Adon’s torpor the rest of the evening was slightly uneasy.

He was awakened much more easily by subsequent stimuli than he had been by the moth.

The pitter-patter of raindrops falling softly for around a quarter of an hour. The soft scamper of a weasel across the small number of dead leaves that had already fallen to the forest floor. A handful of Little Brown Bats flying through the air, not even aware of Adon’s presence and giving his tree a generous berth.

Each time, his mind jolted into activity again, only for the butterfly to feel a strange combination of put-at-ease and disappointment as he realized the sound was nothing.

Right, he reminded himself. This is what nature is like. False alarms all the time. Nature never stops moving. Why did I want to come back out here again?

As the last hours of night passed, he was able to enjoy a longer period of uninterrupted rest.

The sun came out, and Adon pushed himself forward from among the leaves he had mimicked. He lightly fluttered his wings to shake off as much of the morning dew as he could. Then he sat still for perhaps a quarter of an hour before he felt warmed up enough to take flight.

Adon was surprised at how quickly his body absorbed warmth from the morning sun.

I guess I’m designed a little bit like a solar panel, though.

His broad, thin wings were perfectly shaped to absorb as much light and heat as possible.

Soon, he was taking to the air again, fluttering down toward some wildflowers that grew along the forest’s edge. It was time to refill his Biomass meter, which now sat at 2/50. He would stock up on reserves of energy so he could make it to the actual targets of this hunt.

Wild beasts that lived in the woods. Or maybe wild beasts that lived in the mountains way off to the East. Or birds of prey.

Adon was in no state to be picky as he considered his future plans.

He could feel his body almost ready to eat itself as he held his wings semi-stiffly for an almost effortless glide down.

He was almost to the ground when he heard it. He still had not let his guard down from the previous evening, and this sound drilled down into his psyche and reminded him instantly of one of his most disturbing memories from this life. A time when he had felt completely helpless.

The chainsaw-like sound approached a bit closer, and Adon knew in an instant, though he could not yet see the creature, that it was after him.

He did not waste a moment. He reached into his core, found his magical power, and pushed it throughout his body, infusing his weary frame with an energy that his metabolism alone could not provide at the moment—at least not without beginning the starvation process.

Adon used the power that surged through his body to push himself into a loop-de-loop maneuver. And not a moment too soon.

In his peripheral vision, he saw the dragonfly rush through the empty air, filling the space Adon had just vacated only a fraction of a second after Adon had moved away.

That winged assassin again, he thought.

As he watched, the dragonfly made a series of improbable and unbelievably quick zigzags through the air, until it was close to Adon’s front.

The dragonfly charged at Adon straight on, seeming to decide that the butterfly could not possibly pull off a move like that again.

Adon gave a supernaturally powerful flap and blew the dragonfly and himself in opposite directions with the force of the resulting gust of wind. The dragonfly spun like a top, taken completely off guard.

If Adon had possessed a pair of lips, he would have smiled then.

You know, I used to be so afraid of you, but you’re not so big anymore. I can win this.

It felt absurd to be so pleased with himself for evading a dragonfly’s strikes, but he was. And he knew instinctively that, magical or not, butterflies were extremely vulnerable to dragonfly attacks. There were many natural predators that Adon needed to be wary of, but only a few had given him the same gut feeling of dread that he’d experienced when he first encountered a dragonfly.

And now look at you.

The dragonfly had been flung backward and thrown off-balance by the sudden change of winds, but to its credit, as Adon was internally gloating, it performed another series of strange zigzagging movements that reminded him of a helicopter. Its wings cut through the air, and the backward movement slowed and then stopped. The predator had stabilized itself.

Adon watched closely as the dragonfly hovered, up and down, back and forth, looking at the butterfly to decide on a new angle of attack.

It had no way of knowing that Adon was the cause of that insane burst of wind. It could only have felt that the wind was random. A fluke. The butterfly would die soon enough.

There was a part of Adon that wanted to continue this dance with the dragonfly and overcome another of his fears. Right now, his body was running on pure Mana. His control of it was not as fine as he would have liked, but his movements were extremely powerful, and he could harden his entire exoskeleton with his large reserves so that no dragonfly attack could get through.

Another part of him was grimly aware of the possibility that he would run out of energy and pass out if he and the dragonfly dueled for too long. He needed this power to take him to feed on the nearby flowers. He should not waste it on a creature like the dragonfly, which was surely no longer far above him on the food chain.

Still, Adon had developed a certain measure of pride as the garden’s deadliest predator.

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He hoped the dragonfly would give him an opportunity to kill it.

There would be nothing much to eat there, but it would feel like a triumph over his past self.

And then the dragonfly seemed to make up its mind to get away from the strange magical butterfly.

It hovered up, then it flew a zigzagging path back and to the right relative to Adon’s body.

Adon didn’t let down his guard, though.

He could still hear and feel the chainsaw sounds of its wings vibrating somewhere not far away.

That first attack, it positioned itself in my blind spot, he thought. It’ll do it again.

Adon began changing the form of his Mana, vibrating it as Rosslyn had taught him, ready to spark flame in an instant.

He heard the sound of the chainsaw grow a little louder and then suddenly quiet, and he knew. The moment was here.

Adon ignited his Mana and pushed a burst of flame connected to his body out in all directions.

Then he folded his wings and dropped his altitude quickly.

