Adon held his breath for a long moment.

Please don’t notice me please don’t notice me please don’t notice me…

He was almost praying to the big shadow that enveloped him. He felt uncomfortably like the center of attention, as if he was under a sort of reverse spotlight. His cruddy vision still made it impossible for him to make out the shape of the shadow, but Adon’s common sense told him what it would be.

A giant shadow suddenly appearing from above had to be a bug’s worst nightmare. A bird. Either that or an impossibly quiet human, but the shadow was too small for that.

The bird moved forward until the shadow no longer covered him, but Adon wasn’t relieved. He could see that the shadow was growing larger, and the figure casting it was already wheeling about in the sky. The caster was turning back around and getting closer to the ground.

Adon moved frantically to get into the thickest, densest patch of shrubbery that he could find, not bothering to scan it carefully for predators or obstacles. If he didn’t get out of the open, he knew he was bird food. He was slowed by the presence of the Leafy Bush Cricket still impaled on his spines, unmoving but still heavy and larger than Adon. A dead weight that might kill him yet.

No no no, I’m not going to die here, he thought. There was no time to throw the cricket’s body away—and a part of him felt a powerful, greedy desire to keep this piece of meat that he had so clearly earned—but he was terribly slow and ungainly as he moved. It was more of a waddle than a run.

The one advantage that Adon had was a head start, which narrowed each second. He began to hear the quiet wing beats as the bird moved closer.

No…

Adon dashed the last foot, finding some energy deep down that he thought he’d fully depleted. He threw himself into the tight confines of the plant life he’d been running towards—which, as he struck it, turned out to be a thick, dense patch of some sort of thorny bush.

The thorns that would have seemed so harmless to Adon as a human tore into his body, raking his exoskeleton in multiple places. Contact with the plant snapped off several of his venomous spines as the impact tore the cricket corpse away from his body.

No, my food! he thought a bit desperately. After all that focused effort… He wondered where the cadaver had landed. Maybe it could still be recovered.

But he couldn’t spare much energy or attention for the Leafy Bush Cricket’s body now.

The bird landed at almost the same moment that Adon’s body came to rest on one of the thorny stems. There was a little additional pain as a final thorn planted itself firmly in his back, but Adon felt grateful. The thorn hadn’t penetrated anything important, he could tell. There were only dull aches and pains all over his body, nothing sharp and agonizing and clearly fatal.

Note to self, though, he thought. Definitely keep upgrading that regeneration Adaptation whenever you can.

A tiny voice in his head, distantly remembering a sort of referee from a game he’d watched in one of his previous lives, pronounced: You’re safe!

The bird stared at him as he had that thought, and Adon wondered if it would try to brave the thorns to get at him. But no.

Identify.

Common Garden Bluebird (Female)

I bet if I was still human, I’d think you were cute, he thought. Freaking Godzilla monster…

He watched wearily as the bird tilted her head and changed her posture, clearly examining parts of the thornbush that did not contain Adon.

Did she not see me? he wondered. Did I just imagine that she was staring at me?

Her posture and the direction of her head had screamed that the bird was staring at him, but with his horrible vision, he couldn’t be sure of where her eyes were actually resting. That, he knew, was an even more important thing to update than his regeneration. At least his body had some healing abilities now. His vision felt like looking at the world through a translucent screen. Better than nothing, but if he couldn’t tell when a predator was looking at him, that was a serious defect.

The bird finally rested her eyes on something that was far below Adon but still enmeshed in the bush. She darted forward, trying to push through the thick tangle of branches, then immediately bounced back. If Adon’s read her body language correctly, the bluebird became aware at that point, if she hadn’t been already, that her prey was stuck in a thornbush.

She went for the cricket, he realized. Why not me? Then Adon pictured his body, as it must appear to any predators. Oh, I’m covered in venomous spines. Right. I guess I’m really not in danger. I’m too much trouble to eat.

The bluebird tried different angles to get at the cricket’s body. Finally, seemingly frustrated, she turned away from the bush and began poking around at the tangle of plants on her opposite side.

Good luck with that, Adon thought. I’ve been having a heck of a time finding anything around here to eat—

The bird stepped away with a big worm-like creature in her beak.

Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me! These eyes of mine must be the biggest handicap on my entire body. And I thought the soft, squishy caterpillar body was a pretty big issue! There was really a defenseless worm right there?

