Valeria looked considerably less credulous. “Can you show us the spot where you fought the zombie?” she asked.
I shook my head. “It’s a pretty long journey,” I said. “And it was weeks ago. I haven’t seen anything like it since.”
“We should go check it out,” Talos said.
“But the divination pointed us to this area,” Valeria said. “Not the eastern edge.”
“Look,” Talos said. “How can you not believe a pretty face like that?”
My seductress passives were working. Valeria frowned and looked at me. I tried to look my prettiest and most innocent. Naturally, that meant my horns itched. Hopefully they were still well hidden by my hair. “I still want to look inside that tomb,” she said. “It’s the logical place, and it’s right here.”
“No,” I said. “Not without a warrant.”
“A warrant?” asked Valeria.
“A custom, where I come from. Never mind.”
“And where do you come from, exactly?” Valeria asked.
Ooops. “Boston. Have you heard of it?”
I shrugged. “It’s a big world.” And not this one.
“What are you hiding?”
A dick, I thought. But she probably meant inside the crypt. “Nothing that concerns you.”
I didn’t want to fight these people. One, because I wasn’t sure I would win. But two, and equally importantly, they weren’t bad guys. They were looking for an evil necromancer, which was reasonable. Their divination might have been triggered by Enash’s awakening, not by anything I’d done.
“Come on,” Talos said, tugging at Valeria’s arm. “Let’s go check out the zombie, and see if we can pick up the trail there.”
Valeria hesitated. “Can you give us better directions?” she said at last.
I wanted them far away, and I hadn’t been in the part of the forest I was talking about. But Xyla had drawn me a rough map, so I did the same in the dirt, drawing the outline of the forest, and then a Z at the eastern edge.
There had to be a better way of dealing with this, I just didn’t know what it was.
Eventually, they trudged off into the forest. The moment they were gone, Xyla stepped out of one of the oak trees. Not from between them, but right from the middle. I’d seen her do it before, but it was still unnerving.
Her leaves covered even less of her than the swimsuit had covered of me. Barely. She ran forward, hugged me, and kissed me. “I heard about them, and I came as fast as I could,” she said. “But I thought it best not to reveal my presence.”
“It’s nice to see you.”
“What was that about a zombie?” she asked.
“I made it up.” I explained to her that I was trying to get rid of them, because I didn’t want them talking to the trolls.
“If they try to kill you,” Xyla said. “I will show no mercy.”
“Hmm. I’m going to try very hard not to be killed. At worst case, I can just disappear for a bit.”
“They’ll try to get in the crypt. And then they’ll find the gate.”
“Good point,” I said. I sighed. “So now what? At best, I’ve bought us some time, but when they find nothing, they’ll be back. And they may be back before then. I don’t think Valeria believed me at all, and I’m not sure Talos did. I think it’s fairly likely he just pretended to so that they could go somewhere and talk about it. Like we’re doing now, I suppose.”
“I can bind them up with my vines,” Xyla said.
She was silent for a moment. “Um, yeah. Maybe they like that sort of thing? All tied up, at the mercy of two beautiful girls? We could make out in front of them and make them all riled up.”
“Sexy, if consensual, but not a long term solution.”
The long term solutions are kill them and turn them into zombies, or seduce them and give them a futanari necromancer fetish. Or you could seduce one and turn the other into a zombie, I suppose. Or give one a zombie fetish!
“Maybe they’ll hurt the forest,” Xyla said.
“Maybe, although I got the feeling that – well, maybe. What’s your point?”
“Well, then I could strangle them in their sleep, and it would be justice.”
Sometimes I really like the way that girl thinks. There’s your answer. Charm one of them to start cutting trees. Sell the logs to the trolls, green tits will take care of the paladins, and you can feel you didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone wins.
I supposed it was progress that Enash was at least trying to work within some sort of framework of ethics. I wished for a moment that I could get him to read Immanuel Kant or something. But the only way I could do that was by reading Kant myself. Once was enough. Besides, even if Enash understood an ethical system, he’d probably regard it the way a power gamer sees a game system – he’d look for the exploits.
“Capturing is fine, but no strangling,” I said.
Xyla pouted. “Even if they hurt the trees?”
“I’m not saying we can’t punish them for that, but we can’t just kill them.”
Xyla crossed her arms in front of her and looked at me with that “you’re no fun” look. However, the action had the effect of making a shelf for her boobs and pushing them up and out, so I was a bit distracted.
Well, two could play that game. “Oh, before they came, I was lounging on the chairs in my new swimsuit,” I told her. “Want to see?”
“Swimsuit?” she asked.
“Clothing worn for swimming,” I explained.
“Why would you wear clothing for swimming?”
“Good point, well made. It’s an Earth thing.” I pulled my top over my head, and had her attention where I wanted it.
“It’s just two triangles and some straps,” she said.
I pulled off the jeans. “Three triangles,” I corrected.
