Troll Tussle
Two months after the Greenskin Genocide, as I had been calling it, I saw Green Bean. Winter had passed, so the behemoth of a bear was out and about, hunting for food.
I avoided him and watched from a distance.
He was sitting in a glade just outside my territory, muching on the head of a Troll.
Scary.
Trolls were powerful creatures, to me. They didn't burn, their skin was too thick to pierce, and they were immune to poison. Not to mention their freakish strength and speed, which was completely out of proportion to their weight.
Like a magical version of cockroaches, they'd won the evolutionary lottery. And in this forest, they were the undisputable predators.
Or at least they were before Green Bean showed up, casually ripped one's head off, and started chowing down.
Yeah. I'd defeated the Greenskins and destroyed their village, but that had required careful observation, planning, and many, many spears. If I were to fight Green Bean, who was much stronger than any tribe of Greenskins, I would almost certainly die, regardless of any plans I made.
Well... if I had to kill him, how would I do it?
I couldn't get close, since he had that paralyzing roar. I suppose I could just use teleportation to move, but I'd rather not be paralyzed in the first place.
That left long-range attacks and traps. Long range attacks weren't likely to pierce its thick hide, so that left traps.
How would I go about using traps to kill Green Bean?
An incendiary trap? I didn't know if Green Bean was flammable.
An extremely deep pitfall? Maybe.
Suffocation? Probably my best bet. Every animal needed to breathe in some way. It was just a matter of how long they could hold their breath for.
Well, there wasn't much use thinking about it. Green Bean wasn't causing me problems at the moment, and while I disliked the bear, a true conflict between us would be too dangerous for my tastes.
Instead of Green Bean, I focused on the Trolls. Unlike the green bear, those trolls were causing me trouble.
Similarly to the Greenskins, a few groups of trolls had been edging in on my territory. I'd identified three so far, and had named them according to which direction they were in relation to my territory.
There was the Northwestern group, which was made up of three trolls, two males and a female. There was the Northern group, a group of four, two males and two females.
And then there was the West-Southwest group, by far the largest. It was made up of seven trolls, and its leader was much larger and powerful than the rest.
None of this was good. All of those groups were slowly moving into my territory, hunting and killing prey, and unlike with the Greenskins, they weren't nearly as easy to kill.
The silver lining was that the trolls were nowhere near as smart or organized as the Greenskins. They had groups, not tribes. They hunted alone, rather than in groups. They rarely used weapons, and the few who did only knew how to use clubs. Plus, they were carnivores, so at least the plants and fungi in my territory were safe.
Still, I couldn't tolerate Trolls in my area. They made things too dangerous. So I needed to figure out how to get rid of them.
Hmm...
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I stared down from my tree-branch at the troll beneath me. From nine meters up, I'd dropped a boulder on the thing's head, and it still wasn't dead.
How tough were these fuckers?!
It was rubbing its head with a stubby, meaty hand. It's beady little eyes darted around, looking for whatever had hit it. It had a potbelly that I could see protruding from my position above it.
The beast reminded me a little of Uncle Vernon.
...
...
...
Well now I had to kill it.
I floated another boulder above the troll with telekinesis, and let it drop. Then another, and another, until I'd exhausted all the boulders I had with me.
This seemed to have more of an effect. One after another, the boulders struck the troll's head, each doing more damage than the last. The head began deforming, and was finally crushed.
The troll's body swayed, and fell to the forest floor with a thunderous thump that I could feel all the way from my spot in the tree.
<Level 19 -> Level 20>
<Telekinesis II Lvl.2 -> Telekinesis II Lvl.3>
Nice.
Now I had to do it another thirteen times.
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There weren't that many boulders in the forest, so I ended up having to recycle a few. I was honestly glad that I had telekinesis, because although months of living in this forest had made me dirtier than an earthworm, the thought of touching a rock covered in troll brain-matter genuinely made me cringe and wrinkle my nose.
Trolls were disgusting creatures. Likely an evolutionary defense-mechanism of some sort. One that worked well, as it was so repulsive.
Using the boulder-drop method, I'd managed to kill off four more trolls. That had gotten rid of the Northern group and part of the Northwestern group, but there were still eight more running around.
