Monster Girls 2

by Edward Lang

Unfortunately, Urt and Vurt were very proud of my occupation.

  “He’s a Sex Mage!” Urt called out.

  “And a Returned!” Vurt chimed in.

  You would have thought the crowd had seen Beelzebub himself rise up out of the top of my head.

  “He is evil personified, a pestilence come to wipe out community!” Neckbeard yelled to his fellow shitheads.

  “No, I’m not!” I protested. “We’re going to destroy the Imperium!”

  The crowd stared at me, their mouths agape –

  And then they started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked crossly.

  “He’s a fool, as well!” Neckbeard announced to his men. “He belongs in the madhouse!”

  “No one can prevail against the Imperium!” another shouted.

  “Told you,” Zala said in a blasé voice.

  “Why would you even try?!” a third villager yelled at me.

  “Because they’re trying to kill monster girls,” I said. “They capture them and sacrifice them for black magic – ”

  “GOOD!” Neckbeard interrupted.

  “May the Dark Immortal rid the entire land of their foul kind!” another shouted.

  Okay… now my blood was starting to boil.

  I looked over at my women – and all four of them looked either enraged or sad.

  Alia and Zala were on the pissed side of the spectrum, while Spirella and Dyra were far more hurt.

  “Apologize for that,” I snarled.

  “I will NOT!” Neckbeard yelled.

  Seems this little twit needed to be taught a lesson.

  I stretched out my hand –

  And fired a Venom Blast at the dirt in front of his feet.

  TZZZZAP!

  Clods of dirt flew up in the air, and green smoke boiled out of a small hole in the ground.

  “AAAAAH!” Neckbeard screamed, and pushed his way hurriedly through the terrified group of villagers. From the way he was waddling, I was pretty sure he’d crapped his pants.

  “Apology accepted,” I said darkly. “Now let us through and we’ll be on our way.”

  Neckbeard yelled from the safety of the back of the group. “Seize the pervert and his beastly harlots!”

  The villagers all looked around at each other uncertainly.

  I held my hand out and let some green electricity run over my fingers for dramatic effect.

  “Next guy who says a thing gets it in the crotch,” I announced. “Now – who wants it first?”

  The entire crowd stood aside and let us pass.

  Even Neckbeard was silent, and covered the front of his pants with one hand as we rode past.

  “Yup, that’s right,” Urt taunted him from atop his horse. “He ain’t foolin’ – he’ll lop it right off.”

  “Then you’ll look like us,” Vurt pointed at his bare, bony pelvis.

  The villagers gave us an even wider berth after that.

  So we typically avoided signs of civilization. More than anything, I didn’t want my girlfriends having to be subjected to that kind of abuse.

  So we mainly kept to the forest… but we still stopped by every graveyard we passed.

  We would be riding down the road, and suddenly Urt or Vurt would perk up like golden retrievers smelling a steak on a grill.

  “Ooh – ooh – they’re some dead guys over there,” Vurt would say.

  “A good ten or so,” Urt would agree.

  “I can smell ‘em.”

  “Rrrrrrrripe!”

  “They’re itchin’ for a fight, I know it.”

  “Lemme talk to ‘em – I’ll get ‘em all onboard!”

  We would follow the cousins’ Sixth Sense – We smell dead people – until we found the cemetery, or crypt, or even empty fields.

  “Are you sure someone’s buried here?” I would ask dubiously –

  And every time, skeletal soldiers from long ago would dig their way up out of the ground, covered in rusty scraps of armor.

  “The nose knows,” Vurt would say smugly, pointing to his complete lack of a proboscis.

  There must have been a lot of battles and unburied dead over the years, because we ran across a lot of empty fields with dead soldiers in them.

  The problem was, if the dead didn’t want to join our campaign, Urt and Vurt took it personally. Especially the ones in nice, peaceful graveyards.

  Some dead guy standing half-buried in front of his tombstone would politely refuse, and Urt and Vurt would start picking a fight.

  “Why? What else have you got goin’ on, huh?” Vurt would yell.

  “Gotta plow the fields? Gotta milk the cows?” Urt would ask sympathetically, then turn into an asshole. “NO YOU DON’T! Why not? Oh, I guess you forgot – YOU’RE DEAD!”

  I had to pull them away from more than one graveyard as they shouted, “Put ‘em up! Put ‘em up!” to some bewildered dead guy.

  “Walk it off,” I said as I gently pushed Vurt in the opposite direction from the graveyard.

  “Liches be crazy,” he fumed as he stalked away.

  After a couple of those episodes, we made Zala the point woman. She was far better at it – much more of a smooth talker – but even she was having trouble persuading more than half of the liches we encountered. Luckily she was particularly good at convincing the dead guys buried out in fields of battle, so they usually came equipped with at least a sword and shield, no matter how rust-eaten it was.

  “Why are we having such a hard time, Parch?” I asked.

  Because you only have a 50% chance

  of convincing other liches to join your side.

  “What?! Back at the manor, you said that I had a 90% chance of the lich army following me!”