Xyla grinned. “This is your best outfit yet.”
“I thought you might like it,” I said. I plopped myself in the chair. “So I was lounging, .” It hadn’t been quite like that, because I didn’t bother reading a book, and I arched my back a little to push out my chest, and between looking at Xyla, and trying to be seductive, my cock had started to peek out of the top of the lowest triangle.
Xyla jumped on me. Swimsuits were like lingerie, I supposed. The more successful they were, the less time they stayed on.
After we made love, Xyla had forest things to do, and I would just slow her down. The idea of lounging around out front didn’t seem as appealing with paladins roaming the woods.
If I’d imagined a world where paladins were hunting evil necromancers, I would have assumed that I’d have said, “how can I help?” Instead, I was starting to regard them as pests. Although Valeria had been pretty hot. Objectively, Talos was probably hot, too, but I was biased.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
“Based on previous experience, probably not.”
Charm them both, have a threesome, they break their oath, and … what rhymes with threesome?
“Yeah, that wasn’t what I was thinking.” But now that he put the idea in my head, I wasn’t sure it was going to leave. Still, mind controlling people into having sex with me was not something I wanted to be doing. Maybe it was better than killing people, but even that wasn’t clear to me.
Enash started describing the possible threesome configurations in detail, and I decided that I would be better going back to Earth for a bit. I wasn’t sure what was worse, the revolting parts, or the fact that occasionally he’d come up with an idea that was kinda hot.
I spent the afternoon prepping the rooms I wasn’t using for painting. I’d done painting prep dozens of times, so it didn’t require my full mental attention to do it well. I kept spinning on my paladin problem, without a great deal of enlightenment.
When the zombies were done with their daily trip to the trolls, they had directions to return to the crypt and guard it. They couldn’t get in, of course. Locks were beyond them. But that meant that I’d have a bunch of zombies standing outside, ready to be investigated by curious paladins. That would probably seal the case against me, even if they’d previously decided I was too cute to be a necromancer.
Stereotypes were everywhere.
I decided that when the zombies came back, I’d let them in for the night and keep them out of sight in the crypt. I didn’t like the idea, because they didn’t smell good, and it would probably take me weeks to stop the crypt from smelling like rotting flesh if they spent the night. I don’t know that the fresh air did them good, but it did me good to have them in it. Still, it seemed liked the lesser of two evils.
At about four, I got a text from the “doorbell.” Xyla wasn’t one of those girlfriends who texted all the time. It probably helped that she had to go to the mausoleum to do it, rather than having a phone in the pockets she didn’t have. I pulled out my phone, and read it, but the text was blank. Maybe a squirrel had managed to push the button by mistake.
Or maybe Nutty had done it on purpose. I opened my laptop and logged onto the feed from the security cameras on Amaranth.
Talos and Valeria had decided, apparently, that investigating the crypt was more important than finding the place where I’d supposedly killed a single zombie over a day’s travel away. I would have made the same call. They poked at the door, and then Talos swung his mace at it, but it was sturdy and didn’t break. Then they had a quick confab, and pressed up against the wall, as if planning to ambush someone coming out the door. Me, perhaps. The security cameras provided a top-down view.
If it weren’t for the zombies, I could just wait them out. But eventually the zombies would come back. They might decide that ‘guarding” meant stopping two people lurking outside, but zombie logic was weird. Either way, paladin logic probably meant killing all my zombies, which would mean no more lumber service for the trolls. I could probably get the trolls to get their own lumber, but that meant letting them know the location of the crypt, and I didn’t love that, either. It brought them too close to the gate.
Since I didn’t give my zombies weapons, I suspected that two armored people with swords could probably make short work of them.
Valeria and Talos waited in ambush while I hurried down to the basement, carrying my laptop, and stripped off my clothes. I left the laptop behind, since I had a second one in the basement, and climbed down the ladder quickly. They were still waiting.
The zombies might be back any minute. Their return time varied by an hour or so, and they didn’t always come back in a group, since if one of them tripped the others kept going, sometimes even if it meant walking over their fallen colleague.
Colleague probably wasn’t the word that went through whatever passed for their brains. I pulled on panties, shorts, and a tank top, not bothering with a bra because I was in a hurry.
The paladins were still there. I put on tennis shoes, skipping socks. I didn’t have a plan. But I could pop out and say “hey?” And maybe start running in the other direction to make them follow? But no, I’d have to lock the door behind me, and by then they’d be on me and I’d have the key out.
Maybe I’d been hanging around Enash too much, because it crossed my mind that if they attacked me, I could kill them and it would be self-defense.
No, it was better to let the zombies perish and accept the consequences. Except that once they’d seen the zombies, there was no way they were leaving me alone.
I consulted my system display.
Dimension Step: User teleports to any place within twenty meters that they can see. Consumes mana.
Did looking through the cameras count as seeing? If so, I didn’t have to open my door. There was only one way to find out.
“Dimension Step,” I said.