NOVEL WEB Chapter Twenty-One: Apply Directly To The Forehead
Topher's hands ached as he gripped the shovel tightly; he wanted to cast Remove Fatigue, but knew that doing that now would deprive him of precious MP he would need later. At least his Constitution had somehow gone up to Rank D; that would at least make this "possible but painful" instead of "agonizing and humiliating". This was his fourteenth attempt at killing this scrawny goblin, and he was determined to do his best to ensure there wouldn't have to be an attempt #15.
The first few attempts had gone much the same as his first test run; ineffective strikes, followed by panicked flight with a healthy dose of Conjure Shield. After that, he'd had to get more creative; attempts #4 and #5 had involved pushing the goblin into the river to see if it would drown, but it had managed to dog-paddle back to shore without too much trouble. For attempts #6 through #10, he'd tried setting his spear against a charge by the goblin, hoping to use its own strength against it, but the creature was so light and scrawny that it didn't have enough mass to impale itself; for attempt #11, he'd even tried digging a tiger pit, but even the extra gravity of a fall wasn't enough to drive the stake through the creature's tough, rubbery skin. Attempts #12 and #13 had involved trip-ropes strung between the trees of the forest, but the creature simply didn't stay down long enough for Topher to try any tricks like bashing its head in with a rock; it was possible he could try to hog-tie it while it was dazed, but he doubted that any rope he could tie would be able to restrain the creature's strength if it was able to knock him ass over teakettle with every swing.
So, for this attempt, he'd decided to dig another pit -- this one basically a ten-foot cube on all sides -- and simply trap the goblin inside until he could think of something cleverer to do. He'd first dug a shallow, conical hole, then slowly expanded it downwards and outwards until its center reached a depth of ten feet -- which had taken several hours on its own -- then strung a rope from a nearby tree down into the pit and climbed down inside, equipped with a bucket. He then proceeded to hollow out as much of the pit as he could from inside, making the bottom of the pit slightly broader than the top so that the walls would lean inwards as they ascended (thus, he hoped, making the pit impossible for the goblin to climb out of). He had a good bit of trouble getting up each time to excavate each bucket-load of dirt, and by the time the pit was finished he was completely out of MP simply from casting Remove Fatigue. He'd covered the pit, gone back to the inn to sleep, and then discovered the next morning that the eastern wall had collapsed, so he had to dig it back out and then build up the eastern wall again. Now it was at least two hours after noon, his hands hurt, his shovel was starting to look a little battered, and he was tired anyway.
Sighing, he cast Remove Fatigue, dropping his MP back down to 19 (he'd been hoping to keep it at 20 in case he needed two castings of Conjure Shield, but that obviously wasn't happening now). Re-covering the pit with an old blanket and a generous helping of leaves, he crept back to the river to wait for the scrawny goblin. It was nearly an hour before it appeared, and Topher had almost dozed off in the golden sunlight of the afternoon; shaking himself and cursing, he hucked a rock at the goblin and fled in the direction of his trap.
As it had with every trap he'd set before, it worked perfectly; the creature was obviously supernaturally strong and tough, but it had no wits to speak of that Topher had been able to discern and didn't seem to learn from its mistakes. It scampered after him, yowling wordlessly, then stepped on the blanket and disappeared into the pit with a thump. Topher poked his head over the side to see the creature thrashing about on the ground; it seemed to have gotten stuck in the blanket. He stroked his chin, contemplating; well, I've got the little green freak, now what?
He tried throwing a few lighter rocks, but the creature didn't seem harmed by them; an attempt at dropping a much heavier rock simply got dodged and hurt his shoulder besides. He supposed he could try to spear the creature while it was trapped, but he doubted it would have any effect; even the full force of his bodyweight behind the spear probably still wouldn't be enough to do pierce the creature's freakishly tough skin and bones. Finally, he decided to just try to drown the thing; he walked to the river, filled his bucket with water, and emptied it out on the goblin.
