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Summoned by Monster Girls - Chapter 61
🕑 Added 2024-08-13 08:00:04 +0000 UTCSecuring the little room didn’t take long with only the one door to block.
We’d spent part of the day walking in the tunnel, so I estimated it to be around noon on Monday still or just a little bit after. Not enough time had passed in order for us to really need to sleep. So instead, we focused more on just catching our breath after the tense moment in the tunnel.
Kassandra made a show of stealing some blankets out of Rieka’s bag and made a rough nest in the corner furthest from the doorway to curl up in, as the stone underneath was actually cool to the touch. Rieka watched in amusement as her friend made off with the blankets while she was still carrying the dimensional sack before digging out some of the dried trail food we had bought, mostly just jerky and trail bread. Meanwhile, I dragged the remaining heavy furniture to the door to barricade it shut.
Other than the doorway, there were only two possible entrances to the room, and those were iffy at best. Two ventilation ducts sat at the floor level, but were blocked with a thick metallic mesh that looked like cast iron and were the size of a hardback book. I made sure these were easily visible from our corner and set one of our light-stones next to each of them.
I didn’t know if the shadow-monsters had made it through to this side of the iron gate or not, and didn’t want to take a chance of having them come out through the vents.
There were already enough creepy vibes from the place to go around as it was.
With that taken care of, I walked back over to where the girls were talking quietly while they ate. Kassandra’s pitiful, pouting face combined with a grabby-hands gesture destroyed any hesitation I might have had about sitting on the ground. So I plunked down in the middle of the blankets and my dwarf lamia promptly wrapped her serpentine body around me before draping her humanoid torso over my back. I could feel the soft squish of her breasts against the back of my head and the firm edges of her corset digging into my neck as she leaned into me.
“That is so much better,” Kassandra groaned while sliding her right arm over my shoulder to pull my head back into her bust slightly. “You are so warm and comfy, Liam.”
“Hot-water bottle reporting for duty,” I snarked back, but turned so I could kiss Kassandra lightly on the cheek to soften the verbal barb.
“Oh, you are so much more than just a hot-water bottle, Liam,” Kassandra purred and her coils kneaded my chest gently in a rhythmic squeezing motion.
“Ahem.”
Rieka cleared her throat, and the noise drew both of our attention back to her. “Thank you,” she said primly, though I thought I could see a faint hint of envy in her icy-blue eyes.
“You could always join us, Rieka,” Kassandra teased. “It’s been so long since you really snuggled with me.” Kassandra toyed with the top folds of my armor, slipping one hand under the leather and inside to rub my chest slowly.
Rieka frowned, and at first I was worried she would snap at my serpentine lover. But, to my surprise, Rieka just huffed and stood up, her food in one hand.
Kassandra squealed happily and before I knew it, she had unwrapped her coils from around me. Rieka stepped over and turned around with the intent of settling in next to me, but Kassandra hooked her right arm with both of hers and tugged Rieka down onto my lap instead
The wolf-eared woman overbalanced with a yelp of surprise. I reached out both arms to catch her on instinct. Rieka landed on my lap with a soft thump and a sharp blush.
Before the platinum-blonde woman could get her balance to shift or move, Kassandra used her grip on Rieka to pull her into my chest before promptly throwing her coils about us once more and pinning Rieka into my lap.
“Perfect,” cooed the redheaded trouble-maker, draping herself over my shoulders again.
“Kass!” Rieka protested, wiggling for a moment to try to get free. Kassandra’s coils tightened and Rieka let out a little grunt before stopping her struggles.
I was both sad and glad for my armor at the moment. I was sad because the heavy leather kept me from feeling the soft curves of the woman in my lap, soft curves I was already passingly familiar with from her cuddling while we slept. However, I was glad because the leather would blunt any embarrassing reactions I was guaranteed to have that would make the situation awkward. I knew I was getting a hard-on just from the sweet scent of Rieka’s hair in my face and the sensation of Kassandra’s breasts pillowing against my head.
