash is a pretty good cook at this point, and she has some spices that added zest to the flavor. Enough so that we even got a buff. For the next five hours, we all have +10 defense. That's a pretty useful buff, if you think about it. We're going to make some jerky in the hopes of getting it when we need it. But in the meantime, I have to work on El's axes. The first axe isn't a problem.

I can see where the metal bent over and dented, and it's just a matter of using a whetstone to reset the burrs and straighten it out. Soon enough, there's an edge there, good as new. But the second axe is not so simple. It's bent over much more fully, more visibly, and the axe head is cracked in a few places.

"I don't think this one is salvageable," I say, offering it to her. Which is too bad; it's of rare quality and it did a base damage over two hundred. But I just don't see any way to fix it without reforging the whole thing. And we do not have a forge. Maybe there are crafter spells that would've let me do it. Based on what Cedric was talking about when he was making my dagger, there are spells that will take the place of a forge, that will heat the metal up to the right temperature for it to be worked on.

But I don't have any of those spells, and neither does Vincent.

"I do collect spells," he says, "but I only take ones that are useful to me. It's a matter of cost. Spells aren't cheap." Fair enough.