The Corrupted Ogre
Monsters, just like hunters, each have abilities of their own. For an ogre, that ability was Natural Recovery.
◈ Greatly increases natural life recovery in proportion to the Endurance stat. (Current: S, +600%)
◈ Greatly increases damage reduction in proportion to the Endurance stat. (Current: S, +35%)
◈ Grants a grace period to every injury of fatal severity or less, in proportion to the Endurance stat. (Current: S, 3 seconds)
"What kind of skill even is this?"
My eye had been calibrated to SSS+ rank, so an A+ skill had me thinking, hm, probably nothing special. Then I actually read it, and I understood in a single glance how that bizarre phenomenon could possibly be happening. I'd always assumed that no matter how famously tough an ogre's vitality was, it came from nothing more than a high Endurance stat. Seeing the fine print, though, I finally grasped the true source of an ogre's life force. The thing wasn't simply born that way. A completely broken skill stood squarely behind that rock-hard body and hide, and with something like that propping it up, the creature became an immortal that couldn't die even if it wanted to.
I stared, fascinated, as the neck knit itself back together. It had fused before five seconds were up. Blood still streamed from beneath the seam, yet the ogre cocked its newly joined head as if checking the fit, then roared all over again.
"GRAAAAAAH—!"
So it was true. Nothing ordinary was going to kill this thing. I wasn't particularly afraid, though. A few exchanges had already shown me the full extent of what the ogre had. If I simply cut the neck again before it could reattach, I could finish it this time too. An ogre isn't invincible. It just recovers fast.
Thud—!
I sheared halfway through the neck once more and, giving it no opening to fuse, finished the cut. The ogre's head dropped with disbelief frozen across its face, and our eyes met on the way down. The enormous body stayed standing. The head did not. An arm flailed, trying to catch the falling skull, but commands from a head no longer attached to the body had no hope of arriving where they needed to go. Even so, the body sank to its knees and swept the ground, desperate to stick back on a head that had already hit the dirt.
The situation was already past absurd, and the reality — that the thing would actually live again if the head stuck — was more absurd still. This wasn't the three-second rule kids use for food dropped on the floor. A skill that saves you even when your head is lying on the ground, so long as you stick it back on within three seconds? Sadly, the ogre failed to produce a miracle lasting any longer than that. The shabby fallen head, and the corpse of the body that had tried so hard to pick it up, lay forlornly on the ground. I shed a tear at the sight.
"Slurp... that looks delicious."
I don't eat the meat of humanoid monsters if I can help it, but ogres are the exception. Strictly speaking, an ogre walks on two legs, yet it's hard to call the thing a humanoid. A giant cow. A monster like a centaur is, if you want to be precise, a bovine in human shape, and the correct way to see it is as a cow rather than a person. An ogre belongs in almost exactly the same family. More than anything, ogre meat is wonderfully chewy and delicious.
Not that the meat was the only thing making my mouth water.
"Tra-la-la. Happy butchering time."
Carving up that enormous body took quite a while, but the byproducts that came out of it made me happy.
"Heh heh heh."
Meat, hide, bone, blood. I tucked every last scrap thriftily into my inventory, then offered a brief moment of silence over the spot where the ogre had stood.
"I'll eat well."
So it really had been nothing special. If I hadn't had an SSS+ close-combat weapon ability. If I hadn't had Leap Slash. If I hadn't had Two-Fold Strike. Could I have taken an ogre down this easily? That was a question I couldn't answer so readily. Overwhelming attack power, enough to punch through an ogre's hide and sever the vital neck within three seconds, and the Agility that decided how many of those strikes I could land. Add a movement skill that could carry me to the ogre's throat in a single bound, and of course it had been easy. I possessed, without a single piece missing, every element required to perfectly counter the ogre's one and only advantage.
"I almost feel bad for the corrupted ogre. If running into a ten-year Farming World veteran counts as a crime, then I suppose that's the crime."