Rieka grumbled cutely under her breath, a noise that Kassandra made a point to counter by mumbling sweet-nothings in my other ear. After a minute or two, the grumbling stopped and Rieka sighed.
“Well, we are inside the ruins now. I expect we will have to either find an alternate route out or a method to deal with those shadow-creatures in the tunnel for when we leave. For the time being, we have supplies inside the dimensional pouch and can study these ruins.” Rieka’s statement was only a bit annoyed now, and she went back to gnawing the hunk of dried meat she’d had in her hand when Kassandra had pulled her into place.
Rieka’s ears were sitting sharply upright, the tips and back tickling my face slightly from her perch on my lap and I had had to fight the urge to kiss one of them since they were just so cute. Even with her pinned in her place with Kassandra’s coils on her lap holding her there, I could feel the slight wiggle of her tail trying to wag in my lap. The sensation put to lie her protests. Kassandra seriously seemed bent on snuggling the shyness out of Rieka where I was concerned and I had a feeling the wolf-eared woman wasn’t going to put up much of a real resistance.
Pausing for a moment in her chewing, Rieka pulled the loosely plaited mass of blonde hair over her shoulder to get it out of my face, then shifted to look back over my shoulder with one eye.
“How are you feeling about all this, Liam? You channeled quite a bit of power around opening the way around the gate and you saw the main mass of the creatures. Of the three of us, you should be the most worn out or stressed.”
“Fine,” I replied automatically and got a snort of derision in my right ear from Kassandra.
“Be honest, Liam.” Kassandra poked me in the cheek after her snort and demand.
“Honestly, I do feel fine. I’m a little disoriented from the mental exercise of the work, but that’s about it.” I closed my eyes for a moment and checked my interface to see if my mana reserves had recovered at all.
Mana - 10/10
“Huh,” I muttered, blinking my eyes open once more.
“What?” Rieka’s head was tilted curiously now, one ear flopping over cutely. The urge to kiss it was even stronger now.
“Ah, uh. My mana recovered already.”
“Already?” The disbelief was thick in Kassandra’s voice, as well as the confusion. “I thought you said you were just going to use the crystal.”
“I changed my mind while we had time to work around the door. There was no way to know how much it was going to cost, so I just decided to empty my pool out since I don’t really use it for anything besides general utility. Figured it was better to train with it while I could.”
“But isn’t that recovery fast? I remember it took a lot longer while…” Rieka let the sentence drift off thoughtfully. I waited for her to finish the thought, but Kassandra wasn’t so patient. The dwarf lamia gave her friend a squeeze with her coils that squished the two of us together, making Rieka grunt again.
“While what?” demanded the part-snake woman from her place with her chin on my shoulder.
“While we were on the surface. I was just thinking that it must be easier for Liam to regenerate his mana down here, where he’s surrounded by earth-aligned mana,” Rieka explained when Kassandra loosened her grip.
“But my mana isn’t earth aspected until I use it,” I protested.
“Exactly why I was thinking it over until Kass decided to try to throttle me.” Rieka turned to her right to glare over my shoulder at Kassandra. This motion brought the tip of her other ear around and it smacked me lightly in the face.
At this point, I gave in to the intrusive thoughts and lightly kissed the soft, furred point in front of me. Rieka gave a surprised squeak and froze for a moment before pressing herself back into me and letting her head go slack on her neck. This allowed me equal access to both ears, and I lightly kissed the other one, getting another happy groan from the wolf-eared woman.
“Good points to make,” Kassandra teased after the happy groans stopped. “But I agree with Liam. I have to wonder if there is some other environmental effect present here that alters his regeneration rate. I remember the power says something about your surroundings affecting it, right?”
Thinking for a moment, I nodded once but closed my eyes to check the entry for the power again to be sure.
Mana Reservoir (Minor) - Grants the Traveler a minor mana reservoir equivalent to 10 mana. This mana will regenerate at a fixed rate, depending on ambient mana of the environment. Spells cast by the Traveler will pull from this reserve first, then any other mana reservoirs in the Traveler’s possession.
