Armin wiped the sweat off his forehead, leaving a fresh trail of blood in its wake. He was hot and tired and his hands, nay his shoulder, back, and everything else: hurt. His hands were covered in blisters at this point. Turns out skinning animals is a fuck ton of work.

Armin laughed mockingly at the fact that he was sweating his ass off despite not being all that far from the ice crater.

Upon resting up a bit, Armin had dragged the two dead Meezogs away from the ice crater a bit, just to try and avoid freezing to death while he dealt with what's to come, skinning them. He was adamant that their hide was something akin to leather or something that would serve as a suitable alternative at the very least.

He had only the vaguest idea of what he was doing here, having perhaps played one too many survival games, especially one or two that were quite ‘literal’ and actually forced the player into the steps of making leather. Well he at least hoped so, since they were games, it was likely to be some approximation of the process, he just hoped it would be ‘approximately’ close enough to real life, to work. Armin once more could not help but chuckle inwardly at the fact that he was worrying about if his gaming techniques were realistic enough to work in a game-like world.

So he had dragged the Meezogs downstream a bit before setting to work on them. Armin had carefully tried to cut their hides off with his ‘knife’, a job equal parts gruesome and difficult. All he could smell at the time was blood. Different to a humans though, not nearly as ‘iron’ smelling.

He had performed rather well for his first and second time respectively skinning animals. Were they animals? Perhaps monsters or creatures? A quandary for another time. Armin was quite proud of his efforts, although given just how long it had taken him and how slowly he had gone at it, just to make sure he didn’t fuck it up, he kindof thought that a particular saying involving monkeys and typewriters might very well apply here.

The only time he had fucked up was when he cut into the underside of the second Meezog, starting out, he had stuck his blade in too deep and too close to the groin. The unbearable smell of shit and rot that escaped from the resultant disemboweling had been so bad it had even made him vomit. Twice.

The job had been a gruesome one, that he was thankful for the nearby river to aid in cleaning off his blade his hands and his sanity. Not so grateful for the intensely cold water making his hands go numb and hurt from the cold. Unfortunately not far away from the crater enough it had seemed.

Armin had moved on to step two, a step that had proved even more tiring and even more difficult. Cleaning the hides off. That is, scraping all the shit off the hides.

This step had been challenging to say the least. It involved normally bracing the hide against a flat surface, underside up and scraping with a blunt edge, all the muck off of it. The problem is that Armin did not have any large, hard, flat surfaces to work from. He had settled for the flattest rock he could find and then expended every little but of mana he had (which was not that much) to try and grind it down and make it even flatter, met with rather questionable success.

Luckily, despite the rock not being that flat, the hide was rather tough compared to what he expected it to be and in the process of scraping, he had only torn the first hide in two places and the second in only one place. Amatuer work to be sure, but still a lot better than he had expected to get away with.

He had started out cautiously, having never done this before, but seeing as how applying too little pressure was literally getting him nowhere, he had ramped up his efforts rather quickly. His initial worries about how much he was actually supposed to scrape away, were quickly overcome when he realised that there was a membrane near the inner most layer, just before the thick and hardy skin, that was near impossible to scrape off, at least compared to the rest of it. This serving as his natural stopping point, definitely made it easier and had filled him with a tad more confidence.

Armin plopped down on the ground, absolutely exhausted, his hands blistered and aching. He was done scrapping the hides, the result pretty damn good if he didn’t say so himself, netting himself two decently sized ‘rawhides’. He would just have to leave them to dry a bit.

He would be stopping here. The rawhides would have to serve as is, as some cavemen style clothing for himself. He would not be tanning them, partly for a lack of knowledge (he was quite sure his survival game knowledge would be too far fetched for this), and partly because he simply lacked the resources to do so.

Armin lay there for a while, letting the excess heat leave his body and recouping a fraction of his lost strength, or at least attempting to do so. Eventually he would have to get off his back, either because of the cold that would start settling in too much, or because something might simply show up and eat him otherwise.

Armin sighed. Life was hard.