For a moment, I found myself weighing an SSS+ summon against close-combat weapons. What if I had chased the romance of it and picked the SSS+ summon instead? Would my SSS+ summon, still nothing but a little squirt, have won a straight fight against an ogre? And Ruru's Previous Master, the former master of the Rift Dimension — could SSS+ Magic have taken an ogre down? With only two skills? By the time you reached something like a Level 4 or Level 5 Biome, those paths might display flashier, more devastating power than an SSS+ close-combat weapon. But right here, right now, in the Level 0 Biome and nowhere else, the close-combat weapon I had chosen was stronger than any other ability.
I had forgotten my original purpose entirely, and somewhere in the middle of throwing myself into the ogre hunt, I found myself standing before a tree as vast as a world tree.
"So this is the one."
The Corrupted Tree. Blackened from the chaos energy it had drunk down, it was pouring out a foul aura that made it obvious the rot ran all the way through from the core. I looked around. No S-rank ogre in sight, from what I could tell. Did I really need to wait? The quest was to remove this tree anyway. The corrupted ogre wouldn't vanish just because I cut the tree down, so clearing the quest first and dealing with the ogre afterward was a perfectly valid approach. That was how this game had always worked. Monsters that guard a resource. Slipping past the monster and quietly taking the resource was one of the orthodox plays.
I raised my sword and cut into the tree.
Skreeeeech—!
I was cutting a tree, and it rang like steel. It felt far harder than an ogre's hide. I drove a twelve-strike finisher into the exact same spot, and the trunk gave way by barely a handspan. Was this even the right way to do it? At this rate I could spend hours at the nonsense and still never fell a trunk this thick. There had to be a weak point somewhere on the tree, something that would actually let me bring it down. I was about to move and look for it.
"Oh."
Boom!
An instinctive warning flared, and I abandoned the spot at once. Something enormous crashed down exactly where I had been standing. An ogre, a little larger than the young one. Even having dodged it, the sight of that full body weight driving straight down was chilling. My Endurance was S-rank and I had armor on besides, but the young ogre alone had weighed more than six hundred and fifty pounds. If this even bigger one had come down on top of me, I probably would have ended my life flattened into a strip of dried fish.
Yeah. I really would have died. On the stats alone, it was my equal. Worse, the Natural Recovery passive the young ogre had carried, this bastard held at S+ rank.
◈ Greatly increases natural life recovery in proportion to the Endurance stat. (Current: S+, +1,500%)
◈ Greatly increases damage reduction in proportion to the Endurance stat. (Current: S+, +65%)
◈ Grants a grace period to every injury of fatal severity or less, in proportion to the Endurance stat. (Current: S+, 10 seconds)
Fortunately — and I use the word loosely — there were no added options, but the numbers themselves were so obscene I wondered if I had misread them. The young ogre's regeneration had already been enough to make me click my tongue, so I didn't need to sit around wondering how much better it would heal at 1,500 percent. The 65 percent damage reduction, though, was a figure that creased my face all on its own.
If the perfect counter to the young ogre had been my overwhelming damage punching straight through its damage reduction, then this could only be an overwhelming amount of damage reduction built to stop that overwhelming damage. Only 35 percent of my damage would land. With that, I would have to sever the neck before it regenerated — and even after the neck came off, I would have to keep the corrupted ogre from sticking it back on within ten seconds. And on top of all that, it was fast.
Whoosh—
I drove in a test cut.
Papapapapap—!
The blade did bite into the neck. Maybe it was because I had just tried cutting the Corrupted Tree, but set beside that, this was practically gentle. Even so, unlike the young ogre, whose thick neck I had severed in two strikes, this one wasn't even a fifth of the way through. Damage reduction had climbed by 30 percent, and the power of my skills had dropped by more than half. More precisely, it would be fairer to say the wound was being cut and healing at the same time, rather than simply being halved.
If I could unleash the skill five times in a row all at once, I could probably sever it. But Leap Slash was not the kind of skill I could stack five times, or ten, in a single instant just because I had the mana. There was no cooldown, and yet the time required to actually perform the action still existed. When I swung the sword in the middle of the skill, a power called mana — something that surpassed physical law — went into the strike. There was no extra slack that would let me go beyond that.
"This won't work."
I had the feeling I wouldn't be coasting to a free win the way I had against the young ogre.