An Owl's Rise

Of course, the bat sensed the impending danger and now felt Evelyn\'s presence, but it was to late for it to react.

As soon as it opened its wings and tired to open its mouth to use echo location, its mouth was hit by the wind blade and its head was sliced halfway through.

Miraculously it managed to survive, but it was definitely on its last leg and began falling to the floor of the cave unable to keep itself up.

Before it slammed into the ground and made a loud noise Evelyn made sure to grab it and with her claws. Before she crushed and pieced its throat, ending its life.

\'Its right wing was pretty injured anyway. Probably would have starved to death eventually anyway.\' Evelyn thought as she examined the venom bat\'s damaged wing.

Even at the fiend beast rank with it missing half of a wing it was unlikely to recover unless it was miraculously able to evolve to the next rank.

Having killed an obtained another venom bat Evelyn felt her spirits lifting after her failure with removing the venom sack from the first one.

\'Now I should see if I can find some more. If I am lucky, I will come across others that are injured and alone which make for easy prey.\'

Charging deeper into the cave Evelyn felt a newfound vigor to complete her missions here and went on ahead feeling more confident.

Incidentally she did come across more bats, all of which were at the peak of the fiend beat rank which had debilitating injuries.

The further in she got the less crippling the injures were, but she began wondering what had done this to these beasts who should have been close to the top of the food chain in this area.

\'Are they at war with some other inhabitant of the forest? But the injuries are all pretty similar, and how would some of them have even gotten back to the cave in the shape they are in?\'

Finding this anomaly to be baffling Evelyn could only wonder what was going on her. But since she could not and had no intention of asking the bats, it was a mystery she was likely to never find the answer of.

Nevertheless, it did making hunting the bats in the cave much easier as they were not as powerful as they could have been due to their injures, and with most of them being alone she was able to pick them off like the silent assassins owls were.

\'Looks like the end of the road.\'

Sadly, her good luck could not last forever, as she soon came around a bend in the cave where she saw a larger cluster of bats.

There was no way she was going to just throw herself at them. So, since she had already collected eight bats at the peak of the fiend beast rank, she felt satisfied.

Instead, she headed in another direction and went looking for the ore that she needed to use in the creation of fortification potions.

\'Oh, there it is.\'

Spotting a batch of the vendelrite that she was looking for Evelyn flew down and began scanning the area.

Everything seemed clear and so she gave the shining black rock a test hit.

As she had been told it was fairly brittle and crumbled easily into smaller chucks and powder.

Still according to Melisandre when it was ground down into a fine powder it acted as a catalyst between other materials in the brewing of a fortification potion and made it around thirty percent stronger.

\'Might as well grab it all.\'

Going to work Evelyn smashed away and stored the chucks of vendelrite into her storage amulets.

Soon enough she had finished off this deposit and was on her way looking for the next.

However, along the way she spotted a group of venom bats flying around coming the oppiste direction as her.

\'Crap.\'

Looking around Evelyn tried to find someplace to hide, but there was nothing around that would be suitable as the bats were using echolocation to get around.

\'Screw it.\'

With no other option Evelyn turned towards the bats and charged at them.

She had already seen that the group consisted of mostly low tier fiend beasts, and peak tier wild beasts, with the only stronger bat being their leader who was a mid-tier fiend beast.

Charging in Evelyn caught their attention fairly quickly, but she was much fast than them and was in the middle of their group as they were reeling from her sudden appearance.

Then before they could react there was a large bust of light as Evelyn used her heavenly flame which lit and heated up the cave.

Being hit with what was essentially a flashbang, all of the bats were caught off guard and stunned for a moment with a number of the weaker ones simply dropping dead from the heat.

Lowering the gravity around her Evelyn dropped all of the bats out of the air like a balloon that suddenly lost all of its helium.

Loud thuds echoed through the area as the bats crashed into the ground and Evelyn quickly dispatched them with her talons or some wind blades before they could even attempt to get back up.

\'Hm seven low tier and one mid-tier. I suppose I can use them for practice.\'

After taking the remains of the fiend beast ranked venom bats she had killed, Evelyn swiveled her head around and made sure that nothing else was coming for her.

Fortunately, it seemed that all was still quiet, and she proceed in search of more vendelrite.

But as she was smashing out the second deposit she found, she heard the flapping of wings coming towards her.

\'Hm it is a bit bigger than any of the ones I just ran into.\'

Just from the sound alone she could tell that this was a sizable bat, and when it came into view, she was able to see that it was one at the peak of the fiend beast rank.

This was her first time seeing one of them flying around as she had ambushed the other ones while they were resting. But with its wings spread out it seemed quite a bit larger.

\'I would say it is about the same size as me. Oh, and it has an injury as well. Though not as bad as the other ones I have seen.\'

This one was only missing one of its ears and had a scar down its face, which was far less debilitation than the others that had their wings mutilated, or a foot cut off.

\'She who strikes first wins.\'

Before the bat was in range to use find her with its echolocation, Evelyn shot out and sent a large gust of wind towards it. Taking preemptive action and trying to catch her new opponent off guard.