Chapter Fifteen
It took about an hour for Krysta to finish healing all of their collected injuries.
Once Skylar’s wounds were mended, the djinn took Ripper and Dent from her storage and began using her skills to fix up their damage.
Kora, the least hurt of all of them, stood guard with Reve remaining atop the column.
By the time Krysta had finished up, and even Vester was feeling well and truly put back together, the group had found themselves in a situation that they weren’t sure how to solve.
“I feel bad for them. Maybe we should let them in,” Krysta said, staring out over the survivors of the airship crash.
The blood elflings were looking ragged. None of their scorpions appeared to survive, but there were probably twenty to thirty of the scantily clad women waiting at the border of Krysta’s Sanctuary.
Vester studied them, noting that white hair wasn’t the only color they came in.
He saw a few with lavender hair, several with pale pink, and one with light blue.
Their eyes, the compound gemstones, also ranged from crimson to neon green, which looked startling against their black skins.
The dark bikinis were highlighted by the mithril coins and faint lines that gave them fabric shape, and those lines almost glowed against their bodies.
They’re hot, but definitely look like they want to kill me.
Doesn’t help that Li Ra heard a few of them commenting that the crash was caused by bringing a man on board.
He scratched the back of his neck before turning to look back to Krysta.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to let dungeon monsters inside your Safe Zone. Could you eject them again if they turned hostile?”
Krysta slumped. “I don’t think so,” she admitted while wrapping her tail around herself and hugging it to her chest. “But they have injured people in their group, and I don’t feel right just ignoring them. Can I at least go out and heal some of them?”
“Let me negotiate with them first,” Reve interjected. She dropped off the column, flaring her wings for a moment, and touched down next to Krysta to pat the woman on the shoulder. “We have seen they defer to me as a superior dungeon creature. Perhaps I can ensure it will be a safe task.”
“Fine,” Krysta said—she looked so dejected that Vester couldn’t resist the temptation to rise and move over to her side.
He sat down next to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, snuggling her in against his ribs while he tilted his head to rest against the top of hers.
“I hate seeing people hurt,” she whined, voice soft.
“I know you do,” Vester murmured sympathetically. He kissed one of her fluffy ears, and she flicked it to bat him in the face. The contact calmed her, and she let out another sigh while nuzzling in closer.
While they spoke, Kora went with Reve over to the elflings.
Ripper and Dent moved closer, positioning themselves where they could intercept an attack.
Li Ra had climbed up onto the column that Reve had previously occupied, her rifle now resting in plain sight across her knee while she stared down at the dungeon monsters.
Skylar was sitting nearby, balancing her attention between the golem arm she was finishing and the elflings outside. Vester saw that it wasn’t the same arm she had been working on before, and Vester felt bad for how hard it was for her to assemble a golem inside the dungeon.
She still has some combat frames, but I know she can’t stand the idea of putting Woody’s core in a generic frame that will just get destroyed the moment we face more powerful monsters.
I’m not sure if there’s any way to fix that.
We didn’t get to spend as much time as we’d planned working on her projects back at the lab.
Skylar was molding a piece of dungeon quartz, shaping it into something she could slot into the metal bones to channel energy. Her face radiated concentration, and though Vester hated to break her out of it, he still felt compelled to ask, “When can you create a new golem core?”
Blinking, Skylar directed her lavender gaze his way.
“What?” she mumbled, then the question seemed to actually register for her.
“Oh! I can make one new core now and another in a week. I’ve been debating trying to use one of the elemental cores we got in the desert. But I’ve been so focused on Woody…”
When she trailed off, Vester nodded. “I get it. But remember, Woody’s core is safe in your storage. Nothing can get to it there.” While he spoke, Krysta buried her nose in his neck, openly sniffing him until he started tickling her side to get her to stop. She let out a squeak and calmed down.
