by Zeke Biddle
Talking about the mission like I’m playing any old video game helps me keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Eulalia covers my mouth with her hand and whispers into my ear, “Alexandra might be right about the need for silence. Especially if all those monsters you predict really are out there.”
I nod against her hand. I match her nearly silent whisper. “Sorry. Nerves, I guess. Listen. Hear that water up ahead?” I’ve watched enough nature shows to know that predators frequently find prey near rivers. “Stay alert.”
Alexandra turns with her hand on her hip to warn against me talking again, but her words are cut short when human hands reach down from the branches right above her head and pull her up into their dark depths.
11
“What the hell was that?” I shout. “Were those human hands attached to monkey arms?”
“Gorillas aren’t monkeys, asshole,” a gruff voice says from above me.
“Sorry about that,” I say, squinting up into the branches, trying to find the source of the voice. I can’t fight something I can’t see. I’ll apologize to anything if it will keep Alexandra safe until I can come up with a plan. “Of course you aren’t a monkey. I’m just worried about my friend. You’re the one who kidnapped her, right?”
“I was. A good sneaky trick, don’t you think?”
I bite down on my tongue to temper my reply. “Oh yeah. Very clever. I don’t suppose we could have her back? She’s very important to our family.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” The gorilla sounds bored. “But, no. Don’t worry about her safety, though. She’ll be a very important part of our family from now on. Our hybrid-family has the best protection you could possibly imagine, for we are mighty as individuals, and unstoppable when united.”
“Well, that’s very unfortunate. I’d hoped we could avoid a battle. I’d hate to have to…He’s gone, isn’t he?”
“Afraid so,” Eulalia says, pointing to the rustling leaves a few trees over. Wherever he’s taking her, he’s faster through the branches than we’ll be on the ground. “But it was a very good speech you’d started.”
I roll my eyes. I’m going to need to talk to her about not just being a yes-woman to my stupid ideas. I obviously need all the help I can get.
I turn my attention to my familiar and send it soaring high up above the trees. Off to the east, the branches are swaying more dramatically than elsewhere, and the center of the chaos is on the move.
“Come on.”
We press ahead with branches swatting at our faces until things break up when we reach the riverbank. Between us and the water stand two of the strangest creatures I’ve ever seen. Their heads, hands, and feet are very human, but the rest of their bodies are very animal. One looks like a gorilla and the other like a lion. They are both standing on their back feet and smiling at us as if this kind of thing is perfectly normal.
The gorilla holds Alexandra behind it with one hand but lets her go when he sees us.
I stop and grab Eulalia’s arm to make sure she doesn’t walk past me. “Crap.”
“Can we handle two of them at the same time?” Eulalia asks.
“I don’t know, but we better do it quickly if we’re going to try.”
I point across the river at a small shack. There’s a glowing white outline around it. “That must be important. I bet the monsters are being made there.”
We all hear a scream from inside the shack.
My curiosity gets the best of me, but I have more pressing needs to attend to first: saving Alexandra.
“Keep close, and heal me whenever I’m about to die. Do you have any attack spells that will help?”
“No. Not exactly, but I can cast a poison spell that will slowly weaken them and make them move at half their speed.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me before? That’s perfect. Do it.”
“I don’t know how many times I can cast it before I’ll be out of magic until we rest. What if I can’t heal you during this battle?”
“Don’t worry about that. I think our best option is a little shock and awe.” I pull my wand from my belt. “Which of you furballs wants to burn?”
“Kill monkey-breath first,” Alexandra says from her position behind the gorilla. She doesn’t look any worse off than when I last saw her. “I’m tired of smelling that funk.”
Without knowing anything about the creatures, I have no reason to think one of them might be more dangerous than the other. But two of them is definitely more dangerous than one. “As you wish. Just remember not to waste any time on the lion until the gorilla is dead.”
Based on the glare she directs at the gorilla-man, my battle plan won’t matter. She barely even acknowledges that she’s also standing next to a lion. She is not happy the gorilla was able to abduct her.
“Ready, Eulalia?” I ask as I start calling up my fireball spell, reaching for my wand.
“Ready.”
“Cast your poisons as fast as possible.”
Right as the battle begins, I ponder why Alexandra is allowed to walk freely. Shouldn’t she be tied up or something? After all, what’s the point of the hybrids having human hands if not to tie knots and that sort of thing?
The damage to the gorilla when Eulalia casts the spell isn’t dramatic, but the effect on his mobility is.
He’d been reaching for Alexandra, probably to escape with her again, when the spell landed. Alexandra effortlessly drops below his grasp and dives between his legs.
She stabs upward and stabs him in the crotch.
I squeeze my knees together and groan in the kind of sympathy only a man could properly understand.
Despite my empathy for a manlike creature who’s just been neutered, I still blast him with fire. The smell of burning fur makes me want to vomit, but the hybrid still hasn’t died.
Alexandra takes care of that problem by stabbing upward again, straight between his legs once more, and there’s no way I’ll be volunteering to clean the filth from her sword.