The bluebird took off again, and Adon quickly crawled to the edge of the twig he was perched on to see where she was going next. If nothing else, this bird definitely knew how to find food. She had seen Adon and the cricket he killed from dozens of feet in the air, he was fairly certain. Maybe he could watch her and learn a thing or two about where he should be looking.

He saw the bird much more clearly and easily now that she was back in the air than he had when she was on the ground. Probably because my vision is based mainly on distinguishing light from dark, he thought. Now that she’s up against the sunlight, it’s easy to see her.

The bird didn’t fly very far. She entered a box that stood on a pole planted in the ground some distance from where Adon was. His vision was at least good enough to tell that it wasn’t a tree. So some human was maintaining housing for birds—or even a single structure intended for this bird in particular.

Seeing that, Adon had an absolutely insane idea for what he wanted to do next.

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No, not insane, he told himself. High risk, high reward.

A plan that would take advantage of his human-like Intelligence.

Wasn’t that consistent with his new ethos? Be brave and try new things? Get out of his shell? Sure it was. He resolved, within his own mind, what his next steps would be.

But first—he looked down to find where the Leafy Bush Cricket had fallen—it’s lunchtime!

—

Princess Rosslyn sipped at the mushroom stew daintily and chattered with her oldest half-brother, Baltazar. She often liked to sit next to him and his sister Oliva, in part because they were cute and still played childish games, and in part because of the position of the seat, where Rosslyn would not have to look at her stepmother.

“So then what did you do?” she asked.

The energetic ten-year-old eagerly delved further into the subject of the make-believe game he and his younger siblings had been playing, “War with the Demon Emperor.” It was incredibly cute to hear him talk about going to war, since he still had a high-pitched, squeaky voice—almost a girl’s voice—that made a marvelous contrast with the substance of what he was saying.

At the same time that she listened to him, Rosslyn kept one ear tuned in to Queen Carolien’s conversation with the King. Though Rosslyn found her stepmother vapid and ignorant, at least the King tried to engage with his wife on matters of state. Rosslyn often gleaned information from their exchanges that her father would otherwise prefer not to burden her with.

“Our Ambassador to Parmonia has written to me,” the King said. “His arrival found the King at Temple. It seems a good omen as to his willingness to sign a mutual defense pact against the Demon Empire. Even though Parmonia is not on the front line, their new King appears to be as enthusiastic in his worship of the Goddess as the last. I believe they will stand with us against the worshipers of the Demon God.”

“Ugh, why do we need the Parmons?” Queen Carolien asked. “You know that I have always found them boorish and backward. Come to think of it, in any mutual defense pact, would they not ask for you to commit to their defense against Orthonia?”

“If they seek to negotiate for that, we will cross that bridge,” the King replied evenly, “but the state of international affairs is such that I think an attack by Orthonia is much less likely than aggression from the Demon Emp—”

“Darling,” the Queen said, pronouncing the word with an exaggerated emphasis on the first syllable, “surely the Demon Empire cannot be expected to attack us now, or anytime close to now. They have been inactive in the West for centuries, have they not? Do we not have enough alliances with the countries that actually border the Empire?”

Spoken like someone whose country was never at risk of attack by the Demon Empire for its entire history, Rosslyn thought. The Queen’s homeland of Galton had only ever been attacked by two countries in the last half millennium: Claustria, in its more war-like era several rulers ago, and the island nation of Axonmark, which still claimed that parts of Galton belonged to their King by some obscure legal logic.

It helped that Galton did not border the Demon Empire.

“My Queen, I fear you are gravely underestimating the threat that the Empire actually poses. And perhaps overestimating the capacity of our existing allies.”

The Queen pouted, then seemed to notice Rosslyn in her peripheral vision. “Husband, how goes the wooing process for our young queen-to-be? I seem to recall that she has had several interviews with suitors recently, arranged by our friend Baranack.”

“You might attempt asking your stepdaughter the question directly,” the King replied, smiling very thinly. “Or we could continue discussing issues that could be of life or death importance to all of us soon enough.”

