Sadly, such feelings could only last for a few minutes before we saw something appear on the other side of the clearing.
What arrived was a ten foot tall hulking mass of muscle, covered in rough fur and what appeared to be actual rocks growing out of its skin. The bipedal beast was lumbering along without a care for what was in its way. When it turned towards us, a grey face resembling a human’s, but far more bestial, greeted us. Its face quickly contorted in an eerily human expression. Rage, yet not just any rage, but a sadistic anger as if it couldn’t wait to rip us to shreds. It soon let out a roar before charging at us. Despite its simplistic actions, I can feel the intelligence in its eyes.
As I was distracted, the Hero started giving commands. “Melly! I need you to stop the troll’s charge. If you fail, everyone in the back line will die. Elizabeth, I need you to buff Melly’s strength and durability as much as you can. Don’t bother with anyone else, just keep her in as good of shape as you can. If she falls, everyone dies!”
Why is there a Troll here! Haa, no time to think about that now. As Melly rushes to intercept the troll, I caught a glimpse of her expression. It was full of nervousness and barely contained fear. She was holding her shield with both hands as she braced for the collision. I buffed Melly to the best of my ability, while preparing the healing spell she will inevitably need. The first of many, I sigh. At least she calmed down slightly once my spells activated, probably more from the reminder that she’s not alone than the actual power she received.
I can barely tell what everyone else is doing. An arrow pierced the troll's skin, but it didn't so much as flinch. The earth wall, however, did at least slow it down, albeit minorly. I’ll take any help I can get though. And I’m sure Melly appreciates the help far more than I could ever know.
It doesn’t take long for the troll to arrive, while flattening anything that happened to be in its way without care. Melly met the troll with a swing of her shield, trying to reduce the force she received by as much as possible. My healing spell also arrives at this time, a trick I learned from the church. Healing spells take time to enter the body and activate before they can actually start to restore damage, so using the spell right before being hit minimizes the time people spend injured. It also reduces the pain of the injury, something I’m sure Melly would appreciate if she had the leeway to notice. Finally, it allows you to prepare another spell sooner than usual, something very useful in a tense situation.
Despite doing everything we could, Melly was still sent flying past me from the impact. Luckily, she managed to at least stop the troll’s path of destruction, giving us a fighting chance.
As I turned around, Melly was already getting up. Without hesitating for even an instant, she charged back at the troll. She didn’t even wait for more healing despite still being covered in injuries, as my previous heal had already been used up. As she rushed past me, I also noticed how even though there was only one attack, my buffs had been extremely drained.
Ah, yeah, I’d forgotten about that. Whenever you are damaged, your mana gets at least slightly disrupted, often draining away at your buffs in the process. That also causes you to have less mana available to defend yourself and such with, as you need to use it to stop the wound from affecting you. Which tends to cause a downward spiral of having less and less mana to defend yourself with. Fun…
Sadly, before I could even finish healing Melly’s current wounds, more started to appear, as Melly desperately tried to keep the troll’s attention firmly on her. Despite every attack the troll made sending Melly flying, she never stopped rushing forward as soon as she stopped her momentum. All I could do was make sure my buffs stayed up and keep on healing her as best as I could. At least after I finally healed her initial injuries, I was mostly able to keep up with the damage she was taking.
Between my frantic heals, I did manage to notice some of what everyone else was doing. The troll’s face was currently covered in arrows. The troll was also covered in ice, an attempt to slow the troll as much as possible to make it easier for Melly. The Hero was behind the troll, occasionally stabbing its legs, but he couldn’t accomplish much with his caution, as even a single hit would pulverize him. There was also a bat circling around the Troll’s head, sending sonic attacks to disrupt its concentration. There were also various other animal spirits sacrificing themselves to take as many hits for Melly as possible, taking advantage of the fact that they could revive after a few hours.
The battle soon entered a rhythm. While Melly and the spirits kept being sent flying, neither one was away for long. Combined with the endless barrage of attacks, I started to believe in our eventual victory.
Such feelings didn’t last for long, though. Eventually, the troll got a lucky hit on the bat. At first, nothing had changed. But as soon as I noticed the light in the troll's eyes, I got chills down my back. I hadn’t noticed how dull they were before now. The troll then let out another roar, but that was it. I soon started to believe nothing had changed and I was just being paranoid. Melly’s also wasn’t knocked back as far or as often, so I was positive that the troll was getting weaker.
