by Logan Jacobs
Before I knew it, my eyes were closed, and I was out like a light.
The next thing I remembered hearing was a knock on my door.
“Ben?” Jemma’s voice called out through the other side of the barrier. “Sorry to wake you, but my people don’t want to go through the jungle alone…”
I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. Malak was groggily waking up, as well, and she looked much less amused than I did.
“Can’t you see we’re trying to sleep in here?” the Coonag woman hissed.
“Ohhhhhh,” Jemma giggled. “It all makes way more sense why you disappeared now.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled as I pulled myself out of bed and walked over to the chest of clothes. “What exactly do you need to go through the jungle for, anyways?”
“The Clucker Birds,” the deer woman noted. “You told us we needed to check for their eggs first thing in the morning.”
“First thing in the morning?” I whispered to myself as I pulled on a pair of brown cotton slacks. “What time is it?”
“Judging by the fact that the sun is rising, I’d say pretty early,” Malak said as she pointed out the window.
I tossed on a thin, long-sleeved cream shirt before I tied up my belt of weapons and pulled on my boots.
“You coming?” I asked the beautiful naked Coonag woman.
“I think I might lay here longer,” she chuckled. “I’m not even sure I can walk after what you did to me last night.”
Fair enough. Malak almost certainly needed to recover from our love-making session, so it looked like it was going to be just me and the deer women.
I walked over to Malak, kissed her softly, and then bade her farewell. When I opened up the door, Jemma was standing there in a pair of cutoff cotton shorts that put her long, pale legs front and center.
Not that I was complaining.
“Good morning.” I smiled at Jemma, who returned the gesture.
“Morning.” She grinned as she peered over my shoulder at Malak. “Looks like you two had a fun night.”
“Gentlemen don’t kiss and tell, you know,” I joked as I stepped out of the room and shut the door. “So, your women just need a guard while they’re collecting eggs?”
Jemma frowned. “Well, when you put it like that, it sounds foolish. I would have asked Tirian to go along as our protector, but he has a bad habit of trying to eat the Clucker Birds. Also, Nadir and a few of the Coonag insisted they come along, too.”
“I can’t say I blame Tirian,” I admitted as we began to walk down the hall. “Those little guys are delicious, especially when you toss ‘em in breading and fry them in oil.”
“Really?” the auburn-haired beauty pondered. “I might have to try that sometime. When we have a larger stock of the birds, of course.”
Jemma and I made our way out of the palace and out to the pathway, where Theora, Nima, Thornen, and Brenna were waiting. Each of the deer women wore a similar outfit to Jemma, short-shorts with a loose-fitting white tunic on top, and the fabric of their clothes hugged each and every curve of their tight bodies and showed off their fit, toned tummies and tight asses.
Beside them, Nadir stood there and addressed a small band of Coonag women. Lezan, Jira, and Trin were all present, and they all yawned and rubbed at their tired eyes.
“Hi, ladies.” I waved as I approached the tribe of deer women. “Are we ready to go grab some eggs?”
“We will be,” Trin yawned, “once we find Malak. She was supposed to come along, too.”
“Oh, I saw her earlier,” I half-fibbed. “She said she wanted to sit this one out. Something about needing to get her beauty sleep or something like that.”
The Coonag women woke up a little more at my words, and they narrowed their eyes in suspicion.
“We’re partially nocturnal…” Trin mumbled as she tied her gray hair back into a bun.
Well, shit. This lie was quickly becoming filled with enough plot holes to sink the sturdiest of ships. Still, I pressed on.
“You’ll have to ask her.” I shrugged. “She just wanted me to pass along the message. So, are we ready to collect some eggs?”
“More than ready!” the bubbly, freckled face of the red-haired Nima lit up. “I can’t wait to see what Hali uses them for today.”
“Maybe she’ll make those, what did you call them?” the soft-spoken Thornen asked with large doe eyes. “‘Amulets?’”
“Omelets,” I chuckled and shook my head. “But, yes, I hope she makes those, too. Omelets were practically a food group when I was in the military. Now, shall we?”
I sauntered to the front of the group and then began to lead them into the early morning forest, and we walked for a few minutes before we eventually engaged in casual conversation.
“Were the stories Mira told us true?” Theora spoke up in a mumble. “Is there really an island of sleeping dragons out there, close to us?”
“It is.” I nodded. “We’re going to have to go back there as soon as possible, because the orcs actually found it first. Though I don’t know if they know anything about the rebonding ceremony. I’m guessing not, since one of the ugly fuckers got so frustrated about them being asleep he wanted to just kill them all. Also, Captain Carnog was completely in the dark about all of that stuff.”
“Speaking of Carnog,” Jemma muttered, “I wonder what ever happened to that guy?”
“I honestly don’t care,” I admitted. “He’s either buzzard food right now, or he somehow got back to his home island. And even if he did, the guy’s a double amputee now. I don’t think they’re going to be sending him back out on any adventures any time soon.”
“That was quite the message you sent to the orcs,” the brown-haired Brenna noted. “Where do you come up with these ideas?”
“The deepest, darkest parts of my brain,” I laughed. “The parts I don’t let anyone else see, ever.”
