Voices screamed, and hundreds of people ran in different directions. Some approached the landing of the monster, and some ran away. In the middle of them all, some people were too shocked or afraid to move.

Then, a little further away, where they couldn’t see where the monster descended, uninterested magicians chalked up the disturbance to a failed spell. They paid little mind to the destruction of a building on the other side of town, and they continued their work.

At the forge, where Andric stood, very few people had seen the flaming creature that floated down from the sky, but everyone heard the crashing it made upon impact with a building.

Boele walked out from the forge and stood behind Andric, and Andric said, “It was a giant chicken,” and made an arch with his finger, tracing the path the monster fell in. A second later, he added, “And it was on fire.”

One of the smiths followed Boele out of the forge, then asked, “What was it?” and looked from Andric to Boele.

Andric answered him, “A giant, flaming, falling chicken.”

Neither Boele or the smith had ever seen a chicken fall from the sky, but they knew as well as anyone about the magical land they lived in. If it was anyone else, they might have scolded him for making things up. But, since it was Andric, they took his words as an observed fact.

The group looked up, watching for more monsters that might fall onto the city, but nothing came. A few seconds later, they turned to view the ends of the street, which intersected with major town roads, and saw many people running away from the interior of the city.

At a time like this, where panic quickly spread among the civilian population, Andric had largely different thoughts from Boele and the smiths. While the smiths were thinking about how to protect themselves and their business, Andric imagined what kind of possibilities could be happening beyond the few rows of buildings that separated him from the chicken’s crash site.

He spoke, “I’m going to investigate,” and dashed away, quickly disappearing in a tight alley between two buildings.

“Wait!” Boele called, but it was too late. Externally, he couldn’t believe Andric would so readily run toward danger. Deeper inside, however, he knew it fit exactly with Andric’s personality. He hoped for the best, then returned inside his forge.

The forge couldn’t run when a mysterious creature was wrecking the town. Boele and his workers closed the bottom hatches on the smelters, placed a cover on the bin of coal, and then hid in the basement of the house. With their small preparations, the forge would have less of a chance of burning down.

When the monster itself harbored flames on its body, though, there wasn’t much that could be done to prevent fires. In addition, if the mages who went to combat it used fire magic, the risk of buildings catching on fire further increased.

A few hundred feet away from the forge, the monster that fell from the sky hopped out of the rubble of the building it landed in and gazed around. It purposefully landed near a large, open area, but it hadn’t expected the building to instantly collapse when it landed on the roof.

With the destruction of the building, wood scattered across the ground, and many splinters impacted bystanders and other buildings. Worse yet, the flames from the monster’s back rapidly spread, and whoever inside the building might have survived the monster’s impact quickly burned alive.

The monster’s head twisted back and forth, and its eyes darted around the opening. Suddenly, its long neck bent down. Only a few feet away, an injured man laid on the ground, and the monster at his entire body with just four pecks.

Not satisfied with such a tiny meal, the monster flapped its wings once and appeared on the other side of the clearing, where he quickly gobbled up three torsos. With so much food around it, the monster disregarded tiny limbs and only went for large bodies it could swallow in one bite. With another flap of its wings, and arrived at a new location.

Many of the citizens of Gallus Town knew about the monstrous creatures that could mutate from ordinary animals, but few had ever seen one. In some cases, when they were too scared to look behind them and see the devastation in the clearing, they died without even knowing what hit them.

One magician had a sliver of bravery, and shouted, “Die, beast!” upon seeing it ram into the side of a building, reducing it to rubble in only a second. He looked at a large wooden beam that stood beside the monster and, with one flex of his mind, activated his ranged wood magic affinity.

From the wooden beam, a large spike protruded into the monster’s side, penetrating flames and feathers. With one flat of its uninjured wing, the monster flew several feet away and spread flames across over a dozen feet of road. Then, with a flapping of both its wings, the monster flew over to the wood magician and effortlessly bit off his head.

Seeing how the wooden spike injured the monster, more magicians came to fight it, but they were all blown back when it jumped onto the roof of a building and rapidly flapped its wings. A few feathers fell down, and the wing returned to its uninjured state.

Flames roared where the monster initially landed, in three locations where it rammed into buildings, and in a fifty-foot radius around the roof where it healed its wing. Hundreds of magicians ran for their lives; they weren’t strong enough to fight something with such a demonic power.

In a few places, magicians with water magic affinities stepped up to control the flames, but most were scared of the monster returning and looked for shelter. However, the buildings in Gallus Town were made from wood, which would eventually catch fire if the flames spread by the monster were not contained.

Whenever a particularly courageous magician attacked the monster and inflicted some damage upon it, it would fly up onto a roof and spread flames around the town while healing the injury. Fire magicians, who were commonly the strongest combat magicians, were powerless against the flaming chicken.

Meanwhile, following it as fast as he could, Andric pursued the corrupted beast.