Troll Strength: Gold

The Savior Lord displayed noble character and did not begrudge his praise, earning a reward of 1 experience point. This method has reached its limit. We hope you will keep it up.

"Keep it up my ass!" Harry had been about to continue singing praises and earn another handful of experience points, but now he was furious.

[...Continuing lottery by default]

The golden light-screen of the wheel appeared before Harry, and the pointer began to spin.

"Stop."

[Troll Strength: Gold]

[Greatly increases strength, with a complete reconstruction of muscles, bones, and nerves]

[In the world of trolls, there is no fancy magic, only the highest stats!]

[The Savior's luck is boundless. Would you like to load the talent trait, YES or NO]

"Se... Forget it. I'm already here, so I might as well give it a try."

--Wait, don't...

Harry suddenly noticed that it said [reconstruction], not [alteration].

When he had inserted [Unicorn's Holy Blood], he had only undergone an alteration, yet he had suffered the excruciating pain of having every blood vessel in his body pulled out one by one.

[The path to salvation will always be fraught with hardship!]

The Black-hearted Book had given him that response, but Harry had been around the block. He knew that once you learned to endure hardship, there was no end to the hardship you could face.

But now... There was no time.

"Raaagh!"

Harry fell to his knees and pounded the ground. The stone floor shattered in an instant, sending chunks of rock flying. One pierced the head of the cameraman behind the camera lens, while others struck the bodies of students and staff nearby. The ground collapsed, and Harry and several students fell into the chasm.

To him, the stones and dirt were no more than mud. The flying "specks of mud" claimed the lives of the occasional unlucky bystander.

The students who fell with him were mixed together with the rocks and dirt.

An even more terrifying transformation took place inside Harry.

His bones snapped one by one, then healed. It was as though an ancient mountain range, asleep for millions of years, had awoken deep beneath the crust, thrusting upward and tearing apart the existing structure.

His nerves had clearly snapped, yet the electric signals of pain still became tangible sparks and shot toward his brain. At the same time, the channel of Troll Strength was directly reconstructed.

His muscles grew savagely, bursting through his skin, but they carried the silvery-white Holy Blood with them. Not a drop escaped from his body.

Harry felt his vision distort into irregular patches of light. He thought he saw a troll.

It stood ten meters tall, as if cast from gold. Its head was neither grotesquely small nor ugly. Instead, it radiated an air of majesty. It was a troll unlike any that might ever have existed in this world.

Then...

The flesh mixed in with the shattered earth began to separate, merging with scraps of cloth to take human form again.

The ground healed, and Harry, buried deep beneath it, was squeezed back up to the surface.

The rock passed through the cameraman's head. A moment after the hole in the camera lens, the silent world became noisy and alive once more.

"Harry, we should head back."

Uncle Vernon's voice sounded beside Harry's ear.

Harry looked at his broad hands, perfectly proportioned despite their size. It all felt like a lifetime ago.

But the pent-up frustration in his heart had been released by that bout of smashing. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at the faces that had just turned to mush and were now alive again, then started toward Uncle Vernon.

He had perfect control of his strength. The fragile world, as brittle as cardboard, had survived beneath Harry's feet, despite the Golden Troll Strength he now possessed.

With power like this...

--I fucking just got better at housework!

"Weeding Fist!"

Under the blazing sun, Harry stood in a horse stance and thrust out his fist.

After the skill's quality improved, [Weeding] could be used not only with a knife-hand strike. A sharp burst of energy could erupt from any part of his body.

As for why he had to call out the skill's name, that was another tragic story.

[The Savior Lord should call out the names of his skills loud and clear!]

The good news: this only applied to active skills. He could still say them silently, but then he wouldn't get the rare boost from the Dogskin Book—the increase to power and training efficiency.

The sharp wind from his fist swept past. A few blades of grass floated up from the lawn, which was already nearly as even as a carpet, and broke into fragments too small for the naked eye to see.

"Floor-washing Elbow!"

