Chương 131: Chapter 129: A drawn out battle

I do my best to force my mana into my blade. I imagine all the magical power within me gathering together, focusing on my hand, and spreading out into my sword. I imagine my sword starting to glow, and I do everything I can to force myself to believe it, to will it to happen. I should be able to do a lot with my willpower. I have 150 willpower, it should do something other than determine how much stamina I have. It should be able to transfer my mana over into damage somehow. Even just a little. Every bit will help.

I block a tentacle with my shield, letting my dagger slice into the tentacle as it lashes against me. I try to force the mana into my weapon, trying to do something. Praying, almost, that we can do more damage. There has to be something that will allow this to work. Something that will let me deal more damage. I don't know if my mana is helping, but I feel like I'm dealing more damage. I shift my feet so that I'm fighting facing towards Gigi rather than alongside her.

There's enough of the giant beach guardian that I can get a portion of it between us. That allows me to get sneak attack along with the flanking bonus. That lets me do 772 damage with about a third of my hits. So I hit it forty times in a minute, dealing 386 damage two thirds of the time and 772 the other third. That's good for almost twenty thousand damage per minute. Mab's Rage finally ends after the seventh minute of battle.

And as it does, I see that we've gotten the creature down to about four hundred thousand hit points. Stamina is starting to drain, and we still have a long way to go before this monstrosity dies. Amanda casts another spell, and the giant beast seems to stutter a little, moving more slowly than it was before. That's all well and good, and it's nice that it won't do more damage to us as quickly, but that's not the thing I'm worried about. I'm worried about us getting too tired to kill this thing.

Vincent's spell to reduce defense goes off again, and on a whim I shoot a Fire Bolt at the beach guardian. It still only does 313 damage. So the defensive reduction doesn't apply to its magic resistance. I didn't think it would, but I had hoped. If we could get this thing's defense lower, we could really pile on the damage. I start making my way away from Gigi and towards Amanda. I need to get close enough to talk to her.

Maybe she has something that will lower its defenses, or that will make all of us do more damage. She has a lot of spells, but she might not have thought about using the spells in conjunction with allies. She's never had allies before; she's used to fighting by herself. That means that she might not have thought about certain things. Like what if the spell that makes her swords glow bright red can be cast on my sword as well? Wouldn't that be useful?

And if she has whatever made the defense go down, maybe we can stack on top of it. Reducing the thing's defenses by 100 would make an enormous difference. I dance around the tentacles of sand as they come whipping out at me, slashing at them to try to cut them free. It doesn't always work; sometimes I don't cut all the way through, sometimes the tentacle pulls back before I can even make the attack. But when it does go through, it does more damage than a normal strike.

A trade off for its ability to attack all of us at once, I suppose. It's attacking close to one hundred and fifty times a minute between the five us, and that's not even counting the occasional ball of badness it shoots at Vincent. It would have to be more vulnerable at least some of the time, just to be fair. And that's when something occurs to me. This fight is fair. All the fights are fair. Not every situation is fair, but the fights themselves are. The monsters here follow rules, and the rules are fair.

The battles are always meant to be fair. You may end up fighting something many levels higher than you, in which case it's only fair that it kills you. But it is still fair. The thing that isn't fair is us. Our character sheets aren't fair. Our sheets, our stats, are breaking the mold of this world. We aren't playing by the rules. But the monsters are. The monsters are all playing by the rules. Including the beach guardian. This fight is possible. It's possible because that's what is fair.

Could Amanda have killed this thing on her own? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's more powerful the more of us it's fighting. Maybe it would have been significantly weaker if it had just been her. But the thing I can be sure of, the one certainty in this fight, is that the monster is playing by the rules. It's fighting fair. But we don't have to. Still trying to push my mana into my sword, I make my way towards Amanda, until I'm close enough that I think she'll be able to hear me.

"Can you," I say, ducking under a tentacle, "enchant my sword too?" She looks at me for a split second, not comprehending. Then my words seem to catch up with her, and she looks almost embarrassed. She waves her fingers, and my sword and dagger both start glowing bright red. I slash, expecting to do another 386 damage. Instead, I do 886 damage. She boosted my damage by five hundred? Amazing. But something I notice: my mana is now draining, and rapidly.

I'm losing twenty five points of mana per second to maintain that extra damage. I'm perfectly okay with that; I've still got almost 4500 mana to burn. That gives me three solid minutes of doing an extra five hundred damage per hit. That's an extra sixty thousand points of damage all told. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

So over the next three minutes, I keep attacking as recklessly and quickly as I can, not even worrying about the tentacles. If it allows me to strike just one or two more times, I'll take the hits. I'll lose twelve thousand hit points a minute to the slashing and slamming of tentacles if it means I'm dealing an extra twenty thousand damage per minute. My Shell goes down, and I cast it back up, which is going to reduce the length of my weapon enchantment, but only by a second. I can handle that.

