Leaving the restaurant with a high opinion of the staff who worked there, Stanton folded his arm in Battlemaid's as they took the slow walk back to his tower. He noted that there was no one on the street, and while he expected his friends to have made themselves scarce, he was surprised there were no residents of the city around.
"M-Master, I calculate a nineteen percent chance something is wrong, rising by a non-trivial amount per second." The absence of people on the street was only the beginning. Battlemaid couldn't detect any heat signatures in any nearby houses, either. "Shouldn't this area be populated?"
Stanton went from being a little wary to being on-edge. "Yeah. This is a mixed-purpose street. Houses, the restaurant, and a bakery further down. There are plenty of residences. Do you think—?"
"Stanton?" Cassandra bit her lower lip. "What are you still doing here?" She did her best not to look back into the alleyway, where dozens of kobolds were pouring from the sewers.
"Just finishing up the night of entertaining this lovely lady, Cass. What's up?" Relief flooded Stanton. While he didn't want to get anyone mixed up in his fight against evil—Cassandra was extremely capable of handling herself in a fight.
Realizing she needed to get him away from the area as fast as she could, Cassandra shrugged her shoulders. "I think there's some big party in the north of the city. Gotten really quiet around here."
That made sense. Stanton was relieved to hear it, and with all his efforts to get ready for the night with Battlemaid, he could understand why he hadn't heard of the party. "That explains why it's so quiet. Well, we'll be getting along then. Are you coming?"
"Uh, no. I'm trying to work on controlling my temper more, and the quiet is good for that." What had actually been good for Cassandra was the newfound calm when she got angry. More important right now, though, was the small army of kobolds hunting nearby homes for a new magic item the Evil Pig of Evil had insisted was important. "I'll see you at class tomorrow?"
"Sure!" Cassandra waved to Stanton and Battlemaid, glad when they turned the corner at the end of the street so she could duck back into the alleyway.
"You took your time. Why did you need me here again?" Gisse asked, leaning against the wall with a pad of paper and some pencils out.
Glaring at Gisse, Cassandra sighed and let her anger go. "Thanks for coming. We need to keep an eye out for those damn noble vigilantes, and… What are you drawing?"
Turning her notepad, Gisse (who was wearing a hoodie that almost came down to her knees, and had cute bunny ears on the top of the hood) showed Cassandra the sketch she'd made of Stanton. "He's so dreamy."
It was with great force of will that Cassandra managed not to nod, though the drawing of him—windswept with a half-open shirt and billowing, long hair that framed his perfect features—was almost her undoing. "He has his qualities. Just about the only noble I'll ever respect. He's faced all the worst that their society has—and he's still nice."
Taking her sketchpad back, Gisse could wholeheartedly nod in agreement to Cassandra. "You still didn't say why I had to be here."
"The artifact that the pig said is in a concealed basement is bound by demonic seals. There's nothing I could do to get it open, but you'd be able to pop the locks off without breaking a sweat." Focusing her magic, Cassandra banished her own clothes and shifted smoothly to her dragon form. "All we have to do now is wait for the kobolds to find it."
Flipping the page over on her sketchbook, Gisse started a new picture. "If they find whatever it—"
"We've found it!" a kobold shouted. "Come! Come quick! It was hidden!"
Out in the street, Stanton and Battlemaid both turned their heads at the call. Each with their own version of super hearing, they picked up the shouting kobold without difficulty, though any reply was missed.
"You can transform, Master, but I don't have my combat-rated uniform." When Stanton gave her a look of pure mischief, Battlemaid had barely a moment to react before she was pulled into a tight embrace with him—and she felt his wand pressed against her back. "Mas—"
"By the shining light of goodness, and with the power of virtue," Stanton said, and kissed Battlemaid's cheek to distract her from squirming so much. "By the purity of my feminine charms, I call on my wand of power to protect the world—and help find my friend something more suitable to wear."
Cassandra had moved to follow the kobold before Gisse, leaving the demoness to be the only one of them that saw the flash of light in the street. Walking to the end of the alleyway, she looked out in time to see Super Lupine Girl and Battlemaid, fully transformed into their combat forms. Letting out a sigh, because she'd hoped it was the Stanton she knew, she stepped out into the street. "You got here fast."
Battlemaid hadn't been sure what Stanton was doing at first, but when she'd gotten caught up in his transformation magic, and had gotten an outfit that was rigid body-armor complete with an arm-cannon and targeting HUD that dropped over one eye. Before she could ask Gisse if she would let them through, Stanton spoke.
