"Stop," Kali whispered as she raised her arm in a signal that Vorgnar taught her. She herself came to a halt up on a high branch from where she peeked through the canopy and out into an opening in the forest.

 

The dense forest coating the sloping hillside was interrupted by a wide ravine filled with upturned dirt, protruding rocks and bare trees torn out of the dirt and thrown all around it, with a dozen large forms ambling about between them.

 

Vorgnar came to a stop below Kali, and Izuna was already climbing a nearby tree to get a vantage point for herself. Meanwhile, Kali continued observing the clearing, noting one or two openings on the steep sides.

 

She couldn't tell whether those were just burrowed nests or natural cave systems going further down from how far away she was.

 

Her ability to hear spatially only reached one-third across the dry ravine, but that was far enough to have a few of the ambling forms in her range.

 

Kali watched on as two of those forms were beating the ever-living shit out of each other, with tree trunks of all things used as makeshift clubs. Kali wondered if the club shape resulted from them beating each other enough times to trim it into that shape.

 

She shook her head to shake the dumb thoughts out of her head. She didn't want to waste brainpower pondering the intricacies of Trolls crafting their infamous weapons.

 

Trolls.

 

Dumb, ugly, huge and disgustingly hard to kill.

 

They were far away, just a bit outside of Kali's spatial hearing, but while her hearing was supernatural, her eyesight was also exceptional. She could easily see them, a dozen huge forms ambling about while keeping a respectful distance from two Trolls that had a head's height on all the others.

 

These two trolls were also the ones beating each other over the head with trunks at the moment.

 

Kali focused on one of the Trolls inside her spatial hearing range first. It was tall compared to her. She could tell that even from far away, but that wasn't telling much, as she was rather tiny compared to even Vorgnar or Izuna.

 

 

Her chosen observation target was blissfully unaware that an elf was looking at it with a sort of disgusted curiosity. It was lost in the taste of wood. Yes, wood, as in the troll, was chowing on a branch the size of Kali's thighs. Its teeth easily snapped bite-sized chunks off, which it then chowed and swallowed like it was the tastiest treat in the world.

 

Kali might have found it cute if the thing hadn't been even uglier than the ones she had nightmares about in her childhood. Sometimes, reality was stranger than fiction, or, in this case, uglier.

 

The troll — like all the other ones Kali saw — had a hunched-over posture which only showed off its ugly face filled with warts and the long crooked nose even more. Apart from that, the only noteworthy aspect of its 'face' was the two large teeth resembling trunks extending out of its thick lips.

 

The trolls had an unnatural physique. Its stomach was bulging out as if it had just shoved an entire cow down its throat, but aside from that, its muscles were bulging out from under its rough greenish skin. It made Kali think that maybe it did shove something large down its throat and somehow it just hadn't ruptured its stomach.

 

Then again, it was a troll. She wouldn't be surprised if it could eat one of those Thornvine Prowlers alive and still act the same as it was right then.

 

A loud thud drew her attention away from the snacking troll, back to where the two larger trolls were beating the hell out of each other. From how one of them was shaking its wrinkly grey head, she assumed it'd just gotten whacked over the head with the tree the other one was holding.

 

One might imagine a ferocious bout with wild swings and bestial wrestling when one thought of two trolls locked in a duel. But the reality was … underwhelming.

 

One Troll, with a rough grey hide and only one trunk in its mouth, raised the battered tree held in its grip high above his head while the other waited with an unimpressed look.

 

 

The tree came down, smashing the other troll's head down into its chest cavity. The unfortunate troll — who now was trying to pull its skull out of its ribs — had a bluish hide which was marred with burns and scars, but otherwise, it seemed better off than the grey one.

 

If one ignores its head being caved in, that is.

 

The scarred one managed to get himself back into a 'healthy' state in less than ten seconds, making Kali flinch as her regular hearing caught bones snapping and muscles tearing. The troll seemed annoyed, more than anything though as it glared at the grey troll, which was laughing at it.

 

It raised its own tree over his head, which made the other troll quiet down, but it too just stood there. Waiting for the strike to come.

