When I noticed it was dusk, I asked if I could meet with Savre.

  Glynn instead handed me an ice blue potion in a flask of ice. “Something came up, three new refugee families came today, our sister tribe was invaded by a raid ordered by Asnova’s kingdom. If it was a normal raid then they could’ve dealt with it but it was led by an A-rank. So Savre is in charge of making equipment for them so we can only delay your gift.”

  “Oh, alright, I can wait, but what is this potion for?”

  “It’s to temper your body, we can’t tell you why but its better if you drink it.”

  At this point, I didn’t doubt them, even if they wanted to hurt me, they could’ve done it when they first saw me, so I just drank the potion. A freezing sensation spread through my body that made me feel numb.

  After that, Glynn gave me a couple more potions that I had to drink the next day. After that, we said goodbye and I was left alone in my igloo. I made a shrine for my fallen comrade and rested for the night.

  The following day, I went to breakfast again before Glynn set up the magic formation. Aveeno improved rapidly, from ten minutes to five she halved her time. As for me? I practiced pulling strings efficiently and made snowballs, to throw snowballs, to make more snowballs and continue the cycle.

  I overloaded a snowball before throwing it and letting it break against the snow, once that happened, the pieces of snow would attract nearby snow to form snowballs before flying to my hand so I could inject more many and throw it again. This was how I planned to win all my snowball fights. The more important thing was pulling strings.

  After they left to do frost elf business, I explored the forest.

  I practiced climbing trees with my squirrel powers and was getting used to traveling around with one arm. I also learned my lesson to always bring my tools with me. Well, not that it made much of a difference, I avoided predators unless I wanted to fight, and didn’t kill prey animal, only caught them.

  I found a white kitty cat that had black stripes stuck inside a fallen log. After I pulled her out, she kept following me and gave me puppy dog eyes. I played fetch with her, hunted mice together, and I tried to mark her with sparkly powder but whenever I pulled the string she wouldn’t bulge, nor could I feel her direction. I wanted to taint her with my mana, but I was worried if it was going to do something weird, so I didn’t.

  Eventually I decided to bring her home and called her Felicia. I had plans to make a slightly bigger igloo for her and make her a hat so I could track her… and make her anti-stealable.

  After making her an igloo, Aveeno visited me again. She told me I should put Felicia back where I found her.

  When I disagreed, she destroyed me in combat once again and made me put her back. Of course, I didn’t put her in the log again, I just put her near it.

  She then told me the reason she was there, she wanted to use me as a training dummy for one of the refugee children she was teaching.

  I agreed because I could use some practice.

  It was a little girl called Iaysha and it was embarrassing to say she was better than me. She was also stronger than me, I often had to avoid direct blows and deflect most attacks.

  A week passed by with using the formation after breakfast, learning to use mana with Aveeno, exploring the forest midday, sparring with Iaysha during the afternoons, and exploring once more.

  I slowly improved my dagger skills; I could last a lot longer and deflect more jabs. Mainly because she easily broke my icicle this one time and the time limit wasn’t done yet.

  I also got used to the potion, it didn’t numb me as much, but it was still uncomfortable.

  Once the week of support was over, Glynn gave me a list of things to do for the tribe. Most of it was collecting rare ingredients that I had never heard of before. But I selected the easiest one for me, to hunt and gather food. At minimum I had to get enough food to feed myself twice.

  I spent most of my time in the forest, I found a couple of old pits, rivers, wolf dens, and more. As I got used to the forest, the territory I explored gradually increased, sometimes I saw other elves briefly, other times I found abandon camps.

  Whenever I had free time and didn’t want to be active, I spent my time carving arrows from sticks I found in the forest.

  Another week passed before Aveeno gave me good news.

  “Your body has been tempered and is ready to receive the welcome gift.” Aveeno was much more excited than I was.

  “Is the potion why my skin is still light blue?” because, although I wasn’t cold or numb from the potion anymore, my skin that was recovering from hypothermia was still blue.

  “Mm at first we wanted to use a technique that would work on your body since you were human, but mom didn’t have enough free times these days so we could only make your body adapt temporarily… probably.”

  When faced with the potential to no longer be human, I was cool with it, it didn’t really matter to me.

  When we were walking in the village, there were many more elves here than before, a lot more children too. The children greeted me and Aveeno, but the adults were sparce.

