Monstergirl Quest, page 5
She paused, looked back at me, and I got the feeling that she wanted to grin at me, but was trying her hardest not to. “Yes, Earthman?”
“C’mon,” I said. “I did pretty good tonight.”
“Are all Earthmen this emotionally needy?” she asked.
I laughed at that. “I’m just saying, I think I did good enough to earn a gift.”
She put her hands on her hips. “A gift? What sort of gift, silly Earthman?”
“Your name. Tell me what your name is.”
She shook her head, her dark eyes shining playfully, and she turned her back to me as she headed into the cave.
“My name’s Pandora,” she said, right before she disappeared around the next corner.
“Pretty name,” I said to myself, then followed her back to our little camp for breakfast.
Chapter Six
During the last stretch of our journey to Homehold, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before in my stats.
Now, I’d gotten up to Level 6 and I was feeling pretty good about myself, so I almost missed the glowing number in the top corner of my stats page. I took a closer look at it and another page unfolded in my mind’s eye.
I grinned at what I saw, intuiting exactly what it was without explanation.
It was a skill tree! I must have gained a skill point with every level increase, because I had six skill points to spend.
I took a look at my options. It seemed that the skill points could be used to bolster existing skills and stats. There were even options to unlock abilities I hadn’t used yet.
The first one that caught my eye was the dual-wielding perk, naturally. I imagined myself hacking through that horde of goblins with a second firesword in hand and, damn, wouldn’t that have been fun?
But as I scrolled through my options, I decided not to spend any skill points just yet. As far as hack-and-slash, up-close melee went, I was already pretty powerful.
What interested me the most were the magical boosts. There was magic resistance, spell absorption, even an option to gain an invisibility spell, although I could only cast it once every twenty-four hours.
No, I wouldn’t go spending my skill points just yet.
“What do you know about magic, Pandora?” I asked.
She looked back at me, but didn’t look into my eyes. Her eyes were downcast. She turned away from me and continued on ahead. “Not much,” she finally said. “The duke’s official mage can tell you more.”
I nodded. If possible, I wanted to balance out my attributes evenly. The Soulguard gave me plenty of raw strength, but I’d have to figure out how to unlock its magical abilities sooner rather than later.
I thought back to when I ran into that first lich, and how quickly it had incinerated me. Surely, there were far more powerful magic users than that undead bastard. I’d have to be prepared for them.
We made good time. It wasn’t even mid-morning when we cut through the forest and saw Homehold on the horizon.
The closer we got, the more difficult it was to discern if this place was a mid-sized city or simply a large fortress. There were thick stone walls blocking our view of all but the tallest buildings.
Though we were still a ways off, I could see archers manning the battlements, taking sniper positions between the stone crenellations.
Here and there, I saw bulky trebuchets lining the top of the wall. Most were already loaded with ammunition.
“This place looks like it’s ready for war already,” I said.
Pandora grunted. “They’ve always been ready for war,” she said. “Don’t let the greenery of this landscape fool you, Earthman. Just south of those mountains behind, the Frozen Wastes stretch on forever. Being the southernmost city of the Empire, Homehold has been fighting off the Necromancer’s minions for centuries.”
I frowned. “I guess the Empire must help them out a lot, then. Probably sends extra troops.”
Pandora laughed. “No such thing, Earthman. The Emperor has no love for Homehold. He rarely sends any aid. When he does, it’s usually laughable. No, Duke Gladios and the people of Homehold are very much on their own.”
“That doesn’t make any fucking sense,” I said, incensed at this dumbass Emperor’s neglect of his people. “If the Necromancer’s forces are nearby, why not arm Homehold to the teeth?”
Pandora paused, seeming like she was going to give me an answer, but then she looked away.
“The situation here is…complicated,” she said.
“And why’s that?” I pressed her.
She said nothing and remained completely stone-faced.
There was more to the story. I’d have to gain her complete trust to get Pandora to fill me in. I resisted the urge to press her any further. However, I’d have to get the full story eventually, especially if I was supposed to help save this city.
It was only about another half-hour walk before we heard the horses approaching. The guards from the city, I assumed. The men atop the battlements had to have seen us coming by now.
A dozen of them rode out. The horses were scrawny, close to starving. The guards’ armor was old and rusted, but at least their weapons seemed sharp enough. Without their armor, I doubted the guards would be very bulky at all. Their faces were gaunt and pallid.
Even so, they were happy enough to see us.
“Lady Pandora!” their captain said as he brought his horse to heel. The captain looked at me, his eyes wide in disbelief as he looked at my strange clothes…and the fearsome gauntlet on my left hand. “Is this…?”
“The Earthman who goes by the name of Mack the Gamelord,” Pandora said as she gestured to me. “Ride on, captain, and tell the duke that I’ve brought Ciara’s Champion.”
Being around these friendly, if malnourished, faces certainly put us in better spirits. The captain ordered one of his men to dismount, so that me and Pandora could ride. She hopped onto the horse, took the reins, then turned to me.
“Well, are you getting on or not, Earthman?”
She looked down at me with a slight, very subtle playfulness in her dark eyes. I wasn’t even sure she meant to look at me that way. Maybe she just couldn’t help it.
