Adon looked around uncomfortably for another minute or two before he thought about next steps.

He felt like he was in the middle of a crime scene. The hollowed out, feathered husks of his prey were the evidence of his butchery, and he had the ridiculous impulse to hide or bury the bee-eaters’ remains.

That’s silly, he told himself. You’re part of the circle of nature. The decomposer animals will be out in force later to clean up after you. Relax. It’s time to move on.

Adon forced himself to take to the skies again, though he was warier this time. He used Color Change and made himself one with the wind, again, the way he had back at the palace. He did not want to be seen by anything or anyone. It would be good to be alone with his thoughts for a while.

Though he had no particular course in mind, Adon instinctively steered away from the capital. He knew he did not want to go back yet, though the garden where he had been born, the palace it belonged to, and the friends he had made there, felt like home. He moved toward a forest—and, on the distant horizon, a mountain range loomed.

He had wanted to earn at least enough Evolution Points to purchase Telekinesis I, and although he had acquired several hundred from the escapades of the morning, he still did not have enough. Adon thought he had a decent idea of the way Evolution Points were distributed now. They were a reward for accomplishing tasks that demonstrated he was fit to survive. Mainly feeding and fighting. The wilder the environment he moved toward, the better chances he would have of demonstrating his fitness to the System.

Telekinesis I must cost close to a thousand Evolution Points, he thought. The option was still grayed out. The Evolution Store tended to price most of its wares in nice, round numbers, so perhaps it would be a thousand points exactly. If so, Adon had a fair amount of work to do.

But it was far from daunting. Adon felt excited, now that he was over the shock of how he had liquefied the bee-eaters. Being back in the wild, hunting superior species and gliding through the air, he was in his element.

It’s a good thing I go into a feeding trance when I’m eating something good, or I’d probably have a lot of trouble getting that stuff down the hatch. I’m probably pretty strange. The killing part is the least stressful thing for me right now. For most humans, I’m guessing it would be the eating, which is the part that seems incredibly strange to me at the moment.

For a while, Adon allowed himself to simply glide, not thinking of much of anything, just enjoying the sensation of floating above the world like a kite without strings. The morning sky was still bright and clear and slightly warmer than it had been last time he glided, because Adon had chosen to fly at an elevation where the air wasn’t as cool as what he had endured before.

As he glided through the air, Adon spent very little Biomass relative to distance covered. His wings just had to change position—or occasionally, shape, taking advantage of his unique powers as a magical creature—to catch a beneficial current of air and keep moving.

But as the hours passed, his Biomass slowly wound down nevertheless. With his lower post-Evolution Biomass ceiling, even taking advantage of the natural flow of the air, he couldn’t get very far.

Is this the normal cycle of a butterfly’s life? Adon wondered. Constantly eating, just like a caterpillar? Or is this the universe’s way of pushing me into more fights?

Either way, he needed to descend. He could push his body to keep flying, fueling himself with Mana instead of Biomass, but he didn’t like to use up all his resources in both categories. And when his Biomass drew low, it gave him a hollow feeling inside that he didn’t like.

Adon looked down and inspected the forest he was flying above. He saw that the densely packed pines were broken up by a small clearing with wildflowers within easy gliding range.

That looks perfect.

He began shifting his color again, to become visible. He adopted the parchment color he had used with the Royal Family.

Adon wasn’t necessarily looking for a fight—he was just flying toward a small cluster of flowers, after all—but if some creature decided to start something, he would not mind if food decided to offer itself up to him.

Flowers were a less filling food source than protein, after all.

Then he allowed himself to fall, only using his wings to guide the general direction of his descent. There were many negatives to being as small as he was, but he still enjoyed the fact that he could simply fall out of the sky and not worry about suffering any damage at all. With wings, he could now even control exactly where he landed.

He steered toward an intensely blue flower that looked to be in full bloom. He landed and immediately observed the taste of it, which reminded him of very lightly sweetened cereal.

Over the next few minutes, he consumed nectar from the blue flower and a dozen of its neighbors. His Biomass slowly, steadily rose.

And then he noticed something approaching him where he sat on the latest flower.

A large bird was walking toward him along the ground, perhaps moving in the area that it thought was his blind spot.

Adon stood, watching it and letting it approach, for several seconds. The bird’s appearance was striking. Its shape and feather arrangement was like a smaller, more colorful version of the turkeys he remembered seeing in a previous life where he had grown up on a farm. Its tail feathers made a fan shape, though this bird’s fan was black with white splotches, and the turkey tails Adon remembered had been a plain brown color.

The bird’s upper body reminded Adon more of a pheasant or a chicken. Its body feathers came in a dark gray color, while the breast feathers were a dark green.

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It’s crazy that wild birds can be so pretty, Adon thought, recalling the Rainbow Bee-Eaters. These guys must really rely on good looks to get a mate. He already knew that one of his big mistakes in his last life as a human had been staying indoors, with his entertainment systems, rather than getting out of the house, but the beauty he kept encountering—and killing—underscored all that he had missed out on when he had been a man.

Identify.

Capercaillie (Male)

Adon did a cursory search of his memory banks for any reference to this bird and came up with nothing.