Feeling all the power of his transformation pouring through him, Stanton tried to muddle through how best to ask Gisse to not interfere, then he started to speak. "Demon. I have heard that you're seeking to mend your kind's tarnished image. If you let us be, we—"
Slipping her pad and pencils into her messenger bag, Gisse cut Super Lupine Girl off. "Look, I don't want to fight you, but I am bored. I'd hoped you were— Never mind who I hoped you'd been. The Pig has all the kobolds searching for something, and I think they just found it. You probably want to stop them, right?"
Relieved they wouldn't have to battle each other, Stanton gave Gisse a nod. "Thanks. Do you know what they're looking for?"
"No clue. They said I'd need to remove a bunch of seals from it, but then ran off before telling me exactly what they wanted me to do." Narrowing her eyes a little, Gisse looked Super Lupine Girl up and down. She sighed and said, quietly, "Why can't there be more cute guys like Stanton?"
Doing his best to keep a neutral expression, Stanton tried to ignore the succubus calling him cute and focus on the situation involving the kobolds running amok again. "Uh, could you not help open whatever it is?"
"I guess. What's in it for me, though? And don't say the warm and fuzzy feeling of doing a good deed. I might be a young and easily distracted demon, but I'm still a demon." Gisse considered most of it bravado and bluff, but she was sure Super Lupine Girl wouldn't.
Put on the spot, Stanton wasn't sure what to say. He opened his muzzle to answer.
In a flat monotone, to avoid giving away who she was at home, Battlemaid said, "My master knows of the noble Stanton Raveel-Sharptooth. She could arrange a meeting."
"W-Why would I want that?" Gisse asked, wanting to find out only a fraction more than she wanted to agree to everything.
"My cousin," Stanton said, "has spoken of you. He said you competed with others for a date with him. I could try to convince him to give you a date, if you helped me."
Closing her eyes and imagining herself bouncing around in excitement, Gisse betrayed as little of her excitement as she could. "That would be amenable." It would also be the perfect time to give him the protection ring.
"I'll tell him tomorrow, then." Walking past Gisse, Stanton tried to avoid giving her a reason to suspect something. "Oh, which way did they go?"
"Head down to the back-street, then turn right. That's all I heard." Shrugging her shoulders and pulling her hood back up and over her head, Gisse made her way down the street, content that she was no longer involved in the situation.
Giving Battlemaid a nod, Stanton took off at a run down the alleyway, while he heard her just a moment behind him. Looking to his right down the long road at the rear of the houses in the block, he saw a few kobolds milling around the back of one three houses down. "That's our target. Come on."
Not wanting to limit her firing opportunities, Battlemaid engaged her boosters and, surprised, felt the armor she was wearing reconfigure itself as a pair of wings spread out to each side before she shot into the air.
It ruined their element of surprise, but then Stanton could see several of the kobolds had noticed them anyway. Running as fast as he could, he angled his feet before reaching the three kobolds that stood their ground and slid at them—punching as he went. One. Two. Three.
Battlemaid saw the dragon when it stepped out of the back of the house. Stanton was still making sure the kobolds were down and hadn't seen the threat. Training her arm on the dragon, Battlemaid started energizing more of her combat systems before she opened fire.
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Focused on sneaking up to Super Lupine Girl, Cassandra didn't notice the three shots of superheated plasma coming her way until the first seared her shoulder, the second her back, and the third pierced through her wing membrane. She let loose with a furious scream and sent a blast of lightning Super Lupine Girl's way.
Stanton's senses lit up before the spell was even fully formed. He dodged and flipped, getting off the ground and vaulting over the fence so he was closer to the dragon while she was still figuring out how she'd missed. "Give it up, dragon! You can't win!"
He'd long observed how Lorissa's language had changed a little, new words entering her vocabulary along with the feline nya sounds she kept making, but he felt almost compelled to speak in grandiose phrases.
"Curse you, Super Lupine Girl, stand still!" Cassandra tried to line up another spell, but a fist followed by a kick her way forced her to reevaluate her choices. Once again she was caught in close-quarters fighting with someone who could dodge swings before she'd even made them. It was utterly infuriating to know that for all the strength she could put into a swing, Super Lupine Girl would either dodge it completely or block it at an angle that arrested it without harm.
