Chapter 115: Scottish

The Blue Fireball roared forward in the blink of an eye.

It crossed the muscular woman’s speed effortlessly.

The fish, who tried to wiggle and roll its way back into the waters, was forced to suffer a sudden halt.

The Blue Fireball hit it in the head. This alone shouldn’t have been enough to kill a nine-foot long, fat, meaty monster, but it did.

The fireball, backed by the fact that he had recently ascended to the second realm of Mana Comprehension, burned a couple hundred degrees hotter, and pushed against the fish’s head a second longer.

Simply said, he burned off half of its head, skull and all. No fish would survive that, and likewise, it couldn’t slip back into the waters again. It could roll in there accidentally, but that wasn’t much of a problem now, because it wasn’t like the fish could swim away.

Jimmy vividly remembered Blue Fireballs leaving six-inch deep craters in solid stone walls. His current attack was a no-brainer.

[Wels Catfish killed]

[+1,800 system points]

[Total points: 8,381]

Despite the visibly incredible kill he landed, Jimmy, at that moment, was not interested to look at the fish’s magically mauled head.

Instead, he thought, ’Wels Catfish? Why does that sound familiar? I swear, it’s things like this that make me think that I’m still on Earth. My sweet fuck, I hope I didn’t smoke my way here.’

It was hard to figure out anything related to his prior life, with his current bird brain, but he was always tempted to try.

In this case, the tall, muscular woman behind him snapped him out of his existential dread.

She shouted, "Ye’ve just melted the wee moustache fish’s heid! How, ya dafty?"

Her distinctive holler forced him to focus more than he usually did, and as he picked up and studied a few of her words, quite automatically, he was hit by wave after wave of déjà vu. Everything sounded familiar, even the fish did, but he couldn’t figure out why it sounded familiar.

Simply said, he couldn’t quite put his wing on it.

Nevertheless, he answered, "Fire."

"Och, ye used fire, did ye?" She held her breath, though, she quickly devolved to yelling again a moment later. "But ye’re a bloody craw! An’ how in the name o’ the wee man are ye speakin’ tae me, when ye’re still a blasted craw!"

"Ah’m a rare coo." He answered.

Her excited frustration melted down to a light giggle, as she said, "Ach, so ye are, are ye? Ye’re nae a coo, ye’re a craw!"

Jimmy called himself a cow, instead of a crow. It was an honest mistake, they sounded similar in this woman’s language, and there were too many words coming at him at once. He was rightfully confused.

’Sounds like old English,’ He thought.

The moment he realized this, it felt as if his brain slipped out of his ears, and punched him in the face. He realized that he used to speak some variant of English fluently in his past life, and he vaguely remembered having some German heritage, and these couple of facts alone have been burned so deeply within his sub-conscious in this new life, that he had always assumed he thought in German, or English, but spoke the language of the crows.

It would appear that he has thought in the language of the crows as well, and hearing a raw variant of English helped him make the connection.

In hindsight, it was a realization that he could’ve lived without.

Language made him more confused than he already was, and there was no free IQ boost in sight. He was not a fan.

Jimmy realized that he had been staring at the ground for perhaps too long, because when he snapped back to reality, he realized that the wonderful woman that he had an odd encounter with, was gone.

So was the fish. Most of it, at least.

There was a slab of fish meat behind him, likely placed there from the same woman, whose name he still did not know.

The slab had to weigh at least three times more than him. It was more than enough to tame his hunger.

’That’s fair,’ He thought, ’She did most of the work. I only blew the fish’s head off.’

Jimmy stopped thinking for a moment, and chowed down on the slab of meat.

The meat was easy to tear through. It was almost loose to the touch, as if the fish accumulated fat throughout most of its life, instead of working on its muscles.

It was an old fish, which could explain it. Old muscles weren’t as tense.

The taste wasn’t exactly appealing. It almost tasted muddy, but he didn’t care.

Fifteen pounds of meat was a meal that he didn’t plan to walk away from, so he tore one chunk after the other, until he ate his weight in fish meat.

Ten pounds of the slab remained. He had only ripped through a third of it before he felt like he was about to explode.

It was nice to feel full, but in the end, he had to wash the muddy taste out of his mouth, so he took a great sip of water from the lake behind him.

After he felt content, he had this lurking feeling that what remained of the slab was taunting him. This wasn’t the first time he got a meal that he couldn’t entirely eat, but after everything he just went through, he refused to let the slab rot away below the hot sun.

To help beat it, he called his friends over. He was hoping that they wouldn’t ask for an explanation as to how he ran into a neatly cut slab of meat, because he didn’t want to explain an experience that still confused him.

Thankfully, they were quiet, and enjoyed the barely decent breakfast.

In the end, only three pounds of the slab remained, and a great deal of it was inedible fat, so Jimmy was satisfied.

"Alright, follow me," He said, "We have some humans to stalk."

The team weren’t quick to question the stalking, but they got confused soon enough.

Though crows could see a great level of detail, they still believed that the humans in this village were insignificant. Normal.

The fact that the average human here was bigger, and physically stronger, was not enough to grasp their attention for long.

Vorin asked plenty of questions that Jimmy brushed off with simple responses. As for Zoey and Julia, they knew not to press on the matter after they noticed that Jimmy didn’t want to give them a solid answer.

Virena didn’t care. She used the opportunity to climb on Jimmy’s back, and take another nap.

There was a reason why Jimmy ignored most of the questions that his team asked. He focused on the villagers below him.

This settlement may have twenty buildings and less than a hundred people, but it was very lively, even now, less than an hour after the crack of dawn.

People were getting ready to face the day, and some of them, especially the older folk, were ready.

The conversations they had were light. They weren’t shouting as much as the woman he talked to, which was quite helpful, because he could listen into their conversations, and slowly learn their language.

It was a tough task nonetheless, because at his best, he listened into seven conversations at once.

From simple questions regarding their hair, to advanced fishing techniques, he had to listen to them all, and nearly pretend that he was interested in what was up a grown, hairy man’s skirt.

’They like wearing skirts, don’t they?’ He thought, ’Or am I being rude? Those are the manliest looking skirts I’ve ever seen. The checkered green looks manly.’

Other than such brief moments of clarity, he was mostly overwhelmed.

He was learning a bundle of new words after every few seconds, and so his brain got pummeled with new, unskippable information constantly.

The Human Communicator was a purchase that he could not turn off. He was to learn human languages, whether he wanted to or not. The only way he could avoid this, was if he flew away from the village, which he did not plan to do.

The only positive thing he experienced was that the sense of déjà vu he suffered through earlier, nearly disappeared. He knew their language was some variant of English, which overall, lessened the strain he felt in his head.

’It definitely sounds like Scottish,’ He thought, ’Or it’s an odd variant of it?’

The thick accent, and their skirts, otherwise known as kilts, were the two main hints he had, and he couldn’t ignore them.

A disturbance followed within the village, and it broke the mostly calm atmosphere that the rest of the villagers cultivated early in the morning.

Jimmy heard someone shout, and he found the voice behind it familiar.

It was the same woman that he saw pull in, and beach that four-hundred pound Wels Catfish earlier.

’Now, who was dumb enough to piss her off?’ He thought.