Chương 105: Chapter 103: Giant fight

Vincent switches to another spell. I don't see what it does, but the three giants in front of me start to wave their arms around distractedly and seem to have less of an idea of where I am, swatting at me when I hit them but still moving too slow to actually make contact with me. Did he blind them? That would be useful. If the three of them are blinded, maybe I can do something to arrest their movement, to at least give Vincent a fighting chance when they get past me.

I circle around back and see if I can do any kind of hamstringing cuts, slicing at Achilles' tendons and stabbing them in the thighs in the hopes of making their movement more difficult. We don't have to kill them necessarily to make them less combat effective. Maybe we can turn the tide by just being smart and playing with a knowledge of anatomy. I get kicked for 162 damage. That's not a problem. I can take that much damage without difficulty.

It's way better than the clubs, which seem to have a base damage of fifteen hundred in the hands of these giants. At least their unarmed attacks only do 500 base damage. That could make all the difference in the world. One of them tries to step on me, and I stab upward into his foot, twisting my blade and trying to do as much injury, even if I'm not doing a ton of damage. He hops back a few steps, which means about twenty feet, and I turn to the other two. I still don't think this is going to be enough.

Even with all my mad dashing and darting, even with all my dancing around and sliding and stabbing at them, they're still in the high hundred thousand hit point range. It's going to take me a thousand cuts to take these three out, and I just don't have the time for that. Even if I manage to hit them every other second of combat, that will take me more than half an hour to actually take two of them out. And half an hour of combat means that stamina will be draining by at least ten per second.

Will the giants get tired too? I hope so. Maybe their stamina will run out before ours does. That would be a blessing. Or maybe one or two of them will decide to run away when it looks like they're going to run out of stamina. I don't know if we can catch the giants if they dedicate to running away, but I know that I probably wouldn't even try. We've definitely bitten off more than we chew with this battle, and one of them running away would be absolutely wonderful.

The blindness debuff wears off after about thirty seconds, just like it did when Vincent cast his fireball. I wonder if he has another of those in him. He did say that he cut all his cooldowns in half for his spells with a talent, but I don't know how often he can cast that fireball. Maybe it's just once an hour, or once ever two hours like Mab's Rage.

He's got such an arsenal of spells that he probably doesn't need to worry about long cooldowns, but it would be good if he had another spell that dealt a massive amount of damage. Or if he can cast the blindness spell again. That would be useful. The giants are moving more slowly than they were. Not overall, just in the sense of how fast they can eat up distance. They're all limping and trying to balance on wounded legs. That might be enough for giving Vincent the chance to run from them.

Sooner or later, at least one of these giants is going to decide that the others can handle me, and move past me to get at Vincent. I don't have time to see how the girls are doing. I'm dealing with half of the giant forces by myself here. I've got two of them unarmed now, the fifty points of stamina well worth the benefit of disarming them. I still have to wait for the cooldown to end before I can disarm the third one.

I'm looking forward to that, as he's hit me twice in the last minute and really drained a lot of my Shell away. One of the giants reaches out to try to grab me. I roll out of the way, not pleased with this new development. Their hands are big enough that they can grab my entire torso in one hand, and I don't want to think about what they'll do if they get a grip on me. Maybe they'll bite my head off. Maybe they'll just crush me. Maybe they'll rip me in half. I don't want to think about.

I have to think about it, but I really don't want to. I disarm the last of the giants that I'm fighting and suddenly they all want to grab me. I don't like that. Don't like that at all. I dance backwards out of their reach, then try to attack the hands that they grab me with. Maybe I can cut off a thumb or something. At the very least, maybe I can make them rethink their options. Vincent's spells keep pounding away at the giants, but the damage just isn't there. There are three giants attacking me.

One of them has about a hundred and fifty thousand hit points left, the other two are closer to two hundred thousand. I know that if we pull this off, it'll be worth at least one level for each of us, but I really don't think we're going to be able to. It's strange to think that if we can kill these seven giants, it probably means we can kill a dragon. Each of these giants has more hit points than Wrax does, but they don't do nearly as much damage as he does.

