by Prax Venter
“Or hoarded by powerful armies, legendary monsters…” Sasha said with a sideways glance.
A metallic tapping that wasn’t coming from the hooved beast-women to either side of him echoed to Mark’s ears, and he stopped, holding his hand up for silence.
Jezebel and Sasha froze, making the tapping much easier to hear- and it was coming toward them. The rusty hallway curved to the right, obscuring the approaching threat and there were no breaks in the wall for them to hide. They could advance to meet whatever it was, hold their ground and wait for it, or retreat to the entrance.
Mark discarded the last option. Although the throbbing in his eye was growing worse, they were here to fight and get the job done. He looked back at the two beautiful horned women waiting for him to make a call.
“Back up against the wall,” he whispered. “Let’s let it come to us. Remember, Vines first. Hold the Arc Bolt unless we need it.”
All three of them pressed up against the curve of the wall and prepared for whatever was headed their way. Jezebel was directly behind him, and Mark felt her press her exquisitely curved body close against him as they waited.
It was clear they both really wanted him, something that didn’t happen all too often in the real world. Despite the bad luck so far, Mark was looking forward to giving in to these stunning creatures’ intimate cravings.
His wandering mind was brought back to the here and now as a spider-like robot appeared from around the corner. The thing was a dirty metal ball with four pointed legs tapping along the rusty floor as it skittered forward erratically. It moved like it was drunk.
As the thing drew closer and passed through some of the sunbeams penetrating the ruin, Mark saw a three-foot, gray mushroom bursting out of the central body. Wispy tendrils radiated out of the jagged opening like a fuzzy infestation where the thick fungus protruded from the mechanical spider.
Mark tightened his grip on his wooden club and held up his other hand, palm open, with the intention of telling his team to hold until he gave the order to attack. He felt Jezebel squeeze his shoulder but hold her ground.
He waited until it was only a few yards away before he brought his arm down with a swift chop, signaling the attack.
Jezebel stepped away from the wall, her hands glowing bright green in the dim interior.
Mark was only slightly surprised when thick, magic vines appeared to phase into existence from the metal floor and constrict around the metal spider. He heard mechanical motors grinding as it struggled to free itself from the binding vegetation while he and Sasha ran up to dismantle it.
Sasha was faster, and she snapped one of its rusty limbs like a dry twig with a strike from her metallic shin. The thing would be on its side right now if it weren’t for the vines holding it in place.
Mark closed the distance and focused on the thick mushroom breaking out of the robotic spider. Its cap was even with his head and felt like the perfect target for his club. Not only because it wasn’t metal, but the whole thing had a faint red glow to it that made Mark believe that’s where the real damage was to be done.
He swung his bat, aiming to hit this fungal growth right out of the ballpark, and a sizable chunk from the wet, rubbery cap went careening down the hall.
Between Sasha assaulting the bottom portion with powerful kicks and Mark bludgeoning the mushroom with his club, it was a fast battle. A small amount of essence collected into his body from its passing.
Jezebel stepped up to the creature as her magic vines retracted into the floor. Without the snare holding it together, the lifeless machine slumped to the floor in a limp pile. The stunning AI satyr hunkered down to inspect the fallen device, and Mark couldn’t help but stare at the tiny doe tail poking out between her round, finely furred ass cheeks.
“It’s as I thought,” she said in a distracted voice. “The mushroom was infesting the circuits of the machine, controlling it.”
“Right,” Mark said. “Let’s see what else this place throws at us.”
Sasha put a hand on her hip. “I can’t kick high enough with my base attack. I’d like to dump some points into some physics-defying martial arts at some point.”
“Then work the legs for now,” Mark said. “Every kill is filling me with more essence, so… let’s keep collecting.”
Both beast-women locked their hungry eyes on his when he mentioned essence, and he felt an involuntary shiver of anticipation run down his spine. “Ready?” he said, reaching his hand down to help the squatting satyr back to her feet.
Her emerald eyes twinkled as she stood, and Mark shot her a small smile before turning to lead them farther into the ruin.
The long, curving hall eventually gave them an opening to go inward as they explored the rusty ancient structure. A few intersections came and went, and Mark knew that they were going to get hopelessly lost in here. His blind eye throbbed with an uncomfortable growing pressure as they travelled deeper, and another attempt at self-healing might not be the worst idea, but this was not the place to waste his ability on experiments.
They rounded a corner and came face to face with two of the spider-like devices standing motionless. The moment Mark saw them, they began to move forward on shaky limbs as if learning how to walk for the first time. Mushrooms also burst out of these machines but were poking out from different spots, and one gray cap was much smaller than the other.
Glowing vines encompassed the foe on the right, and as soon as Sasha saw the constricting vegetation, she ran up to the other robot’s fungus and held out an open palm. An instant later, a blindingly bright arc of electricity violently exploded the protruding mushroom.
Mark sprinted up to the vine-contained bot and brought his primal wooden club to bear on its fungal protrusion. One of the metal legs broke through a magic vine and flung itself outward in a retaliatory attempt to gouge him, and Mark barely dodged the attack with a quick hop out of reach.