But then, my healing started to no longer be enough to completely restore Melly’s wounds. No matter how I adjusted my healing, Melly continued to get more and more injured. I also noticed that the troll was acting odd. It was moving erratically, attacking in strange and unusual ways. Even though the attacks seemed weaker, the troll didn’t act weaker, and the damage definitely wasn’t. It didn’t take me long to realize what it was doing. We were now experiencing every adventurer’s greatest fear.
The monster was learning.
The troll was using various experimental attacks to figure out how to maximize its damage, the result being instead of using one powerful attack, it used multiple weaker attacks. What’s worse is that some of its attacks were even going past Melly’s shield. Her being knocked back was the surprisingly main thing keeping her alive, as it spread out the time between her injuries, but that wouldn’t last long. This fight was starting to turn into a brawl. One that Melly couldn’t win.
I started to lose hope. Neither my buffs, nor my healing were going to be good enough if I let this continue. As I started feeling desperate, I decided to do something different. So, I drank a mana potion. While I had more than enough mana to keep going at my current rate for at least another half an hour, I would soon require far more.
Mana potions massively increase your mana regeneration for a time, at the cost of overworking your body and effectively poisoning the user, even becoming lethal should you take three within a week or so of each other. But that’s something to worry about later. I then gave Melly every buff I had that I felt would be of any help, no matter how minor. Increasing her speed, perception, reaction time, anything. I even buffed her stamina and mana regeneration, despite the inevitable crash they will cause her after the fight. All in a desperate attempt to delay the troll for as long as possible, hoping desperately that it would give everyone else the time needed to kill it.
I even entered what healers call patient analysis, a state where I utilize my mana to analyze the current condition of the patient's physical body, as well as their emotional state. It is mainly used by healers in hospitals to find problems like poisons, diseases, cancers, curses, internal bleeding, etc, for efficient healing. It is also used to teach others how to cast buffs by letting the student see how the buff affects the user's body. It is almost never used in combat though, as using it requires basically all of your focus, making it basically impossible to react to a changing battlefield.
I don’t care about that right now though. If anything happens to Melly, we’re all dead anyway. Might as well use it to increase my ability to efficiently heal Melly.
While the various buffs are helping a bit, they probably aren’t going to be enough. And with my ability to observe the fight effectively crippled, I can’t afford to just sit back.
So, I decided that I would try to optimize the buffs in Melly’s body. While usually a long and gradual process, that I’ve only vaguely learned about, used to improve buffs for people who’ve already mastered their current buffs, I’ve run out of other options.
I decided to try to focus my strength buff into Melly’s arms, so she could block better. After a few attempts, I actually succeeded. I managed to noticeably increase the power of Melly’s arms. Before I could feel proud of my achievemint, the troll punched Melly’s shield, sending her flying even further than before. I could feel that Melly’s surprise was as great as my own. As Melly continued to fight, I figured out what went wrong. Because I focused my power into her arms, the power in her legs was reduced, making her unable to hold her ground. So, the solution was obvious, I thought, just focus power in both her arms and legs.
I succeeded even quicker than last time. Melly then charged forward to unknowingly test my improved spell. While this time went differently, I definitely can’t say it went better. Melly ended up being knocked to the ground, right next to the troll… Just about the last place anyone would want to be.
Luckily, a combination of the troll probably being distracted and Melly’s quick response prevented anything bad from happening. The fear Melly felt was more than enough to dampen my enthusiasm though. While I am still going to continue, I promise to be more careful, accidentally saying it out loud. Not that I noticed.
This time I focus my power all the way from her legs towards her arms. While this did end up being slightly better than just normally applying my buff, it sure doesn’t feel like it. At least she isn’t being knocked over.
The only thing I can do now is slowly reduce the intensity of focus on various parts of Melly’s body to squeeze out as much power as possible. If only I knew how to fight, this could have gone far better.
Well, after some more testing, I soon realized that the strength and speed buffs don’t actually do anything when applied anywhere other than muscle. Sadly, anywhere that lacked a defense buff almost immediately starts to be torn apart, even when it wasn’t being hit, so I can’t optimize that. So, I decided to try focusing the various other buffs on the areas that they actually affect, while completely removing their presence from everywhere else.
