Pork Chopping

THWACK!

The trap slammed into the boar’s leg, causing it to stumble as its HP dropped by a whopping 35 points. At the same moment, Qhila fired a shot from her covered position, hitting the fungal growth. If that dealt any damage at all, John couldn’t tell it apart from the health bar beginning to trickle down from the poison.

The projectile itself looked like an injection dart like you sometimes saw used in animal documentaries. He only caught a glimpse, though, before the boar shot off towards Qhila with an angry huff.

John had thought the trap more or less broke the beast’s leg based on the sound and damage number, but it was still fast. It was slower than it had been running up to the trap though, otherwise the kiting plan would’ve been dead on arrival.

The boar reached the tree Qhila fired from behind and tore past it at speed, close enough to gouge out a trench of bark and rotten wood with one tusk. Qhila was already moving though, dodging sideways to keep the tree between herself and her assailant.

“OVER HERE, YOU MOLDY SAUSAGE!” When it turned for another charge at the kobold alchemist, John thought it time to interfere. In addition to the insult and two sprays of the scent stuff Qhila gave him, he threw in a Taunt for good measure.

The boar tried to turn too sharply on the side with the injured leg and took a tumble, though it was back up and charging again in a heartbeat. ‘Absent cover, dodge to its left. And fuck, I really should have cast Enhance Muscle while setting up.’

He dodged behind a tree like Qhila had and got showered in splinters for his efforts, but it dealt no damage. Slipping the spray bottle into his last inventory slot so he could hold the water gun properly, he prepared to receive the next charge.

Fearing to get gored, John dodged before firing and ended up just bleaching some dirt while he got sprayed with more bits of wood. On the second go, he managed to hold his nerve long enough to hit it in the face, but only barely got out of the way in time. And probably wouldn’t have at all if not for the now severely mangled tree.

0 blunt damage. Debuff applied.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

Score! Why the thing was **** to bleach, he had no idea, but it sure as Hell wasn’t a gift horse he was going to look in the mouth of. And hopefully, getting it blinded would help as well. Sure, Qhila had said cordy-boars mostly navigated by scent, but boar eyes weren’t vestigial so they had to need them for something.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

The next charge showed no signs of the boar being hindered by the eyeful of bleach and by now the tree John was using for cover was looking like a wreck. In fact, it looked dingy enough that he was starting to worry about it falling onto him.

Based on the roar that came from Qhila, she must have been thinking much the same. It was a surprisingly ferocious one at that, one that would’ve been more fitting for a mastiff-sized dragon than a cute girl. And presumably one that came with spraying some of the scent stuff.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

The boar ignored her completely and charged at John again and again. He dodged to the beast’s weak side, which was likely what kept it from course correcting enough to hit him. But he didn’t quite have time to regain his footing after and it was only a matter of time before he got a tusk in his guts.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

Something had to change and fast. Qhila was still making noise somewhere, but John had given up on that working, and judging by the roars sounding half-hearted, so had she. Hopefully, she was trying to think of something else, but he couldn’t bet on that alone. He had to try to do something himself.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

Fuck! John felt something hard make contact with his arm for a moment there. Whether it was a tusk, fungal growth or everything just felt hard at the speed it was going, he didn’t know, but he probably only avoided damage thanks to the enchantment on the jacket.

If only he could do something to slow it down or hamper its movement further. The trap simply hadn’t damaged the beast’s leg enough… Enough! That was it! The leg couldn’t be far from completely ruined, especially since the poison should be hardest on the tissue near the wound.

Grazed. -6 HP

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

Another near-dodge, this one not quite within what the jacket could deal with on its own. Biting back the moment of pain, John still felt better about the situation than a moment ago. He had a plan. Swapping the squirt gun for the knife in his inventory, he had a flash of insight.

How to hold the knife, how to stand if he could regain his footing, how to put his weight behind thrusts and slashes. He had an intuitive grasp of all of that. Not in completion, but at least basics. It had to be the difference of having a skill for it, but he couldn’t ponder that now. He had pork to chop. Stab. Whatever.

