The class set out in the early morning hours, fully expecting to spend upwards of three hours traveling through the ice and snow. It was a bright, clear day, the kind that Nym hated to fly over snow during. Even with a perfect vision spell active, he quickly found himself with a headache from the glare. He wished he still had his old flying goggles, but the destruction of Ebalsan had taken those from him.
Unfortunately, he lacked the ability to create glass. He suspected he could find a spell like that in an advanced earth magic spellbook somewhere, but it wasn’t something he’d ever thought to look for until he was flying high over brightly lit snow and scanning for threats. It was possible that he might be able to modify perfect vision to account for the light, but he didn’t have the time to play with it.
In the end, the solution he ended up using was to filter everything through his air golem. Since the sensory link went straight to his brain, his eyes weren’t forced to suffer from all the brightness going directly into them. Nym decided to stick closer to the students and leave the golem to drift above them high up in the air as a long range lookout.
The downside to that was of course that several of them started trying to talk to him, and Risa was included in that group. Nym was incredibly awkward around her, and after about half an hour of exchanging pleasantries and dodging questions about where he’d learned and how he’d gotten to third circle at such a young age, he finally hit upon a solution.
“Please, I’m trying not to be rude, but I’m not a student,” Nym told the teenagers flying near him. “I have a job to do here. I need you all to stop distracting me. What if there’s another avalanche and I don’t spot it in time?”
That did the trick, for the most part. The small group that had gathered around him dispersed, most of them going back to walking on top of the snow. Risa waited until everyone else had left, looked Nym directly in the eyes, and said, “I would love to talk more later when you’re off-duty.”
“That… might be okay.”
She smirked, and let herself fall down to the snow where she switched from the extremely shaky flight spell she’d been using to one that hardened the snow under her feet in a small radius. It worked, but she didn’t have near enough endurance to keep it up for miles of walking. That was how she’d ended up in the back of the line yesterday.
The group stopped for a break at the halfway point. They were coming up to where he’d seen the bighorn yeti the night before, so Nym took the opportunity to scout ahead with both a second air golem and a scry anchor. The scrying itself was still short range, but it was the only spell he had that allowed him to see through solid objects, and he was hoping he could find the yeti with it.
He wasn’t expecting to find it, both because there was no reason to suspect the yeti was still lurking in the same spot and because of the range constraints, but luck was with him and he spotted it a few hundred yards down the trail nestled in a small stand of pines and buried under a foot of snow. It was only a hundred feet or so from the trail, probably far enough away for the students to pass by without an issue.
That wasn’t a chance Nym wanted to take though. He flew over to where Professor Lakton sat, perched on a bare rock that she’d scoured of snow with a blast of wind. “There’s a yeti lurking up ahead just off the trail,” he said in a low voice.
“How far off the trail?” she asked. She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully while he pointed out the trees it was hiding in. “That might not be a problem for now. We’ll be a little outside its ambush range even if we don’t make adjustments, and we can definitely go around it. My concern is that it’ll move closer to take a crack at us on the way back.”
“I don’t suppose our numbers would discourage it,” Nym said.
“Possibly, but I wouldn’t count on it. It might be best to dispose of it now so we don’t have to worry about it trying something later.”
“You want it killed?”
“Do you have a way to subdue it for hours and hours without killing it?”
Nym shrugged. “Sure. Blindness. Paralysis. I could entomb it in ice or earth. I could just teleport it miles away and let it make its way back on its own.”
“Oh, well then. That’s certainly quite a few options. You’re certain you could restrain it? I could give a brief lecture on bighorn yetis with a live specimen.”
“Let me see if I can capture it first. I’m not expecting any trouble, but if it resists the magic, I’d rather do it when it’s just me there than give it twenty other targets to go after.”
“Perfect. We’ll wait for you to capture it before we start moving again.”
Nym flew ahead the thousand feet or so he needed to get within range of the yeti. He watched it through his scrying spell as he approached. If it noticed him at all, it didn’t react. Considering how far he was in the air, Nym thought it was more likely that the yeti lacked the ability to see that far away from its hiding place. He didn’t know the limit of its sensory system though, so he decided to play it safe and approach cautiously.
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The plan was simple. He was going to grab it with greater telekinesis and blast it with as strong a paralysis spell as he could muster. If that didn’t work, he was going to trap it in a block of ice reinforced with stone. He was less confident about the back up plan. The yeti’s pure physical might was unknown, but he was betting it was more than strong enough to break through stone.
Nym floated directly over it, perhaps fifty feet in the air. The bighorn yeti was well within range of his greater telekinesis spell. Nym wove it together and sent it down through the snow to grab the yeti blindly. Without being able to physically see it, he had to approximate its position, but that was countered by just casting a wider net.
