Assassin Crow Evolution

The light at the end of the tunnel was a mere candle.

"Fuckass candle," He grunted, "My cloaca hurts. I was expecting a fight."

"Are you planning to fight the man?" Vorin asked.

"We might have to," He said, "I don’t see another way. Shit’s getting too complicated."

"Maybe we should head back, and get the ladies," Vorin said, "We might need Zoey’s help."

"I’m glad they didn’t hear you say that," He said, "You’d never hear the end of it."

The brothers walked past the candle, and ended up in front of a set of ladders.

At the top of the ladder, was another hatch. Jimmy showed no patience whatsoever towards it.

"Blue Fireball," He stretched his leg upwards.

[-200 mana points]

[Remaining pool: 1,800 points]

Fire, when shot from underneath, seemingly burned hotter, because it took two minutes less for the fire to destroy the wooden hatch.

Its remains fell to the ground, and even the ladder had caught on fire, but the brothers managed to slip between the one-sided flames nonetheless. This was the benefit of being crows. They were small enough to slip, and actually fly between spaces that humans couldn’t.

They were greeted by moonlight shortly after. They found themselves one-hundred meters, or over three-hundred feet away from the village, near the outskirts of the lake.

Jimmy was surprised that not a single fisherman had spotted this hatch before, but a moment later, he figured out why he managed to destroy this hatch quicker. Gravel weighed it down, he recalled hearing rocks fall down, through the hatch, as soon as he shot at it. The Chief had hidden the hatch with just about anything close by.

"Do you see him anywhere?" He asked.

"I don’t," Vorin answered.

Though he didn’t try to be sarcastic. He truly couldn’t see in the dark, and the moonlight wasn’t enough.

The frustration that followed after, had a slight delay. Jimmy spent a moment looking around, and only after a couple of minutes did he realize how thoroughly he had been bested.

"The motherfucker probably left hours ago!" He angrily stomped his foot, "The trail hasn’t gone cold, it’s fucking gone!"

The tunnel below him really added salt to the wound. It was simple, freshly dug, and it looked like a fart alone could make it collapse, and yet the Chief bested him with the help of that tunnel alone!

"The village isn’t even that far!" He shook his head, "I should have seen him sneaking away!"

Vorin had nothing to add, Virena even less so, because she couldn’t understand what they were cawing about.

Jimmy had half a mind to head back, swallow thirty or forty of those Flesh Cores, and then wipe out the entire village, simply out of spite, but it only took him a couple of seconds to flat out refuse that plan.

’I want the Chief’s core,’ He thought, ’Fuck, I want his liver too. Fucking smartass.’

Abandoning the hunt was out of the question. He stretched his wings, and hit the sky. Vorin followed suit, as best as he could within the deep, dark canvas of the night.

They patrolled the lake, which hardly took any of their time, because the lake wasn’t too big to begin with, and crows were quite fast up in the sky.

The Enlightened Eyes skill he had, which he mostly used to see in the dark nowadays, came in many stages, or shift gears, so to speak. In time, he figured out that he could control how much he could see.

It wasn’t as simple as closing his eyes whenever he wanted to ignore things, no, the thing was that if he tried, he could ignore his night vision as well. He could turn it off.

Likewise, he could also crank this skill up to the max. It didn’t cost any sort of points, it was however a strain on his cognitive health, as if his brain was a sponge that was getting squeezed.

"Try to hide from me now, motherfucker," He mumbled.

The perhaps most helpful part of the skill was that he could see in infrared as well, as if he was a snake seeking heat. It was mentally straining to make the switch from night vision to infrared, but it was available.

A deep array of colors struck his pupils right away!

The lake below him shifted from looking green, to a deep, pit-like black shade that could contest a black hole! It was a bit relieving for a moment, actually, because the green hue from his night vision got annoying at some point. Everything used to look green.

Plain darkness was refreshing, up until that comfort was seeped away from him as well.

A canvas of bright, white lights spread out across the lakes. Each and every one of them disappeared after a couple of seconds, before they were replaced by new bright lights, as if they were a sped up version of dying, and forming stars.

At first, Jimmy thought that they were fish, swimming across the surface of the lake, but that was not the case. When a fish actually jumped out of the lake, he was close enough to it to get hit with a red and yellow hue, spooking him.

The bright white lights were something much simpler.

"Bubbles," He muttered, "I forgot that fish actually breathe. Hell, those are a lot of bubbles. I wish they could stop breathing for a second. They’d help me out big time."

Anyway, despite everything, the infrared vision he snapped into, proved to be infinitely helpful.

Once he figured out what to be on the lookout for, he spotted a tiny inkling of red.

This little spot of red was two-hundred meters, or over six-hundred and fifty feet past the outskirts of the lake. It was far, it could be a rabbit for all he knew, but it was the only sign of life outside of the lake, so he chased it.

One red dot became two, and once he got close enough, and switched his sight from infrared to night vision again, he confirmed that he did in fact spot the Chief.

His hairless, jawline-deprived chin was unmistakable. His beer-belly too.

𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"Who... what the fuck is he talking to?" He whispered.