“I’m not even sure a Niralope has that part of their brain,” Brenna admitted.
I turned my head to the side and opened my mouth.
“Niralope?” I gasped. “Is… Is that what you call yourselves?”
All of the deer women stopped walking and turned to look at me, with their hands on their hips.
“Of course, it is,” Jemma laughed. “You didn’t think we would be a fully-functioning society and not have a name for ourselves, did you?”
“I’ll admit, I’ve just been calling you the ‘deer-women,’” I explained.
“… What’s a deer?” Thornen asked timidly.
Oh, right. The people of this world may have shared similar characteristics with the animals of my world, but they didn’t know about those creatures. To them, a deer was just as foreign of a concept as a dragon was to me when I first arrived in this world.
“Never mind.” I brushed off the question with a wave of my hand. “Niralope, huh? I’m guessing that’s based on your Goddess?”
“It is.” Jemma smiled. “The Goddess Nira blessed us all with life and created us in her image, so the least we could do was take on her name.”
“Interesting.” I nodded. “Though I guess it makes sense. You don’t really have a creature you are known to bond with like the dragonkin.”
“The Coonag aren’t named after their god, either,” Nadir interjected, and the raccoon woman looked a little more awake now that we were on the move. “We are named because, in our language, the word ‘Coonag’ means ‘silent death.’”
“So… you just chose that name because you thought it sounded cool?” I mused.
“And because it fits our fighting style,” Trin noted.
Having observed the Coonag women in battle, I knew they were anything but silent, but I wasn’t going to be the one to piss in their cheerios, so I just went along with it.
We ventured further into the jungle until we eventually came to the chicken coop we’d built for the “clucker birds.” It was fairly crude, made out of only things we’d been able to scrounge from the dragonkin island.
The thing had a footprint of fifty feet by fifty feet, with a bunch of small chicken-sized huts on the far-left side and an open field for them to wander around.
Obviously, we wanted these birds to be free-range.
Not so free-range, however, that they would wander off into the jungle and get gobbled up by whatever monsters lurked out there. So, we built a ten-foot high fence of jagged tree branches around the perimeter and then reinforced it with a mud and sand sludge. To top it all off, we even created a bunch of small nests for the birds using the palm leaves we’d found scattered all around the island.
The lot of us spread out to go collect the eggs, but there was one major problem…
“Ben?” Jemma asked curiously. “I’m not finding any eggs.”
“Neither am I,” Brenna noted.
“Me, either,” Thornen observed.
“Yup,” Nima added. “Mine are all empty, too.”
“What about you, Nadir?” I asked the Coonag women. “You guys have a great sense of smell, right? Are you picking anything up?”
I watched as the racoon women held their noses up high in the air and took a few long whiffs. Then they looked around at each other and shrugged.
“That’s weird,” Lezan grumbled. “I can smell the eggs, but they aren’t in the spots where the clucker birds usually lay them.”
What the fuck? These chickens always had a bountiful harvest of eggs for us, day in and day out. Was there something wrong with them? I really hoped not. It wasn’t like I could just take them to a vet or anything, after all.
I began to walk around the coop and scope out every nook and cranny that could have possibly housed an egg, but still, nothing.
“This is weird,” I sighed. “I hope they’re not sick. They should be producing eggs by the basketful, and yet--”
Before I could finish my sentence, I heard the all-too-familiar splat of something hitting the ground. Sure enough, I glanced over to see the soggy yellow and brown remains of what appeared to be one of our missing eggs. It must have fallen from above, so my eyes began to drift slowly upwards so I could figure out where it was coming from.
That’s when I saw them.
Up in the trees above the coop was a pack of monkey-like creatures. They each stood about three feet tall, with bright green and white fur all over their bodies. Each of the creatures was bipedal, with a thin, long tail that looked like it was holding them to the branches they stood on. Their heads were small and pointed, with a snout like an anteater’s and small, beady eyes.
However, most important was their arms. In each slender, green-furred arm they carried an armful of fresh eggs. Strangely enough, the little green bastards had six arms, three jutting out of each side.
“I think we found our missing eggs,” I growled as I stared down the creatures.
The monkey-creature let out an aggressive howl, and all of his tribemates repeated the sound in unison. Then, before any of us could make a move, the green bastards turned and took off into the trees.
Not on my watch…
“What are you doing, Draco Rex?” Brenna asked as I began to run after the egg thieves.
“We’re going after them,” I shouted over my shoulder. “Nobody steals from the Dragon King and gets away with it.”
Chapter Three
“We’ve got to get up into the trees!” I commanded as I tore through the brush of the jungle and raced after the green monkey creatures that had stolen all of our eggs. “We’ll never be able to outpace them on foot.”
Instantly, I heard the Coonag women unleash a battle cry, and then I heard a few thuds proceeded by the rustling of branches and the creaking of tree limbs. I dared to take my eyes off the egg thieves for a moment and then grinned when I saw the Coonag women bounding from branch to branch in hot pursuit.
“They’ve definitely got gusto,” Brenna noted as the long-legged deer woman bounded beside me.
