by Prax Venter
“Mark,” his tan centaur muttered as she propped her torso up to face him. “I don’t believe I’ve ever felt…” She paused as they both looked down to find her round tits with dark brown saucers for areolas hanging out and in the spotlight of the massive silver moon. The burning plasma blast she took to the chest had disintegrated a huge portion of her leather armor, but at least he was able to fully restore her tan freckled flesh.
She hung her head and began to sob. Mark reached out with his unwounded arm and slowly stroked the sleek reddish fur over her solid, muscular haunch.
“I’m not even allowed to cover my body now,” she said, wrapping her arms around her exposed breasts. “Mark, I can’t help it. I’m really starting to hate this world, and I just want it all to stop. It feels as if the system AI is focusing all her hate on me and- I know I deserve it- but I don’t know if-”
“Hey,” he said quietly. “I know. I can feel what you do, remember? But the four of us can get through anything. Especially through the shit you do not deserve.”
Some of the light in her gold-flecked green eyes dimmed a little.
“If you can feel everything, then you know our bond isn’t developing as fast as the others. The ones who… came after me. They can see the portals, you can see Abby when she’s invisible, Sasha has new plate armor, damn it. And now?” She paused to lift her open palm over her doe-half as if she were gesturing toward some offensive work of art.
“I’m pretty sure I can work with this,” Mark said as he slid his hand toward those thick brown folds of hers. They were probably soaking wet and if he started massaging-
“Mark,” she said softly. “There’s more to it, and I thought you’d know- that you’d see. But it seems that you don’t, and I’m… it makes me… heartbroken.”
He let his palm rest on her warm fur, focused his blind eye on hers, and saw the same maelstrom of self-doubt, jealousy, over-protectiveness, and fear about how everything would change now with her forced centaur form.
“Please just talk to me. After all this time, I still don’t know how any of these fantasy psychic powers work. Jez, what is it?”
She took a shuddering breath. “Oh, I don’t know, fucking ladders maybe? Or what would happen if we needed to squeeze through another hole like when I snapped Sasha’s fucking wings like twigs? There’s no way this 600 lb slab of meat is going to stuff through it, Mark!”
He blinked at her. She was right, he hadn’t honestly taken the time to think about how this dramatic shift in her body would not only affect her mentally but also their future adventures. He was so focused on sex, he had forgotten about everything else. The one thing she wanted out of life was adventures with him, and Jezebel felt like she was starting to be left behind. This fantasy world had angled his mind toward non-stop fucking, and Mark felt ashamed for not seeing everything that was bothering her.
His Heal was ready, but he held it. While his wounds were painful, the blanket effect application from earlier made sure they weren’t life-threatening. And she wasn’t done unloading.
“Ah, you are starting to see how bad this is for me. I’m sure we’d both get off no problem as you take me from behind, but if I stay like this-”
Mark finished her sentence. “We’ll never be able to kiss, our eyes locked on the reflections of the other’s ecstasy…”
Jezebel cupped her two freckle-splattered breasts. “Correct! Nor will you be able to suck on these while you fill me up. I don’t think you know how wonderful it is to smell your hair as you’re… doing those things to me.” She let her chest go, and her tight body barely let her breasts bounce. “Now?” she continued. “Never again- unless you want to snap my spine.”
He nodded, tears coming to his eyes as he started compartmentalizing the complex emotions wrestling for attention within her mind.
“I see, Jez. I can truly see. I’m so very sorry. I wish I could fix your shapeshifting ability, but… I don’t see anything that I can fix.”
Tears now poured out of her fading green eyes.
“Now you know why I ran,” she said, all emotion gone from her voice. “You bent the rules of reality to fix Sasha, then you did it again to fix Abby and make her whole… but you can’t fix me. And here we are.”
The tether that bound their hearts began perceptibly shrinking, and Mark began to panic. Was he going to lose Jezebel to her own sorrow? He thought about trying to target their emotional connection with a Heal, but he could see it might widen it for a fleeting moment, but the problems would still be there.
