Isarnfur

Chapter 5

The travel was interesting, the man had with him some sort of high quality twine and a sack that he used to make a small trap for game that was local to the forest. This was something that I found interesting because only products like his only appeared in my world because of people being summoned here.

"What kind of prey are you looking for?" I asked, thinking that the trap was a bit on the cheap and weak side of things even if the materials were rare. "Something small? Anything like..." then I saw a couple pictures he was thinking of, one was a small rodent, like a rat with more rounded ears and fluffy tails...? The other was a rabbit with stiff quills interspersed in the fur. "Ah, we have something like those just not exactly the same." I responded.

"Well I'm trying to get those small game for food" Will responded. He only stood up again once he was done with the small trap, stepping back grabbing a couple of the twigs and made himself into something that looked like a fake bush to an outside observer. "What are we doing?" I asked Will, still curious. "Waiting" he said simply.

So we waited, waited, and waited. It must've been two hours until a rabbit came up to the trap, sniffing at the small piece of bait, the dumb animal tugged at the odd "vegitable-peminican" as Will called it. A knot untangled and caused the whole contraption to pull the rabbit up and away from the ground. Will rushed in and grimaced, he cleaved the rabbits neck, killing it.

~

Surprisingly even after a half hour, Will still kept quite even in thoughts while he skinned, stripped and butchered the rabbit. Thinking about how he had to take care of the meat of the animal to the best of his ability, feeding himself with the most he could out of it. A strong want to respect the animal he killed forefront of his mind.

I watched intently, another half hour passed before Will was able put the animal on a couple sticks over a new campfire, settling down near the new road. I watched this all in silence, finding his actions new in all my long life. Apparently I haven't experienced all of the types of sentient life. Most of the bounty hunters and others that grabbed me never did trapping or hunting, only eating solid soups, jerky, and pemmican on their ways from city to city, staying on the safety of the, now, old main roads.

"Why! I haven't seen anyone so passionately respectful to the dead animals they were having," I stated. "Well, I just feel like it's the right thing to do, the animal was alive after all. Even if my survival is more important than it's survival is, I should still respect it."

I didn't respond, just watching him cook the rabbit, placing a parallel pole to the flame to smoke the meat into jerky. Next he got up and rebuilt a small cranny from previous travellers, obviously meant to be slept in for the night. We then had hiked for long stretches in the next day, never taking many breaks nor were they long. I only was able to give broad directions in the travels. Staying up front with the fact it had been a long time since I've gone traveling. Being stuck in that other city, he found me in. I vaguely remember the name of the place being Wolkton? I wasn't there for long enough for me to decide to remember that place's name

Anyways, I had enjoyed getting out in the wider world again, not just the dreary and poor aesthetic that dominated the human realms currently. Which only compounded on the joy of having someone to actually to talk to in all these decades that I've been mute for. Something that led me to ask him questions, which he answered and asked some of his own. Which basically him saying that he couldn't really comprehend this place too well. Being from a different planet that was engulfed in "the religion of science and fear of war" as he put it

A thought struck me later that night, "Where exactly did he come from?" Maybe I should ask where this place he came from called. But for tonight, I kept my attention on slowly pulling the rest of the iron out of the dripping blood of another dead rabbit, adding an iron layer over my runed copper plate, giving the runes a more iron metallic white. A process which took a lot of energy.

I sighed, going back to my nightly routine of wishing the little reserve-like cells of mana energy were full already. Those were a project of their own, something I had to creatively find how to do faster. You see I wasn't exactly allowed to change the areas around the runes in the copper nor able to take out copper out of the bracer.

Luckily, the runes that the Bracer's creator, Auro, engraved didn't really set any rules that I couldn't use the Iron that I collected to restructure the copper that was furthest away from the runes. So with this minor exploit, I was able to store little batteries of mana that would otherwise be ambient in the air or clinging on some outside surface of earth or anything living. You see, mana was the equivalent of acting as the flint fire starter to a fire to magic, It was the most common and cheapest way to do magic, though mana also tended to be the fuel of spells too.

With this in mind, it made collecting mana reserves vital to doing spells, my little gimmick really because not many spirits imbued in armor could really do that. Which sometimes made me ridicule myself honestly, a part of growing as an Iron Spirit was that of improving the ability to collect as much as possible in one instance, under any circumstance. Though I could always retort to whoever said that was being a blinded purist that didn't notice I was improving just not doing every day to be on guard. Something I was slowly finding that was exhausting to do comparatively speaking.