Itching.

The wind under her wings wouldn’t quell the itch.

The blue above the sky-fluff didn’t alleviate the itch.

Releasing the burning-crackling in her eyes did nothing for the itch.

There was only one thing that helped the itch. Eating. It faded a bit when she killed a ground-crawler. There hadn’t been many of those nearby recently though. But, sometimes, she found a two-leg. Eating those was the best. It wasn’t that eating two-leg crawlers made the itch go away, but that they made it feel good, just for a bit.

The itch had always been there. Always with her. Like a ghost in the corner of her vision. One that she could never see, no matter how good her vision got.

The wind fought her. The sky didn’t want her in it. It never had. She’d never cared. Let the sky fight her. She’d beaten it a thousand times and would beat it a thousand more. She made a triumph-noise that shook the sky, because she had won again.

She was coming back to the tall-nest. Her chicks would be there. They would be hungry, and were reaching the age where she could no longer provide enough food for them. They would need to leave soon, to find their own hunting grounds.

She didn’t want them to go.

But that didn’t matter. They all needed to eat. Which was why she had brought food. A dead ground-crawler was clutched in her talons. She’d had to go a long way to find it. The blue and the black above the sky-fluff had traded places six times. They had never stopped fighting, the blue and the black, not that she or her dam or her dam’s dam could remember. But one of them would win eventually, such was the way of all fights. She hoped it was the blue. It made things easier to see.

Maybe someday she would be able to fly high enough to help the blue kill the black? That sounded like a nice dream. She should tell her chicks about it; maybe they would get strong enough to do it, someday.

The tall-nest came into view, still miles away but she could see it. Her chicks weren’t there. Had their hunger overcome them? Did they go out hunting?

That was fine. That was good. They could feed themselves. They didn’t need her. They shouldn’t need her. She would keep the food for them if they didn’t get anything, and eat it herself if they did.

She soothed herself with such thoughts until she saw the stains of red at the base of the tall-nest. The fallen, crumpled, and dismembered bodies. The scattered feathers.

Her chicks were dead.

Her chicks were dead.

HER CHICKS WERE DEAD.

A scream of grief shook the heavens and earth, and it was only after it petered out that she realised she had made the grief-noise.

This could not stand. This would not stand.

She needed to know how this had happened. She needed to make this right. She needed to know who had done this to her chicks!

Her Mana was bent into an ability that she knew most would think wasteful. It was a power that did not unleash the burning-crackling. It did not use her sharp beak or claws at all. But since she was a chick herself, her dam had taught her how important her eyes were. Seeing things. Learning things. Time and time again, her ability to see had proven incalculably valuable, whether in providing food for her chicks, evading the beasts that would eat her before she could eat them, or pushing the boundaries of her hunting grounds. She had always taken every power the blue box offered her that related to her eyes.

So she looked into the past, and she saw what had happened.

The two-legs. The one that had escaped her a few days before, and another one. They had the big shells. She hated the big shells. It wasn’t fair that she had to kill something so large when the edible part was so small.

Her chicks had hunted them. Their instincts were good, and so was their teamwork, but their technique was lacking. But that should have been fine! They were strong and they were fast. But the two-legs had cheated, like they always did. Cheated with their big shells and their strange long claws and some kind of blue-with-horns ground-crawler that was fighting with them for some reason.

They had killed her chicks.

Her chicks were dead.

They had killed them.

There was a strange feeling in her chest. Like the burning-crackling was leaking. It hurt but it didn’t hurt. It was hot but also icy cold. It made her want to find the two-legs and burning-crackling them until they made pain-noises and then they died!

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

So that was what she was going to do!

<=====}—o

“I still feel bad about killing the baby birds,” Mikayla confessed as they made camp that night.

“They weren’t babies, and why?” She stifled a grin as Keldryn’s tail bristled. She was mostly certain that it was a sign of his frustration, but it was also adorable, like a sulky kitten.

“I just . . feel like we should have found a better solution than that. They were beautiful birds,”

“That tried to kill us,” he reiterated. “If they’d won, they would not be thinking things like ‘maybe we shouldn’t have killed those people’. They would be going ‘yum, yum, tasty human!’,” He pointed at Mikayla and mimed being chewed up.

“Where I’m from, it’s considered part of our moral duty to act in the best interests of creatures who aren’t smart enough to make those decisions themselves. Just killing them like that is . . not okay,” Mikayla stared at her feet.

Keldryn wrestled with himself for a minute. Acting in the best interests of monsters? That was stupid, that was one of the stupidest things he’d ever heard. But Mikayla was from a wholly different world. It was clear to see that her values and culture weren’t compatible with the Kaiju Coast. He had to ease her into being more pragmatic. “There’s no point beating yourself up for not doing something that no one in the world can,”

“Do you know that? Has anyone even tried to do things a better way?” she demanded.

