The girls spent a bit more time fishing around inside the damaged engine, extracting a few more of the earth-oriented mana crystals. After about ten minutes, I reminded them that it was getting late and we should head back up to the camp soon.
Before the girls agreed to head back, Kassandra and Rieka stated that we should scout the tunnel for a distance, to see if we could find out where it ran and how far. After following the tracks under the mountain for nearly ten minutes without seeing any sign of change, we doubled back to the blockage.
“What do you think is down there?” Rieka asked once we got back to the cave-in and the ancient, ruined train.
“No idea. The copper map labeled this as a research facility, though. So I imagine it will have lots of scientific stuff,” Kassandra said gleefully.
“Provided that this end wasn’t the research facility,” I interjected. Both girls turned curious looks at me and I shrugged. “This whole thing reminds me of a subway, which is a type of underground conveyance back home. They run all over big cities and in some countries they handle travel all over the country by diving in and out of the earth. That track might run all throughout the mountains.”
Rieka was back to biting her lip in thought, while Kassandra frowned cutely, her brow wrinkled in concentration as she considered.
“We might need to bring the tent and sleeping supplies back down with us,” Kassandra said with a sigh before leading the way into the passage. Her words echoed back to us as she vanished from sight. “Having to double back each day would eat up a lot of time. While we are making light stones and the like, we should prepare a map too.”
“What about the other sealed room at this end?” Rieka suggested as she followed her friend. Rieka bent over and crawled into the tunnel without a care, her fluffy tail framing her muscular butt as it wiggled back and forth.
I did my best to not stare at Rieka’s butt in the tight riding pants she was wearing. I did notice her tail was puffed out in worry while doing my best to avoid staring at those tight curves. Crawling without at least glancing ahead of myself felt like a recipe for disaster, all right?
“I’ll record the glyphs on it, and I can work on an unlocking ritual for it, too. If we are lucky, they used the same glyphs as the main door. But realistically? It’ll be a day or two before I can get that one open. So it’s something we can work on while we travel.” Kassandra’s response was distant as she slithered through the hole I’d made in the rockslide.
While we crawled, I used what mana that had regenerated to further compress and reinforce the narrow passage to ensure it was as safe as possible.
“Huh? Hey, Liam! The lights are off,” Kassandra called a moment later, and I hurried to follow her out of the tunnel.
It was true. The lights in the station were once more off and the room was as oppressively dark as the tunnel had been, with only Rieka’s light and a faint glimmer of sun leaking down the long, sloping tunnel from above.
“Lights,” I called. Another distant clunk noise and the lights came back on in the station, though I felt like they were dimmer than they had been in the past.
I wonder if they are on a timer or something?
Shaking off the thought, I gestured for the girls to lead the way back onto the platform.
We stopped long enough for Kassandra to copy down the engravings on the secured door that led off the platform before heading back up to the surface. Kassandra also wanted to take the topographical sculpture off the wall, but I didn’t have the mana left to shape the stone to release its anchors. Rieka also advised her it was better to leave it safe down here so it wouldn’t crowd the storage bag.
Emerging into the warm afternoon sunlight, I let out a long breath and held my face up to the sun. It was good to be back up and out of that impartial, silent darkness.
“Come on, you two!” Kassandra urged, pointing back over the lake towards the campsite. “Let's go make some dinner. I’m starving! The only thing I’ve eaten so far besides breakfast was some dried meat while I was working.”
“Sure thing, Kass. I’m sure you’d like to wipe some of that dust off too.” Rieka nodded to the smudges and smears of dirt and dust all along Kassandra’s normally pristine scales and the redhead scowled at her friend.
“Don’t poke fun at me, Rieka. You look more like a gray fox than a white wolf right now.”
“Easy you two,” I interrupted and nodded towards the sinking sun, which was barely an hour above the horizon. “Let’s get back to camp. I want to get things set up so we can clean up and relax before it gets dark. Sooner we get to sleep, the sooner we can keep exploring. Right?”
This turned out to be exactly the right thing to say in order to turn Kassandra’s mood around. My dwarf lamia’s grin returned and she once more led the charge out of the clearing and back towards the campsite. Rieka followed after her, talking quietly with her friend.
I moved to follow, but kicked something in the long grass. Glancing down, I noted the ward stones that Kassandra had set up earlier in the day around the entrance to the underground cave and its door. The girls had deactivated them when we emerged, but hadn’t bothered to collect the stones.
