by Edward Lang
That is something YOU said,
Scott, not me!
Funny – he’d been happy to ponder about the possibility of being a ‘messenger from the Gods’ when things were going well.
But I wasn’t looking to point any fingers. Parch had saved my skin a number of times – I couldn’t fault him when things didn’t go our way.
“That ‘from the gods’ part was mostly just speculation by me,” I told Dyra. “It’s not like a god comes down and hands him a message or anything. He just knows stuff.”
“Or doesn’t,” Dyra said, annoyed.
“Or doesn’t,” I conceded. “We’ll have to be more careful about gathering intel in the future. But we can’t dwell on that at the moment. We need to figure out what to do now.”
“Get out of here?” Spirella asked innocently.
“YES,” Alia said. “Immediately.”
“Well, we have to go back for Zala and the others. We can’t just leave them there.”
“I know,” Alia said with a sigh. “But how can we rescue her? It’s 300 of them against four of us!”
“Well, if we kill the necromancer…ess, I’m pretty sure her hold on Zala and the rest of them will go away.”
“Oh, yes, so simple – just kill the Magistra of the Imperium. Why didn’t I think of that?” Dyra said sarcastically.
“That’s not helpful,” I snapped.
“…sorry,” she said meekly.
“It’s alright,” I grumbled. “We’re all on edge. But the point is, we need to get her – not mess around with her army. After all, we don’t want to hurt Zala and the others.”
“So how do we do it?”
“Hey Parch – we saw her walking towards us on the road from the Grim Keep. Would you agree the chances of that being her home base are pretty good?”
The chances are excellent, actually.
It’s the only fortification within miles.
“Alright, easy peasy,” I said. “I’ll just go climb the cliff walls and kill her.”
Dyra frowned. “…easy peasy…?”
“It means ‘simple,’” I said.
“I won’t be mean like last time,” Dyra said carefully, “but I’m not sure I would call that ‘simple.’”
Parch concurred.
Scott, I don’t mean to be a naysayer,
but if a necromanceress of the Imperium
is staying in a fortress, the first thing she did
was to garrison it with an army of the dead.
Gods know there is plenty of raw material
in these mountains, slain in battle.
“…oh yeah,” I realized, and not happily.
Not to mention that those
crucified skeletons we saw along the way
were probably sentries of hers,
who magically informed her we were coming.
Which means she could put a skull on the cliffs,
towers, and every wall,
and know YOU were coming.
“Alright, I get the picture.”
And while you now have many magical abilities,
you are NOT a rogue.
You will NOT be able to approach the castle
without alerting Necra to your presence –
“Okay, okay, I got it! New plan – we get some allies to help us storm the castle, maybe provide a distraction,” I said. “Girls, you think there are any others of your kind around?”
Alia frowned. “Lamia usually stick to low woodlands, not mountains.”
“And dryads favor swamps and wet areas, not arid ones.”
Spirella shrugged. “There are arachne everywhere… but we would only find them one at a time, and only by chance. We’re solitary creatures.”
“Okay, not what I was hoping for,” I muttered to myself.
Parch had an idea, though.
Scott – would centaurs do?
Because there is known to be a tribe
inhabiting a valley very close by.
Suddenly my thoughts were flooded with images of Cerea, the almost comically well-endowed female centaur from Monster Musume.
I mean, we’re talking prize-winning watermelons here, folks.
Unfortunately, I realized that it would probably be a bunch of horse dudes. Not my first choice, but centaurs would help significantly if we were going to be battling an army of the dead.
“Yeah – centaurs would be great.”
“Centaurs?!” Alia exclaimed.
“Ugh – you’re not going to copulate with a CENTAUR, are you?!” Dyra asked.
“I… hadn’t thought about that,” I said, although that wasn’t strictly true.
I might have pulled my pud to Cerea once or twice.
…or a couple of dozen times.
But who was counting?
Now that I was presented with the actual possibility of sleeping with a real live centauress, though, it was a bit… daunting, shall we say.
Even Spirella winced. “They’re…”
“They’re what?”
“…scary.”
Scary?
A half-spider woman was calling them scary?
Now I was definitely intrigued.
“Why are they scary?”
“They’re so warlike…”
“That’s good!” I said enthusiastically. “I mean, if we’re going to storm a castle, the more warlike, the better!”
Well, they’re only about a
three hour’s hike east of here.
“Which way is east?”
All of the words on Parch’s surface disappeared and were replaced with a giant black arrow pointing deeper into the forest.
“Alright. Do we go tonight, or get some sleep?”
“Why would we go TONIGHT?” Dyra asked. “It’s dark, and it’s cold, and – ”
“And we’ll get further away from Necra and the liches.”
