As soon as the stone broke the surface of the water three long fleshy projectiles shot out of the water in Warren’s direction. Luckily, my friend as holding his shield and was able to put it up in time to block them. From the shit eating grin on his face this was exactly what Warren had been expecting to happen, but it was clear that his HP had also taken a decent hit from his reckless actions because he quickly pulled a potion out of his Inventory and drank it.

“Jesus, Warren!” I shouted as three toads that came up to my waist jumped out of the water. “That was incredibly reckless.”

“Hey, it saved us time, didn’t it?’ he chuckled in reply as he deflected an attack with his shield.

I sighed in exasperation as we ran towards the toads which as I had expected turned out to be Javelin Toads. While two of them were only Level 4 there was one Level 6 and Warren shouted loudly to attract the attention of all of the toads as best as he could without a ranged Taunt Skill as he ran up causing the toad to launch its tongue at him again. Since I had expected this to happen, I had already activated my Barrier Skill and the spike-tipped tongue slammed into the wall of blue energy as Warren stepped aside so that the tongue missed him completely when the barrier broke and then smashed his glowing sceptre down on the fleshy tongue which was immediately retracted as the toads eyes bulged even further out of its head in pain.

“Nice one Zeke!” My friend laughed as he slammed his shield into the most powerful toad and activated his new Shield Pummel Skill for the first time bringing his arm around and smashing the side of his shield into the toad’s face. The toad flinched back from the sudden attack as its eyes turned bright red in anger but my friend had already twirled away and hit one of the other two toads with his now glowing sceptre with enough force to knock it back slightly before spinning around once again and using Shield Slam on the last toad to stun it.

Seeing this Kelly, Katy and I decided to focus on the toad that Warren had stunned, and bolts of blue energy as well as arrows shot over my shoulder as I approached. As I engaged the toad with my naginata I noticed something. Fighting the toads was much easier than fighting the Terror Birds was. Their attacks were powerful but extremely easy to dodge and since I was engaging them in melee, they couldn’t even fire their spike tipped tongues at me. This told me that they were smarter than they appeared and had obviously learnt their lesson after Warren had crushed the tongue of the larger toad.

The toads were also much easier targets to hit

Warren had a bit more difficulty dodging the attacks than I did but with his shield he didn’t fare any worse than I did and soon enough we were staring at the corpses of three toads. I sighed in exasperation as I turned to my friend who was whistling happily as he looted the other two toads.

“You know, if you were going to do something as stupid as that you could’ve at least told us,” I grumbled.

“What would’ve been the fun in that?” Warren chuckled. “Besides you two were taking way too long to work out what we were going to do. It all worked out alright in the end as well so why are you complaining?”

“Because if you’d given us a couple of minutes warning, we could’ve set up a trap and made things easier dear,” Kelly sighed as she shook her head in exasperation.

“Yeah but I was getting bored waiting,” Warren replied with a shrug. “Besides, we learned more about their capabilities this way anyway.”

I hated to admit it. Especially since Warren pulled stunts like this relatively often but he was right. We had learned more about the toads that we would have if we had actually been prepared so after glancing at Kelly who had the same long-suffering expression on her face that she usually did when Warren did stuff like this I sighed and looted the toad that I had killed.

I managed to find a strange fleshy orb that was labelled as a poison gland, some toad leather which was very weird to touch and one of the Soul Shards that I needed to complete the Quest that Kerr had given me when I used my Soul Harvest Skill. Once I had looted the toad that I had killed I also used my Skill on the other two and got another two Shards. I did have to try a couple of times to get a Soul Shard from the other toads but we needed to recover from the battle anyway so that didn’t matter that much. As t turned out the Soul Shards that I collected had a small Constitution Affinity and a small Agility Affinity which made sense considering the size of the frogs and the fact that they were able to move surprisingly quickly for short bursts by, you guessed it; hopping.

“Alright shall we move on to another area then?” I asked once I was done and the other two nodded in agreement.

“Say, Katy,’ Kelly said to my companion as we walked along a healthy distance from the shore of the swamp.

“Yeah?”

“Why is it that the Terror Birds that we killed gave us two Soul Points but the Javelin Toads which were similar Levels only gave us one?”

“Because the Terror Birds were rare mobs,” Katy replied with a smile. “In a lot of ways, you guys were really lucky to get the chance to fight them. Not only did you get more Soul Points and experience than if you’d fought against weaker monsters, but you also got to experience what fighting can really be like in this game.”

“We would’ve killed more monsters if we had fought weaker ones though,” Warren pointed out. “But I suppose that you’re right. Especially since we also got to have a look at some of the Skills that we could learn by watching Jameson and the others.”