“Huh…” I mumbled under my breath before shrugging and nudging the stone back into place. “Cosgrave,” I said clearly, using my last name that the girls had set as the password.
I felt the stones take a small amount of my mana before the runes flared briefly in a blue-white color before fading.
“There, that’ll keep anything else sneaking down there while we are gone,” I sighed before hurrying to follow the girls.
<><><>
I worked on making dinner for us, cooking pan-fried steak and potatoes in the large skillet, while the girls used both of the large pots to heat water to wash with. It also served to give me something to do besides staring at the girls while they washed themselves. They professed not to care if I looked, but I didn’t want to be a creep and stare.
Manually tossing the roasting potatoes in the pan, I caught Rieka teasing Kassandra about how she had refused to do a ‘rag bath’ last time they were here in order to tempt me into washing her. Kassandra’s response made me grin.
“I don’t need to tempt him anymore, I just have to ask our Liam and he’d be happy to scrub all of me.”
Rieka’s sputtering in response had been cute, and they had lowered their voices after that point. I toyed with the idea of improving my hearing to see if I could catch what they were saying, but decided not to invade their privacy. It was obvious they were whispering to keep something secret.
The girls finished their washing up relatively quickly. Rieka took over managing the pan while I quickly wiped down. Kassandra settled in next to the fire to watch. Whether she was watching her friend cook or me wash, I wasn’t entirely sure.
Most of today had been just walking about in my armor, so only my face and hands were really dirt from the dust and loose soil underground. I still made sure to wash the sweat away though and change into clean clothes that the girls had brought for me.
While it wasn’t a whole wardrobe, they’d bought me a few sets of loose pants and shirts in the local styles to wear while I was here. The pair I chose was a set of russet pants with a high waist and a simple shirt in dark blue.
Even with the excitement of delving further into the cave tomorrow, the hot food combined with the exertions of the day rendered all three of us exhausted. Kassandra was the first to slither into the tent and begin settling the bedding, with Rieka close behind her. I could hear giggling while I extinguished the fire using some of the extra wash-water from the cauldron.
“We should fill these up with fresh water before storing them, if we are going to be in that tunnel for a while,” I mumbled, pouring the rest of the water out to run down the slope back towards the lake. The thick grass of the clearing glittered beautifully with the moisture of the water, and the trees swished quietly in the wind. Pausing, I looked up at the night’s sky.
Darkness had fallen while we were unwinding and now the sky bore a glittering scarf of distant lights. A handful of clouds lingered to the east, out towards the sea, and blocked out the night sky in that direction. However, directly above us was a beautiful and surreal vista that made my heart ache.
I wish we could still see a sight like this back home, I thought wistfully.
“Liam, come to bed?” Kassandra’s request was muffled by the canvas of the tent. I pulled my eyes away from the speckled light show above me and back to the ground. The tent was illuminated from within by Rieka’s light stone and I could see the curvy silhouette of Kassandra against the canvas.
“Coming.”
“No, you are not! Not yet at least,” Kassandra teased and I could hear the grin in her voice before a light swatting noise made her yelp and I saw her shadow jump against the tent.
“Not in the tent, Kass,” Rieka’s muffled chastisement was followed by a yelp of surprise from the wolf girl, then by several giggles from them both.
“Such silly girls. I love them so much,” I mumbled before unbuckling my boots and ducking into the tent.
The sight that greeted me was definitely a sweet one.
Kassandra was wearing my old tee-shirt as a night dress again, the chest of the shirt straining slightly against her full figure. Her butt was entirely on display, framed by where her scaled tail met her human lower half while she playfully wrestled with Rieka on top of the bedding. Rieka, for her part, was wearing a loose nightshirt that would have fallen to her knees, but their wriggling and giggling had hiked it up as well to show the curve of her hip.
“Am I interrupting?” I asked with a smile. Both girls stopped, turning ruffled and amused looks towards me. Rieka was blushing slightly but made no move to cover herself, while Kassandra just grinned wickedly.
“Not yet at least,” quipped Kassandra as her grin turned lascivious. Rieka rolled her eyes and beckoned me with one hand, while smiling sweetly.
“No. Come to bed Liam?”
Her request was done with such earnest affection that I couldn’t have stopped myself if I wanted to. And I really did not want to resist at all.
