When the timer finished the door opened itself, and I could see out into the arena but seemed to have a hard time focusing my eyes past around the halfway mark. Likely a measure to prevent preparing for the fight before exiting.
Stepping out I got the same prompt as before but with a different monster name.
Defeat the combatant to finish this round and enter a rest round. Current opponent: Young Goblin
Looking across the arena I can see a small humanoid, about three feet tall with sharp almost bat-like ears coming out of the side of its ears, and eyes that looked like a cats but with a dull brown colour. Most striking was its skin, a sickly yellow tone with splotches of brown spread in a few places, and no hair on it at all. The creature was only wearing a pair of rough shorts, and had a thick stick in hand.
Having read a little about goblins, they occasionally build up and raid new settlements so they were one of the required readings I had in my initial training, I knew even a young one could be dangerous. They were often underestimated for being the size and dimensions of a child, but people forget just how strong children can be, and that these are monsters who will bite, scratch, and do anything they can to take down a perceived threat.
Knowing I didn’t have the best combat reflexes yet, and I lacked experience, I figured the best thing to do would be to try to finish this quickly. Running forward I try to swing to hit the goblin, not using any mana on my fist yet while I get a feel for if it's even needed, and suddenly there is a hot pain across my lower arm and the goblin has danced further back away while chittering at me.
Looking down at my arm I can see a welt where it has struck me with its stick, meaning I was that much slower then the goblin that it could strike me before I hit it and still step back with ease.
Dashing forward this time I try to quickly kick the goblins legs, hoping my legs being stronger and faster than my arms this might go better, but instead I am rewarded with another two welts this time on my shin and calf, while the goblin hops back and chitters again. At this point I am going to assume it's laughing at me, but in fairness if someone this slow was trying to fight me I would probably do the same.
Stepping back to think about it I know from watching the guards train its possible to channel mana into your body to reinforce it, and considering how strong my manual mana control had gotten it really shouldn’t be to hard.
Focusing on my legs I try adding mana in, and I can feel the mana building up inside the muscles waiting to take action, after half a minute I decide to try running at the goblin to see if the increased speed is enough.
As soon as my first foot kicks off the ground I realise something is wrong, the mana isn’t following any pattern or directly assisting the muscle. Three steps in, suddenly I feel extreme pain in both of my legs, looking down it looks like all over my lower legs little pockets of mana have burst out through my skin. I can already feel my passive healing the wounds, but it was a lot of blood and the sudden pain still has me quite dazed.
Hearing something running towards me I look up and realise the goblin was ready to take advantage of this situation, raising my arms to ward off the blows as it strikes out with its stick, after a few hits I panic and flood my mana to surround my arms creating a small blaze around them.
After a minute passes with no further hits I lower my arms and see the Goblin back a few metres away, watching wearily, it seems the fire made it panic a bit which is useful to know.
As I slowly stand back up thinking over what went wrong, I realise I can’t just expect my body to know how to manipulate mana in a way I can’t even do myself yet. It's like flying before walking, sure some creatures might be able to do it but certainly not a human.
While the goblin was still being cautious I needed to take advantage and try to work out something to give myself an advantage. I was a healer with no real combat skills beyond punch things and pour mana into it to make fire happen, but being a healer if I could work out a good way that suits me to fight close range I could become a juggernaut by self healing as I fought.
Feeling the way my mana moved around my body, trying to find what I was missing, I realised that the mana didn’t just pool in my core and flow around my limbs randomly, but it seemed to follow paths and patterns through each part of my body. My core was almost like a mana gem but infinitely more complex, like a cascading flow of mana circling in on itself and somehow looping back to the start but each drop itself was containing the same structure as the gem.
Looking at my skin, muscles, and bones I could see they were all different from each other notably and that each muscle group was unique from each other in small ways. I could see a few patterns that looked like they could be given mana to activate throughout my muscle groups but I had no idea what each would do.