As if to punctuate this feeling and address the notion of being eaten, a large black beast suddenly casually strode into Armins line of sight. Armin quickly sprang to his feet, but before he could reach for his spear, the black beast disappeared. Armin scanned around for it, more than a little surprised at that little parlour trick. He quickly spotted it once more, this time directly between Armin and his spear. How had it gotten there and instantly at that. He had not seen or heard anything. Some kind of teleporting magic?

Armin was a little at ease, only a tiny bit mind you, as the beast in question turned out to be one six legged unidentifiable ‘jaguar-thing’. The Jaguar was currently giving Armin a look that somehow seemed to scream: ‘Try it, I dare you’.

After a few moments of nothing happening, mostly because Armin was paralysed with fear, the Jaguar turned around and with its powerful jaw, simply picked up one of the Meezog carcases. Right before it strode off however, it spotted the drying hides spread out on the rock. It examined them for a moment or two and then turned to look at Armin instead.

Armin could swear it was giving him a rather judgemental look. Jeez, it was my first time, alright!

The jaguar once more strode off with its meal in hand, once more seemingly fading into the shadows.

This was going to be a regular thing wasn’t it? At least it left Armin with the one carcass to potentially eat, flavour and a lack of any poison be willing. On the bright side, even though to Armin, it looked like he’d be losing food to the jaguar regularly, at least it seemed like it would not be eating him. Was it really intelligent enough to use him as a food provider? A scary thought indeed.

After waiting a few moments to make sure that it wasn’t coming back, Armin decided to get back to work. The first order was food. He was getting hungry. Armin started a fire once more and propping his spear up on some supporting rocks he gathered, was able to do his very own rotating barbecue. Albeit with manual rotation.

While Armin was waiting for his meat to cook he decided to practice some magic. His mana had started to recover a little quicker by now, the rate of which was about half of what it had originally been, before the damn bugs had messed it up. He was at least confident that it would not be long before it was back to normal, able to confirm now that whatever they had done to him to be a temporary thing.

Armin tried to rotate the spear, or more specifically the Meezog by controlling the mana around it. This did basically nothing. His control was not really good enough for this. Yes he could push the Meezog with mana, but it was more like an air current, and could not really affect something heavy.

Armin switched instead to using his own mana. Drawing it out of himself and then pushing it against the Meezog. This as expected did a little bit more, having better control over his own mana, than that outside of his body. It still was not nearly enough though, succeeding in little more than nudging the beast ever so slightly.

Armin sighed. It felt like the mana could wield a decent enough force if it didn’t simply flow around the beast so readily. Armin also tried controlling the mana inside the dead Meezog, even though there was very little present. He was surprised to find it was almost impossible to exert any kind of control over it. Interesting. Was it because the mana belonged to the Meezog? Although it was dead now, it certainly wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

Armin was stumped. It looked like he would have to keep manually turning the thing, which was a bit painful, since the Meezog was heaving and his spear did not exactly come with a turning handle.

Armin decided to try one more thing. He focused on not just a small patch of mana, but rather the mana in the entire area around the Meezog and tried to move it in concert, all at once. It was too difficult, so he quickly tried again, this time filling the area with his own mana, albeit sparsely and then trying to move that all at once.

It worked for the most part; that is, moving a large amount of his own mana at once. As he rotated his own mana around the area of the Meezog, it did seem to exert some kind of force on it. It once more just wasn’t enough.

Armin sighed, running out of ideas. He thought of the ice crater. While he didn’t exactly know how to replicate that, nor did he have any reason to, it did give him an idea for an experiment. Should he really be experimenting with magic on his food? Seems like a “don’t shit where you eat” kind of deal. Whatever, he was bored and hungry and tired of turning the meat.

Armin tried to exert as much control over his mana that he was rotating around the Meezog as he could manage, to basically force it perfectly into ‘formation’ while it rotated.

Something changed. The quality of the mana seemed different, it seemed more powerful? No that wasn’t quite right. It did however actually start rotating the Meezog. Strangely enough, at a slower speed than the speed the mana around it was rotating at. Armin was thoroughly impressed with himself.

