Assassin Crow Evolution

Life in the mountainous forest was much more lively compared to the common flatlands that humans lived in.

The most dangerous or special animals weren’t necessarily massive. Some of them were the size of a walnut.

Frogs were surprisingly good at evolving. It was just that they didn’t focus on size. They didn’t care to be huge monsters, and in most cases, they actually were the size of walnuts.

They evolved so often and so fast that their base species was impossible to guess. Humans simply called them frogs, Jimmy likewise, except for some reason, he didn’t expect to see frogs in the forest.

One of them slithered across the ground like a long, beautiful rainbow. The problem was that frogs weren’t supposed to slither, they were supposed to hop.

"What the fuck is that?" Vorin’s feathers jerked up as if he was a spooked cat.

"A frog, apparently." Jimmy said. "Let’s not touch it. Its skin could be poisonous, or god knows what else."

"Poison?" Vorin parroted, "I don’t even want to know what that is, but I sure as hell am not touching it."

The alleged frog rustled across the leaves like a long, colorful piece of sentient spaghetti. Its body was nearly liquid, yet somehow, its movements could not be described with an active process of evolution.

The frog wasn’t evolving, it just moved like that.

Jimmy wished that he could talk to it, and ask it a book’s worth of questions, but there was no available purchase option that would allow him to speak to frogs. If he wanted to speak to one, he had to learn their language, and this was not what they came here for.

"Well, frogs don’t have feathers, I hope, so let’s leave him alone." He said.

Getting information about the Sentient Feather they were hunting, out of a forest that refused to listen to them for the most part, and at the same time where their senses weren’t trained to intercept its knowledge, was difficult.

Jimmy remembered the description that the system gave him regarding the Sentient Feather. Whenever he recalled the description, he was amazed, and stressed about it at the same time.

[Sentient Feathers dabble with the concept of immortality. Feathers fall off of birds, and then those fallen feathers are supposed to wither away, but some of them don’t. Life finds a way, the cells in the follicles of some feathers refuse to let the feather wither, and continue to multiply to the point of mutation. Sentience in those feathers is oftentimes inevitable.]

[If you merge with a Sentient Feather, your body’s regenerative abilities will skyrocket. You’ll be a bit harder to kill.]

[Sentient Feathers are drawn towards environments where evolution is more advanced and absurd. They study odd beasts, and try to copy their evolutionary paths.]

The last description was why Jimmy decided to travel west-wards. He just knew that the meadows had no weird feathers to offer him. Even if a feather became sentient there, it would’ve left the meadows a while ago because Jimmy was the most interesting creature there, and he felt that he wasn’t interesting enough for a feather to stalk him.

Jimmy had no map, he didn’t know which piece of land had the weirdest creatures, so he explored, and kept flying forwards until the creatures began to look weird.

With walking trees and spaghetti frogs lurking around, he believed that he was getting closer to a Sentient Feather.

Relatively, he was also closer to greater dangers.

Heavy footsteps echoed over the horizon, perhaps behind the mountain, or close by. It was hard to tell, but one thing was for sure, it had to be the biggest creature that Jimmy ever saw.

"The Crawler Tree walked towards the top." Jimmy said, "It’s either suicidal, or there’s something worth checking out over there."

"Or it’s something that’ll crush the life out of us." Vorin said, "I doubt that it’ll get us closer to finding a weird feather."

"It could, or it couldn’t." He said, "We don’t know enough about it."

Vorin didn’t ask too many questions about the feather. He didn’t know how his brother got the idea, or where he heard about it, but he thought that it was a bad idea to bug him with too many questions about the matter. He doubted his brother before, and it didn’t get him anywhere, so he tried to be as cooperative as possible.

Likewise, he said, "We can check it out, but let’s try to not get ourselves killed."

Jimmy chuckled, "There would be no point in dying. Of course we’ll try to avoid it."

The team traveled up the mountain. They headed towards the top on foot.

They could fly, of course, and make the trip shorter, but Jimmy feared that they’d miss many important details, and or clues, if they didn’t stick to the ground.

Somewhere along the way, Jimmy stepped on something soft, and froze on the spot.

At first, he feared that he had stepped on a well-camouflaged frog, which was likely to be a poisonous species, deadly to the touch!

"Fuck..." He whispered.

In hind-sight, he didn’t have any sort of skill that would undo the effects of poison, so he was horrified, but two seconds into the ordeal, after noticing that whatever he stepped on hadn’t reacted, he decided to look down.

"Frogs aren’t this big," He shook his head. "Snake!"

Jimmy jumped a whole foot upwards when he realized what he stepped on.

Vorin did the same. He didn’t like snakes.

The snake itself didn’t react much. It just slowly dragged its lower body out of their way.

Its body was thicker than Jimmy, over two feet across, and much longer in circumference. Draconic.

Jimmy could not understand how he hadn’t seen it before. The snake wasn’t even well camouflaged. A radiant streak of two parallel red lines ran across its spine, bright and threatening.

The team watched the snake from a few feet away, and couldn’t understand its calm demeanor. The snake didn’t want anything to do with them. It didn’t behave like a threatened snake either. Its movements remained slow.

"He spared us?" Vorin blinked rapidly, and could not believe its eyes. "Why the fuck would it do that? If I was that big, I’d kill anything in sight."

"I think we just confused it?" Jimmy added, "It probably couldn’t understand how we were stupid enough to step on it."