Pocket Dungeon, page 30
“It was?” Yasha asked, like she hadn’t just made me fucking see God.
I laughed and pressed a kiss to the side of her temple. She seemed pleased by the gesture, so I did it again before I finally lowered her down to her feet.
“Yes,” I said. “It really, really was.”
She seemed satisfied with my answer, and instead of bending down to grab her clothing, she simply grabbed the Millennium Falcon set I’d gotten her and made her way over to the couch.
I watched as her perfect ass and tail swayed in time before she dropped herself down onto the couch.
How the hell had I gotten so lucky?
“I would like to have ice cream now, and watch more of the Star Wars with you,” she said, which honestly was probably the best post-fuck ritual I’d ever heard someone suggest.
And because I wasn’t a man to fuck around with a perfectly good idea, I grabbed one of the pints of ice cream from the freezer, two spoons from the drawer by the sink, and made my way over to the couch to join Yasha.
She’d arranged her Millennium Falcon on the coffee table right in the middle like a vase of flowers by the time I arrived. I tucked myself back into my jeans before I sat down and passed her the ice cream and one of the spoons.
She took both from my hands and then made herself comfortable against my side with her legs stretched out along the rest of the couch.
Honestly, this all felt a little surreal, but in the best way possible.
“Wes?” Yasha said as she dug her spoon into the pink, cherry-speckled ice cream.
“Hm?” I grabbed the remote and started to pull up Attack of the Clones so we could continue where she had left off last night.
“There is… something I would like to give you,” Yasha said in an almost anxious tone. “Something very rare and important…”
Chapter 20
My brow furrowed, and I looked down at the woman tucked against my side.
“What is it?” I asked. For a split second, I was afraid it was going to be something bad, but I had no idea what in the world she could possibly give me that would be bad.
Except, like, some sort of other dimensional venereal disease, so fingers crossed that wasn’t it.
“My crystal,” Yasha said with firm resolve, as if this wasn’t the most confusing thing to hear right now.
I blinked a few times as I tried to process what she was saying.
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, your crystal? You never returned through it, how do you have it? I thought that after the twenty-four hour period, it reappeared in your homeworld?”
She shook her head, which sent a tuft of fluffy hair brushing up against the underside of my nose.
“No, no, not that crystal,” she said. “I… I have a second crystal, Wes.”
The fox-girl sent me a nervous glance as she licked a small bit of ice cream from her spoon, and I felt like my brain had flipped inside out.
Yasha had a spare crystal?
How the hell, and what the fuck, since when?
“I did not merge it with my first because I was worried about the skill level it would require,” she said in a rush. “And I feared it was something I would not be able to handle on my own. I was… I was cowardly, I know. But I did not feel prepared for such a task.”
I blinked as I processed what Yasha was saying. “You mean… you have another crystal… the magic things people are totally willing to kill for… and you’re okay just giving it to me?”
It felt crazy, but as I said it all out loud, Yasha nodded her head.
“Yes,” she said. “As I… said before: You are noble and kind, and I trust you will do good with it, Wes.”
She offered me a spoonful of ice cream to punctuate the end of her sentence.
I opened my mouth to accept the bite in a little bit of a daze.
“Thank you,” I mumbled around the hunk of fudge in my mouth. “But… if you have a spare crystal, that could be your way home. You could–”
“No,” she firmly interrupted, and the way she scowled above her pint of ice cream made it hard not to laugh, no matter how serious the situation was. “This is why I did not want to bring it up before. I told you, I want to stay here with you. Arcadio is in my past. You are my present, and… I want you to be my future. I have never felt so safe and happy as I have with you.”
Butterflies exploded in my stomach as I wondered if this was how chicks felt when men proposed to them.
Yasha wanted me as her whole-ass future?
Hell fucking yes, I was okay with this.
“You will take the second crystal,” she continued as if it was entirely decided. “And you will have amazing adventures with it.”
I nodded blankly. “Do you think I can handle the skill level?”
Yasha laughed, and it was a bright, pleasant sound. “Of course, Wes. You are brave and strong, and you are very smart. You have already learned things about the dungeons, and you have a hunger for these adventures that cannot be taught. Even after training so long for the dungeons, I did not feel such a thrill as you showed when we had finished. You are made for this, Wes, and I think you can handle whatever the dungeon may throw at you.”
She paused to eat another bite of ice cream and then offered me another bite as well. I readily accepted it.
“And I will also go with you into the dungeon,” she finished.
That took me by surprise more than anything else she had said.
“You will?” I asked. “You don’t have to do that, Yasha. I know that your foot isn’t entirely healed yet, and--”
She cut me off before I could finish with another spoonful of ice cream.
“I want to help you in the dungeons, Wes,” she said. “It is different with you than it was with my family. I am not afraid of what would happen if I was not good enough. I feel as if together, we would be unstoppable. You and I made a very good partnership the night we met and slayed the wyrmling.”