I'm getting more hits, doing more damage, and the beach guardian's health bar is finally starting to fall at a decent rate. As a group, we're dealing almost forty thousand damage a minute. By the time my enchantment ends and I'm back to doing the 386 damage per hit, it's health has dropped down below three hundred thousand. We're getting close to half of its health down, and we're only ten minutes into the fight. I thought we were going to need almost forty minutes to kill this thing.

Now I'm starting to think that we might actually be able to do this. But stamina drain is still the big fear. It's still the most likely killer. I can't help with magic anymore. I've got, currently, fifteen mana. That's enough for me to cast Shell one more time and then have five points. So I could cast a single Ice Spike too if I really wanted to. But as far as magical help goes, I'm out. All I have left is my stamina and the damage that I can do with my sword and my dagger. I need to think of something else.

I know I have something. There has to be a way to cheat through this battle. Think of it that way. Think of it as cheating, because that's the mindset you need. The enemy has to play fair, but you don't. So how can I play unfair? How can I go outside of the normal abilities that I would have in battle? I could start throwing things from my spatial bag at it, but I don't see that doing anything helpful.

Unless it's somehow vulnerable to land shark meat, I just don't think that hitting it with backup weapons would be a good thing. I don't see any of that helping. But there is something in my spatial bag that I had forgotten about. Something that I've been carrying around for a while, ever since I learned what they are. Potions. I immediately take out the blue potion and drink it. That gives me a mana regeneration of ten per second for a minute. So that's good for six hundred more mana.

And I can do the same for stamina, to offset the exhaustion penalty. Six hundred stamina is a lot. It's another full minute of fighting at the ten per second drain. I'm currently draining five per second, with a regeneration of two per second. That potion can keep me fighting. It can keep all of us fighting. I know that El and Ash have at least one of each potion. They probably forgot, same as I did, because we never needed potions before.

Last time we were fighting until we ran out of stamina, dying was part of the plan. We weren't expecting to get out of there; we were just killing as many of the orcs as we possibly could. So we wouldn't have thought about the potions.

"Don't forget potions!" I shout out, as loud as I can. I don't know who heard me, but it might be the best I can do. I do notice that Amanda immediately pulls out a golden potion and drinks it down. That's for stamina, which means she's starting to hurt for that too. But that should keep her going for a while at least. I look at the beach guardian. It's below half hit points, which is incredible. We've dealt so much damage to it in these last twelve minutes of battle. But will it be enough? Can we keep it up?

Can we do anything else? Vincent casts a spell, and the tentacles start thrashing about more wildly. Less controlled, less specific in their attacks. They are attacking blindly. I guess it doesn't need to have eyes to be blinded after all. I look back to Amanda.

"Weaken its defenses!" I yell at her. I don't know if she has a spell that will do that, but I'm hoping she does. She drinks a blue potion and casts another spell. I hit a tentacle for 486 damage. That's more than I've been doing. I think she reduced its defenses by another fifty points. That means we're each doing an extra fifty points of damage with every single hit that we make. That's good. That will add up.

I roll over a tentacle that tries to knock me back, landing with my feet braced on the slippery ground and slicing out at the tentacle before it can be withdrawn back into the mass of the beach guardian. I slash back and forth with my sword, just trying to deal damage more often. Each hit counts, and more hits are better. I don't need to worry about slicing around armor or making sure that I hit vital points; the whole thing is one giant blob, and there's no way to tell where the vital points might be.

The closest thing to a vital point I've found is the tentacles themselves, carving something away from the giant mass of the creature. I keep moving around the outside of the creature, trying to find a way to get behind it, if there is such a thing as behind it. I'll know because my damage will go up, but for the most part I'm just continuing with the same movements, the same attacks, over and over again. I chop and slice, trying to get at the tentacles as they come at me, trying to do something.

I've got the mana to keep my Shell up for a good long while; the potion of mana I drank really helped with that. I've got 615 mana left right now. It might be worth it to get the enchantment from Amanda again, just to the extra five hundred damage per hit for a single minute. That would be almost twenty thousand damage. As we move closer and closer to twenty solid minutes of fighting, I start to wonder when I should drink my stamina potion.

Twenty minutes of solid fighting is going to start draining twenty stamina per second. Maybe I should drink the potion now, recharging six hundred stamina. That would allow me to drain only three stamina per second for a minute. But I'm not the only one I have to worry about. I don't think the others have as much stamina to begin with as I do, meaning they will run out faster than I will. Which means that Gigi and El and Ash are going to run out of stamina. And when they do that, they'll get killed.

How many hit points does this thing still have? We've dealt about three hundred thousand damage, meaning it still has two hundred and fifty thousand to spare. There's just no way.