I undressed down to my boxers in less than a minute, amusing the girls with my hopping back and forth to shuck out of my clothes and gear, before joining them on the pile of bedding.
Rieka snuggled into my right side, once again claiming my arm and wrapping it around her before tucking my forearm between her breasts so she could snuggle it like a pillow. Kassandra wound her serpentine length around both of us before draping her torso over my chest to rest her chin on my chest.
“Night, girls,” I murmured, squeezing both of them gently.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Good night, Liam,” Rieka mumbled with a cute little yawn.
“Love you.” Kassandra accented her words with a small kiss to my jaw and I drifted off happily.
<><><>
I don’t know how long we slept, but it definitely wasn’t long enough.
A loud crack of lightning and a piercing, animalistic scream of pain tore me out of a very nice dream where both girls had been covering me with kisses. In response, my eyes flew open to take in the almost pitch black confines of the interior of the tent.
A second crack of electricity and another scream, quite distant, shook the rest of the cobwebs from my mind. I was about to wake both girls, but from how tensely Rieka clung to my arm I knew she was already up.
“What was that?” Kassandra’s murmured question told me she was up too.
“That can’t have been the camp wards, they would be much louder.” Rieka wriggled to try to get free of Kassandra’s coils and my redheaded dwarf lamia let her friend go.
The mention of wards had me blinking for a moment before I recalled earlier that day and I growled. Kassandra was still draped over my chest, but she was pushing herself upright now, so I had to move carefully to untangle myself.
“The cave. I activated Kassandra’s line by the mouth of the cave when we left. I didn’t want to risk something sneaking down there, since we left that big door open inside the cave.”
Both girls stopped moving in the darkness for a moment before speeding up once more. Rieka was already pulling on her pants underneath her nightshirt, tucking the flowing garment into the top of her pants while Kassandra folded her skirt around her hips, buttoning it closed on top of my old tee.
“We need to go check it out, then. Good thinking about doing that, Liam. I didn’t charge them much, so I doubt they’ll last long,” Kassandra rattled off as she writhed on her back to try to get the skirt into place on her sinuous hips.
A third, quieter crack split the night and this time it was accompanied by a distant growl rather than a yelp of pain.
“Kass, did you finish enchanting those light stones?” Rieka demanded, belting on her spell rod and pouches while I yanked my pants on.
I didn’t have time to buckle my armor on. I’d have to make do with the armor created by my Shape-Shifting for now.
“Pouch by the door. Just need to push mana into them.” Kassandra was locking her own utility belt into place when I pushed past both girls. I only had my pants on, but I was ready to fight if something was near the camp.
Things had been so quiet up here thus far that I had almost forgotten the violent world that we were in right now.
Poking my head out of the tent flap, I used Shape-Shifting to adapt my eyes and scanned the darkness.
The clouds from over the sea had broken up and the night sky was now aided by a waxing moon in illuminating the surrounding landscape in its silvery glow. With the vastly improved night-vision, it might as well have been bright as day for me. I could see the grass dancing in the evening breeze and even spotted a large owl cruising over the lake nearby.
A flash of light lit up the trees out towards the site of the cave and a fourth zap of electrical discharge told me that whatever was up there had not moved on. This burst was much weaker and there wasn’t a screech of pain, either.
The feeling of a soft hand on my back prompted me to step out into the cool grass of the evening and Rieka followed me with Kassandra close behind.
“Are you two sure you want to leave the campsite? It’ll likely be dangerous. I can go scout it out?” I asked them, while focusing on my hands and feet.
I’d been experimenting with several new shifts during my last week without work and I thought that now would be a good chance to try one of them. My feet shifted and expanded, turning from their normal human shape into wide pads with sharp claws and tufts of gray-brown fur. My hands repeated the feat a moment later and, with a flex of the tendons in my arm, claws sprouted from the feline pads that were easily three inches long and wickedly sharp.
That crag hunter really had sharp claws. Mine now, though! I thought with a grin while I studied the heavily muscled limbs. A thin layer of natural armor coated the limbs to protect them as well, giving me the look of wearing leather armor on my forearms and lower legs.
I was so caught up in preparing that I missed the glares from both of the girls. I didn’t miss the smack on the hip from Kassandra, though.
