The bird’s species name displayed for Adon. It was surprisingly far from intimidating.

Rainbow Bee-Eater (Male)

Well, the first part of the name makes sense. Does this guy realize I’m not a bee?

But if the bird knew what sort of creature it was dealing with, Adon could tell that it did not care. Adon had hoped that the name of the bird’s species would give it some clue as to his next steps. Instead, the name was totally unfamiliar to him, and its body language was telling him everything.

The Rainbow Bee-Eater bobbed to the side—no, it performed a head fake, trying to make Adon think it was moving to the side!—and then slowly fluttered just a bit closer.

This thing is pretty smart.

Adon flapped his wings to move a bit closer to the nearest tree, his mind racing. He had many methods for killing enemies, and he went through each of them as he considered how he wanted to deal with the bird.

Probably not fire magic. He still did not have the hang of controlling it completely—as he contemplated that option, his mind leaped unstoppably to the moment when he had almost burnt Rosslyn’s face by accident, or at least thought that he was going to. It was a scary precedent. And he wanted to consume his prey on this hunt, not burn it to a crisp.

He could fire a concentrated Mana ball, but the bee-eater was awfully agile, and that attack only covered a small area with each burst. Adon might have to let the bird get dangerously close to assure a fatal blow. If he did that, he might also inadvertently blow the creature to bits. It was much smaller than the crow had been.

Venom spines?

As he had this thought, the bee-eater finally made its move, rushing up from below Adon and quickly cutting the distance to a fraction of what it had been.

Adon fired a volley of dozens of venomous spines at the bee-eater. Some of them missed. A few of them glanced off of its wings. But it could hardly evade at the speed at which it was rushing toward him.

He had the gratifying experience of seeing many of the spines land serious hits. The bird’s right shoulder, left leg, left wing, and right eye were all struck with spines.

There was nothing to suggest that the venom was working in the first couple of seconds after the Rainbow Bee-Eater was hit. But there was something about the way its body moved, the way its posture shifted, that told Adon the bird had recognized that it had gotten into something more difficult than it had intended. Already, Adon was putting up more of a fight than any bee could possibly match.

Still, the bird came on.

Adon danced through the air, floating backward in a leisurely way. Now that the bird had been stabbed in multiple areas of its body and was bleeding slightly, the butterfly felt comfortable with turning this into a battle of attrition.

The bird would wear itself down first. If the spine that had penetrated its eye did what Adon’s spines usually did, the bird’s movements would start to break down soon, as the venom worked its way quickly from the eye into the brain.

But as if it knew it was on a limited time horizon, the bee-eater threw itself at Adon with a ferocity that he had rarely seen before.

He flitted through narrow gaps between overlapping branches, only for the bee-eater to crash through the nearby flimsier twigs in its desire to chase him down.

Shit, this thing is persistent!

Adon infused his body with Mana and flapped with more force than he could normally muster, trying to gain some distance.

It just seemed to give the bee-eater a greater sense of urgency. The bird accelerated to follow him faster. Adon began to feel cornered.

Which was absurd. He was just playing a waiting game with this thing. Right?

He heard the sound of flapping wings again, and he reacted instinctively, flapping his wings hard to change direction and plunge straight toward the ground.

He sensed as a winged shape passed overhead, from the opposite direction to that which his pursuer had come from.

Another bird is after me?

Adon stopped himself before he could crash into the ground and immediately had to change directions as the new enemy—another Rainbow Bee-Eater—rushed toward him.

He flitted up into the leaves of the nearby tree, where he hoped his Color Change would buy him time to assess his situation. He looked directly at his new pursuer, which was fluttering in a little dance with the original pursuer, flying around it in small circles.

Identify.

Rainbow Bee-Eater (Female)

Adon instantly knew what was going on.

They’re mates. That was the only explanation for why a bird would come to another’s aid against such a dangerous opponent, unless they were like the ants or wasps. But Adon had never heard of eusocial birds.

He at once felt sorry for them and slightly more threatened. They probably had no chance of defeating him, since he was magical and could do a lot more than he had shown already.

But if they were mates, they would work together and struggle with Adon to the bitter end—fight harder for each other than either ever would have fought on its own behalf.

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It’s time to finish this.

Adon remembered how he had reinforced his venomous spines with Mana back in his caterpillar days. With his much larger supply of Mana now, he came up with a more ambitious and decisive plan for how to kill these two birds off.

The venom spines already seemed to be working on the male bee-eater, though not as well as he would have liked. It was visibly slowing as he watched the two birds flutter around beneath the canopy looking for him. But it was still flying, which ran counter to his expectations.

Perhaps it had specialized into some form of venom resistance over the course of its life.

Adon concentrated and ran a surge of Mana from his core throughout his entire body, but focused to a much greater degree on the edges of his wings. They were not sharp, exactly, but he hoped that would be good enough for what he intended. He had suffered paper cuts enough times, across hundreds of lives, to know that thin and strong was almost the same as sharp.

His wings were already thin. His Mana would supply the strength.

