A lot of things happened at once. Gren got up quickly and nocked an arrow to her bow.
The rest of the trolls stayed on their knees, cowering.
Valeria reached for Talos, putting her hands into the flames to try to heal him.
But what surprised me most was that Lesseth jumped on top of Talos, her body steaming as she tried to put out the fire. It was one of the few things that could truly hurt her, and she was risking herself to save someone she wasn’t even particularly close to.
For a moment, Kathy stood there shocked. The eyes still blazed red, so she still wasn’t all the way herself, but I suspected she was closer to being in control than she had been when she told everyone to bow down and serve. Kathy could be a pain at times, but that didn’t sound like her at all. She’d be more likely to make people tell her everything they knew than try to get them to take a knee.
I had to seize the moment to try again. I didn’t even bother getting up from where she’d thrown me, but immediately teleported to a spot a little ways over her head. As I fell, I grabbed the crown from off her head, and then I kept falling. An arrow flew over me as Kathy turned and tried to grab me, but before I hit the ground I teleported again, landing a good forty feet away.
For defeating a silver dragon queen, you have earned 3000 experience points. You now need 1900 experience points to reach fourth level.
I ignored that, although I couldn’t help but feel I’d found another exploit.
Haha! I doubt the system will let you get away with that more than once, but oh, if only it did! Check your stat sheet!
Kathy changed. The silver around her disappeared. Her hair shortened back to its usual length. Her eyes turned brown again. She was standing naked in the middle of a field with a bunch of trolls staring at her, and her boyfriend on fire, and I felt sorry for her. For a moment there, she had been the enemy.
She had also saved the day.
I put the crown in my bag, because that was a priority. Then I pulled out a blanket, teleported once more, and worked on smothering the fire with it.
“I got this, Lesseth,” I told her. “Be safe. You were amazingly brave.”
Lesseth oozed away weakly. I don’t know how to describe the difference between a weak ooze from a strong one, but I could tell. I guess it’s something that you just learn when hanging around slimes.
“Val, Lesseth needs healing too. I don’t know which one needs it more.”
Valeria nodded. She quickly touched Lesseth, muttered something under her breath, and then went back to Talos. I kept moving the blanket, putting the flames out. If Lesseth hadn’t jumped in right away, it would have been a much harder job. Even as it was, the smell of burning flesh was thick in the air.
Kathy knelt next to me. “Please be okay,” Kathy said to Talos’ inert form, her voice catching. “I’m so sorry.”
Talos didn’t say anything, because he wasn’t conscious. Maybe not even alive. I took his pulse, and didn’t feel anything.
Then it was there, weak, and slow, but not gone. It had just taken a while to find.
“Sorry about the arrow,” Gren said, kneeling down to help me with the blanket. “I thought I’d try to shoot the crown off. But your idea was better.”
I was about to ask Gren about the consequences of her missing, but I knew her answer. She’d tell me she wouldn’t miss, and at that range, I’d bet good odds that she wouldn’t have if I hadn’t moved the crown and caused Kathy to reach for me. I wasn’t sure I’d bet my life on it, or Kathy’s, but I wasn’t going to second guess her decision making.
I got another blanket out of my bag and put it on Kathy. She blushed, as if she’d been ignoring the fact that she was naked until then and my action had actually made her more embarrassed, not less.
“We need to get the armor off,” Valeria said. “It’s hot, and it’s making the burns worse.”
She wasn’t exaggerating about the armor. Touching it was like grabbing a hot pan, and you had to do it in bits to avoid getting burnt. But Gren, Kathy and I worked together, unstrapping it and pulling the metal bits away.
Underneath, the skin didn’t look good at all. Where it wasn’t blistering, it was still bright red.
“Will he?” Kathy asked. She didn’t have to say the rest.
“He’ll live,” Valeria told her. “It’ll be a while, even with my magic, that he’ll be okay.”
“I almost killed him,” Kathy said.
“But he’ll be okay eventually,” I said, trying to ignore the burns that were all over his skin. “And first, you saved him. You saved all of us, in fact, Kathy.”
Kathy smiled every so slightly, even though tears were still streaming from her eyes. “He told me he was going off to die. I couldn’t do nothing, although I didn’t know that that would change me into that.”
I followed the “that’s” well enough. “Sometimes you have to take a chance,” I said. “Do you feel back to your normal self now?
“Well, kind of,” she said. She wasn’t giving the conversation her full attention, because she was looking over Talos. “Something has changed.”
“Alright,” I said. “But you’re not going to tell us all to bow down or go on a rampage?”
“No,” she agreed. “I think you can count on that.”
“Lesseth, are you okay?”
She changed her body, so that she was a woman again, although lying down on her back, and smiled up at me. “I am well, my wife, and happy that you care.”
“A kiss would make me better,” she said. “What flavor would you like me to be?”
“The flavor you are now,” I told her. I got the impression that changing her body took something out of her, and she was still weak from her life-saving heroics. She was red now, and I expected raspberries. I kissed her.
She tasted like blood. I started to pull back and then kissed her again. It wasn’t bad when you were ready for it.
Yum. Nearly as good as the real stuff.
Ugh. Why did he have to spoil everything?
Lesseth smiled at me, softly. “Thank you, Abby. I should rest now. I will be okay, and Talos needs Valeria more. But my time for healing will come, I hope.”