  Yes, the lich army that fought

  at the Baron’s manor.

  But that was because they knew Zala

  and had already fought at your side.

  With all other liches, you have only a 50% chance

  of persuading them to join your cause.

  Dammit…

  “Can that ever increase?”

  I am sure there are ways,

  but I am not cognizant of them at this time.

  It didn’t matter. There were a lot of graveyards, and even more dead guys – and so our army swelled, little by little, until we marched into the Grim Mountains with an army 300 strong.

  5

  First we came to foothills rising up from the forested plains. The next day, we reached mountains covered with pines.

  And on the third, we were deep within the Grim Mountains.

  I saw why they were named the Grim Mountains. For one thing, they were in a perpetual state of twilight. The forests on the slopes were gloomy, with dark, impenetrable cloud cover hovering overhead at all hours. Even at noon, it looked like 5PM on a winter’s day.

  Barbaria… Mysterios… Grim Mountains.

  I’d noticed that this world was a little on the nose in its naming conventions.

  But the dim lighting wasn’t the only reason things were grim.

  For one thing, there were all the skulls.

  They were at every major intersection of roads, perched atop signposts that pointed the way to the nearest town.

  And they didn’t answer to their fellow liches, even though Urt and Vurt tried.

  “Hey, man,” Urt said.

  No answer.

  “We know you can hear us,” Vurt said.

  Silence.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Urt asked with a snort. “Or gangrene? Or just general decomposition?”

  Nothing.

  “Dick,” Vurt muttered, and flicked the skull in the forehead with a thump of his fingers.

  Then there were the crucifixions.

  We started seeing them the farther we went up in the mountains: skeletons on wooden crosses and X’s, bony hands and feet nailed to the boards, gazing down at us with angry, empty eye sockets. And it was always skeletons; never fresh corpses.

  Crucifixion wasn’t just the
way Jesus died – it was how the Romans used to routinely execute people they considered to be criminals. For instance, after the historical slave revolt depicted in the movie Spartacus, the Romans lined the road to Rome with thousands of crucified rebels – a warning to any that would dare try it again.

  That’s Romans for you. Real bastards.

  It was kind of a shock seeing their preferred execution method in real life, though. I mean, there were no Romans in this world, nor had there ever been.

  However, crucifixion was an extreme form of cruelty, and cruelty seemed to travel easily across dimensions and planes of existence.

  I had some serious questions as soon as I saw the first crucified skeleton.

  “Parch, who the hell would do something like this?”

  Possibly a human warlord in the region…

  but most probably a member of the Imperium.

  “General Zalerno?”

  No, we are nowhere near his territory yet.

  “Who runs the Grim Mountains, then?”

  They have been contested for generations.

  I am not aware

  of any single Imperium general

  who currently holds sway over the region.

  “We should get him down,” Zala said sympathetically when we came upon the first crucified skeleton.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, not convinced of the wisdom of disturbing something quite obviously meant to scare the shit out of people. Part of me was worried we might become the next object lesson.

  “Yes,” Zala said as she got off her horse and walked over to the skeleton. “We can’t just leave him up there.”

  Parch appeared in the air, and he ‘sounded’ more nervous than usual.

  Scott, you might want to

  warn her against that –

  it’s possible that the bones are enchanted.

  Before I could say anything, Zala was prying out the iron spike pinning the skeleton’s feet to the cross –

  And it spoke.

  “Undead WHORE,” it barked at her, “leave me alone!”

  Zala stumbled backwards in fright, as did the rest of us.

  The dark, empty pits of the skeleton’s eye sockets began to glow light blue, and backlit fog slowly boiled out.

  “You have made a dangerous mistake, fools, entering this realm,” the thing croaked in its raspy voice. “You will not even be given the blessing of MY fate – you will be torn apart, your guts fed to wolves, and your bones scattered to the four compass points! Your heads will be thrown into sewers, where rats and spiders will spawn in the depths of your – ”

  WHACK!

  One of Zala’s curvy-bladed daggers sank deep into the skull’s forehead, and the blue lights in its sockets went out.

  Head shot.

  As the fog from its eyes dissipated, the skeleton fell to pieces – as though it had been held together by some supernatural string that had been cut by Zala’s blow. Its torso and limbs clacked to the ground, leaving behind only its hands and feet spiked to the cross.

  The head smacked the ground, the jawbone flew off, and the skull rolled over to Vala’s boots. She pulled the Ravager out of the skull’s forehead with a dry crrrruk sound, then sheathed the blade.

  “That was quite enough of that,” Zala said primly.

  “Man – they either don’t talk at all, or they talk too much,” Vurt complained.

  We continued on down the road. Every new crucified skeleton we saw, we left alone.

  Finally, though, we came to a stretch where we couldn’t ignore them anymore – because they weren’t on the side of the road anymore, but above us.

  Hanged men dangled from the branches with nooses around their necks.