The kobolds rushing out of the back of the house coincided perfectly with Battlemaid's missile pods coming online. Smiling with joy at supporting her master, she selected the targets as they came and launched dozens and dozens of swarming missiles.
Though explosions started going off around him, Stanton felt no urgency to move—so he didn't. "Give up and tell us why you're here, dragon!"
"Where is that damned demon? The whole point of her being here was to deal with you!"
Smirking, Stanton decided to push things a little further and see if the dragon would lose it. "'The whole point'? You mean you didn't bring a demon to break that demonic seal I can feel below?" Panic, followed by incredulousness, was Stanton's best guess for the expressions on the dragon's face. "Did I guess right? Do I win a prize? I'll take sit down and surrender please?"
Snapping out of her shock, Cassandra swung for Super Lupine Girl's head—and only missed because of her agility. Her mind raced while their fight continued. She had to ignore the quips and goading and reasoned out the problem. With Gisse nowhere to be seen, that meant they couldn't open the seals in the basement anyway. "Ugh. This is boring. Come on, let's get out of here!"
"Running away?" Stanton dodged under a wild swing from the dragon to deliver a solid one-two punch on each side of her rib cage. The first punch just seemed to wind her, but the second time he struck he felt a little give in her rib bones.
The sharp pain from the punch angered Cassandra. She glared at Super Lupine Girl, opened her mouth, and a moment before she unleashed her electrifying breath attack, a missile hit her in the face. Looking upward at the annoying target in the evening sky, Cassandra let loose with her held breath.
Looking up at Battlemaid, Stanton watched the magic lightning hit her and, like a puppet with its strings cut, Battlemaid started falling out of the sky. "No—" Ignoring the shriek of his alertness, Stanton took a punch to his back as he ran toward where his instincts told him Battlemaid would come down.
When the punch landed, and Super Lupine Girl ran to save Battlemaid rather than dodge it, Cassandra felt more angry with herself than with the heroes. She snarled and turned back to the kobolds. "Come on! Move! That will only buy us so much time!"
His mad dash put him right under where Battlemaid was falling, and Stanton held out his arms, knowing this was going to hurt a lot more than what the dragon could do to him. At the last moment before she reached his arms, Stanton raised up on the balls of his feet as high as he could. Then her mass hit him.
Battlemaid wasn't the lightest of robot girls to start with. Thankfully, she hadn't reached terminal velocity, but her speed and mass was still enough to drive Stanton down until his thighs touched his calves as she settled to a stop in his arms.
There was no life in Battlemaid. Her servos didn't twitch, her eyes didn't look up at him, and Stanton felt real fear that the best night of Battlemaid's life had been made her last. "No, no, no, no…" Taking off at a run, he ignored the angry shouts of the dragon and the kobolds, ignored everything that got in his way, too, until he reached his home.
All caution had been discarded, not that it mattered he hadn't obfuscated his route, not with everyone in the city gathered for the party he had no interest in. Laying Battlemaid down in the middle of his living room, Stanton had to wipe the tears from his eyes to see properly.
"Magic wand, you have some kind of connection to the universe, or something. Can you help her?" His wand, though, showed no sign of life.
"What's going on here?" Angel rubbed at her eyes as she flew down into the bottom floor of the tower. Her sleepiness fled when she saw Battlemaid motionless on the floor. "What happened to her?"
"That dragon used some kind of lightning it shot from its mouth. Hit her midair." Looking up as Angel flew closer, Stanton let out a soft whine. "Can you help her?"
"I—" Angel felt around Battlemaid, seeking out the magic that was missing. Stanton's cooling spell was still working, but the rest of the robot girl was lifeless. Of all the tropes she knew about, Angel was sure of one that would work in any circumstance where a pretty woman was seemingly dead. "Stanton, kiss her."
Blinking in surprise at the command, Stanton felt the uncompromising universal truth of the statement. She needed a kiss to save her, and he was the only one who could do it.
Leaning down, he felt the warmth of her body and, not hesitating, he kissed her lips. The first sensation was how soft they were. She was tender and forgiving, and though he knew her body was made from composite materials that could withstand huge explosions, she felt as mellow as any other girl he'd kissed.
Then he'd felt a tugging sensation. She needed something from him. Stanton started with magic. It was by far the greatest asset he had, and he let it pour into Battlemaid through their contact. With it, though, he felt his mental self drawn along for the ride.
Inside Battlemaid was a whole nation of complexity. Millions of miles of roads and buildings made from sand—all pushing electricity around. At least, they should have been. Stanton could feel that there was the potential for so much amazing stuff to come from all the connections, but they were quiet.
