I shook my head.
“I. Am. Theo.” I tried to point at myself, but with my only working arm bound I could only move my fingers in my general direction.
The green-haired elf understood the gesture quickly. Instead of trying to repeat my words, she pointed a finger at herself.
“Am Sava.”
Suddenly things clicked into place. That hair! Those eyes! That accent! They were all identical to Savitania’s. I’d met her back in the brothel, and she was actually able to speak English! Having her by my side would change everything. Being able to communicate with the locals would mean I’d get to figure out what the hell was going on and why every elf I met had an oddly sexual grudge against me.
“Where is Savitania?” I asked, hoping this new elf would recognize the name.
“Savitania?” the green-haired elf repeated in surprise. Then she shook her head and repeated her earlier phrase. “Sava.”
Okay, so her name was Sava. Based on her reaction though, the word ‘Savitania’ wasn’t just nonsense to her. It meant something. Maybe it referred to a person. Maybe there was a chance Savitania was around here somewhere… except four hundred years have passed. I didn’t have a firm grasp on elvish lifespans, but it might have been a little excessive to hope she might still be alive.
My gut sank again. It had been a long shot, but I was disappointed nonetheless. The idea of a familiar face was too good to be true.
With that, our conversation ended. Sava went back to drawing, and I went back to being her immobilized nude model.
At one point she got up to refill the fluid in the tube sticking out of my leg, and that was about the extent of our interactions until she fed me food that evening.
I nearly spat it out when she first shoved it into my mouth. I immediately knew what it was. It was raw white fin meat, just like I’d been catching since I first came to this world, except as soon as I gained the ability to make fire, I’d taken to cooking the food like a civilized person.
Apparently, Sava didn’t think cooking the meat was good. When it looked like I wasn’t going to chew and swallow, she popped the piece of fish in a vial of liquid that appeared to be water from the creek. For some reason though she handled the vial as if it were filled with acid.
It was then I noticed she had a bag of tools at her hip, which appeared to house an extremely extensive collection. Much more than should have been able to fit in such a small satchel. One of the tools was a mortar and pestle which she used to grind up a variety of plants, both dried and fresh. Bit by bit she added them to the vial and stirred the whole mixture around.
Occasionally she’d wave a hand over the vial to safely give herself a sniff. At some point she looked satisfied with the mixture. She stuck in a small wooden stick that looked like a chopstick. When she withdrew it, it came with a tiny droplet of the liquid, which she held over her mouth until it dropped in.
She closed her eyes, wincing slightly and nodded. Then she picked up the whole vial and shoved it in my mouth. The fluid filled my mouth, quickly causing a large portion of it to spill out. That made her frown and pull out the bottle. I choked down what little of the stuff I had to in order to get my air passageways clear. A lot of it got in my lungs, giving me a coughing fit.
When I was able to breathe again, I noticed something. There was that sweet, pleasurable feeling. The kind I’d felt when I first started drinking the water from the creek and eating the fish in its raw form. Could the raw fish and water from this area have some sort of addictive property? Or was there some strange magic at play in my body?
With Sava’s brew, the sensation was a hundred times stronger. If before I’d been drinking flavored water, now I was drinking the latest energy drink. As it hit my systems, I realized it was doing something.
Apparently, whatever that something was, Sava thought it was good for me. Good enough that she ended up pouring the rest of the vial into her own mouth. With just a hint of shyness, she pressed her face against mine.
I’m a very paranoid person. I quickly came to the conclusion that the liquid must have been an addictive compound. Many primitive cultures loved euphoria-inducing drugs. Maybe she was feeding me some sort of magical cocaine to get me hooked. Once I was, I’d need to come to her for my supply, and that meant she’d have control over me. I could already see myself with a dumb, addict smile on my face pulling a plow across a field like a horse while my green-haired captor lounged in the shade, drawing a picture of me doing an impression of an ox.
No thank you. I wasn’t having any part of that. Unfortunately, my captor didn’t seem pleased by the fact that I’d shut my mouth tight.
So, she pinched my nose shut. That was weird, until I noticed I couldn’t breathe. Oh crap, that was her game.
I held my breath for a few minutes longer, but realized that this was a game I wasn’t going to win. Eventually I had to open my mouth to breathe, and when I did she pressed her mouth against mine. Her tongue quickly found its way inside my mouth and started exploring.
I was tempted to bite, but she was very pretty, and it would be rude of me to refuse a pretty lady who wanted to kiss me that badly. The fact that I was also completely at her mercy helped convince me to behave myself.
It was obvious that she planned to force-feed me her mysterious elixir via mouth-to-mouth. As humiliating as it was to be fed in the same manner of as a newborn bird, it was also somewhat erotic in its own, strange way.
The pleasurable feeling of consuming the strange liquid increased as I ingested more and more of the exotic brew. Soon, I felt a tingling sensation spread throughout my entire body. That was kind of scary, and apparently Sava must have sensed something, because she slapped my chest and muttered a few words under her breath.
She pulled out a massive leather-bound tome. It had seen much more wear than the scroll she’d been writing on before, and the text was far too cramped to have been done with a brush.
