As the party made its way down the ruined streets in the equally ruined former city, they kept their heads and eyes on a swivel to make sure that no monster could catch them by surprise. As they moved deeper into what appeared to be one of the places where several different nations had parts of a few of their cities lifted, dropped down, shattered, and then fused together in an architectural nightmare, they heard the distant sound of battle taking place.

“Do you hear that?” asked the healer, a nice, quiet girl who wore a brown robe and carried a cartoonish wooden staff. “We need to see if someone is in need of help!”

The rest of the party squirmed in their clothes. Their healer was no mere pretty face, nor was she the normal type of person you’d expect a nice, quiet girl with healing powers to be.

She had trained her powers to their current level by breaking the bones and tearing the flesh of small animals, after all, and she seemed to take a rather perverse delight from refusing to allow her healing powers to dull or erase the pain of those she healed. If anyone reading has ever had surgery or a root canal done with no anesthetic, and had that work hit multiple nerves, they would know a bit of the pain that this healer liked having her charges endure as she stitched bone and meat back together.

And so they, her party, were always of two minds whenever they brought her out and about. Sure, she was a fucking magnificent healer, one who could put most others to shame and even restore lost eyes, teeth, or limbs. Hell, she had even managed to bring someone back from brain-death once, so she was stupidly powerful, but her mood when it came to healing and having people beg to be healed or beg to have others healed was, well…

Saying that it was problematic would be an understatement. Not that the guys among the party had anyone to blame for her mannerisms than themselves, for reasons that would eventually become clear.

“Mary, please, for the love of all the Gods, New and Old, don’t make us regret bringing you out here this time.”

Mary, for her part, nodded shyly.

Then again, she had done that every time they asked her not to be a deviant, so that accepting gesture more than likely meant nothing at all.

“Fuck it. Fine, let’s go see what is going on. Ralph, take point.” the party leader said as he patted the tank of the group on his shoulder.

“Got it, Johann,” Ralph replied as he smacked his metal cudgel against the side of his tower shield. “Haruto, cover me with your buffs before we get too close this time. I don’t want Mary to put me back together because you failed to buff me fast enough.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Yeah, yeah.” The resident living buff-bot replied with faux sarcasm. “And would you like me to spit-shine your boots, too?”

“If you feel like it.” joked the Shield Bro.

“We need to hurry, everyone!” Mary interjected. “They could be just on death’s door! I need to heal them!”

All eyes turned back to the healer, who had a look of twisted delight on her face that she was seemingly completely unaware was even there.

“Jesus Christ, Mary… Get your mind out of the gutter.”

…

“Son of a bitch-flavored cunt. You sick, persistent bastard.” Lyrhea said in a half angry tone as she bounced off of a fallen table with one hand and tossed a looted throwing star with the other. The shuriken, which of course had Lyrhea’s signature venom on it, hit its mark and while it did not drive deep enough to be stuck it did end up breaching the hide of the annoyingly aggressive and absurdly horny cross between a baboon and a crocodile.

The creature screeched and lunged after her, but our MC put more distance between it and herself before springing her trap. The next move that she made saw her pull at a vine and, with that one swift action, bring down a mass of concrete, metal, and ceramic floor tiles on the body of the nearly 9-foot tall freak of nature.

The beast, for its part, looked rather unperturbed by the fact that it was now hopelessly trapped with barely any room to move around, its face and a single hand peeking out from under the wreckage. Lyrhea would have moved in for the kill, but the damn thing kept on huffing and puffing with a perverted look on its face whenever she was within its sight, and while that certainly made her want to end it then and there, she really didn’t want to get any closer to it than she needed to.

“What the actual fuck am I gonna do with and to you?” mused the snake-human as she slinked from the critter’s view. She was half of the mind to kill it herself, and half of her just wanted to leave the thing there to die of thirst, hunger, or whatnot, but she really could not make up her mind as to which it should be.

She was about to come to a decision when her ears picked up the sound of metal on tile flooring and she twisted her neck around in a way that no human ever could without breaking their neck outside of a comic or cartoon and saw a group of several people rushing down the hall that she had been chased down just a few minutes ago by the now-trapped horny beast

“As if today just could not get any worse….” Lyrhea spat as she turned to leave. She wanted to kill the creature, as that was the choice she had decided upon, but that would not be allowed if her senses were true. The amount of hostility coming off of these people was just too massive for her to want to trouble herself with, so she would let them waste their time with the monkey-croc and that would give her time to leave and continue trying to find another snake to try transforming.

“Come Get Some, Bitch!”

She nearly made it clear when a powerful energy infiltrated her body and stopped her in place. Against her will, she turned around and rushed towards the heavily-armored and shielded teen armed with a metal cudgel as a bolt of fire came over the top of the group and at her face.