CH39

Spring 43, 11M 495Y

Cainite Territory 

Bavilim Outskirts 

Gabriel clutched at the stinging brand on his arm hidden under his gambeson, expensive chainmail, and ruinously more expensive runed plate. The six weeks of training with steel swords, his rifle, and grenades were every boyhood dream he every had rolled into one, and at the end of his journey, he was going to slay vampires. They and six other companies marched silently to their destination, kitted out with over 300lbs of gear for a decapitation strike. His boots were silent even when he nearly stumbled over holes and kicked a hole through stumps. Beneath his armor rested an amulet containing all the reason he needed to sell his life away to the Canite's Governor Charles A. Bel. 

His squad leader, a 15ft tall Mountain Troll, pulled two wagons of siege equipment and wore a set of black steel plate mail with runes that glittered like the night sky when he wasn't in stealth mode. First, Seargent Prog was a dangerous beast, even among Trolls. If not for his training, they wouldn't be marching, let alone moving silently through miles of terrain to their destination.

The smell of smoke hit them hours before they arrived in a burned-out town. Bodies were raised high on stakes, bleeding out while women danced around them, collecting drops of blood in their mouths.

One man raised their rifle only for the Prog to force it down. "We were tasked with killing only the male vampires. Every female vampire killed will be a dock to your pay and a lash. Do you understand me, Smith?"

Gabriel watched a motherly woman with brown hair, pale perfect skin, and large breasts hold a teen only a year younger than his 18 to her chest lovingly. A teenage girl with sun-kissed skin, black hair, and shiny red eyes gripped the teen's hips while one kissed his neck. The sight caused a stirring in himself and he felt like the teen defenseless among those monsters was lucky. It was a thought that made him feel foolish and guilty.

His sister was taken by men, beautiful specimens of these monsters in the night. Gabriel heard them; the one with a white hat and purple hair called his sister bitch. He held her down, and through a crack in the door that night, Gabriel saw him kiss her neck while forcing himself on her. She was so young and innocent, and he took her. When Gabriel touched the door, something paralyzed and silenced him. His heartbeat slowed to a crawl, and it felt like he was asleep and paralyzed. Through the crack in the door, Grabriel watched his sister Anya be taken by the white demon naked, all except for a white hat fedora over his purple hair. She said no, and the vampire took everything.

"Why should we spare them? They are," Gabriel was interrupted.

"Victims who can't control their nature at such young ages. The vampires in charge placed them here to trap us. Soldiers don't look good killing women."

"They are feeding on a boy. I think he's only a little younger than me," William said.

"We have our orders. Don't question them; you are paid to kill male vampires. Female vampires are only victims of rape." Prog said.

He remembered his sister's teary eyes and knew he couldn't kill her.

…

Nana felt a sharp pain in her tail from Yon's spikey hair. Little particles of fell covering her former comrade's body only kept the quills pinned while her acid worked on him. The same crystals of fell that protected her from the quills also soaked up her acid, prolonging the experience as her victim struggled, causing her tail to ache from various stabbings that were slow to heal.

She took her time; there wasn't a rush; the Calamity seemed preoccupied with a set of papers pinned to a cork board covered in symbols and algorithms she didn't recognize. They were noticeably more sophisticated than the ones she saw earlier like the Calamity needed very little time to advance in his understanding. He reminded her of Dr. Raito in that way.

"Will you fight any of them, or am I to fight all of my former friends as a sign of loyalty?"

"When you find someone you can't handle, I will step in." The Calamity said.

While his hands were preoccupied with tapping the wall, hands made of blood extended from his shoulders and did the writing.

"Are you nervous?" Nana asked.

"Yes, I only have so much time to finish my combination before we need to leave. It's hard stepping into a new field and being completely untalented in it. What did you do before becoming a guard?" He asked.

The being before her was a terrifying existence. She had no idea what the equations and symbols were for, but seeing them made her eyes blur and her thoughts cloud up.

"I meant, are you nervous about the quest."

He looked up at that but hadn't turned his attention to her. Hands made from blood blurred as they quickly filled out sheets of paper before stabbing them into the cork board with sticky notes. The Calamity surveyed his new mind-breaking creation before shaking his hand and ripping one of the papers away before tearing it up.

