Crack!
Cra-ack—!
As the clash dragged on, the iron blade slowly began biting into the thick wooden club.
In the end, the ogre's wooden weapon was at a disadvantage and was chopped clean through by Aaron's sword.
The broken half spun away and crashed to the ground in the distance, kicking up a cloud of dust.
The ogre stared at the broken club in its hands, its vicious face going blank with confusion and shock as it involuntarily took a step back.
With a mind only a little sharper than a goblin's, it simply could not understand how this "weak human food" in front of it could have more strength than it did.
While the ogre stood there stunned, its chest completely exposed,
Aaron's eyes flashed. Ignoring the numbness in his arms, he tightened his grip on the hilt, angled the sword point up, and drove forward, ramming straight into the ogre's chest.
Pshhk!
The sharp tip punched into the rotten wound on its chest and, pushed by his charge and the upward thrust, drove straight into the spot where its left heart was.
"Pain… pain… RAARGH!"
The agony sent the ogre into a frenzy. "Food! Human food!"
Even with such a grievous wound, it still had the strength to lift both massive hands and claw down at Aaron's chest.
At this distance, there was almost no way to dodge.
But—
"Instant Reflection!"
A pale blue light flared over Aaron's body.
In the next moment,
his body snapped backward as if time had rewound, blinking back to the spot he had stood in just before his thrust, the blue light flickering out as he retreated.
Thud!
The ogre's huge hands slammed together with a muffled boom, its thick arms grasping at empty air.
As Aaron was yanked backward by Instant Reflection, his sword came free with him, tearing out of the ogre's chest. Blood gushed wildly from the wound.
In that state,
the searing pain wrung bestial roars and ragged gasps from the monster.
Even with its heart pierced, its powerful vitality kept it from dying on the spot. Staggering, it kept reaching toward Aaron, but in the end it crashed to the ground.
Boom.
Dust billowed up.
Even then,
its body still twitched and struggled weakly.
Seeing that,
Aaron did not step up to "finish it off." He had no intention of repeating Captain Dosari from the Rock party's mistake.
"Food fights back too," he said coldly, watching the ogre writhe in the dirt. "So you can go ahead and die now."
As the battle ended and his tension eased,
tss—
he drew in a sharp breath as the pain and numbness in his hands and arms washed over him, and a dull ache spread through his whole body.
These were clearly the aftereffects of Instant Reflection.
The martial art Instant Reflection forcibly snaps an unbalanced body or motion back to its pre-attack stance.
It is extremely effective for dodging counterattacks.
But this kind of unnatural, forced "reset" puts a real strain on the entire body.
He glanced at the HP line on his status panel.
His health had not dropped.
A thoughtful look crossed his eyes.
So the bodily damage from Instant Reflection does not reduce HP… or at least, it has not yet reached the threshold where it would.
Bzz—
"EXP +320."
The notification popped up on his panel.
"So it's dead."
Seeing the prompt, Aaron pulled his gaze away from the ogre's corpse.
"EXP: 1271/1500."
Wiping out a small goblin tribe plus one ogre had given him a big chunk of EXP.
After a brief rest, he shook out his arms as the numbness faded, then moved among the ogre and goblin corpses, cutting off their ears.
At the same time, he began searching the little camp.
As a former player, there was no way he would forget to look for loot.
Unfortunately,
after combing through the whole area, all he found was a mass of bones and scraps of rotten meat. There was nothing of value in the entire small goblin settlement.
He felt little disappointment; he had not expected to find anything precious here to begin with.
He walked over to the two remaining human corpses,
stood in silence for a moment, then sighed and turned away.
He did not dig a grave. There was no point.
It would only waste his strength, and in a forest like this, even if he buried the bodies, beasts would sniff them out and dig them up.
Unless he burned them to ash.
But lighting a fire in this dim forest would be far too conspicuous and would bring needless risk down on his own head.
Because here,
the true threat was not the goblins or ogres, but the troll tribes. They were the real masters of this region.
Night gradually fell.
Even by day, the thick canopy blocked most of the sunlight; now only a few scraps of moonlight slipped through the leaves.
The forest sank into near-total darkness, and the roars of beasts suddenly seemed much clearer.
In conditions where human vision was this poor,
without Night Vision or some other means of operating after dark, Aaron had no intention of moving around rashly.
He picked out a relatively thick tree,
climbed up to a sturdy branch, pulled the tough black robe he had bought over his whole body, and leaned against the trunk to rest.
To be honest, it was uncomfortable.
The branch was hard and dug into him, and the constant insects and beast calls kept his nerves strung tight.
"Still, there's a kind of bitter enjoyment in it."
Wrapped in the black robe, he tilted his head back to look at the bright moon and scattered stars through the leaves.
In the eastern outer reaches of the Great Forest of Tob, the only real nuisances were goblins and ogres. After this fight, he had a solid grasp of their fighting styles and strength.
They were troublesome, but not truly dangerous.
So although his nerves were somewhat taut, he did not feel much fear.
Instead, he calmly enjoyed the otherworldly moon.
"Compared to being a beast of burden in my last life, this dangerous life with power in my hands feels strangely solid."
"At least I know what I need to do each day, and what I'll be facing down the road."
The thought drifted through his mind.
But the moment he remembered the Great Tomb of Nazarick that would eventually descend,
the good mood that had just begun to rise inside him evaporated at once.
______
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