“Shit.”

  What do I know about crows? They are smart and they like shiny things…or is that ravens? Are crows and ravens even different animals!?

  The standoff between Lillian and the crow was interrupted by a loud droning. The sound was reminiscent of helicopter blades. From the canopy above, a group of giant hornets descended. The bird's flashy actions had stirred up a mess of trouble. The crow didn’t notice right away—still focused on the gem it had swallowed. The bugs must have deemed the crow a better meal as they quickly surrounded and waylaid her dark savior.

  The bird leapt and snatched the largest hornet midair, crushing it in one talon before flinging it aside. The overgrown wasp crashed into the mud, thrashing in its death throes. The four other hornets took that time to sting the bird as it tried to take flight. The crow was much faster than the hornets when in the air, but it was a sitting duck on the ground. One of the hornets managed to plunge its stinger into the crow’s wing. Paralytic venom coursed through the wing, locking it in place at the bird's side. The wounded bird hopped around in a panicked frustration while trying to avoid the stingers.

  This forest is terrifying!

  Lillian felt bad for the crow. She even felt indebted to it after it took care of the snail for her, and hornets were assholes even on old Earth. They provided no honey, only pain. She was about to attempt to slip away when she noticed the dead hornet. It was on its back, its deadly stinger pointed skyward.

  She rushed forward and yanked with all her strength, tearing the oversized needle free. Wielding it like a dagger, she acted, lunging at the nearest hornet that was tangling with her temporary ally. The blow was aimed at its head, but she missed, instead piercing the small connecting piece that held its upper body to its lower body. The stinger cracked open the carapace, and with a second surge of force, severed the hornet completely, leaving it in two halves. Lillian jumped back as the upper half of the bisected hornet thrashed and tried to bite at her. She then stepped back in, letting loose a soccer kick to its head. With a snap, the head separated from the body and flew off into the brush.

  The white-hot pain shooting up her leg instantly reminded her of how foolish the kick was as her raw toes cried out in protest. The snail slime was still steadily eating into her foot.

  The bird was putting up a good fight, but even with her help, the hornets were winning. The sound of the neck cracking incensed the remaining trio, and they turned away from the wounded fowl.

  Lillian backed herself against a nearby tree as they approached. When the nearest hornet lunged at her stinger first, she managed to dodge out of the way at the last second. The hornet's stinger became embedded in the massive tree behind her. One of the others found her skin though. A stinger pierced her thigh, and the leg immediately locked up. The poison spread like a drop of ink in water. The final hornet hovered over her while taking chunks out of her arms as she tried to fight it off. Her flailing arms put up a weak defense. Lillian had been very lucky to hit the first hornet at all. She had never even been in a real fight before and none of her training had covered fighting bugs.

  Blood ran down her arms from her fresh wounds as she prepared herself for death. The stinger in her leg had been ripped out as the hornet flew back, positioning itself for another lunge to finish her off. As it began thrusting, the bird crashed into it from behind.

  It didn’t abandon me.

  The crow was in bad shape, blood marring its black feathers as it brutalized the caught bug. The hornet tangled with Lillian turned around, and she managed to clip one of its wings with her wild swings. The grounded hornet ignored her and scurried after the bird who was tearing the caught hornet into chunks.

  “Look out!” she shouted, as the battling crow turned towards her voice in time to see the approaching bug.

  “Caw!”

  The hornet that had lodged its stinger in the tree crashed into her, knocking her flat. It thrust its abdomen into her to finish her off. Luckily for Lillian, it was unaware that it had left its precious stinger behind.

  Gritting her teeth, Lillian swung her looted stinger up into the hornet’s body, piercing it. She continued thrusting at the small hole she had made but the insect’s frantic movements caused many of her thrusts to glance off. They continued a battle of attrition as they whittled away at each other. Her wild stabbings mirrored by the vicious maw that attempted to sink its pincers into her flesh. After the sixth stab sank into the hornet’s body, it finally stilled and fell to the forest floor.

  Out of breath, Lillian laid her back against the tree.

  We did it.

  The pain of the snail slime was finally weakening. She looked down at her foot and blanched at the bloody mess. The slime was still eating into her, she just couldn't feel it anymore because of the venom from the hornet that had been deposited in the thigh above.

  The stinger stuck in the tree at head height highlighted how close she had come to death. Humans used to be at the top of the food chain. Now, even bugs were a serious threat.

  The bird had finished off the final hornet and eyed the canopy above. The brief calm was short-lived as the droning returned. They both watched in horror as the canopy came alive with life. There was an entire hive above them somewhere in the trees; her face paled as she realized that the tooth and nail fight for survival she’d just endured had only dealt with a small scouting party.

  How many wasps normally live in a hive? 100? 10,000?

  The crow was in just as bad of shape as she was. It had been stung several times and many of its feathers were missing, bitten off by the murderous hornets. The bird didn’t even attempt to fly with its wings damaged, and instead it hopped towards the tree Lillian had collapsed against.

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  “Caw!” The crow released a loud call as death approached. The descending tide made it half the distance before a much louder bird replied.

  “CAWWW!”

  The sonorous reply reverberated through the forest as rays of light burst through the canopy. Along each ray of light, a black shadow emerged and shot off toward the swarm of hornets. Each shadow was a crow. The flock descended from above the treetop, and chaos ensued. There were hundreds of hornets, all swarming in panic as the murder of crows assaulted them. The birds swallowed them whole and clipped them in midair with their wings.

