Now this was just insulting.

“Why do you keep trying Vim?” Miss Beak asked as she wrapped one of her webbed feet around me. She was big enough now in size that she was nearly able to cover my whole upper body in her webbed foot.

She grabbed rather roughly, and began to pull. For half a moment I didn’t budge, but as I shifted my body and tried to move my arms it allowed enough give for her to pull me out of the hardened slag.

The stuff was a mixture of metals and rock, and was strangely strong. Almost impossibly strong. Stronger even than the special steels and metals my mother had shown me how to make so long ago.

Loud cracks and pops accompanied my being pulled from the slag that had hardened around me, and a few moments later I was dropped by Miss Beak onto the ground near the hole she had just pulled me from.

“This stuff is very hard. I wonder if they had planned this,” Miss Beak noted as she stepped away and tapped her beak onto the ground, to hear the notes she made by doing so.

They sounded strangely pure.

“I strongly doubt it,” I said with a scoff. Although her parents were strong, and strangely keen on how to fight, they weren’t very intelligent. Not anywhere near as Miss Beak was, at least.

“It should be a considered tactic. This is after all the twelfth time, Vim. Even an imbecile would begin to try other methods,” she said as I lay on my back and stared up at the darkening sky. The sun was setting. Which meant I had been stuck in the slag for half a day at least, since I had begun my fight with them this morning as the sun rose over the nearby mountains.

“What does that make me then, since I keep failing too?” I asked her.

“An honest man.”

I scoffed. Was she trying to be metaphorical? She was horrible at that. No matter how much I tried to explain it to her it seemed to always be just out of her reach of understanding.

“You didn’t even get a wing or a leg this time. Why is that?” Miss Beak then asked.

I groaned and closed my eyes. “I got trapped by your father’s breath attack. Then your mother continued to melt the area around me, until I simply fell into the pool of slag without able to do anything else,” I said.

“You didn’t adapt quickly enough?” she asked.

“No. I think he has somehow figured out how to shift the temperature of his ability as he uses it. I hadn’t noticed at all, since pain is just pain, but I think my body started to adapt in different ways several times throughout the experience,” I said as I remembered it all.

“So your body adapts to more than just the boiling blood and melting skin…?” she asked, interested.

“So it seems,” I admitted. Honestly this was the first time I’d ever battled something, or someone, for so long that such little details were even a problem to consider.

“What if I melted you before you engaged them? To condition your body to it?” Miss Beak suggested.

I opened my eyes and frowned at the yellow ones staring down at me inquisitively.

“A possibility. But if your father has fine-tuned his ability so precisely then it won’t matter. He’ll just hit me with a different extreme of heat, forcing my adaption to restart,” I said.

“I see,” she stated, not sounding upset or worried at all.

She was right though. It was time I tried a different method.

I’ve tried sneaking up on them. I’ve tried tearing wings off, or heads. I’ve tried focusing entirely on one or the other, and have tried to separate them. This time I had even tried to attack them while they were apart, I had waited weeks for them to separate and had attacked once Miss Beak’s mother had left for one reason or another.

She had returned before I had been able to do much damage to the male flamingo. Not enough, at least.

But what else could I do?

I couldn’t lay traps. They were constantly on the move, only staying in one place for a few months at a time. Thanks to their ability to fly, for impossible distances at a time, there was no way I could plan or prepare for such a thing. They being firstborn monarchs also made them immune to other divine abilities. I couldn’t rely on saints, or non-human servants. They were beyond such things. Outside of their domain.

There was no way I could build any weapons or tools. Anything I made would just melt in their heat, and even if I got a use or two out of them they’d be useless. I could barely break their skin with all my strength, what use would a hard item have? Explosives wouldn’t work, thanks to the heat, either so nothing like that would work.

Water, ice, their own heat, tools, traps, weapons…

My mind felt sluggish as I tried again, for the millionth time, to figure out how I was going to kill those damned birds.

“May I offer a suggestion?” Miss Beak then said.

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“Please do.” I’d take any help at this point.

“They have perfected their escape. You arrive. They are startled, since they cannot sense you. You clash. You injure them, sometimes terribly, but the end result is the same. They lock you in the molten slag you so desperately hate, and then they escape before you can get out of it. Or at least, they escape far enough for it to work,” she said.

“Your suggestion?” I asked, not caring for a lecture my mind was already giving me.

“Why do you even fight them?” she asked.

I blinked at that. “What do you mean?”

“Why fight at all? Why not just let them be, Vim?”

Slowly sitting up, I stared up at the monarch I’d long since grown to call my friend.

“How long have we known each other, Miss Beak?” I asked.

“Oh…? I do not know. Decades at least,” she said excitedly, as if happy to think about it.

