by Noah Layton
‘This is better… than I ever even remembered…’ Elena moaned, as James’s head lolled back uncontrollably against the silk of the bed. He had never felt anything like it, and the fact that she was a goddess had only made the experience hotter. Looking up at her perfect round boobs bouncing up and down drove him closer and closer to the edge, but he was determined to resist the explosive urge that seemed to have been begging to burst out ever since she had uncovered herself.
He hadn’t needed to move; Elena had been glad to do the work as they indulged in each other’s bodies, but with his hands still rested upon her curvy waist he pressed her body down upon him, remaining inside her as he grinded her body against him. Elena’s mouth suddenly went wide, her eyes filling with redness and her teeth sharpening as they had done back in the apartment. Her arms threw wide and her wings spready hugely. She screamed out with ecstasy, her walls clasping hard around his shaft before sending him completely over the edge. As she came she tightened up impossibly, leaving James unable to hold it any longer. He felt the pleasure rush through his abs and fill his waist too quickly, any semblance of control over his manhood vanishing in an instant.
With a hellish roar he finished inside of her, holding her body down against his cock as he filled her up with his warm seed. Even his body seemed to fall away in that moment; there was only all-encompassing pleasure, encasing his body before steadily bringing him, and his goddess, back to reality.
Elena’s wings returned into place, her eyes returning to the normal tint and her teeth receding as her eyelids flickered. She sank forward onto James, her huge, soft breasts resting against his chest as she wrapped herself around him. He was still deep inside of her, and the feeling of her body pushing against his could have sent him crazy enough to go another round, but the exhaustion somehow won out.
His goddess eventually pulled herself from him, falling to his side as they both drifted in and out of consciousness before finally settling on the latter.
Chapter Twelve
Unleash
Before Tommy’s Joint had fallen into obscurity it had been famous among the residents of Manhattan for its décor. A penchant for craft beer and cheap home-cooked meals had given it a steady stream of customers over the years, but after an outbreak of E.coli from a series of under-fried servings of chicken wings had resulted in the place’s reputation being brought very nearly to the brink of extinction.
After a run-in with a laundry list of health code violations long enough to keep the original Tommy in court for more than a decade, a settlement had been reached that had sent the man himself far away. Tommy’s Joint had now been taken over by Joe Tomlinson, who knew two things for definite about the purchase he had made; first, that having a surname that sounded a little like the owner’s original name didn’t make you anything like the guy, and second, that once a place’s reputation has been put through the ringer, there’s little chance that it will claw its way back into relevance.
Joe, of course, had realised this too late, as he stood behind the bar three months into the tenancy of the place and one month away from bankruptcy. The only things that he had for company now were the scattered drunks whose names he didn’t know, numbering three or four in shadowy booths at the back of the open-plan innards of the bar/restaurant, and the aforementioned décor that adorned the walls.
All manor of random objects were scattered across the walls, lined up and fitted into carefully organised places like a slapdash game of Tetris. A fishing pole coated in gold paint; a license plate from Louisiana; the body of an acoustic guitar…
Only one of these items was of any importance, of course, but Joe Tomlinson didn’t know that until this very night, when he would meet the end that he had been moving towards his entire life.
The sound of the bar door opening was paradoxical for Joe – on the one hand he knew that he was going under, and a new drinker would do little to stem the tide of the loan sharks that he assumed would eventually come for him. On the other, business was business, and he wasn’t going to turn it down. He had convinced himself that he would be success in life, and some small part of him was still clinging onto that notion.
The man who entered the bar was clad in black from head to toe – a tunic that looked like something out of a cosplay convention, leather pants, boots, and a leather overcoat. His face was sharp and aggressive, his hair tattered and falling over his shoulders.
He stumbled into the bar like he was already beyond drunk, not paying a single bit of attention to Joe or any of the other patrons.
Joe readied himself, looking the man up and down, waiting for him to charge towards the bar, shove his head under one of the taps and pour frothing beer into his mouth.
Instead he ignored the bar completely, looking about the room frantically. His eyes scanned the haphazard range of objects, squinting through his eyelids as he ran his gaze over every orifice of the place like his life depended on it.
Letting out a slight grunt, like an animal sniffing around for its prey, the man stomped loudly into the centre of the bar and continued his search for… Whatever he was looking for.
‘Hey, listen, buddy,’ Joe started. ‘I don’t want any trou-’
‘Hm!’ The man grunted loudly, holding up a finger and pulling a tight-lipped, glaring scowl at Joe. ‘Shut up. Shut the fuck up.’
Joe did as he was told, inhaling deeply and stepping back away from the bar top.
The man tilted his head to the side suddenly, cocking his neck like a distracted dog. His eyes scanned the musty air as he listened.