His ears went flat and his gaze hardened. “Yes. They have,” He took a breath, steeling himself to talk. “There’s a story that gets passed down to new recruits in the Goliath Guard, to stop them from getting bogged down by exactly the kind of nonsense you’re on right now,”

“Oh yeah?”

“There was once a group of researchers that managed to retrieve an unhatched Kaiju egg, of a snake Kaiju. They thought they’d raise it in captivity, domesticate it. Because surely a Kaiju that had never known the wilderness, never had another Kaiju to teach it to hunt or to hate, could be raised into an ally of sapienity. For a while, they thought it worked. It never showed any hostility. It acted like it loved them. It got fat and strong off of the researchers’ affection. And then one night it killed them all in their sleep, using a grisly power that no one had ever heard of,”

“How?”

“It turned their flesh into stone. Killing without a sound, without a struggle. No one’s really sure how monsters get their powers, but this snake, it was smart enough to take advantage of being nurtured and get strong enough to develop that incredibly dangerous power, then as soon as it didn’t need its caretakers anymore it killed them all. And then it killed everyone who went to investigate, until finally someone managed to escape and spread the word that the facility was lost,”

Mikayla gulped. “What happened to it?”

“It’s still there. Still building its nest of stone. And these days people call it Gorgon, the Fifth Monster King,” Keldryn exhaled, closing his eyes. “Look. You’ve been here for a week. We’ve carved out our way of life and survived out here for two hundred years. Do you think no one else has ever thought the things you’re thinking, felt the way you’re feeling, in all that time? If there was a better way to do things, that’s what we’d be doing,”

A long, slow breath left her lungs. “Was that supposed to make me feel better? ‘Kaijus are all bloodthirsty beasts and don’t deserve mercy’?” Mikayla skeptically questioned, wringing her hands.

Keldryn tilted his head, ears twitching. “Well. Yeah,” Why was that not good enough for her?

She balled her fists. “I’m not going to just accept that. I still feel like there should be a better way,”

Keldryn rolled his eyes. “Do you even realise how hypocritical you’re being? You killed those wolves. You’ve killed other Kaijus before, and it wasn’t a problem then. Why are the ‘baby birds’ any different? Especially when you told me all about how terrifying and bloodthirsty their mother was - give any of them another ten years to grow and they’d each be just as bad,”

Mikayla faltered. He wasn’t wrong. She’d killed the spider and the gecko out of self-defence, but she’d willingly provoked the Rimeroar Bear. At the time she’d let Nocturnus goad her with his argument that it needed to be done so that she would get strong enough to survive leaving Astralia’s Spear. But was that really okay? Did necessity trump morality?

Maybe she really was just grandstanding about morality in some conceited attempt to make herself feel better.

“And, hey. At least we got plenty of death points out of them. Put me that much closer to level 22,” Kedryn’s eyes unfocused, peering at something only he could see, and Mikayla guessed that he was looking at his Profile.

She frowned, the incongruity of his statement drawing her attention. “Death points?”

“Yeah. Y’now. Some people call them ex-pee points. But they’re death points because you get them for killing things and the letters X-P look like a little dead face,” Keldryn mimed closing his eyes and letting his tongue loll out.

“What? So they don’t stand for anything?”

“No, what would they stand for?”

“Experience Points?”

Keldryn cast her an odd look. “Experience starts with an ‘E’. And, you thought they were ’Experience Point Points’?”

“No, I thought they were e-‘XP’-erience points,” she counterargued.

Keldryn mulled that over. “Might be. Maybe,”

Another thought occurred to Mikayla. “Why do we only get ‘death points’ for killing things, anyway? I feel like it’s contributing to a cycle of violence,”

“Huh? I dunno. There might be other ways to get them that I don’t know about,” Keldryn considered that for a second, then shook his head. “Nah, that’s not it, otherwise they’d use whatever other method to level up Goliath Guard members than making them fight captured monsters. Yeah, I dunno. You’d have to ask a faerie, or the Cosmic Scales,”

“The who?”

“The god that made the System. The faerie race were created by him and usually act as his envoys. If something goes weird with the System, it’s only a matter of time until a faerie comes to fix it,”

“Are you sure about that? Because my System has been buggy since I got here. It keeps telling me some functions are unavailable and I need to go to a place with an active Ataraxia node to fix it,”

Keldryn’s ears went flat. “Nah, that’s normal. I’ve got the same problem when I’m out here. I don’t really know why it works that way. It just is, and we can’t do anything about it, so . . Mikayla? Something wrong?”

Mikayla’s gaze had drifted into the distance as she fully processed what the foxkin had just said. “Wait, what was that about a god that made the System? Gods are real?”