The light from the staff hit the trolls, and the trolls' skin began to hiss.
The trolls roared and backed off three paces. That rock-like hide was being eaten through—finger-thick holes bored clean into the flesh.
Real damage, yes. But the spectacle of trolls turning straight to stone, which Bella had expected, didn't quite happen.
The light wasn't strong enough. She figured it out fast: trolls weren't afraid of dim light or ordinary dark-of-night gloom. They were afraid of strong light.
The staff's built-in Light spell just didn't cut it.
Still, a first-circle spell wasn't going to stump her.
The same spell cast through a staff versus cast by a mage directly had very different output. Items were static. Mages weren't. Even on a first-circle spell, ramping up her psionic output let her push it to second-circle equivalent intensity.
"Shut your eyes!" she shouted.
Loud as the shout was, Bilbo Baggins stood there staring straight at her. A half-second later the world went white in his eyes, blasted by the radiance erupting out of Bella's palm.
He'd never once imagined light could get this bright. He hit the ground rolling, hands clamped over his face.
Bella kept pouring psionic power into the spell. Only once the trolls had gone utterly still and their corpses had calcified into stone did she lower her hand.
"All right. You can open your eyes."
Seeing the glare fade, Thorin and his company all moved closer.
Bilbo swayed to his feet like a drunk.
They all reached out to touch the petrified troll body—and found it hard to believe.
These things were terrifyingly strong. And their weakness was just as extreme.
Bilbo Baggins found a stick and started methodically tapping the stone corpse.
"What are you hitting it for?" Bella asked.
His "good friend" the mage was addressing him. The inborn hobbit boldness kicked in, and Bilbo didn't hesitate. He pointed at the stone troll. "Why did it turn like this?"
"Their kind can't handle light."
"Why is that?"
"They're...basically a botched piece of magical work, and every race like that has some equally huge flaw. The world tends to balance things out—if you gain enormous power, something else usually has to be given up."
Bilbo scratched his head and kept at it, relentlessly. "Why, though?"
Bella couldn't be bothered to keep explaining. This one asked a lot of questions. She wisely shut her mouth.
"Uh...could I write this down in my journal?"
Bella watched him pull an oversized notebook out of his pack, and waved a hand. "Keeping a journal is a good habit. Write whatever you like."
Since trolls couldn't function in daylight, and since trolls usually didn't wander far from their lair, the company went looking in the immediate area and found a cave reeking of rotten meat.
The cave was full of animal pelts and decaying carcasses. Thorin Oakenshield also turned up two ancient Elvish longswords.
As the expedition's leader, he took one. Bella took the other. A sword each.
They didn't waste a breath being polite about it with the other dwarves.
The one Bella got had been the personal blade of a king of ancient Gondolin. Whenever orcs drew near, the edge flared with white light. Elvish runes were engraved along the spine. Its name was Glamdring.
Thorin's blade was also Gondolin-forged, glowing faintly in the presence of orcs. It had slain countless orcs and goblins. It was called Orcrist.
Strictly speaking, Glamdring handled more like a traditional cross-hilted sword. Orcrist was closer to a long blade.
Just before they left the cave, Bella turned up a third weapon of the same Gondolin craftsmanship: a short blade. With barely a pause she handed it to Bilbo Baggins.
An unnamed short sword. It glowed blue in the presence of orcs. There were no runes on it. The scabbard and hilt were far plainer than Glamdring's and Orcrist's.
The cross-hilted sword Father Christmas had given her was back on Earth. She'd been feeling the empty space on her belt, and Glamdring had all but delivered itself to her.
She hung Glamdring at her belt. The sword's forging quality put it at the top of the three, and the king's-blade pedigree added to it—she obviously wasn't going to pass it up.
Thorin felt some shame at wearing an Elvish weapon. Dwarves were legendary across the world as smiths and forgers. For a dwarf king to carry an elf's sword?
But in the end he couldn't argue with the sheer quality of the weapon. Dwarf height being what it was—shorter than elves, shorter than Bella—he had to strap the sword across his back. In a fight, he'd draw from over his shoulder.
Bilbo was left holding his short blade more or less helplessly, not sure where on himself to even put the thing.
Bella was back, and the company pressed on eastward.
Two hours of reading, two hours studying the Eye of Agamotto—subtract meals and conversation, and the remaining hours Bella spent manufacturing ammunition.
Tat-tat-tat. Muzzle flash lit up in a quick series as Bella, on horseback, test-fired an AK-47. She aimed at a tree branch and cut loose, three shots.
Adequate. Ironhide's work was solid, and her after-market tweaks had pushed the round's punch noticeably higher. The poison coating held up too. Accuracy? AK-series rifles were always middling at that—modified or not, you got what you got.
Bilbo Baggins watched the mage lady going tat-tat-tat from a distance, occasionally doing odd little aiming motions, and had absolutely no idea what she was doing.
Hobbit curiosity outstripped any other race's. When in doubt, ask. Seeing Bella take a break from firing, he trotted over and asked what on earth she was up to.
"Doing what? Making weapons, obviously. Dragon-slaying weapons!" Bella's tone suggested this was the most natural thing in the world.
Clearly Bilbo couldn't quite grasp the concept of a firearm. His mental model was probably slotting the AK-47 in somewhere between war-hammer and iron club.
"Watch. Right—you, what's your name, Bombur? Here, raise your shield!" When in Rome: Bella had picked up the habit of casually bossing the chubby dwarf around. Bombur lifted a skillet-shaped shield without a word.
The next second, a rattling tat-tat-tat smacked into that shield. Bombur was as wide as he was tall and weighed as much as two ordinary dwarves, and his shield was plenty thick—but the gunfire staggered him back anyway.
"Is that magic?" Bilbo's eyes went huge.
Bella rooted around and pulled out an M16 assault rifle for him.
"This is the trigger. This is the muzzle. When you want to hit something—see this front sight? Line the front sight up with your target, then pull the trigger..."
Bella ran through it twice. Bilbo didn't understand the principle yet, but he was already cradling the rifle eagerly, examining it from every angle. For him, a gun had to beat a short sword that required getting in close to the enemy any day.
Hobbits were great at throwing stones. The marksmanship talent was there.