I floated along behind my sister as she flew through the air, moving like a particularly acrobatic dancer to avoid the barrage of rocks the trolls were hurling at us. More and more of the monsters were showing up, and there was plenty of loose stonework to serve as ammunition. Senica spun around, her limbs contorting to get them out of the way and her magic shifting her from side to side.
I caught my own fair share of attacks as well, but for me, they weren’t such a serious threat. I simply kept an eye on my shield ward and made sure its mana reserves were topped off while I focused on ensuring that Senica was far better protected than she thought she was. The whole point of a training mission was to get real-world experience, after all. If she knew that I had invisible strands of telekinesis threaded around her, ready to stop any attack that she couldn’t dodge, she wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep herself safe.
Of course, just dodging wasn’t going to win this fight, so while Senica darted through the air, she was also flicking her wand out and dropping lines of fire on the trolls. Back in my day, trolls had a well-known weakness to being burnt, but apparently these ones had gone without any sort of predators in their environment for so long that they’d forgotten it was possible to be hurt.
Senica taught them better.
At first, the trolls ignored her retaliatory spells. That was their primary method of defense – to just accept any number of hits in exchange for one of their own. They were monstrously strong, probably used to ending a fight with anything they could reach in a single blow. It wasn’t until more than a dozen of their numbers were on the ground, bellowing so loud that they shook the leaves off the trees, that the rest finally realized something was wrong.
Predictably, their response was to simply keep doing what they’d been trying all along. If it were just Senica up here, it probably would have worked, too. More and more trolls kept showing up; more and more rocks filled the air. Even with some of them targeting me, it was getting to be too much for Senica.
“Time to retreat,” she announced.
We flew up together, her dodging around rocks and me just deflecting them away, until we were five hundred feet up and well out of the range of the trolls. Dozens of them stared up at us, their prominent, floppy noses sniffing repeatedly and squished, beady little eyes squinting to pick us out from so far away.
“Thoughts?” I asked.
“There are a lot of them,” she said. “More than I thought I’d be facing at one time. They take longer to kill than I was expecting. I think it’s safe to say I underestimated how difficult a fight this would be.”
“What else?”
“I need something better than just dodging for defense. I think it might be easier to just stay away from them and modify my conjurations to increase their range. I won’t get all of them that way, but we don’t need to kill all of them, do we?”
“That depends entirely on whether you can harvest troll blood without killing everything in the area first,” I said.
“You know I can’t.”
Troll blood worked well as an alchemical reagent, but it did require a lot of work refining it into something suitable for use. Like many monsters, trolls could use mana instinctively to mimic various magics. In the case of trolls, they could recover from almost any kind of damage given enough mana. Fire was the hardest to bounce back from, but if they had the time, they’d regenerate charred flesh, too.
That magic was present mostly in their blood, which of course circulated everywhere and repaired the body using the same mechanics as a regeneration spell. It was entirely possible to create a synthetic liquid for use in alchemy that did the same thing, but it was also altogether cheaper and faster to harvest troll blood and purify it. Since Senica couldn’t rely on my mana reserves for her own purposes, we were going to be working on the harvesting and purification process tonight.
“Alright,” I said, looking down at the assembled trolls and counting upwards of a hundred. “This is partially my fault for being so late. Dusk is the prime hunting time for trolls, so there are more active now than usual. That having been said, sometimes you’ll have to deal with suboptimal circumstances. If I wasn’t here, how would you adapt to the extra challenges?”
“I’d wait for the sun to come back up,” Senica said dryly. “I’m not in any hurry, certainly not enough of one to justify taking more risks than necessary.”
I laughed. “Excellent answer. That’s exactly what you should do. But what if there was a pressing need for this reagent? Someone is injured and you need to make a healing potion.”
“Well, it’s not like I need dozens of trolls for this. I’d scry for an isolated troll off on the outskirts of the city, bait it to a location I’d already secured, kill it there, and bleed it dry.”
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
“Good, good. That’s smart. Rational. It’s the path forward with the least resistance and the least risk. However…”
Senica groaned. “Why do you have to keep changing the rules?”
“Why should you only take one lesson from this mission when you could explore multiple scenarios?” I countered.
She just groaned again. “Fine, what restrictions are you adding this time?”
“You’re trying to retake the city so it can be filled with human settlers. Every troll needs to be killed in order to make this dream a reality.”
“That’s dumb. Why would I try to take an entire city by myself?”
“You’re the only one who can. Everyone else in your group is too busy trying to find food and keep your base camp safe.”
“We would just go live somewhere else. There’s nothing worth fighting over here.”
“Sure there is,” I said. “According to Keeper, there’s a fortune in mysteel under the city.”