The creature sputtered and shrieked, but nothing untoward seemed to happen; Topher sighed, wishing he'd dug his pit closer to the river, and went back for another bucket. After ten buckets, the bottom of the pit was wet; after fifty, there was about two inches of water in it, and Topher simply didn't have the patience to continue. With a little estimation, he realized glumly it would probably take several hundred buckets of water just to fill the pit halfway (and that was before accounting for any of the water seeping away into the dirt, which it obviously was). He'd been hoping to have the dirt mix with the water to create some kind of quicksand-like mud, but it looked mostly like he was just giving the goblin a very slow bath with extra steps, so he gave up and went home.
To his surprise, however, the goblin was still there the next day, and the next day after that; it didn't seem to be growing any weaker from hunger or thirst, but it was clearly very unhappy about being trapped in a pit. Topher pondered just burying it alive, but figured it wouldn't sit still long enough for that to work; it would probably just climb out over the dirt and murder him. He wanted to build some sort of pneumatic hammer over the top of the pit to squish the damn thing like a bug, but he didn't have the materials and didn't know how to go about doing that even if he had had them. After a while, however, he realized that the water could only drain from the pit so quickly; if he kept filling it with water, even if it took several days, it would eventually fill, right? At least he wouldn't have to save as much MP for Conjure Shield, either.
So Topher began pouring water on the goblin again; for four hours the morning of the first day, then he went home for lunch, then he came back out and did it for another four hours. By the end of the first day, the water was up to the goblin's knees; the next morning, it had receded some, but there was still quite a bit left. It took Topher another two days to get the water up to the thing's neck, and it was really thrashing about and yowling now; I guess I would be too, Topher admitted. Finally, on the fourth day, he managed to fill the pit high enough that the goblin couldn't keep its head above water without swimming; he kept fetching more and more buckets of water while the creature spluttered and splashed, but it didn't actually drown until mid-afternoon. And, of course, when it did, he gained neither Levels nor a Magic Stone; apparently drowning a goblin, even at he cost of tremendous and painstaking effort, didn't count as "slaying" it by whatever metrics his Status used to calculate whether his Level would increase.
The Topher who had initially arrived in this world would have been both defeated and inarticulate with rage, but Topher was neither of those things now. He was tired, yes; he was annoyed and frustrated, but not unduly so. But mostly, he had discovered a fifteenth way to not kill a goblin, and that was enough progress for him to merely be disappointed rather than overcome by despair. Returning to the inn, he went through his options; apparently he had to personally cause the goblin to die via physical or magical trauma directly. Does that mean I can't use traps at all? He asked around, but no one had any idea. Eventually, he settled upon the idea of using his Attract Object power.
He knew that it was capable, under some circumstances he didn't yet understand, of moving more than a minimal amount of weight; unfortunately, he didn't know what those circumstances were. But he was pretty sure that using the Skill counted as being the wielder of the force it inflicted; it certainly couldn't be any different than being the one who threw a rock or shot an arrow, and it should in fact be more likely for his actions to be attributed to him since he was using a Skill to make it happen directly. And so he began experimenting with Attract Object for the first time since he'd left Strathmore.
First, he tried to just use the ability normally to lift heavier weights; it was possible that its weight limit had increased with his Level, after all. But when he found that it could still only move objects of a few pounds or less, he tried to replicate the one situation in which it had moved something heavy -- Cailu's body -- and found that he could do it; if he was pressed up against something very heavy himself, he could pull more weight towards him. So I guess it's less about the weight of the object and more about the forces involved? It's got something to do with the physics of it, then.
Vaguely, he remembered Hotaka saying that he had discovered something important in his research into physics that might have been important for Topher's power, but he'd never found out what it was before... well, before whatever had happened had happened. He was still pretty vague on exactly what battle had driven him out of Strathmore, but he was pretty sure it had been ugly and that probably none of the other F-Rankers had survived it. He also definitely remembered that something had destroyed all of Hotaka's notes and the textbooks they'd managed to save from the real world, which meant that he wasn't going to be able to just go read up on physics. He sighed. Hopefully I won't have to do math.
