Turi was filled with genuine glee when they finally got to the edge of the park, and was filled with genuine hatred when someone suggested taking a break. Luckily, Leo decided against it, although they wouldn’t do much real hunting today. Instead, they were going to spend most of the rest of the day making a camp and checking out the area. Luckily, the humans had no need to do the latter with Turi here, so they wouldn’t waste nearly as much time today; hopefully, they would be able to get at least some hunting done.
The park had changed quite a bit more since the last time he saw it. The soldier ants, which had previously been the size of a rat, were now, on average, the size of a medium-sized pre-ascension dog.
Worse, there seemed to be some sort of higher-rank soldier-esque ant that was practically twice its size, standing at four and a half feet tall or so, and covered in overlapping layers of chitin that reminded the humans of ancient ‘knights’, they decided to call them knight ants. Soldier ants and knight ants; it was a rare moment where Turi was actually quite content with the human’s naming sense.
“I can hardly wait to slaughter them by the dozens. Imagine how many cores we’ll get.” Aaron said, and everyone else looked disgusted.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Aaron?” Leo said, and Turi did his best approximation of a frown.
Wasn’t that why they were here? Turi was eager to hunt the ants, too.
“Isn’t that why we’re here?” Aaron asked, giving voice to Turi’s thoughts.
“It is, but try to show some restraint. You sound like a psychopath.”
Oh. Turi agreed with that; Aaron did sound like a psychopath. He had found it odd how he had phrased it, but hadn’t thought much further on it. Still… wasn’t it a bit hypocritical to reprimand him when it was something that they had intended to do from the get-go?
“I don’t understand.” Turi said.
“That’s because it doesn’t make sense,” Aaron grumbled.
“It’s less about killing the ants and more so about enjoying it. I doubt it, but its very well possible that they’re not just stupid, mindless bugs anymore, and are conscious, thinking creatures, with emotions, likes and dislikes, just like us.” The fun-fact lady said.
“You kill the beasts, and they have those same thoughts and emotions. Why care for the life of a mindless drone?”
“We killed them for food and for the strength to protect ourselves and others.” Leo said.
“What of the ants? You will not eat them, and you are strong enough to defend yourselves and your camp.”
“We may be strong enough for now, but what about a week from now? If we stop getting stronger, others will outpace us.”
“Hmm,” Was his only response.
Turi fell into thought.
‘Is it wrong for me to enjoy the thrill of the hunt, then? Is that the behavior of mindless, immoral beasts? I’m not mindless, but am I immoral?’ Turi wondered, and he thought back to everything he had done in the past.
‘I’ve refused to hunt birds; that’s better than most birds. I’ve also saved Jeremiah; I even spared the fox, and I’ve…’ Turi trailed off. There weren’t many other positive things he’d done. There weren’t many negative things he’d done, either.
‘Sparing a fox for joining me under the threat of death is probably more of a negative than a positive. I’ve threatened to cause problems for the humans if they didn’t give in to my demands, too.’ Turi thought. Did the humans treat him as a beast because he was a beast?
The thought made a shiver run down his spine.
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The humans had changed topic long ago, but they weren’t discussing anything of importance, and Turi was having a… he didn’t know a good word for it, but he was worried that he may be a beast.
“What are morals? What is good and what is bad?” Turi asked.
***
Despite how eager he had been to hunt the ants, Turi couldn’t even concentrate on it. The humans did all of the work, and Turi slowly hopped after them, as he tried to process morals; what was right and wrong and why it was right and wrong.
The concept didn’t make sense to him. He struggled to comprehend it, but he… couldn’t. Turi decided to push the moral dilemma aside and get to work, but as he impaled ants with spikes, Turi couldn’t rid himself of the feeling of disgust with himself. He was a beast; he didn’t understand the morals, the rights and wrongs of the humans. The closest thing was that he didn’t want to hunt other birds, but that was just an instinctive disgust towards the idea. Was that morals? Why did he not feel them when he should; when he ended the life of the two mated stone-clad squirrels, why did he not feel anything, even now?
