Adon felt an instinctive sense of pressure at the presence of the flying beast a thousand feet below him.

  Even floating far above, even invisible, he sensed that this was a superior species that could kill him and consume him—would naturally kill him and consume him, assuming that he had no tricks up his sleeve that could upset the natural pecking order.

  This was the same feeling Adon had experienced during his encounters with the eagle and the bear previously.

  This sense of his own status as prey persisted despite the fact that the winged creature did not look up at him—did not seem to be aware of his presence in any way. Adon did not even have any apparent reason to believe the creature was intelligent, but he still felt an instinctive hesitancy at the thought of fighting this monster.

  As he watched, the avian creature tore into its bisected prey. The victim continued wriggling its green limbs, despite being torn in half, even as the bird-like monster sank its head into the exposed innards protruding from the upper half.

  Adon felt slightly queasy at the sight of the monster eating the intestines and drinking the blood of its slowly dying quarry.

  For once, I’m glad my base size is small, he thought. I can’t imagine being killed that slowly.

  It must have been a few minutes at most, but as Adon watched the green figure die, it felt like an eternity passed before his eyes.

  Still, he learned multiple important pieces of information about the second level in those few minutes.

  First, Adon looked away from the monsters demonstrating the circle of life and got a broad view of the terrain. The second level appeared to be entirely a massive underground canyon, with gray cliffsides that rose on either side of a roughly hundred foot gap. The cliffsides were marked with small grottoes of various sizes, where Adon guessed the monsters made their dens.

  This setting began not far from the waterfall entrance—there was a dead end cliffside close by—and continued on for roughly a mile in the other direction, before it hit a wall that either marked the end of the level or at least the end of Adon’s ability to see in that direction, if there was a curve that he was unable to spot from his present distance.

  Second, he used Identify on the two monsters. The green creature was a Diminutive Green Goblin; Adon had guessed the creature’s general race correctly. The gray and white feathered monster was a female Bloodthirsty Strix, a name Adon had never heard before.

  Third, Adon began to piece together how the ecosystem of the second level functioned. The adjectives in the monsters’ species names told a story that Adon was able to corroborate and flesh out with his continued observations. As he was watching the green goblin be slowly killed by the strix, two additional goblins cautiously crept out of some tiny hollows at the base of the cliffside, and they went for a couple of the same glowing mushrooms that the first goblin had been brutally savaged pursuing.

  There was a tense moment when the strix looked up from its prey and eyed the creatures, and the goblins froze. No, they did not just freeze. They stopped, adjusted their postures, and stood in place like baseball players caught in the middle of trying to steal bases, poised to flee to their previous positions. Then the strix seemed to decide that a goblin in its grip was worth more than two that it would have to chase. It lowered its head and continued tearing into its already-captured prey—with added gusto, to Adon’s eyes—and the goblins resumed their forward motion. They plucked a handful of mushrooms each and then high-tailed it back into their tiny grottoes—holes small enough, Adon guessed, that the strix could not easily pursue them into their dens.

  These two goblins were some of the lucky ones, in Adon’s view.

  As he got a better look at the lower elevations within the level, the butterfly saw that there appeared to be many goblins within the hundreds of holes in the walls that were goblin-sized. Most of them were reluctant to poke their heads out.

  Adon knew why. The strix was still out there, finishing off one of their brethren.

  Then another goblin stepped out of its hole. This one was not as lucky as the previous two had been.

  Swooping in seemingly out of nowhere with a horrendous screech, another strix descended. It moved so quickly that Adon felt it would be difficult for him to catch it at its top speed, and as the goblin attempted to scramble back into its grotto, the strix caught it within its massive talons. Then it lowered its long, blade-like beak and began tearing into the poor green monster’s vital organs.

  Since this strix had been less merciful than the first one, the entire area around was soon filled with the sounds of a monster screaming and crying as it was eaten alive. Fatal injuries were inflicted within the first minute, but Adon knew by looking at the nature of the wounds that it might take almost half an hour for the monster to die.

  He was tempted to put the creature out of its misery, but stealth was the top priority right now, and nothing would get these monsters’ attention like killing their prey while they were in the midst of consuming it.

  Despite his disgust for the strixes’ ways, Adon reluctantly flew closer so that he could get a better look at them and a better understanding of the environment nearer to the ground. The humans he was scouting for would not spend much time at the lofty elevation where he had made his initial observations, after all.

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  A closer view of the strixes revealed that they were like some sort of freakish combination of owl and eagle—not like the eagle-owl Adon had hunted and killed before, which was just a particularly large and powerfully built owl.

  These creatures had heads shaped like that of an owl—boxy, with feathery tufts like horns crowning the tops—and long necks like eagles. Their most important features from Adon’s point of view were their remarkable descent speed, their long, blade-like beaks, and their large and sharp talons.

  As he watched the way they interacted with the ecosystem, it became clear to Adon that the strixes were not actually built to fight the goblins. The goblins were probably just a prey creature that the dungeon had spawned to feed the strixes—it was probably cheaper in dungeon resources to spawn hundreds of goblins than hundreds of strixes that would eventually starve to death if not fed on fresh meat.

