[Hawk, you know what to do. Find us some high danger threats within the zone. As many in high Ascended and Commander as possible.] Karl instructed.
[Four hundred metres north. If you start moving now, you will meet with a lone Commander Rank Troll, thing. Maybe it’s not a troll? Sure is ugly.]
“The scout says that we’ve got a large Troll four hundred metres north. If we move fast, we can intercept it before it gets to a regular patrol group.” Karl informed the gathered leadership group.
“I didn’t hear anything on the radio.” The High Priest replied, with a gesture to his earbud.
“Mental communication between me and my Dragon Hawk. The Troll is moving fast, so I need to go if we’re going to intercept it.” Karl replied.
Tessa threw herself onto Thor’s back and grabbed the short spikes on his ridge.
“Off we go.”
And Thor took off in the direction of the threat, with Karl chasing him, and a small group of the Church Guard in hot pursuit. They had to see this battle, to ensure that nobody was lying or bringing in bodies from other zones. It seemed unlikely that this team would, when they had the power that they did, but anything was possible.
Karl overtook Thor as the beast had to slow down to avoid running into trees or throwing Tessa off, and was the first to come across what Hawk had called a Troll.
That might be what it was, but Karl had never seen anything quite that large and ugly before. It was six metres tall, covered in moss and where there was skin visible, it was pustulent and rotted. It almost looked like it was undead, but Karl could see the wounded areas knitting themselves together even as they rotted and fell apart in other areas.
That was definitely not something that he wanted to fight in close combat.
[Hawk, light this thing up. I think a little fire will improve the situation.] Karl instructed.
The barrage of fireballs seemed to sink into the creature and vanish, but they left smoking craters in the skin, which was slowly closing the gaps as Karl watched.
[We need more attack power.] Karl informed the others.
Rae was as reluctant to touch that thing as Karl was, but to her credit, she did come out to fight, and brought the Golems with her.
They shredded the corpulent flesh from the Troll, leaving rancid piles on the ground, and the creature began to gurgle some sort of war cry.
“Keep at it, the more flesh we rend off, the slower it is regenerating.” Karl cheered the others on as he used [Shred] to hack a large portion of arm fat off, trying to determine where the actual muscles were.
Hawk lit the ground on fire, burning the disgusting piles of flesh, just as the Church Guard arrived on the scene.
“Dragons, what in the world is that smell?” One of them asked, as he activated a glowing golden circle, which did as much to burn away the severed flesh as Hawk’s fire.
It also caused the outer layer of the Troll to begin smoking, and the plant life to burn away, showing the disgusting body underneath.
Like Karl, everyone was throwing ranged attacks at the beast, while Rae and her Golems did their best to tear away bits of flesh with their forelimbs.
“Call back your spider and have her stand in the purifying light. That Troll is infected with the swamp blight, and it kills almost anything in minutes. Trolls just regenerate too fast for it to kill them, so it’s been wandering around blind.” The leader of the reinforcements insisted.
Rae didn’t need to be told twice. Before he even stopped speaking, she was next to the Guard in his cleansing light, but not close enough that she might bump into him and transfer the filth.
The Golems had no need to slow down. They weren’t living things, and the beast was incapable of hitting them as they tore its back apart.
“Is it just me, or is this thing actually happy to die?” Karl asked as the Church Guard focused their attacks to take out the creature’s chest.
The Guard shook his head. “It’s trying to get us to cut enough of the corruption away that it can cure itself. Trolls of that sort don’t die so easily. If you don’t burn the bodies, they’ll come back from just a hand eventually.”
So, the disease was more susceptible to destruction than the troll itself was, and once they had burned all the infected body parts away, it might theoretically be back to full strength.
[Hawk, keep using fire. The troll can’t regenerate fire damage as well.] Karl instructed.
As they fought, more of the fast-moving warriors were joining the battle, encircling the troll and hacking away at it, while making sure the ground stayed burning, so that the severed flesh didn’t try to regenerate into more blighted trolls.
Slowly, painfully slowly, the creature was brought down, hacked into tiny bits, and then the bits were burned to ash to ensure that it didn’t regenerate.
“Well, that was unexpectedly disgusting. Even after burning and purifying it, the area still smells horrific.” Karl noted.
“It will take a bit more cleansing before any of us can leave the area. Especially for the Cerro and the spider, who actually came into contact with it.” Tessa explained.
She was still riding Thor, and hadn’t gotten down when he had charged into battle, she had decided that it was better to give him combat instructions instead, to avoid having him dig his horns into the beast and end up infected himself.
He had fought the whole battle with his tail, and with Tessa enhancing him while she rode on his back, but mostly they remained at the edge of the battlefield, where Earthquake could reach the target, but they wouldn’t suffer any splash damage.
The battle was long finished before the rest of the team made it to them, and the Guard Commander gave his report to the High Priest, who cast an additional cleansing on the area, as the creature was Commander Rank, and might have survived the flames of lower ranked Elites somehow.
“This is worse than I feared. The blight is a terrible thing, but more importantly, we don’t know where it started, or how many other creatures it might have spread the disease to.” The High Priest sighed.
The Captain of Karl’s team nodded gravely. “That sounds like a real conundrum for the Church. This is the first signs I’ve seen of the blight here as well, but it’s only our third day. Would you like to split a team off to search for the source while we deal with the other ranking monsters that the Dragon Hawk has reported?
There are still more threats that the Awakened Rank teams here are not prepared to deal with, and plenty more that the Common Grade teams with Awakened leadership won’t be able to deal with at all.”
The High Priest shook his head. “I will call in a scout team to these coordinates, and they will track the blighted troll back to its source. They have the skills to do it. But we are assigned to you and your team until the other matter is settled.”