Adon’s energy ball shot forward from between his mandibles, straight toward the fascinated crow.

As he watched, it struck the crow between the eyes. The projectile kept moving after hitting, as if the crow’s body provided almost no resistance. It burned a neat hole through the center of the beast’s head, and then it emerged through the other side, its arc seemingly almost unchanged from the trip through the crow’s skull. The energy ball kept falling through the air behind the crow until it landed on the rooftop.

Adon saw it scratch a thin groove along the rooftop tiles before the energy ball disappeared over the edge. It seemed much smaller, he noticed, by the time it fell from the roof. He guessed it wasn’t going to do much more damage on the way down, considering how weak it looked after carving its scratch into the palace roof.

The crow’s body flopped to the ground in front of Adon, writhed for a few seconds, and then lay still.

An instant kill.

Adon’s body released a tension he hadn’t even realized it was holding.

If I doubted the effectiveness of that attack, there go my doubts.

His eyes lingered on the grooves he’d dug into the roof tiles.

I’m glad I didn’t break through the tiles more, he thought, although he definitely wanted to eventually obtain that kind of destructive power. But right now, he wasn’t interested in busting holes in the royal roof.

The hatchling was chirping weakly, but Adon almost tuned it out. He was still in some mild shock.

I killed a crow. That thing was even bigger than the bluebird. It’s incredible that I did that. He didn’t think he had even been afraid at the moment he attacked. Just ready. Ready to kill. When did that happen? When did Adon become that kind of creature?

Regardless, he thought he liked the change. Adon didn’t like being afraid. He liked this newer, more dominant position in the natural hierarchy that he was beginning to feel he’d attained.

Mostly thanks to this energy attack, he knew. Nothing else he had could have killed the crow. Even if he shot it full of venom spines, and assuming the venom was enough to kill a creature so much larger than him, the crow would at least have managed to try to fly away.

The only problem with the energy attack, at least as a weapon against creatures in the palace garden, was that it was extremely visible. Adon was just fortunate that crows were attracted to bright shiny things. It might also provide an advantage if he went out hunting moths.

But for everything else, I need to get illusion magic, he thought. Like I thought before. Then I could disguise this.

It would be even better if he could disguise the crow’s body right now. Adon thought he might have a hell of a time getting it back to Goldie’s web. With luck, all the nearby predators that had made themselves scarce after the Princess burned the Vendetta Ants would still be in hiding.

Without luck…

The hatchling’s chirping got louder and more frantic, and Adon was forced to turn to face the creature.

Poor little bird.

The hatchling was very obviously a newborn. For one thing, it was noticeably smaller than Adon, though given how much his size had increased over the last few days, that was perhaps not saying much.

The coral-pink skin, eyes that remained sealed shut, and the very thin spattering of downy feathers all gave off an impression akin to that of a very ugly newborn baby.

But Adon had never seen a newborn baby gushing blood from a severed limb before. Or crying for a mother who would never return.

A newborn of any species should never be attacked this way, he thought, dimly aware he was probably being some kind of hypocrite. He had gone after eggs of other species before. Still, this feels just a bit different. Just a little bit worse. Not for the first time, Adon felt a bit disgusted by the natural world he inhabited.

Before his thoughts could paralyze him, Adon stepped closer to the nest, aimed a handful of his venom spines carefully at one of the sealed shut eyes, and he fired them into the hatchling. That quieted the crying and brought the pain to a swift end.

There. All better.

Adon wanted to cry, but for better or worse, it was something that a caterpillar could never do. Instead, he forced himself to keep moving. What was next?

Before he returned to the crow, he took a few seconds to move right up to the edge of the nest, so he could see where the other hatchling was. Adon was surprised to find only an egg beside the corpse of the hatchling he’d just killed.

I guess they hatch one at a time or something? He wondered if insect eggs and bird eggs worked the same way. Then he shook his head. It doesn’t matter right now.

Adon turned back to the giant creature he’d just killed. He decided to wrap the crow in silk as quickly and thoroughly as he could, and hope he didn’t get noticed as he crossed the garden.

At least there were no Vendetta Ants to try and steal from him. And the Exploding Carpenter Ants were nocturnal.

Hopefully I can get away with this.

Adon began wrapping the crow at what was left of its head, and by the time he reached the top of the body, he realized he might have underestimated the difficulty of this project. He decided to cut the wings off to make the package more compact, and he infused Mana into his mandibles to do the job.

Even simply cutting the wings away from the body was a time-consuming task. Adon was using his Simple Eyes to track the sunlight now, and he estimated that it took half an hour. On the bright side, he felt certain that this would make the rest of his task much easier. The wings were the bulkiest part of the body, but also full of bone and tough muscle. Hopefully the breast and the organs would make better eating as well as an easier to carry package.

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Adon spent the next hour wrapping the rest of the bird in silk. It took so much Biomass out of him that he took a break near the end and consumed the bird egg. He had decided he would wrap the hatchling and try to come back for it later.

The egg was as delicious and filling as he remembered, though the contents were much crunchier than they had been a few days ago. As he ate, Adon slipped into an eager feeding trance.

Munch munch. Chomp chomp. Gobble gobble. Gulp.

After he came out of his post-meal euphoria, Adon finished wrapping the crow with renewed energy and noticeably increased physical Strength and Agility. It appeared the same rule about eating species above him in nature’s hierarchy still applied.

By the time he finished enclosing the crow in his weird, impromptu body bag, not a feather was left uncovered.

I’m a lot better at wrapping things than I am at building webs, he thought.

He gave the same treatment to the hatchling much more quickly, and then he removed it from the nest and moved the corpse back where the nest had been, hiding it under the loose tile that the bluebird had relied on to conceal her babies.

