Chapter 154: Fishing~
Klaus didn’t lie to them as he leaned his head back against the leather headrest.
"Yeah. A bit. I killed her dad, took his stuff, and now she’s looking at me like some kind of saint while she thinks the Witch Cult did it."
Sparky scoffed loudly, kicking her tiny bare heels against his collarbone.
"You better feel guilty, you fucking thief and brute! You walked into our camp, butchered everyone, gutted Lord Varhem, and turned me into your personal battery!"
Klaus didn’t react to her insults. He just stared at the ceiling, accepting the truth of her words.
Seeing that her harsh words didn’t provoke an argument, Sparky’s spiky hair relaxed with the blue sparks fading away.
She looked down at her tiny boots, her face flushing a rosy pink as she fidgeted with her tunic.
"I mean... make no mistake!" Sparky stammered suddenly, her voice turning flustered and bratty. "I’m not saying I like being with you or anything! You’re a total meathead! But... but I definitely prefer you over her! I didn’t like Varhem’s daughter that much anyway! She’s annoying!"
She stumbled over her own words with her tsundere logic completely tangling into a messy knot.
Realizing she was making no sense, the tiny elemental let out an embarrassed huff.
She leaned forward, pressing her soft plasma-warm lips directly against Klaus’s forehead, right next to where Valeria was hugging him.
She patted his silver hair with her tiny hands.
"Just... don’t be sad anymore, okay?" Sparky mumbled softly, her voice surprisingly gentle. "I love being with you way more than I ever would have loved being her spirit... You gave me a real body and you’re my Boss."
Klaus let out a genuine chuckle with the heavy cloud in his chest lifting slightly.
"Thanks, Sparky."
"Shut up! I was just stating facts!" she shrieked, instantly flying up to hide in his silver hair alongside Valeria, complaining loudly to cover her embarrassment.
By the time evening fell over the northern continent, the carriage had finally come to another scheduled halt.
They had traveled miles away from the epicenter of the mountain blizzard.
In this particular clearing... a wide, flat valley surrounded by towering, natural frozen cliffs, the snowstorm was completely non-existent.
The air was still bitterly cold, the temperature hovering far below freezing, but the iron-gray clouds had cleared, revealing a brilliant silver moon hanging suspended in the dark, star-filled sky.
The heavy wooden doors of the carriage opened, and everyone stepped out onto the frozen terrain to stretch their legs.
Klaus stood near the rear runner, looking at Tasha as she stepped down into the snow.
She looked around the valley with mild curiosity, but there was zero recognition in her eyes.
Klaus inwardly noticed that she clearly had never seen her father’s private, elite transport before, or she would have recognized the custom oak interior and iron framework instantly.
It was one less headache for him to worry about.
Mirela and Tasha walked to the edge of the snowpack, looking up at the sky.
"Look at the moon..." Mirela whispered, her goat ears perking up as the silver light reflected in her eyes. "It’s so clear out here."
"It really is beautiful," Tasha agreed softly, pulling her fur cloak tightly around herself.
Klaus walked up behind them, his broad shoulders squared against the chill with his long silver hair catching the moonlight.
He looked at the two girls, then looked down at the flat pristine white ground beneath their boots.
"Alright," Klaus announced, a lazy smirk pulling at his lips. "Let’s make something different for dinner tonight... Let me catch us some fish."
Mirela turned her head, looking at him with a deadpan, thoroughly unimpressed expression.
"Master... we are in the middle of a frozen valley. The ground is solid permafrost and ice. Where on earth are you going to get fish from?"
Klaus chuckled, stepping past her toward the center of the clearing. "I’m glad you asked."
He stopped over a wide, smooth expanse of snow. He didn’t pull out an ice pick, a fishing rod, or an axe.
Klaus simply drew back his right arm, clenching his hand into a heavy fist, and slammed it straight down into the frozen ground.
BOOM!
The physical impact was heavy, but it was the wave of divine magic that followed that truly broke reality.
Klaus pushed a dense radial surge of white Soul Mana directly into the earth.
To the girls’ eyes, it just looked like the ground shook, but beneath the surface, the white energy expanded outward in a perfect microscopic circle, severing the five-foot-thick layer of solid permafrost like a cookie cutter.
CRACK! SKRRRT!
With a sharp sound, a massive perfectly circular block of ice... easily ten feet in diameter split away from the valley floor.
Klaus reached down, grabbing the edge of the multi-ton ice block with his bare hand.
Flexing his divinely fortified strength, he casually heaved the massive cylinder of ice completely out of the ground, tossing it aside like a foam block.
Beneath the removed ice was a deep, crystal-clear pool of freezing, dark blue water... a subterranean river flowing beneath the Winterlands.
Klaus stood at the edge of the hole, looking down into the dark water.
He didn’t need light to see. He expanded his divine senses into the deep pool, instantly detecting dozens of flickering tiny spiritual signatures swimming in the current.
Through the soul, he could clearly map out their physical bodies... thick heavy cold-water Arctic Trout, perfectly detailed just like the illustrations in the book that the mage had.
Klaus turned back over his shoulder, locking his glowing silver eyes onto Mirela, Tasha, and Anya with a confident dark grin spread across his handsome face.
"So," Klaus asked smoothly, gesturing toward the steaming ice hole. "Which one of you girls wants to go fishing?"
The steaming, ten-foot-wide hole in the permafrost sat like a glowing blue eye in the middle of the dark valley floor.
Deep below the five-foot slab of ice Klaus had casually tossed aside, the dark, crystal-clear water of a subterranean river rippled lazily under the silver light of the full moon.
Mirela stood at the edge of the opening with her goat ears twitching as she stared down into the freezing water.
She looked from the hole, to the empty snowpack around them, and then up at Klaus’s towering frame with a look of utter skepticism.
