Hrunt watched the ice ball, at the monstrous creature reflected on the surface.

The monster infused its own purple magical energy into the rock and then craned its muscular arms behind its back, twisting its serpentine body in a way very similar to Ongus’s own throwing form.

There was no doubt about this. This creature was going to hit them. Or get close to hitting them.

Hrunt disabled farsight, and the ball of ice hovering above his skull staff shattered.

“What are you doing!” said Ongus. “He-there’s no way-,”

Ongus’s arm broke apart from the elbow.

It was like an all-erasing, invisible pillar of force had run straight through his arm, completely disintegrating everything much of what connected his forearm to his upper arm.

It was only when the sonic boom erupted and cracked towards them that blood finally spurted from Ongus’s mangled limb.

The goblin champion howled in pain as he leaped up and down, his one remaining hand grabbing tight at the bleeding, armless stump under his shoulder.

Hrunt took action. “You see now the wisdom of my thoughts?”

“Do-do something!” said Ongus as he pointed forwards, into the darkness of the forest clearing where this monster must have been rapidly approaching.

One hundred meters was nothing to this beast that traveled the forests with a speed that surpassed any of the insects that called it their home.

Hrunt grunted and took one of the necklaces around his neck, this one lined with the teeth of the ice antlered shard stag and channeled the frigid magic that lay inherent within them.

He tore the necklace off and tossed it in front of him, and in mid-air, it glowed a bright blue before exploding, manifesting with a sudden gust of chilling air into a wall of sturdy ice.

“This will protect us. Now-,” Hrunt turned around to talk to Ongus only to find that the champion had run away, using his superior agility to rush into the other end of the clearing.

“Green-skinned coward,” spat Hrunt, but he knew he had no time to be cursing his luck and choice of companions. His lengthy, wrinkled ears pricked up, the wispy gray hairs on them standing on end as he heard rustling.

The rustling of a massive presence circling around the thickly forested edge of the clearing. Hrunt’s bulbous blue eyes struggled to keep up with his hearing as he heard the creature rustle in one direction, then in the complete opposite end of the clearing, and then again somewhere else.

Hrunt hugged the wall of ice he created.

Ongus’s Spin was extremely impressive.

An application of his Inhera that allowed his kind to charge up strong blows by rotating their arms and general body tempering magic, but it was a costly technique.

Hrunt’s eyes were extremely sensitive to magic.

That was one of the reasons the tribe had chosen him from birth to be a thrall. Though his body was smaller, weaker, his mind was sharp, and his eyes even sharper.

Any flare up of magic, Hrunt would sense, and he would hide behind the durable wall of ice at the right angle before any rock hit him.

But that did not happen.

Instead, something blurred into Hrunt’s vision, and he found a strand of silk tied to his skull staff.

The end of the strand lay in the darkness of the clearing, and before he could react, the string tightened and reeled in, and within seconds, the staff was gone, absorbed into the darkness.

Hrunt had sensed no magic at all from that maneuver. He growled at the dark. Then that meant that this monster had both magical might and physical power.

A rare combination for familiars.

Something like this would have taken the entire Frostskull tribe to tear down.

Like the time they had prevailed against the giant Jotnar monstrosity.

But Hrunt was alone here. He could not scavenge the bones of the fallen to fuel his magic. All he had were the rapidly diminishing accessories of bone on his body now.

And alone, he instinctively knew his death was imminent.

If…if there was even the slightest chance of talking his way out of his death, of groveling in the dirt or bargaining, he would have taken it, but he had a feeling.

A feeling that crawled from his neck down to his spine, sending shivers throughout his body in a way that the cold of the north never could.

The cold of a death that was to come to him through the jaws of a predator, something that was pointless to talk to.

Knowing this strangely took out much of his fear, and he felt oddly calm. He put a hand on one of his arms, growling and baring his cracked, stubby teeth.

==

The Collector circled the ‘thrall’, granting it some auditory signals here and there to allow it to perform some actions.

In this way, the Collector would gain battle data about the thrall and his magic while also ascertaining whether there was anything truly useful to consume from the specimen.

After all, as of now, the Collector merely had three cores it could slot into its body, though in time, it would be able to develop more capacity.

It had already devoured the stick of wood topped with a human cranium and found that there was not much useful for it.

>>>

*Metalloglottic Ossifier sample obtained*

–Runewood

>>>

The wood had a property of channeling magical energy through it more efficiently, but not to a staggeringly improved degree, and the skull’s biomass was that of an ordinary human.

There had been no roots or core to retrieve from the human, for it seemed that those were even more sensitive to expiration than even memory retrieval from the brain.

This left the skull with only its base biomass which provided not even a tenth of a single point at the Collector’s current level.

Yet, the thrall did not seem to be doing anything of note worth either. Rather, the specimen seemed to be waiting for the Collector to make the first move.

The Collector desired to force him to utilize his ‘mistform’ spell.

Now that the Collector possessed the means to sense mana and its flow, it would be able to determine the primary functioning of the spell that had once confounded it so.

Thus, the Collector emerged from its hiding spot, surging forwards with a closed fist to smash against the thrall.