In an instant he whipped his head around, focusing in on a particular location upon the wall. He hurried forwards to one of the booths, clambering up onto the table before running his hands over the objects before him; the end of a paddle from a rowing oar, a bike tire, a 30kph road sign… And an ancient, battered lockbox.
Despite having not interfered with most of the objects assorting the walls, Joe recalled the lockbox reasonably well. It was rusted beyond belief; the bronzed colors had merged with whatever original metal it had been composed of long ago.
The man grasped at the item and ripped it away from the wall effortlessly, bringing the bindings with it and taking out a chunk of plasterboard in the process. Some of the regular drunks were so fazed out that, by this point, they still hadn’t registered the strange man who was no in their midst; with the ripping of the lockbox away from its place, every head in the bar turned in his direction.
The man paid no mind to them, of course; only when thing was dwelling within his thoughts, and it was right in front of him.
He held the box delicately, looking down at it wistfully before muttering something in a language Joe had never heard before. Latin, maybe? But after finishing his phrase he smashed his fist through the lid of the lockbox, breaking the rusted metal as if he wasn’t even trying.
A blackened wisp of smoke flew from the object, rushing into the air before sinking to the ground nearby. Forming as he himself had done not so long ago, the smoke steadily solidified into something that turned Joe’s blood cold. It was the kind of sight that caused the glass that he had been scrubbing clean in an effort to save water to slip from his hand, the kind of sight that meant he didn’t even respond to the sound of it smashing against the ground.
The drunks in the bar made the first sounds he had heard many of them make in weeks aside from the quintessential grunt of get me another glass. Little did they know upon placing their previous orders that it would be their last.
‘Now, my kin,’ Ascevious said longingly, patting the creature that had formed upon the head and looking about at the patrons and, of course, Joe himself. ‘I know you are so very hungry after such a long rest. As a reward, here is your feast.’
Joe knew that there was no way he was going to make it to the door, and neither were his final few customers on his final shift.
He just hoped for a quick death.
As Elena would say, though, there was no point to any of
this; it had occurred entirely by chance. Live by random choice, die by random choice.
Even if that choice is made by somebody else.
Chapter Thirteen
Lunch
‘The choice has been made. You’re a master now.’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call myself a master.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because master suggests that I’m an expert at something.’
‘Well, you are an expert at something, I know that.’
‘Let’s be real, you did most of the work there.’
‘You pleasured me beyond belief. You did something right, believe me.’
‘But I’m not a master at… Hunting down goddesses. Or monsters.’
‘So what do we call you then?’
‘A… Hunter, I guess. That’s what we’re doing. I’m hunting goddesses and I’m hunting monsters. When I get really good at those things, we’ll call me a master.’
‘So what about the first thing? Do we call you… Sex master?’
‘That’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard,’ James laughed. ‘Even though I do like the sound of it… You’re doing the goddess-flattery thing again, aren’t you?’
‘No!’
‘You can’t trick me anymore.’
After returning through the dimensional crack to James’s apartment, the pair had showered off together and changed, Elena into her new clothes and James into a fresh pair from his closet. Even after she had drained him – literally and metaphorically – he found that he couldn’t keep his hands off her, even while they were washing down. Their lust had resulted in another fucking session against the tiles of his shower, her hands clasped in his as he pushed her against the wall and she wrapped her legs around him, forcing him to finish inside of her once again, which he had gladly obliged.
His desire for heat had changed too – despite overheating and begging for freezing temperatures just a short while ago, James had found himself desiring scolding warmth under the shower nozzle, something that Elena explained was natural considering the changes that he was going through.
‘Haven’t you ever thought about living somewhere more pleasant, master?’ Elena asked, once they were dressed and back in the living room.
‘All the time,’ James said, ‘but doing that means having a lot of money, which I don’t exactly have on hand right now. I’m a college student. Besides, this situation is a lot better than most of the other students at my college. My grandparents left me some money, my mom too, and in the eyes of most in this city this apartment is nice, believe me.’
‘You don’t need to make money to acquire a better domain. You could always just steal it, or kill the occupants of a home and claim it as your own, or…’
James raised an eyebrow at Elena, signalling his curiosity at her suggestions.
‘Are those not things you would be interested in?’ She said innocently, genuinely confused.
‘Unfortunately not,’ James replied with a smile. ‘Yeah, if you do that stuff in this world you tend to get arrested. Or executed, if the thing you do is bad enough.’
‘But how would anyone know?’
‘If you do something illegal or wrong in this world in the 21st century, the government have a way of finding you. They’re pretty much watching everything that we do, all the time, even though a lot of people would call that crazy talk. You see this?’ He held up his phone. ‘Or that?’ He pointed at his computer. ‘They can hear us through these things.’
‘Then why do you have them?’
‘Because… They’re important. You can access most of the information in the world through them, you can talk to people on the other side of the planet, you can… Watch stuff.’
‘My word, technology certainly has come along considerably since my confinement.’
