MTLNOVEL Chapter 150: Skybaud
Space twisted around Kael as he teleported out of the cave and appeared in front of Nalii.
"Where are you going?" He asked with a frown. Nalii didn't look like she was in the right state of mind to be wandering around at the moment.
"Don't worry, I can take care of myself," Nalii said casually while still keeping her strange smile on her face.
"Hmm, follow us then, and stay by my side." Kael offered.
"Follow you to where? Zabita and I are the only ones in our caves." Nalii revealed.
"Everyone has gone to do their own thing again. Eidel and Ruda went out to hunt, Katari and that new caste are trying to work some things out I guess, N'bayé has gone to look for something.
Olivia is hanging out at the bottom, I honestly think she should get her fat ass to work on something. Oh, Diane is briefing Commander Bibi on potential threats that need to be neutralized..." She revealed.
"Oh," Kael muttered, he looked to to his right, down the descending spiral road. He briefly let his spirit sense out, letting it roam like a ferocious beast that had been released from its cage.
Indeed, just as Nalii had said, the other lionesses were absent from their caves. He narrowed his eyes, he had planned on strolling down the spiral road, checking on each of his lionesses one after another.
But it was quite unrealistic for him to think that would all be in the cave at this point.
Nalii suddenly did something that caught Kael's attention, she lay on the ground. She lay on the vines that were creeping out of her cave, with her head facing the sky.
"What are you doing?" Kael asked curiously. He saw how her antlers were glowing and could feel the surge of energy coming from the vines.
"I'm going down the mountain," Nalii said happily. The matured and motherly lioness was already gone, all that was left was this bundle of unexplainable humor.
After saying that, the vines Nalii was lying on twitched and turned. They wrapped around Nalii's body, covering her in a cocoon made of vines.
Vines stretched out of the cocoon, acting as legs that propped the cocoon up from the ground. With grace and elegance, the vine cocoon crawled down the mountain.
Kael watched this with a tired expression. He wanted to stop Nalii from going down the mountain but he received a telepathic message that caused him to readjust his priorities.
*EIIIICH!*
The loud cry of an eagle reached Kael's ears. Just then, Priya who had just walked out of Nalii's cave looked in the same direction Kael was looking at.
"Oh, Skybaud came," She said.
Off in the distance, under the dark blanket of the night sky, a small dot was approaching rapidly and expanding just as fast.
The figure got closer, revealing itself to be an avian creature. Two powerful and massive wings flapped magnificently, creating small wind blades as it moved.
A massive eagle soon appeared above Kael, a creature that was simply filled with Majesty.
He had yellow and white feathers on his body, arranged in layered patterns. His beak was a darker shade of yellow, the same with his feet.
Being stared at by both the King and his consort, Skybaud dared not stay in the sky. Wouldn't it be an insult if he made the king have to raise his head to address him?
He descended to the ground and landed in front of Kael and Priya. His landing caused a low thud sound to spread out and his jet-black talons created clanking sounds as they struck the hard stone ground.
Skybaud stood at a height of two meters plus, being taller than Kael who was in his humanoid form.
Kael had noticed that when birds had similar power levels to other creatures tended to be taller. An example was Isaiah, the Space Crane.
Isaiah was also of a similar power level to a tier 3 lion but he stood nearly three meters tall, towering over most creatures of the same level.
Although not all birds were like this, enough of them were like that for Kael to notice it. Skybaud who stood before him was not as tall as Isaiah but he was still quite tall.
"Your Majesty," Skybaud bowed to his King, just as he had been doing since the circumstances that caused him to be a subordinate of Kael occurred.
More than one month ago, after Kael had realized that depending on Natalia for information was very risky he had made arrangements to secure his own intelligence-gathering agency.
He formulated a plan to catch some birds, the best type of creatures other than the spiders for intelligence gathering.
His plan also involved the use of Darius's body to make a trap to catch these birds. Despite so much time having passed, the dead tiger remained fresh. Even in death, the power of a tier 4 tiger still preserved the body.
Kael didn't know how long this preserved state would have lasted and he had no patience to wait and find out.
Kael had N'bayé cut off some large pieces of Darius's body and assembled them in different areas of the forest. These areas were closely monitored with observation runes which Kael also had access to.
Skybaud just happened to be the first to fall for one of the traps.
Back then, he was just an eagle with a power slightly higher than a tier 2 lion, his strength was high and his appetite was higher. He desperately searched for any opportunity to evolve to the next stage of his life.
He had been flying high above the sky one afternoon, gliding just below the sparse clouds with sharp winds overflowing from his feathers.
His sharp eyes caught sight of a squirming red piece of flesh on the branch of a tree. On a normal day, something like this would have been ignored by him, he preferred hunting slightly larger animals and those with high quality too.
But something about this piece of flesh was interesting. His keen eyes were able to notice the faint black stripes on the fur-less flesh. He could also see traces of a very heavy aura.
Curious, he dived lower to have a clearer view. He saw that the piece of flesh hung from one of the branches in an unnatural way like it had been left there accidentally.
The faint stripes he was seeing spurred a bit of information within his mind. There was a fight in that area not too long ago. A fight between a golden lion and a tiger covered in red lightning.
He had not been present to watch the fight but his friends and relatives who were observing from a distance had described it as the most intense fight they had ever witnessed.
'Could this be the flesh of that tiger?' Skybaud had thought that day when he saw the piece of flesh. It was way too optimistic for him to think of this but he saw no reason not to.
After all, the body of the tiger mysteriously disappeared, no one knew if that golden lion had eaten it or if it had been distributed to his subordinate.
Rumors had spread around at some point that the golden lion had ripped the tiger to shreds and the flesh was spread all over the mountain. Although most of those who witnessed the battle knew that this was false, they didn't say much about it.
Soon, that rumor has become a conspiracy theory of some sort with some creatures literally dedicating time to finding the pieces of Darius's body. This rumor spread and died within a brief period, not up to a week, but enough time for Skybaud to know about it.
Maybe, just maybe, this was one of those pieces. Skybaud made a decision, he swooped down, heading straight for the piece of flesh.
His talons had been brandished against the world, ready to grab and take off with the flesh as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, Kael and Fate both had different plans for him. As soon as Skybaud's talons had touched the flesh, a jolt of electricity shot through his body.
The sudden electric shock paralyzed him, cutting off his cry for help and rendering him flightless.
He watched as red tendrils shot out of the tree and the ground, coiling around his twitching wings and legs.
Half an hour later, a humanoid arrived with some wolf escorts to take him away. Skybaud had never been so scared in his life, any creature that could have this anthropomorphic form was not someone he had the power to mess with.
He could only watch helplessly as he was dragged to the direction of the mountain, only then did he realize that he had fallen for a trap. What was weird was that the humanoid did not take the tiger flesh, she just left it there, as if she was hoping to catch more unfortunate souls like Skybaud.
Skybaud had readied his mind, he was convinced that they had captured him to eat. Perhaps, that mysterious king was hungry for some bird meat. The thought of how he was going to die made him anxious and caused him to start screaming like a madman the closer they got to the mountain.
He thought about how they would kill him, how they would cut his throat with their sharp claws, how they would rip his wings from his body…
No one paid any attention to Skybaud's noisy antics and even those who heard his cry from the sky dared not swoop down to save him.
Skybaud remembered how surprised he was when he finally met Kael and the latter proposed the formation of an intelligence agency rather than trying to eat him.