Harry leaped high into the air and brought his elbow down toward the gleaming stone floor. The moment it made contact, ripples spread out from the point of impact. His sturdy, iron-tower-like body used his elbow as a pivot, floating high into the air as lightly as a dragonfly skimming the water in a martial arts film, then spun around.

"Drying Waxing Palm!"

With his head pointed down, Harry stretched out his palm toward the damp stone floor.

Heat arrived, melting the wax and evaporating the water.

Ten minutes later, the entire Dursley family home looked brand-new.

Every flagstone, every red brick in the walls, every tile on the roof looked as though it had been sanded, glazed, and polished.

The windowpanes were so clear they seemed not to exist, while the doorknobs and letterbox shone like mirrors.

Every blade of grass on the lawn had been trimmed to precisely the same height, and it was as green as a plastic model.

The hedges looked as though they had been cut with a laser, their sharp angles straight enough to use as a ruler.

Beneath the sunlight, the entire house seemed to have a filter laid over it, making it look completely out of place.

Amazingly, no one noticed.

Harry continued training as if no one else were around, supporting his whole body on a single finger and repeatedly lowering and raising himself, head down.

His body, perfect as a marble statue, gleamed in the sunlight.

[Ding, ding, ding! Congratulations, Savior Lord! You completed the [Guard Your Territory] task 50 minutes earlier than yesterday. 10 experience points deposited, 5 more than yesterday.]

--You bastard! There's still 20 more! I'm six times more efficient than before!

After four years of conditioning by the Black-hearted Book, Harry was still able to keep a pleasant smile on his face, even when furious. He didn't stop moving. His eyes remained fixed on the fingers of his right hand, and his breathing stayed steady, as if he were still immersed in his training.

[...How could the Savior Lord concern himself with trivial matters? Your single-finger support now needs to be switched to your left index finger. Preparing second-level reward, [Intermediate Thunder Shock]. Countdown: 10...]

--You bastard! Since when was this Intermediate Thunder Shock?!

Harry quickly switched fingers.

[You're welcome, Savior Lord. It's only right. You are now an [Intermediate Savior]. After your second-level reward, your resistance to Dark Magic will increase by 0.1. Would you like to claim it?]

--I don't want it!

Harry actually found himself regretting that the running-to-school task had been canceled. There were no stray dogs or hooligans along his running route around the neighborhood anymore, and he really wanted to beat them up. The one with blood on his forehead especially deserved a good thrashing!

At the same time, he began to reconsider whether he should just dismantle [Troll Strength: Gold]. That would let him upgrade another trait to something above [Gold].

However, of all his current talent traits, only this one had given him such direct strength.

He had already suffered through the pain of fusing it. He couldn't bear to dismantle it just like that.

Most importantly, after truly gaining Troll Strength, Harry had discovered that a troll's strength was essentially magic existing in the form of physical power.

That was also why trolls had such high resistance to magic and such tiny brains.

This magic was highly inert and closely bound to the body. Ordinary spells couldn't direct it. It only underwent subtle changes based on the host's environment, which was why Mountain Trolls, Forest Trolls, and River Trolls differed so dramatically in appearance and abilities.

But it happened to work perfectly with Harry's abstract skills, the ones he'd gotten from talents like Fantastic Beasts.

The magic in [Unicorn's Holy Blood] was too simple. It couldn't be used to create skills like Withered Grass Fist or Energy-Absorbing Palm, which added negative forces.

[Ding, ding, ding! Your [Single-Finger Support] task is complete. Proficiency +1, added to [Literature and Sports Both Bloom], [Potter Combat], [Dursley Housework Encyclopedia], [Slack Off and Fish]... [Pull Noodles] proficiency +0.1, [Eye Poke] proficiency +0.1, [Zoning Out]...]

--Stop, stop, stop!

"Stop, stop, stop!"

At the sound of the voice, Harry raised his head in surprise. A giant, even more muscular than he was, rode a Hippogriff in circles high above Number Four, Privet Drive.

"This is the place, boy. You're Dudley Dursley, right? Where's Harry?!"