Sasha came in from behind him, stomping her hoof down on the metal leg, bending it with a screech of twisting metal. The robot’s free leg was now disabled.
Mark danced around her and resumed beating the mushroom into mush. With its defeat came another dose of essence, and he could feel his tank was about a quarter full.
Both foes were dead, and no one was hurt.
“Nice work, ladies,” he said, flashing them a huge smile. “That’s how it’s done!”
Both beast-women stood side by side, their eyes twinkling with desire.
The blue-eyed succubus crossed her arms and said, “You know… we’ll have to decide who gets him first- and soon.”
Jezebel’s cute face shifted from a cheerful grin to narrow-eyed determination.
“Uh,” Mark began, “let’s worry about getting the shard first. Then we can flip a coin or something. Let’s keep moving, you sexy beasts.”
Mark’s two Enthralled exchanged a competitive glance and then followed him deeper into the rusty ruin.
The farther they crept into the center of the structure, the more mechanical the walls became- as if the whole thing was one machine. Exposed rusty gears, thick hollow pipes, and unknown contraptions sat motionless in the sunlight filtering in through the corroded roof. In addition to the ancient machinery, they also began to see stationary gray-capped mushrooms growing in the darker hallways and corners of the ruin.
They encountered a handful of fungus-controlled spider bots on their way but dispatched them cleanly each time, and Mark was happy the group was fighting so well together. The only problem was the increasingly distracting throb from the swollen orb wedged into his left eye socket.
Mark was leading the two beast-women down a particularly dim and fungus-filled hallway when a series of dark purple flashes and a low hissing noise demanded his attention. He hesitated, trying to figure out what this was before foolishly running in. When the hissing stopped, and everything remained silent, Mark hurried forward as carefully as he could.
The hallway opened up to a much larger area filled to the wal
ls with gray-capped fungus and the stagnant air smelled like musty, damp earth. Lying on the floor in front of Mark was a huge humanoid robot with damaged mushrooms bursting out of various places on its metallic body. But what demanded his attention was the glowing red crystal currently being clutched by the green, demonic octopus that had come through the portal and attacked them earlier.
“Stop it!” Jezebel yelled, running into the room, but the creature moved its many disturbing tentacles quickly, propelling it toward a back wall in a tumbling mess of flailing appendages. The tan-skinned satyr held out her hand, and a green glow lit up the chamber as she cast her restricting Vines on the thief.
Magical roots emerged around the creature, but it was able to shift its sack-like body around the attack, and before anyone could do anything about it, their otherworldly enemy scurried into one of the many pipes passing through the ruin.
Mark watched the red glow of their first shard recede into the small dark hole. He couldn’t believe his eyes… Well- he couldn’t believe his good eye. The wrong one was still throbbing intensely. Was it a built-in warning that a Crystal Shard was close by?
That line of thought seemed to gain validity as the uncomfortable sensation receded while the creature moved away from them through the walls.
Sasha reached the pipe where the bizarre thief escaped and kicked her metal shin against the opening. A loud and satisfying gong sound echoed through the rusty ruin, but little else was accomplished by the attack.
Mark sighed and turned to study what must have been the boss of the area. The eight-foot robot had a broken glass dome for a head and a thick, segmented tail twisted under its back. Huge metallic pincers capped off its arms and seemed as if they’d do a lot of damage if they got a hold of some soft flesh. He bet the boss bot would have had a lot of essence to collect…
“That thing is seriously pissing me off,” Sasha said from across the chamber.
Next to Mark, Jezebel clenched her fists and said, “You and I can agree on this.”
A stray thought struck Mark, and a shock ran through his system.
“We need to hurry and get to the other place! The Echo Nest.”
“Oh no, you’re right!” The strawberry-blonde satyr’s eyes went wide with understanding. “It’s probably going for that shard next!”
Sasha didn’t need any more discussion and started clomping her shapely chrome legs back towards the hallway leading out of this chamber. Mark and Jezebel matched her determined strides as they retraced their steps back out of the ancient metal ruin.
It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it took much longer than Mark would have liked to find their way back out from under the rusty dome.
The chrome-legged succubus led the charge, and he saw her leathery wings unfurl every so often as she ran. They were too small, and the dark red webbing inside looked too thin to support her weight in flight- or so he thought. As she watched her beat them again, it was more like she was using them to dissipate heat as she sprinted forward.
Mark saw unwavering determination in the succubus. She was livid that this thing had hurt him, and her desire for vengeance narrowed her focus down to a very sharp point.
They followed a game trail as they dashed through the forest, but Sasha saw something and made an abrupt left turn, tearing an opening with her horns in a mass of thick, leafy bushes. With Jezebel clomping behind him, Mark ducked his head as he chased the whipping tail of his AI assistant out into a clearing on the other side.
There, standing in what looked like an enormous impact crater, was one of the jet-black salamander women, and she was fighting for her life against four ghostly versions of her race. She moved like a ninja as the ethereal, blue bo staff danced in her thick-fingered hands. Mark watched mesmerized as the nude amphibian ducked and parried with her glowing weapon. She was breathtaking.