Disposing of the bodies was difficult. After all, they weren't flammable. In the end, I just buried them near a patch of Killshrooms, knowing the fungi took well to corpses.
Mushrooms grow on dead things. A law of decomposers.
---------
Unlike with the Greenskins, I didn't feel bad for killing the trolls. Perhaps I should have, since they were technically alive and sentient to a degree but... they just weren't human-like enough for me to empathize with them.
Sure, they were humanoid, but that was about it.
Trolls lacked a culture. They lacked a language. They lacked any form of society, besides that of rudimentary group hierarchy dynamics. For all intents and purposes, they were animals that just happened to be shaped like humans. Rabid beasts, not even at the monkey's level of intelligence.
So I didn't feel bad about killing them. Not as bad as I did with the Greenskins.
This is what I told myself as I dropped some more boulders from the sky.
The troll below me bellowed, swatting at the odd things that kept crashing onto his head. It sniffed around, trying to find me.
It seemed to be picking up my scent, so I teleported to a new spot and began hurling more boulders at it.
It screamed some more, but it could neither find me, or escape me. As a result, it died to repeated boulder-impacts almost an hours later.
This was my seventh troll. And coincidentally, the last member of the Northwestern group.
Now that the chaff had been taken care of, I had to deal with the strongest of the three groups, the West-Southwest group.
I teleported back through the trees to my home. I had to strategize.
---------
Over the months, my tree-branch home had changed and developed. I had dug out places to put things and places to do things.
A rudimentary cooking station leaned against a stone-support place. A storage-room dug into the tree-trunk was filled with mushrooms. A similar storage room sat next to it, filled with sticks to turn into spears.
And hanging off the sides of the giant tree branch, were plants, sitting in beds of dirt, contained by carved wood and stone. My little garden.
I'd created the garden out of boredom. I'd built it in the time between my attack on the Greenskins and the advent of the trolls. My thought process hadd been a bit like this:
'I have the Gardening Skill, so I should make a garden.'
So I did.
I started with carving flowerpots, filling them with dirt, and then haphazardly leaving them around my living space. And it had worked, for a few weeks. But then I realized that they unnecessarily took up room, so I remodeled them to hang off the side of the branch instead.
So now I had flowers growing off the side of my tree branch home. They were colorful, healthy, and calm.
Violets. Marigolds. Snapdragons. Or that's what I thought they were. I was never much of a plant buff.
As I smelled the flowers, I thought about how to go about killing off the West-Southwest troll group. The strongest group. The one that I would need to actually plan for.
To start, I should define what they are, and how they're composed.
From what I'd seen over the past week of surveillance, the West-Southwest group was made up of seven trolls. Two females, five males. And one of the males, the leader, was more giant than troll.
Like, seriously. Most trolls were three to four meters tall, but this one was over five. Once again, the square-cube law meant nothing to magical creatures.
I'd been calling this guy Goliath, for obvious reasons. He was big and strong, and I wasn't going to be killing him in a fair fight.
If I waltzed into the West-Southweest group and tried to punch him, I would be killed very quickly, by both him, and the other six trolls. I just couldn't beat seven trolls in a straight fight.
And that's where strategy comes in.
As I thought about the creature, my mind wandered to my last encounter of him.
It was a few days ago. I'd been chain-teleporting through the forest, keeping eyes out for interesting plants, animals, and creatures. And trolls, of course.
I ended up coming across the West-Southwest group, who had been steadily making their way East across my territory. I hid in the shadows of the treetops, observing them through the darkness.
They had been lumbering across the forest, growing, grunting, and howling at each other. It wasn't a language. Just noises, designed to express happiness or unhappiness. And occasionally intimidate.
In the middle of their group was Goliath, shaking the earth as he walked.
He noticed that one of the males was walking too close to a female, so he reached over and bashed the other troll's head with his fist, giving a loud, mighty howl. The troll, once recovered, scrambled away whimpering, making sure to stay away from that female.
It was like they were gorillas or something.
I wondered if this was what a zoo was like.
I kept watching for the next hour, making note of their group-dynamics.
Goliath was the biggest, the strongest, and the most dominant. The other trolls did what he said, or they got beaten. He kept the group together, working for him, and as coordinated as a group of trolls could be.