“My King, I know that the royal succession is a matter of life or death importance to all of us. Not in a possible future, depending upon a number of foreign leaders’ decisions, but for a certainty.” This was what Rosslyn hated about Queen Carolien. She simpered and pouted like she was Rosslyn’s own age instead of almost twice that. She acted like a child, and then she suddenly made cogent and logical arguments. Seemingly always in service to her own power and vanity, but consistently with the fig leaf that she had the Kingdom’s interests at heart. “So I will ask her,” the Queen said. “Dear daughter, how has the courting process been going? I imagine it must be difficult to choose one’s own husband. I was fortunate that my father made such a good match for me.” She clutched the King’s arm tenderly as she spoke, leaning slightly in her chair to be closer to him.

You are not my mother, Rosslyn thought fiercely. And I wish I had much more control over this process than I do. It was as if the Queen knew every button of hers to push. Rosslyn wanted to punch the woman in the face. But she kept her facial expression under control and tried carefully to seem enthralled by Baltazar’s descriptions of the game the children had been playing.

“Did you end up slaying the Demon Emperor?” she asked, very pointedly not looking in the Queen’s direction or acknowledging that she had spoken in any way.

“Yes! I plunged the sword into his heart, and…” Baltazar went on describing how the evil Demon Army’s power was broken, and their Goddess-worshiping hostages were rescued. Then the old lands that had belonged to the other Goddess-worshippers in the region were liberated.

Sweet, naive boy, Rosslyn thought, smiling a little despite herself. If only it were that simple. Sometimes she really thought that Baltazar could be a good king someday, if only she weren’t in the way. He truly seemed to have the warrior spirit that a future king of Claustria ought to have. Other days, she was sure that Queen Carolien would steer him into war with exactly the wrong neighbors. This youthful wish to defeat the Demon Empire would be channeled into a war with Parmonia—because the Queen found them boorish.

“My dear Princess Rosslyn, I know you are deeply engrossed in your conversation with your brother, but I wish to know how you are finding the courting process,” the Queen said much more loudly.

Rosslyn forcefully plastered an unnaturally large smile to her face and turned to face the Queen.

“Were you saying something to me, Stepmother? I was enjoying Baltazar’s stories about the war with the Demon Empire that he was waging.”

“Oh, of course, my dear child,” Queen Carolien said, her voice spending a little too long on that last word. “I was just asking about the wooing process. I understand that Lord Baranack has been providing you with the flower of noble youth to choose from.”

“Perhaps that flower has wilted, Your Highness.” Rosslyn tried to make her lips perform a sincere frown. Manipulating her facial expressions for effect was really more the Queen’s forte than hers, but Rosslyn thought she’d been making strides in learning her stepmother’s methods.

“Hm. I am certain I do not know what you mean, child.”

“I mean that Lord Baranack’s efforts seem to be futile. He has thus far only been able to attract weaklings, incompetent second sons, and men of so little account that they seem to be measuring the value of the furnishings for auction as they examine a room.”

“I cannot believe—”

“That seems to me to be just the problem,” Rosslyn said. “All of the things that you cannot believe—”

“Please be civil, Rosslyn,” the King interjected mildly.

Rosslyn let out a deep breath. Inhaled. Exhaled. This is just what she wants. You know this is just what she wants, to get between you and your father. That knowledge didn’t make it any easier to avoid rising to the bait.

“I have not been enjoying the courtship process,” Rosslyn said finally, looking pointedly at the King rather than the Queen. “I think that my stepmother knows that perfectly well. I have little doubt that these suitors are the best that Lord Baranack can find. I trust his good intentions—yet I think it a marvelous display of restraint on my part that I have not shouted at any of these jesters whom he has provided us with. Father, you have met some of these men yourself.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It is an unpleasant fact that many of those who Lord Baranack can induce to come here are unworthy of the honor. I cannot be expected to entertain all of these fools.”

“Yet it is your duty,” the King said quietly.

Rosslyn noted the Queen’s silence. She won. She got my father and I arguing. Now she has stepped out of the conversation.

“Indeed,” Rosslyn replied. “My duty. May I please be excused?”

The Queen returned to life. “You have hardly eaten anything, my dear,” she said. “Only bread and soup. The meat course—”

“I find that I have little appetite this evening,” Rosslyn said, “and I must remain fit for my suitors—and in case of war.”

“You may be excused,” the King said.

And with a last smile at Baltazar, who seemed confused by the whole exchange, Rosslyn rose from her seat and left the table.