Chapter 8: The Troll's Toll
The massive trolls lumber before Stormveil's gate like mobile siege engines that had forgotten their original purpose. Chains thick as ship cables bound them to carts loaded with corpses—not fresh kills, but the accumulated harvest of weeks spent clearing roads for Lord Godrick's convenience. Their faces held the blank patience of draft animals, eyes dulled by captivity and routine brutality.
Gara watched from cover, analyzing weaknesses with the cold precision of someone who'd learned to see combat as a series of solvable equations. The creatures were massive—easily twenty feet tall, with reach to match. Slow but devastating, high health pools, probably vulnerable to sustained damage against their legs. Classic boss design, really.
"Just like Dark Souls," he muttered, then caught himself with a wince. "Except those hits actually shatter bones. And there's no health bar floating above their heads."
The trolls ignored his presence, focused entirely on their grim work of corpse disposal. One of them lifted a body from the cart with surprising gentleness—a young woman who might have been a merchant or pilgrim before whatever killed her had claimed priority over whatever dreams had brought her to the Lands Between. The troll placed her carefully in a growing pile, treating the dead with more respect than the living usually managed.
They're not evil, Gara realized with uncomfortable clarity. They're slaves. Prisoners forced into labor, doing what they have to do to survive another day.
The knowledge should have changed his tactical calculus. Should have sent him looking for alternative routes that didn't require adding two more tragedies to Stormveil's collection. Instead, he found himself weighing their rune value against the energy cost of fighting them.
Big creatures, probably worth significant experience. Challenging but manageable with proper stat allocation. Risk versus reward favors engagement.
His hand moved to his weapon while his conscience staged a futile protest. The trolls weren't threatening him, weren't even aware of his presence. They were just existing, trying to survive in a world that had reduced them to tools for other people's ambitions.
But runes were runes. Power was power. And power was the only currency that mattered in a realm where everything wanted him dead.
Gara shifted his stats to maximum Strength and charged.
The first troll's foot came down like a falling building, cratering the ground where he'd been standing with force that would have reduced him to paste if his enhanced reflexes hadn't carried him clear. The creature's roar shook dust from Stormveil's walls—not rage, exactly, but confusion. Why was this tiny thing attacking when it could simply walk around?
His sword struck the troll's ankle with the force of amplified desperation. The blade bit deep, drawing golden blood that flowed like liquid sunlight, but the wound was proportionally insignificant—like a paper cut on a giant. The troll shifted its weight, and suddenly Gara was dodging a stomp that would have made the cliff fall look like gentle exercise.
Death #74: Stormhill Troll. Crushed by stomp. 1/10 - should have expected the retaliation.
He respawned with adjustments already calculated: endurance priority for sustained mobility, dexterity for precision strikes, just enough vigor to survive glancing blows. The second attempt lasted longer but ended the same way when the troll's massive hand swatted him into a wall with casual force.
Death #75: Stormhill Troll. Swatted like insect. 2/10 - really need to work on spatial awareness.
The third approach revealed the solution: patience. These weren't video game bosses with scripted patterns and convenient openings. They were living creatures with realistic limitations—fatigue, balance issues, finite attention spans. Gara shifted all stats to Endurance and Dexterity, abandoning power in favor of sustainability.
The resulting fight lasted twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes of constant movement, of striking ankles and retreating before retaliation could connect. Twenty minutes of watching a captured giant slowly bleed to death from a thousand cuts while its companion watched in helpless confusion. Twenty minutes of systematic execution disguised as honorable combat.
When the first troll finally collapsed, its death rattle carried something that sounded disturbingly like relief.
The runes that flowed into Gara were substantial—thousands of points of concentrated life force that made his muscles sing and his vision sharpen. But they tasted of exhaustion and resignation, of a creature that had welcomed death as escape from bondage.
He stood over the corpse, panting from sustained exertion, and realized that the second troll hadn't moved. It stared at its fallen companion with eyes that held too much understanding, too much grief for something supposedly mindless.
It was just standing there. Waiting. It could have attacked while I was fighting the first one, could have ended this easily. Instead, it watched its friend die and did nothing.
The moral calculus shifted with uncomfortable clarity. These weren't monsters—they were prisoners. Slaves who'd been pressed into service by forces beyond their control, trying to survive in a system that viewed them as expendable tools.
And he'd killed one of them for experience points.
Scouting revealed alternatives he'd ignored in his rush to test enhanced capabilities. A narrow path wound around the troll position, steep and treacherous but definitely navigable. Twenty minutes of careful climbing versus twenty minutes of systematically murdering a captive giant.
The completionist in him screamed protests—that was significant experience walking away, runes that could fuel meaningful character progression. But looking at the surviving troll's grief made the mathematical arguments feel hollow.
For the first time since arriving here, I choose efficiency over power.
The side path proved challenging but manageable. Rocky scrambles that tested his enhanced Dexterity, narrow ledges that required careful balance, exposure to weather that would have been problematic before his stat improvements. But no deaths, no moral compromises, no runes that tasted of unnecessary tragedy.