I had to admit, she had a point. I might have just started attempting dungeons, but I did have a mind for the puzzles I’d seen inside of them. On the other hand, Yasha was clearly a badass warrior, and I doubted we would come across anything inside of the newest dungeon that the two of us wouldn’t be able to handle together.
“You do have a point,” I admitted. “The two of us make a pretty damn good team.”
“Yes,” Yasha said with a firm nod of her head. “Like Obi-Wan and Anakin.”
I opened my mouth to protest the point because holy shit, hopefully not, but then I remembered that Yasha didn’t exactly have the cultural know-how of literally everyone else on Earth.
She didn’t realize that Anakin Skywalker turned into Darth Vader. So, I bit my tongue.
“Maybe,” was all I managed to say. “Or maybe we’re more like Han and Chewie.”
“Yes,” Yasha agreed as she fed me another spoonful of ice cream. “You are like Han Solo, but more noble, and I am stronger and from another planet.”
You know what? I wasn’t even going to argue that one. I just laughed.
“Sure,” I said. “That works for me. We’ve got a few hours to kill before we can even get into the dungeon, so what do you say we finish Attack of the Clones and then start Revenge of the Sith and see how far we get?”
Yasha didn’t answer aloud, but she did nestle herself into my side even further and made herself comfortable. I picked up the movie right where she had left off.
It was the part where Padme and Anakin were just arriving on Naboo.
I relaxed back into the couch and let my mind wander for a bit as I thought about how insanely good my life was getting. I had a sexy woman who wanted to not only be with me, but work with me, fight beside me, and tackle incredible and daring challenges with me. I was also getting more money faster than I had ever expected. And I was even getting in the world’s most intense workout every night without even having to go to a gym.
Things were improving in my life so quickly that it was a little hard to keep up with them.
That was the last thought I remembered having before I woke up with a start on my couch to Yasha letting out a sharp, panicked cry.
I bolted upright so quickly that I knocked the throw pillows off of the couch.
“What is it?” I shouted. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
But before Yasha could answer, I put together exactly what was happening. I recognized the sounds of lightsabers clashing and the tragic chords of Battle of the Heroes, which, was it lame that I knew the names of the songs from the Star Wars soundtracks? Hm. Maybe.
On screen, Obi-Wan cried out that Anakin was his brother, and Yasha looked more distraught than I had ever seen her.
She whipped her head toward me, and her golden eyes were blown wide. She looked like she might have actually started to fucking cry.
“We are not Anakin and Obi-Wan!” she gasped out. “We are not Anakin and Obi-Wan!”
I bit back a laugh at her sudden about-face as I reached out, curled my arm around her shoulders, and pulled her into a side hug.
“I do not want to watch this,” she sniffled against my chest.
I glanced over my shoulder at the nearby clock on the wall and saw that it was nearly nine o’clock at night already. Time had flown by all day, and now we were just arriving at the time we could climb into the dungeon.
I didn’t say anything for a second as I turned the movie off. The sudden silence that followed was only broken by Yasha’s occasional, heartbroken sniffling.
“Come on,” I murmured. “Let’s get dressed, we can head into the dungeon now.”
Yasha gave another little sniffle, but she nodded as she slowly started to peel herself out of my arms. I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying as she started to scurry off through my apartment to find her clothing, but it sounded an awful lot like she was cursing “Lucas.”
I assumed she had watched all of the credits and caught George Lucas’ name. It meant she was a true Star Wars fan now. No one could hate Star Wars more than Star Wars fans.
While Yasha busied herself with getting dressed and having a minor emotional break, I tidied up the living room. I took the spoons and empty pint of ice cream into the kitchen to put them in their proper places before I grabbed Yasha’s discarded clothes and boots from the kitchen floor.
I was about to shout out to her that she had left her clothing in here before she emerged from the bedroom wearing the short tunic dress I had seen her in when we first met. She had also draped the bag Mimic had given me across her shoulder to bring into the dungeon with us.
Smart. We were going to need that.
“Here,” she said and extended her hand toward me. “I believe this belongs to you.”
I cleared the small distance of my living room and set her clothing down on the coffee table. Then I opened my palm to her, and she dropped something into my hand.
It was the second crystal she had told me about.
My own crystal was shot through with practically neon green streaks underneath the clear quartz, but this one was filled with pale pink spiderweb fragments. It was strange how different yet how similar the two stones looked.
I pulled the green crystal out of my pocket and held them up next to each other to study the differences, but as I did so, I felt a strange, magnetic pulling sensation between the two. I frowned and had to struggle against letting the stones clack together.
“Let them,” Yasha said. “That is how they join.”
I hesitated, because it was sort of against every natural instinct I had to just let anything happen to my crystal, but Yasha was the expert. I stopped fighting against the strange magnetic pull the crystals had on one another and let them slam together.
I worried one of the stones might break upon impact, but instead, they began to meld and fuse together.
It was one of the strangest things I had ever witnessed.
The two stones seemed to become almost gelatinous as some invisible force pulled them together to combine the green and pink strands on the inside of the quartz-like material. It was almost like watching someone deftly create a braid.
