But killing the helpless elf didn’t seem like the right thing to do. She had tears in her eyes and was in the middle of trying to save her friend’s life. Even now, she was glancing at her companion’s still body, worrying about her situation more than her own.
The whole thing tugged at my heartstrings just a bit too much. Maybe it was her pretty face, maybe it was the tears in her eyes. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I pressed the broken blade against her throat, in an obvious threat. Even with the thing just barely touching her skin, I could see blisters starting to form at her throat. I coughed, my throat unused to speaking in recent days, since all my communications with Mac happened via my implant. Because of that, my voice came out far more guttural than it normally did.
“Listen here.” I said dangerously as the blade pressed against her throat. She whimpered and closed her eyes, apparently waiting for death. “I could have killed you right here, right now, but I’m not. That should count for something.”
I pulled the sword away, and the elf looked up at me, surprise evident in her face. She wouldn’t have understood a word I said, but body language was universal. I had her dead to rights, and yet I was sparing her life.
Enemy defeated. 85 points awarded.
That was interesting. I was awarded points even when I didn’t kill my opponent. It seemed that surrender was all that was necessary.
I threw the upper portions of the dead male elf’s garments at her feet. She recognized the gesture for what it was and picked it up after I’d removed my foot from her chest.
She bowed deeply, hands clasp one in the other and made a fist over her heart. Then she pressed the cloth to her friends’ wounds in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
I didn’t think she’d succeed. Gut wounds in the middle ages were usually a slow death sentence. The danger of infection was too high. Then again, considering I hadn’t gotten an infection from a set of giant rat teeth plunging into my skin, maybe that wasn’t a problem in this world.
Regardless of what happened, I wasn’t sticking around. Already I was starting to stagger. Though I spared the purple-haired elf’s life, there was no telling if she’d do the same for me if I collapsed somewhere nearby.
I made another tourniquet for both my leg and my arm and collected my spear to use as a walking stick. Given that my left arm was also wounded, I had to use it awkwardly in my right, so the going was slow. Even with my wounds bandaged I was still leaving a trail of blood behind me dripping in the sand.
Any moron with a pair of eyes would be able to track me. I needed to lose the trail. I could walk upstream in the creek for a little while. That would wash away any blood trail and give me the chance to lose any trackers I might pick up. The cave system that Mac was in wasn’t too far away. I could hole up in there. Nobody had found that place in four hundred years. Maybe I could heal up in there and wait? Mac might be able to make something to help me, or maybe the ship would let me buy medical supplies with points. I checked my points 402, that was just barely enough to buy the medical bay.
The numbness from the darts was starting to fade, and the pain in my body continued to increase. A pit of despair welled up inside me as full feeling returned to my wounded limbs. I wasn’t going to make it. I was going to die here in this creek.
I stumbled along, bit by bit. As the feeling came back to my leg it started to get harder to walk. Eventually I tripped on a rock and fell down in the water. It took a supreme effort of will just to flop over on my back so I could breathe.
This felt rather nice. The water flowed around me, surrounding my body and encasing me in its cool embrace as it carried me along, without a care in the world. The water seemed to seep into my wounds, searing them with a flickering flame that felt almost alive. It should have hurt, but it was actually somewhat pleasurable. Maybe the pain centers of my brain had just been maxed out and now the spilling over into pleasure-governing regions. Maybe this was just what death felt like. At any rate, as consciousness faded I had a smile on my face.
The last thing I remembered was my body being picked up by the stream and carried away.
CHAPTER SIX
The first thing I realized when I awoke was that I was naked, and that there was something warm somewhere there shouldn’t be.
I opened my eyes and realized that there was a presence looming over me. She had green-hair and matching green eyes, which were scanning me up and down while her fingers moved a brush across an open scroll. Dimly, she reminded me of my elvish companion back at the brothel. After a moment’s study I realized that her features were different. She was similar in appearance, but was a different elf entirely. Maybe a relative.
I was just barely able to see that on the scroll was a crude representation of my naked form, erect cock and all.
What’s more, it looked like it was a heavily annotated diagram. There were endless tiny lines of script on the page, organized in neat rows. It reminded me vaguely of the script I’d seen back in the cave, but altered for writing with a brush instead of a chisel. Instead of rough, straight lines, there were lots of arcs of varying width with smooth, circular patterns throughout the text. It was elegant and beautiful in the same way the stone carvings had been austere and imposing.
That made the writing clash horribly with the lewd drawing of my naked body right next to it. The drawing reminded me of a medical diagram from Gray’s Anatomy and was somewhat embarrassing with its accuracy and attention to detail. My stomach was flabby from years without exercising any muscle other than my brain. I certainly didn’t have Dean’s level of muscle tone.
