For the better part of around four hours, I went about the motions to acclimate my body to the immense strength dwelling within my small stature.
Starting with sprints, I ran back and forth roughly a hundred times until I felt comfortable that I wouldn’t bite the dust by taking sharp turns; from there, I moved on to executing basic combat maneuvers.
By the end of the allotted time, I had self-imposed; I was fully comfortable in my skin again and in peak fighting shape, albeit hungry as hell.
So after a quick snack, I found myself standing before the Barrier leading into the depths of the Caverns, eye to eye with two hungry-ass injured beasties.
’Hm, there’s no point in trying to avoid direct contact because even with my explosion in strength, these two technically have higher stats than me. Regardless, they are exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated, so it shouldn’t be too tough.’
Wielding my dagger in my left hand and the sword in my right, I slowly paced up and down the edge of the Barrier, causing the tired Ferretmoles to mimic my movements with bloodshot feral eyes.
"Right, let’s do this then," shifting all my weight to my right foot, I shot forward, running full speed at the wall on the opposite side of the tunnel, riling up the two monsters in the process as they pushed on through the fatigue to keep pace.
Unfortunately for them, since they were too dumb to understand my rudimentary idea, neither one of them understood that although the wall usually meant being on a collision course, for someone like me, it was merely an obstacle.
Rushing forward at my new top speed, I easily out-sped the two tired monsters, and with a faint tapping sound, I ran up the wall several steps before crouching and kicking forward with all my might, crossing the Barrier, and diving head first at the fastest of the two monsters.
Due to their size and weight, it wasn’t easy for the monster to turn on a dime or stop its body from lurching forward, so before its peasized brain could even register what happened, pain flooded its system as my weapons buried themselves up to their hilts into its basketball-sized eyes.
With complete focus, I relished in the soft squishing sensation of cutting through gooey flesh; my dagger easily moved around; however, in the case of my sword, I felt the resistance of something hard, indicating I had dug straight through the eye and into its skull.
The reason was simple: the moment my sword dug into the beast’s eye, it had begun thrashing in anguish, manipulating my angle of attack and, as such, forcing the sword tip to curve upward into the roof of its skull.
So, by the time my dagger bit into its other eye, I was already in an awkward position with my right hand and thus had to be satisfied by wiggling around my dagger as my chance for an instant kill was already gone.
As I said, these dumb beasts had peasized brains, so although their head was mainly filled with fluid for who knows what reason, the skull of the creature was incredibly hard and, as such, acted like a stone block stopping my weapon from advancing further into the Ferretmoles head which was easily twice the size of my entire body.
Snapping my head to the side so I could look at the incoming wall, I whipped my body left and right with such force that, for a moment, I was able to control the direction my pseudo-mount was moving. In a twisted display, I used my two weapons to alter the trajectory of the Ferretmole, leading it away from the safezone and toward the bowels of the Caverns.
But right as I did, I suddenly found myself fighting back the urge to burst out laughing because although I had technically saved one of my opponents from slamming into the jagged rocky terrain, the other wasn’t nearly as lucky.
BOOM
YELP YELP YELP
The first sound was akin to throwing a pack of soggy noodles at a wall as the second Beta-Ranked Ferretmole crashed belligerently into the wall, followed by its sad and injured whimpers.
’Too funny, heh heh,’ shaking my head in an attempt to regain my combat awareness, I pushed my body up, using my weapons like a vaulting bar, I propped my feet on the top of the monster’s face, and with all the strength in my arms, I slammed down, causing the half a ton creature in my grasp to smack its chin into the ground with such force that amazingly enough the tip of my sword pierced through the top of its skull allowing a weak fountain of blood to jet out the top of the injured Ferretmole’s head.
Knowing it wasn’t nearly enough to kill my opponent, I released my sword, Augmented my arm, and started raining a hellacious number of powerful punches in the center of the wounded monster’s face, each one bringing with it a loud smacking sound as I delivered hundreds of pounds of force onto the furry flesh.
By the point my 15th fist fall occurred, I was able to feel the fragmented bone concaving around the point of impact, and with my 16th and final blow, my fist burst through what remained of the monster’s hardest bone.
As a result of my fist breaking into its dome, I was drenched in gore from its head while I thrashed my hand around inside until I felt the sensation of XP fleeing my opponent.
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Taking a deep breath and exerting some effort, I extricated my sword and dagger from the dead monster and, with a small flourish and quick slash, freed them of any vicious fluid before turning my attention to the final monster who was splayed out in a comical position with its face down ass up.
"Well shit, that was easier than I expected…" I muttered while shaking my body like a dog who just jumped out of a lake and wiping my face with a clean rag from my inventory.
Ignoring the massive corpse, I had just created, I casually walked over to the still-wimpering Ferretmole and, with a couple of slashes, ended its life even faster than I had the first monster before checking my XP gains and clicking my tongue in annoyance.