‘It seriously has. Nothing’s the same as it used to be… So what do we do now?’
‘Well, we won’t be able to find Ascevious until he makes himself known. I’ve no way of tracking him, unless one of these things of yours could hunt him down?’
‘It doesn’t exactly work like that.’
‘I see… Well, the only thing we can do is search for him ourselves. But what would help us is boosting our ranks. With my locating ability we should be able to track down the next of our goddesses.’
‘Just how many are there of these goddesses scattered about?’
‘The dimensional council was originally composed of thousands of goddesses from different dimensions. Many possess different values and codes, but all would be immensely grateful to the one who would free them from their cages.’
Thousands, James thought. One’s been enough trouble to deal with, never mind more than that. But a bunch of smoking hot goddesses serving my every whim? What more could I want?
‘Well let’s make start on finding them then.’
James was intent on carrying the axe with him wherever they went – who knew what trouble they would run into? The problem was keeping it hidden. Hunting through the apartment for something appropriate, James found an old guitar carry-bag in the bottom of his closet. It was a bit of a stretch, but it just about pulled over the axe.
After another discussion about doing her best to act normal, James and Elena took to the streets once again, not entirely knowing what it was that they were looking for.
That, of course, didn’t matter too much to Elena – even if she was committed to finding the other goddesses and making sure that Ascevious didn’t end up destroying the world, she was also completely entranced by the sights and sounds of a world that had been 80 years in the making.
‘This place is astonishing…’ She said, snuggling up to James’s arm and looking about at the buildings as they headed downtown. ‘How do you not spend your days staring up at everything?’
‘It’s like anything in life,’ he replied. ‘If you’re around it enough you eventually get used to it.’
‘This is true. So what do people in your day and age do for fun?’
‘They… watch and listen and tell stories. That black mirror in my apartment? That’s a television. You can watch moving pictures on it, any kind of story you can think of. Or what we just did, usually. Or they watch other people do it.’
‘You can watch other people fuck on the television?’
‘You don’t know the half of it. You can watch people do anything, pretty much.’
‘Now I see why the sights of such great structures is less than interesting to you.’
‘Yep. People are still assholes, though, don’t mistake that.’
‘Oh, I have no doubt about that. Like I said, when you can see into people on a regular basis you start to lose faith in them altogether. My kin used to say that the demons were not always like this, that we were once kind and gentle creatures, but with the ability to look into the hearts of humans we quickly became cynical about the world.’
‘That’s.,. Really depressing.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, although there are plenty of people who I would like you to take a look at so I can see what lurks inside of them.’
‘Pick and choose, master.’
‘I will, but not here. We’ll go to my college eventually and I’ll show you around.’
‘Wonderful. In the meantime I’m starving – has this world of yours got any more sugar nearby?’
They stopped off at a diner as they continued to wander downtown, the thought of the next goddess somehow falling into the back of James’s mind as he set his eyes on a bacon-double and a mountain of fries that was set before him, while Elena looked as if her red eyes were going to come out again at the largest ice cream on the menu that she could order.
James went to start eating but stopped, analysing Elena for a moment. Her black hair was almost shimmering in the pale autumn light, her beautiful face looking inquisitively down at the ice cream.
‘What?’ She smiled up at James.
‘You do know how to use a spoon, right?’ He as
ked sceptically.
Elena giggled and shook her head, taking the long dessert spoon up in one hand, flicking it into the other in a perfect balancing act before digging into one of the scoops, taking up the most graceful of portions and slipping the cold metal between her luscious, full lips. She slid it back out, indulging in the flavour for a moment.
‘How’s that for spoon-using-techniques?’
‘Sorry,’ James smiled picking up a few fries and putting them away greedily. ‘I just wonder what you do and don’t know.’
‘Well, before I was locked away I spent a lot of time among the high societies of the world. I’ve been in the presence of the French court during the renaissance, spent time in some of the raunchier parties that took place among high-up members of government, and so forth. I know how to conduct myself like a lady and how to carry myself around gentlemen.’
‘You were in the high courts?’
‘Of course. The people from my world enjoy possessing power over humans, but indulging our more hedonistic desires is our main pastime. Where else to find that than amongst the rich of the world?’
‘Humans are hedonistic too. The problem is most of them don’t when to stop.’
‘Neither does a goddess. We just don’t suffer the effects. And pretty soon, neither will you.’
James shook his head at the thought, a little worried about the repercussions. But that worry was vastly outweighed by the potential upsides of the future that awaited him. If he were to have a harem of sexy goddesses running around after him, what did that make him? Goddess hunter, goddess master… King of the goddesses?
He liked the sound of every one of them.
Taking a bite of his burger, he realised the insatiable hunger that he had been trying to fight off for the last few hours. Maybe it was the new power that his body had taken on, but upon finishing it in only a few minutes he felt like he could have another one.