A ring appeared on the ground, glittering in all its golden glory. Somehow, the item appeared more “real” than everything around it.

  Charlemagne very much wanted to wear the shiny ring, so he agreed to let the System put it on him. It vanished but, much to his surprise, did not end up on one of his claws. He checked himself as best as he could, but wasn’t able to spot the ring anywhere.

  Running outside, he made a beeline for the first reflective surface that he could see. The ring was in front of his left eye. Shaking his head violently, the rooster was unable to dislodge it. He also couldn’t seem to see the ring in his peripheral vision, despite being able to see far beyond the angle necessary to notice the golden object. Then he mentally shrugged, chalking the whole thing up to the vagaries of the squiggles, and moved on to the next thing on his agenda.

  Fidele, the hen that had been picked by Judith to lead the combat team, had finished selecting her squad by the time that Charlemagne had arrived. Judith and the five hens that made up the squad were in the middle of examining a battered three-wheeled vehicle which was essentially a motorcycle in the front and a tiny truck bed in the back.

  “Bawk?” Charlemagne asked, surprised that the girls had managed to drag the thing all the way into the farm.

  “This is your battle wagon,” Princesse announced proudly. “I found a nice long strap that you’ll use to pull it. We’ll put one of the girls on each of these little things here,” she added, pointing towards the handlebars, “to make sure it goes in the direction you want. The other three girls will ride in the back, one facing each direction, looking out for anything that could be a threat or good to eat.”

  “Or anything that looks useful,” Judith added, clearly annoyed at having been upstaged by Princesse’s creation.

  “Bawk,” Charlemagne said, causing both Judith and Princesse to blush.

  “All right, Fidele, get the girls loaded up. And don’t distract Charlemagne! This is a serious outing, not a picnic,” Judith scolded.

  The combat team leaped into action, with Judith taking the rear guard while the others took up their positions in the back of the trike and on the handlebars. Charlemagne was not exactly thrilled to be pulling the entire contraption, but he didn’t want to put a damper on the girl’s enthusiasm. So he gamely moved to the front of the modified motorcycle and allowed Princesse to loop a long, strong cord around his chest.

  “This will allow you to cover a lot more ground than if you were all on foot,” Princesse explained again.

  “Bawk,” Charlemagne noted.

  “Yes, we showed Fidele and the girls how to work it while you were busy getting your new item. Which looks fabulous on you, by the way.”

  After finalizing all the details that apparently needed to be discussed, Judith told Charlemagne that the girls were ready to move out. Truth be told, he felt a little silly to be pulling such an awkward load, but the three-wheeled vehicle rolled smoothly and needed little assistance as the six chickens pulled out of the farm and onto the dirt road, headed toward the center of Parakou.

  It didn’t take long before one of the girls spotted movement, alerting the others that there was movement up ahead and to the left. Charlemagne disentangled himself from the strap connecting him to the trike and went to check it out, using his new Identify skill on a non-chicken for the first time.

  Charlemagne had eaten over a dozen of these lizards during his forest escapades when the army was hunting him. But that was before the System had arrived and he was unsure if the lizards had gotten significantly stronger. It was time to find out.

  Rushing in at top speed, the surprised lizard never had a chance against the devolved rooster. It was caught in the vice-like grip of Charlemagne’s beak and tossed through the air, landing right next to the converted motorcycle. The girls wasted no time pulling the poor beast limb from limb, devouring as they dismembered. In a trice, the lizard was gone.

  Heartened by the first encounter, the combat group remounted the trike, ready to continue. Charlemagne, in good spirits as well, resumed his duty as a beast of burden. The morning was still young, and there was a lot of ground to cover.

  Two dozen lizards, five goats, three monsters that looked like dogs but weren’t, and one actual dog later, all of the girls had reached level 10 and received their classes. It was late in the afternoon, and Charlemagne had grown tired of pulling the trike around. For one thing, he had to go a lot slower than his top cruising speed in order to keep the thing stable. But what was more annoying was that the stupid thing kept falling over, because the girls were not very good at turning.

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  Even so, the rooster couldn’t help but regard his work with pride. Each of the hens had received a class, and all of them had chosen an option that would help them protect the flock.

  While the first three classes were focused on fighting skills, Charlemagne was pleasantly surprised to find that Bertille’s class, Fowl Medic, had come with the ability to summon a variety of items that helped to treat injuries. Fidele, who had suffered a few deep puncture wounds during the fight with the four-legged monsters, was patched up in a jiffy once Bertille finally figured out how to use the powers that came with her class.