After several minutes of trial and error, I have created a noticeable increase in the effectiveness of almost every buff I had given Melly, though, their improved effectiveness has actually increased their drain drastically. I guess that’s just what happens when you start using all of the buff. So, she now needs far less healing and is in a far less desperate position. She was even able to calm down a bit, displaying some of her usual confidence. While she is still struggling, we’ve restored the situation to around the state it was at the start of the battle.
Now, the only buffs that couldn’t be optimized right now were things like defense, stamina, and mana regeneration buffs, as they seemed to work everywhere. I’m surprised at how inefficient my buffs were, though. Hmm, I wonder how much further I can actually go?
With that thought, I tried to optimize her strength even further. Despite feeling apprehensive, I eventually decided to start lessening the reinforcement of her various muscles. While I was both only lessening the buff, as well as focusing only on a few specific muscles, I couldn’t escape my nervousness. At least, until I discovered something new. While I expected to find muscles that she wasn’t using, she alternated which muscles she used often, and too fast for me to effectively help with.
But that's when I discovered that Melly activated her mana in the specific muscles that she is currently using. While this is common knowledge, it gave me an idea, what if I linked the activation of my buff with Melly’s natural mana usage? What could possibly be more efficient than that?
It took several tries, as patient analysis sadly could only vaguely tell me where mana was currently being used, without actually actually allowing me to properly perceive it, but I eventually managed to succeed. While inefficient at first, I was quickly able to create something usable in the muscles I was testing. Overjoyed with my current results, I recklessly applied the buff to all of Melly’s muscles.
Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!
Almost immediately, Melly lost all control over her body. I quickly replaced my buff with my previous one while rapidly healing the many injuries that she just received.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry!?” I cried out as I felt the sheer terror Melly was experiencing. I had even cut off my patient analysis in my panic.
“WHAT DID YOU DO!!” Melly shouted while squeezing my shoulders so hard they bled.
“Ah!” I screamed. “I-I made it so that w-whenever you used mana, my b-buff would activate.” I quickly explained, suppressing my pain with my mana.
“What does that even mean!?” Melly pressed.
“Now's not the time!" The Hero shouted. “At least fight the troll while arguing!”
Melly grunted as she quickly went back to fighting the troll. I took the moment to quickly survey the battle that I have been ignoring.
The first thing I noticed was that the troll was only four yards away from me, so I hastily retreated to a more reasonable distance. The battle seems to have gotten a lot closer to me while I wasn’t paying attention, I thought nervously. I’m lucky to be alive, Melly must have been working hard. I’m so sorry.
The troll itself was a mess. Broken arrow shafts and chunks of ice and rock are stuck everywhere throughout its body. Despite being covered in blood, most of the wounds that don't leave something sticking inside have already healed at least enough to keep the troll combat ready. While a troll’s ability to heal is far faster than most creatures, thankfully they don’t heal nearly as fast as in some of the legends. Trolls can bleed out; they just take far longer to do so. Our troll is already noticeably weaker than earlier, so the battle likely won’t last all too much longer, so long as we handle its final gambit properly.
I then checked out the actual battlefield. It was a complete mess. All the plants near the troll have been either crushed or torn apart. Broken arrows and chunks of ice and rock litter the blood stained terrain. Outside the immediate area were the various dying spirits that haven’t disappeared upon their death yet. Hopefully the durges are fine, I idly thought.
Since things have calmed down a bit, I feel it’s okay to tell Melly what I did. “Melly, I linked the activation of my strength buff with your normal mana strengthening.”
“What does that mean?” She asks after I once again heal the damage she received blocking the troll.
“My new buff only activates whenever you use mana, in only in the areas that you use mana, drastically increasing the power and efficiency of the buff. I basically just enhanced your body enhancement technique.”
“Then why did I lose control over my body then?” She demanded, still angry, and a little scared.
“Um, it seems that the increased strength was too massive and sudden for you to immediately control. Haa, I should have introduced it slowly so you could have gotten used to it, but I got too excited. I’m so sorry.” I finish while bowing towards her, not that she can see me.
“How much did you increase her strength?” Gregory questioned.