  When we reached Savre’s place and entered the sixth room, I noticed that there were less weapons hung on the walls but on her loom was a beautiful ice jade bow tapestry.

  “Quickly, quickly, mom only has a little bit of free time, let’s do this quickly.”

  Savre greeted me with a smile and made an ice blue wall appear, it had blue chains and looked like a torture table.

  “Please take off your shirt and put your limbs in the cuffs.”

  I was starting to feel suspicious, I really felt like I was about to be tortured.

  “Don’t give me that look, giving you your gift requires us to carve your flesh and bones.” Aveeno innocently batted her eyes.

  “Do I have to be awake?”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Aveeno clicked her tongue, she then grabbed a light blue potion, this one much smaller than the others before.

  “We can make you numb but other than that, we don’t have anything to make you sleep.”

  At this point I didn’t want to back out, so I took off my shirt and got locked up.

  She poured a few drops of the liquid in my mouth before everything went beyond cold.

  Everything was slow, Aveeno slowly held a needle up to my left side, her mom holding her hand and guiding her.

  Slowly, searing hot pain assaulted my mind, everything was moving so slowly and painfully, my eyes had tears in them.

  When I blinked my tears away, I felt burning ice all over my left side, left chest, and left arm before the feeling abruptly stopped.

  As I opened my eyes, I saw a pool of blue blood gathered beneath my feet, Aveeno cleaning the blood from my chest and arm. My body was strangely stiff and unresponsive.

  “Oh, you’re up! How is it? Can’t you feel the power coursing through your veins?”

  I noticed I was still gritting my teeth and slacked my jaw before I spoke. “You said it would numb me.”

  “It should have?” she tilted her head. “During the process you would’ve felt like tiny paper cuts wherever the needle went but with the potion, everything would pass by quickly and it would feel like a short itch.”

  “I felt a cold so cold it felt hot.”

  “Oh, I guess you don’t have resistance to the cold like we do, oh well, its over now.”

  Savre summoned snow to remove the blue blood from the floor before releasing me.

  She then handed me a very small vial of blue liquid, there were a lot of those.

  “It’s enough for you to take one drop a day for a month, no more, no less, go along now, I need to make a new tapestry, Aveeno please tell him how the markings work.”

  After getting kicked out, we went to my igloo, and I took a drop of the mysterious blue liquid. I also noticed my necklace was gone.

  “Alright I’m only going to say this once. Ahem, don’t inject mana into your new markings, it’s just to be safe. That being said, after three weeks are over, you can inject some mana and it would condense ice from the water in the air or snow from the ground to form a bow for you.”

  She then demonstrated by pulling her sleeve down. I didn’t see a tattoo but when she injected mana, an intricate pattern of a sword glowed on her forearm before a crystal ice sword slowly formed in her hand.

  “And if you lose it, the weapon will slowly evaporate, your markings are the mold and your mana is what activates it to create a weapon.”

  She then shattered the sword in her hand. “That’s about all, also you will skip practice today and tomorrow, rest or something.” She said before leaving.

  Although she told me to rest, I did anything but that. Like how you should stretch your stiff muscles after a long nap. Although it was slightly painful and I heard cracks occasionally, I think it was working because by day two I wasn’t as stiff anymore.

  Since I could no longer practice making snowballs with my mana, I decided to practice using my bow. I didn’t have a finger to pluck the string, but I could infuse some mana into the string, and let it be pulled when I moved my entire right arm.

  My accuracy wasn’t as good as it used to be, often too far right or left, I wasn’t dejected as practice makes perfect.

  A week passed since then, and although my accuracy didn’t improve much, I could draw my bow very quickly.

  When sparring with Iaysha, I changed my tactic, from fighting her like a normal warrior would do, I developed a tactic where I often clash before rapidly retreating and looking for openings.

  During my exploration time, I had a total of five new pets, Jimmy, Eevee, Kitsune, Rat, and Bob, but Aveeno either made me let them free or took them for herself. I honestly have no idea what she did with them.

  Another week passed before something interesting happened.

  During midday, when I was looking for a new pet that Aveeno wouldn’t steal, I found Felicia. She was running rapidly towards me and meowing a lot.

  “Git er, er eyes are enough for me to retire!”

  Uh oh, people are here.

  I grabbed Felicia and hugged her with my right arm. I immediately climbed a tree and hid.

  “Where is she? Shit, someone has been here, they must’ve taken er!”