Finally, after a lot of trial and error, he figured it out; Attract Object functioned in much the same way as if he were pulling the object over to him with a rope. It didn't actually have a weight limit, it just couldn't move Topher himself; if he tried to pull something light towards himself, the resulting counter-force on him would be negligible and the object would fly right towards him. If he tried to move something heavier, but still sufficiently light that he wouldn't have to brace himself if he were using a physical rope, it would drag itself towards him in much the same way. But anything sufficiently heavy that pulling on such a rope would yank Topher himself towards the object, even to the slightest degree, the power would simply do nothing (probably because otherwise he'd have hurled himself across the room and broken his neck trying to pull the first heavy object he attempted). If he braced himself against a heavier or more immovable object, the amount of counter-force that could be applied increased; he could probably also pull extremely heavy objects straight upward if he were above them and properly braced, but that seemed both useless and dangerous, so he didn't think that would help him. He was also pretty sure he could accelerate extremely heavy objects straight downwards if he were underneath them, but that seemed not so much dangerous as outright suicidal.
After a lot of contemplation, he figured his best shot was to combine his success with traps and his attempt to use Attract Object; so he began making a deadfall. He convinced one of the lumberjacks to let him have a tree they had just cut down (it would respawn anyway) and dragged it with agonizing slowness out to the area where he knew he could lure the goblin. Laying out four long strands of rope (he was going to go broke just buying rope from Jerp at this rate), he carefully rolled the log onto them, tied them around it at four equidistant points along its length, then tossed the trailing lengths over the branches of two trees roughly the same distance from the log. It took him a while to figure out how to keep the log from immediately falling back down once he let go of the rope, but eventually he figured out the trick of hauling the rope down, tying it off, then going to the opposing side to repeat the procedure. Eventually, after about an hour, he had the log hoisted about two feet off the ground, at which point he pushed it backwards until it began to rise into the air; when the ropes were almost parallel to the ground, he tied a fifth length of rope to the back of the log and secured that to a third tree, then made sure that he could use Attract Object to pull the knot loose from about fifteen feet away. This was fairly finicky, and had a large number of disadvantages (most prominently that he would have to be very close to both the goblin and the trap to pull this off), but it was the best he had come up with thus far. Grimly determined, he double-checked all his preparations, cast a single Remove Fatigue, then went to the river to wait.
An hour went by, then two, then three, and Topher had an unpleasant suspicion. Sneaking back to the goblin camp, he confirmed it with smoldering anger; the goblins did not respawn.
On the one hand, this was good; it meant that any goblins he killed would stay dead, and thus he might presumably have a chance at whittling down the encampment's numbers if necessary. On the other hand, this meant that Topher now had to find another goblin to kill, because he was pretty sure he would rather die at this point than have done all that work for nothing.
The sun was starting to set when he picked out a goblin who had gone into the forest to hunt; it was stronger and bigger than the one he'd drowned, but he needed to make this attempt now before some squirrels chewed through his ropes or something. As the creature stalked into the forest, casting about for a deer or boar to slay for meat, Topher threw a rock at it and began to scamper in the general direction of his trap.
Immediately, he encountered two problems; first, this goblin was a lot faster than the scrawny goblin had been, and he had to start sprinting almost immediately to avoid it catching him. And second, since he had been planning on ambushing the scrawny goblin at the river, he was now slightly disoriented and had to scramble to find the right area where his trap was set up. He almost missed it; when he finally detected it in the branches above him, he was less than enthused to discover that he was running under it, rather than towards it, and if he set it off now it would kill him instead of the goblin. Jesus. This is really not my day.
Topher, panting, did it anyway; he was too exhausted to run any further and couldn't cast the six-rune Remove Fatigue while gasping for breath, either. Falling forward, he twisted onto his back and managed to choke out "Zom Voq!" as the goblin raised its club high for the killing blow; at the same time, he yanked as hard as he could on the trap's trigger with Attract Object, then pulled the falling log towards him at the same time.
