Chương 174: Chapter 172: Goats and ice

I shoot a Rapid Shot at the same goat, dealing 3, 802 damage. About seven thousand after the bleed. That puts me up to having done about ten thousand damage to the goat before it even starts to close the distance between us. Plus whatever Vincent's fire storm does. But, looking at the dire goat, I see that its health bar has barely moved. It has more than a quarter of a million hit points. And that's just one of them.

"Come on," I whisper, trying to will the goat to turn around and flee.

"Come on, leave us alone." But it doesn't leave us alone. Of course it doesn't. It moves forward to get out of the fire storm, and once it's started moving, it begins to pick up speed. And it lowers its head. It's coming right for us, and it's going to ram into someone. It's just a question of who. I could Dash. That would get me out of the way. That would make sure it wasn't me. But I don't know that it's charging at me in the first place. It probably is, but I can't be sure. And someone else might get in the way.

That's just what we'd need. A tangle of limbs as we slide down the scree and over the ice and then over the cliff. That's not the kind of team bonding I want to do. I take a breath and use Killing Blow. It hits, but doesn't kill the dire goat. Think fast. I've got maybe ten seconds before it reaches me. I'm braced pretty well with the pickaxe. Could I withstand the ramming? If I manage to stay still, I could arrest its movement. Then the four of us could wail on the creature for a while.

It might get a few good head butts in, but it won't be able to stand up to all of us at once. I glance up at the other two. They aren't moving. They are watching the fire storm warily, and don't seem that eager to follow their companion down towards us. I shoot a Sniper Shot at the charging goat, hoping that I can take out one of its legs. I do hit the leg, and the goat does stagger a little bit. In fact, it crashes forward and does a complete roll. But then, somehow, it regains its footing and just keeps coming.

One of El's javelins slams into the thing's side, pushing it off course a little bit. It might actually miss me now. Or it's going to hit Ash. She seems braced for it. Shield is in hand again, and she seems to be pretty low to the ground, getting as much stability as the mountain allows. I switch to my sword just before the goat hits her. It slams into her with a loud crashing sound, and the impact pushes Ash back through the scree and gravel about a dozen feet.

The goat, on the other hand, stops immediately upon impact, and turns to me, ready to head butt me into submission. I try to deflect the blow with my own shield, but I don't have the kind of surface area that Ash has. The horns of the goat slam into my arm, which pushes into my chest. I don't move because of the bracing pickaxe, but I do take 1, 598 damage from the impact. That means it started at two thousand. That's a lot of damage. That's more than I can handle on a regular basis.

My sword does its normal 500 damage back to the goat, which is a small miracle. I don't know what I would do if it had armor as well as that many hit points. El leaps and tackles the goat, knocking it over on its side. That pretty much makes it unable to attack. It thrashes around trying to dislodge her, trying to kick her or bite her or something like that, but she gets a pretty good grip on it.

And with that grip on it, Gigi and I are able to stab the goat over and over again, little wounds that will add up over time. Vincent starts throwing lava lances into the creature's hind quarters, and slowly but surely its health starts to decline. El doesn't get any strikes on the dire goat, but her contribution is undeniable. I don't know if we would've been able to fight this thing without her holding on to it like she is. It takes some time, but we do kill the dire goat.

And by the time we do, I look up to see that the other two have wandered off. We're safe. We're successful. And I don't like fighting on the mountain side. You have defeated dire goat. You receiver (260, 000/5) 52, 000 experience. That's enough for El and I to level up to forty seven, and for Ash to hit forty six. I put five points into agility, five into willpower, and the remaining three into presence.

As I'm working on leveling up, I notice a bunch of different notifications for skill increases that I've apparently been ignoring. My climbing has gone up to ten, which isn't surprising. My alertneness has gone up to 27. Been a very long time since that skill increased. My dagger skill has increased to 19, my bow to 43, my dodge to 40, shield up to 23, and my tracking has hit 33. I don't know what increased my tracking; maybe it was examining the monsters that Amanda left behind.

Whatever the case, that's more skills than I had. My sheet is pretty impressive, all things considered. I haven't upgraded any of my faction ranks in a while, but the rest of it I'm very proud of: Caleb Strong, level 47 wolf blood ranger. XP 12870/490000. HP: 18800 MP: 6674 Stamina: 15980 Defense: 407 Magic Resist: 140% Strength: 200+10 Agility: 305 Vigor: 200 Manipulation: 104 Presence: 142 Willpower: 170 Charisma: 131+10 Awareness: 140+4.

