Chapter 40: Chapter 38 – “Solo” deer hunting

Apparently, my parents bought the excuse that Mirefa took so long precisely because she noticed where I was and spent the time bringing me back home. Or maybe they didn’t and decided that it was a lucky mistake and the final result was more important. Either way, Mirefa got away with a light punishment and a sore rear, and that was pretty much it.

 

I forgot that elves were seen as dangerous, and let slip that I’d been playing with Anortha a long while back. I had to explain they weren’t really a threat as long as you could communicate with them and I could. My parents and brother didn’t really seem to care too much about magic, which seemed to be a pretty stark contrast to my sister.

 

The current tent my family lived in only had room for four, and they were excitedly talking about expanding it until I told them this was only a temporary visit and I was going back to the elves.

Mirefa asserted that I was still as physically inferior as I was before, so they were deeply worried about my ability to survive.

 

In the end, the conversation steered toward needing to prove myself by hunting and processing a deer for consumption, as they were very skeptical about how useful magic was when I lacked the senses and muscle power to hunt a deer.

The next night, my family all followed me around as I tried really hard to find any traces of deer. I did know some magic that could help me detect deer, but they have to be near enough. The one that would be the most useful would probably be using magic to detect infrared waves, similar to heat sensing cameras. The only difference is the resolution is absolute garbage, but at least I could tell that there is a warm object in the distance, which is likely to be a deer. Or other lupoy, as it turned out a few times.

 

About an hour or so of getting baited, I claimed I needed to use the restroom, and signaled for my sister to follow me. She luckily got the hint, and claimed she also needed to go.

 

“Could you at least tell me in what general direction some deer are located?”

 

“Why would I do that? You were insisting on having me punished.”

 

“Well, in the end it was really light. Not to mention when you said that you took that long because you were bringing me home, I never really bothered to correct them anyways, even though I could. Also I never told you to tell me where the deer are exactly, just need to know the general location.”

 

“Oh fine.” Mirefa pointed off to her left, and then headed back.

 

With that hint, I walked for about six minutes and then detected something warm in the distance. It was a good distance away, so I quietly snuck towards it.

It turns out that it indeed was a deer, and even better, it was on the ground sleeping. I had to wonder how Mirefa even noticed it from that far. Even though it was sleeping, I only had one shot, or it would get startled and run away. I couldn’t even get too close, or the deer would notice me.

 

If I was just trying to kill the deer, I could roast it from afar, but given that having burnt deer for dinner wasn’t quite as palatable as I would like, I decided to not do that. I was not close enough to shred the deer with pure wind magic, since any concentrated pressure I would form would quickly disperse.

 

In the end I went for a very primitive method of throwing a sharp rock at the deer. Of course, boosted with magic. Unfortunately, even to this day, I fail miserably at creating any substance, be it water or earth, otherwise, I would have just showered it with magically created stone. What I could do was pick up a rock from the floor, slowly shape it with magic, and then throw it while boosting it with magic.

 

I formed a bullet-shaped rock, with a difference in that the front is pointy rather than rounded. I would love to say I could mimic firearms with magic, but unfortunately, the speed is rather slow, and because of that, I needed the tip to actually be sharp or the “bullet” wouldn’t pierce through anything.

 

Now prepared, I approached it and threw the bullet, using magic to spin the bullet to prevent it from tumbling, and some wind magic to make it go forward faster. I didn’t get a headshot, even though I was aiming for it, but at least it still stabbed it in the torso. It tried to run away, but with the injury, even I could follow the blood trail and keep up with its speed. In the end, a simple stab through the heart with the spear I borrowed from my family ended the hunt.

 

Now that the hard part is done, I had to go process the corpse while my family were watching me. Back in the day, that was the only thing I was good at, but it’s been years and I pretty much forgot how to do it. I remember there were specific places to cut to make disassembly easier, but that was pretty much it. I decided to randomly hack at it away with a knife, and decided for the more stubborn places, I used wind magic to blast the meat away from the bone.

 

“Please stop ruining our future dinner,” my mother said. “It’s clear you don’t know what you’re doing.”

 

“I know I’m not doing it the most efficiently or elegantly, but it gets the job done.”

 

My mother decided to pull me away from the carcass while explaining, “First of all, whatever you did to attack the deer initially pierced its stomach, releasing all the contents to the rest of the deer. Not optimal, but we don’t always hit it where we intend to and it happens. However, when you were processing it, you jostled it around without care, spreading the stomach acid and its dinner everywhere. Not only that, you even brute forced your way through, and I can see some bone fragments now stuck everywhere in the meat.”

 

Well I guess magic can’t be used as a substitute for everything.

 

“I haven’t really hunted or prepared deer since I was with you all,” I said.

 

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“So those elves hunted the deer on their own and fed you?”

 

“No, I haven’t eaten deer since then.”

 

As soon as I said that, all four heads turned to look at me.

 

“Wait, so what have you been eating then?”

 

That was actually a good question. I could name most of the ingredients in the elves’ language, but I wouldn’t know what they were called. Not to mention that the meat I used in cooking was already preprocessed so I couldn’t even say what animal they were actually from. They probably weren’t from deer though. Probably not from lupo either.

 

I ended up saying, “Some plant things and the occasional meat from some other animal.”

 

My parents looked at each other, and my father said, “No wonder why you haven’t grown up much. You need more deer in your diet.”

 

“I mean when I was with you all, I still was smaller than average, even with deer.”

 

“Yes, but at least you did grow. You still look the same five years ago.”

 

“I told you, that’s because of magic.”

 

“Sure. Anyways, while you’re staying with us, you are going to get all you can eat deer.”

 

Well it wasn’t like I disliked deer or anything so it was fine with me.

 

While we were talking, Cabg and Mirefa were busy cleaning up my mess and preparing the deer, so by the time the conversation lulled, the deer was fully processed.

True to their word, my dinner that day was venison and only venison. While I didn’t mind deer, only having deer meat was a bit much. That and I probably did ruin the dinner from my processing and it didn’t taste quite as nice as I remembered.

 

“So, did I pass?” I asked during dinner. “I still did end up finding and killing the deer and while it wasn’t the best, I could process it enough to at least isolate the meat”

 

“”No,”” my family said all at once.

 

My mother followed up with, “You might have thought that you left far enough, but we still heard you ask Mirefa for directions. So you already failed the ‘find the deer’ part. Your target was also sleeping, and if it were awake, I would think you wouldn’t have been able to get that close and did whatever you did, since it would have ran. And knowing you, you wouldn’t be able to keep up if it did run. And finally, it actually hurt watching you ruin our dinner. Even with Cabg and Mirefa undoing your mistakes, you can still taste the difference.”

 

Ouch. To be fair though, knowing how to hunt deer wasn’t exactly high on my priority list of skills to have.

 

I decided to change the topic instead and asked my family what they had been up to. Most of it was filled with stories of Mirefa growing up and the embarrassing things she did. The other parts were filled with Cabg working as a scout, since his experience of finding Mirefa every time made him quite good at his job. My parents’ life didn’t change much so there wasn’t much in that regard.

 

Once dinner was done, I announced that I was planning to leave tomorrow, since the elves were expecting me then. Given my less than satisfactory deer hunt, I assumed that they wouldn’t let me, but that didn’t happen. The only thing they mentioned was that they’d like for me to visit them every year, and they didn’t quite trust me to go back alone. Mirefa immediately volunteered herself to accompany me. Cabg wanted to join too, but given that he was absent at work since he was searching for Mirefa, it was denied.

 

I still wasn’t used to being up all night, so I retired early and fell asleep.