The monkeys were fleeing across the canopy of the jungle like bats out of hell, but thankfully we were all still fast enough to keep up. The Niralopes’ long legs and thick muscles gave them the speed of an Olympic athlete, while my dragonkin enhancements allowed me superhuman endurance and a slight boost in speed.
Still, even with all our abilities, we didn’t come anywhere near being as fast as the Coonag women were in the trees. These raccoon beauties had lived their entire lives in the forest while climbing massive trunks and living among the land. Even though they were on a foreign island, they were still completely in their element.
“Tear them to shreds, ladies!” Lezan declared.
“Don’t kill them!” I called up at the canopy. “They’re just hungry, and we didn’t secure the coop tight enough. The bastards are only doing what any animal would do in this situation.”
“No killing?” Nadir shouted, and she sounded sad.
“Just rough ‘em up a bit,” I continued. “Make them afraid to ever try and steal from us again.”
“Scare them,” Trin answered, “got it.”
We ran a few more paces before I saw the large clearing up in the distance. The ground completely disappeared into a steep drop-off, replaced by the tops of the massive trees growing down below. The closest one looked to be several dozen feet away, but thankfully mother nature had provided me with an easy solution.
Several long, lush green vines dangled down from the trees above, and they were practically giving me an invitation to go full Tarzan on them.
“Uh, Ben?” Jemma gasped as she leapt over a log to my right. “There’s a cliff up there.”
“I know,” I reassured her. “You see those vines? Grab onto them and then use your momentum to swing out onto the new set of trees.”
“How do you know if they’re strong enough?” Thornen questioned.
“They’re almost as thick as my arm,” I noted as I gestured to the vines around us. “That has to be able to hold some weight.”
“Got one!” I heard Trin call out. “Alright, you little egg poacher…”
Trin let loose a loud hiss that reverberated through the forest, and I was sure the poor green monkey was pissing himself in fear.
Good. Maybe he’d remember that the next time he thought about stealing from us.
Another green, anteater-faced monkey let out a howl as it came careening down from above and smashed into the ground. It tumbled across the foliage, with its body covered in the remnants of the eggs he’d been carrying, and then he sprang to his feet and scurried into the brush.
“Careful of the eggs!” I reminded my friends. “It’s not good to scare them if we smash all of our breakfast along with the message.”
“Are you sure this is going to work, Ben?” Jemma worried as we approached the dropoff.
“Just trust me.” My heart pounded in my chest as I watched the edge of the cliff getting closer and closer.
Then, once I was right at the edge, I sprang up into the air, threw my hands around the width of the vine in front of me, and let my momentum carry me out over the side of the ravine. My heart stopped for a split second as I swung out into nothingness, and then it began again in a chaotic rhythm when I released my grip.
There was no turning back now.
My body was hurtling across the sky at about three hundred feet above the ground, and I was all pins and needles. Thankfully, my swing had enough momentum to carry me to the next set of trees, and I landed onto a thick branch with a harsh impact that knocked the wind completely out of me. Still, I grabbed onto the branch, hoisted myself up, and then turned around just in time to see several off the egg-snatching creatures leap out of the trees and jump toward the canopy I was standing on.
Now was my chance.
So, I grabbed the closest sturdy-yet-bendable branch, pulled it back as hard as I could, and then waited.
The little bastards must not have seen me, because three of them scurried right toward my position. So, when they got too close, I let go of the branch.
The wooden trap sprang forward, and
then there was a loud crack as it sent the incoming monkeys off into the sky like a fly ball. I watched as their bodies slammed into a nearby tree, bounced off, and then plinko-ed down the branches below.
“Nice shot, Ben!” Nima whistled as she landed her jump and continued in pursuit of the monkey creatures.
The freckle-faced Niralope pulled her bow off her back and, while still bounding across the branches, took aim at the fleeing creature. Then she unleashed her arrow and cackled victoriously.
I saw the projectile shoot through the canopy and then strike a small tree limb right in front of the monkey’s path. The arrow must have loosened the thing, because when the creature stepped on it, the branch gave out.
The green monkey tossed all of his eggs up into the sky and flailed his arms wildly as he plummeted out of sight.
“I’ve got them!” Trin promised, and the expression on her face told me she was bound and determined.
Without breaking stride, the gray-haired Coonag woman placed her foot on a higher branch, pushed down, and propelled herself into the air. Then she practically cartwheeled through the sky as she snatched up the free-falling eggs and pulled them in close to her chest. She finished her acrobat routine on one leg, and she struggled to keep her balance as she held the eggs like the precious cargo they were.
“Good job!” I shouted as I ran past the Coonag woman. “Now, just don’t let them--”
Before I could finish my sentence, something hard smashed into my forehead. The sudden blow knocked me off course, and my foot missed the branch I’d been aiming for. The ground went out from underneath me, and suddenly my chest slammed violently into one of the tree limbs.
I felt a warm, gooey liquid running down my head as I pulled myself upright. Fucking hell, did these things actually draw blood? I reached up, wiped a bit of the liquid off my forehead, and examined it.
Eggs. The bastard had hit me with an egg.