I tried to sit up but found I couldn’t. My wounded left arm was bound in a wooden splint and my right arm to a loop of wood that supported the hammock I was currently laying in. There was a similar splint on my left leg, except this one had some sort of strange tube-like contraption sticking out of it filled with a pale blue fluid. After looking at the tube, I realized it was plumbed into me through my leg, right where the crossbow bolt had hit me. Now that I had noticed it, I realized there was a soothing sensation spreading from that spot on my leg, and I felt no pain from there. The bolt must have been removed and I must have either healed or be on painkillers. I tried to twitch the leg but nothing happened. Painkillers then. While the other leg hadn’t been hit with a crossbow bolt, it had taken its share of pain from the fighting and I could only weakly move it. I definitely wouldn’t be walking any time soon.
My good right leg was bound to the other end of the hammock, just like my right arm. With two of my limbs wounded and the other two immobile, I was quite helpless.
It seemed my captor was in the middle of creating a detailed diagram of my more intimate parts, and the warm feeling I’d felt on my groin was her making adjustments to get a better view. Something about the elf seemed incredibly familiar. Which was odd, since I hadn’t met many elves. Maybe I was just bad and reading elvish faces, and all elves looked the same to me.
The green-haired elf was engrossed in her work. So much so that she hadn’t noticed me waking up. I made a noise to get her attention, causing her to drop her writing brush in surprise.
“Hello there.” I said in as gentle a voice as possible. I felt blood rush to my face. I wasn’t a virgin, especially if you count the elves I’d met in the brothel, but it was still quite embarrassing to be strapped naked to a hammock in front of somebody pretty.
The elf babbled something in that strange language they shared.
Processing language data… 27% complete
Another message appeared, indicating that whatever had become of my implant after the pocket watch had merged with it would eventually be capable of providing me some form of translation. That was good.
I tried to repeat some of her words, hoping that might get her to keep talking. I was eager to see what would happen once I got that progress bar got to a hundred percent.
The green-haired elf continued to frown and then repeated my words back to me.
&n
bsp; “There.” She said carefully, her tongue flicking across the words as she tried to enunciate them just as I did.
“I’m Theo.” I replied, trying to keep my words short.
“Immatheo.” The elf repeated.
I shook my head.
“I. Am. Theo.” I tried to point at myself, but with my only working arm bound I could only move my fingers in my general direction.
The green-haired elf understood the gesture quickly. Instead of trying to repeat my words, she pointed a finger at herself.
“Am Sava.”
Suddenly things clicked into place. That’s hair! Those eyes! That accent! They were all identical to Savatania’s. I’d met her back in the brothel, and she was actually able to speak English! Having her by my side would change everything. Being able to communicate with the locals would mean I’d get to figure out what the hell was going on and why every elf I spotted seemed to have it in for me.
“Where is Savitania?” I asked, hoping this new elf would recognize the name.
“Savitania?” the green-haired elf repeated in surprise. Then she shook her head and repeated her earlier phrase. “Sava.”
Okay, so her name was Sava. Based on her reaction though, the word ‘Savitania’ wasn’t just nonsense to her. It meant something. Maybe it referred to a person. Maybe there was chance Savitania was around here somewhere… except four hundred years have passed. I didn’t have a firm grasp on elvish lifespans, but it seemed a little excessive to hope she might still be alive.
My gut sank again. It had been a long shot, but I disappointed nonetheless. The idea of a familiar face had seemed too good to be true.
With that, our conversation seemed to have ended. Sava went back to drawing, and I went back to being her immobilized nude model.
At one point she got up to refill the fluid in the tube sticking out of my leg, and that was about the extent of our interactions until she fed me food that evening.
I nearly spat it out when she first shoved it into my mouth. I immediately knew what it was. It was raw white fin meat, just like I’d been catching since I first came to this world, except as soon as I gained the ability to make a fire I’d taken to cooking the food like a civilized person.
Apparently, Sava didn’t think cooking the meat was good. When it looked like I wasn’t going to chew and swallow, she popped the piece of fish in a vial of liquid that appeared to be water from the creek. For some reason though she seemed to handle the vial as if it were filled with acid.
It was then I noticed she had a bag of tools at her hip, which appeared to house an extremely extensive collection. Much more than seemed likely to fit in such a small satchel. One of the tools was a mortar and pestle which she used to grind up a variety of plants, both dried and fresh. Bit by bit she added them to the vial and stirred the whole mixture around.
Occasionally she’d wave a hand over the vial to safely give herself a sniff. At some point she seemed satisfied with the mixture, and she stuck a small wooden stick in that looked like a chopstick. When she withdrew it, it came with a tiny droplet of the liquid, which she held over her mouth until it dropped in.
She closed her eyes, wincing slightly and nodded. Then she picked up the whole vial and shoved it in my mouth. The fluid filled my mouth, quickly causing a large portion of it to spill out. That made her frown and pull out the bottle. I choked down what little of the stuff I had to in order to get my air passageways clear. A lot of it got in my lungs, giving me a coughing fit.
When I was able to breathe again, I noticed something. There was that sweet, pleasurable feeling. The kind I’d felt when I first started drinking the water from the creek and eating the fish in its raw form. Could the raw fish and water from this area have some sort of addictive property? Or was there some strange magic at play in my body?
With Sava’s brew, the sensation was a hundred times stronger. If before I’d been drinking flavored water, now I was drinking the latest energy drink. As it hit my systems, I realized it was doing something.