  But the long, sharp, metallic-looking beaks and claws were clearly intended to kill larger prey than the goblins. Adon assumed that this creature had been specifically designed to fight armor-wearing humans. He did not want to bet that the strixes’ talons would be rebuffed by the knights’ equipment. Especially not if the knights were assailed by the strixes while they were descending the high, steep cliffside

  That’s a really good deathtrap, Adon thought. These creatures are fast and aggressive, and a human descending the cliffside would be as much of a sitting duck as these goblins. Maybe more.

  After his first ten minutes of watching the strixes, Adon thought he had a good idea of how the ecosystem down here worked.

  Then another goblin emerged from its hidey-hole, and Adon witnessed something very different happen.

  The goblin made it to where the mushrooms grew—tortuously distant from the entrance to its little cave.

  Adon saw a strix streak across the open air toward the goblin. The goblin began to run back toward safety—hopelessly, Adon thought, given its speed.

  Then a big, feathered brown shape struck the strix. The smaller bird of prey was essentially batted out of the way of the larger creature and went spinning off toward one of the cliffsides. And the big brown shape—both feathered and furry, Adon noticed—descended at even greater speed than the strixes and stopped the goblin’s flight with a single claw pressed into its back.

  The claw struck with the full force of the creature’s weight, penetrating the goblin from back to chest and coming out the other side. As the strange creature—it appeared to have the front half and wings of an eagle and the back half of a lion—raised the goblin on its claw toward its mouth, Adon could tell the goblin had died instantly.

  That’s interesting. The one monster basically plays with its food, but this bigger guy—Adon quickly Identified it as a Noble Griffin—kills them in a single hit. It’s almost like a difference in philosophy on display.

  The butterfly could easily have believed that the griffins were simply predators, while the strixes were sadists, from their respective behavior—the latter essentially the monster version of vicious serial killers.

  As he observed from his invisible position perched on a cliffside, the griffin swallowed the goblin whole.

  Then the strix that had been batted away flew over and attacked the griffin. The strixes’ long, vicious talons traced a path of blood down the griffin’s back, but the wound looked shallow to Adon, and the attack brought the strix within the griffin’s attack range as well.

  The griffin’s movement was almost fast enough to evade Adon’s sight. It tore at the strix with a diagonal swipe of its claw, and the strix suddenly gushed a miniature river of blood from its center of mass.

  Far from being killed by this horrendous blow, the strix retained the strength to flap its wings and get distance. The griffin rose from its resting position and looked as if it wanted to pursue the strix, but three more strixes suddenly flapped toward the injured one. As the griffin held still a moment, assessing the situation, the four strixes stood seemingly united and glared at the beast.

  The griffin seemed to decide that the strix was not worth pursuing, surrounded by allies, but it also did not appear to fear the number of strixes on display. It did not flee, but simply seated itself and began licking away at the blood on its claws, cleaning itself where it had penetrated the goblin.

  Adon was close enough to the action that he could read all of the creatures’ primitive thoughts at this point, and his Telepathy painted a fascinating emotional and ecological picture of the dynamics at play.

  The griffin seemed to be a relatively simple creature, but one with certain human-like emotions. A sense of pride, or an emotion much like that, kept it from abandoning the field to the strixes unless it was forced out by superior power on their side. It clearly viewed the birds of prey as hateful and inferior creatures.

  For their part, the strixes were all thinking different things. The wounded one, positioned third from the left, flanked by its comrades, doubted that its fellow strixes would join it if it tried to strike back at the griffin. All it hoped for from the other birds of prey was that they would not abandon it while it waited for its chest slash injury to slow its bleeding. The creature was even aware of a certain risk of being cannibalized by its fellows, depending on how long its wound took to heal, though there seemed to be some unity in the face of common enemies.

  The largest strix, furthest left from Adon’s perspective, was thinking about using what appeared—in the video memory Adon could see within its mind—to be primitive magic. The strix had memories of gathering what looked like Adon’s mana ball on its beak or claw and using it, in conjunction with superior numbers of strixes, to fend off griffins in the past. But it seemed reluctant to take the initiative without any way of assuring its allies would join it in the attack.

  The second from the left was bored. It recalled being in situations similar to the present one before, and it was aware that they tended to end in a sort of uneasy truce, with the griffins and strixes unable to fully dislodge each other from their shared zone of predation. From this strix’s memories, Adon gathered that the strixes had both basic magic and superior numbers—around fifty or sixty in total—on their side, while the griffins were larger, stronger, and more powerful, and their hides seemed to be somewhat resilient to both magical and physical attacks.

  The result of this dynamic was that the strix would never win in a one on one fight, but the griffins could not safely hazard a struggle against the strixes’ superior numbers.

  The strix on the furthest right was afraid. It kept having visions of the griffin tearing its head off run through its brain. It had a clear determination in mind to flee if the griffin actually attacked.

  But the silent truce held, until external circumstances changed things.

  The waterfall that had stood behind Adon and to his right suddenly roared downward in a much greater quantity than had flowed before. The pool where the water gathered below started to overflow its banks, and all of the creatures at ground level stirred at the same moment.

  As Adon observed, the second level began to flood.