Nearly a kilometer into the airspace above the Black Swamp, I honed in on my next target as I charged up a Combination Spell attack. Wisps of silver and red flickered off my steady form as I gently glided around while biding my time.

Tier 1 Spells Circles slowly materialized before my beak as I concentrated my Magic before a weak flame slowly grew in size and density. After ten seconds, my originally weak red flames had brightened and lightened in shade to a much more threatening orange before I arrived at my limit.

Now I just had to get the timing right…

I finished my preparations with a final deep breath before withdrawing my wings and letting gravity do the rest.

A couple seconds later, I was halfway down to my target before I activated one of my premade Empowering Spells, flapped my wings, and instantly accelerated up to being 20% faster. Then, upon getting about a hundred feet away from my target, an unassuming brownish-black alligator who had been ignorantly eating some sort of decaying animal, I released the rest of my Spells.

Fshhh!

The outcome was instant. My fireball rapidly grew to be nearly ten meters wide before it crashed right onto the alligator and its meal. All around it, the ground instantly dried up before ending up charred black, while the water around the edge of the little piece of muddy land the alligator had previously been standing on instantly started boiling over.

The alligator itself just slumped over as it started steaming; its previously slightly brown scales, now scorched to oblivion.

[Name: Muddle Alligator

Estimated Rank: D+ (Before Dying)

Description: A fully mature version of one of the many common types of Alligators native to the Black Swamp. It is now dead and most definitely overcooked for human standards. If its core was damaged, it is rapidly losing its essence at this moment.]

'That won't do at all!' I thought as I walked over the still heated ground and furiously started pecking open the alligator's body. After hunting in the Black Swamp for a couple days, I had entered this kind of situation too many times to not immediately go for the Monster Core.

I'd Leveled Up quite a few times and gotten strong enough to graduate from D- to purely D Rank, so my beak was sharp enough to cut through the alligator's bony scales and before long I had disemboweled the Alligator and fished out its cracked Monster Core.

'Well… Don't mind if I do,' I rolled my eyes as I swallowed the Monster Core. With my Magical Gizzard Skill at Lvl 4, I could completely digest everything bar C- Rank and above Ranked things; and I do mean 'things,' seeing as I could process inorganic materials like ores.

[Magic Reserves: 89/89 → 61/89]

Damn…

One-thirds of my Magic gone in the blink of an eye; in just one attack at that. That's going to take a while to recharge even after I finish eating the rest of the alligator.

Thrash! Thrash! Thrash!

I sighed at the sound of water rapidly thrashing all around me as I flapped my wings and gained a few dozen meters of altitude. Looking down at the source of the noise, I couldn't help but roll my eyes.

'Of course, there are more of them,' I rolled my eyes.

No matter. Even if they were all ranked to be at my level of power — none of them being fully mature like the alligator I had previously assassinated — and I no longer had the element of surprise on my side, they were all remarkably unintelligent. The worst they could do against me is spit balls of water or stone in my direction; most of the time, failing to shoot anywhere near me.

Ah, the perks of being able to fly…

It's grossly unfair, but I am not above exploiting all of my advantages to their utmost limit; especially not to the dim-witted and reckless animals that bothered me just before I was about to start eating.

I swooped down as I prepared a Tier 0 version of my Fireball Spell. Then, when I was at most ten meters away from the second alligator that would fall to me during this encounter, I activated the spell and chucked a relatively harmless mass of weak flames at the alligator's eyes. The fire did its job as it got my prey to close its eyes and remain helplessly unaware of my approaching form long enough for me to land on its neck.

Crack!

Having Level Up and after fighting restlessly for the last couple of days, my Strength was such that I could grasp with my claws and shatter everything within the D Ranked alligator's body. With my claws retracted and through the sheer power of my Grip, I rendered the alligator's flesh into mushy pulp, its neck and spine crumbling along with the fires of its life.

Unfortunately, despite killing another alligator, to do so, I had put myself close enough to the others for their terrible marksmanship to no longer matter. On the bright side, the alligators were still extremely dumb, seeing as they had failed to quickly group up and instead opted to continue hurling magical attacks at me.

'This is going to suck,' I whined as I covered my head and shielded my body with my wings as I casted a Tier 1 Reinforcement Spell. I wouldn't have been able to avoid all three magical attacks at the same time, so I decided to better endure them all whilst being in my most defensively powerful state.

Th-th-thud…

[Life: 100% → 94%]

As I felt the last stone break off into wet pieces after crashing into my body, I unfurled my wings and took to the skies once more. I assessed the damage done and frowned when I felt some of my feathers had been knocked off and some bruising had started to form.

Well, whatever…

I'd deal with my injuries after I finished exterminating the three remaining alligators. The idiots below me were still insistent on using their magic while staying apart from one another, so I waited a bit for their magic reserves to die down enough for their attacks to lose magical potency before I started picking them off one by one with hit-and-run.

A dive bomb here, a couple of pecks there, and pretty soon I was left with just a single alligator who now wanted to flee. 'Uh, how about no?' I snorted as I landed on its back and cleanly severed its spine.