“Plus, the money that we got from doing that Quest was way more than we would’ve gotten from just doing the normal Quests,” I pointed out.

“True,” Warren nodded. “Plus, we get to train with the guards now and that’s better than any other reward that we could’ve gotten.”

“Indeed,” Kay nodded. “There are other places where you can train in town, but they wouldn’t be as effective as training with the guards would be.”

“I’m also willing to bet that those other places don’t have Quests available like the guards do,” Kelly chuckled.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I was really lucky getting in good with them.”

“I still find it hilarious how good you are at finding special Quests and things like that,” Warren laughed before coming to a halt and holding up a hand as he looked out over the water.

Immediately we also came to a halt and prepared for a fight while Warren scanned the muddy water for whatever it was that he had seen. Slowly Warren reached down and picked up a rock while several glowing symbols appeared on the shoreline as Kelly used her new spell to set up traps on the battlefield.

As it turned out she could create multiple traps at once, but they took several seconds to become active and there was also a 3 minute cooldown for the spell so unless it was a boss fight she would probably only be able to use it once per fight.

As soon as Warren was certain that we were all ready for what he expected to happen next, he raised his shield and tossed the rock that he had picked up at the water again. Once again when the rock struck the water something exploded out of its depths but to our surprise it wasn’t a toad but something much more intimidating.

“Holy shit!’ Warren shouted as the massive croc charged into him completely obliterating the Barrier that I had put up and simply ignoring the mines that exploded underneath its feet. “Okay this thing is even bigger than I expected!”

Katy and Kelly opened fire, but their attacks didn’t seem to be doing much to the monster which came up to Warren’s shoulders and looked to be more than twice as long as my friend was tall. In fact, Katy’s arrows didn’t even penetrate its leathery hide and simply bounced off causing her to curse loudly before pulling out her specialised arrows in the hopes that they would actually be effective.

Meanwhile Warren was getting smacked around by the croc’s front claws. Thankfully, he was a little bit too quick for it to manoeuvre its massive jaws to bite him or we would really be screwed. However, the fact that none of our weapons were really able to do any damage to the croc was a problem and I considered the idea that we might just have to run away. There was no way that this thing would be able to catch us if we started running but I could see from the excited look on Warren’s face that he would stay behind even if the rest of us ran.

The crazy bastard had the same massive grin on his face that he usually did when he was tanking a boss in other games. I could also see that Kelly had a look of extreme concentration on her face as she fired bolts of blue energy at various parts of the monster’s body trying to find a weak point. Now that she had switched to her specialty arrows Katy was doing much the same thing but neither of them seemed to really be having any luck even when they used their Skills.

Not that I could really talk. Even though I was aiming at areas that should in theory be weaker than others like its joints and underbelly but the only thing that really seemed to do anything to it were my Skills and lightning magic. But even my Skills barely even managed to cut shallow grooves into its leathery flesh and didn’t even seem to reach the meat underneath and my magic only danced over its still wet flesh and damaged the softer parts of its body like its eyes and the inside of its mouth. In fact, so far, the tiny amount of damage my lightning magic was doing every time Jolt came off cooldown seemed to be doing the most damage by far.

After several minutes of attempting to penetrate the crocs tough skin with my naginata I backed away and cast my Lightning Stream spell. As the lightning flowed over the croc’s body, I slowly made my way closer to its head where most of the damage was being done.

The croc roared in pain as the lightning scorched its eyes and the inside of its mouth and started to turn towards me, but Warren was prepared for this and activated his Shield Pummel Skill again which distracted it enough that it continued to attack him instead of me.

Both Katy and Kelly kept up their own barrage of attacks while I channelled lightning magic into the crocs face which quickly began to blacken under the arcane assault. They still weren’t really doing any damage but hopefully that would change soon. It didn’t take long for me to run out of Spirit though, but before I did its eyes burst causing Warren to curse in disgust as he was sprayed with steaming vitreous fluid. Once I was out of Spirit, I was forced to return to attempting to penetrate the crocs hide with my naginata. Since I had already damaged the area behind its back knee that I was attacking I actually had some luck this time and when I hit meat the croc howled in pain and anger as it lurched sideways slamming its body into me with enough force that I was sent flying a few metres backwards and lost my naginata.

That single hit took almost half my health off but I had finally managed to open up a chink in its armour which Katy quickly took advantage of firing arrow after arrow into the small wound with impressive accuracy while Kelly rushed over to check on me after summoning a wall of earth between me and the croc which was still thrashing around like I had cut its leg off instead of giving it the equivalent of a papercut. Then again, I had already destroyed its eyes and burnt the inside of its mouth, so I guess this was just making things worse for it.

