A Gift Most Precious

((Author's Note: And we're back from summer break. In news that are probably mostly exciting to me, the county office finally got back to me with the paperwork I needed to open a Patreon Page. So, if the dude who asked for something like that in a DM in September last year is still around and interested in supporting me, s/he should stay tuned as I'll be posting the link as soon as it passes Patreon's launch review.))

“Why did you- oh.” Qhila’s question died halfway through as she saw the splinters that used to be crates. She had shown up literally seconds after the corpse of the Giant Rat faded. “Sorry, I, uh, didn’t consider that you would weigh a lot more than a kobold. Otherwise I would’ve put a marker not to go in that alley instead…”

“It’s fine, kiting would’ve gone to shit once it hit the enrage trigger anyway.” John made a gesture as if to wave away the apology, while his other hand continued to glow softly green against his chest. While the Level he was certain to get when they opened the Boss chest would refill his health, it would also refill his mana. So he might as well empty it for Accelerate Recovery Skill EXP first.

“Enrage trigger?”

“It’s a type of thing where a Boss gets a significant offensive buff in response to some conditions. Usually time taken fighting it, an HP threshold, or something that’d otherwise be a cheese strategy. In this case, I think it was hitting 20% health or less remaining, meaning 80 HP. It got a big STR boost and immunity to pain, fatigue and fear. And s-” John was interrupted by his stomach loudly declaring his hunger to the world.

“How about you sit tight while I fetch us some dinner, then we pop the Boss Chest and evaluate the fight and all that afterwards? How does pizza sound?”

Qhila nodded with a grin. “Like you should pick up something with meat and mushrooms for me.”

“So, are we starting with the box or the strategy?”

Since John’s mouth was full and one of those involved less talking than the other, and thus left more room for him to keep eating, he gestured at the Boss Chest. It was much more ornate than the regular reward chests, but otherwise still looked like it was plucked straight out of a Legend of Zelda game.

With a nod, the kobold popped the lid, leading to the expected lightshow that came with gaining EXP from these things. There was a lot more of it than they’d seen previously, but that did match the accompanying notification.

+1050 EXP

Level Up

He quickly checked Qhila’s status window in the top left of his HUD to make sure that she’d gotten a Level too, before swallowing his mouthful of pepperoni and cheese goodness and asking, “So, how’d it feel?”

“It… didn’t really. Are you sure there isn’t some sort of bookkeeping first, like with you?”

He scanned his own interface quickly and found nothing. “Are you seeing any dots or crosses in either red or gold in your interface? They would probably be by your HP, MP, and EXP bars…”

“No…” She narrowed her eyes, staring at a point in space that presumably corresponded with her HUD. “But I think my maximum HP and MP increased. One moment.”

She proceeded to fish out a vial from a pocket, run her fingertip along part of it at the cost of a bit of mana, and then place it against the wall. It remained stuck in place when she let go, as though glued to the wall. Thoughtfully, she commented, “Yes. I do have more…”

While she performed her small experiment, John had seen an opportunity to devour another slice. Now, he hurriedly swallowed a mouthful. “In a lot of games, companion character development is more fixed to their existing abilities and role. Might be there will only be system choices for you at a few Level milestones, if at all.”

Rather than respond to that, or grab a mouthful of pizza, Qhila was looking at the finger she had used to bespell the bottle and muttering something where the only word he could make out was “mana”.

“Is… everything okay?” He put a gentle hand on her shoulder as he asked, prompting her to look at him with an expression he couldn’t figure out.

“Yes but… I… We… We talked about your powers making me stronger but… I didn’t understand what it meant. I thought I did, but I didn’t really get it… I… I was getting close to the ceiling. Of what kobolds, or anyone of a feeble race, could achieve in terms of aura strength. I’ve… My mana, and by necessary extension aura, grew more from this than I have in the last 2 years combined. And you’re not done… It’s going to happen again at midnight, and if we keep doing this,” she gestured at the barrier around them, “it’s going to keep happening again, and again, and… hundreds of times…

“And you aren’t even asking anything in return.” Tears of gratitude welled up in her eyes as she continued, “John, I… I don’t have the words to describe how precious a gift it is you’re giving me…”

John’s brain almost immediately spat out a dozen half-jokes of varying degrees of corniness, but making light of her earnest gratitude with any of them just felt wrong. So he pulled her in for a hug instead, which she eagerly reciprocated, and said, “You’re welcome.”

After a minute or two of hugging, John’s stomach growled at the two of them. They reluctantly let go of each other, and he, somewhat sheepishly, had some more pizza while Qhila pulled their loot out of the Reward Chest.

There were 2 bones that looked about the right size for the giant rat’s legs, 3 bundles of $10 bills, one hide, and one essence, which looked like a vial of blood. Aside from the cash, Observe tagged them all as crafting materials, but Qhila had no recipes calling for any of them, so unless the Friendship Benefits Quest reward came with one, they’d probably go to auction.

More interesting were the Ratcatcher’s Pants. Visually, it was a set of dark brown work pants with plenty of pockets made in a durable but unremarkable fabric. Aside from them being magical, there were undoubtedly millions of their kind at blue collar work sites across the country.