"That one won't balance no matter what I try, so it's best if I don't use it at all. It would fit better in another pillar. Maybe I should combine them in parts and see if I have better connectivity that way." The Calamity sighed and turned around, giving her his undivided attention. "This quest is done turning you has made it impossible for them to win. Our victory is only a matter of time at this point."

She would feel flattered if she wasn't the cause of her nation's destruction. Honestly, she considered them even after they made her into a monster and set her to die for a bigger one. Her head no longer resembled a fox's. While she maintained her ears, her face had morphed into something similar to the Calamity's. Her tail had grown longer, and its end had grown a lewd opening under her stinger. The wings on her back were tough, vibrant things that felt stronger than steel and more elastic than rubber. Every time she devoured one of her former comrades, she gained a small part of their strength, and her appearance refined more.

Small eyes had grown at the end of her tail, complete with a second consciousness subservient to her own. Her slanted eyes were the only parts of her that kept their foxy nature along with their amber color. Long, silky black hair fell down, parting over a small set of spines growing from her back and flowing over her shoulders to cover her breasts. She had no idea how her digestive system worked and sometimes imagined she heard two heartbeats in her chest instead of one. Between Nana's legs, her privates were more tucked away than before and less, if that made any sense at all to anyone except her. Her skin didn't have fur on it anymore; it had taken on the color of paper. On her back was a small layer of carapace protecting her wings.

Nana felt powerful in indescribable ways, but whenever she looked at the Calamity happily scribbling his notes, a shiver of terror ran down her spine. He was a monster and didn't apologize for it. There was no doubt in his mind that between them, he was no only stronger but significantly stronger.

The 3rd hadn't arrived yet, and she began to prepare herself to fight with the potential of the 4th breaking free, injuring her horribly, and turning the fight into 2 on 1. Would the Calamity move in to save her, or would he offer a deal to the 3rd and tell him to eat her?

Warm hands grabbed ahold of her tail, and she panicked. Had the Calamity seen her weakness? Was he going to rip her apart? A powerful force squeezed down, angled to keep the spines from poking up. Bones snapped inside her tail, and for once, they were not her own.

"It's important for a tamer to see to their monster's needs and support them. If that means rubbing elasticity lotion on a pregnant Ravage hyena's privates for months before it gives birth so its canal doesn't split, then I will. If that means giving my monsters jobs to do so they feel like they are contributing, then that's what I will do. And if that means crushing some food my monster is having trouble digesting, then that's what I will do." The Calamity said.

She felt a little better after his statement and would never tell a soul. Nana also was sure he could do the same to her with his bare hands if she rebelled. It was a show of power and a reason to be loyal. This creature that she looked more like as she grew in strength would help her to the best of his ability. Maybe she could get behind that anyone was better than Dr. Raito.

…

I was too ambitious in my estimations of myself. 3 attempts lasting years wasn't enough to combine my Berserk, fell, and martial skills. Taking micro naps while in the skill creation zone was the only reason I wasn't dead to the world. Years in relative time gave horrible medical conditions. Time displacement syndrome was a very real and deadly disease, killing 4% of veterans that's adventurers that survived a decade. 

My mind was already fraying at the seams, but combining my skills was helping a great deal. I had no idea what rank would do, if anything, to my skill points, but I felt hopeful. Combined skills were more than the sum of their parts and were optimized to take far less mental energy to sustain. If I could get under 10, I would be much more sane. From there, I could only take skills that I meant to combine immediately and keep myself from displaying too many monster-like qualities. Murder sprees and grinning when I finally had a challenge felt very monster-like to me. Or my personality could have become twisted, and I could permanently desire to fight challenges. Fortunately, I was able to trick my instincts by using Nana as a measuring stick.

If they couldn't push Nana, then they weren't worth my time. The sounds of heavily padded paws made my blood race, and it was all I could do not to draw my chainswords and rush to action. Only by almost hypnotizing myself into believing it would be a boring fight could I stop myself.

My needs were becoming hard to distract myself from. Seeing flashes of Nana's breasts and watching her crouch made it clear to me that I was still a teen in all the ways that mattered. My libido wouldn't be denied forever. I sucked in my breath and let it out, filling my sinuses with the scent of my monster.

I flipped over to the Skill Fusion workbench and decided to see to my Training Skill combination next. I even moved an incompatible skill from my Berserk combo to it for retooling. A part of me debated combining my martial skills together, separate from Berserk. My pride wouldn't allow it because even if I was a novice in Skill Fusion, I believed I could figure it out if I worked and used every resource available.

