19 Sick Troll

Without the trollkin there, the troll would have no legs to rely on. With my in the area, the trollkin could never leave either its or the troll's back open. Then, a miracle happened that solved all of our problems.

A goblin in line with the trollkin suddenly swallowed an arrow in its shrieking and open mouth and their backward collapse was in time with the bloom of a dark flower beside the trollkin hob's head. Because one body was being pushed back by the arrow in its face before falling and the high powered rifle round passed cleanly through the other, the first body to touch the ground was the limply heaped hob's.

Once the last trollkin was down, the shields opened up for both swordsmen to rush out and down the last goblins with a single slash apiece. The tankers closed back up and halved the remaining distance to the troll who was probably only capable of standing, leaving Jack in the safer distance. The swordsmen took places off to the side and only a little behind the tireless tankers.

From up close, I could see the increased whites of the usually solid colored troll eyes and the pale white skin that was more commonly seen in dark shades of gray or even a healthy yellowish tanning. Its peeled back lips from the tautening of its starved face reveal a mouth that was so pale it appeared green. If I did not remember green was a natural color in their body, I would have been even more scared of fighting it.

This thing was definitely sick from some disease before or poisoning while raiding the village. Its leg itself was the only thing with color and that was the same color as its blood. The entire leg was discolored and vaguely swollen where the rest of his body was varying degrees of stretched or saggy. However, the troll simply raised its crude weapon of choice and pointed at the tankers.

These guys were all playing it safe and by the book on this place, the tankers were even resting their shields on the ground while an unnecessarily far distance away. The swordsmen were low and at the ready even further off to the sides and Jack took up a pose of sorts off to one side to draw the troll's attention. Then I remembered why I could only fight the trollkin just as an arrow suddenly seemed to appear in the troll's neck.

I had seen these lethal objects up close one or twice during this shitty siege, they were a hollow carbon or carbide tube with carbon fiber filaments for shot fletching. The front end of the tub was steeply angled like a syringe needs and I had finally found something I was scared of more than needles. These things made my proto-suit need a quick drying.

One of these arrows could easily penetrate most any armor with carbon derived from monsters ensuring a base grade of E fired from an even higher tiered bow. Tiny's bow was an expensive mid D Mechanical MP Bow that, like most MP bow and crossbow weapons, had two measurements. Its 'ease' test and its 'true' test.

The basic contribution Mech MP had an ease test of one-twenty and a true test of three-fifty. 'Test' was generally the strength of the weapon's pull, flex, and withdraw. One hundred and twenty pounds of test was relatively equal to one hundred and twenty pounds per square inch in pressure launching the arrow.

In regular bows, this could send an arrow flying at speeds ranging between two-fifty and four-fifty feet per second.

In a Mechanical MP Bow whose ease test was the physical requirement and true test was the actual flex and strength of the weapon, one of those low-grade bows fired low-grade arrows with flight speeds, distances, and impacts comparable to large game rifles.

However, these non-contribution arrows were a common and affordable D grade aftermarket product with spirals of little teeth or bumps behind the needle-head. Since the arrow was hollow, there was no reason to help it pass through the target. In the elephant-like body of even this starved troll, the arrow only reached a depth of about six inches into the front side of its neck.

The hit was enough to shock its balance, causing the broken tree limb it held while standing to bow with its immense weight. The large-half of some broken wooden door it aimed at the tankers, though, never wavered. This was a proud higher-ranked boss who once held a bright future in their hands.

Now, after some foolish decisions probably along the lines of contracting an STD from screwing large animals or just the wrong species in general before raiding the village and being wounded, it was showing its remaining pride and defiance by remaining standing until the end.

Valuable fluids flowed out of the arrow in the same second that it found its home. To shorten the process, a hand was raised from the thicket of meadow grasses and suddenly a shot rang out from the distance. In the fraction of a second it took my eyes to flick back toward the troll, a hole had formed in the side of the troll's one good knee and the tree limb bowed nearly in half as it struggled to stay standing.

Just as I was turning my gaze back toward the thicket, a thin line of black seemed to stretch across the world while I was turning my gaze. I immediately looked back just in time to see the troll's head tilting back to loose an agonized roar. In the knee of the troll's wounded leg from which burst a short fountain of infection-rich fluids a three-foot long carbon-based arrow had found a home.

The leg gave out before the pressure release ended, even extending and enlarging it from the force of suddenly bending his knee and falling to a kneel. That arrow might have wiggled around as the roar dragged on and shook my rubber suit from more than twenty yards away, but it was securely in place in that rotten joint. Then, as I was examining the defeated legs of the troll, a black line flitted through and once again buried itself in the troll's throat.

If she was missing head shots then that was one thing, but if she was intentionally bleeding the boss dry to kill it and wasting all of its synthesis valued fluids I was going to have some words with that young lady.

I may only get 'team share' for the boss kill without any direct contribution from 'effective injury' or the actual kill, but that still counted on all of our contributions! She wanted to get the boss kill? That was fine.

She wants to kill the boss in a slow and overly dramatic fashion on purpose? Oh, never mind, this arrow just now skated up the troll's forehead. Holy hell, go for the throat!

By the time the fifth arrow was fired into the middle of the bosses throat, they had already been pouring and drowning in fluids for the better part of a minute. The troll simply keeled over after the third direct hit to its throat rocked its weakened body backward. I almost felt bad while watching it fall, relying on my heightened kinetic vision to enjoy the scene in a slight slow-motion.