Mark grabbed the short hairs on her wide thigh into a fist, as if physically holding on to her would do something… But it didn’t, so he earnestly began digging into her mind to find anything he could say or do to make things right again. He flew past the black mists of despair billowing up to fill her every thought. He saw the bright, wonderful future she had planned with him fading as more and more things went wrong. First, it was Sasha barging in on her world, then it was Abby barging in and tearing off her wings. The admin AI that she made the mistake of overlooking woke up and started changing her world even more. Now her primary ability was useless, she’d never be able to climb a ladder, or sit in a boat, or climb a rope… and she could no longer make love the way she wanted.
She thought Mark would be her salvation for this distant murder she blamed herself for- the one she buried deep inside. He once saw her putting the memory of those ashes in the shadows of her mind, but now she was becoming buried in ashes of regret and crippling disillusion.
He watched in horror from the inside as her last-ditch mental defense mechanism came to life. Jezebel was starting to realize that everything would be less painful if she simply cared about nothing and no one.
Mark turned away from that vast emotional nothing threatening to overtake her, and searched for some nugget of truth he could hit her with, or some broken circuit in her AI matrix that might be preventing her from shifting back… any section of code he could revert. She had essentially given him this new existence- this whole virtual multiverse. She did it all for him. Without her skeptical doubts prodding him to reach far and break her expectations, would he have grown so strong? In that moment Mark realized that he had a deep subconscious drive to be worthy of Jezebel’s deeds and unending care.
He needed her no matter what shape she was in, and Mark bombarded the link between them with a potent blast of that one pure emotion.
Then he saw two smoking flashes of identical text illuminated blue by his True Sight. He couldn’t fully understand what they meant, and he felt the same fading blackness encroach on his mind as when he used his enhanced ability to restore deleted objects.
This time, Mark fought it back. He fought for Jezebel. She’d felt as if the universe was beating her down? Well, then, for her? He was going to beat down the universe with his bare hands if he had to.
With unwavering focus, Mark took hold of those two identical portions of time-lost code, and the resulting agony threatened to burn his mind to ash. But he’d felt worse, and would endure worse for his sweet, strawberry-scented Jezebel.
The lines of code expanded in his virtual grip with a violent fluttering flash, and he knew they represented something. A pair of somethings that had been deleted from her- Wings!
Mark embraced the links…or shadows of purged files… or whatever hallucination his magic eye was showing him. He still wasn’t sure what any of the code he was undeleting did, but he had something to fix.
Mark tore open his soul, exposing it to the agony threatening to destroy his mind and put everything into restoring Jezebel’s ripped-off wings.
The moment he did, crackling power surged up through her core matrix as the virtual universe tried to make sense of what he’d done to it. His ability to ignore the flaming chainsaw currently tearing chunks out of his mind came to an end and he was ejected into his own head before he could see any more.
Mark sucked in a sharp breath as his overheated brain spun down, only moments fro
m becoming a wet explosion inside his skull. He had one painful second to also become reacquainted with his physical wounds before a bright flash of light demanded his attention.
Behind the muscular doe-centaur’s back still lying before him were two angelic, glowing wings. They weren’t made from the feathers he remembered and instead looked more as if they were stylized cutouts of pure light.
Jezebel locked her eyes on his as she got up, and to her surprise, she continued rising into the air.
Her four doe hooves dangled uselessly, clacking together, as her body hovered over him. The ghostly wings flapped once, but it became clear that she didn’t need to move them to fly.
“Mark you… fixed me. You restored my wings.”
His flying centaur rotated on the spot, seemingly at will, and he saw that the softly glowing shapes of light weren’t directly attached to her back.
