Turi’s feathers were coated in blood, and his lungs were working overtime. Beneath him was an enormous blob of flesh with the durability of paper; it was so not-durable that Turi had been able to fly straight through it like a bullet through a pre-ascension human.

Its regeneration was absurd, though, and, quite frankly, Turi had no clue what the hell its baseline species was. It hadn’t even been that difficult to kill; just exhausting.

Turi was still annoyingly bad at keeping track of time, but he knew that, tomorrow, the humans would go hunting, and Turi would come and help. The hunting trip would last a full three days, and most of it would be spent hunting. Turi wasn’t very good in the stamina department, but it didn’t matter; the fact that he would be in a group meant that he wouldn’t have to fight everything.

Turi expected to make large gains this time, although he wasn’t quite looking forward to the humans’ bickering. They simply wouldn’t stop talking, but Turi was slightly biased. For him, talking cost essence, so he couldn’t do it all the time. Quite honestly, he would likely be much more involved in conversations if it was free like it was for the humans.

He would’ve made it so that he could speak through natural means like the humans did, and he had even tried, but he had no clue how to make change his vocal chords, his tongue and everything else that would be required to speak naturally.

Turi was a bird, after all, not a doctor. He would, of course, eventually remedy his lack of first-aid knowledge, but he was preoccupied with hunting and learning about other things.

Maybe it wouldn’t even be a bad thing for Turi to have to spend ten years before being able to ascend to the third realm. It would give him time to devour the humans’ accumulated knowledge.

Turi’s heart ached at the very thought of the word knowledge right now. He had recently learned that a very large chunk of the humans’ accumulated information was probably lost to time, with great libraries, the evidence of ancient civilizations and some of Earth’s greatest minds having been destroyed or killed.

Once he was done with this hunt, Turi would start looking for crows. With the ability to speak, he hoped to build a support network of sorts, mostly in the hopes that he wouldn’t have to hunt for himself. He enjoyed the thrill of the hunt and of battle, of course, but he simply didn’t have enough time to learn as it was. Turi was thinking about hiring some of the humans as personal tutors of sorts, to help teach him everything they could, and he would need an effective way of gathering essence cores to pay them, too.

The sun was setting, and Turi hastened his search for the big blob of flesh’s essence core by simply lighting it on fire. Its flesh was highly flammable, but it hadn’t helped whatsoever in the fight because of how absurd its regeneration was. Now that it was dead, though, it was nothing more than ash after a mere minute, and, buried within a very large pile of ash, Turi found its essence core.

After eating it, Turi took to the air and headed back towards Anoptera. Once he arrived, he didn’t say a word to anybody and just went straight to sleep. The flesh blob had truly exhausted him.

***

The only people awake in the camp right now were the people organizing the hunt, the night-shift guards, who would be replaced in an hour or so, and Turi. The sun was only just barely peaking over the horizon, but Turi was so eager that the slight exhaustion didn’t bother him.

He looked at his assessment. A few days had passed since he learned of the third realm, and they hadn’t changed much, aside from his senses being considered ‘ascended’, which was a new word, rather than prodigal. Turi had been working hard, but it was hard to be exceptional in multiple aspects at once. While his assessment of intelligence never changed, ascending it affected him just as much as it would have had it been normal, and he had ascended it several times over the past few days. If it weren’t abnormal, he imagined it’d be beyond ascended, and by a good bit.

Turi flipped to the second page, and found that the flesh blob hadn’t been very successful. It had managed to get to the second realm, but that wasn’t too incredible of a feat anymore. Its essence core had only provided him with a single opportunity to ascend his Aspects of Ascension, and that was with the help of a stone-clad squirrel and a very creepy and lanky raccoon thing.

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Turi ascended his intelligence, and looked at himself in the reflection of a metal plate.

Turi hadn’t changed much since the last time he had seen himself. His feathers felt and looked like they were made out of a black metal, and they faintly reflected the light despite being so dark. His golden irises glowed intensely- for eyes, that is, and his beak seemed lethally sharp. His talons were sharp and articulated, and he hadn’t grown an inch since the last time he had checked. It made sense; he liked his current size, after all.

Perhaps the only interesting change was that he seemed… older, in a bunch of minute details. Turi knew that he was still a fledgling, but he had never thought about how much younger he looked when compared to the other crows.

