Monstergirl Quest Book Two

by Darknight, C. S.

  Chapter Two

  Of course, when I said I wanted to make the most of our downtime, I didn’t mean that I was going to relax.

  There was a lot I wanted to do, though I didn’t have time to do all of it. After a bit of prioritizing, I made arrangements to go down to the armory to learn some lessons from One-Armed Rus.

  “The Earthman comes to learn my craft!” Rusticus said as I entered the sweltering bowels of his armory.

  Everywhere, there was steam or metal glowing molten-red. His small army of apprentices rushed this way and that, hammering iron and silver with their hammers, gripping them in place with tongs, or thrusting newly forged blades, still glowing that molten-red, into buckets of water to cool.

  “There’s much to learn, Earthman,” Rusticus warned me in a rare moment of seriousness.

  “Show me as much as you can within an hour or two,” I said to him.

  “Aye, I’ll see what I can do, lad,” he answered.

  It had occurred to me that it was possible to exploit my save point system. After all, I could spend two hours with Rusticus, learning every bit that I could, then simply reload the last save point. Since my XP stacked despite reloading, I could theoretically become a master armorer in hardly any time at all.

  That was damn tempting, and I almost did it, except for one thing: While it would only last two hours apiece, there was no telling what Bella was going through at the moment.

  If I reloaded that save point just to grind XP, whatever was happening during that two-hour span would replay, over and over again. What if, in that time, Lord Ephemera was torturing Bella? She’d have to live through it, again and again. True, she’d have no memory of it, but the simple fact remained that I’d been the one to risk it.

  No, I couldn’t have that on my conscience. I could only reload save points under the direst circumstances.

  With that in mind, I got to work with One-Armed Rus.

  Though I could see the durability stats with my Second Sight, Rusticus went about showing me the trade secrets of judging a weapon’s weak points.

  “See this here, on your orcish war axe?” he said.

  He pointed to something on the blade, though I couldn’t tell what. It sort of looked like a tiny dent. “That little dent there?” I asked. “It’s tiny, so what about it?”

  “Tiny for now, Earthlad,” Rusticus grunted, before taking the hammer mounted on his stump and banging the dent straight again. “But that there was a weak point, boy. Tiny or not, it’d degrade your weapon over time. First rule o’ armoring: DON’T LET LITTLE PROBLEMS TURN INTO BIGGUNS!”

  Of course, every time Rusticus showed me some nifty trick of his trade, he’d call it his ‘first rule o’ armoring,’ then shout it at the top of his lungs.

  Between his voice and the apprentices banging away in the forge, my head was ringing, though I was determined to soak up every bit of armor knowledge that I could.

  I didn’t realize how talented Rusticus was at his craft until we finished and I’d realized how much I’d learned.

  ARMORER SKILL INCREASED +2

  Though I was too green to restore a broken weapon, I could easily take care of minor problems. You know, before they TURNED INTO BIGGUNS.

  Toward the end, he even showed me the correct way to fix my leather armor. Though different from heavier armor and weapons, there were still some tricks to repairing leather-made armors. Rusticus grinned as he slipped his good hand into his pouch and grabbed a needle and thread.

  “This here, boy, is worth more than diamonds to a fighter clad in leather armor,” he said, then showed me the proper way to go about stitching torn leather.

  I could safely and efficiently fix small dents, I was proficient with a hammer and tongs, for a beginner, anyway. I could successfully repair a broken hilt and Rusticus provided me my own set of hammer and tongs and a whetstone.

  “That’ll keep most of your weapons functionin’ long enough til you can get ‘em back to old Rusticus,” he’d said to me when we finished.

  I would have liked to boost my armorer skill high enough to learn how to recharge a weapon’s enchantment, but I didn’t have time for that.

  Because I had a deadly little date planned with my Mananymphs, and I was already running late for it.

  Sir Lucien set aside some time for us down at the sparring circle deep in the bowels of the castle. There, the walls and floor were bare, barren stone. Everything was cold or damp and covered in cobwebs. It was, plainly, an unpleasant place to be around.

  This was exactly how Sir Lucien wanted it, after all. “If my soldiers can survive training down there, they’ll survive fighting in the worst pits in the Empire, Earthman,” he’d told me.