Then, in the blink of an eye, they vanished, and Jezebel dropped to her hooves with a thud. Her brow came down, and Mark had an instant to fear that he’d done a shitty, temporary job. Then, he felt Jezebel flex her will, her own renewed intention to fight for what she wanted. They sputtered in and out of existence a few times before her new ethereal wings popped back and stayed.
She beat them once and lifted into the purple night sky again. Backlit by her new ability, Jezebel rose higher than before, and he watched as she shed her ruined leather armor to the ground. She hovered fully nude against the cratered surface of the Lagos moon, and her chiseled form stole his breath.
With a delighted giggle, she instinctually galloped her four doe-legs against thin air and darted forward over the landscape, her wild hair fluttering around her head.
He watched as she soared over where Abby and Sasha were rolling around and screamed, “He fixed meeee!” at them. The succubus and petite abyssal horror popped up then Sasha pumped her fist in the air and cheered for her friend’s daring aerial acrobatics.
He watched the nude, flying centaur land far in the distance and become a dark shadow tearing up the landscape before the two wing-shaped blobs of light sparked back into existence, and she took to the sky again. Apparently, her new wings were a permanent, summonable ability, much like Sasha’s arm scales or Mark’s own goddess-given energy.
Either hacking her code wasn’t really Healing, or his ability cooled down quickly again- whichever it was, he really didn’t care. Mark wasted no time finally dousing his pain with a soothing flash of light.
As if drawn like a moth to a flame, Jezebel swooped around and blitzed straight back for him. When his stunningly beautiful horned satyr landed on her two dainty black hooves in front of him, Mark’s jaw fell open.
“You did it,” she said and then tackled him to the grass with her toned, yet more curvy satyr body. She pressed her small, slightly upturned nose into his and the lustful green glow from her eyes was undeniable.
“No,” he said. “I only helped you remember that you could do it, Jez.”
“I’m so sorry, Mark,” she whispered as she looked deep into his eyes. “I will never try to ru-”
Her lips suddenly found themselves too occupied to finish any more words as he pulled her mouth to his. The kept their hungry, passionate lips pressed together as much as they could as they both worked to get Mark out of his pants. The quickest solution ended up being pushing off one boot and slipping out the one leg.
Once he was free, Jezebel frantically pressed her thick swollen pussy down on his cock and consumed him with her hot, satyr body as he sucked on her strawberry lips. Mark reached up and ran his hands down the smooth unscarred skin on her back, her phantom wings sputtering into and out of existence above them like an erratic lightbulb. He really did fix her and spared one microsecond to wonder if in doing so, had restored some of her high-level system access.
Unconsciously, his blind eye dove into her for a hint of an answer, and a jolt of mirrored bliss struck him from her side of their interlocked sex organs. Feeling both their sensations at full strength almost made him cum right then and there, but he shook it off by taking control and flipping his caramel-skinned satyr onto her back.
Jezebel moaned into his mouth as Mark plowed into her thick, brown lips with his rod of taut flesh while nibbling at the flat brown lips on her freckled face. After they’d both become used to the stimulation, he pulled back and roughly clutched one of her tits before he started nibbling her brown nipples.
His satyr arched her back, pushing her chest into his mouth as he spread her labia apart again and again, rubbing her swollen folds with every flawlessly aimed thrust.
Mark switched between pleasuring her firm breasts until Jezebel pulled him tight with both her arms and her hooves, and Mark began sucking the tan skin of her neck instead.
Again, he received a flash of her soul-wrenching bliss at being wrapped around the man she loved- especially after thinking it would never happen again.
The potency of both their mental and physical pleasure was too much for Mark to withstand and he began pummeling her with cum and his full tank of essence.
Jezebel pulled him down on her with a serious amount of force as she reached a spectacular orgasm, and Mark felt the ground fall away from his knees. His one empty pant leg fluttered in the mild midnight wind as she slowly floated them both upward. Still buried balls-deep into her clenching mound of flesh, Jezebel’s new glowing wings carried them both higher and higher.
