Chapter 29
The cabin had not been used in some time. A corner of the floor had begun to collapse, and all three windows were broken.
Invia tossed her two paladins against the wall, and I threw Paulson on top of them. They were still gagged but had given up on begging for mercy by this point. Other than grunts of pain and labored breathing, they were quiet.
She pulled the one surviving chair to the center of the room and had me sit. Straddling me, she sat in my lap and kissed me deeply, finishing the exchange with a bite of my lip. If my constitution weren’t broken, she would have drawn blood.
“I’ve had this fantasy for a long time,” Invia began, looking down into my eyes, her dark hair framing her face as I looked up. “That day in Flowst when the Temple was attacked, I only got to imagine what the fight was like since I was inside. When I finally got to see the carnage…”
She gasped. She paused and closed her eyes, as if taking a moment to collect herself.
“She will betray you again. It is inevitable. Trust me. Trust Aurketzu.”
“It still turns me on to think about,” she admitted.
“I saw all of you that day, all of those displays of your power. I wanted you to take me right there, to throw me onto that pile of corpses and fuck me until I joined them. I wanted to feel your cock slice me in two, and I wanted to look up at you and see the pleasure it brought you to watch me die.”
Invia started to kiss me again. She moved to my neck and spoke between more kisses and bites.
“She is using you for her own gain. You are a pawn, viceroy.”
“Then Autumn told me about how you saved her,” Invia continued.
“I’ve made her tell me the story so many times, about how you tore a man in two, about how you ran naked through the streets, every one of your dicks out and rock hard, about how every inch of you was painted red from the enemies you slayed.
“She told me what it was like to be in your arms, to feel your strong grip holding her close despite the slickness of the blood that drenched both of you. She told me about feeling your erection when you released your shades and cut down more enemies. She told me how you steamed in the night air, all that heat from you and your fallen foes billowing off of you like white smoke as she looked up from the safety of your embrace.”
Invia began to grind her hips against mine.
“You need me to survive your war. You know this as well as I.”
“I don’t want to imagine anymore, Master,” she whispered in my ear, her breath hot and moist. “Let me prove to you that I love all of you. Let me show you that I love the deepest, darkest parts the most.”
“Get undressed,” I commanded.
Invia gleefully stripped, and I did the same. I picked up one of the paladins who had attempted to flee.
“You are nothing, Brenin of Borja! I gave you everything you have! You cannot succeed without my mind guiding your hands!”
“Death will never do us part,” I said, looking into the eyes of my future wife.
“Death has always brought you and me together. Invia, your deepest darkest parts? Even before you killed me, I wanted to bend you over your desk at that stupid guard station and fuck all of those parts again and again. You’ve always been my fantasy. ”
I held the paladin up between us, drove my fingers into his ribs, and ripped him apart.
+24 good-aligned levels.
The two paladins still alive, one of whom was Paulson, screamed through their gags and struggled against their bindings. Invia, meanwhile, basked in the spray like someone enjoying a rare rain in the depths of a hot summer. She smeared the red over her naked tits and down her flat stomach.
“Drown that sorceress bitch in blood,” Invia said. “I’m the only dark voice you need.”
A few hours later, our kidnapped paladins were in pieces. Invia had become my wife, earning her Touch of Abyssal Undeath. When the effect took hold, she grew three whip-like tails, similar to Abby’s except blood red.
She was so beautiful.
And Aurketzu had nothing more to say.
Paladins remaining: 3
That notification came and went the moment Paulson the Pure died, but I was too preoccupied at the time to give it the attention it deserved.
Three paladins remained in the whole of the world. Three! What a marvelous turn of events.
With paladins nearing extinction, celestials and Abaddon were my gravest threats, but I doubted they would be as considerate as paladins and bunch up in a nice little group for me to massacre.
Were fate truly kind, celestials would see what their paladin friends on the material plane got for poking me and retract any aggression they might still hold.
Unfortunately for them, routing the celestial planes was still a cornerstone in my plan against Abaddon, so peace with the celestials wouldn’t last long if it ever came at all.