-12 HP

Critical Hit! 18 damage

-22 HP

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

He had tried to sidestep rather than roll out of the way entirely, then driven the knife into the shoulder of the boar’s injured leg. For his efforts, he had gotten a tusk to the bicep, and when the infested beast barrelled past, it jerked his arm back and tore it open to the wrist.

He cried out in pain and dropped the knife, clutching at the arm even as Gamer’s Body repaired the damage. For the moment he was incapacitated by the pain and shock, and couldn’t have tried to dodge another charge if one was coming. But it didn’t.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

When he gathered himself enough to look, he found the boar only now getting back on its feet. Three feet. The left front leg hung limp. Despite that, it was beginning to pick up speed for another limping charge. A much slower one that shouldn’t be a problem.

It didn’t get the chance to try. John hadn’t noticed when exactly Qhila had stopped with the noise entirely, but another injection dart struck the flank of the now much more hittable foe. A fraction of a second later, it crashed to the ground and rolled over, squealing in pain. Considering that neither the trap nor the stab wound had caused anything like that reaction, John really didn’t want to know how whatever was in the dart felt.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

“John!! Talk to me!” The worry in Qhila’s voice had utterly demolished the empty mask, something John couldn’t help feeling a guilty relief from. Before he had managed to do more than open his mouth to reply, she was kneeling at his side. She pulled away the ruined, blood-soaked fabric and leather over his right arm with one hand. The other held a flask with what he thought he recognized as healing potion up so she could unstopper it with her teeth. However, she stopped in her tracks, expression changing from concern to confusion, when she saw the unhurt arm uncovered by the shreds of his sleeve.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

“Game character bullshit. As long as I have HP, the damage fixes itself in moments, remember?” He was too busy trying to sound reassuring for any smugness to sneak into that, even though he felt rather like a badass right now. With a sheepish expression, she put the potion back in her bandolier. And wiped a tear out of the corner of her eye that John wouldn’t have noticed if she had just waited. That put a knot in his stomach. But a knot that also felt pleasantly warm, somehow.

Super Effective! 2 poison damage.

Enemy slain. +100 EXP.

That was a lot less than he got for the rat ogre, even though the boar was higher Level. But the Level gap was a lot smaller, and Qhila might not have gotten a share of the EXP back then but she definitely did now.

“I am so sorry! I have no idea why drawing its attention didn’t work, the fungus was supposed to have corrupted its mental faculties too much to deviate in behavior…” She sounded so distraught by her miscalculation that John couldn’t help but grab her hand and give it a reassuring squeeze.

“Don’t worry, it was probably my fault. I, uh, reflexively cast Taunt on it with the insult, which meant for the next ten seconds it would have taken damage from attacking anyone else. And the Skill makes the target instinctively understand that even if it normally can’t think at all… But hey, anything I get that isn’t fatal goes away quickly, so better me than you, eh?”

‘Oh god, I am going to end up as a tank at this rate. Please, Developer Gaia, let dodge-tanking be a viable build.’

Qhila didn’t seem quite as distraught but still looked less than happy with how that had all turned out. “It was still… How long does it take to get your ‘HP’ back?”

“Uh…” John had to check his HP Regen before he could give a figure. “About 2 days. But I’ll be pretty close to leveling from the quest to get you the stuff, so if creatures in here don’t bring us the rest of the way, I can do a round of Pseudodrakes or two when I get home.

“Actually, now that I think about it, I got a healing Skill yesterday. It’s kinda bad but should still save us some time. And using it while we look for a thinking cap will at least help Level Theurgic Focus.”

John hadn’t anticipated that to trigger an urgent expression and ‘hold it’ type of palm towards him gesture. “Before you do that, does the Skill say how it heals?”

