If there was one person who was truly ecstatic about the prospect of meeting new people who just happened to be in dire need of rescuing and some guidance to the proper divine path, it was Luna. While my dear daughter couldn’t proselytise all that often, she held a strong belief in Lady Hecate and the guidance She could give to mortals, allowing them to grow their understanding and live worthy lives. Amusingly, while Luna was quite devout, worshipping Lady Hecate was somewhat, well, low maintenance, you could say. She didn’t expect, or want, Her followers to be full-time worshippers; She wanted them to be more than that, to only turn to Her if the problems they encountered were beyond them.

In that, I felt that She was actually quite strange, completely opposite to the behaviour expected of religious people before the change. Where a devout follower of a pre-change religion might spend their days and nights in prayer and worship, modelled their lives after religious tenets of some sort or behave according to the literal rules of some ancient scripture, regardless of their application to the modern world they were living in, Lady Hecate didn’t expect that. If anything, She wanted Her followers to do the opposite, at least that was my understanding.

But then, I wasn’t actually praying to Lady Hecate. She just… popped in to talk occasionally, which, on second thought, was quite the weird state of things. However, by now, I was quite content with this somewhat peculiar state, though I wasn’t about to try and define my relationship to Her, I had a feeling that would only result in a headache.

Before my mind could flit away and do what I had just decided to avoid, I focused on Luna and the gleeful grin on her face as she was already planning to bring Lady Hecate into the lives of the people we would soon meet. From there, it was a fairly short mental leap to the question of what I could and should do regarding them, how I would be able to increase their combat abilities as quickly as possible.

Because that was quite obviously necessary, usually, I wouldn’t care too much about the strength of some locals. They would either sink or stand on their own merits, essentially a form of evolution in action, or at least the principle of survival of the fittest. They could either adapt and survive, or they failed and, well, did not, but here, that didn’t work quite as I wanted it to. If I wanted these people to help curtail and, eventually, push back the Bitumen and the burned land they were spreading, the people needed to have the strength to actually do so. Otherwise, they would melt like ice in the summer, and not the firn that would eventually become glacial ice, but the fresh variant.

So, how could I increase the strength of a group as quickly as possible? Teaching them, while likely the biggest power-increase on a longer timescale, had the problem of needing time to get started. Quite a bit of time, as magical power started obviously at the bottom and went up from there, so somebody who had been hunting for over a year and survived in a fairly hostile environment would actually have their power lowered for some time until their magical skills caught up and overtook their physical abilities. That is, assuming their magical abilities could match their physical ones, what I had observed thus far told me that wasn’t always the case. Or even generally.

Teaching a handful of them would strengthen them, sure, but it wouldn’t be enough to turn them into a force strong enough to protect their homes, and if they lost their homes, they wouldn’t stay; they would retreat and flee, leaving us to clean up this burned mess. Or to let the mess spread out until it stained the world permanently, but that was an entirely different problem.

However, what I could do was use the runic enchantment I had tested on the people of idiot-ville, even if it wasn’t quite the perfect solution here. The Bitumen were fairly resistant against physical power, and the burning sludge they used in their attacks might just be the worst weapon to face when you had regeneration. Getting hit would become a race between the regeneration trying to keep you alive and the insidious burning sludge trying to kill you, leaving you in horrific pain as the race was on with your body as the track.

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Just imagining it sent a shiver down my spine, and not the good kind of shiver I sometimes got when thinking of Sigmir and the many, many things I was planning to do to and with her once I brought her back to life. No, this was a very different shiver, the kind I got when my mind wanted me to mentally change the subject.

Shaking off the previous line of thought, I went in an entirely different direction and considered whether I had a way to provide the people here with some magical items that might give them the necessary advantages. Ranged weapons were the obvious answer, or enchanted projectiles of some kind. Making a bow from Ice was, well, it wasn’t impossible. I was fairly certain I could make something that worked as a bow from Ice, and I would be able to use it by magically moving the Ice, but that wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Such a contraption would only work for me, and, quite frankly, if I wanted to propel a piece of Ice through the air, messing around like that was utterly pointless.

No, if I wanted to improve their offensive options from afar, the best choice would be enchanted arrow- or spearheads, allowing them to unleash dangerous energy into the Bitumen without getting caught up in their range.

The initial idea was fairly simple: making arrow, or spear, heads out of Ice, inscribe a small runic formation into them to unleash a reserve of stored power into the target as elemental cold, cause the projectile to explode into shrapnel or do both, it was basically a small enhancement of my favourite weapon. By now, after over three years of turning Ice into deadly projectiles, I had quite a bit of experience in that regard, meaning I could conjure beautifully sharp Ice arrowheads with ease.

Even adding the required formation was simple, maybe not something I could have done on my first day in Mundus, but I was fairly certain I could have done it in the first month, leaving the small problem of power storage. I couldn’t rely on the people using these arrows to charge them, and infusing them beforehand was problematic, too, as the energy would start to escape back into the Astral River as soon as it was infused. Sure, the escape would take time, especially with the various traits I had to improve the longevity of my frozen constructs and things I infused with my power, but eventually, it would be gone.

As a stop-gap measure, I could make this work by making the arrowheads an hour or two before they were used, but that only lessened the problem; it didn’t solve it. But an adequate solution in time was better than a good solution that came far too late. In this case, adequate had to suffice.

For a moment, I considered whether I should try to make the arrow shafts out of Ice, too. That way, I could conjure as many projectiles as necessary with nary a thought, but I faintly remembered that arrows needed to bend when shot, and if there was one thing Ice was bad at, it was bending. Same problem as with the idea to make bows out of Ice, it worked as long as I used magic to keep things fluid when needed, but that wasn’t a solution.

No, if I wanted this idea to work, the Ice arrowheads needed to be made in such a way that they could be affixed to the shafts quickly and easily, though maybe it would be prudent to move away from arrows altogether. Shafts needed to be procured after all, and if I wanted to equip people quickly, there wasn’t all that much time for that.

Maybe I should consider thrown weapons, something like a discus made from Ice, inscribed with the runes to shatter and explode, though hitting the weak spots in the Bitumen would be difficult that way. Additionally, people didn’t have my cold resistance, meaning that gripping any weapon I conjured would be painful for them, which was why I didn’t think making melee weapons, something like swords, spears or axes, would be a winning formula, to say nothing about shields or armour.

Maybe I would have a few better ideas once we met these people, or maybe Luna had some incredible, maybe divinely gifted, idea. But, regardless of any future plans, we needed to get to these people and meet them first.

Which was the plan for the coming morning, after a fun-filled night of hunting Bitumen and pushing their arsonistic efforts back for yet another day.