“…I think we should go tonight.”
I looked at Alia. “What do you think? Can you travel?”
“I feel fine, now,” she said, then smiled at Dyra. “Thank you for healing me.”
“You’re welcome,” Dyra said and gave her a kiss.
Man it was awesome having a monster girl harem.
“But how will we see in the dark?” Alia asked.
I pointed at Spirella. “Arachnes see great in the dark.”
“That’s true…” Spirella agreed.
“And I can smooth our way by making sure foliage bends beneath our feet and does not trip us,” Dyra offered.
“Even better. Alright… let’s get out of here before a bunch of dead guys show up.”
7
We hiked in the darkness. Spirella led the way and made sure the path was clear with her night vision.
If things got difficult – rocky, or full of roots jutting up through the ground – then Dyra would glow with a gentle bioluminescence, and I would let green electricity crackle over my fingers to light our way. Alia would use Fang as a kind of impromptu, magical torch.
I didn’t want to keep going. After all, we were exhausted. I would have loved to have just curled up and fallen asleep, no matter how hard the ground might have been.
But when there’s a homicidal necromanceress and an army of skeletons after you, you tend to forego naptime.
We’d been walking down the heavily forested mountainside for hours when Spirella held up one of her human hands. “Stop.”
We all paused behind her.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
“I don’t know… but I feel like we’re being watched.”
“Hold on, let me try something,” Dyra said.
She closed her eyes and held her hands palm-up, like some sort of new-age yoga pose.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m communicating with the flora all around us.”
“You mean you’re talking to the trees and plants?”
“Exactly. Perhaps they can tell us if – ”
S
uddenly Dyra’s eyelids opened wide.
“Oh NO!”
I was about to ask her ‘what’ when the question was answered for me.
Hooves thundered around us from all directions. It was like we were dropped down in the middle of a Wild West corral.
The girls and I all stumbled together and faced outwards as horses surrounded us…
…but not just any horses.
Centaurs.
Even though it was difficult to see, I caught glimpses of human forms jutting up from horse bodies. Not much more than silhouettes, to be honest. I could see arms and what I assumed were some kind of helmets, because their heads all ended in points.
One other thing they had in common?
They were all carrying bows. As in bows and arrows.
And they all had them drawn back to shoot.
“Hold, strangers!” a voice shouted out of the darkness.
A female voice, though it was deep and smoky.
“Everybody just relax,” I called out. “We mean you no harm.”
“Then what are you doing prowling about our woods at night?”
“We’re on the run from a necromanceress. She possessed our friends and turned them against us.”
“He must mean the new Imperium scum who has taken up residence in the Grim Keep,” another voice said. This one was higher and more feminine.
Huh…
I was beginning to wonder if there were any male centaurs in this group at all.
And if there weren’t, that would be fine by me.
I imagined a band of Amazonian women, like Wonder Woman but with slightly different lower bodies.
“Yeah, the Grim Keep,” I said. “That’s the one. Her name’s Necra.”
“You said that she ‘possessed’ your friends,” the original, smoky voice said. “How in the Great Archer’s name did she do that, unless they were dead?”
“Uh, because they are. We were traveling with an army of liches to take down General Zalerno.”
“You consort with liches?!”
“Uh… I don’t know if ‘consort’ is the right word, but – ”
“Someone light a torch!” the smoky voice commanded.
I was about to tell her that we didn’t have any when someone drew out a small, smoldering ember from some sort of cannister or bag. One second there was nothing, and then there was an orange glow.
The ember touched something, and a single flame erupted in the darkness.
Within seconds, a torch was crackling in the night.
I could see a little in its glow.
Besides the horse shapes, I could tell that the human upper halves were all covered in hooded cloaks – sort of like what Vigo Mortenson is wearing when he first appears as Strider in The Fellowship of the Ring.
That explained the points on the top of their silhouettes: they all had riding hoods pulled over their heads.
One nice thing, though, was that all the arms coming out of those riding cloaks were slender and feminine, many with leather bracers around the wrists.
Apparently I hadn’t been too far off with my whole Wonder Woman/Amazon fantasy.
Too bad those beautiful arms were all holding bows and aiming arrows at my head.
But when you’re dealing with Amazons, certain things come with the territory.
“Here you are, Seera,” the bearer of the torch said as she held it out.
SEE-ruh.
So that was the smoky-voiced centauress’s name.
Seera’s bare arm reached out of her cloak and took the torch. “Cover me, sisters.”
There were the sounds of hooves clomping over the forest floor, and then a shape towered over me.
The horse part of the body was level with my face – but a human form loomed several feet higher.
Deep within the recesses of the shadowy riding hood, two eyes glinted with reflections of the firelight.