Part of me thinks I should encourage Skylar to make a new core and just resign herself to a substandard frame, but it wouldn’t be the right call emotionally.
Beaky and Splinter are gone, and while she never got attached to the golems she uses for mining our area of the resort, she also never intended them to fight.
She made those ones as work drones and basically ignored them.
Vester pursed his lips, not sure if he should push her or not.
He understood that Skylar attached a lot of emotional value to the golems she kept by her side for combat, and he didn’t want to disrespect that.
Telling her to “get over it” or something similar would just be harmful to her sense of self.
The problem is we need a place we can camp for a solid period of time before she’ll be able to assemble the new golem.
Her new stuff is a lot more complicated than the original versions.
Dent is a brute, but it doesn’t have remotely near the degree of articulation and versatility Ripper does.
I know she doesn’t want to make shit-quality puppets when she has her new skills letting her create things that are damn near alive.
“Vester,” Skylar said, breaking into his thoughts.
“You’re staring at me like you’re afraid I’m going to explode. Relax.”
She offered him a warm smile, an expression of gratitude on her features.
“I know we need me to get my golems going again, and I know I’m obsessing over Woody’s new body. You don’t need to figure out how to give me a gentle lecture on it. Kora already did—though I wouldn’t call the talk she offered gentle.”
He couldn’t stop a snort from escaping him. “Yeah, Kora doesn’t tend to pull punches when she’s talking about delving and what she thinks we need as a Party.”
“That goes for training too,” Krysta added with a laugh, perking up. “She doesn’t pull punches while sparring at all. Remember the time she shield bashed you so hard you were stuck against the wall for a couple of minutes?”
“Remember?” Vester repeated, “Krysta, I still feel that impact in my teeth when I look at her shield. But it got the point across… I take dodging very seriously now.”
They all shared another laugh at that, the somber mood fading.
Their eyes were drawn to the negotiations; Kora stood next to Reve while the Avatar of Life tried to work out a safe way for Krysta to heal dungeon monsters without them having a chance to betray the Party.
Reve’s back was to them, which meant her half-open wings blocked much of her body language.
Vester caught the occasional glimpse of her gesturing with her metal arm, but he couldn’t see enough detail to tell how things were going.
Kora’s tails—all four of them—were low toward the ground, though the stillness suggested she was suppressing her own body language.
While Vester was tempted to get up and join them to see if he could help, he knew it would be a stupid decision. The blood elflings were matriarchal to the point of prejudice, and now that he knew they were an insect-based species, it made sense to him.
Most colony bugs don’t have a lot of use for males.
The queens give birth, the females do the work, and the guys just hide and fuck.
Gender dichotomy at its finest… Well, probably still better than those weird deep-sea fish where the male bites the female and shrivels up until nothing remains by a grafted-on-nutsack parasite.
Vester paused, shaking his head. That’s probably the creepiest example I could think of.
He dismissed the idle musings and frowned, seeing how frustrated the monsters were appearing.
They showed signs of impatience, and more than a few were fingering weapons.
It looked like most of them were armed with slim blades, or rods.
The rods were magical focuses about three feet long, with various gems or carvings on top.
The things looked like scepters to Vester, but some mages used them as clubs when needed.
I don’t see many bows, crossbows, or other ranged options. I’m guessing the three women holding lances were scorpion riders, but their power should be weaker without their mounts. Can’t say I’m sad to see the giant bugs are gone Definitely had enough of those for a lifetime.
Just before his anxiety rose to the point he’d have needed to move closer to get a better grasp of the situation, the crowd visibly changed.
Something Reve said caused them all to relax, and moments later they began passing over the metal coin belts from their outfits.
Kora tipped her shield sideways, and all of the injured elflings gave up the items until a hefty pile of coins rested on the inside face of the tower shield.
Reve, meanwhile, had turned and motioned for Krysta to come over.
The pandali jumped to her feet, practically sprinting across the Sanctuary to reach the monsters.
