Fellissa panted as she lay on the floor of a completely devastated rumpus room. In one corner lay the remaining fragments of the screen that she and Brett had used to watch the fight between Raul Sanchez and Charlemagne the chicken. The comfortable sofa she had purchased for Brett’s benefit was completely shredded, and the frame, which had been made of wood from a tree that had taken 100,000 years to reach maturity, was now nothing more than kindling. The feline deity’s own playthings were equally ruined: a scratching post was currently on fire in the middle of the room, while the cat tree was now less of a tree and more of a urine-soaked mound of scraps. Even the walls and ceiling had not escaped unscathed, as deep claw marks crisscrossed every available surface.

  Had she been capable of rational thought at the moment, the deity would have given her tantrum an eight out of ten.

  It took half an hour for Fellissa’s erratic breathing to calm enough for her to turn to other matters. Her fur was in complete disarray, so a good grooming was her first order of business. Another half hour passed while she meticulously licked her coat back into its usual sleek, timeless style. Once the grooming had been completed, it was time for a nap. So, she found a relatively soft pile of furniture fragments and, after kneading them a little, laid down. As the deity of felines closed her eyes, the face of Charlemagne the rooster rose to haunt her, his stupid eyes filled with stupid satisfaction. Fellissa put her head into the soft fabric beneath her and screamed as the memories from earlier in the day replayed over and over in her head. Having perfect recall was sometimes the worst curse a being could ever wish upon another.

  The day had started off so well. Raul Sanchez and her Champion, Chip, had tracked down the chicken farm where Charlemagne had made his base. Fellissa had initially advocated for laying waste to it before the rooster arrived, but Brett’s suggestion that their Champions break the bird’s spirit first was just the type of savagery that she could appreciate. Besides, the order didn’t really matter, did it?

  The first annoyance was when the human had simply absorbed Chip. The Incorporate skill seemed to be ridiculously unfair, but Brett had explained that it had limits. Otherwise, the human Champion would have just snagged the rooster, and they could have all lived happily ever after.

  Despite the personal setback, Fellissa was still in good spirits as she and Brett watched the enormous human dominate in combat against the similarly oversized chicken, hacking one wing from its body near the beginning of the battle before deploying a powerful weapon that fired high-speed projectiles from the human’s metal arm. Although Fellissa personally could have caught every single bullet midair with her eyes blindfolded, the attack was far beyond anything she’d seen since the System’s arrival had rendered all technology-based weapons inert.

  The second annoyance was that the rooster found a way to counter the gun.

  In a fair world, Charlemagne would have been turned into Swiss cheese in just a few seconds. But the ugly, stupid bird was apparently some sort of savant at manipulating mana. The pair watched in disbelief as it created shields out of nothing but mana and used them for cover. The bird even managed to close the distance and engage Raul in melee combat, although it took the worst of each exchange. Despite its obvious inferiority, the bird never hesitated and never retreated, even when it was clearly exhausted. Fellissa caught herself starting to admire the rooster’s determination and quickly strangled that particular emotion: there was no point in admiring the dead.

  Fellissa and Brett cheered when the human Champion bested the rooster’s strongest attack and then took to the air, leaving the crippled bird grounded. Watching Raul wipe out the rooster’s entire flock in one fell swoop was just the icing on the cake. Or it would have been, except that baby chicks started to appear out of nowhere just as Raul Sanchez was taking his victory lap. The feline deity couldn’t believe what she was seeing as the rooster somehow managed to escape and recovered his strength by eating the liquified remains of his own spawn.

  “I can’t believe it,” Brett had shouted. “Who eats their young!?”

  There was a long and awkward moment of silence after that, and the atmosphere in the room only grew grimmer as Raul faced off a final time against the seemingly unkillable avian. The human, who was running on fumes by that point, simply couldn’t keep up. Fellissa and Brett watched with horror as the insane bird somehow managed to summon a construct made of fire and mana, wrapping it around his beak like a magical drill and slamming the new attack straight through the man’s torso, dealing a fatal wound to the human juggernaut. When Raul’s final attack failed to return the favor, Brett gave one of his rare sighs, letting the feline deity know just how exasperated he was at the situation.

  The President of GOD rose from the sofa, displacing Fellissa as he did so. Then he walked toward the door, pausing once to turn and address his fellow deity.

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  “This is intolerable. We’re going to wait until the next System update to handle this, but this is a huge mess, and I don’t leave messes. And it’s going to be expensive, so don’t spend anymore that you absolutely have to right now, because I expect you to share the cost equally with me this time. You do know where you messed up, don’t you?”

  Fellissa frowned. She actually didn’t know, but she didn’t want to sound stupid by admitting it. Thankfully, Brett wasn’t waiting for an answer.

  “You didn’t look into what his species really was, did you?” the human deity clarified.

  “I did!” Fellissa protested. “It’s R. Gallus Baronia…some sort of mutated chicken with delusions of royalty!”