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I could hear the Goblin shifting and looking outward I noticed it slowly coming closer while I was standing still. To not lose advantage I figured I just needed to pick one of the four patterns I could see and give it some mana. Logically it should give me some advantage in some way.
Selecting the second mana path in my legs, one for each foot, calf, thigh, hips, and glutes, I pour some mana in and feel the power in my legs change. It feels like they could snap kick a fly from the air, but I can also feel the pull at my mana pool as it steadily drains it.
Quickly suppressing a system notification I try to dash to the goblin again, this time having a lot more success, startling the goblin into falling over, I quickly try to kick the goblin in the chest as it falls onto its side with my right leg.
As soon as I feel the foot connect I realise just how much faster my leg is moving, and feeling my foot go through the goblins back I quickly turn around and throw up. Eventually after a few moments I feel my stomach settle, then as I stand up and turn back around I realise my kick had created a splatter behind it where some internals had landed or sprayed.
Quickly hustling back to the now open again doorway I let the notifications I was suppressing pop back up to serve from a distraction away from the squishy bits I had on my leg and foot.
Skill Unlocked: Body Enhancement (Lower Body) - Speed boost Rank 1 Skill description: Only one body enhancement skill can be active per area at any one time. This enhancement improves the speed and relative power of the body part, along with response time to allow the caster to keep up with limbs. Gives slight increase to durability relative to amount of speed gained to prevent self injury.
Focusing on the Body Enhancement section I was pleased to get a bit more of an explanation.
Body Enhancement skills focus on either specific limbs, areas, or the whole body. These skills can be merged if they are at the same rank. This will merge their effects and areas they influence. Enhancement skills are often unique to the caster and cannot be taught by most skill transfer or teaching skills.
Huh, okay, so it sounds like something I would have had to work out for myself anyway and it's very personal but it's a proper fighting focused skill finally so hopefully it helps with my overall growth as a combat healer. I will need to chat with Bren or some of the guards, maybe even some hunters who are combat classers, to find out more about those mana channels before I mess with it more though. Looking back that was highly risky, but also in a real combat situation like that risks seem unavoidable if I want to survive let alone grow.
Stepping through the doorway I felt all of the bits of goblin come off my leg and boot as I passed the threshold, which was both a blessing and very disgusting to watch happen.
Small goblin killed: 50 exp gained
Wow that is a lot more than the rabbit, but I guess it was a lot harder and there was a very real risk to this fight that wasn’t present with the horned rabbit.
Checking my total experience now I could see I was up to 2000 out of the 10,000 needed to reach level 10. I know logically that being an uncommon class my experience requirements were higher then a common class would be, but it still felt like a long grind to level up and get past the level ten hurdle.
Prompt
Reward Additional rest time
At least it has kept this part simple, selecting reward as half an hour should be plenty of time to recover, shuddering at the thought I hoped it wasn’t about to give me goblin jerky.
Reward granted: Goblin weapon skill piece
As the reward appeared mid air, I caught it wondering if anyone in our settlement could actually use it yet, hopefully we had someone with even a skill for core or card crafting as it wasn’t very rare but also it's usually not the highest priority to include in a new settlement I would imagine as resources can’t be that common. I also had no idea if this was a decent piece to build a core or card with, or if it was considered useless, or if it was subjective in some way I didn’t know about.
Usually people only really knew about how it all worked if they worked in crafting them, as most of the costs for anyone outside of a city, or a settlement without a good local crafter, is in the importing rather than the actual products themselves.
Looking at the piece it was a small jagged crystal, only about a half a hand span in length, and about a quarter of that in thickness. Coloured a smokey brown, almost the colour and opaqueness of a dirty river. Putting it into my small hip bag attached my my belt I hoped I would get to see it created into something useful for our settlement or at least be something we can trade.
Checking the timer the next spawn was still twenty seven minutes away, so I decided to settle down on the bench with some fruit and water again, and break out a piece of my jerky to make sure I had plenty of protein and iron considering the beatings I was starting to take.