A certain peasant's son, instructed by a wise old hag, presented the king with a gold-winged pike (щука златокрылая) netted near the palace.
The king comes to see him personally, and Ivan assures him the other two son's are alive and well, but have continued their journey by themselves in a place where three serpents with six, nine, and twelve heads appears out of the Black Sea.
Although Ivan the Maid's Son is picked, he sleeps through the night, and it is the Storm-Bogatyr who faces off against the six-headed Chudo-Yudo [ru][9][2] (or "sea-monster"[2]) that appears out of the water.
The third night, the Storm-Bogatyr prepares for a difficult fight, asking his brothers to stay alert, and to come to his aid when there appears the sign that he is imperiled (the candle will falter, and the hanging towel will drip blood into a dish).
The daughters utter each of their schemes: transforming into a meadow with a well and a bed, an orchard full of fruits, and an old hut, so that when the brothers are enticed to seek respite, they will be blown to bits like poppy seeds.
[d] When the meadow and well, the orchard, and the old hut are encountered, suspiciously out of place in the middle of the steppes and desert, the brothers are lured into resting there or eating the fruits.
But Storm-Bogatyr who overheard her plans prepares for her attack at a village he entered, hiring twelve blacksmiths to fortify their smithy with an iron plate.
When she gullibly does so, Ivan clasps her tongue with a pair of tongs heated red-hot, and the smiths and the hero beat the sow with iron rods until all her ribs are broken.
The three heroes arrive in a kingdom in India, and the Storm-Bogatyr delivers an ultimatum to its king, demanding that he marry his princess to Ivan the Prince, or send out an army to resist.
Near the location where the three monsters appear, the three brothers discover a "hut on chicken legs" with a rooster's head, with the entrance faced the other way towards the forest, but which swings around and lets them in after the Storm-Bogatyr recites a short incantation.
[14] According to Russian scholarship, similar stories are attested in the East Slavic tale corpus, under the classification 300A*, "Возвращение змееборцем похищенных змеем небесных светил" ("Returning the celestial lights stolen by a serpent").
[15] Russian scholar Lev Barag, who updated this classification index in 1979, noted that the story of the recovery of the celestial lights led into East Slavic type 300A, "Fight on Kalinov Bridge",[16] whose last episode is the killing of the witch with the aid of the smith.
[17] According to Russian scholarship and folklorists, this Kalinov Bridge [be; uk; ru] appears in East Slavic folklore as a liminal space, since the bridge crosses over a swamp or a fiery river named Smorodina [ru; uk], and upon it the hero does battle with the wicked villain (e. g., Chudo-Yudo, Zmei Gorynych).