  “But what does the ‘R.’ stand for?” Brett demanded. “Did you ever think to find out?”

  “No,” the feline deity admitted, looking down at the floor.

  “Well, I guess we both messed up, because I didn’t either. But from watching that fight, the answer is clear, isn’t it? I’ll catch you later, I’ve got to go for a run or something. Get my head back in the game.”

  The human walked out the door, leaving Fellissa alone with her thoughts. The feline deity replayed the fight in her mind over and over again, trying to figure out what Brett had meant about the answer being obvious. It took longer than she cared to admit, but the answer finally came to her. In hindsight, it was so obvious: the baby chicks had hatched just after Raul Sanchez used his Gamma-Ray Cannon attack. And looking even further back, she remembered that Charlemagne had been immune to the lethal energy found in the ruined city of Porto Novo.

  The R. was short for “Radioactive”.

  In a slightly less extravagant but much more intact living room situated in another dimension, a different deity was expressing their frustration as well.

  “Arrgggh!” screamed Grimfalk, throwing a Stoat Water across the room. “Why?! Why did he summon the chicks? Why did he eat them? Why couldn’t some of them have survived the battle? What is wrong with that demented rooster?!”

  “Well, at least he won,” Longclaw noted, pulling her own Stoat Water a little closer, just in case Grimfalk was on the hunt for more ammunition. “Can you imagine how much DKP you’ll be getting from that fight alone? I don’t know what Brett did to that human to make him so strong, but it had to have been expensive. And besides, you saw that last explosion. Any surviving hens and chicks would have been killed by the blast. So, in a way, it’s not really Charlemagne’s fault. You should be mad at Fellissa and Brett, if you’re going to be mad at anyone.”

  “I can’t be mad at Fellissa since I got those Lesser Boon tokens from her, and Ricardo and Sungay both got some good growth out of them. But Longclaw, did you see those baby chicks? I actually felt my follower count go up for a few moments! And did you see those scales? It was easy to see that some or all of them were extremely compatible with theropod DNA. We could already be almost a third of the way to restoring our kind, if Charlemagne weren’t such a screw up.”

  Longclaw took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly through her nose. Then she stood up and walked over to where Grimfalk was reclining and pointed one of her claws at his chest.

  “Any one of your other Champions would be dead by now if you put them through what Charlemagne has been through. He’s a fighter through and through and a credit to his Patron. Maybe he’s not the answer to reviving our kind, but I think what he’s done deserves at least our respect.”

  “Why?” Grimfalk demanded, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  “You know why,” Longclaw answered with a mock frown. “Don’t make me say it again.”

  Grimfalk’s ugly mood began to dissipate as he leaned back further and crossed his arms across his stomach.

  “Maybe I want to hear it again,” he urged.

  Longclaw grabbed a convenient throw pillow and turned it into a thrown pillow. The pair laughed as the pillow bounced off Grimfalk’s shoulder. She turned around and stomped back over to her spot, sat back down, and pulled out her phone.

  Just as Grimfalk began to wonder if Longclaw had changed her mind, the other theropod spoke up.

  “Charlemagne reminds me a lot of you as a young hunter. Always fighting, always striving, always hungry. Yeah, he doesn’t always make the best choices, but I think that his heart is in the right place.”

  “Wait, you think that Charlemagne has a heart?” Grimfalk joked. “You just saw him drink a chick milkshake made from his own babies. I gotta admit, you’ve got a point just for that act alone.”

  Longclaw shrugged.

  “Hey, I call it like I see it. And I think that you should start doing more for Charlemagne. He’s almost level 25, why not give him a boost now? Consider it a long-term investment. Besides, we’ve got the DKP to buy him something decent and still designate two new Champions next week after the System update rolls out.”

  “Fine, I’ll think about it,” Grimfalk promised.

  Longclaw smiled, knowing that meant she had won.

  “But let’s talk about the update,” he added. “I don’t remember voting for this. What’s going on?”

  Longclaw sighed at Grimfalk being his usual self.

  “Well, it was part of the original System proposal that passed. Remember? The whole thing needed to be done in phases to avoid draining too much Divinity at the outset. Since GOD’s projections were conservative in nature, we reached Phase Two of the implementation sooner than later. I kept asking you to read the whole proposal, and you kept saying that you would get around to it, but you were in the middle of bingeing some strange human television series about a spaceship, and I was pretty sure you weren’t going to read it. So I read it for you. Then I tried to tell you all about it, but all you wanted to talk about was whether or not the series was going to get another season. Then I told you that the System integration would wipe out all human technology, which set you off.”

  “I do remember that,” Grimfalk confirmed. “But once I realized that the System represented a way to revive our kind, I was one hundred percent on board. You can’t deny that.”

  Longclaw rolled her eyes.

  “Yes, it only took weeks to get you to realize that.”

  “Nuh-uh!” Grimfalk disagreed. “It was me who realized it was…wait a minute…oh.”