Charlemagne was on the verge of collapse after unleashing his full power mana ball attack. He staggered as he took a few steps back, wondering how he was going to continue the fight with no working wings and an almost empty Mana Core. But Raul Sanchez had not escaped unscathed. Streams of blood emerged from holes in the man’s cracked armor, and the human’s left hand was burnt and mangled. Panting, the man dropped to one knee and planted his gun arm against the ground to help him balance.
“Your…attack’s name…is…ridiculous,” he complained.
“Bawk,” the rooster shot back as he sprinted forward with a sudden burst of energy, his speed pitifully slow compared to his earlier charges. He repeated the trick of creating small mana shields in the air, allowing him to aim a desperate claw Strike at Raul’s throat. The man’s counterstrike was equally slow, but it was enough to ruin Charlemagne’s aim. The rooster’s claw left a deep cut along the human’s jawline, but failed to do any serious damage.
Sent sprawling into the dirt yet again, the devolved rooster struggled for a few moments to rise to his feet. The last attack had taken what little energy reserves he still possessed and he didn’t think that he could muster up enough strength for another assault.
Raul put his hand to his cheek, and Charlemagne noted that the man’s flesh and bones had already significantly recovered. His own wounds were still healing slowly because he lacked both the mana reserves and available calories to fully power his recovery process. The influx of nutrients that he had received from the chimpanzees had largely gone to fuel his mental development, leaving fewer available for this fight. His conviction, which had so far kept the despair welling up inside him in check, wavered. First the time in the fight, he considered fleeing, but deep down he knew it would do no good.
“Ah, that’s a good look in your eyes,” the human noted, pushing himself up to his feet. His gun arm began to transform as he rose, becoming bulkier and losing its symmetrical look. A giant spike emerged from the tip that glowed with a sinister green light. A strange and sinister glint shone in Raul’s organic eye as he examined his arm’s newest configuration. Then he turned his attention to the half-dead rooster, his face sporting an unhinged grin.
“Do you hate me? Do you even understand what hate is, I wonder. You must have some sort of ability to feel emotions: I can see the fear in your eyes. And yet it is a natural response to realizing that your life is about to be cut short. You have dared to raise a hand against your betters, you piece of trash. You’re an irritant on the face of this beautiful Earth, you and all your kin. I am going to end you, but first, I think we’ll perform a little experiment. How will you react when I kill your entire flock with one attack? Will your despair become complete?”
The turbines attached to the armored man’s shoulders began to spin and Raul slowly lifted off the ground, his attention no longer on Charlemagne but on the farm just beyond the wounded rooster. As he continued to gain altitude, his newly transfigured gun arm grew larger and the glow surrounded the tip intensified. The man’s armor began to radiate as well, causing a sickly green aura to appear around the ascending man. The rooster instantly recognized the energy type that Raul was using in his attack. It was radiation.
“I bet I’ll get an Achievement for killing so many chickens in one attack,” Raul boasted, shouting over the sound of his turbines. “I really am hoping you’ll survive this next part, because I want to find out if chickens can cry.”
A ball of blue light started to condense in front of Raul’s right arm. After forming, it rapidly absorbed the green aura that surrounded the man, changing the ball’s color to a resplendent teal. The orb grew denser by the moment until it seemed to possess a gravitational pull of its own. The rooster found that he simply could not look away as the attack’s power reached a crescendo.
“Behold, the power of magic and science, combined!” the gigantic man yelled as he made ready to launch the ball into the farm below. “Gamma-Ray Cannon!”
Charlemagne watched, helpless, as the gigantic ball of green and blue energy descended toward his twenty-five thousand hens and almost five thousand pending offspring. The physical pain he was experiencing was nothing compared to the mental anguish of knowing that his entire flock was about to be killed, and he could do nothing to at all to stop it. The attack started out slow-moving at first, but quickly gained speed as it dropped from the sky. Just before reaching the farm, there was a tremendous flash of light. The rooster’s retinas were burnt by the blast, but fortunately his Mana Core had recovered enough to send twin steams of soothing energy to the area.