I nodded, smirking as I jumped onto the horse, right behind her in the saddle.
“Hold on,” she said as the horse began at a trot.
I swallowed hard. I was sitting right up against her. I put my hands on her slender hips and held on tight.
She looked back at me, half-glaring, half-smirking. “Don’t get any ideas, Earthman,” she said.
I laughed. “Lady Pandora,” I said, “I don’t have the slightest idea as to what you’re talking about.”
She shook her head, kicked the horse, and we went bounding off toward the city’s gates.
********
As we entered the town, the rhythmic gallop of the horse kept grinding Pandora’s body against my own. Now, I was facing a challenge more difficult than all those goblins and undead combined.
I don’t think I need to spell out it…but with her firm butt grinding against me, well…you know.
I’ll just say that I was very close to drawing Pandora’s attention.
To keep my mind off her slender body in front of my own, I questioned her about the city.
Despite the gaunt, malnourished look of the soldiers, the townspeople looked comparatively healthy.
This, Pandora explained, was due to the armed forces volunteering to ration most of their meals for the last few weeks.
“The soldiers and guards would do anything for the people of Homehold,” Pandora went on. “They take after Duke Gladios in that way, as he’d been a fine soldier in his youth.”
“But why are they rationing food?” I asked.
“They began rations when word came that the Necromancer’s forces were on the move,” Pandora said. “Once King Darkheart’s army falls upon the city, it will be cut off from any reliable food supplies, so they have to plan ahead.” A particularly vicious scowl shot across her face. “The Emperor says he doesn’t have enough supplies to send food south to Homehold.”
“God, I hate this guy already,” I said.
“Shh,” Pandora said, cutting me off. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Most in Homehold are trustworthy, but the Emperor has ears everywhere.”
I nodded, getting the picture.
But, I noticed, even the townsfolk were preparing for the coming war. Everywhere I looked, I saw citizens practicing with wooden swords, often under the tutelage of off-duty soldiers.
Even the little kids were training.
All this effort on the part of these humble people, and their goddamn Emperor couldn’t even be bothered to help them.
Well, as Pandora said, I had to focus on helping Homehold first. However, I began to wonder: Would there come a time when I’d have to consider the Emperor my enemy?
Given the way he treated his people, I wouldn’t have minded that so much. But, anyway, I had the Necromancer to kill first.
The guards rode along with us as we approached the center of town, where the duke’s castle was located. It wasn’t anything fancy. Just stone and brick with a deep moat running along the perimeter.
It was odd, though. Everywhere, I saw townsfolk coming and going through the castle grounds, rich and poor alike.
“Shouldn’t there be, like, more security here?” I asked as we crossed the bridge that had been lowered over the moat.
“Duke Gladios’ family were never like other nobility,” Pandora said. “They identify with their people, much more than the others. Duke Gladios welcomes his townsfolk into his castle freely.”
“He sounds like an alright guy,” I said.
She nodded. “If needed, he’d offer his meager bed to the lowliest peasant,” Pandora went on.
Pandora continued to explain Homehold’s defenses, but a strange, sudden dizziness took over me.
Initially, I chalked it up to exhaustion. We hadn’t slept much, not with the goblin horde attacking, and our breakfast had been meager.
Yet, as I tried to shake it off, the dizziness only got worse.
“Earthman, are you well?” Pandora asked, though now her voice sounded like it was a million miles away.
The world began to grow dark. Quite suddenly, I was falling again, as I fell through the watery void the first time I donned the Soulguard.
Once again, I found myself staring at a fuzzy image, only this time, it wasn’t Ciara.
This girl was shorter, slightly more slender, and her hair was the finest, most brilliant shade of silver.
Unlike Ciara, the girl had been forced to wear filthy, tattered rags instead of proper clothes. She was bound at her wrists, sitting on a dirty floor.
Of course, she was just as beautiful as Ciara had been. Her small, elf-like ears poked out through her moonlight strands of hair and she turned her sparkling emerald eyes toward me.
“Gamelord…” she said, her voice echoing throughout the darkness.
“Yes, I’m here,” I called back to her.
The slender Mananymph was panicked, trying to hurry, but I guessed that her telepathic powers weren’t quite as strong as Ciara’s, because it was far more difficult to hear her.
“My name’s Sephara,” she called out. The image of her in that watery void rippled and fragmented for a moment, though it came back together soon after. “Darkheart…forces are moving in from the west…surprise attack…”
“From the west?” I repeated. “Where, specifically?”
She shook her head, grimacing, trying to keep this psychic connection between us going so she could finish.
“Bogwater Bridge, you must hurry!” she shouted before the image came apart, before I fell like I had before, falling in every direction at once as I went tumbling from the void and back to the real world.
My consciousness slammed hard back into my body, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that I was lying on the floor just inside the castle’s entrance.
Pandora was kneeling over me, squeezing my hand, trying to get me to wake up. Around her were several people I never saw before.
Chief among them was none other than Duke Gladios himself. He was easy to spot, with his family’s sigil molded into his otherwise-plain iron armor, hardly different than what his men wore.