The two females were second to Goliath on the hierarchy. Not only were they themselves rather strong, but anyone who pissed them off would get a smack from Goliath.
The four other males were the lowest on the hierarchy. They were only really there to follow orders. They squabbled among themselves frequently over things like food and position, but were passive when hunting, or in front of the females or Goliath.
Given this information, my strategy became clearer. I needed to kill Goliath first.
Without Goliath keeping the group coordinated, they would become a disorganized mob and probably split ways, since no single troll besides Goliath was strong enough to keep the others in line. With their group fractured into multiple smaller groups that no longer coordinated together, it would be that much easier to pick them off individually.
Divide and conquer.
But that was assuming I could kill Goliath in the first place.
One would think that as a creature's size increased, its durability, strength, and mobility would decrease, due to the square-cube law. This was not the case for Goliath.
I'd seen him hunting. He was faster than the other trolls, easily crashed through tree trunks without a scratch, and could pulverize a two-meter-diameter boulder in a single strike.
Crazy physical feats.
I couldn't crush him with boulders like I had other trolls. I couldn't stab him with my spears, as I had the greenskins. And I couldn't cut his head off, like I sometimes did with Speedfowl.
So what did that leave? Suffocation? Poison? Starvation?
Suffocation might work. But I'd have to wait until he slept.
Hmm... this could work.
---------
It was afternoon, a week later, when I finally found myself approaching the snoring mounds of putrid flesh.
Seven trolls, lined up in front of me, fast asleep.
Trolls were nocturnal, and slept during the day. I knew from observation that the West-Southwest group tended to sleep from anywhere between six to eight hours. Today, they had gone to sleep about four hours ago, so I had four to two hours to act.
I crept around the bodies towards the largest one, my stealth skill kicking in. An ugly musk filled my nose as I got closer and closer.
Soon, I was near Goliath. Even laying on his back, he was almost my height. His head came up to my chest, and his disgusting breath buffeted my face each time he snored.
I positioned myself over his head, and took out my tool-of-choice for his imminent death.
It was a wad of plants. Sticky plants, designed specifically to stick, and stay stuck, even under the effects of lubricants.
I waited for Goliath to snore one more time. When his mouth finally opened again, I stuffed the sticky wad down his throat, careful to get it in the right tube. In this case, his large size was a good thing, since it meant my arms had enough room to make it down his mouth.
As soon as the wad of plants was in place, I teleported to a shadowy tree-branch nearby to observe the results of my work.
And not a moment too soon. Right as I teleported, Goliath's jaws snapped shut, nearly taking my arms off at the elbows. His eyes snapped open wide. He began trying to yell and roar, but his voice was choked and strangled from the plant-wad stuck in his windpipe.
The other trolls were roused by the noise he was making. They stumbled to their feet, toddling on over to him as he thrashed, looks of concern on their stupid, trollish faces.
But no matter how concerned they were, there was nothing they could do anymore. Hell, there was nothing 'I' could do, even if I'd somehow changed my mind and wanted to save the big lug.
Eventually, The Goliath of the trolls shuddered one last time, falling to the ground, his heart no longer beating.
He was probably dead. Hmm... Wait for it...
<Level 25 -> Level 26>
There it was.
Now I could say that Goliath was dead.
Did that mean that these trolls were Philistines? Was I David?
...
...
Nah.
------
Over the next few days, my prediction came true and the West-Southwest group fractured and split. The six trolls became two groups, one of three, one of two, and one loner.
I killed the loner first. Same boulder-drop method as last time.
Then the duo, a male and a female. The male died when I shoved a flame-enhanced piece of wood down its throat in a similar manner to what I did to Goliath. I was able to use my Firebending to keep the flame going, even though the troll's innards lacked oxygen for my fire to consume.
It was nice to know that the troll's insides were much more flammable than their outsides. Something to keep in mind, in case I needed to exterminate them again.
The day after that, I tracked down and killed the female, splattering her head across a tree with a horizontally propelled boulder. Due to my Telekinesis level increase, I'd graduated from just dropping boulders on people. Now I could throw them too.
I continued my killing spree until the end of the week. Just me, following after the troll-groups, picking them off one at a time, day after day.
Until there were none.