“What is wrong with that woman?” I ask no one in particular while shaking my head at the carnage.
Her methods might be crude, but they work.
The gorilla collapses to the ground with one last whimper.
I look around for the lion-hybrid, but he managed to sneak away from us while we’d all been focused on the monkey.
And don’t come back!
“Don’t you ever touch me again, you dumb monkey!” Alexandra yells down at his corpse.
Chimes and trumpets sound.
“What was that?” Eulalia asks.
12
Laughing, I say, “I think we leveled up.” I don’t have time to enjoy the moment or check for what new skills we’ve reached. “Behind you!” I yell at Alexandra.
The lion lands squarely on her back, pinning her to the ground.
“Cast your poison spell again,” I tell Eulalia.
“I can’t. I already used it on the—”
If I’m right about leveling up, all of her mana or whatever the game uses to quantify magic has probably been recharged. “Just do it!”
She casts the spell and the lion slows as the magic takes effect.
“I don’t understand,” she says.
I don’t have time to explain.
Even though the lion’s weight is more than enough to keep Alexandra from escaping, he’s too slow to do anything about the fireball that blasts him right in the face. Before he’s even realized I’m attacking, a second fireball hits him, and then a third.
A fourth flies harmlessly over the area where he’d been before he falls lifelessly beside Alexandra.
I’m still breathing hard when Eulalia pulls me into a hug. She whispers into my ear, “It’s over. She’s safe now. You saved her.”
I squeeze her back.
The adrenaline is already fading away, leaving me tired and exhausted. “We need to sleep.”
Another scream from the small shack nearby reminds me our jobs aren’t quite done yet.
“Let’s go see what the hell’s going on over there first.”
After wading carefully through the river, we stand in front of the shack.
It’s so small there can’t be more than a single room inside. The only sounds are a steady thrum.
“Come on. Let’s get this over with,” I say when I’m convinced there can’t be too big of a problem inside the structure, and no one has appeared from the surrounding area to try and kill us.
I pull open the door and walk through the opening. The girls hurry to join me inside. It takes our eyes several seconds to adjust to the darkness of the single room. When they do, it doesn’t help much with figuring out what we’re actually seeing.
There are test tubes and beakers on shelves all along the outside walls. Long bending tubes of glass stretch up toward the ceiling to connect them to a machine in the middle of the tiny space. The machine is a wonder of gears and pistons, spinning and pumping in perfect harmony.
On a conveyor belt that passes through the machine from our left to our right, there’s a buffalo head emerging from the machine. It’s moving painfully slowly, exacerbating the creepiness of the moment.
When we hear the scream again, it comes from inside the machine.
“What the hell am I looking at?” I ask.
“It’s the machine where the hybrids come from,” Eulalia says, her voice dripping with disgust.
“How does it work?”
“I don’t know, Marcus, but we must destroy the machine before it makes more of those… things.”
I ready my fireball spell, but Alexandra pulls my arm down when I point my wand at the contraption.
“Hold on. You have to destroy the machine, but we should check inside it, first,” she says in a somber tone.
“What do you mean?” Eulalia sounds disgusted. “The vile creatures that spew out of that…thing…must be stopped. Blast it to hell, Marcus.”
I close my eyes to shut out the sight, if not the sound, of the two of them arguing. It is so odd that Eulalia wants me to go all alpha male on the machine while our wild warrior wants me to be more gentle.
I’m missing something.
The scream comes from the room again, and I suddenly understand Alexandra’s desire for caution. I might not know how the machine works exactly, but I’ve just figured out what she suspects. It uses a human to make the hybrids, and whatever evil is happening inside that box, there’s a woman in great pain.
I give the buffalo-thing a quick look to confirm it isn’t about to leap at us, but the belt is moving so slowly, we still have several minutes before it will be completely…what, born?
“Let’s see if we can find a door or some opening into that thing,” I say.
“What if there’s some kind of monster or witch inside there making the hybrids?” Eulalia asks. “Just blast it first, and then we’ll see what was going on.”
Eulalia makes a fair point, but I shake my head. “There might be a surprise inside, but I think there’s an innocent victim we can save. I can’t just kill her because it's the easiest way to handle this mess. I won’t be able to live with myself if I’m wrong.”
Eulalia takes a long, slow breath before nodding. “You’re a fine man, Marcus. You too, Alexandra…well, a woman version of a man…you know what I mean.”
They both follow me to the other side of the machine where we find a door with a handle. When I give the handle a yank, the door bursts open, and a wave of purple slimy goo gushes out and covers us all. The flood carries a woman out with it, and we all land on the floor in a tumble of limbs.
“This smells vile,” Alexandra says.
“What is this slime?” Eulalia asks.
“No idea,” I say. “But I bet we can ask her.”
The lady on top of me is naked. Her eyes are wide open, and she appears nearly catatonic. I’m tempted to try to slide her off me so we can all move away from the stink of the goo, but she looks like a deer caught in the headlights, and I’m a little afraid the next shock will literally kill her.