“I’ll make sure of it.”
You’re doing this torture me, aren’t you?
Doing what, I wondered, and then I figured it out.
I got up and walked over to Gavabar, who had gotten to his feet. “Are your people okay?” I asked.
Gavabar nodded. “And much better than we had any right to expect they’d be,” he said. “Thank you, Abby.”
“It was mostly Kathy,” I told the troll chief. “Excuse me for a moment.”
“Of course,” Gavabar said. “Will you be at the celebratory orgy tonight? All of you are invited, although perhaps Talos wouldn’t be up for it.”
And Valeria wouldn’t be, either. Somehow I doubted it was Kathy’s thing. “No, but thank you. I’m honored.”
Aw, come on! Do you know how many trolls you could knock up?
“Any time,” Gavabar said.
A few of the trolls leered, and I walked away. Gren followed me.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “We won.”
I nodded. “I leveled. I was just going to check my display.”
“Ah. I leveled too. Let’s do it together.”
I smiled and summoned my character sheet.
Species: Demonic Futanari / Human
Class: Necromancer / Seductress
Experience for Next Level: 1990
Innate Demonic Ability: Dimension Step
Innate Seductress Abilities: Back Stab (Seductress version), Special Attraction, Sexual Satisfaction, Stealth, Exposure
Spells: Life Drain, Detect Magic, Animate Lesser Undead, Find Dead, Mend Corpse, Charm Person, Imbue Fetish, Endurance, Speak with Dead, Fear
Ah yes. Fear! I’ve missed that one. The rest of that stuff seems like bullshit. Trust me, the dead are boring conversationalists. Kind of like you, that way.
I decided to look at them in order.
Stealth: When the seductress doesn’t want to be seen or heard, she is naturally stealthy. This can be used everywhere but is twice as effective when hiding to avoid being detected in relation to a sexual situation.
Seduce the wives, hide from their husbands. Although with your body, the husbands would probably just want a threesome. Although they might be kind of intimidated by that huge dick I made for you.
Great. I was good at hiding in closets and slipping out the back way.
I must have said it aloud, because Gren said, “You can slip in the back way, too.”
“Somehow that just doesn’t seem my style.”
“Oh,” said Gren, looking disappointed. “A lot of my friends say that when you’re pregnant, it feels better that way. I was looking forward to experimenting with you.”
She means that you can fuck her in the ass, dimwit.
“Oh,” I said. “We can do that.”
“What did you think I meant?” Gren asked, confused.
“Uh, never mind. It’s my skill I was talking about.”
“Oh, you have a skill at it?”
“Sure, I’m, uh, twenty percent better at it. No, thirty percent, now.”
Exposure: All of the seductress’s abilities become more effective with appropriate clothing. Less is more.
I wondered just how much exposure we were talking about. Would a little cleavage be significant, or would I have to be practically naked?
I like where this is going.
“You would,” I retorted.
“I would what?” asked Gren.
I bet she’d like it, too.
“Talking to Enash,” I said. “Always a mistake.”
Endurance: This spell requires a moderate amount of mana, and restores the endurance of the seductress. The amount of mana required is greatly lessened if this spell is cast soon after sexual activity.
All night long, baby!
Okay, so it was intended for sex, but it was a good, generally useful skill. And with four women wanting me, I would probably use it for its intended purpose quite a bit.
Speak with Dead: The necromancer may raise a dead person for the purpose of having a short conversation with them. The dead person is compelled to answer any questions put to them truthfully. Requires that the necromancer touch the body, or touch it with their wand.
I could have used that with the orcs, rather than Charm Person, when I’d been trying to find out more about their main army.
Fear: Creates a feeling of terror among all beings in a ten by ten meter area, at a range of up to thirty meters.
An area of effect spell. That could have been very useful against the orcs. Honestly, I hoped never to need such a spell again, but things kept happening.
Look. Here come some orcs! A chance to give it a try!
I looked up. There were indeed orcs approaching, about ten of them. The trolls had gone back to their village, but I still had a couple dozen zombies, so ten orcs didn’t represent too much of a threat.
There were five males and six females, I noticed, and a woman was in the lead. The men were bare-chested except for some leather straps across them, and wore tight brown leather pants. The women wore similar pants, but dyed various colors, with bandeau leather tops and unbuttoned vests.
The leader was pretty hot, actually, in a thicc kind of way.
Gren nocked an arrow. I heard Valeria coming up behind me.
The orcs came to a stop, and soon Valeria and Lesseth were at my side. Kathy stayed with Talos. The zombies were near enough to stop the orcs from thinking that they could take us on just because there were eleven of them and, practically speaking, four of us.
“Hail,” said the leader. “Who is in charge here? Or should we look elsewhere?”
Everyone pointed to me. “Well,” I said. “There is Gavabar.”
“Seriously?” Gren asked. “I love my daddy, but at this point, if you said jump, he’d jump. Besides, you have the crown now.”
“You’re royalty?” the orc asked, fluttering her eyelashes.
I was going to deny it, but Gren quickly said, “Yes.”
I shot her a dark look, and then decided maybe she knew what she was doing.
“And you commanded the dragon that demolished us?” asked the orc.
“Well, it was through an artifact I have,” I said. It wasn’t a total lie.
“Then you have defeated us,” said the orc. “And we come to offer tribute and negotiate a peace.”