Burp.

I find a patch of undisturbed grass and fall backwards on it, laying on my back.

Taking a short break on a full stomach was nice. Now this felt like living. How many years has it been since I last laid down after eating? Blinking my eyes up at the blue sky, I bask in the moment.

If I was still in my human body, it would feel stiff and sore. That's what happens when most of your time is spent staring at a computer screen, with hurried lunches during work hours.

Being a raven was not all bad.

BURP.

Oof. We'd eaten well. I was so happy with the two pluses of not feeling any pain in my body and having a full stomach. Then again, I did miss the good old days when these positives were the minimum. Never in my old life had I felt torturous pain, like I did before each evolution. I'd never fought to stay alive either.

I kind of missed the pain of the small but annoying blisters that formed on the back of my foot when I wore a new pair of high heels for work.

Raven vs. Human. It was a toss up. There was losing my hair because of the overwhelming pressure of my job, and killing and fighting to survive in this fantastical world.

I didn't know which was worse.

Clearing the negative thoughts away, I focus on looking over my status again.

In my mind, I lazily call out: Status!

Ding~!

 

Hmm. Ok, being a Nachtkrapp was pretty good.

Wait...

 

 

Oh COME ON, RAVEN!

Greenie jumps up in surprise when I suddenly sit up.

Enemy?!

While he starts waving around his hoe at the bushes around us, I take deep breaths to try to calm myself down.

We're ok, Greenie.

No enemy? He peers into the bushes, prodding them with his hoe.

No.

Just the enemy that is my stupidity.

??? Master?

I can sense Greenie's confusion through our link. Shaking my head, I fly and land atop his hoe, making him gently set it on the ground.

It's ok Greenie. We're fine.

Greenie relaxes his tense shoulders.

Ok, Master.

"Ki!" He gives a goblin call to punctuate the thought and grins at me.

I wave at him and then go back to staring at my status screen.

How could you forget about your new mimicry ability?!

Yelling at myself, I resist the urge to bang my head against the nearest tree like a woodpecker. As is, my wing-fingers were bent and rubbing into my temples in an old habit I'd had as a human when I was having a headache.

What was I even doing, rubbing my bird head when I didn't have temples.

Master?

Greenie peers down at me, the concern emanating off of him in waves.

All that cool inner monologue about Sun Tzu and the Art of War, and I'd forgotten my own stats.

My face feels hot, though that might be me just imagining the sensation. Good thing my feathers covered up my skin so even if I was blushing, no one could tell.

Thinking about it on a positive note, being a bird had given me the ultimate poker face.

Ahhhhh. It was pathetic. So lame. I was lucky there was no one except Greenie privy to my thoughts. And he didn't understand what embarrassment was yet anyways.

Breathe, Raven.

Let's just say the pain from evolution got to my head.

Yeah, let's go with that.

Going back to the main point.

This mimicry skill was going to change the game for us when it came to hunting. With it, we could now do some traps! Instead of using taunt, which was more of a wide skill that gathered groups of monsters to come after me, the mimicry could lure out one monster at a time. In theory. 

So now we would have to start building traps.. Staring at the rats before me, I list up the items I could use in my head.

Greenie and I had eaten two of the rats out of six, messily skinning the thick furs off them until there was nothing left but a pile of bones and sinew.

The tendons and sinews, Greenie had unsuccessfully tried eating. But they'd been too elastic for him to chew on, like gum. And they stretched out like a thin rope too.

I had him save those. We could use them as an alternative for string. Using vines as a rope to hold things together, like our hoe worked for now, but I wasn't sure how long the hold would last.

I start dragging each rat across the muddy ground by its tail. These tails were quite elastic from the way they stretched when pulled by my beak.

Razor Bite!

And tough too! The tail didn't break even when I used Razor Bite on it.

"Kiek!"

Greenie helped me move the four rats further away from the bush. What a gentleman. An overall nice goblin. Most important of all, he was probably the cleanest goblin in this world.

Thanks in part to the Siphon Bush.

Usually when Greenie ate meat, he would look like a terrifying psychopath with blood all over his face. But the rats we'd eaten didn't have a lot of blood or wetness, because the Siphon bush had siphoned it away. What a creepy little useful bush.

My beak was still relatively clean, so that I wasn't bathed in blood and brain matter like the time when we'd taken apart the emerald snake to eat. The Siphon Bush had sucked most of the wet matter out of the rat, including the blood, leaving the meat cleaner for us to consume.

Even now, it twisted around eerily, clenching around at empty space as it sought the dead rats we'd taken from it.