In happier news, Aurketzu hadn’t whispered in my ear since my wedding night with Invia.
My templar’s method for quieting the voice had me dubious from the start, but I had been willing to try anything to escape the hiss of the dead sorceress.
Drowning Aurketzu in blood and debauchery might have actually worked.
Time would tell. The sorceress had often gone several days without speaking, only to blindside me in the middle of a key negotiation or critical battle. If a month passed without her harassment, I would consider the ritual a success.
For now, my attention was best devoted to my remaining threats.
I wondered how Drae and Stacey’s progress was coming along. The construct I commissioned would have been completed weeks ago had I not repeatedly modified the design. I also hadn’t checked in with the demon sisters in some time, I realized.
Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t visited Penny’s Bar and Bathhouse or Byron’s Bathhouse in some time, either, but what was the point? My women and my demons didn’t need my supervision to fuck all the money out of adventurers. I could leave day-to-day management to…
Who was in charge of those operations now that Mirko was dead? I could picture her face but could not recall her name.
Whatever, someone I picked was looking after them both. If there was a problem, I would hear about it.
Drae and Stacey’s work was more directly impactful, I decided. If they had misunderstood any part of my requests, the constructs could need yet another round of retooling, so visiting sooner rather than later was wise.
A summoner on the plane of seraphim invites you for an audience. You cannot receive or deliver harm for as long as you remain within the summoning circle, and you may return to your home plane at will. These rules cannot be broken or cheated by either party.
Do you accept the invitation?
Yes / No
Had Arcturus found me a client already? Motivated business partners were such a blessing.
I had cleaned myself thoroughly since my bloody romp with Invia, both with traditional baths and with several rounds of Abby’s Prestidigitation spell, but I still worried a little bit of undead cunt juice had dried on my balls somewhere and the seraphim client would notice.
But I shouldn’t keep such a high-value client waiting.
I grabbed a bag of supplies and selected Yes.
I appeared in a room that felt like being inside a geode. Instead of amethyst or quartz, these crystals were like polished mirrors, turning any one point in time into thousands of reflections.
The floor was made of the same material but had been polished smooth, and a round bed sat at the center.
The piles of blankets and pillows were like a fluffy white cloud crossing the sky on a lazy summer day.
The woman on the bed was the first seraphim I ever saw in person, and my simple human mind struggled to comprehend what I was seeing.
I was aware of a powerful presence, but the being on the bed had no physical form. They were a blindingly bright light that seemed to bend the very fabric of reality, warping and distorting the air around it.
With a flash, the light disappeared, and a woman with perfectly white skin took shape among the pillows and blankets.
She had a voluptuous figure, like a sculpture with exaggerated proportions.
Her hips were almost twice as wide as Solara’s.
One of her ass cheeks was the size of Wistia’s entire butt, and her breasts were closer in scale to bags of grain, far larger than any I had ever seen on a human.
The seraphim’s eyes were like polished diamonds, reflecting and refracting light across thousands of intricate facets, and her hair never became entirely physical.
It kept the same glow as her original form, as if sunbeams had begun to turn into a sort of gel.
When I looked, I saw her nipples were the same sort of semi-material light, and though her legs were closed, the brilliance of what lay between her legs could not be fully contained.
Sense Weakness.
She was weak to humiliation. That I could work with. Curiously, she betrayed no reaction to my ability. In the past, stronger beings could sense when I probed their minds in that manner, but had my stats reached a point where that was no longer the case?
“Do not be afraid,” a voice like the chorus of 100 angeli said. “One such as you has never seen real beauty, but fear not, I will not harm you.”
“I do not fear you. I am, however, ignorant of the heavens and what it means to be a seraphim. Any hesitation you see is my attempt to understand what I’m experiencing.”
“One who does business with Arcturus does not understand the supremacy of seraphim?”
“I understand that seraphim are the highest ranking celestials and have the strength to match, and I vaguely understand that such a thing must be earned. Beyond that, as I said, I am ignorant.”