Turi almost got snapped up inside a knight ant’s mandibles, he was so lost in thought. Turi had only been saved by his inherent abilities as a Turi crow; that is, accelerating his thinking.
After that happened, Turi truly forced himself to take his mind off of it. He’d deal with the idea of morals later; right now, his life was on the line.
***
Turi sat on a small stool of stone that he had made himself in the small, temporary camp near the park. It was midnight, but he could not sleep, despite his exhaustion. Turi didn’t want to think of it anymore, though; he didn’t understand, and would have to come to terms with being a mere beast. Turi could vaguely feel a tear forming in his eyes, and they lit up. The tear evaporated, and Turi felt like destroying something. But he couldn’t; he may be a beast, but he wanted to stay as far away from it as he reasonably could.
As he listlessly stared at the moon, an idea struck him.
He had stopped growing in size despite ascending his strength because he hadn’t wanted to get any larger. Turi’s tome manifested itself, and it flipped to the second page. Turi eagerly looked at it, before realizing that he hadn’t eaten any cores. They were stockpiled in the middle of the camp, and were to be distributed when they returned to Anoptera.
Turi didn’t want to steal them, though. The humans had explicitly listed that as one of the ‘bad’ things to do.
Turi wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight. He took to the air and headed toward the ants. Their warzone wasn’t far, and it was significantly less active than it had been during the day.
When Turi got there, he dove into the center of the battlefield, where the battle was at its most intense. He impaled a soldier ant with his beak and burrowed into its corpse, but he would be found and torn apart soon, when another ant inevitably tried to take its core.
Not that it would find one. Turi had burrowed directly into it, and it was already in his stomach. From his position within the soldier ant’s abdomen, Turi’s eyes lit up like candles and his thoughts practically quadrupled in speed.
Outside, Turi could suddenly feel the air, but it was only for a brief moment; it was too expensive to maintain. It was enough. Turi knew exactly where every ant within a ten yard radius of him was, and spikes of stone rose from the ground, impaling every single one, but only killing roughly… twenty-five percent of them? It didn’t matter.
Turi’s eyes felt like iron in their sockets as he used the stone spike within the dead ants’ bodies to find their cores and, with the holes he had just made, tear them out, right towards the dead ant he was hiding within.
Turi leapt out of the dead ant’s corpse just as thirty-one cores, four of which had belonged to the knight ants. He didn’t have enough essence to carry them with him, and so… Turi, in the middle of the ant’s battlefield, started eating the cores, two at once.
The impaled bodies of the ants, both living and not, blocked the way to him partially, but he knew it wouldn’t last. Turi shoveled the cores into his mouth, and his stomach felt strained. It felt hot, like the sheer quantity of high-quality essence cores was going to burn a hole through it.
Turi held three of them in his beak, but he couldn’t hold any more. Turi’s stomach and beak full, and with no other way to take them with him, Turi regretfully took to the air, leaving fourteen whole essence cores behind; of course, he had eaten the most valuable cores first, but it was still a big loss. Those fourteen cores would’ve been enough to make his strength ascended, too.
Turi took to the air, and, through the cores in his beak, let out a sigh of relief. The ants couldn’t reach him. Turi started to fly towards the temporary camp that the humans had set up, but stopped as his attention was caught by a tendril of mist snaking from the south side of the city, and towards the park.
‘What the hell?’
The mist tendril snaked forward, moving through objects with no problem. Turi wondered what purpose it served if it couldn’t touch a thing, but as it neared the park and faces started to move from within the increasingly-dense mist, Turi quickly shot towards the human camp. He didn’t want any part of what the mist was doing; not when he had more important things to do.
Turi regretted not having crushed the cores, because, when he manifested his tome, he realized that his plan wouldn’t work until a few hours later. By then, it’d already be morning.
Turi sought out and found the second realm human that was on watch, and told her of the incredibly creepy mist tendril before flopping down on a small cushion that the humans had brought for him and passing out.