  Hanged skeletons, to be accurate. Every single body had long ago had the flesh pecked off its bones, presumably by the dark swarms of ravens that flew cawing through the forest.

  You know how groups of lions are called a pride, and for geese, it’s a gaggle?

  The correct term is apparently a ‘murder of crows.’

  In the Grim Mountains, it felt appropriate.

  (Side note: one of my favorite memes back on Earth was a picture of two crows, with ‘Murder’ beneath the photo. Next to it was a picture of a single crow, with ‘Attempted Murder’ underneath.

  (That’s it. That’s all I got. Carry on.)

  The forest had started to thin out when we reached a fork in the road.

  One path led down, presumably into a valley…

  …but the other path crossed a steep mountain ridge and ended at a distant peak.

  Atop the mountain sat a fairytale castle out of a nightmare. There were high towers with pointed roofs, and crumbling black walls that looked like they could collapse any second.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  None of the girls or liches knew, but Parch did.

  The Grim Keep.

  The former seat of King Varxik,

  who died two hundred years ago.

  He was one of the very first members

  of the Imperium.

  “The Imperium’s over two hundred years old?!”

  Its leader IS named the Dark Immortal.

  Oh yeah.

  “And there’s nobody living there now?”

  Not that I’m aware of.

  “‘Not that I’m aware of’ isn’t the same as NO, Parch.”

  I realize that,

  but I only know what is revealed to me.

  “Who was the last person to live there?”

  King Varxik, who built it because

  this was the land of his birth.

  The castle has been used temporarily

  over the last two centuries

  during military incursions,

  and by bandits in between occupations.

  However, the Grim Keep is too remote

  to appeal to modern-day Imperium generals,

  most of whom wish to rule

  heavily populated regions.

  ‘Modern-day.’

  That was funny.

  I guess it had to be the remoteness that made the Grim Keep unattractive, because it was a hell of a fortress.

  There was only the one road up to the castle. Otherwise, all those sheer cliffs beneath it made it impregnable.

  Well… I could have climbed up the walls with Wall Crawler, but it was pretty much safe from a conventional army. They only way they could get to it was that main path, which led up to a heavily fortified gate.

  The Grim Keep.

  It certainly lived up to its name.

  I thought about going up to check it out…

  …for about two seconds.

  We had an Imperium general to defeat and sexy, grateful monster girls to free.

  “Alright,” I said as I turned to the girls, “let’s go down into the valley. We can spend the night… there…”

  Everyone frowned as my words trailed off.

  “What’s wrong?” Alia asked.

  “Zala,” I said, “what’s with your eyes?”

  Her irises were glowing blue… just like the crucified skeleton we’d talked to on the road.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, apparently unaware of how she looked.

  “By the Great Weaver, your eyes!” Spirella exclaimed.

  “What?! What’s wrong with my eyes?!” Zala cried out.

  I whipped around in my saddle to look at the rest of the lich army.

  I could see the glimmer of blue light in a couple of their eye sockets… but the number was growing by the second, like fireflies gradually appearing on a summer night.

  “Parch, what the hell is going on?!” I yelled.

  I don’t know…

  Some form of enchantment,

  possibly…

  I glanced back at Alia, Spirella, and Dyra. None of their eyes were affected.

  “What kind of enchantment would only target liches?!”

  As soon as I asked the question, I knew the answer from D&D – and
I nearly puked.

  Parch confirmed what I was thinking.

  Well –

  there’s always necromancy…

  JESUS.

  I prayed that I hadn’t just stumbled into a necromancer’s domain, seeing as I had an army of dead guys backing me.

  This was almost as bad as Tyrion taking Sansa down into the Stark family crypt when the White Walkers attacked Winterfell.

  Parch immediately recognized the implications, too.

  Oh…

  considering our traveling companions,

  a necromancer would be bad…

  “No shit,” I snarled, then turned back to the army of liches. “RUN DOWN INTO THE VALLEY! NOW!”

  Suddenly, voices above me croaked, “Too late, human – too late!”

  I looked up.

  The hanged skeletons dangling from the tree limbs above me were glaring down, their eyes glowing blue and giving off backlit smoke.

  “Too late, fool – she comes for you now – you and your army of the dead!”

  “GET OUT OF HERE!” I yelled.

  My lich army headed for the valley road – but leisurely, like there was no hurry.

  And I noticed almost all of their eye sockets had lit up with blue light.

  “What are you WAITING for?!” I screamed. “Run for it!”

  Vurt looked over at me in panic. “Uh – Scott – I’m not controlling my legs!”

  “What?!”

  “Me neither!” Urt whimpered.

  “ALIA, SPIRELLA, DYRA – GET OUT OF HERE!” I shouted.

  “Where do we go?!” Alia cried out.

  “Down into the valley!”

  “They’re in our way!”

  It was true. The lich army had separated into multiple ranks of 50 liches standing shoulder-to-shoulder and were blocking the path towards the valley.

  “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” I yelled at them.

  “We’re trying,” Vurt called out in an anguished voice, “but we’re not in control!”