She flipped through the pages, apparently searching for something. She eventually got to a page and saw something she didn’t like.
After that, Sava quickly set up a whole array of cylinders and tubes, all in a line. She was working much faster now, preparing all sorts of herbs and pouring more than a bit of liquid from the vial of teal liquid at her hip.
Then she pulled out a long thin dagger and poked me with it. At the tip of the dagger were a few drops of blood, which she stirred into the vial. Alright, this was some honest-to-god witchcraft going on. I was not a superstitious man, but Mac had already warned me that there was something approximating magic on this world. Any potion that required my blood was something I didn’t want.
This was especially true considering the massive transformation the bottle had undergone the moment my blood touched the rest of the liquid. Like magic, or perhaps because of magic, it changed color from clear to a deep purple. Then the elf placed the vial onto a pedestal, under which she placed a strange, two-colored piece of wood. She shoved the multi-colored wood into a small burner where it caught fire, no tinder or matches needed.
As the wood burned, I noticed each tongue of flame had two colors to it, one red and one purple. Sava said some words and delicately stirred the elixir until the flame died out. By that time, the color had turned to bright purple, and it was glowing.
That’s when Sava’s mouth-to-mouth feeding session started up again. I was very tempted to resist, but the pleasurable tingling feeling of the previous drink I’d just been fed had been growing the entire time the green-haired elf was brewing the second concoction. At this point, the tingling was so widespread that it felt like my body had too much of the stuff in it. That something was suffusing my every cell and threatening to burst out at any moment.
The feeling was distracting, to say the least. It felt like I was on the verge of losing myself to the feeling, similar to how I felt while floating in the creek water.
The new potion that Sava had brewed was like a wave of ice flowing through my entire body. It stopped th
e tingling feeling in its tracks. Small wisps of smoke could be seen escaping from my skin, and a black, tar-like substance was being produced.
Did this girl just… experiment on me?
She wiped the sweat from her brow, relief evident on her face. I suspected she’d messed up with the first batch and had almost done something very bad to me, which she’d only just barely managed to correct with the second batch of liquid.
Yeah, I had no desire to drink any strange concoctions from this elf again.
Or maybe I did? While checking my body all over for damage, I realized I felt fine. Better than fine actually. I felt great! Whatever it was she’d done, it had amazing healing properties.
Minus the goo that had formed all over my skin, it felt like all my wounds had been healed, and that my muscles had suddenly grown stronger.
A feeling of power suffused my body. My flesh, blood, and bones all felt as though they’d been enlivened. They were the same bits of meat I’d always worn, but now they felt like they were just a bit… more.
I could feel a thrum of power. Something deep within me was taking root, centered on my abdomen. It was sending its strength flowing through my very essence and I felt an incredibly itchy sensation, like blood was pouring through veins I hadn’t had a moment ago, forcing its way through my body and around that region below my navel.
The ropes that bound my right arm and leg felt much weaker than they had moments ago. I pulled on both, and the chord creaked and became taught. I wasn’t strong enough to break them, but I was close to that point.
My left arm was healed now, and I flexed it, trying to free it from the wooden splint. By instinct, I tugged at this source of power that had nestled itself in my center of mass, just above the base of my spine.
These were thinner and weaker than the ones binding me and couldn’t resist my newfound strength for long. They cracked and popped and ripped as I flexed my muscles.
Sava took a few steps back, but looked on with a clinical eye, observing the whole process with a proud expression on her face. She pulled a string and the chords binding me came loose
I clambered to my feet, enjoying the feeling of the newfound power that was at my disposal.
You have been initiated into the local magic system! You can now convert your own mystic energies into points and can further enhance your abilities via point purchases or training. For your progress, you’ve been granted 500 points.
So that’s what this feeling was. Magic? Well, I’ll take any advantage I can get. Mac would be jealous for sure. Speaking of Mac, I now had over 900 points. That meant I could finally afford some of those new rooms Mac had mentioned.
I looked at Sava, standing across from me and looking slightly wary. She bowed her head in my direction, hands clasp. I returned the gesture with a head nod. She’d tied me to a hammock and drawn several humiliating diagrams of me, but I was willing to let that go considering she’d just given me magical powers.
I’d played my fair share of games back home, and one of the best feelings was being able to do magic. When I was little, I wanted to be a wizard. It was a dream I’d always kept to myself because it was just too embarrassing to share. After all, it was a complete impossibility back on earth. But if it was possible here…
Just when I was riding high from the feeling of magic within me, I was hit by an explosive burst of pain in my left arm and left leg, right where the crossbow had pierced me.
I collapsed to my knees, and Sava leaped to my side, catching me before I fell to the ground. I clutched at my bare leg and saw purple veins pulsing right where the crossbow bolts had pierced me.
Pain flared again, worse than it had when the crossbow had actually shot into me.
I looked at the green-haired elf, thankful for the help she’d given me thus far, when I noticed the expression on her face.
