“Eldro? What do you want?”

“Now I know why you're frustrated, you're feeling the same thing I am. Your first day and nothing eventful has happened, is this how my new life is going to be? A boring existence where I do nothing but breathe and walk?”

“What?”

“But need not worry, for I, Goddess Eldro, has the solution. A creature with scales stronger than steel and jaws strong enough to crush boulders. A legendary creature whose kin plagued a world far away, killing thousands.”

Almost on cue, the ground began to pulse softly. Gin pressed her ear to the ground, she could feel small vibrations in the loose soil, getting stronger and stronger.

“What the hell did you do?”

“Dun, dun, duuun. I present to you, your opponent. A Tortitan!” The monster came over the crest of a nearby hill, its massive body casting a shadow that seemed to stretch as far as the horizon, “It's a lot bigger than I thought it would be.”

The monster was shaped like a massive turtle, with four massive legs pillar-shaped legs and a round head, but instead of a shell it had a massive round body, lined with thousands of small grey scales. It didn't look special at all, almost kinda adorable with its smooth round head and giant round eyes. The problem was it was huge, although each leg was about the same size as a small tree, its body was the size of a barn.

It looked at Gin and roared, the sound making every single blade of grass bend in terror. Then it came charging down the hill, running at a speed that should be impossible with how tiny its legs were compared to rest of it. It tucked its head in and slammed it into Gin, sending her flying through the air and then crashing into the dirt below. She crawled back to her feet, her head spinning. The axe and the rucksack no longer in her possession, lost in the grass somewhere.

“How the hell do you expect me to beat this thing?”

“I don't know, punch it or something.”

It came charging again, Gin bent her knees and leapt to the side, narrowly avoiding it. Clawing with her hand on its hide she found a small gap and grabbed on, pulling herself onto its back. The monster stopped, turning its head in confusion. She steadied herself, then with all her might, slammed her fist into its back.

Ping

Her fist bounced off, causing her to lose balance and tumble off its back and onto the ground. The monster spun around with terrifying agility and slammed her with one of its front legs. Leaving her once again on the ground spitting out dirt.

“Uh, maybe you could try kicking it?”

“You shut it.” She pulled herself back up, just in time to see the skull of the Tortitan slam into her face, but with less force this time. She barely had time to think about this before she felt its foot onto her chest, slowly crushing her. She grabbed it with both hands and pushed back, but she could feel herself losing, a dull pain growing in her chest.

Suddenly Orb let off a small little ding, barely audible over the Tortitan's roar.

'Your combat rating has improved to allow the usage of the ability 'fireball'.'

Gin felt her mind suddenly flooded with memories, memories of some kind of simulation. Feeling the arcane power flow through her arms and expelled, over and over again, until it felt as natural as breathing.

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The roar of battle was muffled from her ears, the pain faded away, she felt the flow of arcane power in her arm. She pressed her hand into its belly, letting the energy flow through her arm into her palm. The words slipping out in a whisper through her throat.

“Fireball.”

Her arm flared up into flames, she felt the heat as it burned through the beast's soft underbelly. She pushed it further, tearing deep into its flesh until she could sink her entire hand into it. The monster reared back in pain, backing away, a soft growl as it stared her down.

Although the flames had greatly injured it in the spot where it hit, a small puncture on its massive body wasn't going to bring it down. Its hide was tough, even the soft tissue on the inside wasn't going to burn easily.

She stood back up, staring right back at it. The arm that had used fireball laid at her side lifelessly, yet this was expected. In those memories were ones when she had first used the ability, her arms would sit like this for a couple of minutes.

She stretched her other arm, “One more, have to make it count.”

The monster charged her once again, Gin charged right back. Both of them screaming as they tore across the field at each other. Instead of ducking its head down the beast lunged forward with its jaws open, snapping them shut around Gin's arm. Blood sprayed from where jaw met flesh, stopping only at the bone.

But Gin smiled, planting her foot on its snout and pushing herself till she laid on her head. The arm that the beast had in its jaws was the arm she had used, she plunged her free arm straight into its eye. She pushed down as far as she could until she felt the solid walls of bone, her arm nearly elbow deep in its squishy eyeball.

“Fireball.”

The flames shot straight through, tearing through every hole in the beast's skull. It roared letting Gin fall back to the ground. It writhed, screaming in pain. Smoke funnelled out of both sockets, the inside of its head slowly burning away.

Then nothing, it froze up and fell to the ground, completely lifeless. Gin laid there, collapsed on the ground. As the adrenaline faded she slowly came to terms with what had happened. She stared at her own arm, mangled and bloody. Bits of bone could be seen through the deep gashes of bloody flesh and rivers of blood flowing out.

“You did it! I knew you could, never had any doubts at all.” Gin didn’t respond, panting heavily. She couldn’t feel the pain directly, but she was scared. Her arm looked like it was on the brink of just falling off completely. “Hello? You still there?”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“I thought the best way to help you was to give you a little combat experience, see you even learned a next skill ‘fireball’.”

“With no warning or any time to prepare? Against a monster you didn’t even know the size of?”

“Your body is strong, it should be able to handle anything I throw at it?”

“Then what about my arm? You telling me that nearly getting it torn off it is handling it?”

“The bone is fine, you see, the bone is completely fine!”

“Yeah, I can see that because the flesh that’s supposed to be around it is fucking missing!”

“Uh, I think it’ll heal in time.”

“What do you mean I think? Didn’t you build this body?”

“I didn’t exactly cut into it randomly to see if it heals, hmm, maybe I should have done that." Her voice trailed off, then almost like an offhand comment, "You’re losing a lot of blood, you might actually die.”

“I might actually die? How can you act so calm about this?”

“Eh… It’s only the start of your adventure, there’s no way you’d die this early.”

“You just said I might die from this wound!”

“You might, but you’re the Goddess’s champion, I’m sure some helpful passerby will come along any time now and patch you up.”

Gin felt more blood being lost, her head starting to get dizzy, “I’m lying in a ditch, out of sight of a road that I have never seen anyone else use, the chances of some master healer just walking by is extremely low. You’re a Goddess, can’t you do something?”

“I can’t interfere with the world directly. Oh, I know, maybe Orb can heal you. Now that I think about it, Orb probably has a plan to patch you up right away.”

Orb was hovering right above Gin’s arm, just out of sight. Several messages had stacked up, Orb was scanning her arm over and over again, each scan getting more frantic, like she was beginning to panic.

Gin scrolled through the messages, an array of different content ranging from small tips about Tortitans, to little suggestions on how to fight it. But the most recent ones read thusly:

‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH’

“That’s probably not a good sign…”

Her consciousness was beginning to slip away, kinda like the first time she had died, “Help me, you, bitch.”

“Again, I can’t interfere with the world directly. But help is on the way, a healer will walk out of that bush any second now.”

Gin stared at the bush in question, it was tiny, barely reaching her knee in height. No way anything could be hiding in there.

“Any second now…”