But to be honest, I was more interested in what was jutting out of the cloak: a couple of gorgeous breasts hidden away behind a leather cuirass. The armor was cut just low enough to show off the upper halves of two lovely globes.
You know how movies about 17th and 18th century Europe always have women in dresses that smoosh up their boobs so they look gigantic? Like in Amadeus? I mean, Mozart’s wife is stacked – or at least her dress makes her look that way.
Well, this centauress put her to shame.
Daaaaaaaamn.
“A lamia, a dryad, and an arachne… you keep strange company, human,” Seera said. “At least, I assume you are human underneath that helmet.”
“I am. And they’re my girlfriends.”
A murmur went up amongst the female centaurs, along with a couple of titillated laughs (heavy on the ‘tit’).
“Your girlfriends?” Seera asked in disbelief. She looked around at Alia, Spirella, and Dyra. “You mean… you have all mated with this human?!”
“Yes,” Alia said proudly.
“Oh yes,” Spirella said dreamily.
“And with each other,” Dyra confirmed happily.
“With each other!” Seera exclaimed in shock.
I could see a couple of other female centaurs glancing at each other in the shadows.
“And did you lie with a lich, as well?” Seera asked.
“Yeah,” I said defensively, “but she was all there. I mean, not bones, and not rotting away or anything. She looks totally normal… except she’s grey. And her hair is white.”
“She’s quite beautiful, actually,” Spirella added.
“Very,” Dyra agreed.
“And good in bed,” Alia said with a giggle.
Seera looked confused as she took in the information, then glanced down at me again. “That’s… quite something, human.”
“Eh, you know,” I said with a modest shrug.
“You must be quite the connoisseur of non-human females.”
There was more curiosity in her voice than condemnation. With most of the humans we’d run into, it had been all condemnation.
“I appreciate feminine beauty in all its forms,” I said, and meant every word.
“Hmph,” she grunted. “Well, you are still trespassing on our lands.”
“Actually, we were hoping that you might join us in our fight against Necra.”
Inside the riding hood, the eyes grew wide with the reflected flame of the torch.
“Is that so? And why would we do that?”
I didn’t think it would be polite to say, Because I want to do you really, really bad, and then 50% of you are supposed to help me out.
So instead I said, “Well, by the way you described Necra as ‘Imperium scum,’ it doesn’t sound like there’s any love lost between you guys and the Dark Immortal. So I’d say that would make us natural allies.”
“Hmph… how many lich ‘friends’ of yours did the necromanceress commandeer?”
“About 300, give or take.”
There was an exclamation of shock from all the female centaurs.
Seera’s head jutted forward even more in surprise. “And you expect us to help you battle 300 liches after you so foolishly gave them over to Necra?!”
“We didn’t ‘give’ them to her – we stumbled into her territory without knowing it.”
“Much as you stumbled into ours, it appears.”
“Yeah, except we were looking for you,” I retorted.
Seera eyed me warily… then spoke loudly to her fellow soldiers.
“We shall take them to the Chieftess to see what she says.” Then she quite clearly addressed me and the girls. “If you try anything – whether to attack us or escape – you will die.”
“Can we at least have a torch so we can see our way?”
Seera harrumphed again, then looked over at another female centaur and jerked her head.
A second torch was lit from the first and handed over to me.
Thus began our second long march of the night.
8
Parch made his appearanc
e as we continued walking through the forest, albeit now under guard by a bunch of half-horse women.
That went well, all things considered.
Centaurs are notoriously distrustful of outsiders.
The fact that they didn’t shoot you on sight
is a good sign.
I could have talked to him in my head, the way I had when I’d nearly been buried alive outside the Baron’s manor, but I would have had to ‘shout’ my thoughts, and that got exhausting after a while. So I just whispered instead.
“Are all centaurs female?”
The vast majority of what you call ‘monster girls’
ONLY have female members of their race.
“Really?!” I asked excitedly.
Yes.
Now, there ARE other races
such as the Naga which have only males,
and liches have both males and females
because they were once human –
but the vast majority of demi-humans
are female only.
“Then how do they reproduce?”
Females need human males
to copulate with them.
Which is a problem for them.
“Why’s that?”
Because almost all human males
find monster girls repulsive.
“Ohhhh,” I realized. “That’s why everybody’s so shocked that I like them so much.”
Yes.
Even though you are a Sex Mage,
in many ways your greatest ‘power’
is your attraction to females of all different species.
It is what allows you to seduce them,
and what makes them WANT to be seduced.
The attention you show them
is unique in their experience –
and generally intoxicating to them.
“Seera doesn’t seem that taken with me.”
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Centaurs are notoriously stoic
and outwardly unemotional.