“We are not sending you out there alone, Liam!” she snapped. I turned to smile down at my irate lover. She looked adorably dangerous in her sleep-mussed state, with the wide neck of my old shirt hanging off one shoulder and exposing most of one breast. She also clutched the deadly weapon that was her spell rod in her right hand, ready to use it.
“I just wanted to make sure. Come on, let's have a look.” My response drove the irritation away from both girls and we hurried down into the lake valley and across as a fifth, far quieter, zot of electrical discharge sounded in the distance.
Rieka and Kassandra both carried light stones now, and the girls remained behind me so as not to ruin my improved vision. The twin sources of light threw crazed shadows all around us as we rushed through the trees and up the winding path on the far side of the lake and the spring that fed it.
We emerged into the meadow around the entrance to the cave to find utter chaos.
There were sections of the grass near the open mouth of the cave smoking, while two spots were actively burning with low flames. Several things thrashed in the grass, snarling in pain while they tried to fight off the twitches that came with a severe electrical shock.
As I watched, something else emerged from the entrance to the cave and crossed the ward line. The wards gave a quiet crackle and there was a little flash of light that made whatever it was yip in surprise, but the rustling in the grass continued away from the cave.
“I don’t know what they are, but it looks like they are coming out of the cave, not going in!” I hissed to the girls, crouching and slowing down as we approached.
“Whatever it is, they shouldn’t be here. My senses are going wild right now. Something is very wrong here.” The dwarf lamia straightened while gesturing with her spell rod. Rieka matched her a moment later while I moved to stand in front of and between the two women while they cast.
“Glacial Earth!” Kassandra cried a moment later, and a ripple of frost burst from the area around the entrance to the cave. Ice grew over both ground and grass, making the entire area slick and sending shapeless forms tumbling back into the open mouth of the burrow.
“Spark Net!” The spell from Rieka fell a bare second after Kassandra froze the ground. Lightning crackled through the icy grass and latched on to several targets that thrashed harder in the grass.
Inhuman squeals and shrieks of pain rent the night air, and all three of us charged ahead.
I was the first to actually lay eyes on the strange creatures that were, even now, trying to force their way out of the underground cave and past the frozen, slick earth and their twitching fallen.
They were low to the ground, standing barely a foot high, and were black as pitch. The flashing of electricity and the glow of the stars both glinted off hardened carapaces and thrashing, four-clawed limbs. It was hard to count as the arms protruded off of a segmented body roughly the size of a medium dog, but I was pretty sure they had six limbs and at least two circular mouths full of jagged teeth, one on each end of their bodies.
“By the Gods!” Rieka exclaimed in disgust, her spell rod flicking back and forth before she launched one of her preferred spells. “Bolt Chain!”
The chain made of lightning lashed out and connected with the nearest of the creatures. Squealing in surprise, the creature thrashed and spun in place before it exploded with a wet pop. Rieka flicked her spell rod to send the other end of the chain out to find another target, which resulted in another of the creatures exploding a moment later. Kassandra was sending targeted spears of ice into the mouth of the cave, as far more of the creatures were crowding the opening still as they fought to escape the cave and rolled in the ichor and guts of their dead when they slipped on the slick ground.
“That’s gross,” I grunted at the gruesome smell of the popped monsters.
Movement caught my eye as one of the creatures circled around towards Kassandra’s open side.
Ducking low under Kassandra’s barrage, I lunged at the creature and slapped down with one paw-hand. My palm caught the creature from the side and the claws exploded out of their hidden state, scoring deeply into the chitinous exterior of the critter.
Shrieking in pain, the little monster tried to claw at my arm in revenge, but its claws just scraped over my armored forearm. Whipping my arm back, I lobbed it back towards the fray, intending for it to land amongst the ones by the cave mouth. My aim was off slightly, and it landed far closer to Rieka than the group. The creature bounced and rolled into the illuminated space of Rieka’s light stone.
The scream that rose up from the creature in response was even more piercing and actually made Rieka stumble away from the creature. Its limbs thrashed while it tried to scramble away from my wolf-eared girl, but couldn’t seem to get them to work properly at first. I silenced its screaming with a powerful stomp a moment later that crunched the monster underfoot.
“Icicle Rain!” Kassandra snapped from right behind me and I spun to see her channeling with her spell rod into the air over the cave mouth.