My first move had been to combine all my psychic skills, and they easily broke apart and combined into a single-layered skill. I only needed to cut out a few parts to make them work for better optimization. Common skills, which were mostly rank 1, worked for a wide variety of entities. Because they worked with monsters that could change into entirely different species given time and resources, they weren't human-friendly. Since I wasn't going to become a spider, snake, dragon, or troll, some parts could be taken out with no issue, increasing optimization and reducing the strain from the skills. From that point, they aligned perfectly. All that was what I predicted and worked on in another time stop to master.

When I tried to combine them with Training and Specialized Workout, I hit a snag. They didn't fit anywhere with training at all. That wasn't to say I couldn't fit them together; they were just not right for each other. I took Crow Step and slotted it in easily, which made it annoying when a combined Training and Specialized Workout couldn't even connect to Crow Step. They were entirely incompatible unless I wanted to create a subpar skill. It would still be better than if I didn't make it at all, but it would feel like a rusty nail sticking out of a post.

So, I did the only responsible thing I could. I saved the possible psychic combination and tried to combine my Cosmic Skills with Training.

While it was better than Psychic, I didn't like the look of the new pattern. I moved on and tried fell skills.

I watched in awe as the training skills slid into place like they belonged to fell all along. Maybe blood would have been better with Berserk, but I would neve know. I combined the training skills with fell and tested it for a month to be sure my new skill was a powerful and useful as I imagined it should be.

Ping! 

New Skill 

Black Umbilical (O) lvl1

Rank: 4

Description: Fell withers, corrodes, and destroys in its efforts to rebound psychic energy from this reality. What survives the path of fell is the strongest substances reduced to the hunger of the undead; they seek life to fill what was lost, growing stronger so long as they have life to fill them. 

I felt it was a chord invisible and intangible but attached outside our reality. Somewhere where it led, fell energy poured into me, different from the fell energy I touched before. It flowed into my stomach, pure and completely different than what I had touched before. My entire understanding of fell energy shattered at that moment as I felt something curious within the pure darkness flowing into me.

Pain hit me then, and I pulled at my stores of blood to heal from the damage the cord inflicted. I tried to turn the skill off, but it ignored my attempts. My control of the fell energy was clumsy what I was used to touching was the diluted mess that was dragged in when someone used psychic power.

The ground shook, and I looked up to see a fox centaur. Out of a massive fox body, the torso of an Anthro fox armed and wielding a repeating rifle opened fire. I shifted my position, and it felt good. Bullets flew still too fast to react to, but I could predict where they were coming from and move before the shooter lined up his shot. I felt the new fell energy flowing into me and gathered it between my fingers. More fell pushed into my body, causing a huge chunk of my saved blood supply to vanish as I compensated. As it turned out, the more I used the more fell would pump into my body.

I didn't know what it was doing for my attributes, but that wouldn't matter until I left. The lance slowly formed, not because my skill was terrible but because the new fell energy was so much denser. Normal fell was air while this was cement.

The lance formed, and Nana tried to pull from it like the nine-tailed fox she consumed, but it was too pure for her automated absorption to affect. I grinned and launched the weapon.

Number 3 looked shocked when the massive, dense lance of fell energy carved its way through his flesh and bones when he stood still.

"How am I going to eat him?" Nana asked.

I tossed her my chainsword as I watched bits of my lance dissolve, slowly becoming in steps what I considered natural fell energy. From what I could tell, it would take hours or days for it to fully dissolve.

A smile spread across my face like I was about to face a powerful being, and I realized that I enjoyed a challenge. To get my control good enough to use my new fell energy like I'm used to could take years. If it was really a 4th ranked skill, then I would need that time to get to the attributes needed to master it.

Ping! 

Nana 

Reputation -4 to -2 Helpful 

Affection -3 to -2 Less of a Stalker

Obedience 2 to 3 Reliable Commander 

Loyalty 1 to 3 Bought with Bonuses 

I picked up a coin that was gold +4 Affection on one side and -1 to highest rated on the other. While it was a gamble, I decided to hold on to it for when I had more to use. Fighting together really seemed to help form a relationship. All I needed to do was talk a little more, and we were sure to be even closer.

…

Patreon Only Lemon 

"What was that?" Nana asked.