Adon’s body whirled and spun in the air as he fell. His keen eyes saw the dragonfly closing in on the flames that were still explosively expanding. The airborne assassin tried to change its momentum, suddenly zipping up and to the right—and successfully avoiding the brunt of the small explosion the butterfly had created.

But not all of it.

Adon saw the edges of the dragonfly’s right pair of wings blacken and char as their flimsy gossamer substance brushed up against the unavoidable flames.

The rest of the fire passed the dragonfly by, as it had gained enough altitude to evade, but a moment later, it began to tumble toward the ground. With its two right side wings slowly crumbling, it was incapable of flight. Flapping the left pair more rapidly only hastened the dragonfly’s spiraling descent.

As Adon continued to fall, the dragonfly made a strange drilling motion through the air, falling faster than Adon by its efforts to remain airborne.

Wow. That was a definite win.

Adon fluttered to the closest flower with the last of his natural, Biomass-fueled energy, uncoiled his long proboscis, and began sampling nectar.

As he did so, he watched the dragonfly, which had landed in the grass nearby, struggle and writhe against the sudden and irreversible weakness of its position, trying to rise again.

The taste of the nectar was sweet. Not as sweet as whatever premium butterfly nectar the palace knew how to prepare for any butterflies that happened to pay them a visit. And not as sweet as victory.

Adon got a certain morbid satisfaction out of watching the dragonfly. He had no feeling of personal malice toward it, since this creature was only doing what it needed to do to survive. But it had tried to kill and eat him.

And he had overcome it.

When Adon had finished the first flower, he moved onto another one. Then another after that, closely followed by a fourth flower. It would take a lot of flower nectar to fill his Biomass to the brim, it seemed, although he did not intend to fill completely up. For now, Adon was enjoying the process of not starving and appreciating the subtly different flavors of the disparate wildflowers.

With every flower he landed on, his feet picked up a different flavor. Some of them reminded him of the taste of honey. Others were closer to sugar. Still others were even sweeter, almost like artificial sweetener.

He could have spent all day doing this, except that Adon did not actually want to fill up on flower nectar, and he had started to feel sorry for the dragonfly.

He had not stopped watching the creature, and it had not stopped moving. Perhaps it did not yet understand that it was permanently disabled. Half of its wings and, now that Adon had gotten a closer, more prolonged look, two of its six legs were unusable.

Clearly, no one had told the dragonfly.

The poor creature just kept on trying to fly, although it lacked the appendages required for it. The closest it got was sort of throwing itself off the ground with its remaining legs, vibrating its wings, and spinning for a moment in a dizzying downward trajectory until it spiraled back into the earth and crashed.

If it had been a helicopter—the closest non-living thing to the dragonfly in terms of its movements and maneuverability—it would have blown itself up already with repeated crashes. As a lightweight insect, the dragonfly did not have that problem.

It was slowly killing itself instead. Burning rapidly through the reserves of energy that had once allowed it to move through the air with such incredible speed and grace.

Adon had half expected that another insect would come by and deliver the coup de grace while he was watching, but no mantises or ladybugs or anything else had stopped near the dragonfly. It was possible they all heard the half-chainsaw sound of half the dragonfly’s wings vibrating, and they knew on an instinctual level to stay away from that. They had no awareness of the weakness of the predator yet.

The butterfly lifted off from the last flower. He had not been interested in killing the dragonfly himself, once he felt that he had won the fight. But the decent part of him thought that it was the right thing to do, if such a thing as right and wrong could be said to exist in this bug-eat-bug world.

His Biomass was almost halfway full now, and a dozen flowers had been relieved of the burden of their nectar. The relatively small share of Mana he had used up had rebounded. He had plenty of energy for what would come next.

I’ll just rip his head from his neck with my legs, Adon thought.

But as he got close to the dragonfly, he heard a sound of wings flapping, clearly moving toward the position of Adon and the dragonfly. Adon started to see a distant shape flying in out of his peripheral vision. It was a bird.

Finally, something was coming to finish off this pathetic wounded creature.

Adon fluttered up and out of the way and fully turned in the air so that he could get a better look at the creature flying toward him.

He found its coloration strikingly beautiful.

Somehow I didn’t know the Goddess made birds that colorful besides peacocks.

The top of the bird’s head was a melding of orange, yellow, and green feathers. Its eyes were a beautiful shade of dark red. There was a pale blue streak under its eye, and a smear of black all around the eye itself. Like the bird was wearing eyeliner. The rest of its body was similarly attired in beautiful feathers, though with a greater emphasis on the blue than the orange, yellow, and green.

Adon got an excellent and prolonged look at the bird, because it swooped down quickly, pinched the dragonfly in its long, sharp beak as if the bug wasn’t a moving target, and hovered for a few seconds. Then its head turned up, and it looked intently in Adon’s direction.

He felt himself and the bird make eye contact.

Uh oh.

It seemed just possible that the dragonfly had not been this living rainbow’s real target.

Adon was involuntarily reminded of the bluebird that had pursued him weeks ago.

Well, I did leave the palace looking for a fight, Adon reminded himself. The dragonfly wasn’t equipped to give me a very long one. And this bird isn’t that big…

It was actually slightly larger than the bluebird had been, and its body was more specialized to prey upon insects, but Adon’s perception of his own size had changed over time. And he was far more powerful than he had been.

He used Identify and braced himself to read the eccentric-looking bird’s name.