  Clemencia’s class showed a lot of future potential as well, assuming that she could raise her Special attribute enough to unlock mana skills. Her initial ability allowed her to create a sound as a distraction and worked great in conjunction with Imade’s stealth skills. With her assistance, Charlemagne also received a level to his Sneak skill.

  That wasn’t the only bonus that Charlemagne received during the hunt. Eating the dog had given him a boost to his compatibility with his theropod template.

  Charlemagne was satisfied with his day’s work and confident that the combat team, if they worked together, could handle routine threats that the flock might encounter. Now that the hens were taken care of, at least in the short term, he could spare the time needed to head north and find the free city of animals that Francois had told him about. Surely they would be willing to trade food such as corn, rice, and soybeans in exchange for a steady supply of unfertilized eggs (once the girls figured out how to separate them out from the fertilized ones, of course.

  When he and the three hens returned to the farm, he rewarded the battle team and his three direct subordinates with a sufficient amount of roosterly attention before making the preparations needed for the trip. That is to say, he gorged himself on chicken feed and got a good night sleep.

  The next morning, Charlemagne awoke at his usual time and, after waking up the farm with his crowing, said goodbye to Princesse, Judith, and Philomene.

  “Bowoark,” he said, comforting the trio.

  “You’re right, Charlemagne, and we’ll be eagerly waiting for your return,” Philomene answered.

  “Come back soon!” added Princesse.

  “I’ll make sure the girls train hard and never stop looking for threats! Once they’ve leveled up a bit more, each other them will lead their own team. But I hope you’ll be back before then, Charlemagne,” Judith promised.

  With all the goodbyes having been said, Charlemagne wasted no time in taking off and heading due north from the city of Parakou. He started to follow the road north, but as he neared the forest of N’dali, which was west of the aptly named town of N’dali, his nutritional sense that he had received from his Special Ability, Food for the Stomach and the Stomach for Food, started going nuts.

  The rooster landed on the outskirts of the forest, sniffing the air and sampling the scents that the wind brought in. Most of the smells were normal: there were a few cattle, some goats, snakes, lizards, and even a few wild dogs. But there was something that Charlemagne didn’t exactly recognize, although he could have sworn he’d smelled it before. The rooster, having advanced in intelligence enough to guess that this scent belonged to whatever was making his food sense go crazy, decided to check things out.

  The ambient light dropped to almost nothing as soon as Charlemagne entered the forest, far more than he would have expected from the existing tree cover. The reason soon became clear, however. It was the squiggles' work.

  The smells that had emanated from the forest were almost drowned out by a flood of new scents. Charlemagne couldn’t recognize most of them, nor could he track anything with confidence within the forest. For one thing, his nose was nowhere near as sharp as a canine’s, and, on top of that, the scents overlapped and formed a thick soup that made isolating any particular one quite difficult. Thankfully, as a rooster, Charlemagne was a vision-oriented hunter to begin with. So, he activated his Sneak skill and slinked forward though the dense underbrush, wondering what delightful things to eat were waiting for him ahead.

  Charlemagne received his first snake-bite within five minutes of entering the forest when a large screen snake dropped from the trees and, landing directly in front of the startled bird, caught him right in the chest. His Identify skill told him that he was looking at a monster, while his Monocle of Refinement showed him that the base of its skull was a weak point.

  One swift Strike from Charlemagne’s beak caught the monster as it prepared a second attack, separating its head from the rest of its body. Charlemagne quickly ate the snake, letting his Mana Core work on the dose of venom that he had received. Then he reactivated sneak and continued forward, this time making sure to scan the treeline as well as the ground nearby. That was when the second adder emerged from a fallen log and bit him right in the thigh.

  By the time Charlemagne had been in the forest for ten minutes, he had been bitten a total of six times. His head began to swim a little bit from the effects of all the neurotoxins, and his Mana Core was now struggling to keep his body augmented as more and more of his body’s resources were spent keeping the magical venom at bay. What had begun as a fun hunt through a prey-infested forest had turned into a test of endurance, one that Charlemagne was forced to admit that he might not win.

  Deciding that he needed some fresh air to clear his head and some time to figure out a new strategy, the rooster turned around and began to retrace his steps through the forest. It was then that he realized a disturbing fact. He was completely surrounded by the adders, and they were moving in to finish him off.

  Charlemagne, completely unprepared for the tactics displayed by the snakes, did something that surprised even himself. He took to the air, leaving the adders in the dust.