Chương 170: Chapter 168: Into the mountain

We progress, moving a bit more carefully, listening for movement. I rely a lot on my nose, sifting through the overlapping smells and trying to find the ones that are the freshest to tell me what we're going to be facing. I do smell Amanda a few times. She doesn't leave much scent behind when she's flying, but we do come to a small chamber where I smell her pretty clearly. She must have stopped here to rest or to eat or something like that. It's a pretty defensible spot.

Maybe twenty feet across, with just two entrances. Pretty easy to keep them both in view while you relax. We stop there and have a bite to eat while we consider our next move.

"Have you decided if you're going to become a god?" I ask Vincent while we rest.

"I'm still unsure," he says.

"I might. The possibilities of magical exploration are tempting. So is the prospect of the power that divinity would provide. But I'm not sure I want to give up my mortality."

"We barely have mortality," Ash says.

"We come back from the dead. What is that if not immortality? We wouldn't be giving anything up."

"We still age," El says.

"At least, I think we do. Our time is still limited, even if we can come back from the dead."

"But we have a taste of immortality," Ash insists.

"Why not get more of it? Why not take the power that is being offered to us?" I furrow my brow.

"Is it being offered?" I ask.

"We're seeking it out. We're trying to find something based on legends from a whole other world."

"If Amanda is here, there's got to be something to it," Gigi points out.

"She had all the information from Root, remember? She probably knows that this is the right way to become a god." We are following in her footsteps. And she does seem to know what she's doing. Still, I don't think that godhood is being offered to us.

"We're still seeking it out. No one is presenting it to us on a silver plate."

"Silver plates change color when there's poison," El says.

"I learned that from an anime." I smile at El.

"The world is offering it to us, such as it can," Ash says.

"It's making it possible. We're the only beings capable of becoming gods, remember? Only people from Earth, only players, can become gods. The world makes it possible, and the death cycle brought it into reach." My eyes flit to Vincent. He never went through the death cycle. But Ash's point is still valid, I suppose.

"I'm still going to refuse, if it is offered," El says.

"I don't want to live forever. I don't want to be a god."

"What do you want?" Ash asks.

"No, seriously. Once we've completed this quest, once we've found the ambrosia or whatever, what do you want? If you help me become a god, I'd think I would owe you some sort of boon. What would you want?" El shrugs at first, but Ash keeps pushing.

"Give it some thought," she says.

"I don't know what will be in my power and what won't be, but I'll give you anything I can. You deserve to get some kind of reward for this." Her eyes flit to me.

"So do you, by the way. So does anyone who helps me become a god but doesn't become one themselves." What do I want? If I could have anything in the world, if I had a favor from a major god, what would I want? Immortality? I could get that by becoming a god. Wealth? Power? Maybe a shit load of experience. Like, a billion points or something like that. That would make me as immortal as I want to be.

It would pretty much guarantee that there were no more threats to me anywhere in the world, and I could just do what I want. That's often how I used to play those open world games. At first, you grind through the lower levels. You get more powerful, more capable. You get better gear, you improve your skills, all that. But at some point, eventually, you hit a plateau. Maybe you hit the maximum level, or maybe you just hit a level where you can one shot a dragon all by yourself.

Whatever the case, you reach a point where nothing in the world is really a threat to you. The bosses become cannon fodder. For a lot of people, that ruins the game. That takes all the fun out of it. It removes the challenge, and they don't want to play anymore. I'm not one of those people. I love getting to the point where I don't have to worry anymore. Where I don't have to care, and where I barely have to pay attention. I like when I can let an enemy wail on me for a while, so that they don't die embarrassed.

I want them to think they're doing well before I slaughter them. It gives me a weird sort of satisfaction. But it's not just because the combat becomes easy. It's that the combat stops being the focus of the game. It truly stops mattering. I'm not saying I become a pacifist, but I do become someone who doesn't have to fear. And at that point, I can just explore. I can delve into the deepest dungeons, into the oldest and most dangerous parts of the world.

I can go and find the ruins of lost civilizations and just explore what they left behind. I can be an archaeologist or an anthropologist. And not a good one. I don't have to be meticulous and make sure that my discoveries are peer reviewed and fit the current literature and all that. I can basically make up whatever I want to believe from the fragments that I find. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

I've heard of archaeologists who construct whole civilizations from a single shard of pottery. They've got to be making up most of it. They follow logic, and they do have a line of reasoning that others can follow, but they're still making it up. I want to do that. I'm not looking to be an academic. I want to be an explorer. So not a real archaeologist. More like Indiana Jones or something like that. Only without all the cultural appropriation. Or the Nazis. Maybe the Nazis, if I can find them.

I'd be totally down punching Nazis. That's the other benefit of making it to a power level where nothing can threaten you. You get to be doom to those you deem are doing wrong. I don't mean merchants cheating people or slightly oppressive governments. I mean things like slavers. I can wipe out every slaver I come across, and free everyone who has been enslaved. I can take down a fascist government all by myself if I have to. I can work to make the world a safer and better place.