Overall, Turi was happy with himself. He was a very handsome bird, to ‘toot his own horn’, as the humans said. The only part he questioned was how mundane he looked, compared to how brilliant he truly was. His faintly-glowing golden irises made him a little bit distinct, but they weren’t exactly the most visible feature.

The minutes slowly trickled by, and the camp slowly became more busy. A small group composed of eight second realm humans had gathered in front of the gate, and Turi hopped off to join them. The rest of the humans would stay behind, meaning that Anoptera would be defended by six second realm humans and twenty first realm humans. It was overkill, in Turi’s opinion, but he had no say, and it just meant that he wouldn’t have to split the loot with as many people.

Turi and Jeremiah were to be the scouts, for the most part. Turi was strong, but there were several other humans amongst the group that were stronger in a direct confrontation. Emphasis on a direct confrontation; Turi was semi-confident of being able to beat the strongest of the humans, Aaron, in a one-on-one battle through his sheer brilliance, but the front-line fighting should be left to those who specialized in it.

It took an entire half-hour for the hunt to finally start, and Turi was genuinely annoyed by how slowly the humans did things and how meticulously they planned out every tiny detail. They were going towards the park to hunt super-bugs in mass quantities; what more was there to plan? Most of their planning would probably be worthless in the end, anyway, due to unforeseen problems.

Regardless of Turi’s complaints, it was finally time to leave. Turi and Jeremiah had devised a means of long-distance communication between the group and Turi himself when he was in the air or scouting ahead, and it involved an illusory ear, eye and mouth that would follow him almost everywhere he went.

Turi and Jeremiah had also decided to scout in shifts, and so Turi had nothing to do for the next four hours. He graced Jeremiah’s shoulder with his presence, and only vaguely listened to the human’s conversations as they ever-so-slowly moved through the rubble of the city.

His only entertainment was watching the humans stumble and climb through the rubble despite their strength. It was absurd; even Jeremiah could kick a stone wall in, but they were having so much trouble walking through the rubble. He understood that they weren’t going for speed, but still.

Two hours in, and Turi was briefly called upon to scare off a large vulture-like bird that was following the party. He, personally, had never had any problems with birds aside from the falcon at the beginning of Earth’s ascension, but that was only because he was visibly very fast, and most birds didn’t think it was worth chasing him down even if it was his only aspect; which it wasn’t.

After chasing it off, Turi returned and hopped along the ground this time. He said nothing in this time, conserving his essence. That changed when one of the second realm humans started talking to him, and she knew the way to his heart.

“Did you know that a group of flamingos are called flamboyances?” She asked, and Turi did not know that; he wasn’t sure why she knew that, but it didn’t matter. It was knowledge, and he was very glad as the human occasionally spat out random ‘fun facts’ to make conversation.

He learned quite a bit in the next hour or so, very little of it truly meaningful and almost all of it very shallow, but he was still very disappointed when Aaron, the horrid bastard that he was, very impolitely told her to shut up.

They occasionally killed a stray beast that wandered the streets or attacked them, but it was nothing meaningful, and it felt like they were hardly moving to Turi, who could arrive at the park in only a few minutes.

Finally, Jeremiah’s shift was over, and Turi took to the air, leaving the loud, smelly- not that he had much of a scent of smell- humans to crawl through dust and rubble like mere peons.

Turi smugly glanced down at them every once in a while, but most of his time was spent watching monsters and constantly relaying where they were, vaguely, through an immensely complex set of verbal signals; the long, quiet caws meant North, the long, loud caws meant South, the short, quiet caws meant East and the short, loud caws meant West.

Truly, they were incredible. Turi only expended essence to give the humans a more detailed account whenever an actually dangerous-looking monster was nearby, but they rarely did more than peak at them and leave when they found so many second realm humans.

It was slightly torturous to the impatient Turi, to be so high in the air. He could see the park from here with his ascended senses, and it was painful how slow the humans were moving. They would get there soon, though; within a half-hour at the most.

“The park is only four blocks away. Hurry up, or I’ll leave you behind.” Turi threatened, but the illusory mouth that followed him only giggled. Turi debated following through on his threat, but he discarded the idea of going ahead on his own when he noticed that, despite laughing at him, the humans had actually sped up.