Huh, that is odd. I wonder why it let me just use the stone then? I thought idly as I stared at the last line of the description. Or did it?
“It says that it’s dependent on the ambient mana of the environment.”
“Okay, so that means that the ambient mana down here is far thicker than usual. Given that this is a sealed space that’s been closed up for who knows how long, that does make some sense.” Kassandra’s voice was thoughtful, and I sneaked a peek at my bespectacled lover to see she was picking at her bottom lip lightly with two fingers while she thought.
“Something we can theorize about later. Right now, we have a ruin to explore,” Rieka reminded her. The wolf-kin princess in my lap snuggled further back into me, still keeping her head positioned where I could easily reach her ears.
Obliging Rieka’s silent request for attention, I nuzzled those delicate, fluffy triangles gently and she let out a quiet, pleased hum in response.
“You are right, Rieka. I think we should be methodical about this. Secure this room as a safe-retreat location since it has a single entrance, and then check the station area over. We found that copper map back at the entrance of the first station, so I want to check for something similar here. The various bits of art and statuary will be worth something already, given that it’s from the human era. But do we want to plunder it and stuff the dimensional pouch? Or leave it for now?” Kassandra raised several good points, and we paused to consider them.
“I’d say leave it.” I added my two cents between nibbling on the tips of Rieka’s ears lightly. “No reason to fill the pouch with stuff that is already secure. Unless you expect to unleash some sort of nameless evil that was trapped inside the facility for untold millennia, we can just get it on the way out. I’d say save the space for stuff we know is important and valuable. Heck, for all we know the ‘facility’ that opens off this area is just the bathrooms for a way-station here that divides the tracks on some kind of underground railway.”
“Railway?” Kassandra questioned, since Rieka was still distracted by my affections still. I could see the pleased smirk on my dwarf lamia’s face at her friend’s expression, but was glad that the busty troublemaker decided not to tease her friend.
“It’s a word from back home used to describe a method of transport using those metal rails that carry the trains,” I explained, wondering if I had somehow managed to not mention this yet or if Kassandra was just confused with the term. I’d relied on the translation power that was part of being a Traveler so often that I didn’t even consider if it would properly translate some concepts. Before I could ask, I was interrupted.
“The trains!” Rieka exclaimed, making both of us jump. “That one that was parked still. We need to have a look at it.”
“Good point. Finish eating and we can go check it out. That work for you, princess?” When Kassandra had pulled Rieka down into my lap, I’d wrapped one arm around her waist instinctively to steady her, so I used that arm to squeeze Rieka back into me.
The wolf-eared woman grunted cutely before nodding, sending her ears flopping slightly before she went back to nibbling on her salted meat. I could tell she was still hoping for a bit more spoiling, since she kept her head tilted so that those delicate, fluffy ears of hers were within range, so I teased her lightly with a few soft kisses to them while the girls finished their food.
Kassandra shared some of her food with me, since I’d been drafted into body-heater duty before I could get some from the pack. She took an inordinate amount of delight in feeding me bits and pieces of dried meat or trail bread. I didn’t complain; it felt remarkably decadent really.
<><><>
While we planned to use the room as a fall-back place, Rieka insisted that we not leave anything behind. So we folded up the blankets before I unblocked the doorway and crept out onto the platform.
Nothing had changed in the time we were inside. The overhead lights still glared and illuminated the train platform. The only places remaining in shadows were within the three tunnels that lead away from the platform. Given that, we checked those first.
All three tunnels were sealed with an enormous iron door that fitted into a slot in the stone of the walls; it even sealed away and entirely blocked the rails. None of the doors were damaged and the only ways I could only tell the one we had entered from was the opening that I’d left when I partially sealed my circumventing tunnel and the orientation in relation to the station.