I can do real good, and no one can stop me. Who determines what's good and right? I do, at that point. And I know, there is a worry about becoming corrupt when it comes to that. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, after all. But I don't think that my morals are going to bend all that much just because I can kill anyone I want to. I mean, I used to kill everyone I wanted to back on Earth. Because I didn't want to kill anyone. My morality has never been based on an external force that will punish or reward me.

I don't care about that sort of thing. I don't know if there is an afterlife or not. I hope that there is, and that it's one that I'll enjoy. But that's a hope, not really a belief. My belief is that the world is not a perfect place, but that we can strive to make it better. We can do our part to improve the world for those who come after us, and for those that we share it with. That means tolerating others, but it does not mean tolerating intolerance. I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my life.

There was a time when I lived in fear of doing it accidentally. It's why I wouldn't have sex with my long term girlfriend when she was drunk. Even though she had consented before drinking, even though she had consented many times before, I wouldn't do it while she was drunk, because she couldn't consent then. She got really mad at me, but I stuck to my principles. I stuck to my morality, because it's how I see myself, how I define myself. I don't think that's going to change just because I have great power.

I think I'll go more like Spiderman than like anyone else. Power is responsibility as much as it's freedom. Maybe that's why I don't want to be a god. Maybe it's more about the responsibility over the world that would come with that much power. I might be able to survive immortality. My brain might adapt to that, might let me actually survive forever. I don't want to die any time soon, after all.

But maybe the reason the prospect of immortality is so scary isn't about forever, it's about the responsibility that comes with it. We finish our brief repose and continue through the mountain. I keep rolling the thoughts over and over in my mind, trying to think of what reward I would want when this is all said and done. Do I want peace? Do I want power? Do I want knowledge? I don't know. I'm not able to sink into another spiral of thought, though, because the next cavern we come to is full of trolls. Cave troll.

Legendary elite monster, level 54. HP: 54, 000/54, 000. There are six of them, so I immediately start Mab's Rage. So does Vincent. Unfortunately, it only seems to be doing half the damage it should do. Still, 82 per second for three minutes is a lot of damage. Almost fifteen thousand. The women move forward, El in the center with her axes and Gigi and Ash flanking her with shields. I stand a few feet behind them with my bow, sending in Rapid Shot and Power Shot.

At first, it seems like it's going to be like any other fight. But after a few seconds, I notice that my arrows start to drop out of the troll's flesh. They fall out as if they were pushed outwards. And I notice that while their health bars are going down, they aren't going down as fast as they should. The damage notifications tell me that my strikes are doing the full amount of damage that they should, but I notice that if I turn my attention from one troll to another, the first troll's health starts to go up.

They regenerate. Of course they do. Maybe they don't regenerate from fire. That's usually how it works in the stories. I throw a Fire Bolt at one of the trolls. It does 864 damage, so they aren't exactly vulnerable to fire. But as I watch the one I hit with flames, I see that it doesn't recover that damage. It still regenerates from everything else, but not from fire. Probably not from acid, either, but I don't have anything that does acid damage.

Vincent starts using his lava lance, throwing spears of magma into the fray. I decide to do the same. I'm not doing it because of the damage, of course. I only do 330 damage with my lava lances, while Vincent seems to do about three times that much. But I have to use the spell for it to level up, and the burning does an additional ten points of damage for a hundred and forty seconds. That adds up.

The girls seem to be holding their own against the trolls, though I can tell that El is frustrated when she notices that her strikes are being regenerated. Ash shouts out for them to concentrate on a single troll at a time, and things get a bit more effective there. But it also leads to a problem. Once all three of them are focusing their attack, they stop holding the trolls back.

Four of the trolls still try to overwhelm the three of them, but the other two lumber past and start moving towards me, and towards Vincent. I've already put my bow away, so I draw my sword and my dagger and I activate Stinging Defense. There's a notification almost immediately, telling me that the ability has leveled up and now does seventy percent of my defense in damage. That's still only 281 points of damage, but it happens every time one of the trolls attacks me.

When I attack them, I do the full 502 damage, even more with Bleeding Strike. I use Killing Blow, but it doesn't take. So I rely a lot on Vital Slash. Between my various abilities, I'm able to do a fair amount of damage to the trolls attacking me. I am fighting somewhat defensively, so I'm only hitting them about once every four seconds. They're attacking me twice in that same amount of time, though only about one in four of their strikes get through my defense.

All told, it seems like I'm doing about thirteen thousand damage to one of them, and about four thousand damage to the other, over the course of a minute. And since each of their strikes is doing 398 when they get through my defense, they're only doing about four thousand damage to me. Unfortunately, it seems like they regenerate as much as ten points per second, so six hundred points a minute. That's really going to drag this out.