Oh no! That was not good at all. I could take something positive out of it, after all the frost blow hadn’t hit me, but otherwise it wasn’t good at all. I had been looking forward to cutting some nice steaks out of the antelope, but instead I was now dealing with a 40-pound piece of frozen meat. This was so damn unfair! I stomped my foot on the ground and screamed out my anger.

After I calmed down a bit, I walked around the ice statue and looked at the mess. When the buck was caught by the ice magic, he had just lifted his head and looked at me, so he was frozen too. However, the effect of the freeze seemed to be limited upward, because the horns themselves were not frozen. I imagined my body turning to ice up to my neck so that only my head was spared, and shivered. That would definitely not be a nice death, if there was such a thing as a nice death at all.

But what should I do with my prey now? Frozen or not, this was a lot of food that might have made the difference between life and death for Orthok and me. I had to drag the carcass to the cave somehow. I lightly bumped the trestle with my shoulder to get it to tip over, but it was frozen solid and wouldn’t move. Only after several strenuous attempts did I bring him down. When the time came, I grabbed him by the horns and tried to pull him across the floor.

This went relatively well, but I had to move sideways or better backwards in a stooped position, with the distance I had to cover, I could completely forget about it. I tried to push the buck in front of me with kicks, but that served more to get rid of my frustration than to actually move it. Perplexed, I looked around. I didn’t want to give up, but how could I solve the problem? Then I saw a small grove some distance away and had an idea.

I ran there and with my sword cut down two young trees whose trunks were as thick as my wrist. I chopped off the lower branches and the tops and dragged the rest back to the carcass. There I tied the thin ends of the little trees together with my belt and then pulled the buck onto it. I then grabbed the logs by the bottom end and dragged the structure behind me. It was tiring, but went better than I had feared. I just had to pay attention to the path and avoid larger stones and bushes.

I didn’t walk back the same way, but headed directly for the group of trees closest to the cave. At least, that’s what I hoped it was. I pulled and cursed, choosing my path carefully and activating Magic Gaze again and again. Sweat ran into my eyes and my shirt was soaked through when I finally arrived back at the river.

Here, I took a break, quenched my thirst and cooled off in the water. On the other side of the river, I looked for the notched tree to make sure I hadn’t lost my way. Then I returned to my load and examined the buck. The outer layer had already thawed, but underneath the meat was still frozen hard. I looked thoughtfully at the river. Since water is much denser than air, the thawing process would be much faster in it, especially in flowing water.

With the sword, I slit open the buck and with difficulty pulped the frozen entrails out of him. Then I pulled him into the water and weighed down the carcass with stones so that the current could not carry him away. I then sat down on the shore and began to meditate to recharge my mana and make good use of the waiting time.

During the time I spent first chasing the buck and then struggling with its frozen body, 17 units of mana had regenerated. I called up the image of the mana lake and watched mindlessly as the torrent of mana poured out of it and filled my mana vessel. I felt that it didn’t take much longer to fill it up, even though the capacity had greatly increased. Apparently, as the magic core grew, not only did the maximum amount of storage increase, but so did the rate of absorption. I still waited for the heat pulse that announced the increase of the mana supply to 48/48 and opened my eyes again.

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I had to blink in surprise, because I couldn’t believe my eyes: in the middle of the river a fish’s fin was moving towards me, as if a miniature version of the great white shark had strayed over here. And the creature had undoubtedly targeted the buck, which was slowly bleeding as it thawed in the river, thus attracting the predator.

Alarmed, I jumped to my feet. I hadn’t bothered to drag the carcass this far just to feed it to the fish here. Standing, I could see the monster clearly in the clean water. It had to be over a meter long and was obviously altered by magic, because no normal river fish carries so many spines on its body and has such a wide mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, such bizarre appearance I knew so far only from photographs of deep-sea fish. The Magic Gaze provided the confirmation: the monster glowed in an intense shade of blue.

I feverishly contemplated how I could fight the attacker, or at least send him fleeing. Because of the puzzle, I now had other elements available to me besides fire, but which of them could I use against a water creature? Besides the elements themselves, I unfortunately only had the arrow glyph to affect it. An arrow of air sounded absurd, an arrow of water would probably do nothing, and an arrow of earth didn’t sound very promising either....

Even though I didn’t expect it, I wanted to try the fire arrow first, with the wolf it brought a good result after all. The fish dived deeper, as if it had read my thoughts, but it probably just got better at my buck that way. The dorsal fin was now no longer sticking out of the water. “Fire! Arrow! Fly!”, I shouted excitedly. The fiery projectile sped toward the river surface and went up in a cloud of steam. The monster took a swerve, but continued to head toward its target. In the magical vision, I saw the glow around its tail fin intensify and threw myself to the ground.

Not a second too soon! A high-pressure jet of water hissed over me and whipped through the bushes behind me, sending their branches flying. Damn, it had a ranged attack too! If the fire arrow didn’t work, a regular arrow would have to do. I fished one out of the quiver and lined myself up so that I could see the enemy. I had no idea if I had to account for the refraction of light at the air-water boundary in a magic shot, so I just imagined the arrow hitting the monster in the eye. With a splash, the arrow disappeared into the water, with no visible effect.

Instead, I watched with impotent rage as the giant fish began to eat the antelope I had killed. The crime happened not two meters away from me, right under my eyes. If I wasn’t so afraid of the monster’s magic, I would have jumped into the river and attacked it with my sword. It was just a stupid fish after all! All right, a mouth full of sharp teeth wasn’t to be sneezed at either. So close combat was out of the question, and my magic proved ineffective. If only there was no water between us!

Wait, this thought was worth considering to the end. If the enemy was not in the water, but on land... that is, not surrounded by water, but by air... I could use the Fire Arrow. I see, all I had to do was... I made a series of transparent symbols manifest in the water next to the monster and then commanded, “AIR!” A large bubble of air appeared next to the fish. “FIRE! Arrow! Fly!” I hurriedly shouted after it and before the monster could react, a thick fire arrow formed in the air bubble and bored into its wet flank with great speed. BOOM! The air escaped bubbling from the water, followed by the body of a fish twitching in agony, then coming to rest belly up on the surface. Direct hit!