The rune hunger whispers it's a mistake, he realized as he bypassed the troll entirely. Part of me wants to go back, wants to finish what I started. The part that's learned to see everything as fuel for the machine I'm becoming.
The surviving troll watched him pass with eyes that held gratitude and wariness in equal measure. When Gara nodded acknowledgment, the creature nodded back—a gesture of respect between beings who'd chosen not to kill each other when killing would have been easier.
It was a small thing. Probably meaningless in the broader context of cosmic war and divine politics. But it felt like the first genuinely human choice he'd made since awakening in Limgrave.
The feeling lasted until he reached Stormveil's entrance proper.
A Godrick Knight stood guard at the main gate, resplendent in golden armor that probably cost more than most people earned in lifetime. His stance radiated arrogant confidence—chin up, shoulders back, weapon held with the casual expertise of someone who'd never met a problem that couldn't be solved with superior breeding and expensive equipment.
"Hold, Tarnished," the knight commanded, his voice carrying the kind of authority that assumed obedience as natural law. "This castle is under Lord Godrick's protection. State your business or prepare to be removed."
Gara tried for diplomacy. "Look, I just need to get through. I'm not here to cause trouble or steal anything. Can we just... not fight? Please?"
The knight's laughter was crystalline and sharp. "A coward seeks entry to Lord Godrick's domain? How amusing. Perhaps you'd prefer to crawl through the sewers with the rest of the refuse?"
Professional pride warred with tactical wisdom. The smart play was to accept the insult and look for alternative routes. The human response was to educate an aristocratic bully about the wages of arrogance.
The knight drew his sword mid-sentence.
The blade took Gara's head off with surgical precision, the knight's follow-through so perfect it might have been choreographed. Apparently, diplomacy was a one-way street in Godrick's territory.
Death #76: Godrick Knight. Beheaded mid-conversation. 3/10 - really should have expected that.
The second approach abandoned subtlety in favor of speed. If conversation was impossible, then conversation wasn't necessary. Gara charged the moment he respawned, sword already drawn, stats shifted toward maximum aggression.
The knight's spear punched through his sternum before he'd covered half the distance.
Death #77: Godrick Knight. Spear thrust through chest. 4/10 - adequate technique, poor positioning on my part.
The third attempt required innovation. Raw speed and power hadn't worked—the knight was simply too skilled, too experienced, too well-equipped for conventional tactics. But Gara had advantages no normal warrior possessed: perfect memory of the knight's patterns, unlimited attempts to refine his approach, and the ability to reshape his capabilities mid-combat.
He began the engagement in balanced configuration—decent speed, adequate defense, respectable offense. Nothing that would alarm an experienced fighter, nothing that suggested unusual capabilities. The knight advanced with textbook form, confident in his superiority over another desperate Tarnished.
Halfway through the knight's opening combination, Gara shifted every available stat point into Strength.
His muscles swelled with unnatural power, bones creaking under the sudden redistribution of mass and capability. The sensation was nauseating—like his entire skeleton was being rebuilt on the fly—but the results were undeniable.
His mace "Trusty Stapler" connected with the knight's chestplate with force that rewrote local acoustics. Metal crumpled like paper, ribs shattered like kindling, and something that had been human suddenly wasn't anymore.
The visceral crunch made Gara retch behind his helmet, but the runes that flowed into him were substantial enough to justify the technique. The knight dissolved into golden light that tasted of arrogance and expensive wine, leaving behind only memories of superior breeding that hadn't quite been superior enough.
Statistical superiority beats technical skill, he noted while his enhanced Strength faded back to normal parameters. But the physical cost of rapid stat shifting is significant. Nausea, disorientation, muscle strain. Need to account for that in future tactical planning.
He'd also need to account for the fact that he'd just discovered how to become superhumanly strong on demand, how to reshape his body's fundamental capabilities through force of will. The implications were staggering—and terrifying.
Standing in Stormveil's entrance hall, surrounded by grafted corpses hanging from walls like obscene decorations, Gara muttered the only appropriate response: "I've made a huge mistake."
Behind him, Torrent refused to enter the castle proper. The spirit steed had limits, apparently, and those limits included places where sanity went to die in industrial quantities.
Smart horse.
The entrance hall stretched before him like the throat of some architectural beast, its walls decorated with bodies that had been incorporated into the stonework through Godrick's particular brand of artistic expression. The air smelled of old blood and fresh terror, of experiments that had gone wrong in ways that made wrongness itself seem insufficient to describe the results.
Seventy-seven deaths, Gara thought, checking his mental tally. Seventy-seven lessons in pain, each one carving away another piece of whatever I used to be. But I'm stronger now. Smarter. More capable. The question is: more capable of what?
The castle's depths waited ahead, promising fresh horrors and corresponding opportunities for growth. Each monster would teach him something new about violence. Each death would refine his understanding of the world's cruel mathematics. Each respawn would bring him closer to whatever he was becoming.
The only question was whether that destination was worth the journey—or whether the thing that arrived would still be human enough to care about the answer.
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