  The wounded crow on the ground was as tall as her waist, which had made Lillian think it was another mutation like the snails and hornets had gone through. The truth was that it was a hatchling. Each bird in the flock above was the size of a car. The descending hornets were annihilated, and the murder flew back towards the hive to continue the assault. The sounds of battle continued for half an hour before the rain of insect legs and feathers came to an end.

  The victorious crows picked through the fallen hornets on the ground and claimed the gems as prizes. They seemed to have some kind of code as they only took cores from the ones they killed and avoided the ones that Lillian and the hatchling had slain.

  One of the largest adult crows landed on the ground between Lillian and the wounded bird while spreading its wings in a show of dominance. The battle had damaged the mighty bird's tail, and many of its feathers seemed to have been melted by a corrosive stinger which was still lodged beneath the bird's wing. The smaller hatchling hobbled past the mighty crow and sat near the terrified girl, squawking at the warrior. The larger bird trilled several times before taking to the sky and rejoining the flock. They disappeared above the canopy once more, but Lillian knew they were not far off.

  Lillian was slowly regaining feeling in her leg, which she was unhappy about. The short reprieve from the burning pain was already over.

  At least the venom wasn’t deadly.

  She was battered and wounded, but she would live. Somehow, the hatchling looked much worse for wear than she did. It had curled itself into a tight black ball at the base of the tree. The crow was previously interested in the gem that it dug out of the snail. After watching the crows clear the battlefield, she knew the hornets had them too.

  With a great amount of effort, Lillian climbed to her feet. Her body proved more resilient than she had imagined. A hole through the leg should have handicapped her, yet she was already able to put a small part of her weight on it. She could just make out the sound of moving water in the distance. After she finished helping the bird, a bath was the first thing on her to do list.

  She hobbled over to the nearest corpse and started digging, puncturing holes along the carapace in a line before shattering it with her knees. The carapace sprayed fluids into her face that smelled of decaying leaves.

  She was no expert on insect anatomy, but she was pretty sure there wasn't supposed to be a gem tangled in what looked like a set of veins. It almost looked like a heart. She cut it out before removing the stinger. They were the best weapons she had found so far, but she wanted to have extras in case she lost one in the heat of battle. Battles that she knew would be much more difficult than the ones she had just gone through. If not for the hatchling, she wouldn't have been able to do anything to even the larger snail, much less the hornets. She collected the gems and stingers from each corpse before collapsing in a heap back at the tree's base. The small gems looked like acorn sized diamonds, but the inside of the gem seemed almost fluid.

  “What can you do with these?” she whispered as she thought back to what the crow had done.

  It ate it…

  She tossed one of the sparkling gems into her mouth and swallowed it, knowing if she stopped to think about what she was doing, she would never get it down.

  The gem was hard as a rock when held in her hand but changed to the consistency of cotton candy as it traveled down her throat. The mana flowed out of the gem in waves and swam through her blood. Her body reacted to the influx of mana like a desert that had finally received the first rain of the year.

  She watched in wonder as the hole in her leg clotted over the next several minutes. What was a gaping hole was already plugged. The skin on her foot had already begun to shed off a layer of skin, peeling away like sunburnt skin. The pain was muted as the skin stitched itself together before her eyes. The soft gem in her gut stopped dissolving after her wounds closed, leaving half remaining. She had a sinking feeling that ingesting these gems would be an important step in tempering her body.

  She took three of the five gathered gems and placed them near the hatchling. She would keep all the stingers, but the gems were useful to both of them. She didn’t wait for the little bird to stir as her mind returned to her current cultivation woes. The scroll had been clear; to continue tempering her body, she needed to destroy it. Her options were limited by her surroundings to a large degree. Fire would attract even more attention to her, so that was out of the question. The prospect of drowning to gain an affinity for water seemed even less enticing.

  The moment of peace faded just as quickly as it arrived. The leaves around the girl rippled as the lesser snails returned. The purple-eyed legion had come to finish what they started.

  Did they put some kind of pheromone on me?

  Crack!

  Lillian’s foot shattered another shell, re-applying a coating of slime to her mangled foot. She didn’t have time to care about the pain as she brought her foot up and smashed it into yet another shell. Lillian refused to go quietly into the night. Her new friend was still resting, unaware of her struggles as she continued to flatten the snails into paste. As her damaged foot descended again, she lost her balance and fell into the mud.

  Lillian flailed her arms as she struggled to get back to her feet, but the venom from the hornet had done more to her than she thought. The strange equilibrium that had formed between the venom and the mana from the core broke as her wounds worsened. She felt the snails cover her, burning through her clothes and into her flesh. The half-core that was resting in her gut quickly dissolved, deploying the mana within the wounds. The mana from the gem was a powerful panacea, but it wasn't capable of offsetting so much destruction.

  She buried her face in the mud as her heart-wrenching howls sounded out. Her arms kept thrusting out around her as she fought for her life. The stingers rarely connected with the snails, and even when they did, they didn't cause any damage. The pain was far worse than before. Her eyelid sloughed off, and her eyeball screamed as if lemon-soaked glass shards were carving it from within. The slime melted her ears and nose off as the rest of her features dissolved. The burning tunneled into her muscles, each fiber shrieking like it was being torn on a rack. The burns were accentuated by the small nibbles the snails were taking out of her.

  With a final burst of adrenaline, she shoved the remaining cores into her mouth, swallowing them down with a large helping of mud.

  The resting crow woke up and screeched loudly and began to battle with the legion.

  The heavy pressure of the snails pressed Lillian deeper and deeper into the mud. Her skin burned as she fought to hold onto the bird's claw in a final desperate bid for survival. A violent tug freed her from mud, and a pain of the ground rubbing into Lillian’s open wounds shot through her as the bird dragged her away from the horde.