Given that it had no downsides other than taking up an equipment slot that was currently empty, adding it to his gear set was a no brainer. The rodent damage was kinda narrow, but a nice bonus if they did more rat clears. The disease resistance he was kinda lukewarm about since he’d have to be wearing them to benefit and he couldn’t really do that all the time. Wearing it whenever bite damage was likely was a much easier thing to do, however, and if video games and literature were any indication, there were lots of monsters with a dangerous bite.

They ate in silence for a bit, until Qhila asked, “So, what’s the plan now?”

“If we can improve our approach to the Boss, then more rats at least until we’re sure we can’t spawn and kill another giant rat before midnight. Even if we can’t do much to handle the Boss better, it’s probably still our best shot at another Level within the time limit.”

“Okay. We’re a bit over halfway through the Piper’s Philter.”

John checked the time and did a spot of mental math, concluding, “We have plenty of time for one more Boss clear, but probably shouldn’t bet on two then.”

She nodded. “About the Boss, the poisons didn’t hamper it as much as I’d expected.”

John didn’t really know how much effect was to be expected, but it had kept moving mostly freely in spite of them. “Could be Boss status elevated its normal poison resistance enough to make that a crapshoot for anyone who doesn’t outlevel it enough to make debuffing pointless…”

“Should I load some darts with acid then, or come down from the roof?”

Injection darts with acid sounded… nasty. But that was kind of besides the point. “I think you should stay on the roof. Without Taunt we don’t have a good way to control who it goes for if we’re both accessible targets, and we need that to pull it into traps. I think the part that’s missing is a better plan for handling the enrage trigger. The ideal would be hitting it with something that finishes it off the moment it enrages, or bursting it from a ‘safe’ HP value in the low 90s straight to 0, bypassing the trigger completely. Alternately, we could try to hamper its movement enough by means other than poison that I can keep kiting it through traps even after the trigger.”

Qhila looked thoughtful for a moment. “I could switch all 4 modulars to hobbler and angle them for breaking giant rat legs. That way you should be guaranteed the option of luring it into at least one.”

“Sounds good. That just leaves us the burst part, since it’d be best to prepare for both, just in case.”

That brought about a frown. “The issue there is, the only thing I have that doesn’t come with enough blast radius to risk hurting you as well is not easily replaceable and I would have to get it from the nest traps…”

“Yeah, no, definitely don’t do that.” After a moment of thinking, however, he had a different idea. “There may be a way to use the ones with a blast radius though…”

“Oh?”

“Since the Boss showed up in the middle of the Arena barrier, it might be a fixed spawn location.” She didn’t seem to catch quite what he was getting at, so he elaborated, “Meaning there’s a good chance future Bosses in this barrier will come out of the same hole.”

Judging by the grin Qhila was now sporting, that did the trick. “Well in that case, I’ve got just the thing…”

She then pulled an actual hand grenade out of her bag of gear. Which, in retrospect, he should’ve seen coming because there was one rigged up to a ‘wrong’ door protecting her nest too.

“Nice. Though I’m not sure I want to know where you got that…”

“One of the arms dealers near the Abyss Market sells them in packs of 10.” She said that in a tone like someone discussing a discount on eggs at the grocery store, which he found somewhat disconcerting. Then again, the laws of Abyssal Springfield didn’t limit personal ownership of weapons in any way. Letting people keep explosives was probably less of a concern when some of them could create explosions with their mind anyway…

It also begged a different question, now that he thought about it. “Okay. Uh, if stuff like that is that easy to get, then how come you don’t carry a gun?”

“I don’t have a lot of arm and upper body mass to absorb recoil with, and anything where that isn’t a problem doesn’t really have more stopping power than the crossbow. So I’ll take the stealth benefits and potential for bigger alchemical payloads over fire rate. But you should probably get one.”

He couldn’t really argue with the possibility that a point blank shotgun blast might’ve been the solution to bursting down the last 80ish of the Boss’ HP. “I guess we’ll have to go shopping over the weekend… Anyway, to return to the topic at hand, sounds like our plan is to run the Pit of Rat Roasting-” that prompted a slight giggle, “-for as long as the Piper stuff lasts, then do it the slow way after.

“For the Boss, you’re rigging something up to blow it to smithereens when it comes out of the hole, and if that doesn’t pan out, it’s the initial strategy except for more leg breaking, and acid instead of poison in the darts. Also, if you can write “don’t go here” on any places that would need wood to support my weight to not be a dead end while you’re at it, that’d be nice too.”

She gave him a thumbs up, which meant the only loose end other than polishing off the last bits of pizza was his stat points. In the grand scheme of things, he wanted to take WIS to 25 next. Grinding Arena Bosses was guzzling alchemist’s fire pretty hard. While he wanted to Level Up quickly to get a safer footing in the Abyss, he also wanted to not take his reserves of it too low in case a crisis happened.

The way to resolving those conflicting needs was more MP Regen, which meant more WIS. That said, he had at least 2 more Levels worth of stat points coming by the end of the day. That meant these 5 could go wherever they were most needed for the time between now and midnight, which was STR. Both for running faster to help the kiting and for quickly finishing the giant rat off in melee if the kiting failed.