The team was in a very peculiar situation. Tim had this ten foot tall ape on a choke hold, but since he was pouring mana into this advantage that he made for himself, he couldn’t keep things going for long, as his mana pool was not infinite! The Soul Grabber ability was currently taking sixty points of mana out of him, every second, and this example was not cheap.
That aside, this ape seems to be quite tolerant to the team's attacks, they wouldn't be able to kill him so easily even if they wanted to! Tim felt that he had to negotiate.
“Do we have to kill you, sir Lestuk?” He bluffed.
“You can try,” The other picked up on his bluff.
“You want me to try, huh? Okay.” Tim threatened, but this time he wasn’t bluffing as much, because he wasn't as clueless anymore - He had an idea! “Skendus, what do you make of his brain?”
“Intelligent for an ape, but I'm probably smarter than him… by a nudge.” Skendus was quick to answer.
Timothy smiled in response, this was the best thing that he heard today! He loved dealing with enemies who in bleak comparison, were dumber than him, because he knew that in a way, they were very vulnerable!
To set his plan into motion, he then removed the bones from the yeti's gross, chest arm, and bashed those bones in the yeti's head instead. Every part of this process was telekinetic, so he didn’t have to lift as much of a finger in order to impale the target again, he just had to spend a lot of mana!
However, he then noticed that the yeti was still protesting, he was resistant, and since his mana was very limited, Tim had to ask for help. In this case, Skendus was to come in really handy!
“Do your work on him, try to overload his brain!” He requested, “If we can't kill this big bastard through brute force, then we'll just fry his head from the inside.”
“I see what you're trying to do,” Skendus nodded, and then he pushed his arms forward.
Skendus was an illusionist, so when he used his recently-overcharged powers, symbolic eyes appeared to mark his involvement. The eyes were very realistic too, they were as big as his head, and by figure one could tell that each single eye belonged to a different species!
These eyes then floated around his head to the point where they looked like Saturn's rings, and that was when the magic happened. He poured hundreds of points of mana towards the yeti, to make him live these very real-looking, torturous illusions!
The yeti’s fears were used against him, Skendus made Lestuk imagine that his bones were suddenly very breakable. The illusion featured Tim breaking Lestuk's bones, and then rolling him up like a banana leaf, it was brutal but very effective! The following screams of fear and pain were unavoidable, Lestuk was being tortured, so at this point one may even question Tim's ways of handling things, as he may have gone too far here.
“Is this really necessary? We can just knock him out.” Arvena added, of all people, she was the one that was concerned by this display of brutality.
“We can't let him go, because if he found us once, he can find us again.” Ortana argued with her, she was an experienced, oldish woman who has seen a lot of the world. “Besides, if even your fireball can't burn this spooky thing, then what makes you think we can stop him next time?”
“Relax, I'll make his death quick… and mostly painless.” Tim guaranteed.
Afterwards, he used a trick that he had been holding on to, it being the Electro Nerve Splitter ability! He hadn't used this one that much so far, because it was very costly to do so, but if he didn't use it now then he may never get to. This abomination of a yeti had to die today!
Tim casted multiple nerve splitters against the target, they cost hundreds of mana points, but they did travel to their destination very quickly, in a blink even, so it was mana well spent! They hit the yeti's brain, and then scorched a bunch of nerves that were connected to his brain!
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That and Skendus' help with the matter, brought a result that everyone was at least relieved with, if not comfortable in a moral sense. They fried the yeti's brain, quite successfully, so Tim finally stopped using his powers.
The brain damage was extensive, irreversible, so the yeti died ten minutes later, in a paralyzed, and senseless state of mind. He did not suffer much, and this issue was over.
Timothy did not get any rewards for killing this ape, which was very weird, as the system should have rewarded him with thousands of system points! She was supposed to, but yet she argued that Timothy did not kill this ape alone, and she also insisted that the ape was not real, in a physical sense! There was no easy way to understand what she just said, but he couldn’t take system points out of her by force, so he just let it be, regardless of how much mana he had spent on this ape.
Anyway, out of all the things that they expected to happen today, encountering a mutant-looking ape wasn't one of them. It seemed like a bizarre case, but then the team realized that it wasn't too bizarre after all!
For example, this place was called the Frozen Red-leaf Forest, and the weather here was absolutely unpredictable. The layers of snow that had coated the forest for a couple of days, didn't seem as weird now when they realized that a yeti had lived in this forest, things made sense! Weird stuff like this was supposed to happen in this forest, as it was considered natural.
Timothy was not a fan of what just happened nonetheless, so he looked at Arvena, and scolded. “How the hell is it that you brought us here, knowing full well that we could've gotten beaten to death by an ape?”
“You give me too much credit, I can barely tell one forest apart from the other.” Arvena argued, she sounded quite sincere. “If you want someone to blame, blame that Innkeeper we visited a couple of days ago, he didn’t bother warning us, even though it was him who told us what this forest’s name was.”
“For someone that's native to this universe, you sure sound stupid. The forest was practically on your doorstep, how would you not know about a forest with indestructible gorillas?” He argued.
“I'm a mage, not a…” Before she could answer properly, a bolt of thunder struck on a tree near them, and it muffled her words effectively.
The booming sound almost gave them heart attacks, but this unpredictable weather was just part of the forest's charm. At first things weren't too weird, but then the temperatures around them suddenly dropped by a solid 40°C, all within a few seconds, and this part was pretty weird!
Degranus Goblins weren't particularly known for their resistance to cold and harsh environments, so inevitably, they all started shivering badly, more than they already were. Arvena almost went into shock, even, she was not tolerant of such cold, so she immediately started shooting a few small fireballs in front of her feet, with the hopes of getting a bush burning, for it to act like a mini-campfire. She tried, but it was pointless!
Harsh winds picked up around them, and the wind developed into a blizzard moments later, and this could not be any more demotivating than it already was! These circumstances had a very high probability of killing them, if they didn't act fast!
Tim gave a hard look at the situation that they were in, and since a great portion of his stingray life included hiding and taking shelter, he quickly recognized that most of what this forest contained, would not help them survive this cold! With that said, he focused on the things that may give them a fighting chance, those being plain dirt and old animal bones.
It took little time to summon more bones from within his close vicinity, and once he had those bones multiply into hundreds of bones all within just a few seconds, he then had them dig a ditch. They were tiny and sharp, so they bashed their way through the dirt quickly, ultimately fulfilling his commands!
The ditch then turned into a tunnel, because the bones had also dug sideways, and this tunnel went a couple of feet underground, and created a nest of sorts as a result. It took half a minute to do this, and it perhaps put the team in further risk by leaving them exposed this long, but this was their best shot they were going to get, they had to go underground in order to avoid this sudden, brutal environment!
“If I was alone, I could've just floated my way out of here.” Tim thought to himself, however, he didn’t nearly regret saving the group.
They went underground, and Arvena kept a couple of fireballs burning above her palms, to maintain some of the heat. Considering that they were avoiding most of the wind and snow now, they only had to deal with the descending temperatures. Now the underground nest they were in helped avoid half of the cold, but they still had to work their way around the other half.
Tim guessed that it was about -25°C in the nest right now, and if they couldn't fight this situation, they may die of hypothermia within a few hours. It solely depended if this blizzard would hold out for long, but as far as they were concerned, it was only getting colder right now!
Either way, he was fresh out of neat tricks. The abilities he used recently were still new to him, he bought them last, and he only got to use them properly today, but he already noticed their charm faded away! Soul grabbing, nerve splitting, and bone multiplying would not save him from the cruel death that hypothermia could bring, it wouldn't work out.