“Mysteel is worthless to anyone but you,” she pointed out.
“And I’m paying you a fortune to retrieve it for me, but in order to accomplish that, you need to clear out the troll tribes in the city.”
Senica paused to consider that. “Is there actually a bunch of mysteel under the city?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m here,” I said. “You’re here to get some hands-on problem-solving experience. At minimum, you need to secure a portion of the ruins so that I can dig uninterrupted.”
“Again, I wouldn’t come here myself.”
“Your trusty companions have met a variety of bad ends along the way. You’re all that’s left and the job is depending entirely on you.”
“In that case, it doesn’t matter if I can harvest any troll blood. I’m burning the whole city down. There are plenty of trees I can light up. The trolls will either burn to death or they’ll flee. Either way, you can dig in peace.”
I considered the city below us. It was overgrown, most of the buildings swallowed up by nature. In fact, it was surprisingly green compared to everywhere else I’d been in the new world. That made me wonder what else I’d find buried under its streets. When Keeper had come to me with information about a city called Geldrisa, everything she’d found had led us to believe the setup would be similar to Derro. I was starting to suspect that wouldn’t be the case.
“I don’t think you fully appreciate how hard it is to get a wildfire started, or how hard it is to stop one,” I said. “But that’s alright. This is an impossible job, and I know that you know that. Let’s narrow down the scope. Your new mission is to clear everything in that block of the city.”
I pointed to a square that had at one time held a public fountain, but these days was filled with thin trees that hung over the edges of a green, scum-covered pond. Trails worn through the brush told me that trolls—and possibly other monsters—were using it as a watering hole, but that wasn’t why I’d picked it.
The north side of the square had what looked like some sort of temple, miraculously intact even after a thousand years of neglect. Vines ran up its walls, thick leafy things that pulsed with mana. Even as I watched, two new vines crept out through a crack and stretched out to catch hold of nearby tree branches.
“Uh, what was that?” Senica asked.
“Different type of monster,” I said. “Probably why that building is still in one piece. The trolls must know better than to get near.”
“And you want me to fight that?”
“No. I want you to secure the square. I’ll handle whatever’s inside the temple.”
“You make it sound so easy,” she said. “How many trolls do you think will come running when the fighting starts.”
“I guess that depends on how many of them you’ve made afraid of fire. My advice would be to keep a clear escape route and not to overestimate yourself.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll just abandon you.”
I rolled my eyes. “I appreciate the show of loyalty, but when we go back down, I’ll be working and you’ll be training. I don’t actually need you to protect me from a bunch of forest trolls. Now, I’ll be clearing out the interior of the temple. You’ll be killing or driving off anything else that comes into that square. Hold it for as long as you can, then retreat. Don’t follow me into the temple.”
“I can do that,” she said, but she didn’t sound too sure of herself. That was good. This job was too big for her to handle and I wanted her to get some experience feeling the limits of her abilities while I was around to bail her out if she overestimated herself.
“Here we go, then.”
We descended through the canopy using force spells to make a hole and landed on the north side of the pond. The ruined stone face of the fountain statue sticking halfway out of the center of the water stared at us, what little that was left of its expression somehow mournful. I spared a moment to wonder if Keeper knew this particular statue’s history and what, if any, relation it had to the temple it faced.
Then the first troll appeared between the trees a hundred feet away. It paused, its nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air, then advanced into the open. “Can it really smell us from that far away?” Senica asked.
“Probably. Their eyesight isn’t that great, but their noses help them make up for it. They’re pursuit predators, and this is how they run down their prey. Fortunately, trolls are dumb as a rock, barely even sentient. Just don’t let their numbers overwhelm you.”
“Got it,” she said, flicking her wand to where a second troll had appeared and igniting the air around it into flames.
While she torched the incoming trolls, I floated through the air, my feet a foot or so off the ground to avoid touching any of the vines coming out of the temple’s main door. I noticed that several of them stirred as I approached, somehow sensing my passage anyway. Something must have confused them, because they didn’t lash out at me, not that they would have been able to grab me anyway, and I drifted by unhindered.
I’d chosen the temple as my base of operations for two reasons. First, it was highly defensible, being one of the few buildings left in Galdrisa that was mostly intact. Second, it had several sublevels below it that would save me a few hundred feet of digging.
The drawback was that I needed to kill this plant monster living down in the basement, but, well, there were always going to be monsters no matter where I started. I might as well enjoy the perks of using this temple. Besides, maybe the plant monster would be alchemically interesting.
As I entered the foyer, vines writhed across the walls and rose up behind me, weaving themselves together into a living net that blocked my retreat. I glanced back over my shoulder, snorted, and flew deeper inside the temple.