Standing next to the door we had entered from, I thought I could hear a faint scratching of claws on metal through the door, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Neither of the girls could detect it when I asked, so I chalked it up to my anxiety and nerves.
With the confirmation that nothing lurked in the shadows once more, we proceeded back up onto the platform and made a quick circuit to check the remaining bits of art that hung on the walls.
Unlike the first station we had come through, the displayed art was partially trashed. Several pieces had been pulled or knocked down and damaged. I found a few shards of broken clay scattered behind one of the displays that still showed the same brightly colored lacquer as the floor tiles, confirming that some of the plinths had held pottery that had been destroyed. The partial barricade around the swinging doors consisted mostly of furniture and a few larger, metallic bits of art that were not bolted directly into the wall.
Several of those pieces that were attached directly to the wall were just flat plates of copper or bronze, covered in verdigris or tarnish. Kassandra voiced a theory that maybe they had something engraved on them or had been painted at one time, but the passage of time had occluded the decorations. Rieka didn’t disagree, but pointed out that the metal wasn’t mana-imbued and thus any value would be archaeological, so we should leave them be for now. Kassandra made a note of them in her leather-backed journal and we finally took the time to study the train.
The interior of the stubby, pyramid-headed train was actually worse than the exterior. I had to manually pry the doors open, as time and a lack of maintenance had caused them to seal up. The doors folded into themselves and out of the way like a bifold closet door. The train and cars were made of the same iron as the tunnel gates. Though, unlike those massive gates, the train showed signs of wear and a bit of rust.
“I wish I knew why the wrecked train was rusted nearly to oblivion, but this one is almost pristine,” Kassandra mumbled while she waited for me to yank the door open. The train did not give up its secrets willingly. The doors squealed several times in protest, but I was able to open the passage up enough that we could proceed inside.
The interior of the train was very simple. Metal bench seats that likely once held cushions lined either side of a narrow central aisle. Any cushions had long since crumbled into dust, which had remained trapped within the train cars. There was next to no decoration inside the train other than some elaborate molding along the ceiling and floors. Bits of the heavy glass from the broken windows were scattered about the interior of the train floor as well. There was a passage between the train cars, but no access to the engine compartment. We found more signs of death inside the second car after we threaded through the first.
In the back corner of the second car, huddled down low so it was out of sight of the windows, was a brittle jumble of bones sitting amidst an ancient, stained portion of the metal deck.
The body did not smell. Far too much time had passed for there to be any stink about it, and the bones looked like they were only one step away from crumbling into dust. The skull sat on top of the jumbled pile as nothing to keep it in the shape of a body remained.
“Fascinating.” Kassandra breathed in astonishment. She was at the head of the group and peering about intently inside the train carriage while I stood watch behind her. Rieka kept close at my back, watching the platform with her light-stone held high.
“Does it have anything of value on it?” Rieka asked from behind me. While Rieka was interested in the ruins, she apparently didn’t have as much of an interest in bones or remains.
“Not exactly. There aren’t really any examples of human remains left behind, though. The skeleton itself might be valuable if it didn’t look like it was going to collapse into dust at a moment’s notice,” Kassandra replied tartly.
The dwarf lamia had turned to shoot a glare at Rieka from around me, so she didn’t see the slight shift of the bones, but the movement caught my eye.
Hissing Kassandra’s name, I pulled her back away from the jumble of ancient calcium as the bones began to shift and wriggle to pull themselves together. I didn’t wait for it to finish, dragging Kassandra’s torso back bodily with my left arm around her waist while my right flowed and changed as Shape-Shifting altered it to defend my lover.
My attack came before the skeleton even managed to halfway assemble itself. The armored spike that tipped the long, flexible appendage my right arm turned into drove into the skull and shattered it into a hundred pieces. The bones did not stop assembling themselves, so I ‘backhanded’ the half-formed body with the armored back of the limb and sent the bones scattering in the car with a sound like someone rattling a paint-can full of gravel. That did the trick and the skeleton stopped trying to assemble itself. Though that might have been because most of the bones were now only shards.