“She should be around twice as strong as when I originally buffed her, possibly even more.” I responded while still bowing, but still paying attention to the battle and healing Melly. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like linking my buff gained another drastic increase in its power, but it did at least make the spell far more mana efficient. Especially while idling, as the buff now only really activates when being actively used.
“That much!” Melly shouted. “Maybe we should try it again? Slowly this time!” Melly asked, obviously nervous about what happened.
“Are you sure?” I ask, shocked.
“Yeah. That much power is too much to pass up.” Melly decided. “But remember. Slowly!” Melly reminded me. Her excitement overpowered her nervousness.
“Okay, here I go.” I say before activating patient analysis again. I then slowly started converting her current enhanced buff into the new, linked one, bit by bit.
The closer we got to completely using the linked buff, the more excited Melly got. She even figured out how to limit its power on her own, making it even more useful and efficient. By the time I completely swapped to the linked buff, Melly was practically shouting in excitement. Maybe she even was. While she was still a ways off from being comparable to the troll’s strength, now it was more like the difference between a city guard and an average adult, instead of a city guard and a child.
Since this went so well, I asked. “Should I try to replicate this with other buffs?”
Melly’s excitement was immediately doused, but slowly built back up. I presume she said something in response, but I couldn’t tell. I don’t want to leave patient analysis yet as the process of entering and exiting it is fairly disorienting, especially when done in rapid succession.
She seemed to realize something was odd when I didn’t respond, as she eventually nodded, something I could actually notice. Hmm, Gregory probably explained it to her.
Now with permission, I attempted to link other buffs to her mana activation. Sadly, I failed to convert even a good few of my buffs. Like, I was able to link the speed buff to her, but the perception buff failed. Though, I presume that's more because of her not really enhancing her perception over me not actually being able to link it.
What truly surprised me was my ability to link my defense buff to her mana. It makes sense in hindsight, as even I know how to guard my body with mana, but it still surprised me. What’s really exciting, though, is how drastically that increased her defense. When I noticed that she needed far less healing now, I planned on using a simple, sustained regeneration spell so that I could fully focus on further optimizations.
Melly had a different idea.
She stopped two-handing her shield, and instead drew her sword.
“What in the world are you doing?” I shouted in worry.
I hurriedly started monitoring her body intensively in panic, hoping to keep her alive when things went wrong. But, after a minute or so, she didn’t gain any more injuries than normal. Confused, I decided to exit patient analysis to see what’s going on.
What I saw shocked me.
Melly was now all but soloing the troll. While she was still heavily reliant on my healing, and her damage was still far from being able to overcome the troll’s regeneration, she wasn’t being completely suppressed like before. Instead, the gap between them was now closer to how the Hero and the orc had been during our first group battle, albeit with completely different fighting styles.
“Wow,” I exclaimed. “She’s been enhanced way more than I thought she would. If she had a strength potion, she might have even been winning.”
“Don’t get distracted now." The Hero said. “I presume you are free enough to give everyone else some buffs? I want to finish this quickly. We do still need to deal with the troll’s final gambit after all.” He asked.
“Sounds like a plan.” I said. Oddly, the Hero quickly stopped me before I could buff everyone.
“Normal buffs please." The Hero pleaded.
“Of course.” Well, mostly normal ones, I don’t think I’ll ever use the normal buffs again, once I finish enhancing all of them.
So, I cast my ‘normal’ buffs on everyone, getting an eye roll from the Hero.
While I buffed everyone and they quickly got used to the increased power of my enhanced buffs, I watched Melly fight. At first glance, you might think she doesn’t know how to fight properly, since, despite having a shield, she is just tanking most of the troll’s attacks that she didn’t dodge with her body. This constant stream of direct blows is why she still needs constant healing. While you might think tanking the attacks instead of blocking them would be worse, she has a reason.
The troll is fairly intelligent so it realized that using a full power attack let Melly easily block it while the troll was just left even open to everyone else’s attacks. It didn’t even do any real damage with its blows, as Melly kept resisting most of the attack. The troll is also then incapable of using follow up attacks because of how off balance such an attack leaves it. As such, it started to use multiple, weaker yet controllable attacks so that it could actually hurt Melly.