Skills: Animal Harvesting 23, Alertness 27, Bow 43, Climbing 10, Cooking 3, Dagger 18, Detect Traps 12, Disarm Traps 6, Dodge 40, Haggling 7, Intimidation 8, Meditation 17, Negotiation 15+4, Pick Lock 18, Riding 10, Scrounge 13, Shield 23, Sneak 44, Spellcraft 45, Subterfuge 11, Survival 18, Swimming 2, Sword 43, Throwing 15, Tracking 33, Trap making 14. Secondary skills: Armorer 22, Bowyer 7, Fletcher 5, Scrapping 12, Smithing 24.

Talents: Darkvision, Exemplar (Agility), Polyglot, Regenerate (stamina), Fast Reflexes, Toughness, Resist Fire, Rugged, Stalwart. Hunter (copper): 60/360, Adventurer (copper): 275, Scout (copper): 200/300 We don't want to take too long just hanging out on the side of the mountain. It's still cold, even if we are all pretty used to it. That doesn't mean you stay out in the cold longer than you absolutely have to.

But at the same time, we don't know if we're going to run into some other creatures or monsters, so we want to have every bit of our leveling done before we move on. I see that El has broken thirty thousand. She now has 31, 020 hit points. Ash has 26, 220. I'm right in the middle of the pack, which is fine by me. I do wish we could do something to get Vincent some more health, but he seems content not even breaking three thousand.

We keep moving upward, looking for another cave, a crevice, or just some shelter out of the wind. The wind is really picking up, and everyone who really knows cold knows that that's the real killer. When the wind whips through the air just right, it's like the cold can pierce through any layers of clothing you may have, getting deep into your bones. You lose your core heat, and it's really hard to get that back. Especially out in the wilderness without the opportunity to take a hot shower.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Thankfully, Vincent finds a small cave that we can rest in just a few dozen feet above us. It's too small to be an animal den, barely more than an overhang of rock, but it will serve our purposes. We can make camp there if we want to. Build a fire. Get warm.

"I miss windbreakers," Gigi says as I pull wood from my spatial bag and start to build a fire.

"I used to wear windbreakers as my top layer. It really helped stop the cold from seeping in." She's shivering enough that her teeth are chattering. I start the fire with magic rather than with flint and steel. Magic is faster, and we need to get some heat going. The fire heats up our little nook pretty quickly, as there isn't much space to heat up, and soon enough there is water dripping down from above us. I hope that doesn't loosen up an avalanche or something.

This cave is big enough for the five of us to fit in, but it's pretty cramped, and I don't want to spend time buried under tons of snow.

"Have you thought about flying to the top?" El asks Vincent as I feed the flame and make the fire a bit bigger. He looks at her, then out of the mouth of the cave.

"I've considered it," he says.

"But there's a lot of wind the higher you go. It makes things difficult."

"But you could probably get to the top of the mountain without having to go through all this shit," she says. He nods.

"True. But then I'd be leaving all of you behind. It's one thing to scout a bit and help out, it would be another to risk flying up there by myself. What if there are flying monsters?" I hadn't even considered those. And there almost certainly will be. Creatures who live higher up in the mountain will probably be fliers. They'll have wings and swoop down to attack us. My bow will really come in handy then. So will the bows that the others have, though to a lesser extent.

Having Vincent there to cast spells into the air that might force the creatures down to our level will be invaluable. He doesn't want to fly himself because of the risks. That makes total sense. He's kind of a glass cannon. He can dish out a lot of punishment, but he still only has 2, 880 hit points. He isn't going to be able to stand up to things like those dire goats on his own. But what is Amanda's excuse? She has plenty of hit points. I think she had more than fifty thousand.

She can withstand attacks from flying creatures. Plus she's invisible, so most of them won't even be able to see her. It's possible they could smell her and attack based on that, but even that shouldn't be insurmountable. Why didn't she just fly to the top? I keep going over what El said about the journey being part of the destination. What if the Ambrosia is hidden within the mountain? Or what if the cup you need to drink it from is somehow inside one of the caves?