The confidence and worry that suffused her features before had been replaced by a thin smile that looked equal parts satisfied and embarrassed.
She patted me on the shoulder “I’stala, yivir. Mordul kutur,” She said as she grabbed my arm.
Processing language data… 46% complete
Damn it! She planned this! I should have suspected as much. The other elves wanted to capture me for some reason. Same thing with this green-haired one. She jammed something into my back at that point.
It was pointy and filled with some sort of cold fluid. My last waking thought was that I’d never trust an elf again, no matter how pretty she was.
“Zora… sora. I’lp zora,” She looked like she was apologizing even as she drove the needle deeper. She wouldn’t meet my eyes as I stared at her. I tried to grab her arm and push her away, but I was already too weak.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I WOKE UP trapped thirty feet above ground in a sort of net contraption. I was hanging sideways and slightly upside down, with my arms and legs bound tightly with several rows of vines. These vines were supernaturally strong and try as I might I couldn’t even budge them. A similar set of bindings surrounded my legs. While they looked like simple vines, they didn’t give at all when I pulled and I doubted I had any chance of breaking them.
Other than the bindings, I realized I was lying in another hammock, this one of far finer weave and quality. My captor must have taken me somewhere more secure. A tree house, I guessed as I gazed through a hole in the floorboards below me down at a massive tree trunk, with the ground far, far below. The floorboards weren’t really floorboards either. They were made of one solid continuous piece of wood, rather than being joined from many planks and boards. Almost as if this room had been grown, rather than built.
There was a window nearby and I was just barely able to crane my neck enough to look out of it. It wasn’t square or built like you’d expect a window to be, but rather like it was a natural knot in a tree. Through the natural window, I smelled the scent of fresh pine cones and crisp forest air. In the distance I could see several structures nestled in the crooks of gargantuan trees, like human-sized bird’s nests. Or rather, elf-sized bird’s nest.
The hammock I was trapped in was seriously undersized for somebody of my height and as a result I was way too heavy for it. As a result, the sides of the hammock wrapped all the way around me, with both sides meeting above my head. At the top where the two sides of netting met my captor tied me in with two big knots. I was like a fish pulled out of water in a net.
Now how am I going to get myself out of this one?
“Mac?” I whispered. “You there?”
Nothing. I must be out of range.
I was very glad for the window view. It meant I could learn a bit more about the surrounding area. Looking out the window I saw row after row of trees that could make redwoods look small. Off in the distance, there was an increasing density of the various tree houses. The nearest ones were isolated and had rope ladders hanging down from their floors to the earth below. The ones farther away had wooden drawbridges moving from one branch of the gigantic trees to another. What’s more, the branches themselves looked to have been hollowed out in the middle to form corridors and walkways, where distant figures could be seen. I was on the outskirts of an elven tree-village.
I could tell at a glance that the room itself wasn’t built to hold prisoners. There were piles of books and scrolls on a shin-high desk off in one corner, with an open inkwell just waiting to spill.
Along the other side of the room there were piles of glassware that matched what Sava had been using to brew that foul stuff she’d made me drink.
I recognized some glassware. There was a round bottom flask there, and there was a pipette just across from it. There was one tube that had been lined with a fine mesh of something, possibly for distillation.
I concluded I was in a private residence, most likely the private residence of the very elf who had seen fit to tend to my wounds, then promptly poisoned me. This was… a good thing. It meant that I was being held by an individual, not a group. That would make escape far easier since
my captor could only be in one place at a time.
“Hello?“ I called out loud. If Sava was here, she’d probably show herself. If she wasn’t, then she wouldn’t, and I’d know it was safe to try to escape.
After several more calls, the green-haired elf appeared, much to my disappointment.
“Aldukul,” She said as she stroked my head. “I’lp zora, chaka.”
Processing language data… 76% complete
Change of plans. Grinding this number to one hundred percent would probably allow me to have at least a limited understanding of the elf’s language. I liked my odds better in diplomacy than in combat.
“Hey there, Sava, was it? Keep talking to me,” I said gently, trying to get her to keep speaking.
“Ziel, katip zora chaka,” The elf said as she ran her fingers against my body. She said a few more words of nonsense before the message appeared again.
Processing language data… 87% complete
Come on, just a bit more!
Sava turned her attention away from me and started rearranging her glass cylinders. After she had a bottle set up under my head, she approached me again with a big blush on her face. She poured a runny, pale blue liquid all over her hands and rubbed them together, lathering her hands up.
My strategic nudity and position in the hammock quickly became apparent. I was positioned in just such a way that the elf was provided with access to my cock.
The liquid she’d poured on her hands? That was some sort of lube. She wrapped her hands around my member and started jerking me off.
Slow smooth strokes brought my cock up to full mast quickly. Soon I had a raging hard on, and with my hands tied there was little I could do about it.
That only encouraged Sava to move faster and harder. She spread her attention to my thighs and balls, then undid a few knots to the net surrounding me. This allowed her to get her entire head in.
Zeal of the Mind and Flesh: A Cultivating Gamelit Harem Adventure (Spellheart Book 1) Page 10