The stones began to grow so hot in my hand that I nearly dropped them, but the feeling was gone in a few seconds, and I was left holding one crystal instead of two. The line where the two had fused was seamless, and no matter how many times I turned the crystal over and over in my hand, I wasn’t able to find the place where they had once been separated.
A small glowing light sat at the center of the larger crystal where the green and pink veins of rock curled together to form some sort of strange nucleus at the very center.
“Whoa,” I gasped and lifted the new crystal up to the overhead light in my apartment to study it further.
Even Yasha seemed intrigued with the change between the stones, and it was honestly a little hard to look away.
“It is beautiful,” she said.
She was right, too. There was something undeniably mesmerizing about the stone, and I found myself fighting the urge to enter the dungeon right there in my apartment. Finally, though, I managed to lower the crystal from the light and tuck it back into the inner pocket of my leather jacket.
“We should go,” I said. “We have to find a new place where we can enter the crystal.”
“Yes, of course,” Yasha said. She brushed past me to grab her boots from where she had left them on the kitchen floor before we’d had sex. It was nice to see that she was clearly able to maneuver on her injured ankle much better now, and it was almost like she had never actually injured it at all.
“How is your foot doing?” I asked as I watched her pull on one of the knee-high boots.
“Much better,” she assured me. “It feels as though it was never injured to begin with.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “On Earth, it usually takes humans much longer to heal from injuries like that. I was wondering if maybe your race heals faster. How long does it usually take to heal a sprained ankle back in Arcadio?”
Yasha pursed her lips as if she was in thought. “Seven days.”
I raised my eyebrows. It definitely hadn’t been seven days since she had come out of the crystal with me, but then again, seven days was already insanely fast to fully heal from a sprained ankle.
Not to mention the fact that a day could be an entirely different length of time on Arcadio than it was on Earth. Then again, she seemed to adhere to the twenty-four hour crystal rules, so…
My brain ached just trying to compute all the technicalities, and I shook my head to refocus.
“Seven days?” I repeated.
“Yes.” Yasha nodded. “I believe that the treatment I was given here has accelerated my healing time.”
“Do you not usually get your ankle, like, wrapped or anything of the sort?” I frowned as I tried to imagine Yasha being forced to handle this injury on her own back on Arcadio.
“If someone is injured in a dungeon and survives, it is a battle wound to be worn with pride,” she said. “I would not have been given any treatment for the injury and would have gone back into the dungeon again the next night. It is the way of separating the weak from the strong. Many of the elders of Arcadio are so battle worn they can no longer take care of themselves, but it is a place of honor.”
Well, that was fucking insane.
“Ugh,” I sighed. It was hard to wrap my mind around a world where people just weren’t taken care of. I knew that, obviously, Earth had its problems, but this was a whole separate level than something I was used to. It sounded like a great way to burn out the most capable fighters and leave them unable to do what they’d been trained to do.
Even just from a logistical standpoint, it didn’t make any sense whatsoever. But I supposed the old-fashioned way of doing things didn’t always have to make sense. People tended to flock toward the things they had always done, even if those sorts of things actively hurt the people who were doing them.
“It is just the way that things are, Wes,” Yasha said. Her tone was gentle, like she was trying to ease me into the idea.
I gave a violent shake of my head. “But it shouldn’t be! Especially not when you’re involved. You deserve people who take care of you and actually help you, not whatever that shit is.”
Yasha’s eyes softened as she looked at me. “Thank you, Wes.”
She said it like she had never heard anyone say that maybe she didn’t deserve to be thrown to the metaphorical wolves, or whatever the fuck it was they had in Arcadio. That was a natural history lesson for a different time, though.
I shook away the anger and annoyance I felt at the mere notion Yasha could be mistreated and brought myself back to the present.
“Come on.” I extended my arm out to her to help her walk, even though we had sort of just established that she didn’t really need much help anymore.
Still, she took my arm anyway, and together, the two of us made our way back down to the parking garage where my bike dutifully waited for us.
My mind buzzed with all of the potential that the new crystal held. I still felt like I was getting the hang of entering a single crystal dungeon, much less a dungeon made up of two separate crystals. It was quite literally a whole new world.
The mere notion of what it might hold made me itch to find out, but we had to get as far from my apartment building as possible first.
I passed Yasha her helmet and pulled on my own before we mounted the bike. I waited until I was sure Yasha was secure before I revved the engine and peeled out of the parking garage as fast as I dared.
As soon as we merged into traffic on the street, I cut my eyes in both directions. No one seemed overly interested in our comings and goings, but I couldn’t help but be concerned. So far, each time I had tried to use the crystal for the last couple of days, there had been someone waiting in the wings. I half-assumed that whoever it was was also twirling their mustache around their fingers like a fucking supervillain.
Yasha tightened her arms around my waist as I sped up to weave in and out of traffic. I was on the receiving end of quite a few angry honks, but I had a hard time caring as I slowly managed to pick up speed as I worked my way out of the inner portion of the city and toward some of the more isolated areas.
