Charlemagne’s danger sense, which had been screaming at him before, somehow managed to escalate in pitch and volume as the rooster encountered the stream of air being directed into the jet engine’s fan blades. The rooster understood that allowing himself to be sucked into the spinning circle thingy would spell instant death. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any good options. He had shed a fair amount of airspeed with his sidestep maneuver, so trying to dive down was unlikely to get him clear fast enough. Trying to go higher would lead to the same issue, with the added problem that he would be fighting against gravity and the engine’s pull at the same time. With up and down both out of the picture, his only choice was to dodge to the side once again.
Despite being in a bad position for it, Charlemagne gamely attempted another acrobatic maneuver meant to adjust his position laterally. It failed miserably. The jet engine’s pull was just way too strong, and it was growing stronger by the moment. Charlemagne was out of time. A sentient being in his position would probably have given up all hope and waited for the inevitable yet mercifully quick death by jet engine intake. But Charlemagne was a rooster operating with less than half his brain intact. He literally didn’t know when to give up.
A brilliant glow appeared just beneath the rooster’s jet-black feathers on his breast before quickly spreading to the left side of his chest and his left wing. Charlemagne, drawing the instincts common to all birds, understood the mechanics of flight. His wing wasn’t currently strong enough to push himself out of danger with one flap. But it could be stronger. The young rooster’s Mana Core skill represented multiple interconnected abilities that used mana to empower the user, and, under the guidance of Charlemagne’s resurgent instincts, it did exactly what it needed to do.
Charlemagne’s left wing shattered as it sliced through the air with enough force to break the sound barrier. Likewise, his chest muscle ripped itself into shreds with the force of its own contraction. The rooster found himself forced to the right at an extreme speed. The pull of the jet engine was incredible at close range, even managing to strip some of the rooster’s feathers straight off his body. It fought against the Champion with the relentless energy possessed by unfeeling machines, its power growing stronger as the distance shrank between plane and bird.
Charlemagne was entirely out of options, but his Mana Core skill activated again, trying desperately to coat his entire body with a layer of protective mana. Against the fury of the turbine spinning at well over fifty times a second, the coating would be about as effective as putting on a poncho to survive being drenched in lava, but the rooster’s survival instincts would not be denied. The rooster, having nothing else to do, braced for impact.
There was a horrible screech of metal on metal as something impacted the engine’s turbine at a high velocity.
Suddenly, the pull from the engine diminished just enough to cause Charlemagne to avoid being sucked in. He passed so close to the engine’s outer casing that he lost a few more feathers. The danger now having passed, the dim-witted bird did not give his brush with death a second thought, merely chalking his salvation up to his own actions. This could not be further from the truth.
What had actually saved the rooster’s life was the clump of his feathers he had lost to the engine’s incredible suction. They had been pulled into the engine and had impacted at just the right angle to foul up the turbine, causing a cascading failure as each impacted fan blade was displaced into the next. The failure of the turbine caused air that had been flowing completely smoothly into the compressor to back up, pushing the outer layers out of the high-density zone around the intake toward the lower pressure zones to the left and right of the intake.
Now behind the landing aircraft, Charlemagne relied on his uninjured right wing to turn and did his best to glide after the aircraft, relying on his incredible healing abilities to first stabilize and then begin to repair his broken wing on the fly. The spot where his feathers were missing itched intensely as new shafts erupted from his skin and slowly began to unfurl. His Mana Core also reactivated itself and began to reabsorb as much of the mana coating his body as it could, beating slowly as it recovered just enough mana to circulate through the rooster’s body. However, Charlemagne’s healing was approaching its limit, and a few cracked bones stubbornly refused to accept the healing energy circulating through his body.
The airplane, having lost the majority of thrust from its damaged engine, was forced to descend sooner than expected. It did not crash, however, instead hitting the runway between the threshold and the touchdown zone. Charlemagne’s adrenaline spiked as he realized the plane was slowing down after it had reached the ground but attributed the loss of speed to fatigue. He tested his newly repaired wing with a few low-power flaps before accelerating toward the grounded aircraft, swiftly gaining on it as it continued to decelerate to its taxiing speed. The plane stopped entirely as he reached it, which spooked the rooster into climbing higher and circling as he evaluated the situation.