What happened next was quite hectic; Topher, surrounded by the staticky gray globe of his Conjure Shield spell, was pulled backwards between the goblin's legs with terrific speed. As it twisted around with a dumbfounded look, the log deadfall trap struck it with shattering force directly in the face; the goblin's head burst like a melon and it went flying off into the woods with its chest shattered for good measure. Topher, dazed and covered in dirt, threw up.
When he finally managed to stagger shakily to his feet and cast Remove Fatigue yet again, he couldn't believe his stupid shitty plan had worked; he still didn't understand why he'd been pulled backwards -- maybe because I was shielded? or lying down? or the log was in the air? or all three? -- but the fact remained that he'd unquestionably killed the goblin, because his Level had gone up to 6. It took Topher a bit to find the corpse, but it was well worth the effort; the dead goblin had a Magic Stone the size of his pinky nail, which would almost certainly sell well to Jerp. He dragged himself back to the inn, drank three beers, and went to sleep with the warm glow of satisfaction suffusing him.
Unfortunately, while it was a victory, it wasn't exactly reproducible; he didn't have the time (or, quite frankly, the energy or the funds) to repeat such a performance for every goblin in the camp. Jerp did give him twenty-five gold for the Magic Stone -- "A real beaut, Mister Bailey, I ain't seen one this size in years!" -- but that only put him back up at around fifty-seven gold, still not remotely enough for the spellbook. And so Topher was sitting in the common room of the inn, eating a bowl of mushroom stew and wishing he had a chicken sandwich, as he puzzled over his options. No matter how much his level increased, he wasn't going to be able to kill goblins (or, for that matter, anything else other than Jelly Slimes) without titanic effort unless he was able to use his Class abilities more effectively; but the problem was that the Clerk Class was obviously suited only for the most mundane of tasks, and would probably never gain any combat-oriented abilities even if he reached an absurdly high level. Not that Topher minded, really; swinging a sword around near monsters that could take your head off with a sneeze sounded unbelievably stupid to him, even if he'd wanted to do it, which he didn't. Topher was both old and lazy, and if he had to kill monsters, he wanted to kill them from far away, preferably with his feet up and while eating a chicken sandwich. He needed that spellbook. He needed fifty gold. He needed a nap. He needed --
It was at this point that Topher noticed he was not alone in the inn's common room; the elf named Varissian was making a rare appearance, eating his own bowl of mushroom soup with an expression that implied that each spoonful's primary ingredient was dog turds. Topher had never spoken to the elf before this point; he'd found bathing in cold water less uncomfortable than social interaction. But he was now both desperate and very tired, so he dragged himself over and forced himself to be pleasant. "Don't think I've seen you out here before. You're Varissian, right?"
The elf's hawk-yellow eyes flicked over Topher; he blinked, very slowly, and took a long time to reply. "I am," he deigned to confirm at last; Topher could already see this conversation was not going to go well. "And you are...?"
"Topher Bailey. I'm new to this town." He resisted the urge to hold out his hand to be shaken, and instead gave his best effort at a bow; the elf, observing him coolly, did not return it. "I have to admit I don't know much about the area," he said, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously; "I sort of ended up here due to some unusual life circumstances."
The elf sniffed. "That makes two of us." He looked down into his bowl and stirred it listlessly. "I suppose you're going to ask me to heat up your bathwater for you."
"Actually, no," said Topher, abruptly feeling like a complete idiot, "I was mostly just trying to be friendly, but now that I think about it, I think instead I'm going to ask you to teach me to heat my own water. I learned Mage Light and Mage Shield, so depending on what you use to do it I might be capable of learning that too."
The elf closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose; Topher recognized a prayer for strength when he saw it. "You cannot possibly be serious."
"I am," said Topher very calmly, "and I'll prove it." He muttered the words to Remove Fatigue and targeted the elf with his casting. As Varissian's eyes flew open with shock, he could not resist letting a smirk cross his face. "First one's free, buddy; but the next one's gonna cost you."