Adon suppressed a series of morbid thoughts at that.

Inspecting the sunlight, it was clearly midafternoon now. Maybe around three o’clock in the afternoon, in human terms. Adon did not want to encounter nocturnal creatures on this trip. They were bigger and badder overall than the day dwellers.

It was time to go.

Getting the crow off of the palace roof was the easy part. Adon pushed, and then gravity did all the work. The crow rolled down the side of the gently sloping roof top until it fell out of sight. Then Adon jumped after it. The fact that falls could not hurt him meaningfully was an incredible perk of his present size. He wondered if he would still enjoy that trait as a butterfly.

When he landed, Adon connected himself to the crow bundle with the thickest, strongest silk string that he could manage. And his labors began.

He dragged the crow across the garden, working like a beast of burden to get it to Goldie.

Even with his repeatedly enhanced Strength, it wasn’t easy. But he was at least more than capable of pulling the crow, even if he did have to take breaks every twenty minutes or so.

I used to worry I wasn’t going to get any exercise, he thought during one such pause. Now look at me!

He would end up a super strong caterpillar, if his heart didn’t give out in the attempt to get this meat home.

He imagined he would have made a ridiculous picture, if anyone could actually see him. His mind had no other tasks to focus on but watching for predators, continuing to move forward, and maintaining Color Change, so he remained completely invisible as long as potential enemies weren’t smart enough to recognize that something was dragging this carcass around.

Happily, most creatures were still hiding after Rosslyn’s display of magical pyrotechnics earlier.

The few creatures that were bold enough to come out and threaten to steal Adon’s prey—a few lizards, a relatively small mantis, and a beetle—were easily dissuaded. Adon shot them full of venom spines, and each opponent ran away as quickly as legs could carry them. The venom spines seemed to be a much more powerful attack than they had once been, penetrating deeply into enemy flesh. He hoped that the venom was also much more potent, though he would not have time to collect the bodies of his possible victims.

Getting the crow to Goldie was all that mattered. This was the most superior sort of species she could possibly want to eat. Though Adon faintly recalled that she had not actually asked him to do this.

As he was just coming within sight of Goldie’s web, and the sun was getting low in the sky, he felt a heavy tug on the silk line connecting him to the crow corpse.

Adon looked back, and he saw a spider standing atop his silk bundle, fangs embedded into the crow. Injecting venom. That wasn’t particularly bad for Adon. Venom was only harmful when injected, not when it ended up inside of one’s stomach—the reverse of poison—but who was this thing trying to steal his food?

Identify.

Green Huntsman Spider (Female)

That's a scary name. Yet Adon didn’t fear her. The spider was smaller than Goldie, and therefore also smaller than Adon had become. He was invisible, while the spider was a bright green, clearly camouflaged to blend in with leaves. Out of her element.

I can take this thing. I kill birds now. I can’t be afraid of random spiders.

He charged his energy ball attack. He wasn’t sure that venom spines would be enough to scare this creature away—and anyway, he was feeling a bit more aggressive. He was going to kill this thing quickly and get to Goldie. By now, he was at full Mana again.

At first, the spider ignored him and continued moving around atop the crow corpse, injecting her venom in different places in the large bird. He was completely invisible, so he was not particularly surprised that she paid him no mind.

But as he finished charging the attack, the spider finally looked in his direction. He had a glowing energy ball clutched between his mandibles. Even with his body blended into the ground, she could at least see the bright light.

Adon waited for her to look away again. The spider turned to the side, so most of her eight eyes were pointed in a different direction from Adon.

He figured this would be his best moment. He fired—and the spider sprang off of the crow with a crazy-quick movement. Adon was ready for this. He looked away from where the Mana ball had flown and aimed his spines at the spider. He fired a barrage of those. She tried to dart away again, but five of them impaled her, stabbing through her abdomen and one leg.

Time seemed to slow down for the spider as she looked at the crow carcass, then back in Adon’s general direction. She clearly didn’t know quite where he was, only the area where the attacks had come from. The spider stood stock still for a second.

Adon felt that they were in a sort of standoff, as the spider decided whether to spring toward him or flee.

He readied another wave of spines to shoot—and suddenly, the spider ran away.

The tension suddenly dissipated, and Adon was left with a slight feeling of lightheadedness.

Wait, did that really just happen? A spider ran away from me?

A spider with “Huntsman” right in the name, too. And a female.

Adon pumped his left front leg. I did it!

He felt no sense of regret that he had failed to kill the spider. Only an intense pride at having become dangerous enough that enemies who normally ate his kind would actually run away after exchanging a few attacks.

He looked for a moment for the signs of his energy ball’s damage, but he couldn’t see them. Where the ball would have gone after missing the spider, there was a thick tangle of shrubbery, so it seemed the damage he’d done would be lost in the mess.

Finally, Adon resumed walking. There was no reward for almost killing the Green Huntsman Spider. Nothing except that he could complete his journey in peace.

Adon dragged the crow the rest of the way to Goldie’s web, and he stashed it carefully underneath the structure Goldie had built. He had to lift part of the web out of the way to do it, but he was proud that he had somehow made it this far.

I basically run this garden, he thought. I’m the man! Figuratively speaking.

Then he reached out to Goldie with Telepathy.

I’m home, he sent.

Welcome back, Adon. The sound of her voice was slightly strained, almost as if she was ready to pass out. Adon felt a sense of tension again. This time it was much more than what the Green Huntsman Spider had given him.

Are you alright, Goldie? he asked, trying to contain his alarm.

Oh, of course! she replied. Do not need to worry. I have just laid my eggs.