Then, the miracle shot happened. After after fifteen seconds of blood bubbling out of the throat arrows to show it was still alive, the sixth and final arrow was fired. It struck gold in the exposed underside of the boss's chin, a target roughly the size of a cantaloupe, from a little over a hundred yards away. With a weakened but still mid D grade boss killed in only six hits with three confirmed in the throat, tiny might just had made a name for herself!

The death of the troll marked the end of our mission, now we had about an hour to loot a one or two of three object types and head back to the portal. Even with four hours of distance to travel, if the boss's blood was dry when scouts came to check the area the team would be flagged for untimely manner and potential over-looting. We worked for the government being paid both cash and contribution, the government would make sure they got their due.

Looting took us only ten minutes of brief discussion. I had seen a few things on the way in that were interesting and without getting to claim a piece of troll I was upset. However, in exchange, I was given both sets of trollkin tusks.

A mature and healthy troll will have tusks as thick at the base as a polish sausage which taper out for about eight to twelve inches before ending in a rounded or broken point. Trollkin hobs have much smaller tusks about four inches or so in length but the ivory was unique in that its density and lack of pores allowed it to be smelted and shaped at low temperatures.

As well, trollkin hobs seemed to accumulate their evolutionary energy in organic parts of their bodies as such as their tusks besides just their inorganic cores. The skull, sternum, tusks, and newly developed genitalia of the trollkin or other hobs were the places that accumulated the most natural MP.

I had no interest in the genitalia like the government did and I planned to use the tusks for future equipment but the head and sternum were both coming home with me. There will be trolls in the future, ones without diseases. These trollkin would have to be enough for now.

While looting the trollkin I, of course, tested their weapons. Both spears of the second trollkin were warped or twisted and the sword had fractured in lines similar to a superimposed microstructure. Since I did not kill that trollkin, I did not bother with its loot besides its actual organics.

The trollkin that I killed, though, was stripped naked of its animal hides and the spear that was still intact was retrieved by yours truly. By some twisted physics, there was something like a fifty-fifty chance that this section of spear would break down in another person's hands unless I actually gave it to them. By way of the warped reality of the current world, this spear was irrevocably MY loot.

On the way out, though, I helped myself to a few goblin weapons made from broken pieces of wood and odds of metal or bluish leather. Thanks to Lucinda's friends from the Bureau's founding days, I had somebody who could ultimately synthetically copy any item from any substance I gave them.

The collective of my broken wood would be broken down, packed into a literal printer program, and a variety of programs will run molecular structure equations four a few hours. When the best designs for my purposes came out, I would pick one and come pick it up in a few hours.

The guy I would have tech talks with already had a cabinet of cartridges with my name on them.

With the additions of these materials, I might finally have enough material to make some new weapons. Especially if I decided to keep and recycle the spearhead. For higher dungeons, I would have the spearhead narrowed and thickened and even lengthened by as much as how long the point comes out to be. By a normal craftsman!

I would not, though, accept simply having it recast. Even if the MP rating does not change, the product itself is weak and only good for one or two fights. The current spearhead, even though broad for impaling an oncoming body, was worked from an ingot just from the grain lines in the patina of rust on its blade and body. The academy drilled into us students various means of identifying and rating the ingredients and qualities of various items on the markets.

Many Protectors and even higher grade Guardians met misfortune due to not being able to recognize the difference between cast, worked, and folded steels. Or the importance of it. Sure, and ingot one works into a weapon is cast from steel, but working it properly and thoroughly changes not just the shape but also the integrity and even functions of the steel.

An armor plate cast into shape and size will break before a plate worked to shape and size even if it was cut into shape after being flattened out. Tempering was also necessary for most metal equipment, but a cast plate's structure is brittle even after tempering because it was simply placed in an unnatural state and hardened to it.

Flexing the metal of armor and weapons before tempering gave it a healthy flex after tempering and was a very necessary part of the process.

Folding was just taking working to the next levels and moving to a new scale for measuring sharpness. With more worked layers the item comes out stronger based on design and production for intended purposes. The layers of a sword make it more resilient because the layers support each other. The measure of how keen a cutting edge could be was based on a ratio of how many layers the weapon has and how many layers are exposed at the edge.

There were edge grinding methods that make the very cutting edge thinner than a single layer and magic methods of preserving this edge, but the principles involved were worlds apart when comparing a sword with ten layers and a sword with one hundred and a sword with a thousand layers.

A cast sword is already one layer, so trimming the very edges off of one side redundantly makes it sharper than a single layer of steel.

With all of that in mind, I decided to use the spearhead as it was for now and simply have a shaft printed to conserve money materials for the time being. The other metal odds and ends, though, were all probably going to be added to my personal MP scrap. This was decided long before I even left the portal to have everything scanned and logged.

Along the way, though, I had no choice but to stop when I saw and exceptionally healthy looking thorn shrub. The black of its limbs was so rich it appeared red in direct sunlight and the thorns all had bright green tipping. The usually curled up needles of its leaves were now currently unfurled like multi-pointed triangular petals. The plant had no discernible fragrance but it was still interesting and was probably E grade or better just because it came from this world.

My only problem was transporting it. The bush had a base roughly twelve inches in diameter and a root system multiple times bigger. However, the swordsman on the group did not mind stopping to help me uproot the bush by stabbing into the ground around it at angles with our weapons.

Then I simply bagged the giant clump of roots and soil in a burlap sack from my coat usually reserved for slime cores and carried it the last mile-plus to the portal.

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