  For the occasion, Sir Lucien had gotten me a used suit of leather armor. (I didn’t want to use my own, not for training, but the used suit was similar in weight and movement, so it was practically the same as my own.)

  Then, sitting next to the armor, there were two wooden weapons with blunted edges. One was a longsword, about the same size as the Dayfire longsword. The other, a war axe not unlike my orcish axe.

  I grinned as I suited up. I paused, looked around the room, but I didn’t see Pandora or Sephara.

  “Pandora?” I called out. “Sephara?”

  The room, which was the equivalent of a locker room, you could say, was utterly silent. Nobody was down here but me.

  I shrugged, assuming that the Mananymphs were running even later than I’d been, then made my way out to the sparring circle.

  It was a large chamber, with the stone floor stained red from the blood spilled during training. Sir Lucien demanded that no one ever clean it off. “While no soldiers under my command have ever died whilst sparring, I leave that blood there to remind them that they very well could,” he’d said.

  The chamber was lined with torches, so there was nowhere to hide. I supposed it was pretty good for a –

  Hold on.

  I cocked my head. Something about the stone floor didn’t look quite right. I took a step closer. The floor was, for the most part, covered in a thin layer of dust. Except, next to me, there was a line of tiny footsteps leading right out to…shit!

  I heard Sephara’s giggling at the exact moment when she thrust the blunted tip of her wooden spear my way. Quickly, I blocked her first strike with the Soulguard. Sephara leaped over my head, laughing as she spun in mid-air, and landed behind me.

  She thrust the spear toward my legs. I parried the blow with my wooden longsword. “Where the hell did you learn invisibility spells?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Stupid Earthman, I’d been riding with Felaxia for the better part of a day! She showed me a few tips, that’s all.”

  I laughed. “But you two seemed to hate each other’s guts.”

  “Nope,” Sephara said with a smug smirk on her face that just made her off-the-charts adorable. She spun her spear then took an attack stance. “But I knew you and I would likely be sparring at some point, so we acted like we hated each other so you wouldn’t suspect that she’d teach me anything.”

  I laughed again, harder. “You are just a goddamn –”

  From the corner of my eye, and coming in hot, was one of the two wooden daggers Sir Lucien provided for Pandora. I’d been expecting her to sneak up on me from behind…but not overhead.

  I raised my wooden longsword just barely quick enough to parry her blow as she came fluttering down, flapping her fairy wings as she descended from her hiding spot on the ceiling.

  BLOCK SKILL INCREASED +1

  After ducking and rolling to put some space between us, I hopped to my feet. The Mananymph sisters stood side-by-side, both of them grinning widely.

  “Almost had you, Earthman,” Pandora said.

  I shook my head, smirking at the two of them. These two made quite a pair, that was for sure.

  With the wooden sword in my right hand, I raised up the Soulguard and beckoned them to attack. “Well? Are you going to spar with the Idiot Earthman o
r not?” I asked.

  The Mananymphs fought seamlessly in unison, bringing to mind those spriggan sprites I’d battled back at Silverton.

  Pandora handled the brunt of the attack, using her speed to dance around me, those twin wooden daggers slashing and stabbing.

  While she tried to overwhelm me, Sephara kept creeping around my flanks, trying to catch my armor at a weak point with her spear.

  I let them back me toward the wall, checking their blows as fast as I could, yet I kept backpedaling to lull them into a false sense of security.

  “We’ve almost got him, sister!” Sephara hollered.

  Just then, she flipped forward, stabbed her spear at my head, and I just barely dodged it.

  EVASION SKILL INCREASED +1

  I waited for Pandora to bring her dagger down for an overhead strike. When she did, I disarmed her using the Soulguard. Sephara came at me next. I checked her spear then pivoted away from them, leaving them with their backs against that stone wall, rather than mine.

  Pandora’s eyes narrowed on me, making her look mischievous as her lips curved into a smile. “He’s planning something sister,” Pandora said. “Be careful.”

  “I sure am,” I said to them, then promptly cast a fortify speed spell.

  I laughed as I charged them, because now their slight speed advantage was null and void. Still, the Mananymph sisters were no pushovers.

  Pandora managed to just barely dodge my first attack. She came at me with her remaining dagger and came pretty damn close to catching me under my armpit, where my armor had a small weak point.