"Master..." Mirela started, her voice dropping into that flat deadpan tone she reserved for whenever he did something completely absurd. "I appreciate the enthusiasm. I really do. But even if there are fish down there, how exactly are we supposed to catch them? We don’t have fishing rods. We don’t have nets... We don’t even have string."
Tasha, wrapped tightly in her oversized winter furs, stepped up beside the demi-human maid.
She peered over the edge into the dark water, her light blue eyes wide with bewilderment.
"She’s right... Even an experienced ice-fisher would need proper iron hooks and heavy line to pull anything out of a glacial stream. The water is so cold it would freeze a standard line solid in seconds."
Klaus let out a low, amused chuckle. "You two worry too much."
He didn’t reach into the carriage supply trunk and he didn’t search through their gear.
Klaus was already aware that they had none.
Instead, Klaus simply stepped past them, crouched down near the edge of the ice hole, and drove his large hands straight into a pristine drift of deep, white powder.
He gathered a heavy, solid mound of snow between his palms.
Tasha frowned, watching him closely. "What are you... are you making a snowball?"
"Watch and learn, princess," Klaus drawled.
He closed his eyes, tapping directly into the thudding furnace of his divine core.
VWOOM!
A dense luminescent wave of pure white Soul Mana erupted from his palms, completely engulfing the mound of snow in his grip.
Klaus didn’t melt the powder.
Just as he had done when forging the indestructible ice-wheel for Varhem’s carriage, he used his raw divine intent to forcefully compress the snow on a molecular level.
The white powder violently condensed with the air gaps between the ice crystals collapsing under the immense unnatural pressure.
The snow turned from opaque white to a crystal-clear translucent blue.
Klaus pulled his hands apart, drawing the hyper-compressed ice out like warm glass, shaping it with his magical authority.
In less than ten seconds, the light faded.
Sitting in Klaus’s hands was a long and perfectly balanced sleek fishing rod made entirely of divinely reinforced ice.
It looked like it had been carved from a solid sapphire.
Extending from the tip of the rod was a razor-thin, glowing white filament... a flexible and virtually unbreakable line woven from pure, solid Soul Mana, ending in a sharp, perfectly shaped ice hook.
Klaus stood up, casually spinning the translucent ice-rod in his grip before holding it out toward Mirela.
Tasha’s jaw literally dropped open.
Her light blue eyes bulged as she stared at the glowing, solid rod, completely unable to process what she had just witnessed.
"W-What... what kind of magic was that?!" Tasha blurted out, her composure completely shattering.
She stepped forward, pointing a trembling finger at the sapphire-like rod.
"I’ve studied elemental ice magic under the capital’s grand mages! Ice creation requires continuous mana maintenance, and it’s far too brittle to bear tension! You just... you turned soft powder into a solid, flexible tool in five seconds! What spell is that?!"
"It’s not a spell," Klaus lied smoothly, his face a mask of casual indifference. "It’s just a unique property of my mana. When you compress it right, snow becomes harder than steel and flexible enough to bend without snapping."
He looked at her shocked, flushed face and raised a silver eyebrow. "Would you like one too?"
Tasha blinked, her cheeks turning a faint pink as she realized how unseemly her outburst had been.
She cleared her throat hurriedly, trying to regain her noble posture. "I... well... if you are offering... I suppose I could assist in gathering provisions..."
Klaus smirked, reaching down to scoop up another three piles of snow.
VWOOM. VWOOM. VWOOM.
With three rapid pulses of dense mana, he forged three more identical ice-rods.
He handed one to Mirela, one to Tasha, and turned around to hand the smallest one to Anya.
The six-year-old Shinigami took the glowing blue rod with both hands.
Her striking purple eyes scanned the translucent ice construct with fascination, testing the flex of the Soul Mana line with her tiny finger.
"The tensile strength of this spiritual filament exceeds standard carbon steel by four hundred percent," Anya said flatly. "The probability of line snapping during a heavy retrieval is zero."
"Does she really have to talk like that...?"
"Now we just need bait," Klaus said, turning back toward the carriage.
Mirela was already two steps ahead of him.
"I’ve got it!" she called out, jogging over to the rear supply trunk.
She returned a moment later carrying a heavy wooden bowl and a small leather pouch filled with the last of their dried salted monster jerky.
She set the massive wooden tub down near the edge of the hole, pulling out a small iron hunting knife.
She quickly carved the dried meat into long, thin strips, handing them out to the group.
"Just thread the meat onto the hook," Klaus instructed, demonstrating as he pushed a strip of jerky onto his glowing white ice-hook. "Then drop it in and wait for a bite... These cold-water trout down there haven’t seen fresh food in months. They’ll snap at anything that smells like blood."
Within two minutes, all four of them were lined up along the edge of the ten-foot ice hole with their translucent blue rods gleaming under the bright silver light of the full moon.
Above Klaus’s head, the atmosphere was far less peaceful.
Sparky, the chibi-sized Lightning Fairy, was hovering directly over his left ear with her tiny arms crossed over her woven tunic as she glared down at the dark water.
Sitting directly on top of Klaus’s silver hair, nestled comfortably in the long strands, was Valeria.
The miniature Crimson Sharpshooter had her legs crossed, resting her chin on her hands as she looked down at the group.
"This is ridiculous," Sparky complained with a tiny blue spark zapping from her spiky yellow hair though she was whispering. "You are strong and you are using your power to catch food for a bunch of women..."
Klaus assumed that she was just jealous because she didn’t need to eat.
"Quiet, battery," Valeria chimed in smoothly from Klaus’s head with her ethereal voice carrying a bratty superior smirk. "The King is demonstrating mastery over his domain. Besides, observing the mortals struggle with primitive hunting methods is mildly entertaining."