[Level Up

Status

Name: Nova

Species: Lesser Eaglet

Level: 7/10

Rank: D

Life: 94%

Condition: Hardly Injured

Magic Reserves: 61/89 → 49/93

Attack: 50 → 72

Defense: 40 → 48

Speed: 47 → 60

Endurance: 37 → 45

Magic Potency: 10 → 41

Magic Resistance: 34 → 42

Skills:

Common Eagle Bloodline Lvl 1 → Lvl 4]

'Finally!' I chirped happily as I started to eat my fill. It usually didn't take this long for me to eat after killing something; after all, I didn't go out of my way to attack groups of monsters for a reason.

Oh, and I guess Leveling Up to Level 7 was cool too. I'd kind of gotten over the whole game-like process of my rapid maturation after my Eagle Bloodline had been purified. And by that, I meant that the concept of Leveling Up had lost its novel feel to me.

It turns out, Leveling Up was a totally natural process for all Monsters. Humans, my Bloodline told me, could Level Up too, but only Monsters could manifest the process of speeding up their maturation. Humans would at most just feel a bit more powerful; there wouldn't be any three-year-old D Rank or above Ranked people that looked like grown men or women even if they could easily annihilate entire battalions of their Rankless peers.

I was still thrilled to see my Level, and power by proxy, increase. It's just… My increasingly pure bloodline had already started putting into perspective just how insanely long it would take and how ridiculously hard it would be for me to complete the mission Munich gave me.

At the moment, I was just a week-old Eaglet. I couldn't be called an ant or even just a speck of dust to the strongest entities I currently had learned of; and those were just A Ranked variants of the types of Eagles I could potentially evolve and mature into.

I have no doubt that there are much, much stronger monsters somewhere out there in this world. But they are so far removed from what I am currently dealing with that it could take years, decades, or even longer to approach their level even if I continue hunting and fighting as aggressively as I've been doing for the past couple of days.

I'm talking about beings four or five evolutions above the fodder-like existence I currently am in comparison; Monsters with the potential firepower of nukes. Is it any surprise then, that I've stopped celebrating small achievements like simply Leveling Up through the maturation of my second form?

To get through just this second phase of my life, I'll have to go through ten such events. Needless to say, it would be ridiculous to make a big deal every time the occasion came up, considering I'd have to Level Up more times through every subsequent evolution I underwent. In the end, it wouldn't surprise me if I had to Level Up thousands or even tens of thousands of times.

"Eeek!" The high-pitched squeal of a woman in distress suddenly brought me out of my idle musing as I had just started eating up the last of the alligators' corpses.

'A person?' The thought confused me quite a bit, considering I'd scoured through at least a couple hundred square kilometers of the Black Swamp without finding so much as a trace of another person's existence.

"Oh god, oh no! I'm going to die!" The distant person shouted.

Wait a minute… That's not a woman, that's clearly a man's voice! I snorted a laugh as a stand-in for actually laughing at the thought that any man could be capable of such girly screaming.

"Eeek!" He was at it again.

I should probably go help him or something. Though, I could stay exactly where I was eating what was left of my food as the man was actually making his way towards my direction. At least going by the sounds of his girlish screams, it certainly sounded like he was running towards me.

Soon enough, I caught sight of what looked to be a haggard-looking seventeen-year-old man. His clothes looked like they might have once been high-end robes, but now they were muddied and cut up. He also had his back turned to a bunch of E+ Ranked Bats that were furiously crashing into him and scratching at him.

Whistle!

I cried out for both the bats and the man to know that I was present. The symbol Katherine had placed on my body glowed moderately so as to convey to the man that I was on his side, but he was so defeated by my appearance that he instantly just gave up and stumbled onto his knees.

Perhaps he simply stopped thinking after noticing that I was a much higher Ranked Monster than the bats chasing him. That or my body, which was currently still bathed in the blood of the alligators around me, did the trick.

A shame the bats weren't at all affected and just continued attacking at the poor man. Some of them foolishly even went for me!

Welp, they all burned to a crisp after I casted a Tier 1 Fireball Spell. Their pathetic intelligence and lackluster speed made it impossible for them to get away after I had made my way over to the man's side.

Sadly, their thoroughly charred bodies were completely unsalvageable; they're Monster Cores totally incinerated. Though, I guess on second thought, it wasn't that big of a loss after considering that they had been Monster Ranked far below me. So, I completely ignored what was left of their corpses as I walked over to the man.

Hmm…

He glanced at me with fear and despair in his eyes before looking down, hanging his head, completely ready to die; still totally unaware of the symbol that glowed from under my wing. So, as tactfully as I could, I walked over to him and outstretched my wing for him to see.

But he didn't look up even as the seconds dragged on…

Eventually, I lost my patience and bonked him in the head 'lightly' with the same wing, so as to not hurt him beyond shocking him out of his stupor.

"Ow!" He looked up at me with a surprising amount of annoyance for someone who had been expecting me to kill them and asked, "What are you waiting for? I want a quick death!"

I bonked him again for ignoring my wing before he asked, "Are you going to torture me to death now?!"

I felt my eye twitch before I bonked him for a third time and started waving my wing at him threateningly. The idiot before seemed to need an even more blatant signal, so I redoubled the amount of Magic I was pouring into the symbol on my wing.

"Oh..." was all he said after finally noticing that I was a Tamed Beast. "Well, this is awkward now, isn't it?"

I rolled my eyes at him and snorted.