Without hesitation, Krysta began touching the injured with her staff and helping heal their wounds.
Kora, meanwhile, came back and dumped the coin belts at Skylar’s feet before going for a second load.
It took Vester a few moments to realize that the blood elflings were giving over all of their metal goods, which included their weapons, magical foci, and for some of them their tops—to ensure Kora got the metal framing in their bikinis.
“What is going on?” Skylar asked. Her question came just in time for Reve to rejoin them. The tall, bat-winged woman sat down on a boulder-cushion in a spot that formed a triangle with Vester and Skylar, allowing her to look at both without excluding anyone.
“I was negotiating a payment plan for Krysta’s services,” she explained.
“The dilemma stemmed from my refusal to allow them to pay by sacrificing the ones they considered lesser members. Killing them might have allowed us to grow stronger, but I thought having a larger group would be wise if we planned to accompany the elflings across the dungeon floor to their city.”
“Is that our plan?” Skylar asked. The djinn looked confused, her eyes darting between Vester and Reve. The latter merely turned to Vester, signaling he should be the one to answer that question.
“That was one of the routes I discussed with Kora,” he admitted.
“The thought was that if we could trust the blood elflings, we could use them as guides and escorts to get where we need to go. Non’s Quest didn’t say how many blood elflings I needed to perform the summoning in front of, so we thought the journey might give us a chance to test it.
If we can convince this crowd to allow it, we might have a shot with the larger group.”
“Is the Quest repeatable?” Skylar pressed, though she seemed to understand the motivation. Vester could tell she didn’t have any complaints at this point, she was just seeking clarification.
“I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head. “I might not cast the official ritual until we’re with a larger group. But first we need to see if we can get any of them let us do it… which will be easier when they don’t outnumber us a thousand to one.”
Skylar grimaced. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The last thing we want is to have to fight the entire city while we make it onto that island to access Elondolin’s Quest.”
With that settled, she turned her attention back to Reve.
“Did they say what the skeleton was, or where the undead titanbat came from?”
“No,” Reve said, “and they insisted the undead man was not of the dungeon. He felt like an invader to them, and somehow they were able to tell it was male, though I am unclear on how. I no longer have access to the instincts that let a dungeon creature sense outsiders so clearly.
I can tell when a dungeon monster is weaker than me, but that’s it.”
“Wait, so that thing came from outside the dungeon?” Vester asked, straightening up. “That changes matters. If that undead was delving… and it created the titanbat here on this floor…” He trailed off, his mind whirling while he took in the ramifications of such an event.
The Church of Light has been making a ton of noise, and undead aren’t common.
But I know that the Goddess of Death cursed me to turn me into one so she could get a free Avatar…
so clearly there are sapient undead. Since Death and Peace voted together in cursing me, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out they’re allies.
The skeleton focused on me as soon as it reached the deck…
so maybe Peace called in a favor to have something new hunt me because I kept beating Denny?
It was oddly a relief to think that he wouldn’t have to fight his brother again, Vester couldn’t shake the frustration and unhappiness he felt at being his twin’s enemy. But since he had no idea how to break a goddess’ control on Denny’s mind, he wasn’t sure what options he currently had.
Kora dumped a second load of stuff at Skylar’s feet, and when Vester glanced over at the crowd of blood elflings he blinked rapidly.
Every single one of them was now nude from the waist up.
On top of that, not a damned one had bad tits.
It was a shallow thought, but when twenty or thirty pairs of amazing breasts were jiggling in his face, he didn’t think his reaction was unreasonable.
Skylar and Reve followed his gaze, then Reve looked back at him. “Is this the face he makes when he wishes to breed?” she asked Skylar. The djinn burst into giggles, finally pausing in working on the golem piece, and then devolved into full laughter.
“No, Reve, that’s the look he makes when he wants to fuck,” she replied.
Vester would have loved to deflect… but she wasn’t wrong.