As Charlemagne watched, several metal beetles rolled up, and a strange triangular shape was pushed toward the side of the airplane. Suddenly, the aircraft started throwing up humans, who walked down the triangle and started to get into the beetles. The rooster’s instincts speculated that perhaps the beetles were the airplane's babies.
Realizing that this was the perfect time to strike, Charlemagne ceased circling and dove, slamming into the top of the plane with his claws out and striking the metal with all his strength. The roof of the plane deformed but remained intact. A flurry of pecks was equally ineffective at penetrating the thick metal hide of the beast and sent shockwaves of pain through the rooster’s body. Charlemagne was not deterred, however, as the airplane was not fighting back. He leaped toward the front of the plane, thinking to attack its face, but changed direction midair as he realized he already possessed a way to reach the plane’s innards. All he had to do was to go in where the humans were coming out.
The rooster’s arrival went unnoticed by the passengers, who had attributed the clanging sounds from the roof to normal aircraft noise. The crew, while worried by the strange sounds, had not yet figured out where exactly they were coming from. Thus, both groups were shocked when a giant rooster landed among the disembarking passengers. They were even more shocked when said rooster disemboweled one of the flight crew on his way into the aircraft.
The panic caused by Charlemagne’s arrival created a stampede that ended poorly for the humans. In their haste to escape the beast, several tripped and fell down the stairs. This led to a chain reaction that wounded over two dozen passengers and crushed two more to death. But that was nothing compared to what was going on inside the aircraft.
Several minutes later, the rooster emerged victorious. He had stolen a meal from the enormous metal bird, trashed the interior of the plane, and defecated all over an in-flight magazine. While he had been dealing with the interior of the plane, however, the beetles had fled, taking their humans with them, no doubt to devour them in peace. But that was acceptable to Charlemagne, as he had triumphed over their mother. The rooster, standing in the open hatchway of the aircraft, opened his mouth wide and crowed in victory. That was when a rocket-propelled grenade struck the hull of the plane next to him, and everything went blank.
Back in Grimfalk’s living room, the theropod deity winced.
“Ohh, that’s gotta hurt,” he said as the black-feathered rooster was flung back into the body of the plane by the explosion.
“Is he going to be all right?” Longclaw asked, clearly worried about the Champion.
“Yeah, yeah, he’s going to be okay. Listen, do you remember the rooster that you showed me a picture of…what was his name? Matt? Marius?”
“Oh, you mean Mike the headless chicken, right?” Longclaw responded.
“Yeah, exactly! Honestly, that was the moment I decided that, if possible, I wanted to use a rooster as my Champion. But anyways, Mike acted almost entirely like a normal chicken, and he was running on just a brain stem. Charlemagne’s damage really is nothing compared to that.”
Longclaw thought back to the article she’d read about “Miracle Mike”, the headless rooster. To be fair, Grimfalk did have a point about the amazing tenacity with which the rooster had clung to life. Mike had survived for around a year and a half after losing his head and had only passed away due to complications regarding his airway rather than his mental state.
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“Still, though, I wonder what’s going to happen once he hits level 10 and gets his class choices. How is he going to understand them? Even worse, what if they get downgraded because of his diminished capacity?”
Grimfalk smiled because, despite Longclaw’s overall superiority when it came to knowing the rules of the system, he had anticipated the possibility of Charlemagne reaching level 10 with brain damage and thus had looked up the answer.
“No, he won’t suffer any disadvantages at all when it comes to class selection,” the theropod deity confirmed with a smug grin. “In fact, it will make things easier, because I will get to choose the class for him.”
The pair turned back to watch the screen for a few minutes in comfortable silence. Charlemagne had recovered consciousness after a few moments and regained a little of his strength by consuming the organic material left behind after his first rampage through the aircraft. Truth be told, however, the young rooster’s body was on the verge of breaking down. His damaged wing had taken additional damage when the RPG had gone off right next to him, and the influx of new calories had done little to change that. Most of his bones had developed micro-fractures from the multitude of impacts they’d sustained. His flesh was battered and bruised and his brain was still mostly mush. In short, he was in no condition to fight.
Still, as soon as he felt able, the rooster launched himself out onto the tarmac, ready to defend himself again. Not a person was in sight. A deep weariness settled over Charlemagne that finally overpowered the unyielding rage that had driven him all the way from Ouidah to Cotonou. He had persevered until his enemies had decided it was better to flee than to fight. The cowards.
As if to acknowledge his success in driving away all foes, the squiggles returned, granting him new power.
