Alec had found a good branch that would work for the plan he had hastily come up with. It was short, stubby, sturdy, and cone-shaped so that the tip was scarily pointy. Falling on it would lead to impalement. Not all the way through, though, since it was just shorter than his forearm.
There was just one problem.
It was stuck to the tree. And he didn't have a saw.
He glanced around in case there was anything he could use or if he could come up with another plan.
'Argh, damn it.'
Alec closed his eyes and focused on sensing his mana for a moment. Then, he pulled up the spell formation for Pebbleshot. He sized it up in front of his outstretched hand. He used his other hand to hold onto the branch.
It was the first time he was changing his formless mana to elemental mana. But he remembered Reina's words on the matter. He had also gotten quite intimate with the properties of the elements in the process of trying to understand his formless mana.
Gradually, the translucent bubbles in his body transformed into metaphysical lumps of dirt, which blended and mixed together like gravel.
It wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't painful either.
Like that, he pushed it out of his body. As soon as it left his body, he drew the runes of the Pebbleshot spell formation with the mana before he lost control.
The sheep rammed the tree, and he lost control of half the mana he had drawn out. That was something he couldn't take back right now. He could only grit his teeth and finish the rest before the next charge.
Fortunately, Pebbleshot was a simple spell.
It gathered the earth mana and solidified it into a pebble, which it then shot at great speed straight ahead.
And Alec didn't forget to aim at the base of the stick he wanted to free from the tree's captivity.
As soon as the spell formation finished, something clicked into action. The runes lit up and finished the rest of the job by taking the mana Alec had gathered and concentrating it in the air in front of his hand, the spell formation between him and the pebble.
However, that wasn't enough. The spell formation drained Alec of all his mana.
Alec felt like someone had hit the back of his head with a hammer covered in ice. His vision faded, and an overwhelming sense of vertigo threatened to tear him down from the tree. His insides felt like they were about to become outsides.
It was the worst thing he had experienced.
As if to confirm that, blood dripped out of his mouth.
A moment later, a loud crack rang out as the Pebbleshot launched and broke through the base of the stick Alec wanted. It had worked. He now had a weapon.
He looked down.
The sheep was an instant away from ramming the tree.
He had less than a second to make a decision. He had to jump down. If he waited, he probably wouldn't have the strength to kill the monster. He also couldn't tell how long the tree would hold up.
He stopped thinking, not because he had made a decision, but because he couldn't think anymore.
As soon as he laid eyes on the monster, he was robbed of rationality.
The hunger that had steadily built up over the day and night, the hunger that was no longer suppressed by the sedative Benjamin had used, reared its ugly head. His internal injuries seemed to have awoken a slumbering monster.
This wasn't the adrenaline from thousands of years of evolution leading to a fight-or-flight response.
It was something different.
But it gave Alec the strength to fall onto the sheep's neck and stay on it just seconds after it rammed the tree. Its neck was so strong that it didn't even budge under his weight. And the horns were so hard that it probably barely felt him.
If the sheep had just been a sheep, Alec could have probably ridden the creature for hours before it cared.
But it was a monster with an innate loathing for everything that wasn't itself.
It immediately tried to shake him off or reach back and bite his legs.
It couldn't.
Its neck was too stiff.
The sheep tried to shake its body like a mad bull and hop around like a skittish horse. But its horns provided great handles for Alec, and while the sheep was strong, it wasn't exactly agile.
In the back of his hungry mind, Alec was pretty sure he heard something snap, but that could have been anything.
However, his hands were slipping, so he stopped fooling around and plunged his stake into the sheep's eye, eliciting a howling screech.
"EEEIH!"
"RAARGH!" Alec countered with a roar as he hammered the stake, which was just a hair too thick to get through the eye socket.
The sheep threw itself around in a wild frenzy. It might not have intelligence, but it could instinctively feel death. It fought back as best as it could.
It wasn't enough.
The stake pierced its brain, plunging the monster into eternal darkness. The sheep went limp and collapsed to the side. Somehow, Alec managed to avoid getting trapped beneath it. He didn't know how, though.
As soon as the monster died, relief washed over him like a tidal wave, leaving him unconscious. He had done it. He had killed the monster and survived.
He could rest for just a few minutes. Just until he could get back up on his feet. He couldn't stay here, after all.
While he 'rested his eyelids' he had a strange stream. He couldn't remember it by the time he woke up, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with marshmallows.
Then, he woke up. Any lingering thoughts or ideas about his dream were blown away by the sight in front of him.
His dream had turned into a waking nightmare.