“When is that stupid rooster going to give it up?” Grimfalk complained, watching as Charlemagne destroyed another clutch of eggs that had failed to hatch under his ministrations. The Champion had been on the warpath for days, growing angrier every time his attempts failed.

  “Well, that is the thirty-fourth batch of eggs today, maybe he’ll get the hint soon. But not too soon, because I bet a thousand DKP that he’ll check over thirty-five before the sun goes down, and he’s still got all afternoon,” Longclaw responded before turning her attention back to her handheld device again.

  “Your gambling is getting a bit out of hand, don’t you think?” the theropod deity grumbled. “I know you win a lot, but it’s making you seriously grouchy. Maybe you should cut back, or let me control the account for a while.”

  Longclaw snorted at the thought of Grimfalk trying to place a bet, and the deity of theropods chose to ignore it.

  “You know better than I do that we need more divinity badly,” she said after regaining her composure. “Charlemagne’s frankly been a mint, but all your other Champions have yet to break even. Look at Zaram, he just hit level 10 and got his Paragon of Evolution class, but it will be weeks at the rate he’s going before he earns enough to pay you back. And Sungay is just…well he’s being Sungay.”

  “I’ll admit that I totally miscalculated how fast Zaram would level. Who knew that the humans in Afghanistan would be able to mount such a fierce resistance?” Grimfalk groaned as he sank back into his sofa and grabbed another Stoat Water. “And then there is the unmitigated disaster with Ricardo. At least the token that we gave him came from Fellissa.”

  “Yes,” Longclaw agreed. “Poor Ricardo. That was hard to watch.”

  The conversation died out naturally, and the pair watched Grimfalk’s Champions in silence for a few minutes. Both Sungay and Zaram were asleep, leaving Charlemagne as the main attraction. Longclaw made what amounted to a fist for her hand shape and pumped it as the young rooster found yet another clutch of eggs and breathed over them. He brooded for a few minutes, waiting for them to hatch, before losing all semblance of patience and crushing the eggs beneath his feet, clucking up a storm and nearly knocking down the thin walls of the hut in his anger.

  “Hey, some of those eggs had chicks in them,” Grimfalk yelled to Longclaw. “What gives? I mean, I don’t care about baby chicks, but…well…all right I kind of wish he wouldn’t stomp on the baby chicks.”

  Longclaw nodded in agreement.

  “He must be using a sense granted through one of his Special Abilities to tell whether his efforts were successful. I don’t think that he was anywhere near here, to be honest. Are you sure that you don’t want to send him a Quest with details?”

  “I would, but you know how short we are on funds. Plus, I’m still mad about his most recent devolution. He changed back into a rooster! He had a chance to become closer to his deity, to take another step on the path to theropod, and he didn’t take it!”

  Longclaw nodded.

  “Yeah, I know, but still, he’s your Champion. And he’s not a rooster, his species was updated again. Now he’s a R. Gallus Viscountus.”

  “That’s gibberish!” the theropod deity complained.

  “I know, I know, but that’s what the System recorded it as. And here’s the best part: since the species is completely new, it doesn’t belong to Flockheart. Any offspring of Charlemagne’s that share his species will be yours. So it’s really not that bad, and it will be interesting to see what happens when he evolves again,” Longclaw mused.

  “You think he’ll live that long?” Grimfalk asked.

  Longclaw grinned.

  “I don’t just think so…I’m betting on it.”

  “Wait, what’s he doing now!” Grimfalk shouted, pointing at the screen. The rooster had given up trampling the eggs and was now running around like crazy, chasing something that looked like a dead pixel around the screen. Grimfalk couldn’t make out what Charlemagne was trying to catch. This was not due to any defect in the deity’s eyesight; in fact, Grimfalk’s keen vision operated on principles that largely ignored conventional physics. It was because he had bought all his screens second-hand, and they were not capable of displaying GOD’s Champion feeds in high definition.

  “I literally can’t tell, because these screens are trash,” Longclaw complained as she switched apps on her device, pulling up the rooster’s stream. “Oh, I see now, it’s a mosquito! Get that no good bloodsucker, Charlemagne!”

  Charlemagne was doing his utmost to catch and eat the mosquito that had dared interrupt his rampage. Pieces of eggshell flew around the abandoned hut that had been taken over by a small group of hens at some point in the past. Although usually quite adept at catching small, fast-moving objects with his beak, the rooster’s efforts were so far ineffective as the mosquito showcased surprising speed and agility. It zoomed around in unexpected ways, accelerating at just the right times to avoid being snapped up and snacked on by the enraged chicken.

  Completely blinded by rage, Charlemagne forgot all about his ability to manipulate mana, which he could have easily used to cut off the insect’s escape routes. If he had done so, the fight would have been over in moments. Instead, fiery mana leaked out of the rooster, forming a hazy blue aura as his anger grew hotter with each failure. It was then that the mosquito gave up on trying to escape and tried a different tactic.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Please, don’t eat me! I’m so small that you won’t get hardly anything out of it. And I can help you…I know a lot of things. I’m a Champion of Capilla, I’ll have you know. Maybe we can team up? I’m sorry I was trying to take some of your blood, but you’re just so powerful! And I just need a little bit, it won’t even hurt, I promise!”