Mark thought he caught a shadowy glimpse of a distant floating island like the one they’d seen before, and his sudden excited shock that an option to finish their mission might be back on the table easily reached Jezebel through their swelling emotional bond.
“What is it, my love?” she asked, bending her head back to follow his gaze out into the moonlit darkness.
“After we all have our way with you,” he said with a mischievous grin, “maybe we could book a flight on Air Jez?”
- 27 -
The enormous Lagos moon had scarcely moved at all while Mark and his three Enthralled worked their genitals past the point of overstimulation into numbness, and the world’s bright-yellow sun had begun to ascend into the periwinkle sky. Along with it came warm morning gusts, and as Mark retrieved his missing boot from the blue blades of lush grass, he determined that he much preferred the windy Lagos dimension over the Wrongside. He slipped it back on under his charred pantleg and headed back to his three loves.
“Am I correct in assuming my hack-job didn’t restore any of your higher system functions?” Mark asked as he walked up.
“Correct,” Jezebel said as she slipped into the old familiar armor handed down to her from the retired adventurer, Audra. “I don’t have any new access. The Crystal Heart game world interpreted my wings’ reappearance as unlocking a new ability.”
“Flight is a substantially potent new ability,” Abby said, a huge shark-toothed grin on her adorable face. “Despite our recent setbacks, we continue to grow more powerful.”
Sasha nodded as she coated her arms with metal plates.
“I think I want to spend my new points on elemental defense. Jez shouldn’t be the only one taking the hits, and I’m learning that battle is too chaotic not to become more well-rounded.”
Abby nodded as she used one appendage to coil around the spot where one of Iona’s tigers had torn out a large chunk of flesh.
“Perhaps I should follow your example. I felt very close to death during our last encounter.”
Jezebel secured the last strap on her form-fitting leather gear and then added her own thoughts.
“I think survivability should be high on our list. That being said…”
Mark watched as she slipped on her iron-knuckle fist-weapons and shifted into her bear form. The armored grizzly turned her emerald eyes on his as she effortlessly activated her angelic, glowing wings.
“…our party’s tank has become absurdly mobile,” Jezebel finished through her bear snout before launching straight up into the light-blue morning sky.
Al
l three watched her massive form zipping around overhead, and Mark imagined her slamming her weight into someone at full speed while ripping into them with her claws- or quickly disengaging a fight to come protect one of them.
“A flying, talking bear…” Sasha said, shaking her head.
“I am now the only one without wings,” Abby said with a small pout, her appendages coiling behind her and over her wingless back.
Mark wrapped his arm around the short green woman and pulled her close against him.
“Hey, I don’t have wings either.”
“And mine only let me glide,” Sasha added, watching the horned, armored grizzly up in the periwinkle sky.
Jezebel came back down to hover a few feet off the ground in front of them and then shifted back into a centaur. Her wings were unaffected as she morphed into the muscular doe creature, and her preferred armor followed her into the new form.
Mark couldn’t help grinning as he inspected her shifted gear. The chest armor was the same thick plates she wore normally, but they now continued down over most of her body. Where her old horse-armor fit like a skirt, this armor handled the transition by tightly covering her body in various-sized slabs with the pliant, stretchy leather underneath it- all the way to her hooves. Even her backpack shifted conveniently into a saddlebag.
His eyes panned up from her leather-clad doe-half to her muscular arms where the iron-knuckles had shifted into iron fists. She flexed her fingers, and although she appeared to have reduced range of motion, she’d probably be able to punch through a brick wall.
Jezebel dropped her hands and shifted back to her curvy satyr form before dismissing her wings. She landed gracefully on her hooves, but Mark saw tears building up in her emerald eyes.
“Thank you all for putting up with my… issues. It shouldn’t take an epic special ability for me to see my worth. It will not happen again.”
Both the petite abyssal horror and the blue-eyed sex-demon swarmed their friend to wrap her in a tight embrace while Mark approached more slowly.