“Liam!” Kassandra hissed in surprise, but stopped when she saw the mobile bones as I batted them apart. “Nevermind! Thank you, lover!” Kassandra used her position pulled tight to my side to kiss the side of my throat before turning her attention to Rieka. “Okay, I’m done here. Something animated those bones and I want out. Back it up, girl!”
Rieka didn’t need much encouragement at that, and we piled out of the train.
Outside, the girls held a brief but whispered conversation that I wasn’t able to follow much of regarding necromancy and potential for undead in a place like this. They both nodded and glanced at me before Rieka spoke.
“Don’t trust anything that just looks dead. I didn’t expect animated bones, but with that thing moving? We aren’t taking chances.” I nodded in agreement and the girls relaxed slightly.
While the cars held no value beyond historic or raw metal, the engine refused to give up its secrets. As it was intact, the engine wasn’t exposed from behind the pyramidal, armored nose, and the door to the conductor’s compartment was sealed with a key. Neither woman wanted to try to batter the door open, so we decided to leave it be for now.
Standing on the platform and looking towards the sealed double-doors that lead into the complex, both girls kept close on either side and had their spell rods out. While Kassandra had been making notes before, she had packed away the notebook and stood ready to fight. The moving skeleton had clearly unnerved my dwarf lamia.
“Okay, so plan?” I asked the girls one last time. Rieka was the one who answered my question.
“Find out what is on the other side of the door. If there is anything dangerous down here, kill it. If we are outmatched, run. We already have earned enough to make this trip worth it between the samoflange we found earlier and the earth crystals. We can stop and study things more intently when we have time, but we aren’t stripping this place down to the bedrock. Not yet, at least. Anything loose and valuable we can snatch up. Kassandra and I will check anything for historic value before we decide to sell it. If we find any surviving documentation, that goes to Kassandra for her to study first. Above all else, we keep each other safe.”
“Works for me.” I moved first, leading the way towards the double doors. Wading through the ancient barricade, I kicked and moved stuff out of the way to leave a clear path for the girls to follow in. We had discussed the marching order previously, and I stayed about ten feet ahead of them. My right arm remained shifted into the combat tail/spike that I had been favoring lately, while my left bore chitinous armor and the claws I’d borrowed from Lady Valda. While I could do double tails in a pinch, I didn’t like giving up the access to thumbs for things like turning door-knobs.
The room remained ominously silent as I reached the metallic doors and hooked the handle of one with my left hand. I glanced over my shoulder at the girls to check on them before I opened it.
Both had determined looks on their faces and their rods in hand, with Rieka slightly ahead of Kassandra at the moment. They both nodded, and I tried to smile reassuringly before I yanked the door open and was greeted with what lay on the other side.
A tunnel drove away from me, sloping deeper into the stone for a good hundred feet before it reached a second set of doors. Nothing waited for us in the well-lit but rough-hewn tunnel, not even the thick layer of dust that we had seen on the exterior station and hall. Something kept it from accumulating and I had to wonder if there was some kind of ancient ventilation system that did it, or maybe magic like what pumped the water up for the fountain outside.
“Liam,” Kassandra’s hissed words of surprise drew me to turn towards her to find out what it was, but I spotted it before I got even halfway through the turn.
Deep claw marks marred the inside of the door in a dozen gouges that ran from the top of the doorway all the way to the bottom where it met the floor. Seeing the distinct marks dug in the metal drew my attention back into the tunnel. What I had assumed were tool marks in the slate walls took on a more sinister look as I noted they were in parallel sets of four.
After gathering ourselves, the three of us proceeded down the tunnel and to the second set of doors. These were dented in the center and swung with a quiet squeal of protest on ancient and battered hinges. It looked like something had impacted the doors with a great deal of force and damaged the lock that sealed them shut enough that they didn’t quite latch anymore.
