Chapter 5: Something Larger Watches
By the sixteenth day, Kai Shen had killed eleven hornets.
Not recklessly.
He had spaced them across three days, selecting only lone foragers well away from any colony trace.
He was not yet large enough to handle a defensive swarm and he knew it.
The goal was not glory.
The goal was accumulation.
[Kai Shen Day 16]
[Strength: 28]
[Speed: 31]
[Agility: 34]
[Perception: 29]
[Devour Power: 67]
[Abilities: Devour | Stillness | Reflex Boost I | Eight-Point Awareness | Camouflage Skin I | Jump Burst I | Venom Resistance I | Precision Strike]
[Body length: approximately 7.5cm approaching adult stage]
He had changed.
Not in any way visible to the outside world he still looked, to any passing predator, like a large-ish mantis minding its own business in the undergrowth.
But the quality of his movement had shifted.
He moved with economy. He inhabited stillness rather than performing it.
And through Eight-Point Awareness, he could read the forest's rhythms the way a person reads a familiar room in the dark without effort, without error.
He was, he estimated, near the upper limit of what his current body size could achieve.
Another moult was coming.
Before he retreated into that vulnerability, he had one target he had been setting aside.
He had been watching the dragonfly for two days.
A common green darner Anax junius. He knew the species from memory.
Body close to seven centimetres. Wingspan nearly ten. Speed that made his Jump Burst look pedestrian.
Compound eyes giving it nearly three hundred and sixty degrees of vision, with exceptional motion-detection sensitivity.
By every rational metric: too dangerous.
"And yet," Kai thought, "I want to hunt it."
He wasn't entirely sure why. Partly analytical a dragonfly's aerial abilities would be transformative if extracted.
Partly something less reasonable.
The same stubborn forward-lean that had apparently survived the transition from human to insect intact.
He spent two days mapping the dragonfly's patrol route.
It was consistent. It followed the edge of a small forest pond, with one reliable deviation: it always passed within three centimetres of a particular overhanging reed at the pond's north corner.
There, a rising air current off the water let it hover briefly the one moment in its entire circuit when it was genuinely still.
Kai needed to be on that reed before it arrived.
The problem was the crossing.
The pond's edge was open ground. No cover. Fully exposed to aerial view.
Normally, a mantis would simply not attempt it.
"Normally," Kai noted, "I am not a normal mantis."
On the morning of the seventeenth day, he crossed.
Four stages. Each timed to the seconds when the dragonfly's circuit took it to the far side of the pond.
Between movements, Stillness. Full camouflage toward the grey-green of the pond margin.
Half a metre of open ground.
Forty minutes.
He reached the reed.
Climbed to the underside. Shifted his colour to pale beige-green.
And waited.
The dragonfly made three full circuits.
First pass: two centimetres beneath him, no pause.
Second pass: the same.
Third pass the rising air current caught its wings at the north corner, and for one perfect hovering moment it was almost stationary, three centimetres below and slightly ahead.
Kai activated Precision Strike.
He identified the target: the cervical membrane between head and thorax thin, unprotected, the one location a dragonfly's reflexes could not save if the strike was accurate enough.
He activated Jump Burst.
He fell.
The dragonfly saw him. Of course it did.
Its wings fired. It tried to bank away.
But Kai was already inside its reaction time.
The Jump Burst had turned a drop into a dive.
Ambush Strike multiplied the impact.
Precision Strike placed both forelegs exactly where he had aimed.
They hit the pond surface together.
The dragonfly's wings hammered uselessly at the water.
Thirty seconds.
The fight was over.
Strength +6
Speed +9
Agility +8
Perception +7
Devour Power: +21
[Ability extracted: Aerial Awareness (passive: precise 3D spatial mapping of nearby airspace, tracks movement in all directions)]
[Ability extracted: Wing Sense (passive: detect wingbeats and airborne vibrations up to 50cm)]
Two extractions again.
Kai climbed back onto the reed, soaking wet, and ate in the thin afternoon light.
Aerial Awareness settled in like a new sense activating.
The airspace around him previously felt only broadly through Eight-Point Awareness resolved into something precise and three-dimensional.
A moth, fifteen centimetres away. A bird, landing on a branch twenty centimetres above and to his left.
He went very still.
A bird.
Through Wing Sense he could feel the mass of it on the branch. Somewhere between thirty and forty grams. A sparrow, perhaps, or a warbler.
It had landed quietly.
It was sitting quietly.
Watching the pond.
Watching him.
Kai did not move.
He kept Stillness and Camouflage at full suppression and thought very calmly about how thoroughly he would lose a fight against a thirty-gram bird.
The bird did not move for seven minutes.
Then it flew away.
Kai exhaled or the mantis equivalent and sat with his pulse gradually settling.
"Not yet," he told himself. "But one day."
He cleaned his forelegs.
Another moult was coming.
On the other side of it, a larger body. Better stats. Further reach.
The forest hummed with the sounds of late afternoon birds calling, insects rising and falling like breathing, a thousand small lives moving through their routines without a thought.
Among them, still very small and very quiet, Kai Shen moved.
He had a long way to go.
He knew how to get there.