“Just a sec…”

Accelerate Recovery (Active, Channeled) [Biomancy Branch] Level 1
Touch a target to magically speed up its natural healing processes, restoring 4.5 HP per minute (1+Skill Lvl+INT/10).
Cost: 10 MP/minute

“Magically speed up natural healing is what it says. It’s a heal over time spell and biomancy, if that helps,” John replied uncertainly. Why would he have to be careful about healing himself?

“Okay, that should be safe,” Qhila responded and, when John raised an eyebrow in response, elaborated. “There are different ways of magical healing and each of them has its drawbacks. The three that are in reach at our strength are direct life energy, tissue replacement and stimulated recovery. Your spell sounds like the latter, which has the advantage of safety and working on a broad range of ailments, but is slower and usually not very mana efficient. It is also prone to leaving scars and it can’t heal anything that the body couldn’t at least theoretically heal on its own.

“The other biomancy based method, tissue replacement, removes damaged tissue and replaces it with fresh tissue copied from the area around the injury. It’s fast and can heal injuries that are hours or even days old, as long as some good tissue of the needed kind is available. The main disadvantage is that it puts a lot of strain on the recipient’s body. Overuse causes toxin buildup, headache, muscle spasms and can be fatal. It is also a poor fit for cases where a large amount of tissue is only slightly damaged, and causes weird results if none of the right kind of tissue is on hand. Tissue replacement is what fast acting healing potions usually use.

“Directed life energy is a form of energy manipulation or elementalism, which one depends a bit on who you ask. In any case, it’s good for fresh wounds that are open to the air. It’s quite efficient in good circumstances but applying it selectively to the target is very difficult. Hitting a wound with a lot of microbes in it all but guarantees that the person you heal will get multiple infections, sometimes including ones that would be otherwise impossible. Putting too much raw life energy into healthy tissue creates tumors, which may or may not continue growing on their own.”

John scratched his chin. “I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on the Skill then. While having one that works for in-combat healing would be nice, there’s definitely something to be said for my first healing spell being one I can’t accidentally kill myself with… Besides, while it kinda pales compared to just getting full health from Leveling up right now, once the Leveling pace slows, it’s gonna save me a good bit of time.” ‘In fact, given all that, it’s probably just that video game combat heals set some absurd expectations…’

They were both quiet for a moment, then Qhila got up and turned away. “We should get to it. We still don’t know what Molly will ask for the second leaf, and the Sun waits for neither gold nor flame.”

Returning to the task at hand, some of the detached emotionlessness returned to Qhila’s tone, but it felt different now. Less like a door closed in his face and more like she was just trying to focus on what needed doing while not thinking about the painful aspects of why it needed doing.

Feeling that this was a kind of progress, John took a look at the RS in her nameplate and found it still constantly shifting. It had slowed down enough for him to catch glimpses of individual numbers though and it went into negatives a lot less. At least for the few seconds before John realized he should get off his ass and help.

“Should I try to shunt the whole carcass into my inventory? Or are we just leaving it here?” he asked, contemplating the dead cody-boar.

“Leave it. In theory it is valuable, but it requires either the right storage to make it sellable or the right facilities to make use of it, neither of which I have. Cohort-parasites are tricky and I do not want to risk getting creeping mold in my nest.”

“... Is it safe to just leave it then?”

Qhila looked around appraisingly for a moment before replying, “It has done as much damage here as it can, barring a suicidally **** scavenger that comes in for it and gets infected. The Hunters or the Hermit will be by soon enough to burn it.”

That felt a little haphazard to John, but at the same time Qhila was the one who actually knew anything about the Abyss and Abyssal society.

“We can still load some stuff in my inventory if you want. I get that you probably don’t want to put the thinking cap in it, but Observe indicates a lot of the other fungi around as useful. I need to rearrange things a bit, and it’d be a lot more useful if I’d thought to bring containers, but still…”

Qhila looked thoughtful for a moment before nodding. Then she got a roll of clear plastic sacks from her bag and tossed it to John.