“Ma’am,” I say as gently as possible while tapping her on the shoulder. “We’re here to rescue you. Are you injured?” I nod at Eulalia. “She’s a healer and should be able to help you out.”
The lady shakes her head, but not to answer my question. “You can’t be real. This can’t be real. I died long ago.”
13
“Listen,” Alexandra says, already standing and trying to wipe the goo from her skirt. She quickly gives up when she sees how sticky it is. “You sure haven’t been screaming like a dead woman. I don’t know what happened to you, but I don’t think you’re dead. Does she feel like she’s dead, Marcus?”
The woman shifts against my body.
I blush, realizing how naked and soft she is. She feels very nice against me, but this is clearly not the time and place to notice things like that. “No. She definitely doesn’t.” I clear my throat, hoping I can shake free of the dreamy lovesick tone I hear in my voice. “I think she’ll be perfectly fine after a quick bath in the river. Hell, we’re all going to need one after getting dunked in whatever this shit is.”
Eulalia and I help the woman to her feet. We all start toward the exit. Alexandra turns back and stabs the half-formed buffalo hybrid in the head.
“Good thinking,” I say, and blast the machine with fire.
You’ve destroyed 1 of 2 Hybrid Generators. Destroy one more to complete the quest.
“Well, fuck a duck. I’d hoped there weren’t going to be more than one of these things,” I say.
“What are you talking about?” Eulalia asks.
“The mess-—” I stop when I realize they can’t see the message.
“Dasandra said there were two of these shacks,” I lie, hoping they don’t ask any questions.
“Balls,” Alexandra says with a grunt.
“All the better for gathering more experience and gaining more levels, I guess?” I mumble before realizing I kept talking about game mechanics they can’t possibly understand.
“What are levels?” Eulalia asks.
“It’s complicated,” I say. Changing the subject and hoping I sound confident, I add, “But we survived this mess easily enough. How hard can the other one be?”
The lady wanders over to the corner to retrieve a pile of clothes, a quiver of arrows, and a bow while watching our conversation intently. She suddenly rushes into my arms, nearly crushing my ribs when she gives me a hug. “Thanks for saving me. I owe you. I am yours.”
“Whoa, don’t be…”
Gillian Farcraft has joined your harem. You currently have 2 of 5 women in your harem.
“Hey, that was my spot,” Alexandra snaps.
“I thought you were holding out for a better offer,” I snap right back, wondering how she could have even known it happened without seeing the message. There must be some indicator I’m not aware of.
Alexandra blushes, something I never expected to see out of her, but it somehow makes her look even prettier. “Yeah, well, you seem okay, so I figured why wait any longer? But this bitch just stole my spot.”
Despite being covered in slime, the new woman places both hands on her very naked hips and stares down Alexandra. “Your spot?”
My jaw drops as I stare at her body. The gross slime no longer covers her as thickly, and her thin frame and pert breasts are impossible to pull my attention away from. She’s shaved, too.
I keep staring until a rock hits me in the chest.
“Hey!” Alexandra shouts. “Can you shut that mouth of yours before you swallow a fly, and maybe tell this bitch she can’t be a part of your harem without your permission?”
I look back and forth between the two women, and then at Eulalia for help, but they are all waiting for me to make some grand decision on my own.
“Now that Alexandra mentions it, that was pretty bold of you to force yourself into my harem. Why shouldn’t I just kick you right back out? I have known Alexandra longer.”
No
t that Alexandra seemed interested in me at all until this new woman stole something she thought belonged to her.
So this is what it feels like to have two women fighting over me.
I don’t like it one bit.
No matter which woman I accept, the other will be mad at me, and until we leave the Cursed Woods, I can’t exactly abandon anyone while the hybrids still exist.
“Wait a second.” I point my staff at Alexandra. “If you want to join my harem, just ask.”
“It doesn’t work like that, wizard. How do you remember to keep breathing when you’re that dumb?”
I turn to Eulalia. “What’s she talking about?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. Joining a harem sometimes doesn’t work. No one really knows why. After you pick up a new member, though, a certain amount of time must pass before another can join. But the time is, like, random. No one can predict when exactly you’ll be eligible again.”
I ponder her words before I understand.
Leveling.
If I could pull up the game menus, there would probably be a very clear mention of what level I’d need to reach before a third woman could join. Nothing I could do about any of it right now, though, so I try to move back to the situation at hand.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” I ask Gillian.
The woman bats her eyelashes as if fighting back real tears rather than trying to seduce me. “That machine slowly bled away my health. If you’d arrived a few minutes later, I would have died…again, I guess.”
Alexandra snorts. “Lady, you’ve never been dead a day in your whole life.”
Eulalia says, “Dear, I can heal you quick as lightning.”
“Hold on,” Alexandra cuts in before Eulalia can cast the spell. “How do we know she isn’t the one responsible for creating those monsters? Who’s to say she’s a victim at all?”
She’s not wrong.
“What do you know about whoever is making these hybrids?” I ask.
The woman shrugs. “Not much. I wish I did so I could convince your warrior before she slices me in two.”