The troll's current strategy seems to be just hoping that Melly blocks one of its weaker attacks, leaving her open to a full power blow. While it hasn’t succeeded yet, there have been some close calls. Even with my buffs, Melly would be down for a bit should that happen. Melly’s biggest problem though, is that if she dodges too much, the troll can just advance away from Melly and towards someone else. It almost got to me earlier while I was distracted with my patient analysis. If the troll had gotten any closer, I would be nothing but paste right now.
As a result, Melly is stuck in a fight where she can neither block nor dodge too often, or she would lose control of the troll. Luckily this stalemate is about to end.
As soon as he noticed everyone had finished getting used to their enhanced power, the Hero shouted. “Let's start the real battle!”
With everyone's newly increased power, the minor chip damage from before started to become substantial. Rapunzel’s arrows and Gregory’s earth and ice spells were starting to cripple the troll's movements, locking joints and shredding muscles. The Hero is able to make attacks more often, occasionally even messing up one of the troll’s attacks, but otherwise not accomplishing too much damage. Hansen, other than his usual supports for Melly, has also summoned some various toxic and fire aligned spirits, in preparation for the troll’s final gambit.
So, some monsters enter a sort of berzerk state when either near death or when subject to a certain condition, like being affected by its weaknesses. That’s what we call a final gambit, with the final gambit being different for every type of monster that has one. The troll’s final gambit massively increases its already high regeneration, with the increase being so great that the troll can even heal through its weaknesses of fire and venom, hence why we haven't used those yet. Getting the troll to enter a final gambit when we were already struggling would have been suicidal.
As such, the commonly decided best way to kill a troll is to just jam things into its body, mostly stopping its ability to heal while also weakening it. Then, once it enters its final gambit, use the troll's weaknesses like fire and venom to slow down its regeneration, then basically just keep fighting slowly and steadily like you were before, slowly draining away the troll’s remaining vitality until it can’t recover anymore.
That is, of course, intended for those who lack the means to overcome the troll’s high defenses and regeneration.
After wearing it down for a bit, the troll let out another roar, as it started to leak vitality. Ah, the troll has started its final gambit. And, since my buffs have made us powerful enough, it’s time for us to stop conserving our energy and finally go all out!
Without even waiting for the troll to finish, Hansen ordered his spirits to attack, while Gregory made sure the troll was fully on fire with his spells. The poor troll never even got the chance to actually use its newly increased regeneration before it was mostly taken away.
As the troll let out an enraged roar, Melly thrust her sword into its eye. She then released her sword to stop the troll’s wound from healing. While the troll focused on Melly in its ever-increasing rage, Rapunzel pierced its other eye with an arrow. Before the troll could attempt to recover, Hansen sent over a bird to start pecking at the troll’s injured eyes to make sure they couldn’t recover.
At the same time, Gregory started to burn through the troll’s right leg. Hansen also sent over the bear he was saving to assist by tearing a chunk off of its leg. In addition, Rapunzel also filled its leg with arrows. As the troll started flailing around in panic, the Hero took the opportunity to also stab his sword into the troll’s knee before just leaving it there.
The troll, having lost all its support, fell to its knee. But we weren’t satisfied yet. We continued our assault on the troll’s other leg while making sure to keep the troll blind. After a while, we managed to cripple its other leg, causing the troll to fall prone.
Everyone combined their final assault upon the troll’s neck to finally kill it. The troll, realizing its impending doom, finally had fear in its panicked cries as it flailed around in a desperate attempt to deny its inevitable demise.
Slowly, the troll’s cries became quieter and quieter as its neck was slowly torn apart, until nothing remained but a wet groan. Finally, with one last swing of her sword, Melly severed what little remained of the troll’s neck, bringing the battle to its end.
“WE WON!!” Melly let out a final shout in victory, before falling onto her back in exhaustion.
“We did it.” I mumble, my fatigue from the mana potion now catching up to me as I stopped using my mana. My mind feels like it’s on fire as I struggled to even understand what anyone was saying.
I ended up stumbling over to where Melly lay, just to collapse next to her. I vaguely noticed everyone crowding around me. Ah, I think they are talking about mana potions. Soon, I felt something warm enter my body that reduced the burning sensation I felt throughout my body.
I became just aware enough to notice Melly struggle to put her hand on my head. “Good job, Eli.” She choked out.
I passed out shortly after, with a smile on my face.