Chapter 144: "Crow, yeet that gator"

The Violet Fireball, paired with Jimmy’s current, realm two, level eight mana quality, should be able to melt through almost anything.

Burning at 2,900 °C (5,252 °F), he wouldn’t be surprised if it melted through hard dirt too. It had the power to do so, especially since it stuck to a surface like a molotov, for two minutes straight!

Jimmy expected to burn this admittedly unique alligator all the way down to the bone! Tapping into some sort of sadism, he wanted to hear it squirm too.

Whenever he could help it, he tried to remain neutral whenever he killed something, beast or human alike. He tried to stay calm, but the fact that this gator resisted his second hottest, and majorly destructive fireball with ease, got him worked up in all the bad ways.

"Come on, die already!" He exclaimed, letting out the breath he had anxiously held in.

For a moment, he believed that he scared the gator, because the moment he shouted, it scurried away.

It rushed forward, and submerged into the lake in front of it.

Jimmy saw the violet remains of the fire follow the alligator into the lake. The coat of fire was hard to shake off, even within the depths of water!

Once the alligator submerged, the fire did not instantly get put out. It remained resilient, almost water proof, but only for five seconds!

"Haha!" Jimmy exclaimed, "That hurt you, didn’t it, you little bastard!"

Jimmy did manage to hurt his target, but to his dismay, he hadn’t managed to kill it yet. Its large tail flickered left and right, pushing its eight foot long body forward throughout the water like a torpedo!

The fire had burned it for forty seconds before the gator decided that it had enough, but Jimmy had a feeling that whatever wound he caused, wasn’t enough to kill it. He figured that he had just heated up its back a little bit, without melting through its titanium-like scales.

"If I just spent three-hundred points to give him a sunburn, I will lose my shit!" He said.

The gator wasn’t dead yet, so odds are that he did just lightly burn it.

Jimmy wanted to lose his shit, and some would say that he had a good reason to, but he refrained from doing so. He was invested in the matter now, yes, but he figured that it would be best if he handled it strategically.

Crashing out never solved anything.

Below everything he was as a crow, mana-based or otherwise, he was still meant to be an assassin. Naturally, he thought like one.

For that matter, he landed thirty feet away from the lake, sat down, and began to meditate. He calmed down a little bit, and started thinking of a nine-step plan. One that didn’t sound completely stupid either to him, or anyone else.

Five minutes later, Zoey came to check on him. When it came to leaving him alone, she was growing more anxious by the day, as she knew that Jimmy liked to put himself in harm’s way quite often.

When she saw him just sitting there, she assumed that he had randomly fallen asleep, so she tried to be quiet. She was tired herself, but she had the sense that she had to guard him.

When she spotted a rugged, green reptilian a hundred feet away, she knew that she was right to trust her gut. She didn’t know what she was looking at, but she automatically assumed that it was dangerous.

"Why did he fall asleep here?" She whispered to herself, "He was supposed to look for food."

Jimmy heard her, and responded, "I am looking for food, but, I’m also trying to think of a plan."

"Can’t you think of a plan back there, up in the tree?" She added, "I don’t like how that big lizard looks."

Jimmy did not want to answer, as he tried to concentrate, meditate, so he simply grunted along, and hoped that Zoey understood.

She did understand, kind of, or at least, she knew better than to be offended by the behavior of a crow who wasn’t even a single summer old. She decided to stick close to him.

Zoey wasn’t used to unleashing directly harmful attacks, but as of recently, she had telekinetic abilities. She figured that she could crush any lizard’s mere head if she tried, which to her, seemed like enough of an offensive defense.

Jimmy continued to meditate. He sat there, for fifteen minutes, until he came up with a nine-step plan that he was comfortable with.

He altered the plan a total of six times, just so he could filter the absolutely horrendous ideas, such as jumping in the water to fight the gator head on. An idea like that was not smart in any universe.

Un-coincidentally, his plan was rooted in spirituality, so now that he meditated, he already had a head start.

’The Screeching Monk...’ He repeated in his head.

Slowly but surely, the picture of a crow was painted in his mind. Its details were fuzzy, like the painting of an amateur artist, but it was enough.

The crow in his mind began to scream.

After a couple of minutes, it began to screech, and once more, it behaved like it had a mind of its own, in Jimmy’s own mind! He could not tell it what to do, not right now.

Seconds later, the crow, in this case, his physical mirror of a Screeching Monk, appeared in front of him. Transparent, loud, and restless!

Skraaa!

It was practically begging for a command, which was to say that now, he had the chance to tell it what to do.

’Alright... let’s move on to step two.’ He thought.

In the meantime, Zoey watched from the background. She had tilted her head so far to the right that one would think she would break her neck! She didn’t understand what she was looking at.

It was hard to convince an illusionist to think that they were suffering through an illusion themselves. Jimmy did exactly that.

"What the..." She mumbled, though, she felt that she shouldn’t interrupt whatever this was.

As for Jimmy, he wasn’t as bothered this time around. The visual novelty of the screeching crow didn’t hit as hard the second time.

Instead, he was more focused on what this crow could provide for him, and in that regard, he believed that he had come up with a plan that not even the most creative assassin in the world could’ve thought of!

"Monk!" He said, "Throw that alligator one-hundred kilometers up in the air, and then make sure it lands ten feet ahead of me."

The screeching ’monk’ who had initially been running in circles around Jimmy, suddenly stopped on its tracks!

It looked Jimmy in the eye, as if it was trying to figure out if it heard him right.

Skreee!