There could be things that she needs to gather on the way up, things that are forcing her to take the slow route. But if that's true, will we be able to gather the same things? Will there be more than one true grail? Am I bringing in too many legends from our world? Assume it's something that there isn't just one of. She has to find it as she goes, probably a list of things. Like a scavenger hunt on the way up the mountain. That would prevent her from just flying to the top and skipping the whole challenge.

But what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to know what things we should be picking up? Maybe we need some of the scree that we just hiked up. Maybe we need some of the mushrooms from the first cave we walked through, the one that was cut through with water. Maybe we needed some of the liquid from those remaining pools. We might have just walked right past things that we desperately need. Which means we'll probably have to go back down the mountain.

We'll probably have to back track to pick up whatever we missed along the way. Which I suppose means it's a good thing that we're killing all the monsters we come across. If all we have to do is collect a few things, the second time through the mountain should be pretty easy. I hate not knowing. Ever since all this started, it's been a point of frustration for me. Without a tutorial god, we didn't find out any of the things that we needed to know. We had to figure things out for ourselves every step of the way.

We didn't have Root to answer our questions, or to tell us what we needed. We didn't have any of the advantages that Amanda had. Which kind of makes her the villain in our story, sort of. Or at least the antagonist. She's the one that has made everything so difficult. She's thwarted us over and over again, though through no fault of her own. She didn't know that she was screwing us when she killed Root. She didn't know that she was making it so that we had to struggle to figure out how the world worked.

Then again, it's possible that we wouldn't have even gotten a chance to go into the tutorial without her actions. We might have just been stuck in the world after it ended, either dying to the monsters that filled it or suffering whatever fate the rest of humanity had in store for it. We might owe her our lives. We definitely owe her for Shell. And, the more I think about it, for Healing Touch.

Both of those spells are way too powerful for a god who is trying to keep things fair and balanced to allow to remain as single spells. Both of them have given us a huge leg up in this whole thing. They are the only real advantages we have over Amanda, too. If we ever have to fight her, those two spells are the only things that can push things into our favor. She'll have to do a lot of damage really quickly to one of us at a time to have any hope of killing any of us. I don't know if she can.

I don't know if we can kill her either. I don't know if it's going to be necessary. I sigh, holding my hands out towards the flame. The dripping water is a bit more steady, but there aren't any avalanches yet.

"You okay?" Gigi asks me. She's stopped shivering. I hadn't noticed that it was making her armor rattle, but I notice now that it's stopped.

"I'm fine," I say.

"I'm just thinking."

"About what?"

"About all this. About what we're doing, and about what we should do with Amanda."

"What do you mean? You think we should stop her?" I shrug.

"Maybe. Maybe not. She knows what she's doing. She might have more secrets to share with us, if we can catch up to her. But maybe we should stop her. I don't know. What do you think?"

"I think that godhood is a scary concept," she says.

"I think that it's an interesting dream, and it's wild that it's even possible. But I don't know that anyone," she lowers her voice, glancing towards Ash, "who wants it should be allowed to have it."

"Do you want it?" I ask her.

"I'm undecided still," she says.

"I like the idea of living forever, I really do. But I'm not sure I should be allowed to have that kind of power. I mean, gods can shape the world, right? They can perform miracles. They can do things that are impossible."

"So can we," I point out.

"Magic is impossible."

"But that's just it!" Gigi says.

"Magic is already doing things that are impossible. But magic has limits. There are still things that even magic can't do. But a god should be able to do those things. When miracles are everyday occurrences, what becomes a miracle? What would it take to still qualify? We can resurrect, so it's not bringing someone back from the dead. Maybe it's shape shifting, or turning people from one thing to another. Maybe Ash can become a god and turn us into dragons.

Or maybe when she becomes a god, she'll decide to do something bad."

"Why would she do something bad?"

"Maybe by accident," Gigi says.

"Maybe she'll try to end all wars or something like that. It might be that being a god is a monkeys paw kind of deal. Maybe that's why god never really interfered in our old world."

"Did you believe in god?" I ask her. She nods.

"I wasn't really religious, but I was spiritual. I believed that there was a god watching out for us, but not interfering. Allowing us to have free will and all that."

"Is that what you would do as a god?"

"I don't know," she says.

"Probably. I wouldn't want to do too much interfering. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster." She looks over at Ash again. Ash is looking out the mouth of the cave. No, she's looking at the steady drip of water from above us.

"We should move on," Ash says.

"We might be weakening the ice above us. It could be dangerous."