Tree POV
I spent a few hours practicing my water magic. I didn't want to practice to long because I didn't want to be caught with my pants down, figuratively speaking. Being attacked when your out of mana because you spent it all practicing would be a rather embarrassing way to die. Still I understood the importance of practicing my new spells, especially since I'm new to the whole magic thing in general. I had a few more mutant beasts show up over the next few days but they were rather small and seemed content with the scraps left behind by my earlier battles. I'm not sure what's going on but using my life sense skill I noticed that the number of normal creatures has dropped of dramatically.
About a week after the attack by what I'm calling the metal mouthed squirrel I face my next mutant beast. This one I'm guessing used to be a house cats. It could be a tiger, It's certainly the right size, but I've never seen a tiger, or any large cat for that matter, with such a patchy black and white pattern. Honestly I'm not sure if it's a black cat with white patches or a white cat with black patches. Either way if it stood up on it's hind paws it would probably be taller than me. Then again 3 meters is relatively short for a tree.
The big cat lunges at my trunk but I manage to block it with some branches. The cat's paw manages to slash through some of them and the pain was unreal. If getting a tiny root snapped of is like breaking your pinky toe this was like having your wrist snapped. Still I knew it was the big cat or me so I kept going. I used water whip and targeted the cats left eye scoring a direct hit. while it was momentarily distracted I wrapped my roots around it's paws and began sucking up it's life mana. The good news is that the extra life mana seemed to heal me somewhat. The bad news is that unlike the dog earlier this cat wasn't half dead already. This meant that it had a lot more fight left in it.
It broke free rather quickly and this time it circled around to the other side before attacking again, as if that would help. Before it could attack though I used another water whip to target it's right eye. I missed but actually blinding it wasn't the point of the attack. It would have been nice if it worked out that way but instead I used the momentary distraction to wrap my roots around it's paws again. This time I kept going trying to wrap as many roots around it as I could. I used thicker roots this time. It costs more mana to manipulate them but the upside is they are much harder to break. The big cat still manages to break free but it clearly took way more effort and I was able to suck out a lot more of the big cats life mana.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The down side of the thicker roots aside from it costing more to manipulate them is that it hurts a lot more when they are ripped out. Fortunately the excess life mana I gained starts to immediately heal the damage. By this time the big cat has gotten wise and started keeping an eye on the ground. That's when I started using my branches to harass it. My hope was that it didn't have a very good short term memory. That way if I could get it focused on my branches I would get another chance to wrap it up with my roots.
Sure enough after a few minutes of being slapped by branches it started to ignore the ground. I did try to wrap it up with my branches as well but gravity was not on my side this time and the big cat was easily able to break free. Perhaps if I were to upgrade my body manipulation skill I could do it. For now though I'm much to slow. The only reason I was able to get my roots around it is because my roots are easier to control for some reason. Aside from that my opponent was always distracted by something else. This time as a wrapped the thicker roots around it I could already tell that it took way more effort to break free and I was soon able to replace the old roots with new ones as soon as the old roots were snapped off.
That was the beginning of the end for the big cat, though I was worried I'd run out of mana before I finished it off. Fortunately that did not happen although it was a lot closer than I would have liked. I did get another level out of it this fight. Didn't get anything for the level up this time, aside from more health and mana oh and another meter taller. This puts me at 4 meters tall now. Still small for a tree but I'm getting there. The real prize from this fight was the mutant beast core. If anything this fight has taught me that I need to be better at manipulating my own body. Upgrading that skill unfortunately requires 10 points. So instead I buy earth magic because again earth and water magic just feels like two things a tree should have. To my surprise I got another notification when I purchased earth mana.
Well, that's new. I can't afford it right now but as a tree wood magic is certainly calling to me. Guess I should start saving up my shop points for now.
