From my perch on the biggest tree I could find in the area, I was looking down on the ocean. Some ice was floating on the water, though not enough to completely cover the surface, let alone seal it shut. I could see some dark shapes moving in the water, though I had no idea whether those were fish or something else. These shapes could be anything, from something normal, like fish, seal or other marine animals, to the unusual, like Rumcol or Naga. I just didn't know. But I wanted to find out.

However, during my last visit to the area, I had learned that an unknown supernatural effect was in place that could affect anyone wandering too close, which was why I remained at a distance from the shore and up in my tree, approaching carefully. Sadly, I couldn't be confident that I'd recognise the effect; it might be something similar to Luna's recently acquired super-speed, so I needed to be careful. The effect itself might even contain a concealment component, making it even more dangerous than one would expect. Mind Magic was an insidious and often subtle threat, as I was well aware, given that I regularly used it myself.

So, vigilance was a required trait to continue, especially given that I had travelled here alone. Remembering how I had lured some of the creatures living in the bay to the shore with a magically compelled deer, I decided to try to recreate this. Hopefully, it would allow me to learn a little more about the effect that covered the bay. I especially wanted to know its exact size. Once I knew that, I'd hopefully be able to analyse it without entering the area of effect myself, keeping me from being affected by it.

The first step to make that happen was to find an appropriate test animal. A deer, moose or elk would probably have been best, simply because their larger size made it easier to keep track of them, but I wasn't able to find one quickly. Maybe they had migrated from the area, trying to flee the cold and snow, but I wasn't sure. Their absence, and the absence of their tracks, could have been due to local dangers or some other factor I was unaware of. Or I was simply unlucky, just because I had used a few scrying constructs, and a couple of minutes didn't necessitate that I found the game I was looking for.

But what I did find were a few hares, their white pelts neatly blending into the snow as they were hopping through the underbrush, trying to keep themselves concealed in the snowy forest. They weren't quite what I had been after, but they were what I had, so I dealt with them.

With a bit of Mind Magic, one of the hares easily started to hop towards the bay. When it reached the edge of the forest, I had to exert more and more influence over its simple mind until it entered the middle of the open area, closer to the water. There, the hare was about to turn around and bolt back into the cover of the trees, but I focused more power into its mind, until something suddenly shifted.

For a few moments, the hare simply stilled, looking as if it had died. My Mind Magic was still active, but the compulsion effect I had been using wasn't doing anything any longer, so I decided to stop using it, just to see if that would make a difference.

As it turned out, it didn't make a difference; the hare didn't even react when I conjured a sheet of Ice and used it to lift the hare into the air and carry it towards me, something any wild animal should find highly concerning.

When the hare was next to me, and I could lay a hand on it, I immediately noticed just how much damage I had done to the thing. It wasn't dead, though it might as well have been. There was a bit of blood matting its head. I wasn't quite sure which part of its head the blood had oozed out of, but that was the only visible damage.

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Internally, my Blood Magic was painting an entirely different picture. The hare's brain had multiple burst blood vessels, with liquid seeping into the skull and increasing the internal pressure. The animal was dead, it just hadn't stopped breathing yet, making me realise that I had apparently broken the hare's mind so thoroughly that its brain broke in sympathy or something like that.

It was a fascinating data point on my journey to understand the intricacies of the Mind, especially regarding the interplay between Mind and Body. Sadly, it didn't help me understand the local conditions. For a moment, I considered testing this with another hare, but I had a feeling the result wouldn't change. Forcing one of these animals to move across a wide open strip of land, as was necessary to get from their forest to the ocean here, would likely bring about similar results.

Still, repetition and confirmation were a necessary part of the experimental process, so I went to compel another hare.

It didn't take long for me to have to essentially brain-dead hares, though the first had already gone from essentially brain-dead to just dead. Out of curiosity, I conjured a bit of Ice and wrapped it around its feet, allowing me to puppet the body as if it were still alive. Then, I had it hop over to the water. Its movement was jerky and completely unnatural, but as it turned out, the local predators didn't care for realism. They saw the easy meal and went for it.

The first indication of their activities came through the wind, or rather, through the air. It was an incredibly subtle sound, almost outside of my range of hearing. I briefly wondered if I could only hear it thanks to some of my sensory traits or my high Intuition, but it didn't really matter. The important part was that I could hear it and immediately felt a tug at my mind. It wasn't all that powerful, but subtle enough that I might have missed it if I hadn't been paying close attention.

Unwilling to allow any influence on my mind, I tried to invert the Wind Magic I usually used to conceal any sound I made, hoping that blocking the sound would block the influence. My first attempt didn't work out as I thought it would, causing any sound I made to be amplified by an order of magnitude. However, after trying a second time, I found a way to block all sounds from reaching me. That did the trick; the tug on my mind instantly faded, though I knew this would take some additional tweaking. It was utterly impractical to deafen myself just to avoid this effect; there had to be better ways.

However, before I could start to work on the issue, I focused back on the hare I had briefly ignored and made it hop towards the ocean again. The brief interruption of the hare's movement hadn't been enough to put the creatures in the ocean off their feed, and after a few more hops, they struck. Just like they did with the deer I used during the last visit, one of them lunged from where it had hidden, easily catching the hare. Not that I tried too hard to dodge, but even if I had, I wasn't sure if I would have been able.

I immediately tried to use Observe to get more information, but sadly, I was too far away. However, I was close enough to see some of their peculiarities. The biggest was that their skin seemed to slowly shift in colour, allowing them to blend into the mix of snow, ice and mud of the beach area without issues. I might have been able to detect them from up close, but from the roughly two hundred metres I had kept myself back, I wasn't able to spot them, not until it was too late.

Given that Observe wasn't a viable method for gathering information, I decided to take a more aggressive approach. Namely, I conjured a barrage of Icicles and launched them at the highest speed I could muster. The strange creature was taken by surprise by the long distance, and my complete lack of subtlety gave it enough time to react and dive out of the way. It wasn't enough to keep itself completely safe, but it managed to avoid most of my barrage, only taking a few glancing hits.

But it turned out that those hits were enough to draw blood and attract its fellow monsters, sending them into a feeding frenzy. The fight, if one could call it that, was short and brutal. The injured creature was torn apart in less than a minute, futilely trying to defend itself against superior numbers. To make matters worse, my contribution to the fight wasn't sufficient to grant me EXP, or maybe these creatures were too low a level to give me any, meaning I didn't learn their race or level.

This would take some effort.

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