Becoming the Beast Inside

After a minute or two, I encountered my next opponent. You guessed it, another goblin with a club.

I transformed and fought the goblin, it was even easier with the extra stats, my new grasp of combat, and my experience with the first.

It was not even able to touch me. After I defeated it, I picked up its magic stone.

This time I got the impression I could refine my goblin form. Somehow improve it. So, I did.

The experience was similar to receiving my falna, like the goblin form's existence was elevated. Only it was a mere fraction of that.

It also replenished my magic.

However, with both of those things came a hunger. So slight I could barely feel and I ignored it as a result.

Piece of advice, never ignore a mystical hunger no matter how slight.

Ignore I did though.

I instead realized that the goblins were spaced in just a way that I could theoretically never leave my monster form.

As I went, I got hungrier and hungrier.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is this, by the time my hunger got to the point it was concerning I was already too hungry and amped up to be.

At one point, I just stopped thinking and a beastly instinct came over me.

After a while I swept my entire area of goblins, so I went to the next floor.

On and on I went until I reached the fifth floor. Unfortunately, my stats were not being updated as a result fights just kept getting harder. I was just getting more and more injured. The problem was a hungry beast doesn't care about either of those things. My self-preservation instinct also would not snap me out of it until I was on the edge of death. Which in the case of my slow death crawl would be too late to do anything to prevent my death.

The simple fat of the matter was that if I didn't snap out of it, I would die. Luckily the beast reached the boss room before that could happen.

You see the monsters are kind of like a test for adventurers. They are meant to teach some lesson. The goblins are meant to teach the basics of combat and situational awareness. The ghosts at a later floor are meant to teach the importance of magic. Luckily the goblin shaman's lesson is that brute force is not enough to continue in the dungeon.

The shaman has two main abilities fire bolt and shield. The important one in this case is shield. You the thing about the shield spell is this, it's virtually invincible at a similar level of stats but it only covers a limited area.

As a result, to defeat the goblin shaman, you must outsmart it. Trick it into defending positions that you are not attacking and then attacking before it can change the shield's position.

It also cannot fire a fire bolt through the shield. It must take down its shield before it can fire. That being the case you can predict when a fire bolt is or is not coming and when the shaman's shield will be down.

It is just not a fight you can brute force without being at a much higher stat level. Which you can't be without defeating it. You can see the conundrum.

For all those reasons, When the beast attacked it did not go well.

The beast just kept attacking the shield thinking it would eventually break.

The beast was slowed down and weakened by injury and fatigue.

Every time the shaman lowered its shield the beast rushed forward thinking it a chance and get hit by a fire bolt at close range.

After a while, the beast realized something with its limited intelligence, that it finally met an opponent that I could not defeat with its limited intelligence. So, it got to thinking how to solve the problem. Unluckily, as the beast was quite the dullard, it took a while and got more injured in the process.

Finally, the beast had a light bulb moment, it needed the man. So, the beast relinquished control of the body back to the man.