A phantom attacker landed a hit on the tight-bodied salamander and she let out a hiss of pain. Sasha cast her blue eyes in Mark’s direction, looking for his command.
“Help her!”
The succubus nodded once and then sprinted down the slight incline toward the melee. Mark clenched the wood of his club in his fist and dashed after the chrome-legged demon.
As they closed the distance to even the fight, he saw the glowing green tendrils of Jezebel’s vine ability snare one of the four enemies, temporarily removing it as a threat. Sasha held out her palm toward a closer one and erased it with a devastating blast from her Arc Bolt.
Mark chose a target close to the woman in distress, and with a grunt, swung his club wildly at an ethereal creature’s ghostly head- and his weapon whiffed right through.
Dumbfounded and overextended, Mark watched as the skilled female salamander warrior nailed both of her attackers in the face with a series of quick strikes from her staff. One of them vanished in a puff of glittering smoke while she spun low with her weapon, finishing off the other with a powerful blow to its legs.
That only left the one struggling in Jezebel’s magic vines.
Mark couldn’t help but stare as the sleek ninja warrior waltzed up to the final salamander ghost. Her bubble-like ass curved out from a thick tail, but her waist was relatively thin. She had tight, round breasts that barely jiggled as she moved. The neon-blue patterns that covered her bare body were intricate and hypnotically alluring.
Jezebel and Sasha had stepped up to either side of Mark, and they waited while the creature they saved thrust her glowing staff through the final foe’s chest. A fair bit of essence entered his body once it was dead.
When she turned to face them, Mark found her sleek face and glowing blue eyes were quite pleasant.
“I thank you,” she said in a serene, slow voice. “I am Amina. I wonder if you are a Collector.”
“A Collector?” Mark repeated. He supposed they were here to collect the shards, but-
“Yes,” Jezebel answered. “He is a Lover, and we are his Enthralled.”
The jet-black salamander held up her glowing staff, and it vanished into thin air. Once her three-fingered hand was free, she touched one of her biceps before wincing and pulling back.
“I’m unsure what a Collector is, but I can heal you.” Without waiting for a response, Mark focused his will on pouring his healing energy into this sleek, curvy creature. Her skin was thick, like rubber and molded into a perfectly smooth voluptuous woman.
Amina didn’t have irises, but he could tell her attention was locked on his eyes. Her long lashes fluttered, and her muzzle fell open a bit to let out a low moan of pleasure. He was having a hard time keeping his gaze off her tight, round breasts and blue nipples but found that he could harness part of his arousal to ratchet up his healing power.
“Astounding,” she said when it was over.
“What was happening here? Is this the Echo Nest?” Jezebel asked, her hand on one of her furry hips. Mark looked over his shoulder and saw a faint wisp of jealousy spill out of the satyr’s emerald-green eyes.
“I found the old ones angry and restless, as you saw. I can confirm this is an Echo Nest. Now I ask you why a Collector human and his horned women have come to this disturbed nest?”
Mark could tell the salamander warrior had a tranquil, genuine nature about her. She would not take nor give any bullshit.
He gave it to her straight. “We are on a quest to find all the Crystal Heart shards and one of your people in a hut back there said we could find one here.”
Amina nodded her sleek head. “I am glad then. I had intended to please the Echo Goddess and harvest her essence, but the old ones attack instead of ruminating. This is not the way of things, and I now intend to investigate. One such shard has been seen in the chamber of the Goddess, and we can both more safely attain our goals as one.”
Sasha stamped her hoof impatiently. “Then let’s get our asses in there.”
Mark shot the succubus a glance and then nodded.
“She’s right. We need to rush this along. I’m Mark. This is Sasha and Je
zebel, and there may be a nasty octopus thing looking to get the shard before we do.”
The black salamander nodded once, then held out her three-fingered hand. An instant later, her translucent glowing staff faded back into existence.
“I will lead you to the Goddess Echo.”
- 5 -
The naked swaying hips of the sleek yet thick Awysai warrior continued to pull Mark’s eye as they wandered down into the subterranean caves of a place called Echo Nest. Additionally, he was beginning to feel an incessant desire to get Sasha and Jezebel alone in a quiet corner somewhere. He shook off his continually wandering thoughts and focused his mind on figuring out what they were getting into.
The rich dirt walls around them were high enough that he never felt claustrophobic. More mushrooms grew on these walls, but they emitted a blue-bioluminescence that felt soothing to look at. Mushrooms were everywhere in this forest.
Amina took a right turn and came to a chamber with two of the ghostly Awysai “old ones” snarling and searching for something to attack. Both ethereal spirits seemed to sense the presence of living creatures and began to move toward the group.
Amina dashed forward to engage them before Mark could suggest Sasha and Jezebel whittle them down first, and with a sigh, he dashed out with her.
A bolt of lightning from Sasha vaporized one as Amina’s staff passed through the air where it would have been. Mark ran past her and focused on the second attacker. He saw its ethereal legs become tangled in glowing, green vines as he approached and tried to knock its ghostly head out of the ballpark. Instead, his wooden club passed through again.