Hundreds of hand-sized icy spears formed about twenty feet above the mob in the cave and dove downwards to slam into the creatures, cracking chitin and sending the creatures stumbling on the frozen ground as their balance was interrupted.
“Drive them back into the cave, quickly!” Rieka ordered before flicking another of her Spark Net’s into the group, sending them twitching and thrashing.
We pushed forward, the girls holding their light stones up overhead to illuminate the way. I kept to the sides, crushing any of the creatures that tried to flank them. I got bit once, but the creature's little fangs barely made it past the thick skin of my shin armor before I crushed it and then used the spindly body as an impromptu club on another.
Thankfully, not many managed to make it out of the cave mouth before we got there, and the girls were able to corral the creatures back into the cave.
Whenever the direct light of the glowing stones fell on the creatures, they hissed and retreated. Several that were injured enough not to be able to move simply screamed and thrashed in response to the light.
Rieka noticed this reaction as we continued to drive them back. She paused for a moment to hold the glowing stone down directly in front of one of the creatures and its scream grew even more piercing. A lashing limb smacked the glowing stone out of her hand and, as soon as it was away from her, the creature lunged clumsily at Rieka. My wolf kin princess was ready and jammed her spell rod into the open mouth of the creature. A bolt of lightning caused it to explode like a watermelon hit with a hammer a moment later.
Once Rieka collected her light stone, the three of us worked to bottle the creatures up in the cave. The area around the mouth of the cave was a mess of black blood, torn earth, and twitching corpses. It felt like there had to be hundreds of the little bastards, but I knew logically that had to be impossible.
Once we got close enough to the cave, Kassandra tossed her light stone down right at the entrance, which sent the critters skittering back into the depths of the cave and away from the light. The glow of her light stone on the rocky interior reminded me of the lights down below, which were out again from what I could tell of the shadows in the cave below us.
“LIGHTS!” I shouted as loudly as I could. I didn’t hear the clunk this time, but the hissing screams and rapid skittering of the little monsters picked up. A surge of the little beasts tried to push past us and up into the meadow, but the three of us drove them back.
I don’t know how long we ended up fighting, but the girls actually had to start fishing coins out of the pouches on their belt to power their magic before the final one of the scuttling beasts was dead. I made sure to stomp on each of them to ensure none of them survived with just an injury and, in the process, got a chance to count the dead.
We’d brought down sixty-seven of the little beasts.
“Liam? You okay?” Rieka’s question brought me back to myself from the snarling anger that had been driving me throughout the fight. These little monsters had threatened my girls, and it didn’t help that they were so disgusting. It felt like I’d been stomping barefoot on cockroaches and I desperately wanted to clean my feet. The gross feeling of blood and ichor between my toes just further fueled my disgust.
I turned back towards the two and had to take a firmer hold on my anger when I realized the girls hadn’t gotten out of the fight entirely unscathed.
Rieka had a narrow cut on the back of the hand that held her light stone, probably from the creature that had batted it away from her earlier. Kassandra was bleeding from a cut on one cheek. Both of them were speckled with the black blood of these little monsters, and all three of us were panting.
“Little hurt, are you two okay?” My voice was thick with anger and I stomped harder on the nearest critter, which splattered satisfyingly as a result.
“Minor cuts only. What the hell were these?” Kassandra was the one to respond.
My inquisitive, serpentine lover bent close over one of the bodies. I walked over to check on her while she did. Shifting my hands back from paws did not remove the gore from them, so I swiped it off on the grass as best as I could before coming to a stop next to her.
Kassandra leaned into me automatically while she studied the mostly intact body in front of her. It had to be one that must have crossed the ward while it was still fully charged. The creature's body was smoking, but it was still intact.
“No idea, but they were vicious little bastards.” Rieka growled, joining us and holding her light stone up.
“That is…disturbing,” Kassandra mumbled. I looked down at where she was staring to see the shell of the creature begin to collapse, like an ice-cube melting in the sun, as the dual light of the two glowing stones hit it. As I had guessed during the fight, the creature had six limbs. Two protruded from each end of its body and the third set came from the joint between them. It looked an awful lot like a pair of mouths with legs that could run in either direction, covered in a slick exoskeleton to add fuel to their nightmarish appearance.
All three of us watched as the body slowly melted away into the grass, leaving nothing behind but a faint stink and a lingering smoke that was shredded by the breeze after a long few seconds.