Moments after the first Yeti died, it started to dissipate into Astral Power, a disgusting mix of tainted power that made me nauseous to my core. I could easily identify the base types of it, Ice, Wind and Darkness, all bound up in a strange way that I couldn’t quite identify.

The body hadn’t fully evaporated when I heard distant howls of rage and hunger but far more concerning was that I could also feel more presences in the mist, presences that were far closer. The distant enemies were howling, maybe calling in even more, while those closer to us tried to sneak up on us.

“Incoming,” I warned the other two, sharing the impressions I was getting with Lenore.

Her reaction was to mentally move closer to me, getting ready to use our Avatar-state but I didn’t feel like it was time just yet. We might need that important ability later when we faced the current ruler of this place, not while fighting the mob of monsters around it.

“Let’s see if we can beat them at their game,” I added, looking at Ylva and beckoning her closer. At the same time, I channelled my magic, creating a cloud of fog of my own, mixing it with the all-encompassing mist around us and gradually starting to take over that mist.

The dense fog was great to hide in, especially when combining it with Darkness-Magic which allowed me to conceal myself and, by projecting the mist further out, confuse our enemies. I could feel them coming, thinking they were sneaky, only now I knew what to expect. Focusing on one of them, I used my Mind Magic, trying to increase the hunger and channel the insanity of the Dark Moon to induce a bloodthirsty frenzy.

Moments later, I heard a wet impact and a faint smell of blood spread through the valley, the damp mist and moisture making the scent even more intense and I knew that I had struck gold.

Moving backwards, keeping myself concealed and hidden in the mist, I focused on yet another of the Yeti, ignoring the one I had just influenced and the second one the influenced one had attacked. From the impressions i got, they were happily murdering each other, with little regard for anything but how much violence they could inflict as they went down.

A second one was influenced and started to behave erratically, but given the speed of their approach, I couldn’t just influence them one by one, I needed to expand my area of control. Luckily, I had nearly limitless Ice at my disposal, making that a far more efficient way to kill them, compared to my Mind Magic and I would be a fool not to use it.

Clearing up a small void in the mist, I created a vaguely humanoid Ice-Statue, even using a bit of Blood Magic to infuse a bit of blood with Astral Power taken from my hair and smearing it onto the Ice before retreating, hoping that it would dupe the Yeti into attacking my decoy. Once done, I realised that the Yeti were coming for it and continued moving away, channelling more magic to raise spikes of Ice around it while making the mist extra dense. The sheer number of spells I used and the mental effort to control multiple magical processes at the same time started to drain me but thankfully, the Mist I had been channelling since the start had expanded quite a bit, giving me a lot of space to play with.

Within that space, I could already feel three dozen of the Yeti, a few of which had been turned insane by my Mind Magic, creating a violent furball of teeth, claws and madness as they attacked their brethren. Those clumps of violence were quite useful, their noise masking whatever noise I might make, while the blood spilt by them masked my scent. Now, the remaining Yeti had to track me using their sight, nearly impossible within the mist I controlled, or some other special sense that was hopefully blocked by the Cloak of Twilight I had wrapped around Ylva and myself.

A grin formed on my face as I continued to keep my distance from the Yeti, happily watching as more and more ran into the mist, some of them impaling themselves on the spikes I had set up, while others fell victim to the confusion-aspect I had imbued into the spell, unleashing their natural inclination. It made me wonder who, or maybe what, had been keeping them under control previously, as their descent into vicious savagery was a little too quick and far too violent. It was as if they had just been waiting for a reason to start killing each other.

Watching my enemies massacre each other, while I kept nearby, continuously pushing them into an ever-growing frenzy of blood, gore and violence didn’t get old. Sadly, before enough of the Yeti had perished in the scruff, I felt a massive suction force, the wind fading and even reversing, and the mist around us was starting to get drawn away. Trying to keep control of the Mist I had infused with my power became difficult and I quickly realised that I was spending far more Astral Power to keep the mist around than was sensible, so I let go.

The force was strong enough to make me stumble, dragging me forward. Unwilling to get sucked into whatever was playing vacuum cleaner here, I pushed my Ice-Magic, dragging up a piece of the glacier, forming it into a shield behind which I could take cover. And even on that Ice, I could feel the wind trying to rip the Ice out of the ground and drag it into whatever was there. Luckily, the Ice was still part of the glacier and this Ice wasn’t going anywhere.

It only took half a minute until the mist was cleared away, letting Ylva, Lenore and I see the area before us and the killing field we had created. Looking at the havoc we had wrought, was quite proud of myself. It was one thing to feel vague shapes collide in the mist and smell the ever-thickening scent of blood but a whole other thing to see the gory remains of our enemies, some still twitching, others already fading back into the Astral River, their bodies disintegrating.

But while some of our enemies had perished, there were far too many still remaining, their claws dug into the Ice, prostrating before the thing that had cleared away the mist and disrupted my work. It was massive Yeti, more akin to a moving snowdrift than a living creature, easily fifteen metres in height, with a maw that could swallow anything. From afar, I could see and feel how the Astral Power I had imbued into the mist was swallowed into that maw and the moment it did, my connection to it faded away, as if it had never been there in the first place.

With the appearance of that massive abomination of a monster, the mist had been cleared out and now, there was no way for us to hide. In addition, the big Yeti let out a howl of rage once it was done eating the mist and the moment it did, I could feel the remaining Mind Magic gripping the Yeti shatter, a stinging pain feeding back into my mind.

“We can’t take to the sky,” Lenore immediately warned me and I had to agree. If we got caught by that suction while in the air, we were doomed unless we managed to hold onto something. Still, trying to go into close combat with that thing sounded like a really bad time and I wasn’t sure our spells would even do anything.

But we had to try and so, I experimentally pulled up a few frozen Javelins from the Glacier, sending them at the thing in a probing attack. The effect was even worse than I had thought, two of them simply shattered against the thing’s chest, ruffling some of its fur, while three more struck home, going into the gaping maw - And immediately vanishing from my senses, as the thing bit down, crunching them into nothing but tasty snacks within a few moments.

As if responding to my attack, the thing swiped with one arm, grabbing two of the Yeti around it and lobbing them at us in a casual toss. For a moment, I couldn’t believe what it was doing but after that split-second of disbelief, I drew a few fresh spikes from the glacier, setting them right into their landing spots.

The splatter was quite artistic, the toss had enough force to mangle the bodies badly and even shatter the spikes but given the mass of Yeti the thing still had around it, and the additional Yeti I could see approaching from everywhere in the valley, I wasn’t sure if I could win a battle of attrition, especially if the thing began moving towards us.

No, we needed to find some sort of solution, or we would have to retreat. And hope that we could make it.