Snow dog

Ok, enough grinding, time to make some progress! By progress i mean running like crazy from every other monster since I still can't survive more than 2 battles in a row. 

After a few tries  managed to get to the second area of the ice caves, which were thankfully lighter on monsters. There the group cam across a weird hologram image of the sage that's the soul link of Oliver's mom talking to Swaine's father, so it had to have been from at least 15 years ago. There's no explanation give how this vision is there or why, i'll just go with because magic, and it pretty much only shows that they knew each other (which makes sense since they were both sages).

It's just a show, you should really just relax

While running around and fleeing from more monsters, I cam across yet another broken robot. these things are everywhere! 

Warranty is likely expired by now.

Finlly I get to another save point, and this one is a short jog from a big round open area. Looks like I found the boss battle, time to see if all the grinding was enough!

Gee, I wonder what could possibly be in this big open- oh hi dogie.

Since it's an ice wolf with ice attacks in the ice cave, I figured it was safe to stick with the fire attacks. Half way through the battle Drippy pots up to give the oh so helpful advice to try fire...

That's what I've been doing!

After burning through all my HP and MP restoring items, I some how manage to beat down the pooch with only a small bit of health remaining. After the fight, the boss coughs up a black flaming ball that turns out to be one of the stones we need. Kinda odd that the stone for ice powers is yellow though.

Ewww.. good thing they're wearing gloves already.

The boss then explains that it was driven mad from holding on to the power of the stone for too long, which rendered the whole thing of the evil wizard controlling the beasts pointless. Where was he during all of this?

Cool, a talking ice dog!

He then explains that due to how well we fought him, he can tell that the group are good guys and worth of having the stone. The same stone that drove him mad, nice move there dogie. Drippy even calls out how silly the trope of "you beat me, you must be worthy" is, but the boss just says that he's a magic talking ice wolf, so shut up.

He's got a point.

So next time it's off to another stone location. I hope that since all the spots open at once they can be taken in any order, so the grinding i did here should help carry me in the next dungeon.