These doors opened into a larger space that had a looming ceiling, but not quite as high as the one in the station. The ceiling only went up about thirty feet at a gentle slope before curving back down once more. Shaped roughly like a rectangle, the large room was around eighty feet across and maybe forty wide. More of the crystal spheres set into the ceiling at regular intervals provided light. The room itself had the look of a large lobby or common space, with benches and tables made of polished stone and metal as well as decorative planters and bits of art. It had been a nice place, at least at one time.
Now it was the wreckage of a battlefield.
Several of the stone tables, which had the look of being carved directly from the underlying stone, were snapped off and had been thrown across the room. Planters were shattered and loose soil lay dry and scattered around them. The walls bore the marks and stresses of battle, with sections that looked like they had been melted and others where impacts had shattered the formerly smooth stone into fragments. There was no one location that looked like it had held the bulk of the battle, as the chaos and rubble were spread all throughout the room.
I could see two doors, one on either end of the roughly rectangular room to our left and right. Straight ahead of us was a trio of stairwells carved into the stone that lead up to a partially collapsed second floor. On either side of the three stairwells, the floor we were on wrapped around and underneath the second floor, though the piled stone of the collapse was obviously blocking some of that area, mostly off to my right. I was fairly sure I could see another doorway set into the wall of the second floor, but the lighting in that area had been damaged during the fight and several of the globes were missing, leaving patches of darkness scattered around.
I took all of this in with a glance as the girls stepped into the room behind me and spread to either side, Rieka going left and Kassandra to my right. As we came to a stop, the room echoed back the sound of our movement oddly. The strange pressure in the air distorted the sound again, or gave the perception of doing so. I spared a moment to wonder if this strange pressure was the mana that helped my reserves regenerate, but discarded that thought when I spotted movement amongst the rubble ahead of us.
Something stirred from under the stairs, but the bulk of the carved stone blocked my view enough that I couldn’t see more than a brief flicker of movement near the corner of the stairs that might have been a rat, but my survival instincts told me it wasn't.
“Get ready girls, I think something is about to jump us,” I said quietly, getting a snort of agreement from Kassandra before Rieka spoke.
“It would be too much to ask that an ancient ruin of a dead race didn’t have something guarding it.” Rieka’s statement got a quiet chuckle from Kassandra before the movement happened again, but this time from the second floor.
A flickering of movement from behind the balustrades at several points preceded the appearance of the dessicated heads and bodies of well over a dozen shambling creatures. All of them wore musty rags and dragged weapons forged of iron over the stone as they reached the stairs and stopped.
The mummified remains of over a dozen ancient humans stared down at us from that second floor with eyeless sockets. The disturbing sight of their ancient bodies froze all three of us. They had the appearance of brittle and dried roadkill, with limbs bent at unnatural angles and some missing parts of their arms or ribcages even. One shuffled on a single leg, leaning on the wall to support itself as it shuffled forward.
Our staring contest continued for a few more seconds until the dissonant echo of claws scraping on stone from the first floor under the stairs drew my attention there, and something even more disturbing dragged itself into view.
The creature that emerged from under the stairs looked vaguely canine in its design, but at one time it had six sets of legs and was sized more like a small horse than a dog. Two of them had been broken off at the shoulder during some point in the past, the front two on the left side of its body. This resulted in a limping and unbalanced gait as it stomped into view, but its stone body with six glowing red eyes, set in a head almost the size of my torso, remained fixed on us as it stomped over the polished floor. Claws made of iron scraped against stone and left long, white scars behind as it limped towards us.
“A war-golem,” Kassandra’s voice was a mixture of fear and awe as she stared at the stone beast stumbling out from behind the stairs. “An honest-to-gods, human-made, war-golem…” Rieka was just gaping silently at the stone beast.
I hated to crush the wonder in her voice, but the rumbling growl of the animated statue spurred on the mummified humans that stood on the second floor, and they began to stumble down the steps in our direction. I had to get the girls out of their surprise and awe and be able to defend themselves.
“Get ready to fight, Kass. We can study it later, when it’s not intent on killing us.”