Greenie not hungry, Master. Rubbing at his stomach, Greenie groans, using a thin bone to pick at his teeth in the usual manner. In contrast with his facial expression, his emotions were positively glowing. Happiness to Greenie was having a full stomach.

Now that we're both full, there was nothing that could make him any happier.

Gently laying his palm atop my head, Greenie pats it, the happiness and satisfaction he was feeling now palpable through our bond.

He'd seen the state of our cave too. But it didn't bother him as much as it did me. Greenie was happy that we were together, stronger, and now both our bellies were full.

Which reminded me. I needed to survey the extent of the damage to our cave. And where the rats had appeared from.

Leaving Greenie fiddling with the new hoe we'd made, I fly back inside our cave. The stench of feces from when I'd first come here wasn't too bad now, though there was a new wet-dog like musty smell.

I find a ledge on the wall next to the round entrance of the cave and I perch atop it, looking over our little home.

While the poop marks that Greenie left on the walls were still there, the hard-packed dirt on the floor of the cave was churned up by hundreds of little feet. The dirt covered everything on the ground with a dark layer of brown, while more sheets of rock lay crumbled atop the pile.

{Earth Wyrm Feces}

Was the Earth Wyrm the thing that caused the rats' appearance?

There was more of the rock-like poop. At least those pieces were light. I kicked the grey chunks off the helmet I'd used before to make the spice bombs. The helmet looked a little worse for the wear.

Hahhh.

Everything was so dirty, the organized piles gone.

That was the work of the rats.

But the meat? The rats wouldn't have time to eat my precious snake meat when they were busy running outside and trying to kill us in the process.

This was the work of something else.

Interspersed among the small rat footprints were larger paw prints. Some creatures with four toes on each paw. I couldn't tell how many of them there were, but something was off about them.

Maybe I was being overly paranoid. Even if the way the paw prints were formed in a disconcerting pattern. I couldn't put my wing on it though. What was it that made me feel weird about these prints?

Appraisal!

{Kobold Paw Print}

Rubbing the space between my non-existent brows, I sigh.

All that time spent surfing the internet on the train, and I didn't know what a kobold was. So sue me for not being a fantasy creature expert. The classic fantasy books I read didn't include a kobold in their world.

The footprints in the ground looked like a dog's paw print.

What in this strange world was a kobold?

I tried to appraise the word in the box that pops up before me but the system doesn't react.

Guess I would have to find one for myself first to see what a kobold was.

Another species of dog, perhaps? Their paw prints told me they weren't as big as the Wolf King. Around the same size as the Wolf King's subordinate wolves was more likely.

Hopping over the ground, I follow the tracks to where our snake had been, surrounded by Greenie's poop. From the empty hollow where the snake used to be, it was easy enough to see where the Kobolds had come from.....

Straight out the back of our cave.

Now if this was before, I wouldn't have bothered to look into the back of the cave. I couldn't even if I wanted to.

But now the deep darkness no longer posed a problem for me, because-

I HAD NIGHT VISION FINALLY!!!

Punching the air in happiness, I do a little chicken dance. If not now, then when?

I didn't want to let my experience with the rats and the goblins ruin the rest of my day.

At least I had one beam of positivity in an overall gloomy day.

Night Vision meant I could see into the back of the cave clearly. And by clear, I mean 4k clear. All the way to the wall in the back of the cave.

And the large hole where the wall of the cave met the stone part of the floor. The front of the cave was mostly dirt, while the back was more stone. My talons scratch against the hard rock as I hop to the very edge of the dark hole.

A cold updraft ruffles my feathers.

Peering in, I flap my wings to keep myself from falling in. Although Night Vision showed me the edges of the slope in the hole that led deeper and deeper underground, it wasn't strong enough to show me the end of the darkness.

It reminded me of a saying. How did it go?

If you gaze too long into the abyss…

I couldn't remember the rest of the saying. Until, like a deep sea creature raising its head from the depths of the cold waters, the hollow words echo into my mind.

.......the abyss will gaze back at you.

Those sinuous words whisper directly into my brain, and the empty, negative parts of me magnified it. The echoing of the words resounds in my heart as it rises, knocking into my consciousness.

That was scary. Shaking my head hard, I turn away from the hole, accidentally knocking some loose stones into it in the process.

The sounds of stones hitting each other as it rolls downwards, the sounds echoing off each other and continuing for a long time until the stones lose their momentum.

I don't bother peering in again to see how far the stones had rolled.

After all, this hole was the cause of all our problems.