The thrall barely had a moment of time to look up at the Collector’s towering form before a carapaced, red-wreathed fist smashed down into his head.

The Collector clicked its mandibles in understanding as its fist, wide enough to be size of the thrall’s entire head, whooshed past the thrall’s form.

The thrall dissipated into foggy mist, and several meters away, the thrall reformed with his arm stuck out towards the Collector.

Notably, the thrall had a deep scratch running from his forehead down to his stomach in an approximation of where the Collector would have torn through him.

Light emanated from the thrall’s arm, specifically from the bones underneath the skin.

The Collector perceived that all the bones comprising its hands up to its humerus glowed bright with blue, shining through the specimen’s flesh.

A moment later, and the arm burst apart in the same hue of light, and a wave of rippling and rumbling white and blue magical energy crashed towards the Collector in an avalanche that managed to even dwarf it.

The Collector projected its Sapian barrier outwards from itself, preventing the massive wave of mana from directly touching its skin.

The hostile mana slammed against its purple Sapian barrier, forming into an ice formation that towered over even the darkwood trees at the edge of the clearings.

>>>

Mana Level: 60%>40%

>>>

Interesting. The Collector clicked its mandibles as it analyzed what had occurred.

The thrall’s mistform essentially used its own bones as a conduit to channel mana throughout its body and disperse it, temporarily reducing the body into an elementally compatible structure of mist.

That made it impervious to ordinary physical damage and highly resistant to even the magic-boosted punches from the Collector.

The Collector then inspected the ice around it.

It was completely encased in a towering structure of ice, though extending its Sapian barrier had prevented the ice from constricting its movements, leaving the Collector standing in a neat sphere within the frozen wave.

It drew the barrier back, for extending it past the body was heavily taxing to mana, as were other forms of Sapian magic.

By using his own bones as a conduit once more and even sacrificing them, the thrall had been able to essentially surpass his limits and affect a spell that exceeded the Collector’s own expectations.

This must have been akin to how the other specimen such as the red-skinned champion had broken their own limits even when accounting for mana enhancing their strength.

The Collector closed its fists, pumping blood and mana into them.

Their already impressive muscular density only swelled even more in size, foggy ripples of red floating above like crimson steam. It collected the breadth of ice in front of it and determined this would buy the thrall merely five seconds of time.

The Collector punched the wall of ice in front of itself, its two arms punching forwards with carapace-plated fists that shattered and smashed the ice in great chunks with every blow, and there were many, many blows.

So many blows at such a speed that they blurred into an endless, rapid staccato of crashing blows, and the entire ice structure groaned and shook as cracks began to line its sizable length.

The Collector drilled through the ice, and when it neared the other end, unleashed one last, powerful hit to completely shatter an opening for itself. It moved out into the open air and found that the thrall had left the clearing in the small time he had purchased for himself with his arm.

Yet, its scent was still strong. It had not traveled far.

Before the shaking and groaning ice dome collapsed upon itself, the Collector was already gone, slithering into the direction where the thrall’s scent was strongest.

Within seconds, the Collector was back upon the thrall.

The thrall growled and aimed his one remaining arm at the Collector. Blood spurted from his gaping, empty left shoulder socket, weakening his every step.

The Collector tested one last confirmation of its analyses.

It swiped at the thrall’s head with its monomolecular claws, and the thrall broke apart again into mist that started to billow backwards, away from the Collector.

It was here that the Collector aimed both hands at the thrall, and before he could reform, utilized Force Hold to keep the mist in place.

A purple outline covered the cloud of mist containing the thrall’s essence, freezing it in this gaseous state of matter.

The Collector clicked its mandibles. Holding the thrall in this state was extremely easy.

Another hypothesis proven correct.

The Collector had analyzed from its prior experimentations and gathering of battle data that when it attempted to directly force its magical energy on a foreign object, the cost was higher than when it flowed mana within its own body parts, scaling up with the dimensions and mass of the object.

In addition, the Collector noted with more interest, living beings were significantly more difficult to manipulate, with even small goblins requiring more mana expenditure to Force Hold than large swathes of unresisting dirt.

This, the Collector sensed, was because of the spirit roots and cores.

Even in living beings where they were unawakened, they still formed a natural defense mechanism that made infiltration via foreign magical signatures extremely difficult.

Force Hold and other magic like it that relied on directly manipulating other living beings therefore was highly inefficient to utilize.

However, in cases like this where the target willingly dispersed the mana flowing through their body-

The Collector willed the mist above its head and condensed it into a sphere of foggy white.

Then direct manipulation of the foreign body, even one possessing of an awakened core and magic sensitivity, was a minimal effort.

The Collector reduced the size of the sphere above its head, and as it grew smaller and smaller, it opened up its maw, carapace plates covering its face like a helmet sliding aside to reveal its waiting and hungry jaws.

The sphere condensed and condensed, and when the mist was focused down into the size of a tennis ball, the thrall could no longer hold his mistform, and the mist turned crimson first, then exploded into a burst of blood and ground up flesh and organs that rained down into the Collector’s mouth.