Chương 179: Chapter 177: God bears

The god bear does a thousand points more damage than I do when we make contact with each other. Stinging Defense helps a little, dealing about three thousand damage a minute, and my sword and dagger do another ten or so, but that bear is able to hit me six times over the course of this third minute. And that's enough to drop my Shell under two thousand. I can survive one more hit before I have to recast the spell. And then I have to somehow survive five more minutes before I can cast it again.

Five minutes is a really long time when a god bear is slashing at you with paws that are bigger than your torso. Vincent casts a spell, and I find myself moving even faster. That must be the hasting spell he bought before we left the last town. It definitely helps me hit more often, but it doesn't help me hit any harder. Five hundred is about my limit. And even hitting forty times in a minute is only twenty thousand damage. I recast Shell before Mab's Rage ends.

And the bear hits me several more times, dropping my new Shell down by about five thousand points. When the spell does end, the god bear starts to move faster, which means it's going to hit me more. It's down to about a third of its total health, but that's still like ninety five thousand hit points. Vincent keeps launching spell attacks at the bear, sending lava lances over my head and lightning bolts around my dodging to go sizzling into the bear's flesh.

The damage over time effects might be adding up, but I don't know if they're going to be enough. Mab's Rage picks up again a few seconds after it ends. This must be Vincent's version of it. Clever of him to wait until mine ended, so we got the slow effect for a bit longer. With the bear slowed and me sped up, I bring it down closer and closer to death, but I still take seven blows over the course of the next minute. My Shell is down to thirty eight hundred by the time the second Mab's Rage ends.

If someone else had the spell, that would be fantastic. But no one else does, and now we have to fight them the old fashioned way. The god bear draws blood soon after. It's the first time I've bled from anything in a really long time. The wound isn't all that painful, more just a few lines of burning down my arm, but it's definitely a distraction. And it's not going to be the last time it hits me. I keep an eye on my own health while I fight the god bear.

I grit my teeth every time it slashes me, trying to keep going through the growing pain. I have to let my health pool drop a bit so that I get the most out of my healing spell. But that means suffering the pain of the god bear's strikes. Vincent heals me after a particularly nasty blow that drops me down below five figures. The cool rush of healing through my body feels really good, and I grit my teeth as my eyes flick over to see what the counter is on the Shell cooldown. Still more than three minutes to go.

I knew that I would eventually fight something that could break through the Shell, that could do more damage than I could soak with my defensive spell. I knew that I'd fight something that did too much damage for me to be able to keep Shell up indefinitely. I knew it would happen, but I don't have to like it. I actually kill the god bear before I can put Shell back up. Vincent had to heal me twice more during the fight, but I do manage to get the creature down. And then, I can finally see how the others are doing.

None of the other god bears are down. El is covered in blood, and I can see that a fair amount of it is hers. Her skin is flapping open where the bear claws tore into it, and she has a grimace on her face that speaks more of pain than of battle lust. I move up quickly and cast Healing Touch on her, watching in satisfaction as her wounds immediately close.

"Use Shell again!" I shout to her. She hops backwards for a second, and I see a shimmer go over her body. Then she's right back in the fray. I start attacking the weaker looking of the two bears. Stinging Defense keeps doing its job, and the two of us keep carving away at the god bear. My stamina is draining by the time El and I finish off one of the bears. I'm still using Stinging Defense, so my regeneration isn't keeping up with the drain.

I still have many thousands of points of stamina, so I don't really worry about, but I do worry about Ash and Gigi. They don't regenerate stamina, and as far as I know, they don't have the stamina doubling either. They might actually run out at some point. Not any time soon; I'm pretty sure they have at least five thousand stamina a piece. And that's good for a while. But I don't know how much stamina they're using on their own abilities. That reminds me. Killing Blow is off cooldown.

I turn to the healthier bear and use it, praying to whatever might be listening for the spell to actually work. And it does! The bear takes 231, 282 damage from my strike, and it drops into a boneless heap. I celebrate a little bit, and that distraction earns me a swat across the face from the bear. It drops my new Shell down by almost three thousand points. Must've been a critical hit. I suppose I deserved that. With two on one, El and I are able to flank the god bear.

And that leads to much more damage much more quickly. The tide definitely turns in our favor, and we manage to kill the god bear over the course of the next four minutes. I even get to recast Shell without taking more than a few hundred points of actual damage. We finish our god bear and go to join Ash and Gigi. They've managed to defeat one of them, and the other two fall pretty quickly now that all five of us can concentrate our attacks on it. I'm out of breath when the battle ends. I check my stamina pool.

It's already starting to refill, but I spent more than six thousand stamina over the course of that battle, between my various abilities and just the exhaustion of maintaining a fight. You have defeated god bear x6. You gain (1, 710, 000/5) 342, 000 experience points. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. That is, oddly enough, not enough for me to level up.

It puts me within sixty thousand experience of the next level, but doesn't get me all the way there. It gets Gigi and Ash to level up, but the rest of us are still stuck where we are. Gigi is within striking distance of my hit points. She has 17, 220, and I have 18, 800. I'm not putting more points into vigor anymore, so I'm only gaining about four hundred points per level. She'll surpass me pretty soon, I think.

"I'm close to forty two," she says.

"I finally don't feel like I'm as far behind."

"You're catching up quickly," Ash agrees.

"It's going to be a race to see who hits fifty first."

"I will," Vincent says.

"I mean, as long as we're all fighting together and sharing experience, I have to, right?" I take the claws of the god bears and put them in my bag. My animal harvesting goes up to twenty four, then to twenty five as I skin the huge bears. We're not going to be in need of furs for a really long time. Even if the mountain keeps getting colder, I think we'll be okay.

