“I think that tree is poison Ivy.”

“Then it would be a bush or a vine then.”

Konohora shook their head.

“The leaves look similar.”

I sighed. We were now out and away into the forest. Realistically, we literally couldn’t have gone far. We were just too small and slow. But even if we were only a Giantesses’ 2 minute walk away, it was a jungle and we were tiny. It really wasn’t too hard to stay hidden.

Now came the actually hard part of our plan. Surviving the jungle. To that end, first things first. Clothes. We had giant leaves just lying around everywhere. There was no reason we couldn’t have some modesty and some base protection from the elements. Who knew how cold the nights could get after all? Something would be better than nothing.

It took some time, but it’s not exactly like we were on much of a crunch. I was still worried about Riary and Tyler… but Konohora seemed to be doing alright. She must have seen something I hadn’t after all.

After all, I wasn’t with them when we had teleported.

But I wiped those thoughts away and focused on leaf finding. It took us around an hour, not to find decent leaves, but to actually build the clothing. Leaves made a surprisingly good material in this god forsaken super jungle. They were more sturdy than I was expecting. I looked at Konohora and myself and felt like laughing.

I had opted to go for a sumo wrestler style underwear first, then some ‘pants’, which had become ‘shorts’ which had become legging stitched together with strips of leaf tied through holes I had poked in them with my claws, to give the appearance and function of proper pants. The shirt had much the same issue, but I managed to get something close out of it. It was really just a panel on my back, and a panel on my front, tied together, but it looked close enough to a sleeveless shirt. If you were blind. But whatever. It did its job.

Konohora had chosen simple. She’d found a weird leaf that seemed to be wilting, punched a hole through it for her head, and put it on. Then she just pressed it down and against her body, until it functioned somewhat vaguely like a cloak.

We looked like brownies or borrowers from that one cartoon I never saw.

“We look ridiculous.” I said.

Konohora shrugged.

“As long as they work.”

I sighed and we began walking. Because the next thing on our list past clothes was food. Food and water. Uncomfortably, I still wasn’t hungry or thirsty. That small ball of heat sitting below my stomach, near my waist, was still ‘feeding’ me. It felt so… strange. It wasn’t something I had thought about much but… we had been being taken care of. Just in the same way as creatures with no minds, souls, or thoughts. I briefly wondered what a society like that would do with, well, normal people. There were definitely only two outcomes.

An absolute war to destroy the ‘abominations’.

Or absolute fawning and caretaking, treating us like revered pets at worst.

Neither option was one I was too keen to go find out through personal experience. One led to death, the other probably still led to being shoved in a box and forced to fuck to make more of their race. What a strange way for a race to exist. I wonder… if two people… say a demon and a priestess… had sex with that heat inside would they make a giantess even if they weren’t abominations? Actually… wait a minute…

“Uh… Konohora?”

“Hmm?”

“So…” Best to just be blunt with it. “What do you think the chances are of pregnancy?”

She stopped and frowned. And began to think more.

“Hmm. Normally, I’d say 0%. But with the strange race creating method the Giants seemed to employ… but I don’t feel pregnant yet, at least.”

“Wait wait wait. Wait. Let’s roll it back. What do you mean you’d normally say 0%?”

Konohora looked at me and blinked. Then she tilted her head to the side a little and gave me a look that made me thoroughly uncomfortable.

“...you’re serious.”

…What the fuck?

“...yes?”

Konohora blinked again and then something else settled in her gaze. Disbelief. Hard disbelief.

“You… Can not- You should not be serious. How?”

Her face was showing way, way more expression than it usually did. Her mouth was morphing, dropping, and her eyes were squinting. I had well and truly baffled her and I had no idea how.

“What? All I asked is why you’d think it’d be a 0% chance of pregnancy! What, are women different in Ero here or something? Do you get to choose somehow?”

Konohora just stared at me, before her expression, gradually went from mindfucked, to utter bafflement, to maxed out confusion, to horrific stunned shock.

Eventually, it settled on a woman going in for a battle. Her whole body going rigid.

“Derek. How?”

“WHAT?! What is it?!”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Derek… you… I know- you told me- You said, you didn’t grow up around demons but… there’s a lot more to that than you must have let on…” She trailed off.

She firmed up her gaze and took a deep breath. Her body becoming even more rigid. I suddenly had an extremely bad feeling about this.

“Derek… demons don’t, can’t, have children.”

What.

“What?”

Konohora just looked at me, face deathly serious.

I looked at her.

And she looked at me.

I looked at her.

And she looked at me.

****

Birds were singing, the sun was shining, and-

“WHAT?! WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T HAVE CHILDREN?!”

The birds fled in a panic.

My mind whirled.

“Derek, this is basic biology. Almost everyone already knows this.” Konohora put particular stress on that ‘almost’ as if she still couldn’t believe I didn’t know.

But how was I suppose to know?! I became a demon less than a god damn month ago! Oh, so turning me into a chaos-loving, massacre-enjoying entity, and fucking me around here and there all about this whole time wasn’t enough huh?! You also had to take away my ability to have kids?! Disable my little man?! Make me impotent?! Fuck you universe, you can go fuck yourself!

