Chapter 13: Dark Troll King
Vlad took some of the glass containers from the alchemy room and even a large number of potions before he left Swail’s house.
He went straight to the jungle to collect the two ingredients he needed to create the poison he would use to kill the Troll King. While on his way, he was followed by a few Sky Lion guild members, but he easily shook them off.
The first thing Vlad did was check the effectiveness of the gauntlet’s passive effect, ’Instinctive Supremacy.’ Sure enough, most creatures were wary of him, but it did little to stop them from attacking.
The next skill he tested was ’Essence Extraction.’ After finding his first target, he was able to extract dark, ethereal energy from its corpse, and from then on, any time he killed a Pale-eyed Viper, the essence was automatically extracted.
He also quickly noticed that once he had 100 points of the essence, the Pale-eyed Vipers began to be affected far more than before, hesitating in their ambush, and soon, some even started to run away.
The next skill he tested was ’Sovereign’s Mark,’ which used 100 points of essence. The mark itself was nothing but a black diamond.
Once the mark was placed, the creature was his to command. Vlad could order him around through the mental link, but he really had to focus, while voicing them directly was much easier.
The mark also only lasted ten minutes, and with a few more attempts, he confirmed that a level 15 pale-eyed viper could break free ten and even fifteen seconds earlier.
While it was only a difference of a few seconds, it would pose a problem with the Troll King, who had a much stronger will, so it would not be a surprise if he broke free within minutes, if not less.
Vlad was under the impression that Mark’s effective period would be absolute, compensating for its weakness of taking a random time to take effect depending on the target.
However, that didn’t seem to be the case, and that was a major problem because, as experienced as Vlad was, there was no way he would last multiple minutes of combat against the monstrosity that was the Troll King.