"Combat isn't your speciality? Surely you have something you can hit it with! I'm a freshman, I only have one attack spell and it's not even that good—" 

"...I can shield the three of us while you hit it?" 

She waves a hand and a glowing, translucent white bubble springs up around them, fading almost to invisibility after the first flash of light. 

OKAY THEN. Somehow it's on her to take out this mal! 

She takes a deep breath, points at the gorilla-elephant thing's head, and says the incantation for the Persian freezing spell that's the only sort of decent combat spell she knows.

The gorillaphant's head and a small area around it experiences a precipitious drop in temperature: ice crystals form on its fur, skin, and exposed mucous membranes as the air around its head drops below freezing. A larger radius around that area correspondingly heats up as the heat is shunted outwards, which will probably be painful if it survives long enough to feel pain. 

The gorillaphant bellows in pain through a suddenly ice-choked throat and staggers backwards, blinded. 

Unfortunately, stumbling backwards moves it out of the effect radius. Saira drops the spell and re-casts it, trying to aim for the head again—if she can get its brain cold enough she can just straight up kill it that way—

It's flailing about erratically in its panic, throwing her aim off. She gets a chunk of arm and shoulder, eliciting another pained bellow.

It lashes out blindly with the uninjured arm, but hits nothing. 

Twilly, who seems to have bounced back fine from being thrown through the air, dashes forwards to bonk the gorillaphant in the leg with his stick while it's on the retreat! 

What is he doing, he's tiny and that stick is basically useless against something this size—

Ugh, no, she needs to focus. She aims carefully, waiting for a moment when the gorillaphant isn't lurching about quite so much...

...and freeze. 

Letting out one final groan, it topples to the ground with a THUD. 

"Wowzers! That was really cool!" 

"...was that a pun in your language as well?" 

"Huh?" 

Twilly tilts his head, one ear going up while the other one flops down. 

Lady Celestia composes herself. 

"Thank you for your assistance. I apologise that I could not be of more help myself."

"There's a good chance I'm the one it wanted to eat, so, I was saving my own skin as much as yours." She almost says 'it's fine' and reconsiders. "—if you could give me some mana we can call it even, I'm almost out and I would prefer not to be walking through the woods almost out of mana." 

A wry smile. "This is, once again, a place where our magic systems find different things easy and hard. I don't know how to give you my own mana directly, but I have some mana potions and I'm happy to give you one." 

She reaches under her cloak and pulls out a small, rounded glass bottle sealed with a cork. The liquid inside is a deep blue. 

"I recommend you drink it all at once—the preservation enchantments break when it's uncorked, and they lose potency very quickly if not drunk." 

"Dooooes it have any ingredients that come from animals. Or, uh, people." 

"No, the potion base is plant-based and the reagents for the alchemical infusion are all minerals. Health potions should be fine, too, if you find yourself in need of one of those. They involve more plant-based reagents but still no animals." 

"Okay, thank you." 

In that case...sure, she'll try the 'mana potion'. A sip first, and then the rest if it seems to work. 

When she uncorks it, the potion fizzes and smells like blueberries. It tastes like blueberries, too, and does indeed seem to give her mana when she drinks it. Drinking the whole thing refills about three-quarters of her maximum capacity, considerably more than she expended on the fight. 

"Wow! Thank you!" Oh that feels so much better. They can keep walking through the woods and she won't even jump at every rustle of leaves, only, like, a third of them. 

"...I think before the mal attack you were about to tell me your message for Captain, uh, Rolith?" She really owes this lady that favour at this point. 

"Ah, yes, so I was. The message is simply that Twilly and I are taking the shortcut through the woods, and won't be stopping at the keep." 

"You're taking the shortcut through the woods and you won't be stopping at the keep. Got it."