"Do you think Amanda snuck past them?" Ash asks as she cuts steaks from the corpses of the god bears. I shrug.

"It would make sense. She probably thought they would be more trouble than they were worth. I don't know if even she could have taken on six of these things."

"I wish she left a trail." I laugh.

"Me too." We head out of the cave after putting our cold weather gear back on. The cave leads out to another slope we can climb. It looks like we're at least a thousand feet off the ground at this point. Making real progress up the mountain. The climb is arduous, but not eventful. We use our tools when we need them, and we tie ourselves to one another in case someone slips. No one does, but better safe than sorry. We climb until the sun sets, until our stamina drain begins to insist that we stop.

This isn't like walking or even jogging. Climbing used a whole different set of muscles, and it's a lot of very different and very subtle movements. Vincent is fine flying his way along, but the rest of us have to slog through the hard way. We make up about as high as the chimney did, and right around that point, I spot some footprints. And also, right around that point, Vincent drops down to the ground. He looks back at the rest of us.

"No magic," he says. Sure enough, I check my Shell and find that it's gone. And casting it again doesn't do anything but waste the mana. The prints above us are probably Amanda's. She's not flying anymore, and she's not invisible anymore.

"Looks like this race just got a bit more fair," El says, plowing ahead. There is snow up here, and it's impossible to hide our trails. Not that we're worried about that; I don't think anyone is following us. Maybe some enterprising adventurer who followed us from the last village, but I really doubt that. I'm more worried about the path ahead, the path blazed by Amanda. I don't know how often it snows on this mountain side. Which makes it hard to figure out just how far ahead of us she is.

She could be a few hours ahead or a few days ahead. I don't think she can be a week ahead of us, just because of the time it took her to get across the ocean. But she could have a day or two head start on us. We'll cut that distance down quite a bit as we go, though. She had to break the trail for us, and all we have to do is literally follow in her footprints. She broke through the snow, which gets to be as much as waist high, and trudged her way up the mountain.

We're able to move pretty quickly through the pathway that she left behind. The sun has set, but we keep moving. There really isn't anywhere for us to camp right now, and we can see well enough with the light from the stars and the moon above us. It's weird how many fantasy worlds have multiple moons. Wouldn't that wreak havoc on the tides? I know that the moon controls the tides on Earth, and I assume that it does the same thing here.

But having multiple moons, in different places in the sky, would cause all kinds of weird tidal formations, wouldn't it? I get that it's weird and it's cool to have multiple moons; that's why it's a staple of fantasy worlds. But the logistics of having multiple moons would be really difficult. Why am I thinking about this? I guess maybe I am considering becoming a god. Not to stay in this world, though. If I become a god, I'd want to move on to other worlds. Maybe even create my own.

And in creating my own, one of the things I'll have to consider is the moon. The effect the moon will have on the world. Maybe I can figure out a way to have multiple moons. What if there were a moon that had a moon of its own? Like a smaller satellite that orbited the bigger satellite, which in turn orbits the planet? That might work. The gravity well from the two would basically act as if they were one, so the tides should be the same. Right?

As we push through the snow, looking for another cave or somewhere flat that we can set up the tent for the night, I keep thinking about how I would create a new world. There's just so much to it. So many decisions to make. So much experimenting that would have to be done. That could be fun. That could keep me entertained and interested for a really long time, I would think. I could hyper focus on making a new world, one that was habitable by intelligent beings.

People often think that a mind like mine will get distracted easily, and I won't be able to complete anything that I start. I've had that problem my whole life. I've also had people thinking that of me my whole life. But I've finished a lot of things. And I've done them well. I've accomplished a fair bit in my life, I like to think. And I did it despite my mind liking to jump from topic to topic. Because when it finds something to focus on, it really focuses. It hyper focuses.

I hate talking about hyper focus with people who don't understand. Because they think they do. They think that they know what it's like to hyper focus, because they've been 'in the zone' or some such nonsense. But hyper focus isn't just being in the zone. It's not that feeling of having a lot of focus on something, having the energy to keep working and being in a flow state. It's like the rest of you just shuts down.

You stop paying attention to the sensory information that comes into your brain, because it's busy doing this thing you're hyper focusing on. When I hyper focus, I forget to eat, to go to the bathroom, and sometimes even to blink. I only know that I've forgotten to blink when my eyes start watering, and then I just register it as an annoyance because I have to wipe my eyes clean before I can keep going with my hyper focus.

But I don't notice the temperature, I don't notice the noise, I don't notice other people around me. I completely shut off everything that isn't my hyper focus. It may sound like a good thing, but it isn't. I don't realize that my bladder is ready to burst. I don't realize that I'm starving, or freezing, or that I'm drenched in sweat. I don't notice anything, because I'm locked in to my hyper focus. And it isn't a flow state that lasts just a little while. I've had hours pass by without my notice.

Not one or two, but half a dozen hours. I've missed entire days, or been up all night doing something without realizing it. If I were to become a god, I could probably hyper focus for even longer. I wouldn't need to eat or to sleep. I wouldn't need to use the bathroom. I wouldn't need to be comfortable. I could hyper focus, without stopping, possibly for years or even decades at a time. I could focus on creating a new world for people to play in, and not notice that the universe was passing by while I worked.

Is that something that I want? I just said that hyper focus isn't always a good thing. I just said that it's bothersome. It does worry and even frighten me sometimes. Would I want to indulge it like that? Would I go into a hyper focus and just never come out of it? Would my whole immortality pass me by without my noticing it?