“What, but, how?! How do demons… become demons?! What do you mean they don’t have children!”

“Demons spawn, typically in the lower planes of hell. They are a natural result of the coalescing energies there.”

This was another one of those things. Those inconsistencies. I had been to hell. But not the Hell demons in Ero came from. It just had never clicked in my brain before. There were at least two of them. Two separate places. I was, for some reason, absolutely sure that they were two separate places.

I had just never thought about it before. Never really asked or connected those dots. When would I have even had the time to? But now… now I was learning a lot. ‘Layers?’ I didn’t so much remember Hell, as have it imprinted onto me and a set of notes stapled to my brain about it.

1. It was an endless torment of trillions, of trillions, of souls. More vast than a billion planets worth of people. A near infinity of torment. A plane of horrible. So unbelievably bad that not a single soul deserved to experience it, regardless of their sins or crimes.

2. Suffering. Endless, absolute, suffering on a scale unimaginable. Beyond, literally beyond, human imagination. Connected, feeling everything at once, feeling everything everyone feels, all together, at once.

My words were cheap. Describing Hell was impossible. But I knew it sure as fuck didn’t have ‘layers’, at least the one I had been pulled through didn’t. It certainly wasn’t a place where entities beyond tortured souls necessarily existed either. I frowned at that thought and tried to examine it for a moment but… Any more information had me actually feeling pain, as I drew closer to my soul/mind barrier. I quickly pulled back. No reason to die a horrible, gruesome death, for my curiosity.

So there were two Hells. Maybe more. What the fuck did that mean?

Oh and right. I could no longer have kids.

A deep, horrible pit began to open up in my stomach. Well… I didn’t… I’d unpack that later.

“Fuck it. Let’s just go find food.”

“Derek…”

“Food. Water.”

We walked in silence for a time. This was another one of those things. Another damn one of those things where new information smacked me in the face. I didn’t feel pain to the point my body could slowly fall apart if I wasn’t careful, I was mentally so self-absorbed that my body could be deconstructed before me and I’d not even notice in a life or death situation if I wasn’t paying attention or would even just forget I didn’t wear shoes for weeks, mentally leaned towards massacring, my blues eyes were stolen from me and replaced with red, and now I couldn’t have children.

This was too much. God, let the new self-revelations end. It hasn’t even been more than a month since I’ve been to Ero for God’s sake. A task would make me feel better. I leaned down and started messing with leaves again. They’d already proven their sturdiness. Might as well make a ‘bag’ out of them to carry our food and/or water with us. Like anything, weaving surprisingly strong leaves together was apparently a skill. I could already tell I was going to get absurdly good at it if we stayed here forever. Hell, maybe with some proper techniques like drying or coating it in some oil from a plant or something, it could get a bit stiffer. It actually lit up a small amount of joy in me. This, in a way, was the beginning of civilization. Just a man and a woman making stuff out of raw materials. Making clothes, making shelter, hunting for food and water. And then came more. Protecting your territory, growing it, ushering in a proper era of peace. And that was when knowledge would start to come around as your tribe grew. From a tribe, to a village, to a town, to a bustling area. Spreading out, growing. Every problem, met with an advancement. Learning from smart individuals, painfully tried and attempted to be passed down to everyone.

Civilization. This was the beginning of one.

I found myself smiling at the thought. It felt… connected to me. I was and had been a human nearly all my life. This method of existence was part of my origins. Hell, it may go further. May be how all sentient people start out more or less. Regardless of how you come into existence… civilization still needs to occur to be an advanced race. To advance as a race.

I looked around the area, noting different smaller plants and animals I hadn’t noticed before. I turned and-

“Fucking god damn it! Why are you here too?!”

“Derek?” Konohora asked worried.

“Sorry. Ignore me. Just pissed at squirrels.”

The damn fucking creepy ass squirrels with four eyes and two tails were here too! WHY?! How?! They must fuck like god damn rabbits to have spread to the four corners of this earth.

“Derek.” Konohora said, worry in her voice.

“I just saw a squirrel. It’s okay.”

“No. Not that. We need to talk about something. …You knew that Cult leader.”

Ah. Right. He had said my name. I continued to work on my backpack as I answered her, my voice hard like flint.

“He was a bard at the inn we were staying at. He’s dangerous. Incredibly, super dangerous, and he’s around here somewhere. If we see him, he has to die. He’s got some kinda… mental? Powers. He sang and… I can not describe it to you. It… I really can’t describe it. We’ll just kill him if we see him though.”

Konohora was mid nod when-

“Well, that’s not very nice Derek!” A voice said and I jumped up and spun around.

Behind Konohora, walking out of the jungle, was Happy.

I saw Konohora’s shocked and surprised face as she began to turn, but I didn’t hesitate for a second. I ran at him, claws out, tail up.

He would die here and now before he destroyed us all.

“Oh! This is going to be fun!” Happy said, a smile on his face.