Back at Grimfalk’s lair, the two theropods were hunched over a small screen, reading Charlemagne’s notifications in real time.
“What do you mean he needs to find a safe place to devolve,” Grimfalk yelled.
Longclaw tilted her head away as much as she could to escape the shouting before answering in a much softer voice.
“Did you not read the part about devolution? I thought you had.”
“Well, not all of it,” the other theropod admitted. “It was really long, and I got excited about the idea of turning a chicken back into a dinosaur, so I just skipped to the end to see how to initiate the process. Besides, Charlemagne didn’t change that much when we applied the first part of the template to him, so I didn’t think it was going to require a lot of waiting.”
“Well, that’s true,” Longclaw said with as much patience as she could muster, “but that was less than two percent of the total template. Now that he’s leveled up, gotten a Mana Core, and is about to have a class, he’s going to be able to accept a lot more changes to his physiology.”
“Speaking of classes,” Grimfalk added after a moment. “Get a load of these!”
The theropod deity pointed to the screen, where Charlemagne’s three class choices awaited his decision.
“Oh, those are good,” Longclaw admitted as movement on the main screen caught her eye. “Wait, what is Charlemagne doing now?”
The rooster had stumbled out of the airport before taking to the air and was headed eastbound at a good clip above Boulevard de la Marina. He passed between the Golden Tulip Hotel and the U.S. Embassy before landing just past the Palais de Congres, near the Esplanade d’Amazone, where a giant metal statue depicting an Amazon warrioress of Dahomey stood in the center of a small square.
Landing on the top of the statue, the rooster once again pecked downward into the bronze head of the woman. This time, however, he kept at it until he had created a hole large enough to squeeze through. Slipping inside the statue, Charlemagne fluttered to the bottom and landed in an exhausted heap, the effort of forcing entry into the statue having seemingly drained the last of his energy reserves.
“Good,” Grimfalk declared. “I’ll select his class, and he’ll wake up fully healed and ready to keep leveling up. I might have to spend some power to speed up the process if the humans discover where he’s hiding, though. I don’t think anyone saw him go in there, but I’ll keep an eye out anyway.”
“You know, I’d expect there to be more humans around during the day,” Longclaw noted with suspicion. “Maybe they evacuated because of Charlemagne?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Grimfalk said. “But that’s beside the point. Can you guess what class I’m going to pick for Charlemagne?”
“Paragon of Atavism, of course,” Longclaw noted with a frown. “But I wish you wouldn’t. The other classes are likely to provide him with a stronger base to build from in the future.”
Grimfalk sighed.
“You’re right, but we need the power now rather than later. We are way behind the curve in terms of being able to create and empower Champions, and when a creature that looks exactly like a Tyrannosaurus Rex starts eating everything in sight, guess who’s gonna get the credit? I just can’t turn down free divinity like that.”
“Well, all right,” his companion admitted. “But will it make his devolution take longer?”
“No, it shouldn’t,” the theropod deity said with authority, “I researched this class when I was trying to figure out which ones would help my Champions accept the theropod template the quickest. From what I can tell, the devolution process is essentially applying the template too. So Charlemagne will probably have to devolve again soon after, but he’ll get one good rampage in.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Longclaw agreed. “Why don’t you go ahead and select it then?”
Grimfalk concentrated for a moment and then frowned.
“I can’t. He won’t let me.”
“Who won’t let you?” Longclaw asked in confusion.
“Charlemagne, I guess,” the other theropod responded. “The system just said, ‘You have lost a contest of wills’. I don’t understand it at all!”
Grimfalk jumped up and began stalking around the room angrily.
“I raise him from nothing and give him my power, my very own divinity, and this is how he repays me?! I could devour him in a single bite!”
“Grimfalk…” Longclaw said, before getting cut off.
“Don’t ‘Grimfalk’ me! This is what I’m always talking about. No respect! First Phasco and then the stupid parasite in that ridiculous top hat. I can’t believe you actually went on a date with him!”
“Grimfalk!” Longclaw’s voice cut through the deity’s tirade.
“What?” Grimfalk demanded, annoyed at being interrupted. Longclaw merely pointed at the screen, where an enormous mushroom cloud was rising in the distance from where the city of Porto Novo used to be. Quickly manipulating the controls, the demideity zoomed in on the ruined city.
“Oh my Brett, what have you done,” Longclaw whispered as the two stared in horror at the devastation.