A loud, angry roar echoed through the valley as Nym ripped the yeti out of its hiding place. It kicked and flailed at the air, but he had it around the trunk. There was little it could do to get free, at least physically. The yeti must not have been stupid, because it realized that quickly and shifted tactics.
Snow burst into the air in a wave around the yeti, spiking up to an impressive thirty or so feet in the air. It was more than high enough to reach the yeti, and with a burst of unfocused arcana, a huge volume of it clung to the thing’s fur. Its weight nearly tripled and Nym lost sight of it inside the massive snowball it turned itself into.
In some ways, that made things easier. Nym wasn’t about to engage it in a spell duel where he tried to take control of the snow back away from it. Instead, he just peppered it with a dozen arcana injections. Its aura spasmed wildly and the snow started falling off in clumps. As soon as it was visible again, he hit it with the paralysis spell he’d prepared, then added blindness to the mix as well.
He didn’t have a dedicated sleep spell; it turned out that flicking that switch in something’s brain was quite dangerous. But he was able to fully restrain it. Nym used a burst of air to clean a section of the trail and brought his catch down, then started building up literal tons of ice to secure the yeti.
The creature was held upright, paralyzed, blind, and suffering from arcana poisoning. “All clear!” Nym yelled back down the trail. He floated in the air about twenty feet away from the yeti and waited for the class to catch up.
A few minutes later, they arrived and spread out into a semicircle while Professor Lakton approached. “It’s still alive?” she asked.
“Yes. I’ve blinded and paralyzed it, though it can still hear and I assume smell us. I also overloaded its soul well with a series of arcana injections when it tried to use a form of hydrokinesis against me.”
“Very well, thank you, Nym.” Professor Lakton turned back to her class. “We have a rare opportunity today. Before you is the elusive bighorn snow yeti. Note the pelt coloring, how it blends in with the snow. The yeti is an ambush predator that buries itself in mounds of snow and waits for fresh meat to wander by. Then it leaps out and attacks with lethal intent before dragging its prey back under the snow to consume it raw.”
She stopped and looked around at the class, paying particular attention to a few that were constantly straggling behind. “This sort of danger is just one of the reasons that you need to remain close together while we travel.”
There was a sentiment that Nym agreed whole-heartedly with. There were some that just couldn’t travel fast enough to keep up, but there were also some that were just too lazy to work hard. And then there were some at the front that the professor had to keep from ranging too far ahead.
“Can anyone tell me what kinds of magics we can expect from an adult snow yeti? Yes, Ms. Lorezi.”
One of the older students spoke, “The snow yeti uses primarily self-enhancing and camouflage magic to hide itself and burst out with explosive and overwhelming force upon its prey. It also has some mastery over elemental water magic, specifically relating to snow and ice, that it uses to move around quickly when needed.”
“Correct. The snow yeti is notable for its water magic in that it is one of the rare non-monstrous species capable of using second layer magic despite its notable lack of intelligence.”
“Looks pretty monstrous to me,” one of the students snarked.
Professor Lakton pinned him with her eyes for just a moment, and the student ducked his head. Then she continued as if the interruption hadn’t occurred. “Our chaperone was nice enough to capture this one for us, and has given it a heavy case of arcana poisoning in addition to restraining it, so we’re safe enough here, but what are some good strategies for escaping a hungry yeti if you were to encounter one out in the wild by yourself?”
“Run away,” one of the students announced immediately, to the snickers of his peers.
“Fly away,” a different student corrected.
“Fire blast it in the face.”
“Whatever spell Nym used on it.”
“Alright, alright. All good ideas, though if I’m not mistaken, at least one third circle spell was used to restrain it, so I don’t know that I’d recommend trying to repeat this capture,” Professor Lakton said. She looked questioningly at Nym.
“A personal scry variant I developed to find it and greater telekinesis to restrain it until I could layer the other spells on it. Everything but greater telekinesis was second circle.”
“Seriously? You found and caught that thing with almost nothing but second circle spells?” a student asked him.
Nym shrugged. “Not everything requires overwhelming force. There might be more threats today I need to be ready for.”
“An excellent lesson in restraint,” Professor Lakton cut in. “Now, I wonder if anyone can tell me whether this ice by itself would be enough to imprison a snow yeti?”
The lecture continued for another twenty minutes, with the professor pointing out the jaw musculature that allowed the yeti to open its mouth so wide, and the scoop-like hands it used to propel itself under the snow with the aid of its magic. Finally, she exhausted her knowledge of the topic and Nym flew the yeti several miles off the trail before releasing it. It cast him a hateful glare and burrowed down into the snow immediately.
Nym didn’t really blame it. He was the one who’d attacked it after all, but he also knew that if the situation had been reversed, it wouldn’t have thought twice about attacking him and eating him. That made it hard to feel sorry for the bighorn yeti, and served as good motivation to hurry back so the class could continue its journey under his protection.