“This is not going as planned,” my friend muttered under her breath as I drank the potion that she had handed me.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Like, I’m sure this will give us a decent amount of experience when we kill it, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be with anyone other than you guys for this fight.”

“That’s true,” Kelly agreed. “We’re quite lucky that we’re as capable as we are when you think about it.”

“And that we’re used to fighting together,” I pointed out and Kelly nodded once more in agreement. “Well, now that I’m healed up, I should see whether I can make another hole in its armour before my Spirit regenerates.”

As it turned out I couldn’t cut completely through its armour before my Spirit regenerated but by the time I had used it all up again with my Lightning Stream spell the giant crocodile was just about on its last legs. Its head was blackened and burnt and arrows were sticking out of the hole that I had made in its armoured skin and as soon as I ran out of Spirit I shouted to Katy to stop targeting the weak point so that I could get close and finish cutting through the muscle and sinew underneath its thick skin with my naginata.

Doing this took several swings of my weapon while dodging back whenever Warren lost aggro which was much more common now that we were actually doing damage to the monster. Warren was doing his best but since he couldn’t do much damage and only had the one taunting Skill there was only so much that he could do. Luckily, I was expecting to be attacked now so I was able to avoid most of the crocs clumsy attempts to hit me.

When I finally cut all the way through the tough muscle and skin the croc collapsed. By now it was so badly injured that it was unable to so much as moan in pain as I quickly sprinted back around to its head and started spamming all of my attack Skills alongside Warren who was grinning in excitement as we finished off the powerful foe.

As the giant croc breathed its last breath a floating white number five appeared over its body making my eyes widen in surprise. I had obviously known that the croc was powerful, but I hadn’t been expecting it to be so powerful that it was worth a whole five Soul Points.

“Holy shit,” I muttered under my breath as I realised that I hadn’t even checked what Level the croc had been. To be fair it was pretty obvious that the croc hadn’t been an enemy that we should’ve “Just how powerful was this thing.”

“It was a Level 10 Armoured Croc,” Katy replied. “A rare monster like the Terror Birds but even more dangerous under the right circumstances. We were lucky that it was still a fairly low Level, or not only would we not have been able to injure it at all it would’ve been fast enough to catch up to us if we had run away.”

I nodded in agreement. If we had been any closer then Warren probably would’ve been swallowed whole when the croc had launched itself out of the murky water it had called its home and we would’ve been forced to run away so I really didn’t want to think what would’ve happened if the croc had been a high enough Level that it could run faster than us.

“Anyway, we should loot the croc and move on,” Katy reminded us. “After all we still have a Quest to complete here.”

We all nodded in agreement and went about the process of looting the croc which dropped a couple of teeth and several pieces of skin. Once we had done that, I used my Soul Harvest Skill and was rewarded with a Soul Shard was almost as bright as the ones that I had received from the Adolescent Terror Birds. As I picked it up, I examined it discovering that this Soul Shard had a medium affinity for Strength and a large affinity for Constitution which made sense considering how hard it had been to so much as penetrate its leathery hide let alone actually killing it.

In fact, if I was still fighting with my old spear instead of my naginata then I doubted that we would have been able to kill it at all and when I mentioned this everyone nodded in agreement.

“Yes, we really need to get better equipment,” Kelly nodded. “I do agree that getting more armour and Soul Cores is important but if that thing is anything to go by then we need to increase the priority of getting new weapons as well.”

“You should be alright for damage output for a bit longer against most enemies,” Katy said quickly. “But if we’re fighting here then there is a chance that we will run into another Armoured Croc and if that happens I actually suggest that we retreat because as I mentioned earlier that was a Low Levelled Armoured Croc and we struggled to even damage it. Thankfully, Zeke’s Lightning magic and more powerful weapon was enough to do some damage to the croc or we would have lost that fight.”

“Yeah, that was really lucky,” Warren agreed. “I’m sorry I got a bit too into things back there. That could’ve gone horribly wrong.”

“Yeah it really could’ve,” Kelly sighed as she shook her head at her partner in exasperation. “Seriously what is it with you today?”

“It’s just that it’s been so long since we’ve done something like this,” my friend sighed as he rubbed his head in embarrassment. “I’ll try to get a bit more of a handle on things.”

“Right, we’re all healed up so let’s get going,” I said before Kelly could continue to harangue Warren causing my friend to give me a grateful look. “We still have to kill more Javelin Toads to finish the Quest that the old man gave me.”