I nodded. “I’d like for us to know each other for far longer. Not just decades, but maybe even hundreds of decades. Thousands. But if I leave your parents be, letting them live, they will eventually eat you. I don’t want them to eat my friend. Say the least about all the other lives they cut short,” I told her.

“Ah. Yes. I had not meant that, Vim. I didn’t ask what your reason for fighting them was, I asked why you fight them directly,” she said, correcting my misunderstanding.

I frowned at her. “Are you saying I should be facing them another way?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“How?”

Miss Beak shifted and fluffed up her feathers a little. The gesture was one she’d started to do many years ago, and usually was done when I had made a silly joke. As if she was laughing with her body, and not with sound.

Yet right now she was doing it for another reason, as she lifted her wings as if to point at herself.

“I don’t understand your meaning, Beak,” I said softly. Why was she pointing at herself?

“They cannot sense you, right?” she asked.

I nodded. That was proven. Several times I walked right up to where they were, and they didn’t notice me until they actually heard or saw me. Half the time it was only a few moments before I engaged them in battle.

“Then what if you hid in my beak? Or inside me? Only to emerge when they’re close enough?” she asked.

I smiled at her. “You want to approach them close enough, and then allow me to emerge and attack them while they are unaware,” I said, understanding her reasoning.

She nodded excitedly.

“I appreciate the offer, my friend, but they’d likely kill you on sight just as quickly as they try to kill me,” I said. And although Miss Beak was growing older, and far larger than she had been, she was still not fully grown… and also not a firstborn.

There was no guarantee she’d survive their full frontal assault. She may not even survive a single blow.

I couldn’t risk my friend that way. If I did that then I was no better than the monsters I’d been hunting my whole life.

Plus even if she had inherited their innate strength, alongside their powers, there was still a very serious factor to take into account.

She hadn’t eaten any hearts. Not like her parents, who have been eating who knows how many for…

I paused at that thought, and frowned as I glanced away from my monarch friend as she sighed.

“Well, yes. But I’m sure it’ll be okay! Plus…” Miss Beak went on a rant about why her idea was a good one, but I ignored her as I considered something else.

She was a monarch. One who was powerful. She was able to withstand her parent’s heat. And able to produce it herself, to a point. To be honest I didn’t even really know her limits or full capabilities. I’d not really allowed her, or ever given her the opportunity, to see if she could produce as much heat as her parents. I’d done such a thing on purpose. In my attempt to keep her relatively harmless, I’d kept her from having to fight or kill. Only a few times has she needed to defend herself, and usually it was simply from humans or non-humans who attacked her on sight. Half the time she didn’t even fight back and simply took to the sky, to avoid them and their anger.

Yet…

“Vim…? Are you listening? Are you okay? Are you still healing?” Miss Beak’s beak appeared in front of me, as she peered at me with a fist sized eyeball.

I nodded slowly as I stared into her eye. “Your idea has a chance to work, actually,” I said.

“Oh?” She perked up, happy to hear it.

I nodded as I stood, brushing off my dirty skin. I was covered in a strange white paste, likely from the residue of whatever gunk had melted into the slag. Some kind of refuse, maybe.

“Let’s make a detour,” I said.

“Where to?” she asked excitedly.

“A place I’ve not been to in a long time,” I said as I planned our route. We’d have to head south, and then across an ocean. Then we’ll have to find that sunken tomb, one that was likely now under a massive forest. I knew where it was, but hadn’t been there in years. Maybe even hundreds of them.

There were enough hearts there for this to work. Surely. There were even a few there that had been very strong, somewhat like her parents.

“You look like you’re scheming something,” Miss Beak said with a sigh.

“Because I am. You want to help?” I asked.

She nodded quickly.

“You’ll be killing your parents,” I warned her.

I saw a smile on her beak as she nodded again anyway. “To help my friend,” she told me.

I nodded back at her, and decided to do it.

Such loyalty and friendship should be returned in kind, after all.

Let’s feed her some hearts. Speed up her growth. Strengthen her. Maybe I’ll even spar with her, or have her fight other monarchs we encounter on our trip, as to give her battle experience. Enough to let her hold her own, or at least do so for a short while against her parents.

After all my problem was I couldn’t kill them fast enough. Because I got forced into slag, which kept me out of the fight long enough for them to escape.

Which meant I only needed a little help. Just a tad.

If we just got her to enough strength that she could distract them, or slow my imprisonment just enough…

“Where are we going? Is there tasty food there?” Miss Beak asked excitedly as she knelt down a little, to let me climb up onto her.

Grabbing a thick, strong, feather I climbed up onto her back.

“Head south. Towards the ocean of ice,” I said. We were routed. But not for long.

“Aha! Away from my parents! A wonderful plan!” she teased me as she spread out her wings and then leapt into the sky.