Not familiar, dude, guess I’ve never encountered this species in any previous life. Maybe you’re unique to this universe? Although I have been to this universe before…

He supposed it was possible he had simply eaten one of these chunky things as a dragon without wasting time getting its species name. Dragons didn’t care that much about the names of the things they ate, unless they put up a fight.

It didn’t matter. Soon this specimen would be extinct. Hopefully it wasn’t the last of its kind.

As the bird cautiously closed the distance with Adon, bobbing its head from side to side as if wary that some other creature would come up and eat it, Adon began gathering his Mana at the edges of his wings. He was getting ready to perform the same move that had killed off the bee-eaters. Perhaps that would become his signature when fighting birds. They lacked hard armor that might repel his bladed wings, and they were happy to approach him directly, since he looked like an easy snack.

The capercaillie tilted its head to the side as if suspicious, and Adon wondered if the reason he had never encountered this bird before as far as he could remember was that it was exceptionally cautious. It still wasn’t close enough for him to just hurl himself at it and slice through the neck in one move.

Just take a single additional step, he thought.

As if responding to his silent command, the capercaillie raised a foot—and then a deafening crash shook the air all around Adon.

He dropped from his perch atop the flower, stunned. His eyes took in everything that was happening, and his brain processed the sudden event more quickly than pre-Evolution Adon possibly could have, but he found himself too shocked and intimidated to move quickly in response.

What would be the point? Adon asked himself. I can’t possibly kill that thing. Just need to stay out of its way.

Seemingly having dropped straight down from some impossible to see position high in the sky, a truly massive bird stood before Adon, its talons embedded in the capercaillie. Its dark wings extended majestically to each side as the bird struck a statuesque pose. Its brown feathered head turned from one side to another, and its gleaming orange eyes glared down at the area around it as if challenging all comers to attack.

Adon didn’t really need to use Identify. He knew what he was looking at. He did it anyway. When the enemy was something so overwhelming, it was important to at least have a name for it.

Golden Eagle (Male)

Yeah. Thought so. Holy shit.

Adon sensed movement from below the eagle and tore his eyes away to look beneath the apex predator. The Capercaillie was still alive, fully impaled through the back on the eagle’s talons. The movement Adon had noticed seemed to be the creature’s death throes.

Blood gushed from its broken mess of a body, while a trickle of red dripped from the poor creature’s beak. Little gasps escaped around bubbles of blood at the corners of its mouth.

Something about the pitiful sights and sounds brought Adon back to himself.

What am I thinking? “I can’t possibly kill that thing.” Bullshit! It’s just an animal. I’m not a victim like the Capercaillie. I’m a Goddess damned magic—

There was a sudden gust of wind and a sound almost like thunder as the eagle flapped its wings. The unexpected blast of air caught Adon across his body and hurled him lightly backwards. As he tumbled in the wind, spinning uncontrollably, he realized the eagle was about to take off again. He concentrated the Mana into the edges of his wings even more forcefully, then managed to steady himself. He flapped once, and fluttered in the air, landing lightly in the cup of a flower.

Adon took a step forward and prepared to hurl himself at the eagle’s neck. Perhaps his wings wouldn’t be able to cut that massive throat. Then again, perhaps they would. He was eager, almost suicidally so, to find out.

Then another burst of wind struck him. The sheer sound of it hit him like a thunderclap once again. Both force and sound seemed wildly out of proportion to the eagle’s size and plausible muscle strength.

In response to the flapping wings, two things happened at once. The mass of muscle and feathers shot into the air at unbelievable speed. And the butterfly was sent spinning backward again.

This time, Adon slammed into a flower’s stem, stopping his momentum, though the force of the impact bent the stem in two.

It took Adon a fraction of a second to shift the way he was distributing his Mana so as to strengthen the entire surface area of his wings rather than primarily focus on the edges, so that he could muster the strength to actually navigate the gale and get back up off the ground.

I can do this, he thought. I can fight through this wind. I think.

But in that brief window, the eagle had accelerated.

As Adon took flight, the bird of prey was already shrinking to a little brown dot, diminishing in the sky even as he barely lifted off the ground.

I think I still have eyes on him. He’s so small all of a sudden. Shit. I’ve never seen a bird like that before. It reminded him of the blue bird’s weird air sucking attack from back in the garden. This was a larger, more impressive version of the same sort of thing, wasn’t it? Are we sure that animals using magic is rare? There’s no way that mini typhoon could have been natural, right?

Excitement pulsed through his body as his eyes chased the eagle through the sky. It had stolen his next meal, but it was hard to be angry. It felt as if Adon had just witnessed a glimpse of the top of the food chain, without having been directly endangered or threatened himself. It was a stroke of good fortune.

Adon knew instinctively that if he could take down a bird like that, then nothing in the natural world would be able to resist him.

The Evolution Points would be nothing to sneeze at, either.

Adon stared after the bird for what felt like a long time, but was really probably less than a minute. Just thinking. Daring himself. Wondering if he might possibly have what it took to end the eagle’s reign atop the local food chain.

I have to give it a shot, he thought. Yeah. I might not do so well trying to talk to royalty. But this, I understand. All right. I'm going after it.

Adon flapped his wings hard, using both magic and muscle, and began to climb into the sky, looking for the air current that might allow him to catch up with the Golden Eagle.