Chapter 130: Nuts
The average crow could fly up to 30 mp/h (48 km/h), and Jimmy was even faster.
Yet, he had to stick close to the team, and lead them through the dark night. Otherwise they would be completely blind up in the sky, along with being completely exhausted.
He didn’t fly as fast as he could, and as the situation had it, he may not have to.
In the first hour, the team was thirty miles away from the village already. They crossed many other small lakes across the Lakelands, as well as plenty of villages.
The struggle, the trouble they went through just to get the cores, already seemed insignificant to them. Distance was nature’s best healer.
Unless the sloppy, torn up, undead body of the Chief could also run thirty miles an hour, then they should be safe. Jimmy was hoping that the odd creature they fought could not teleport, and amongst other things, he was hoping that its memory was poor too. Otherwise, having a vengeful, god-like being chase them all around the world, would be at least ten times worse than dealing with an elephant that never forgot.
This was no elephant, however, and so this was the train of thought that had Jimmy push the team to absolute exhaustion.
They traveled through the night, they saw the sun rise, and even that wasn’t comforting enough. Jimmy pushed his team further, exactly four hours past sunrise, ten hours in total, up until they flew three-hundred miles, or four-hundred and eighty kilometers away from the threat. He had the system measure the time, so he could have a good estimation of the distance flown.
𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂
Only then did he feel slightly safe. Ideally, he would want to fly for two-to-three days on end, but that wasn’t possible, which was why he settled for ten hours of flight.
No one apart from him cared about the cores anymore. They threw them to the ground as soon as Jimmy picked a tree to land on.
Jimmy had to fly down, and fetch the cores from the ground. He remained greedy, and like an over-prepared little squirrel stashing nuts for the winter, he stashed all six of the cores into a hole in the tree. The cores could barely fit there, but he felt better if he had the cores closer to himself, and the team.
After that, he collapsed. It wasn’t surprising, because although he was bigger, he had carried more cores than the team. He had over-exhausted himself beyond bounds.
Two hours later, he was forced awake by this aching hunger that threatened to take his life. After everything he went through, he wasn’t even given the luxury to have a good night’s, or in this case, a good day’s sleep.
The bugs he ate along the way, in his ten-hour flight, weren’t nearly enough to meet his daily, minimal protein requirements. Not while he had been using every muscle of his body to stay afloat, at least.
He ate fifty bugs along the way, and so he was fifty system points richer now, but that was not enough to feed one of his new obsessions. The cores, along with the hunger he felt, were not as distracting as the Think Ahead evolution. He wanted to max it out, so he’d never find himself in a situation where his hands would be tied, so to speak.
Last night was an absolute waste of potential, absorbable cores, and he did not want to see such painful losses repeated.
First, he ate two fat centipedes. They were as big as him, so they tamed his hunger a little bit.
’Do these green, squishy fuckers eat fish?’ He thought, neck deep in his hunger-inflicted delirium, ’We’re still in the Lakelands, so maybe?’
[+120 system points]
[+101 system points]
[Total points: 8,652]
Thankfully, the centipedes couldn’t fight back. He’d be pissed beyond bounds if he lost a battle to a bug. Thankfully, they were nothing like that absolute monster that Jimmy and Vorin had encountered in their trip to that very colorful, and foreign fauna west of their home city.
’System, give me the thing,’ He demanded, silently, so as to not wake up the team, ’Upgrade the thinking thing.’
[Confirmed]
Jimmy felt a pinch in his noggin. The system was altering his brain, after all, but for a moment, that was all he felt.
Apart from the immense, exhaustion-influenced headache he felt, there wasn’t anything new that bothered him. He wasn’t thrown unconscious by some surprise wave of divinely furious pain, nothing like that. He kept walking around, looking for another meal, and letting the system do its thing.
He spotted a mouse running across the grass. He tried to peck at it, but he was a bit disoriented, so he head-budded it, crushing its skull.
[+13 system points]
[Stone Head skill: Level 3 >>> Level 4]
"Ah, that’s nice," He whispered, "Kinda useless, really, cause a hard skull won’t protect me from thunderbolts, but still."
After that, he ate the mouse, swallowed it whole. It was hardly filling, it was a mere, small critter, but at least its crushed skull made it easier to eat, just like cracking a walnut open would be the most efficient way to eat its fruit. No one in their right mind would eat a walnut without removing the shell.
Speaking of walnuts, he and the team had apparently found refuge in a walnut tree. It was absolutely massive, and since this planet was in the middle of the summer, some of the nuts were falling off.
They were very nutritional, ideal for brain health. As the situation had it, they were almost the size of the average crow’s brain. It had a nice double, or triple meaning.
Jimmy’s brain was a bit bigger than that of the average crow’s, of course, but he was still going through a deep delirium. Brain food helped. He ate twenty nuts.
[Think Ahead evolution: Level 1 >>> Level 2]
[You can now think three steps ahead, at all times, even if unwillingly.]
[-400 system points]
[Remaining points: 8,265]
’Good, good,’ He thought, ’Actually, no, not good. Upgrade it again, system.’