He nodded to me, giving me a grandfatherly smile. His face was wrinkled, his beard so gray that it was almost silver, but there was an unmistakable spark in his eyes. “The Champion awakens.”
Next to the duke, there was some sort of knight, an older man nearly as old as the duke himself. That one had on that familiar iron armor, topped with a fearsome iron helmet.
Then there was a tall woman, taller than all the rest, and she wore a golden mage’s robe that matched her sunlight-colored skin. She had deep, wise eyes. She knelt down beside me.
“Gamelord, my name is Therena, chief mage of the duke’s court,” she said, her smooth voice spilling out in a regal tone over her golden lips. “You’ve had a vision of a Mananymph, haven’t you?”
My voice caught in my throat. I was still dizzy, my vision still hardly better than a blur.
“Sephara,” was all I managed to say before the world went black again.
********
I woke up at twilight. Groggy as I was, I felt a hundred times better than I had after having the vision from Sephara.
I sat up. I was in a big, comfortable bed in a moderately sized chamber. The door was closed. On the table next to the bed, there was a pitcher of water, along with a tall glass of wine.
The wine definitely tempted me, but I wanted to keep my wits sharp. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out of it, and I knew that I couldn’t waste any time, as the Necromancer’s forces would be coming from the west soon.
As I got out of bed, I realized that they’d changed my clothes. Now, I wore a comfortable white tunic along with a matching pair of pants. There were shoes at the foot of the bed and they were just my size.
I slipped into them then stretched. I was alone, or so I thought. There was a door off to the side, and from there, I heard the sounds of running water and crackling fire.
I walked quietly, wondering who was in the adjoining room. The door was opened a crack, so I took a peek.
Holy shit.
There was a woman, sitting in a bathtub, pumping water into it from a nearby cistern. Below the tub, there was a small hearth heating the water.
I gulped hard, knowing that I should probably look away. The woman, who had hair black as midnight, long and flowing down her back, had two beautiful fairy wings protruding from her shoulder blades.
They looked like they were made of crystals and silk, silver and blueish purple and magic. She dunked her head into the water and the steaming hot water rolled down her unblemished back. She ran her hands through her midnight hair and I saw two pointed fairy ears poking out from underneath.
Christ, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Then, quite suddenly, she stood up, grabbed a towel, and I got an eyeful, alright.
It wasn’t until I bumped into the door accidentally that she realized I was watching.
And that was when I realized who I’d been looking at.
“Pandora, I’m sorry!” I said, quickly covering my eyes then backing away from the door.
“Idiot Earthman!” I heard her cry out from the bathing chamber. “Therena said you’d be asleep until at least tomorrow morning, damn it!”
Chapter Seven
I was still reeling from the sight of Pandora’s naked body when she came storming out of the bathing chamber. Now, she wore nothing but a towel, wrapped around her chest then dangling down to her thighs.
Her hair was slicked back, wet and leaking onto her pale shoulders, with her fairy wings hidden under the towel. Her pointed fairy ears jutted out on each side, soft and smooth as the rest of her, and I hadn’t thought Pandora could have gotten more adorable until now.
I was so dumbstruck by the sight of her, of the little beads of water coating her skin like tiny diamonds, that I didn’t realize she had one of her daggers in hand until she swung it at me.
“Stupid, peeping Earthman!” she growled as I parried her slash.
Her blade dinged and sparked off the Soulguard as I carefully backed away from her, parrying each subsequent blow.
“Pandora, you know you can trust me,” I said to her.
“I know no such thing!” she seethed and continued to come at me, whirling and slashing like a deadly ballerina.
Though I was still weak from suffering the vision from Sephara, I’d gone up enough levels that Pandora didn’t pose much of a threat to me.
Not in a stand-up fight, anyway. Here, I still had a huge advantage. But she was angry enough that I was certainly glad there weren’t any shadows for her to hide in.
Yet, angry as she was, I saw something else in her stern, dark eyes. More than anger, I saw vulnerability, I saw fear. For a bit, I let her air her frustrations via battle, parrying her slashes for a few minutes just to tire her out.
It made for good training at least. Though her blows weren’t particularly powerful, they were savagely fast, and blocking them gave me a good workout.
BLOCKING SKILL INCREASED +2
ATHLETICS SKILL INCREASED +1
EVASION SKILL INCREASED +2
LEVEL 10 REACHED!
After a time, when Pandora grew winded, I ended the fight. She slashed at my throat but, this time, I caught the blade in my armored palm then thrust her against the wall.
She struggled against me, but I held her firm.
“Look into my eyes, Pandora,” I said. “And tell me that you don’t trust me to keep this secret.”
She was panting, out of breath. Now, instead of just water dotting her skin, she was dripping sweat.
Pandora looked up at me, her scowl softening gradually. She stared into my eyes. I stared into hers, then brushed my thumb against her chin.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered to me. “Mananymphs, by Imperial law, cannot walk free. If the Emperor or those loyal to him find out about me—”
“They won’t,” I said. “And even if they did, if those Imperial scumbags tried coming for you, I’d burn this fucking Empire to the ground to protect you.”