Examining his mana a little more closely, he realised that it had formed the same kind of mana field he had seen at the ice crater! Armin was all at once thrilled at the idea of cold magic, before he realised that he was trying to cook food here, not freeze it!

Panicking for a moment, armin quickly pressed his hand against the cooking meat to check if it was freezing. This was in hindsight a really dumb idea, not only because if it had been freezing he might have frost-byted his hand or something, but also because it wasn’t freezing and as such he instead scolded his hand. Fuck!

Armin quickly went over to the river and dunked his hand in, too cool it down and try to keep it from blistering. At least he did not have to worry about the meat burning. He was still able to control his own mana from this distance, albeit with some effort, and keep the meat rotating.

As far as he could tell, the mana field looked identical to the one at the ice crater and yet his did not freeze anything. So there was something else to that? He didn’t know, honestly speaking the field may look the same to him, but in reality it appeared as little more than a haze to his manasense in the first place. Maybe once he upped his [perception] or [will] or something, he would be able to tell more.

For now, he simply tried to puzzle out the mechanics involved. The ‘field’ being generated clearly exerted a force/pull/attraction on anything inside of it. Although, it was far more likely that it was instead exerting a force on the mana inside the Meezog. The interesting part was that the force exerted was not at ‘full strength’, so it was more like it was ‘influencing’ it rather than controlling it.

Of course this could be any number of factors ranging from ‘that’s just how it works’, to Armin’s control not being good enough or the stability of the mana generating the field not being perfect enough. There also seemed to be no way for him to know at this point in time. Armin tried a couple different things, but try as he might, he could not improve upon the result, or make any further advances in his knowledge.

After having calmed his hand and finished cooking his meat, Armin sat down to enjoy his dinner. The Meezog meat was definitely on the tough side of things, but tasted good to his empty belly all the same.

Now thoroughly satiated, it was time to once more get moving. Armin considered taking the meat with him, since there was still a lot of the Meezog left to begin with, but this plan fell apart on two fronts. One, he would have to carry the thing with him and that seemed like it would be far too heavy, especially over the long distances he would likely have to travel.

The second problem was that the meat would undoubtedly rot. If he could keep it isolated from the air, or simply freeze it, it would be a different story. Although he did have some ideas of things he could try of the magical variety in order to make either of those things happen, he did not. For anything he could think of currently, he knew he did not yet have the skills or stats to pull it off.

So, with a heavy heart he decided that he would instead just cut off a limb or something for a snack later. Then it would have to be back to fishing after that.

But first things first. Armin looked over to the now decently dried out hydes. He needed to make some kind of clothing out of these two, but he did not have the means to easily transform them into such. No sewing equipment around here. No DIY solutions like clamping or gluing either. Armin stood there for a while pondering the solution. One possibility might be magic, but he could not currently think of a way to achieve a magically related solution here at present.

In the end, there was only one thing he could come up with. Since either hide would be a bit on the small side on its own, he needed to utilize both of them somehow, but without being able to attach them to each other. This left him with only one option that he could think of.

Armin cut arm holes in the top left and top right corners of both hydes. He then proceeded to put one on the front half of his body, and one on the back side of his body, feeding his arms through both. Sort of like a poncho, but supported only by his shoulders and being derived from two seperate pieces instead of just one.

It was by no means a perfect solution, heck, far from it. Since any wind would still penetrate his defences quite liberally, not to mention the couple of holes he had in the hydes to begin with. But it was a massive upgrade from ‘naked’ both in terms of temperature and sanity.

He tried moving around a bit in it. It was actually a bit on the heavy side and more than a little stiff to move around in. The hydes took him down, close to his knees, so were pretty decent on the coverage range. Despite the drawback of the extra stiffness and weight, he was rather pleased with himself for having come this far.

“I will take your life! I will take your experience! I will take your flesh! I will take your skin!” Armin performed a glorious speech to no one in particular. “And I will be king of this wilderness!”

Yep. He was definitely losing his marbles. Also if we’re talking about king here, the Jaguar thing definitely comes to mind. I mean, he was already practically paying fucking taxes to the thing!