Apparently, whatever that something was, Sava thought it was good for me. Good enough that she ended up pouring the rest of the vial into her own mouth. With just a hint of shyness, she pressed her face against mine.
I’m a very paranoid person. To me, an addictive agent seemed most likely. Many primitive cultures loved euphoria-inducing drugs. Maybe she was feeding me some sort of magical cocaine to get me hooked. Once I was I’d need to come to her for my supply, and that meant she’d have control over me. I could already see myself with a dumb, addict smile on my face pulling a plow across a field like a horse while my green-haired captor lounged in the shade, drawing a picture of me doing an impression of an ox.
No thank you. I wasn’t having any of that. Unfortunately, my captor didn’t seem pleased by the fact that I’d shut my mouth tight.
So, she pinched my nose shut. That was weird, until I noticed I couldn’t breathe. Oh crap, that was her game.
I held my breath for a few minutes longer but realized that this was a game I wasn’t going to be winning. Eventually I had to open my mouth to breathe, and when I did she pressed her mouth against mine. Her tongue quickly found its way inside my mouth and started exploring.
I was tempted to bite, but she was very pretty, and it would be rude of me to refuse a pretty lady who wanted to kiss me that badly. The fact that I was also completely at her mercy helped convince me to behave myself.
It was obvious that she planned to force-feed me her mysterious elixir via mouth-to-mouth. As humiliating as it was to be fed in the same manner of as a newborn bird, it was also somewhat erotic in its own, strange way.
The pleasurable feeling of consuming the strange liquid increased as I ingested more and more of the exotic brew. Soon, I felt a tingling sensation spread throughout my entire body. That was kind of scary, and apparently Sava must have sensed something, because she slapped my chest and muttered a few words under her breath.
She pulled out a massive leather-bound tome. It seemed much more worn than the scroll she’d been writing on before, and the text was far too cramped to have been done with a brush.
She flipped through the pages, apparently searching for something. She eventually got to a page and saw something she didn’t like.
After that, Sava quickly set up a whole array of cylinders and tubes, all in a line. She was working much faster now, preparing all sorts of herbs and pouring more than a bit of liquid from the vial of teal liquid at her hip.
Then she pulled out a long thin dagger and poked me with it. At the tip of the dagger were a few drops of blood, which she stirred into the vial. Alright, this was some definite witchcraft going on. Any potion that required my blood was something I didn’t want.
This was especially true considering the massive transformation the bottle seemed to undergo the moment my blood touched the rest of the liquid. Like magic, or perhaps because of magic, it changed color from clear to a deep purple color. Then the elf placed the vial onto a pedestal, under which she placed a strange, two colored pieces of wood, which she lit on fire
As the wood burned, I noticed each tongue of flame had two colors to it, one red and one purple. Sava said some words and delicately stirred the elixir the whole time until the flame died out. By that time, the color had turned to bright purple, and it was glowing.
That’s when Sava’s mouth-to-mouth feeding session started up again. I was very tempted to resist, but the pleasurable tingling feeling of the previous drink I’d just been fed had been growing the entire time the green-haired elf was brewing the second concoction. At this point, the tingling was so widespread that it felt like my body had too much of the stuff in it. That something was suffusing my every cell and threatening to burst out at any moment.
The feeling was distracting, to say the least. It felt like I was on the verge of losing myself to the feeling, similar to how I felt while floating in the creek water.
The new potion that Sava had brewed was like a wave of ice flowing
through my entire body. It stopped the tingling feeling in its tracks. Small wisps of smoke could be seen escaping from my skin, and a black, tar-like substance was being produced.
Did this girl just… experiment on me?
She wiped the sweat from her brow, relief evident on her face. Clearly, she’d messed up with the first batch and had almost done something very bad to me, which she’d only just barely managed to correct with the second batch of liquid.
Yeah, I had no desire to drink any strange concoctions from this elf again.
Or maybe I did? While checking my body all over for damage, I realized I felt fine. Better than fine actually. I felt great! Whatever it was she’d done, it had amazing healing properties.
Minus the goo that had formed all over my skin, it felt like all my wounds had been healed, and that my muscles had suddenly grown stronger.
A feeling of power suffused my body, flesh, blood and bones all felt as though they’d been enlivened. They were the same bits of meat I’d always worn, but now they felt like they were just a bit… more.
I could feel a thrum of power. Something deep within me was taking root, centered on my abdomen. It was sending its strength flowing through my very essence.
The ropes that bound my right arm and leg felt much weaker than they had moments ago. I pulled on both, and the chord creaked and became taught. I wasn’t strong enough to break them, but I was close to that point.
My left arm was healed now, and I flexed it, trying to free it from the wooden splint. By instinct, I tugged at this source of power that had nestled itself in my center of mass, just above the base of my spine.
These were thinner and weaker than the ones binding me and couldn’t resist my newfound strength for long. They cracked and popped and ripped as I flexed my muscles.
Zeal of the Mind and Flesh Page 9