As the rooster’s vision began to return, the squiggles suddenly arrived with an important message for the young rooster. It was an Achievement.
Charlemagne’s cloud of despair began to dissipate as a rush of both emotions and power flowed into him. His Mana Core began filling faster than usual, and his wings started healing a bit faster. His breath started coming easier and his energy levels began to climb once again. It took a moment for the rooster to figure out where the power was coming from. It wasn’t just that his new Achievement had made all his attributes more effective. That happened all the time. This burst of energy was something new, and it was all thanks to Grimfalk. It was the Power of Progeny. Charlemagne’s efforts to spread his genetic material far and wide had finally been rewarded.
A boisterous laugh echoed throughout the dusty road as Raul Sanchez descended from the sky. Charlemagne, having retreated into his own thoughts and emotions, barely noticed as the man landed in front of the rooster and reached down, his hand avoiding a reflexive peck before grabbing the chicken by the beak and lifting him up into the air.
“Come,” he ordered in a sickeningly pleased tone of voice. “Come see your flock.”
Taking to the skies again, the human carried Charlemagne over the wall of the compound. While the walls and buildings appeared untouched, the same could not be said for the farm’s occupants. Dead hens lay everywhere, a testament to the lethality of the man’s Gamma-Ray Cannon. And to add insult to injury, the entire farm was uninhabitable, as large amounts of radiation lingered in the area.
“I’d ask you what you thought of my handiwork, but you’ll just try to peck me if I let go of your beak, won’t you? Well, I guess that this will have to do. Do you see the death and destruction that I have wrought? Do you hate me for it?”
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Raul lifted Charlemagne up and looked deep into the rooster’s left eye with his own organic one. The rooster struggled to escape the man’s grasp, but he was at a disadvantage when it came to leverage.
“Hmmph. It is difficult to discern your emotions, but I can tell that you are overwhelmed. It will suffice. Now, it’s time to end your life, for the glory of Brett and all mankind. But know that your death is an important step towards a glorious future, one that will bring heaven down to Earth for all mankind!”
The man’s right arm once again transformed, returning to its minigun configuration. As the hot metal gun barrels pressed into his temple, Charlemagne thought of the offspring that he would leave behind. He longed to have been able to see them, just once, with his own eyes.
His wish was granted.
Accidentally drawing upon the upgrade to his Special Ability, Charlemagne summoned his offspring to his location. A cascade of tiny yellow-feathered chicks dotted with random patches of scales and long hooked beaks appeared all around the rooster. Since there were almost five thousand of the diminutive birds, they completely engulfed both Charlemagne and Raul, and the human was so surprised that he let go of the rooster to defend himself against this latest “attack”.
Charlemagne fell to the ground as yellow chicks rained from the sky, their tiny bodies slamming into the hard packed dirt with sickening crunches. Others were caught in Raul’s fan blades and were instantly shredded into a sort of chick slurry. The nutritious slop rained down toward the ground below, soaking into the thirsty ground as well as into the open mouth of a particular rooster in dire need of calories.
Charlemagne was eating his own baby chicks.
The infusion of large amounts of proteins, calcium, and amino acids did wonders for the devolved rooster’s healing factor. His exhausted muscles were revitalized as new energy coursed through his body. Even his Mana Core benefited from the influx of baby chick, augmenting his body even further. Even without the benefit of his wings, Charlemagne was now stronger than he had been at the start of the fight. He only hoped that it would be enough to finish off Raul Sanchez.
Dozens of baby chicks had managed to perch on the hovering human, pecking away at him with their tiny beaks and scratching at him with their sharp but incredibly short claws. Charlemagne saw all this indirectly as he kept his eyes on the stream of life raining down, trying to catch every drop of the precious slurry in his wide open mouth. But, not having been designed for use as blenders, the fans struggled for a few seconds before finally failing almost at the exact same time. Raul hung suspended in the air for a long moment before gravity’s tug sent him back toward the ground. He managed to pull off a three point landing, his knee, foot, and gun arm sinking into the earth as his enormous bulk slammed into the hard-packed dirt of the farm.
