If there was one good thing about our continued travel north, it was that the animals in the forests and mountains of Montana were quite vicious. Maybe it was thanks to the system; maybe these beasties had been as aggressive as they were now before the change; it mattered little. What mattered was that the wolves, coyotes, bears, cougars and wolverines were teeming in the forests, sustained by an explosion of prey thanks to the countless animals leaving human farms and returning to the wild, aided in their journey by the system. That meant there were thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of previously domesticated pigs, now tearing up the forests, the system rapidly turning them back into the hogs the humans had originally bred them from, and the foothills were filled with escaped cattle, only that cattle had roughly doubled in size and grown a thick coat of coarse fur, strong enough to withstand quite a bit of punishment.
Even before the change, hunters needed fairly sizable rifles to safely take down wild hogs; now, after the system blessed these beasts with incredible vitality and endurance, one might need a tank to hunt them or weapons enhanced by the system and enchanted by a skilled craftsman.
Granted, magic worked, too, but to get to the point that magic could take down a bovine beast weighing roughly a ton and a half, it took a lot of work. Sure, I could do it, though only with precision and Ice Magic or Mind Magic; if I tried to overcome them with, for example, Death Magic, I would fail. They were insanely tough, with enough vitality to endure a massive amount of trauma; that is, if one managed to inflict that trauma on them, their Endurance was strong enough to shrug off anything I could casually toss at them.
Their strength, in turn, meant the beasts hunting them were equally strong, or numerous enough to wear one of them down, smart enough to drive one off a cliff or just plain vicious enough to tear through whatever weak spot they could find, even if it cost them their own lives. Surprisingly, there were many of those predators, even though most of them were young and had likely undergone a rapid maturation similar to that of Luna.
Whatever the case may be, with an abundance of foot, the various predators were just about in predator-heaven, though I was fairly certain this wouldn’t last; the local land didn’t have the resources to sustain as many prey animals as the change had released from human captivity and, without those prey-animals, the predators would found themself starving, too. But, at least for now, the entire area was absolutely teeming with wildlife.
The big beasties were quite useful to Luna and me. They served admirably as test subjects, training, and if their bodies weren’t too destroyed after fighting them, they made for excellent food. We didn’t even need to hunt them; both hogs and cattle were aggressive enough to charge at us, making it less of a hunt and more of a turnabout as they tried to trample us. Processing them was a bit of a challenge; even after their death, the coarse fur of the cattle and the thick, leathery hide of the hogs was enough to make skinning them a massive pain, even with magic to make things easier.
But, thanks to my magical abilities, it was fairly simple to take the hide, the bones and, most importantly, the meat and make something useful out of it. I even experimented with making Jerky with a combination of Water and Blood Magic, giving us something quite edible, especially after adding some herbs and spices to the product.
But where the big beasties were quite useful and only mildly dangerous and annoying, the small beasties were an entirely different story. Small beasties, in this case, meant enough mosquitoes to darken the sky. They had bred in various puddles, small ponds and the odd creek, and once they hatched, they could essentially use the various animals as an all-you-can-suck buffet, gorging themselves before laying more eggs to create a second wave. It was, quite frankly, insane, the sheer number big enough to carry off a small child with ease, and I thought I had seen a swarm of mosquitoes descend on a piglet once, leaving nothing but a dried-out husk in their wake.
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A small part of me wondered if they would feel a kinship with Lia, but a much bigger part was trying to come up with a way to kill as many of these blood-sucking fiends as possible or come up with some other way to keep them from annoying Luna and me. Slapping them only helped so much, so a better way was needed. A part of me considered whether some sort of magical barrier, maybe a combination of Ice and Death Magic, would work, but creating one and keeping it going at all times would be incredibly exhausting. Active barriers were just a lot of magical work. Similarly, using Wind Magic to keep them off me might work, too, but again, the cost to keep it up permanently would likely be prohibitive.
Thinking back to my time on Mundus, I remembered the enchantments I had woven into my clothes during summer, allowing me to remain soothingly cool at all times with only a fairly limited expenditure of Astral Power. Those enchantments would likely work here on Terra, too, and once I had the cool chill of winter all around me, working the deathly chill of the grave into the enchantment would likely work, too. I didn’t need a whole lot of Death Magic in the enchantment, just enough to kill a weakened insect, so it shouldn’t injure me too much.
With that in mind, I began to work on such an enchantment while Luna and I continued to experiment on a few of the animals that attacked us. Not on those able to actually challenge us, not that there were too many of those, but on those we could beat with relative ease.
Still, these mountains might just be the most dangerous place I had ever been to, excluding the Valley on Mundus in which I built my tower. The spirits of Ice there were just on another level of danger, only subservient to me because I managed to destroy the Yeti, which had devoured many of them in life. Otherwise, I wasn’t sure whether I would have been able to set up shop there without slowly cleansing the entire valley, destroying each and every spirit to the point that they faded from the world.
But the mountains here, with numerous predators living on far too little space for their usual habits, thus driving them all into an incredibly aggressive mindset, were dangerous in their own right. Some of the animals had already learned to wield the elements, as Luna and I discovered when a massive bear, a Grizzly or something like that, demonstrated that it wasn’t just a bear the size of a truck, no, it was a bear the size of a truck which could clad itself in an armour of stone, making it essentially impervious to everything but seriously powerful magical attacks and blunt force strong enough to break through a castle wall.
Luckily, that particular bear wasn’t too intelligent, quite literally. Its endurance and thick armour were meaningless in the face of the mental assault I could deliver with my Mind Magic, allowing me to knock the thing out and once it was down, finding the weak spot was fairly trivial, as the thing had left holes open for its eyes, as it needed to see. Threading a needle into those holes would have been nearly impossible if the bear had been able to move, but given its stunned state, walking up and sticking a needle through its eye and into its brain was trivial. The only thing we needed to be wary of was that the bear would immediately wake up once it felt the pain, but given that I could make needles from Hard Ice and retreat before driving the needles home with Ice Magic made that, too, a fairly simple problem.
Still, if not for my Mind Magic, that bear could have posed a serious problem for us, forcing us to flee or get squashed by its impressive bulk and strength. Meeting that thing made me wonder what other impressively magical creatures might roam these mountains. If they weren’t as dangerous as the Stone Grizzly, they might make for good test subjects, though it would depend on their individual abilities and affinities. Because I had little interest in creating something I wouldn’t be able to contain or kill myself unless we created it right before we left the area as quickly as possible. But even that carried some risk, as the creations of Luna and me weren’t always all that stable. Having an insane beast after us, possibly able to track us down and move faster than we could, didn’t sound like a good time. Far too Frankenstein for me; I had no interest in getting killed by my own creation.