  A dim, almost completely forgotten memory began to burn inside of Charlemagne as the mosquito begged for its life, growing in intensity until it burned away the cloud of anger and sorrow that had enveloped the rooster.

  As the words sprang fully formed into his mind, the rooster found his mental clarity returning, driving away the animal instincts that had pushed him over the past few weeks to hunt down every clutch of eggs that he could find and soak them in a dose of radiation to see if they would hatch. He stopped chasing the mosquito and straightened up.

  “Bawk,” he said to the tiny insect.

  The mosquito flopped to the ground and, not possessing the ability to appropriately grovel, put its two front legs together in a gesture of thanks.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” she cried. “I promise that you won’t regret this. I am going to be so helpful, you’ll see! I bet you don’t know where any dungeons are, but I found one that’s nearby! Maybe we can explore it together once we are officially in the same party!”

  As the mosquito blathered on, Charlemagne was already half-regretting sparing her life. She was just as bad as Francois had been. But, despite the disadvantages of having another chatty know-it-all around, the rooster somehow knew that he had made the right decision. Something good would come from it, he was certain.

  A notice from the squiggles interrupted Charlemagne’s train of thought.

  Charlemagne hesitantly signaled his consent to the squiggles of power before voicing an objection to his new teammate.

  “Bawk.”

  A moment later, the issue was resolved.

  The rooster clucked in contentment. That was more like it.

  “By the way,” Bridget commented after Charlemagne had finished reading the notice. “I am quite famished, actually. Do you think that maybe I could…”

  The rooster turned his head and fixed the mosquito with a stare that made the answer obvious.

  “Oh, uh, I see. Well that makes sense, but I am going to need to go out hunting soon then.”

  “Bawk,” Charlemagne added.

  “Oh…well I certainly don’t want to blow up from ‘mana overload’. Whatever that is…”

  “Bawak?” the rooster asked.

  “No, I’ve never heard of mana. Is it anything like blood?”

  Charlemagne thought for a moment before answering.

  “Bawwk,” he said with enthusiasm. “Bawk buck bawack.”

  “So it circulates through your body like blood, but it does a lot of different things. Wow, that sounds really useful. Is it hard to get access to mana?”

  “Baawkkk Bawk,” Charlemagne said.

  “Oh wow, that must have hurt so bad. I can’t believe you survived that! Well, if that’s what it takes, then count me out.”

  True to her word, Bridget gave Charlemagne decent directions to the location of a nearby dungeon. Charlemagne, curious as to what dungeons did and whether the dungeon bosses were edible, told her to take him to it. It was then that the unlikely pair discovered the first problem with their party: Charlemagne was much faster than the mosquito in the air. Bridget’s wings were made for maneuverability, not pure speed, and she tired easily. So, the rooster did something that would have been unthinkable to him just a few hours prior: he swallowed his pride and allowed the tiny insect to ride on top of his head.

  As they neared the dungeon’s purported location, Charlemagne began to spot cattle grazing in fields. Bridget begged him to stop so that she could fill up on blood, which sounded good to the rooster. Without comment, he dove at top speed, pulling mana from his Ember Core to empower his wings and legs. He took the bovine in the neck, snapping its spine and sending it crashing to the ground. The other nearby cattle, sensing that they were in the presence of a predator they had no hope of combating, fled immediately.

  The level up in Strike was a nice bonus, but Charlemagne barely noticed the message from the squiggles as he dug into the raw beef, which was somehow even more delicious than human flesh. After days of eating little besides raw eggs, the cow was a welcome change.

  “Hey, wait up!” a tiny voice cried out. “You totally ditched me back there.”

  The rooster didn’t bother responding and continued to tear giant bites of meat away from the cow’s body. His pharyngeal teeth engaged, yanking chunks of flesh into his gullet. The process was way more efficient than it had been before his evolution, as the beak and gullet worked in tandem to rend and swallow at the same time.

  “Boss, slow down! You’ll choke to death,” the mosquito Champion warned as she landed as far away from the rampaging rooster as possible and deployed her proboscis.

  “Exsanguinate!” she called out, prompting the straw-like appendage to enlarge by an order of magnitude. The cow’s hide, ordinarily impervious to the mosquito’s ministrations, was not sturdy enough to stave off the wickedly sharp proboscis. It penetrated deep into the bovine and found a large vein. A flood of red liquid surged into Bridget’s blood sac, causing it to balloon out dangerously. The cow’s hide sank down as the flesh underneath it was quickly drained of its precious bodily fluids.

  “Bawk,” said Charlemagne, finally noticing how large his companion had become.

  “I know, it’s pretty impressive, right? Is it okay if I keep going? Once I drink from an area, the meat is no longer very tasty.”

  Instead of answering, Charlemagne took a final bite and moved away from the dead cow, looking around the field to see if there was anything else worth fighting. He didn’t see anything, but his sensitive hearing detected the sound of running water coming from a nearby ditch. He sauntered off to investigate, leaving the mosquito to finish her meal.

  There was a small creek running through the ditch, so Charlemagne drank his fill. He really didn’t need to drink, since his body was capable of taking the moisture out of the massive amounts of meat he had ingested, but he was already feeling the need for a break from his new ally.

  All too soon, she caught up to him.

  “Thanks for stopping, I’m all full! Can I hop back on?”

  The rooster bawked his assent, and the pair took to the skies again.