I think his attacks deal at least double what the giants deal even with their clubs. But if we can kill seven of them, it means we can probably kill one of him. It's easier to fight when you outnumber the enemy, even if he does a lot more damage. I don't want to kill Wrax, of course. I like him. Not just because he helped me with the leveling thing, and not just because he's a dragon. He seems to have a lot of the same goals that we have.

Plus he let me ride him, and riding a dragon is a thing that everyone should get to do. I'm getting distracted and off topic, and I very nearly get grabbed because of it. I manage to slice open the pad of flesh between the thumb and the other fingers, making the giant pull his hand back out of surprise and pain. It deals double damage, which I think is interesting, but even 968 damage just doesn't seem like that much when compared to these giants. We're in trouble, and I don't know if we can get out of it.

I spare a glance at the other three members of our party. If they're not doing well, I'm going to make an executive decision and try to get us to retreat. I'd rather we run away than die. I'm not sure we can outpace the giants, but they might let us go. We've done a lot of damage to them, and we might have slowed them down enough that running away will be a viable option. I'm pretty sure I'm faster than they are, between the buffs of my boots and the lingering buff from the wyrm meat we ate earlier.

But I don't know if the same is true for my friends. I can't just abandon them, but I can try to get them to run away if things aren't looking good. The girls are now outnumbering the giants. That means they've slain another one. That's good. It means they're making progress. We've been fighting for almost ten minutes now, and my stamina is draining at five points per second, which effectively means it's draining at three points per second. I hope the giants are losing stamina at the same rate.

Sooner or later, maybe they'll decide the battle isn't worth continuing and they'll start to withdraw. In the meantime, Ash and Gigi seem to be keeping one of the giants busy between them, flanking it and attacking it as it tries to swing back and forth between them. And El is soloing the other giant, because of course she is. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The time I take to look at this costs me about 2300 points of damage on my Shell, but that's okay; Shell is off cooldown again, and I can recast when it get low. Which it's already starting to do. I should revisit my plan to use Dash to stay away from them and just kite them a bit. But doing that would mean abandoning Vincent, and I can't do that while there are still three giants.

I might be able to leave him alone to deal with one of them while I dealt with another, but I can't let him have to deal with two of them. He casts the blindness spell again, and I take advantage of their confusion to do a massive amount of damage to one of the giants. I just keep slashing back and forth, hitting him once a second for the entire duration of the blindness debuff. That drops him by another fourteen thousand hit points, putting him down into the five digit range.

I can't believe that all this damage and they're still going strong. I mean, on the one hand, you can say the same about us. We're here fighting level fifty monsters that are doing fifteen hundred points of damage with every hit, and we've already lasted ten minutes, just five of us against seven of them. It's an impressive feat, no doubt about it. But I don't know if being impressive is enough.

We don't get the experience for killing them if they kill us first, even if we do manage to take out three or four of them before they kill us. There's no reward for killing half of an enemy that kills you. We'd still all get reduced to level one, and we'd still end up back at Elmspire, with no equipment to show for all of our work. I don't want to lose my equipment. I like my equipment.

So I grit my teeth and I keep fighting, keep trying to stay ahead of the three giants and their swinging arms, keep trying to avoid one of them grabbing me. Vincent casts spell after spell, slamming into the giants and whittling away their hit points, but two hundred and fifty thousand is just so many hit points. And while they're only hitting me for a few hundred points of damage at a time, I don't have a health pool big enough to exchange blows with the three of them.

I really wish there was a way to make them run away.

"Flee!" I shout, hoping that maybe that will work.

"Flee from us or die!" I try my best to be intimidating. I know they can understand me; my polyglot talent makes sure of that. But I just don't know if telling them to run away in the middle of a battle that they seem to be winning is going to do the trick.

"Two of your number are already dead," I say, cutting at the knuckle of one of the giants as he tries to punch me into another time zone.

"You're all going to die if you keep fighting us. You're outmatched. Run away while you can!" I can feel the tension in the air, and I hope that my six levels of intimidation will be enough to get through to them. But it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything. I get a notification, which I assume means that I'm gaining ranks in intimidation, but that doesn't mean that the intimidation was successful. They're still fighting, which means they aren't running away.