Having sufficiently recovered physically and emotionally, Charlemagne took advantage of his foe’s moment of weakness. He dashed forward in a straight line, trusting in sheer speed and his mana shields to protect him as he put all his strength into a Strike that targeted the human’s chest. As his beak lashed out, Raul’s left hand whipped up, once again clenching the vibrating blade that had cost Charlemagne a wing. The knife stopped short as it slammed into the devolved rooster’s mana shield, which held just long enough to deflect the strike.
Time seemed to slow down as the young rooster’s beak accelerated unimpeded. Memories of Charlemagne’s fight against the plasmodium Champion flashed through his mind. In particular, those of the fiery attack that had reduced the rooster’s metaphysical body to ash called to something hidden deep inside the chicken’s soul. A new power began to take form within Charlemagne, beckoning him to use it even though he didn’t yet understand what it was. But power was power, and the rooster embraced it willingly. His eyes flashed and his entire body accelerated, surrounded by a blue aura. Crimson flames erupted from Charlemagne’s beak, forming a swirling drill around the powerful natural weapon.
The new attack crashed into the armor directly above Raul’s heart. Steam and molten metal flew through the air as a rolling shockwave of superheated air expanded outward from the point of impact, flash-frying the surrounding chicks and sending their corpses flying through the air. A cloud of dust and steam obscured the pair. Then Raul backed up out of the cloud.
The human held his left hand to his chest in a pointless attempt to cover the gaping hole that had been drilled through his body. Blood poured from the wound, staining his hand, armor, and even the ground red. For a normal human, such an injury would be instantly fatal. But Raul Sanchez was no longer a normal human. Looking down at the blood pooling on the ground below him, the human frowned.
“I miscalculated,” he admitted. “But even though I die, I will not fail my lord.”
Raul removed his bloody hand and pressed a spot on his gun arm. A small panel retracted. The man tapped a button hidden beneath the panel five times, and then grinned at Charlemagne.
“Let’s die together.”
The rooster opened his mouth to answer Raul, but was interrupted when the man simply exploded. Charlemagne’s broken body was flung through the air as the blast popped the rooster’s eyes, burst his eardrums, and tried to liquefy his organs. Only the extra temporary levels in Mana Core kept his body intact as he slammed through a wall and bounced off a hard concrete floor, finally coming to rest against something somewhat softer than the wall and floor had been. The rooster was blind, deaf, concussed, and bleeding internally. The only thing that he could rely on was his System-granted senses, which told him that something delicious was directly behind him. The room that Charlemagne had been blasted into was the farm’s food store.
He gorged himself until his organs no longer felt like they were going to slide out of him unannounced.
Finally full of good food, which Charlemagne somehow managed to digest without disturbing the Settlement Token that was still intact in his stomach, the rooster was able to turn his attention to the squiggles, which had reappeared at the end of combat.
Charlemagne read through and dismissed the squiggles’ message as quickly as he could, because his Special Ability, Food for the Stomach and the Stomach for Food, was still going crazy. And he knew exactly why.
It took a bit of searching, but Charlemagne managed to find a largely intact portion of Raul’s body. It was, he believed, a chunk of the upper leg, and it was delicious. The explosion had seared the skin, locking all the delicious juices inside. The squiggles returned as he gulped down the last bits of human flesh. But this time, they did not bear a simple message.
The rooster thought for a moment. He knew that he was being offered a life-changing choice, one that would forever alter his future and even had the potential to estrange him from Grimfalk, his Patron. But the longer he thought, the more one particular answer resonated with his very soul. And so, with no regrets, Charlemagne made his choice.
follow, rate, or even review the book. I am planning on continuing through Book 2 before reassessing if the series is going to be commercially viable, so every bit helps.
Did you see that I'm posting a bunch of Jurassic Bawk Book 2 chapters on Monday, and then the story will be on a short hiatus as I launch a new title?