 

Kali grimaced as the tree broke in half over the grey troll's head, making it stumble back as it massaged its head as if it was having a headache.

 

On the other hand, the blue one was staring at its broken tree in apparent shock.

 

 

For some reason, she couldn't tear his gaze away though. She knew it was pointless to watch, but she was growing curious. Were they trying to decide who was the leader of the group? Would the grey one beat the blue into a pulp or would it somehow still win their bout with a broken 'weapon'?

 

To Kali's immense disappointment, the grey one recovered rather quickly and puffed itself up. With its long crooked nose pointing at the sky, it stared down at the blue one which slouched in defeat and that was that. The blue one ambled away and went into the cave while the grey one strutted over to a group of onlooking Trolls, then it proceeded to-

 

 

Kali scrunched her eyes shut. Master Zadkiel might be enough of a deviant to document how trolls reproduced, but I. AM. NOT. I need to burn out my eyes and regrow them with the bracelet.

 

Having better eyes than a hawk was a blessing most of the time, but when a Troll lost its — his — loincloth too quickly to avert her eyes, it quickly turned into a curse.

 

So they were competing to see who was going to do the … 'thing' today. Kali noted as she turned away to banish any chance of her laying her gaze on that cursed thing once again. She suddenly felt thankful the trolls weren't inside her spatial hearing range. Her normal hearing was bad enough already.

 

Laying her eyes on the monsters she grew up fearing was an unusual feeling. Seeing them in flesh and blood took away the veil of mysticism that covered them before, but at the same time, it made the far-away and distant monsters into present and real dangers to her safety.

 

The tales might be just mere shades of what they once were when they were first told, but all tales had some reality mixed in. Trolls snacking on bad elven children who didn't listen to their parents and ran away from home suddenly didn't feel like a scare story told to them to keep them from playing outside of the villages, but something that could actually happen.

 

It was something that probably happened more times than she could count. Trolls were hardy bastards. The chill of the mountains would hardly be enough to deter them from living there if they could sustain themselves.

 

She had to kill one of those? A disgusting troll that wouldn't mind crunching on Elven children instead of a branch? A monster that recovered in less than thirty seconds from having his head bashed in so hard that he could see the contents of his own stomach?

 

Not to say that the whack it gave back in turn made a thundering explosive sound no less impressive than her own fireballs and it only made the grey troll stagger.

 

She had to fight her childhood nightmares once again, just a bit more literally this time. Why was she doing this again?

 

Izuna. Izuna who nearly killed all three of them just a short while ago.

 

Even in the depths of her doubts, she knew she would be glad she enlisted the Fox-kin's help. She would be heading into human towns after this mission, and all she had to hide non-humanity would be a cowl. An ally who could keep up an illusion and fool any guard that might suspect something would be something that could flip the scales in her favour just enough.

 

If humans discovered her, her fate could be even worse than what her father planned for her. The Kashgari were humans too, but they were a multi-species society, even if humans tended to be the ruling class. The corvids were not. For them, you were either a human or an animal awaiting integration and slavery.

 

She heard mentions that she once had an aunt, though nobody dared talk of her and even her siblings shushed her in the very few instances when she dared to ask. All she knew was that she didn't have an aunt anymore and that it was the corvids' fault, their Raven Lord's to be exact. Can't they just call an Emperor an Emperor? They just had to be special little snowflakes and make up a unique title.

 

She shook her head, attempting to dispel the gloomy thoughts with varying degrees of success.

 

She stepped off the branch and landed five meters below on the ground with only a slight sound made as she bled off the momentum with a bend of her knees.

 

"What?" Vorgnar asked calmly, putting away a canteen he was drinking from just when Kali dropped down.

 

"They will hear us," Kali hissed. "We found the trolls."

 

"Trolls have infamously bad hearing," Vorgnar said with a shrug, leaning against a tree as he stared toward the clearing. "If we aren't talking right next to them, there is nothing to worry about."

 

"Really?" Kali blinked uncertainly, her voice slowly rising to a normal level.

 

"I didn't know that either," Izuna noted. She was only a few meters off the ground, nestled in a 'V' shaped bend between two branches, so she heard the conversation easily, though Kali doubted she saw the trolls from just there.

