Vice Captain Afosiosi narrowed his eyes and slumped his shoulders, giving me a long-suffering look. He looked over at Princess Charitomeni, frozen solid, then looked back at me and thumped his tail on the ground a few times.

“Not all reptoids will survive being frozen. In fact very few of us can any more than your kind can still hunt in the deep oceans for days at a time like your evolutionary ancestors could,” he explained as though talking to a child; which I apparently had the appearance of.

“As much as it tears me apart to see my Princess this way,” he continued, “her species doesn’t do well in the cold at all, in fact they are quite susceptible to it. I’m afraid our beloved Princess Charitomeni is quite dead.”

“You sound rather confident in that,” I answered, slowly walking over to the Princessicle.

There wasn’t much, but I could see the faintest amount of heat coming from her core via my heatmap visual overlay. I could also see a bit of mana swirling around within her as a spell ran around her body. I held out a hand in her direction, glanced at her guards and decided I didn’t care what they thought, and looked back at her, focusing my target attention on her.

“[Inspect],” I muttered, bringing up the familiar [Console] screens.

“What are you doing?! I won’t let you defile the Princess,” Afosiosi barked.

“Just taking a peek at that spell she’s running,” I replied.

“Spell? What spell?” he demanded. “Entromos, stop him!”

“The spell currently keeping her organs alive,” I said sharply, looking over my shoulder at the underling. “But it’s hitting her for two mana every five minutes and she’s only got three left. Then it’ll start tapping her life force to sustain the spell.”

“How could you possibly know that? Even if you have the [inspect] spell at most you could see her name, class, and maybe her level if you were powerful enough,” the Vice Captain said bitterly.

“Did that have a lowercase i? It sounded like a lowercase. Mine has a capital I,” I explained.

“The croxe does that have to do with anything?!” he shouted.

“One mana left. I don’t have the time to argue with you and I’m not about to let my Princess’s childhood friend die if I can do anything to save her,” I fired back.

“Ridiculous! Touch Her Highness and I’ll cut you down myself!” he warned.

I ignored him and put both hands onto Princess Char’s shoulders. I heard the metallic shing of a sword coming loose from its scabbard a split second before the blade came down between my shoulder and neck. The sword sang with the familiar sound of metal on metal and did zero damage to my magisteel armor plating.

Afosiosi’s eyes bulged in surprise before catching my foot to his chest. He flew through the air, crashing in a heap several meters away and didn’t get back up.

“Entromos, I’m going to assume just now that your Vice Captain is concerned about your Princess’s honor and not actually trying to stop me from saving her, okay?”

Entromos nodded frantically but didn’t make a move towards me nor his Vice Captain. I moved the [Console] screen for Char to one side and opened up a new window focused on the ice itself.

“Let’s see now...” I muttered, scanning the lingering spell keeping the ice intact. A [pause] wouldn’t remove the spell, it would just keep it in place and preserve the state of the ice, which the spell was doing anyway. I started looking through the source magiScript code for the spell. The spell had a fixed amount of mana that had been embedded into it to keep it running for a set amount of time. It wasn’t very efficient. It looked like it probably cost the mage thirty five mana to cast it but it was better than Char’s hibernation spell and would last for twelve hours total before dissipating.

I tried reassigning variable values in the [Console] command line but I kept getting authorization errors. I also tried to alter the code after [pause]ing it but that errored too. I guess since the spell belonged to someone else it was treated the same as when I tried to interact with another person’s code without their permission.

I started chuckling to myself, earning a frightened look from the underling.

“It’s just... I got an idea is all. It can’t run if it doesn’t have any fuel,” I tried, then swatted the air in his direction before returning my focus to the spell.

I left the screens up in order to monitor the spell and Char and accessed my mana absorption processes. Normally it was intended to run in the background, doing its thing, just passively absorbing mana around me. I’d once managed to use it to forcibly absorb the mana from one of Dezarus’s mana bank things. This didn’t have the interface for it, but using the [Console] screen I tore the spell code apart until I could find where it was storing the mana payload and mentally threw my absorption process at it.

The Princess’s last mana point slipped away and her hibernation spell started eating into her life force. Compared to the mana bank, once the connection was established, the spell was drained in a snap. Without any more fuel to keep the spell going, it fizzled out and the ice around Princess Char became normal ice. Of course, that meant that it would also melt at the pace of an ice sculpture in a moderately warm room. Which is to say that it would take a few days, most likely.

For a moment I considered pushing some of my mana into her but then I recalled when I attempted to top off Milliardo and it made him sick enough to vomit. Maybe just a little? It was an emergency after all. I had to physically touch her though and she was under inches of ice.

I mentally rummaged around for anything that actually generated heat but came up empty. I didn’t even have any body heat to offer her. I glanced over at some unlit light stones set into the wall, not even a candle to put to use.

I still had the code screen open for the ice spell and copied it over into my own developer environment. The spell had a bunch of stuff about gathering moisture and then slowing it down until it froze. Then it would loop through a chunk of code that would test for a given molecule agitation value and would reapply the deceleration script as needed.

I started flipping values until I had a spell that would look for moisture and agitate the molecules depending on how much mana I fed it. Ah, but how to cast it, I couldn’t actually cast magic without an appropriate crystal to funnel it through. Did I have any fire stones in stock? Crap, Char was at about half of her life force and I didn’t have the time to format one.

“You,” I glared, jabbing a finger at Entromos. “Do you know any fire magic?”

“Uh, only a bit? I’m not that good at it though and only know the spell to make a small flame,” he whined.

“Good enough! Come here, no stand right here, good. Put your hands out, yeah like that. I’m going to push a spell into you, you need to accept it if you want your Princess to live.”

Thankfully, he didn’t argue and followed directions. I pushed the spell into his core spell directory like I had done for the fire squirrel Sparky or the elf girl Shea so long ago. He spluttered a bit in surprise but I got him back on task. Together, he started the spell and I pushed mana into him to power the spell.

“I really don’t feel so good...” he complained.

“You’re doing great, we can see the top of her head now! Go for where the ice is thinner, that’s it,” I instructed.

Once enough of her skin was exposed, I lightly touched her to push a bit of mana into her, just enough to power her hibernation spell without taxing her life force any more. It took us an hour of melting away the ice and I nearly lost Underling Entromos a few times to a blackout but he hung in there.

The Vice Captain woke up and I barked at him to sit down and shut up before he could try anything again. It was rude, but I lacked the patience to deal with him at that time.

When Princess Charitomeni had thawed enough, her limbs slumped and she toppled over. Entromos also toppled over and finally passed out. I had to make a choice and I chose to catch the gecko girl. Entromos landed in the icy puddle that had pooled at our feet but wasn’t in any danger. I did turn him over with a foot to make sure he wouldn’t drown though.

“She’s... Her Highness is really alive?” Afosiosi asked, dumbfounded.

“She is... but the hibernation spell isn’t stopping. It’s dropped to one mana per hour but it’s still going. Uh... what’s her collection rate... Ah! It’s four every six hours... That's rather appalling, isn’t it? Well, I guess she’s not a mage, right? As long as someone shares some mana with her daily she won’t be in any danger,” I grumbled.

“Who... What are you?” Afosiosi demanded.

“Someone who’s not to be trifled with. That’s all you need know,” I answered, scooping Char up in my arms. “Grab your buddy and let’s get her to the infirmary.”