Oh Deer

"Shit!" Kir dove forward and ran as a blast of cold air struck the place where he'd been squatting moments before.

He felt pain in his wing as he struck a branch, and realized that with how big his body was now, getting away would be impossible in the confined space of the forest. At the very least he might break a wing.

As he dodged another blast of cold air, he realized his only hope was to enter the clearing and try his luck either defeating or scaring off the crystalbranch.

The deer stomped its hoof, an intimidating display that almost distracted Kir as it gathered mana for another attack.

Animals that used mana and monsters didn't have the most variety in terms of the magic they wielded, but more often than not they made up for that with fast casting times and a high mana capacity.

This time, the beam of cold was aimed at his legs, and he jumped before it could close, his wings flapping out of instinct and bearing him up for a couple of extra feet before he hit the ground.

If they hadn't, he would have been frozen in place.

The realization struck him that once the deer fired its spell, it couldn't see during the attack, and so each casting would leave him an opening of about three seconds.

The crystalbranch huffed in frustration, but was already charging its next attack as it backed up one step and turned its head. Compared to last time, it aimed higher.

Kir waited until the last moment to flare his wings and flap them once, pushing himself backwards instead of dodging the same way he did last time. As soon as he was on his feet, he rushed the deer, who bleated with surprise as it saw too late that Kir was going in for the punch.

His fist connected with the crystalhorn's throat, and it bleated as the force of Kir's punch took its front hooves off the ground.

An unexpected crunch beneath his fist made Kir realize just how much stronger he'd become since his birthday, which came in handy as the panicking deer lowered its head to try to stab him with its antlers.

In his rush to avoid getting stabbed, Kir caught the antlers in each hand, only to spot the ball of cold mana floating in the middle. He realized he was dead if he got touched with it, and so he put all his strength into pushing back the deer as it put all of its strength into pushing down.

A cry tore itself from Kir's throat as he braced himself, angling his body until he was at nearly forty-five degrees, leveraging all his might into his arms, his hands burning from the intense cold until suddenly he heard a set of cracking noises. The pain in his hands increased as the deer's spell neared completion.

Up until now, Kir had been surviving on fear and reflexes, but as he stood on the verge of a cold, miserable death, he felt a new emotion: anger.

His cry became a scream of anger. He forced his fingers to tighten, his grip to rise to crushing pressure, until at last both horns broke off at the base, the ball of mana dissipating as they became detached from the source.

He didn't even hear the deer cry out as he stabbed it with its own antlers, carving into its neck and slashing desperately until the beast collapsed on its side, bleeding out on the ground.

Kir finally stood back as he saw it was no longer a threat. He tried to drop the antlers but they were frozen to his hands by blood.

His chest was heaving from his efforts, and he could feel cold fleeing his skin as his body warmed through the frozen sweat on his brow. After figuring out that he could circulate his mana to melt the frozen deer blood. Once free, he dropped the horns onto the ground and inspected his kill.

The body looked heavy, but he knew it would grow lighter once he dressed the corpse. As soon as he caught his breath, he started the process by using magic to raise a stone platform as a table.

Washing the body wasn't usually done, but he had the luxury of magic and so he gathered moisture from the air and directed the flows to get the grime and blood off its pelt. An idea struck him as he did this, and so he used pressurized water to carve open the belly and make the cuts needed to remove the organs.

Darlae had taught him the basics but crystalbranch deer never wandered near human towns unless there was a fire or some big predator about, and so he didn't exactly know what was edible or not aside from the meat.

When he got to the heart, however...

Attached to the organ was a vein-like web of blue semi-crystals. They were flexible, but hardened a bit in the air as he prodded them with a claw. Kir suddenly felt very hungry. He'd exerted himself quite a bit and almost gotten his head frozen off. Surely he deserved a bite...

As soon as he bit into it, he felt a rush of power. The heart was crunchy and chewy, cartilaginous, and for some reason hard in the middle. That hardness, it turned out, came from a crystal the size of three of his fingers.

Somehow, the blue veins of crystal had given the heart a sweet flavor that Kir hadn't expected. He let the rest of the organ fall away as he stared into the slightly white depths of the twisted and flexible crystal substance.

It took all his willpower not to eat it.

Instead, he forced himself to pocket the crystal and finished dressing his kill.

By the time he got back to camp, it was late afternoon. He'd wanted to bring the horns back too, but they had melted over the hour it took him to finish. Without its organs, the deer had turned surprisingly light, and he barely felt fatigued as he carried it over his back into the ring of wagons.

Darlae and Brigit met him outside their wagon, and he was surprised when Darlae struggled under the weight as he handed it to her. In the end, he helped her carry it to another cart for processing.

A little water magic had helped him bleed the body enough to keep his wings clean, but he was still looking forward to washing himself.

First, he had to get past Brigit though.

"What in the world happened? Your clothes are a mess."

"It was a crystalbranch stag. I'm lucky I wasn't frozen," he argued back.

Darlae was shocked, "You took a crystalbranch on your own? Why didn't you run?"

"I tried, but I was in a bad spot. I would have broken a wing or worse."

"No one hunts crystalbranches alone. You could have been killed!" Brigit raised her voice.

"I know, but it was fight or die, believe me..." He went on to describe what happened, leaving out the part where he'd been experimenting with a new spell. By the end of it, both of his moms were in shock at how daring he'd been.

"Wait, so you ate its heart?" Brigit asked. "Did you at least cook it?"

"I... didn't feel the need to. It was kindof like a compulsion. As soon as I saw the crystal veins I felt I had to try it..."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the fragment of crystal he'd kept.

Brigit gasped, accepting it when he offered it. "This is a pure mana crystal... you didn't just kill a crystalbranch, you killed one with a crystal heart! A decent-sized one, too."

That subject had never come up, and the only encounters Kir had had with mana crystals in books was the common knowledge that they were a necessary catalyst for creating magical tools and circles.

Now, the flexibility of the crystal made sense, since it was also part of a working organ.

Brigit kept going on about how a crystal heart could take decades or even centuries to form. Only monsters were guaranteed to have them, and even then they often exhausted their mana when fighting for their lives, which could severely affect the quality of crystal.

While he was trying to wrap his mind around how that made evolutionary sense in this world when Brigit offered the crystal back to him.

"Here," she said, "It's yours, Kir."

"What do I do with it?" he asked. He wanted to eat it, but that felt like it could be a waste.

Darlae cleared her throat. "Well... if you're willing to let your mom temper it, I can make you a couple of knives to replace the one you lost," she offered.

Kir smiled and handed her the crystal. "I would love that, thank you."

"Oh, and don't mention eating hearts to people. Weird enough that you can eat raw mana crystals, now that I think about it," Darlae advised.

Kir nodded. Given how much of the "meat" he'd wasted, he could guess that it was the mana crystal that attracted him more than the heart itself. "I'm sorry I worried you."

They shared a hug, and Brigit told him to go take a bath.