  In the trees I saw a trio of people with cloaks on. The one yelling was short and held a large hammer. One beside him was an armored knight with a tower shield while the one slightly behind them had a bow.

  When I first traveled in the forest, I often removed my footprints in the snow, but it seems like I’ve gotten used to meeting no one so I got lazy. It wasn’t long before they tracked my footprints to the tree I was.

  When they saw me, I waved and dangled my legs from the branch I was sitting on.

  “It’s a frost elf?” This time the knight spoke, they sounded like a girl, so I think they were one.

  I scooped some snow from the branch and threw it at her.

  The one with the bow removed their hood and looked at me excitedly.

  “Guys, guys, it’s a frost elf, if we capture that savage, we are going to be rich!”

  “Idiot, does it look like we can take him? He looks like he lives here, or maybe he’s just a scout be careful.”

  It looked to be a trio of D-ranks; I was definitely not going to fight them.

  “Ai, but we have Kora, if we git em n that cat, I can retire twice!” The short one said as he swung his hammer at my tree.

  “Ugh, my armor doesn’t change anything!” The knight yelled before following.

  I got up and rode the tree as it fell before jumping just as the tree hit the ground and ran.

  I placed Felicia in my hoodie before pulling out a pre-made snowball. I had already injected it with mana from my right arm, so it wasn’t going to affect my markings.

  While I was doing all of that, the archer shot three arrows towards me, but this was my home field, no it wasn’t, this was a new area, but I could duck behind trees.

  I roughly knew where I was and I didn’t want to lead them to the camp so I went to any of the wolf dens I remembered.

  They followed me closely behind, the short one destroying all the trees in his way instead of going around them like his partners.

  I was running backwards, one eye looking towards where I was running as I took aim and threw my snowballs. The armored one and short one just plowed through them, but the archer dodged mine.

  Once I went into familiar territory, I could finally place my focus and continued to throw many premade snowballs, one had to hit the archer by now.

  “God fucking dammit, how many snowballs does this guy have?”

  “Just ignore em, they just regular balls.”

  Yes, ignore them, listen to the smart short man.

  “You dim wit, he’s pulling them from thin air, obviously they are made from mana.”

  After he said that, they started to dodge my snowballs.

  Well, I didn’t achieve my goal but I made it towards the den, I ran straight towards it.

  A wolf was nearby and growled a warning to me.

  I just jumped, using its face as a springboard before climbing a tree and jumping away like a monkey.

  By the time the wolf howled to alert the others, I was already gone while they distracted the adventurers for me.

  One of them said something about contribution points but I didn’t know what they meant.

  Now I focused on making light tracks so they couldn’t follow me and took a large detour to the village.

  I didn’t know whether or not I should tell Aveeno and Glynn, but I was going to meet up with her in the afternoon for sparing regardless, so I just collected snow to refill my reserves.

  After it turned afternoon I went ahead and went to the area I usually sparred with Iaysha.

  “Oh?” They noticed me. “You’re here early… wait why do you have Felicia, I told you to put her back!”

  “Oh, um here’s the thing, when I was exploring closer to the south, I saw a party chasing Felicia.”

  “How many? What rank?” she poked me with an icicle.

  “Uh there was three, one archer, knight, and hammer man. I think they were at least D-rank.”

  “Did they talk about a bounty?”

  “Uh, yeah, they said something about capturing me.”

  “Well, it looks like my first war against the alliance is coming soon!” She oddly enough had sparkles in her eyes.

  “Wait, what do you mean by that?”

  “They were probably scouts looking for us!” She then twirled and looked to the skies.

  “I’ve heard stories when I was young, I always wanted to fight the alliance, our woodland cousins betrayed us, and I want to see how strong these people they relied on are.”

  Interesting, now I was curious why the regular elves depended on the alliance as well.

  Despite having many questions, her enthusiasm placed her in her own world, and I was too scared to interrupt her, all I did was say “Let’s train more!”

  “Yeah! You are now to attend midday as well; I will be teaching you and Iaysha together!”

  From that day on, after training the use of mana with the formation, I went with Aveeno and learned besides Iaysha before sparring with her and getting better faster.

  I finished the potion vial and I felt strange, very excited for the prospect of war.

  I also could now summon my frost bow; it looked like a normal wooden bow but with a blue tint.

  A week later, news of a large raid from the alliance broke into the barrier.