 

"This isn't my first time hunting trolls," said Vorgnar, drawing both girls' attention.

 

""Really?""

 

"Yes," Vorgnar nodded, unfazed by the two intense stares he was receiving.

 

"When?" Kali asked.

 

"Why?" Izuna quickly followed up with her own question.

 

Vorgnar just smiled slightly at the two overly-curious girls.

 

Though, one was much more reserved in her curiosity than the other white-haired one.

 

"Fine," Kali huffed. "So as our resident troll expert, what do you think? How should we go about this?"

 

"We need to isolate a younger one, preferably a female," said Vorgnar. "Those are weaker. We should be able to incapacitate it for long enough for Kalitra to bathe it in fire."

 

"Will my fireballs be enough?" Kali asked.

 

"They should be if they are young. The hide of the older males is tough enough to ward off any spell you or even an Adept mage throw at them."

 

"Don't you have something for that in that Tome of yours?" Izuna asked curiously.

 

"Umm," Kali grimaced. The Tome. She had that and skimmed through it once or twice, but learning new runes would take a while longer still. She only had a single one she could cast with any consistency and that was the Channel Rune. "I don't think that will help much."

 

Perhaps she could incorporate the rune into the fireball's spell formula, but that would transform it into a flamethrower, sacrificing its piercing capability. Channel was a sort of rune usually called a cast-modification rune. These usually added a twist to how the mage could cast spells, and this one was no different.

 

Now she wouldn't have to recast the Flame+Hold spell whenever she wanted a consistent flame, she just had to swap Hold for Channel and it would let her continue fueling the spell with mana even after she activated it. This robbed her of the ability to launch the spell matrix out of her body, though.

 

Pros and cons had to be deliberated for each spell, but it'd be a godsend for any spell that she used on herself and also had a time limit on it, like the Shield Spell and the Shadow Cloak. If she added the Channel Rune to them, she would have to consistently fuel spells like the Shield Spell and the Shadow Cloak while they were up, instead of taking a single sizeable chunk of mana from her when she initially cast them.

 

That said, fueling active spells required some focus while she didn't have to worry about a regular Shield spell fizzling out because she wasn't maintaining a constant stream of mana to fuel it.

 

The Tome had dozens of pages written just about how she could easily incorporate the rune into basic spells and practices that should help her train her focus on maintaining the Channel rune.

 

All in all, it was a useful addition to her toolkit, but useless for killing a troll. She needed quick explosive power with enough oomph to blow through the troll's thick hide.

 

"I might have something in there that could help, but I'm not sure how long it'd take for me to learn it."

 

The Tome was a thick book, but the number of new runes contained in it was lower than what Kali thought at first. Overall, it had quite a number of them, but as it turned out, her lazy-ass master just gave her the abridged version of the first half of this very same damned book when he started teaching her.

 

The Tome contained all the runes she knew and a few others. However, most of the information in it was just further details about the runes she already knew, rather than new ones.

 

"We still need to scout out the area and construct a plan based on that," said Vorgnar. "It could very well take one or two weeks, and it wouldn't be the end of the world if we had to camp out here for a month."

 

"Yes," Izuna nodded, though she sounded sour about it. She obviously wanted to be done with this mission as quickly as possible.

 

"Alright," Kali nodded, though she felt uncertain. She had years to practice the spells she knew, she could use the runes she already knew consistently and flexibly, but she worried that if she clammed a bunch of new runes into her head and went out into a fight right after, she'd mess up.

 

A single line in a rune that bent just a touch too far or a line that was just a smidge too long would be all it'd take to have her bleeding through every orifice on her head. The spell she'd be casting would be even stronger than the Fireball and the backlash was proportional to the quantity of mana used in a spell.

 

She could handle a backlash from a tiny spell that barely took a thousandth of her total reserves, but what about one that she loaded half of it into? She might just blow her head off in a single go.

 

"Alright, I will try." Kali gave her two companions a shaky smile.

 

She'd just have to try her best, and if it failed, they still had other options.