Rosslyn told us a lot about what Mana can do. Hopefully I’m not wrong thinking it can do this.

If he was, he would be caught in a bee-eater’s grasp and have to resort to brute force with his legs and proboscis, because his wings would have proven nearly useless for fighting.

He should still be able to win, but he would be a lot more comfortable if he was right.

Adon waited with his wings charged for a moment where the bee-eaters separated, and the female was closer to him than she was to the male.

It took a few minutes, during which his Mana was slowly depleting, but at last, the female seemed to notice movement in the branches over her head.

She let loose a quiet chirp, then flew up to check it out.

It was at that moment that Adon struck. He rushed down to meet her. As her beak opened wide to latch onto him, Adon flew straight at her open mouth.

His wing struck the hard edge of her beak, then the soft inside of her mouth—and it kept going.

He felt rather than saw as his wings began cutting through the flesh of the bird’s head. Hot blood bubbled up from within the bee-eater mouth and throat. She had time to let out a single surprised shriek.

Then her head tumbled away from her body. Both pieces dropped like stones toward the forest floor.

It worked!

Adon had no room to celebrate, as the male shrieked and threw itself at him. The butterfly found himself struck with the sharp tip of a beak, talons, and wings heavier than his own, as the bee-eater tried to batter him to death—or simply reacted with emotional rage at the death of his mate right before his eyes.

None of it damaged him. The steady flow of Mana through his whole body ensured that.

It just pushed him backward through the air, knocking him back toward the tree in which he’d concealed himself.

I’m sorry, Adon thought. Mainly sorry you dragged your mate into this. You started the fight, though.

He flapped and secured a little distance from the enraged, but still slowed-down, bee-eater.

As he pushed more Mana into the edges of his wings, the bird rapidly closed the distance between them. Adon turned his body sideways and aimed his wing at the bee-eater’s breast. A moment later, he was inside the bee-eater’s chest cavity.

The bird let out a pained shriek and flapped its wings wildly, almost convulsing, giving Adon the chance to pull away before the bee-eater dropped.

It was gushing hot red blood all over him as he pulled out of its innards, flapping his wings with magically enhanced force to stay in the air despite the weight of blood.

His feet tasted the dark, hot, red liquid, and a strange sensation rippled through his body.

Delicious. So good…

The taste of a bird’s blood was, it seemed, as sumptuous as any wine the humans could prepare for him.

A few droplets of the red liquid had, he half-consciously realized, made their way into Adon’s proboscis, and he instinctively sucked the morsel of fluid up as he floated opposite the bee-eater.

It felt immediately satisfying, and the way Adon looked at the bird changed.

Need more.

Meanwhile, the remaining bee-eater finally seemed to fully realize the extent of his injuries. The bird’s wings slowed almost to a stop as he looked down at himself.

It started to lose altitude, when Adon—operating by instinct and sheer will rather than any conscious plan—reached out to stop the bird from falling. He still did not have Telekinesis, but ever since his Evolution, he had the next best thing.

His six legs stretched. They elongated and thickened. The joints sort of faded away as the limbs changed shape to accomplish their owner’s task. Then they wrapped around the dying bird like so many tentacles rather than the spindly insect legs that they originally were.

The butterfly was barely aware of what he was doing now, but he felt such a violent and urgent thirst that reason seemed to have left him.

Adon’s proboscis unfurled and snaked its way inside of the bee-eater’s body.

As his wings flapped with supernatural power, the butterfly ignored the dying bird’s feeble resisting movements.

He fed.

Slurp slurp. Guzzle guzzle. Gulp.

For the first time since his transition to a butterfly, Adon slipped into a feeding trance.

He was only aware of what happened after that in short bursts. He became dimly aware when he had sucked nearly all of the blood out of the Rainbow Bee-Eater’s body.

At some point, Adon had allowed the bee-eater and himself to descend to the ground and land in the soft forest soil.

Fortunately for the bird, it was dead by this point. Its body was stiff and cold and almost completely dry, thanks to Adon having removed all of its fluids.

There was a dim thought of moving onto the next bird.

Then, still operating on instinct, Adon expelled some fluid from his proboscis and into the bird’s chest cavity.

There was a sick sound of sizzling flesh and bone, and he recognized that he still had some variation of the acid Adaptation that he had paid for weeks ago, back when he had mandibles. The difference was that his proboscis was not quite as potent of an injector.

For a situation like this, however, where the prey was already dead, the ability was perfect.

As the flesh and bones slowly dissolved, Adon sipped the soup that his acid had created.

Slurp slurp. Guzzle guzzle. Gulp.

Mmm…

The world faded away again.

When Adon became aware of himself again, he was repeating the same steps with the female bee-eater.

The butterfly did not become aware of himself again until the prey were both sucked dry, turned into hollowed out, dried up husks of skin and bones and feathers.

When he emerged from the trance, he could hardly believe that he had done it, but he had the scraps of memory to prove it.

This slaughter was definitely his work.

I guess I don’t have a right to think the way spiders eat is gross anymore, do I? Adon thought weakly.