Assassin Crow Evolution

It wasn’t everyday that one would see a tree move. By all means, it shouldn’t.

Jimmy gave a peek at the surrounding trees for a moment, and noticed that the rest of them showed no sign of movement. There wasn’t a trail of ruptured dirt behind them, at least.

It was only this tree that moved, and just as their luck had it, they landed on this one specific tree earlier on. It broke their bones.

"Do you figure this tree has something to hide?" Vorin asked, "You’ve been staring at it for a very long time, man. Just burn it."

"I have a feeling that moving trees are rare. I’m not going to burn this one alive." He answered, "Also, if it did have something to hide, we wouldn’t get any answers out of it if I burned it."

"So what, you can talk to trees too now?" Vorin asked.

"No," He shook his head, "I wish I could, but I don’t think that’s possible, however..."

Jimmy spotted a mantis several meters away. One that wasn’t Virena. It was a red mantis with leaf-like features, seemingly evolved to the point where its base species was hard to pin-point.

Shhhh-hhhsss!

Click-click!

T-sk tsk!

Jimmy went out of his way to talk to the mantis without scaring it away. At his advantage, there was not a single insectual language that he couldn’t speak.

He had asked, "Hey redhead! You lived here forever, right? Tell me, why is this tree moving?"

The mantis was horrified when it saw a crow speaking its language, fluently, and with no grammatical mistakes either. Her voice shook as she wracked her brain to come up with a good answer, because in a way, she felt threatened. She could tell that Jimmy was no average crow.

"Some trees do that," She answered, "You shouldn’t rest on it. That tree ate my cousins."

"Ate them?" Jimmy cocked his head, "How?"

"Its mouth is in the ground," The mantis answered, "When the tree is hungry, it’ll eat anything it can find."

"My fuck did we luck out then..." Jimmy sighed, and then he asked, "Does anyone bother to hunt and kill the moving trees, if they’re such a nuisance?"

"Beavers," She answered, "Oh, and humans. I saw humans start fires in the mouths of Crawler Trees, but the fire couldn’t burn it."

"Crawler Trees... that’s a good name." He nodded, "Thank you, lady, you can go now."

Vorin and Virena watched the conversation go down. They were indefinitely confused, and quite frankly, the red mantis spoke a language that not even Virena could understand. It was foreign to her, and yet Jimmy’s brain had picked its language up just like that, in a snap. She was envious.

"What did it say?" Virena asked.

"From what I understood, this tree is just useless and dangerous." He answered, "Humans might be using its mouth to build forges, you know, where they craft weapons, but that’s about it. We can’t put it to any use, unless one of us picks up blacksmithing. I figure we can put it into use at some point, but it’s not like we can carry it back home if I burn it to ashes."

"It has a mouth?!" Virena exclaimed, horrified. "Let’s get out of here!"

Vorin was left out of the loop. He could not understand a word of what Virena and Jimmy said. Communication between the three of them was complicated.

When Jimmy noticed his brother’s utter confusion, he helped him catch up, and told him that the Crawler Tree was hiding a mouth.

Vorin’s reaction was equal to that of Virena’s. He too wanted to get out of here right away, and so they did.

Their reactions, overall, were like that of a little girl’s when they saw a spider in the bathroom. They didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

The team of three stuck to the ground, because they could have a significantly better view of what was around them as they moved. If there was another moving tree, they’d easily spot it beforehand.

A rabbit ran past them five minutes later.

Jimmy’s voice echoed across the forest as he unleashed a Red Fireball. Seeing something move so quickly after seeing a tree move slowly, a few inches at a time, triggered his survival instincts harder than any other battle in his life did.

[-50 mana points]

[Remaining pool: 850 points]

The rabbit was fast, but it couldn’t get away. The fireball struck it, and burned it alive.

Virena then hurled an orb at the dead rabbit, slicing it open in many pieces. She wasn’t as preservative of her mana, as she noticed that the Fire Orbs she summoned, leaned in more on her skill with her chained sickle, rather than her mana. It wasn’t expensive.

"You guys are pampering me," Vorin said, "Cooked rabbit is delicious, but you cut it up for me as well."

"Well, if we can help it, we shouldn’t waste time tearing the meat apart." He followed along, "Our beaks are only so strong."

The team chewed through the rabbit, and ate most of it. Only its bones remained, as it was the only thing their bodies couldn’t digest.

Jimmy’s metabolism was close to that of an apex predator’s, but his stomach insisted otherwise. He had to be careful.

Nevertheless, the rabbit was filling, so they chose a tree that seemed relatively safe, flew close to its top, and rested. They took short naps throughout the night, in shifts.

One member of the team was always awake, in case something chose to attack them in these foreign lands. Virena handled half of the shifts, since on the way here, she had slept on Jimmy’s back plenty of times.

Jimmy insisted on caution, because he had a feeling there were plenty of predators in this forest who hunted in the night. He didn’t want to get pounced on.

The morning sun followed suit a few hours later. The team woke up refreshed and ready to explore, as this was the first good rest they got after two full days of gliding.

However, they were nowhere closer to finding a Sentient Feather or two.

Jimmy was nowhere close to deciding how he should evolve either. He was hoping that the feather would upgrade his skills in some weird way, and spare him what could be thousands of system points worth of upgrades.

"At least my mana pool is full again." He said, and then they climbed down from the tree. "I need more information on the feather so we don’t run in damn circles. Let’s see what the forest can tell us."