The nation wanted electricity, but though Stanton was a good mage, that element wasn't his specialty. "If she needs power, why not magic? Why can't all these wires and roads and cities run on magic instead?" He started with a little. Grabbing the biggest, thickest wire he could find, he started feeding it his magic.
The wire, and the constructions it was attached to, though, were hungry. The little trickle, Stanton noticed, needed to be more. Strange, though, was that it seemed to want his emotions too. Closing his eyes and closing his hands around the heavy cable, he gave it more and more magic.
He also let it have his emotions.
Love, comfort, humor, pride, and his worry all rushed out. Stanton leaned forward over the cable and pressed it to his chest. More emotion and magic poured from him and into her, and around him he could feel all the circuits fill with energy. "I'll never let you fall."
In a flash of light and a rush of joy, Stanton was back in his body, his eyes closed, his lips still against Battlemaid's. Only, now, he felt those lips curl into a smile. Opening his eyes, he saw her own twinkling and looking back.
It took Battlemaid almost an entire minute to realize she was kissing Stanton—her master. Weirdly, she wasn't overheating. Amazingly, with him in the position he was, it was entirely up to him as to when the kiss would end—and it would never be enough for her.
Stanton didn't want the kiss to end, either, but eventually he wanted to hear her voice. Closing his eyes and deepening the kiss, he let out a sigh and drew back. "Are you okay?"
That prompted Battlemaid to pause and check her systems. Running cold, it seemed like her circuits were operating at nearly three times their normal efficiency. There was a little damage to a spot on her right shoulder and on the ball of her left foot, but as she studied those sections, they each came online and reported themselves fully operational. "I am, Ma—" A finger on her lips confused Battlemaid. She looked up at the owner of it.
"Please, call me Stanton." Drawing his finger away, Stanton reveled in the surprised and happy look on her face. "Or I'll have to kiss you until you do."
"O-Okay, Master." Battlemaid couldn't stop herself. She found this new impulsive and adventurous side of herself to be thrilling, and to top it off she poked her tongue out at him.
Scooping Battlemaid up in his arms, Stanton carried her to the lounge where he set her back down on a couch and took a spot beside her. "I thought I'd lost you."
"What happened? The last thing I have recorded is firing some missiles at the dragon and then"—Battlemaid smiled a little wider—"I woke up to you kissing me."
"Angel said I could only save you with a kiss." Stanton felt so tempted to kiss her again, but knew they'd both get far more distracted if he did. "She was right, of course, but I didn't have any electricity to start your systems back up."
The conundrum broke Battlemaid from her pondering another kiss. "You didn't? Then how am I running?"
"Lots of magic, I think. I found one of the thicker cables inside you and stuffed it with as much magic as I could. It also wanted emotions, so I let it take all that." Stanton, instead of kissing Battlemaid, pulled himself against her. "I'm not sure how, but I was really inside you, and you're amazing! Each path of wire is huge and would span the whole kingdom!"
"Not quite. I have—" Battlemaid held back the mountain of information she'd been prepared to dump on Stanton. "I have a lot of circuits, but not that much." The change to her circuits still surprised Battlemaid. They were getting a little warm, but there was none of the inexplicable heat they were giving off before. "Am I going to need more magic from you?"
"If you do, I think I know a fun way to top you up." It was a curious situation for Stanton. He'd definitely been intimate with women before, but it had never involved this much emotion and none had ever been while his physical form was female. "Uh, wand? Can we go back to normal again?"
A flash of light engulfed the two of them, then a moment later they were back in the clothes they'd been wearing before the fight. Stanton's outfit was doing a great job of concealing much of what his combat outfit had shown off, while Battlemaid's dress was quickly getting rumpled by the position they were in.
"Thanks, wand. You are always amazing." Not knowing a better way to show his wand how much it meant to him, Stanton heaped-on the praise and hoped it was enough.
"H-How do you think recharging would wor—" Battlemaid didn't get to finish. Stanton's lips on hers made her tingle from her toes to her rocket pods, and it wasn't entirely her attraction to him causing it. The flow of magic from him into her filled the need she hadn't realized she had before. When he broke the kiss, she opened eyes she hadn't realized she'd let flutter closed. "Oh."
"Is that okay with you? I mean, we could figure out another way, but in the meantime this—" It was Stanton's turn to be surprised.
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