Which means they're at least smart enough to realize that in a protracted enough battle, they are going to win. I'm losing three stamina a second, and I've already stopped using the abilities that cost stamina, which means I'm reduced to only doing the base damage from my sword. Which is only about 480 per hit. They can take a lot of those hits. They can take more of my hits than I can take of their hits. And there are three of them and only one of me.

They don't have to be that smart to realize that things are going to go in their favor eventually. I'm getting desperate again. I can switch over to my bow and Dash out of their way, but I won't do that and leave Vincent to his own devices. I don't like that I have to protect him, but he's my friend, so on a certain level I don't mind it. I won't leave him. But I have to find something else that will turn the tide of this battle. In a perfect world, another monster would attack.

It would be something that hunts giants, and it would come in on our side to help us take out the wounded giants and to get its food. But this isn't a perfect world, and I don't see any dragons or anything swooping down to rescue us, even unintentionally. We're on our own, and it's going to be a problem. I focus my attention on the most wounded of the giants.

"Hey!" I shout, trying to get his attention. He looks at me with hatred in his eyes, still shaking the pain out of his hand from the last time I hit him. He doesn't look all that willing to listen to reason.

"Why don't you run away?" I ask him.

"There's no shame in it. You've put on a good showing. Go get your club and get out of here. Heal up those wounds. Get going. You don't want to die, do you? Your friends are dead. You're next. Just withdraw, run away. Then you won't die." Still nothing. Damn it. I don't think intimidation is the trick to this battle. But there has to be one. There has to be something I can do to turn things around. Something that I just haven't thought of yet. Is there another of my talents that could come into play here?

I don't want to tell Vincent to rain fire down on us all. I may have resistance to fire, but I don't have immunity, and I'll still take a fair amount of damage from his spell. Won't I? I have resistance to fire, and I have a 124% resistance to magic. His spellcraft is probably close to sixty or so, but that would still reduce the damage of the spell by at least half. Add that to the reduction of the fire resistance, and I might actually be able to handle the amount of damage he can deal. Right? No. Think about it.

If the fireball spell does fifty thousand damage, and I cut it in half, that means it does twenty five thousand damage. Which would kill me. If I cut it in half again, it would at least rip through my Shell. Is it worth it for me to take twelve thousand damage just for him to deal fifty thousand to each of the three giants? It would cut about half the remaining health of the one I've been concentrating on, and it would bring the other two to the brink of six figures. But it would mean ripping through a Shell cast.

And that's just if the spell does fifty thousand damage. What if it does less than that? Will it be worth it still? I glance back at Vincent, not sure what to tell him. He's still moving back, trying to keep distance between himself and the giants. We're putting a lot of distance between us and the girls. I can't even make out the status of anyone in the other group. I just know that they're fighting three against two; I can't even tell who's winning. Not really. We must be at least two hundred feet from them.

And that distance is just growing. It seems like every minute, the giants are forcing me back another fifty feet. Vincent is keeping his distance, but we are rapidly splitting into two separate battles that won't have time to help one another. If the girls kill their two giants, it will take them time to come and join me. Not much time; they can run and make the distance up in less than a minute. But they can't just disengage from their enemies and come to take some of the pressure off me.

Maybe El will do that when they take out one of their remaining giants. Anything would help at this point. I'm taking about three thousand damage a minute from the giants, just from their fists and feet. I'm dealing about five times that, but it's still going to take me a good five more minutes just to kill this one giant. I really wish he would run away. I really wish my intimidation was higher. When I finally kill the one giant, I see that my stamina is now draining at eight points per second.

I still have about 4000 points, which gives me about five hundred seconds before I run out of stamina. That's just over eight minutes. That's more time than it's going to take to kill these other two giants. I recast Shell again and do my best to pick up the pace. I start using more mana, shooting Fire Bolts at the giants in the hopes of doing more damage. Vincent blinds them again, and I hack at the one giant's ankle, trying to cut deep enough into it that he won't be able to stand anymore.

I want to make it so that he can't move at all. Then he'll fall back as we move away from the girls, and I'll be down to fighting the giants one on one. I might be able to take this giant one on one. That could be possible. Can I kill a giant one on one in eight minutes? God, I hope so.