I was still on my way through the forest, every couple of minutes stumbling across the roots of the tall trees around me. It has been around an hour since I began my walk and the forest doesn’t seem to end. While I am not yet hungry, I know that it is better to find something before I actually am hungry.

During this hour of walking I heard enough sounds of wildlife around me and felt from time to time as if I were being watched. Looking around I was unable to see anything, but I still began to look for any hints for any kind of prey.

A few minutes later I saw a white rabbit a few meters away from me. I immediately decide to try and hunt it. The rabbit is highly likely to run away from me, the moment I come to close to it, so I decided to use my Ice Arrows to shoot it.

This is the first time that I’m using magic and the thought about that already is enough to make it existing. Think about it, magic was a thing thought about being completely fictional, and her I am, about to use it. She tried casting the Ice Arrow spell by thinking about it, however that failed not invoking anything. She tried it again but this time by saying “Ice Arrow” and that seemed to do the trick and changes could be noticed.

Unlike what I expected the Ice Arrow didn’t immediately form, in front of her a magic circle began to form. The circle wasn’t large but overall it began to look like a snowflake before completing the circle after around ten seconds. After the magic circle was finished an Arrow made of Ice that looked more like an icicle, appeared out of the magic circle, and immediately launched in the direction of where the rabbit had been.

Yes, correct, “had been”. In these ten seconds the rabbit already hopped away. The arrow that was launched in the direction where the rabbit had been, dug into the ground. Wondering how much force the arrow even would make, Mana decided to walk up to the arrow and pull it out of the ground. The arrow penetrated the earth about ten centimeters, that wouldn’t have been all that impressive with loose earth, but this ground had roots growing everywhere, reinforcing it.

Now, after having launched her first spell, Mana realized how foolish it had been to not even try out her magic before she actually used it to hit a target, which was more than capable of moving. Now it was too late to change that.

Mana had enough MP to test her magic, so she decided to test her magic while searching for a new prey. She tried to do various things while casting. First, she tried to imagine the magic circle that appeared when the spell has been cast. She hoped by imagining the circle that her spell would be cast faster, that however did not change anything, the duration was exactly like before.

The next thing she tried was walking and running while casting her spell. Walking didn’t influence the spell in any way, the cast time stayed the same. Running however caused the magic circle to break in the middle of forming, this showed her that she had to carefully choose a time when to cast her magic, if she were to get attacked while casting, she wouldn’t be able to run out of the way without canceling her spell.

The last thing she tried was testing her accuracy. Testing this on different distances showed her that as long as she was within twenty meters from her target she would likely not miss. But from a further distance her accuracy would drastically worsen and from a distance of thirty meters she had a fifty percent chance of missing her target by about a meter. From forty meters she would miss by around five meters. Her maximum range proved to be at a distance of fifty meters, where the Ice Arrow just fell to the ground. Surprisingly until the Ice Arrow just seemed to fall to the ground, the damage inflicted by the Ice Arrow, seemed to be the same. She was however able to change the direction of the spell as long as the magic circle still formed.

The long cast time and the low range to have a reliable accuracy scared her a bit, if something with the intentions to harm her wanted to attack, then she wouldn’t have enough time to cast a spell. After using her Ice Arrow spell for the 20th time, she should have used a total of 100 MP, but her MP showed her something different.

Mana wondered why it wasn’t at 56 MP how it should be, when she realized that there had to be a way to regain the MP, she had spent in the first place. Trying to figure out how long it took to regain her MP she decided to count the time it took to regain one point. She started counting from zero every time her MP increased by one. Doing this for five times and with the time between each gained MP she figured out that every whole Minute, she would gain one point in her MP.

This means that she had to wait two and a half hours, just to refill her whole MP from zero. Knowing this she decided to stop her training and let her MP regenerate a bit more before training it again. Although she just decided to stop training, she used her till now unused spell “Ice Dagger”. The magic circle for that was bigger than the “Ice Arrow” magic circle and took twenty seconds to form.

From the magic circle appeared a dagger with a blade length of 20 centimeters. It didn’t fall to the ground and the magic circle didn’t vanish, only when she reached her hand out to grab the dagger, vanished the magic circle and the dagger appeared to be affected by gravity again.

Mana wasn’t able to test the dagger, before she noticed something around her in the woods. She began hearing something rushing from tree to tree. To be ready, in case something decided to attack her, she prepared a “Ice Arrow”. This proofed as a good decision. Not long before the magic circle finished forming, she was able to see two rabbits rushing towards her. Unlike the precious rabbit, these two had black fur and their eyes were glowing in an eerie red.

Using the “Ice Arrow” she targeted the rabbits which was the closest to her. When the “Ice Arrow” hit the rabbit, it immediately stopped moving with the “Ice Arrow” still stuck inside its body. The seconds rabbit didn’t seem to be perturbed by his fallen brethren and continued charging toward Mana. She knew she didn’t have enough time to cast a second “Ice Arrow” and was glad that she had summoned an Ice Dagger just a few moments prior.

The rabbit lunged toward Mana, as close as it was, Mana was able to dodge that lunge and pointed the dagger towards the rabbit. She didn’t move that much and decided to wait for the rabbit to lunge again, this time however she wanted to stab it with her dagger while dodging. She wasn’t able to hit the rabbits properly, but was able to scratch it, its blood leaving a faint trace of red on her dagger. When the rabbit lunged toward her for a third time it couldn’t avoid its dark fate any longer. This time Mana was able to hit the rabbit properly and end its life.

Before Mana was able to properly think about what she had just done, words appeared in front of her.

Mana wasn’t able to feel all too happy about this. On one hand she should be happy for her Level up, but on the other hand she was responsible for the death of two living being. Now that she took a life, she truly began to think about that, she previously didn’t even think about that, when she tried to attack the white rabbit. However, had she not killed the two black rabbits, she may as well had gotten injured by them, or worse, even killed.

In the end Mana decided not to dwell on it too much. Now that she was living in this new world, she would probably need to get used to it sooner rather than later, her life is going to depend on this. She will likely not be able to life a life as easy as her previous one, where you could get almost anything delivered to your house.

Mana didn’t have any reason to believe this, but she thought that Skill would be easier to level up by themselves, so she decided not to use it for now and only if her skills are higher or she absolutely needs to use it.

Her two Status points however were used up between Body and Magic, raising both by one. Raising her Body stat will probably be more useful for now, because her magic doesn’t seem to be all that useful at the moment. Despite that, she doesn’t want to give up on Magic, maybe it will get better in the future. To prepare for the future she decided to not neglect her Magic Stat.

After using up her Status Points she walked up to the two dead rabbits. Now she had something to consume when she gets hungry. Mana had no idea how to even prepare the rabbits for consumption, she heard once that you are supposed to slice their throats, or at least a major artery to drain the blood. So Mana decided to slice a few times along their throats and grab them at their feet, while continuing her way through the forest.

The Ice Dagger had not yet disappeared, so she took it with her. After a while of holding the dagger Mana felt that something was off. It took her a while when she noticed that this feeling was due to the Ice Dagger, she was holding the dagger with her bare hands and she didn’t even feel the cold in the slightest. While this may seem weird, after checking her Affinities again she just assumed this was due to her ice affinity.

Once hear MP were filled completely, she tried out her “Ice Arrow” again, wondering what changed now that it got to Level 2. Her time to cast reduced to 9,5 seconds, not the biggest change but at least it helped her cast faster the higher her level would be. Another small change was that her “Ice Arrow” appeared to be slightly bigger, but you needed to look really closely. She continued training here magic until she saw a road in the distance and was interrupted by another row of words in front of her eyes.