  Sephara backed off long enough to cast her own fortify speed spell, but just as the spell was about to take effect, I swung my wooden longsword toward the tip of her spear.

  Already, One-Armed Rus’ lessons were paying dividends. Without his tips, I never would have spotted the small crack in the tip of Sephara’s spear. Or, even if I had, I would have dismissed it as being so small as to be irrelevant.

  But now, I saw it as an opening.

  Hitting at the right angle, my blunted wooden blade snapped the tip of her spear off. I knocked the broken weapon from her hand, swung my blade again, and stopped just short of her neck.

  CRITICAL STRIKE!

  She crinkled her nose, looking both frustrated but also severely cute. “Get him good, sister!”

  With Sephara out of the picture, I figured I’d have no trouble taking care of Pandora. I turned around to face her. She’d collected both of the wooden daggers now, but still, my speed was still fortified for another minute or so. There was no way she’d be able to keep up with me.

  “Yield?” I asked.

  “Oh you smug Earthman bastard,” Pandora chuckled back at me before pressing the attack.

  She moved faster than before, nearly equaling my own speed, but I easily swatted away her blows. Her first slash met the Soulguard, and the wooden dagger came apart into splinters.

  “You can yield whenever you…hey, what’s up with your eyes?” I asked, just now noticing the change.

  They were crackling that bright magical shade of white again, just like the time when she’d used her mysticism ma—

  Oh crap.

  Pandora grinned as she thrust out her open palm and hit me with what felt like a ton of cinderblocks. The wind was knocked out of me as her telekinetic blast sent me sailing across the sparring circle.

  I got up, too excited to even care about all the bumps and bruises I’d have to heal later. I smiled in disbelief as the bright magical light faded from her eyes.

  “Holy shit, Pandora,” I said. “Did you just do that on purpose?”

  She laughed, tossed her broken dagger aside, and jumped excitedly into my arms. “I sure did, Earthman,” she said. “Now maybe I can teach you a thing or two about mysticism magic,” she said as she planted a kiss on my lips.

  She tightened her grip on me, lips tight against mine, and I felt her knowledge drip into my mind.

  My eyes filled with those strange runes and magical shapes, like ephemeral geometry come to life, and the notification flashed across my vision.

  SPELL LEARNED: TK BLAST

  EFFECT: TELEKINETIC DAMAGE ON TARGET

  Suddenly, the moment I focused on my mysticism skill, it was like I could feel the air particles around me. Almost like a strange, tingling, longer-lasting sense of static electricity.

  Pandora hopped out of my arms. Now, Sephara was watching me, as well.

  “Try it out, Earthman,” Pandora said. “Until you’ve trained your mysticism skills, I’d suggest you use the TK blast spell to open doors, move items, and hit switches. At the moment, you’d likely do negligible damage to an enemy. At the moment, I should stress.”

  “Shit, I don’t mind grinding,” I said.

  Using my left hand, the one armored in the Soulguard, I looked for a nearby item. Sephara’s broken spear lay just a few feet away.

  I held up the Soulguard, motioning toward the broken wooden weapon, and focused on it. The air around the Soulguard rippled and shuddered ever so slightly. At first, I didn’t feel much, but within a moment, it was like I could feel the spear’s handle in my palm.

  “This is harder than it looks,” I said to Pandora.

  “Just focus, Earthman,” Pandora answered. “The magic will come to you.”

  I checked my Second Sight. The TK blast spell was already draining a bit of my mana, so far with little effect, but I didn’t let that bother me. Previously, I’d spent a skill point on mana regeneration, so my mana would restore itself on its own over time.

  A bead of sweat ran down my head. Then, quite suddenly, something clicked in my mind. Like wiggling a key in a rusted keyhole until the locking mechanism finally clicked.

  I gasped, narrowed my vision on the broken spear, and promptly hurled it across the sparring circle. It hit the wall on the far side of the room and shattered.

  I grinned. “Alright, that was pretty damn cool,” I said. I knew it would take some time for me to train my mysticism skill to a level where it would be useful in combat, but I was more than willing to grind for XP in my downtime.

  Then I considered how much telekinesis would aid me during stealth missions. I imagined locking doors from a distance, pickpocketing keys off of aloof guards, or even hurling stones with my mind to distract enemies so I could sneak past them.

  “Yeah, this is going to come in handy,” I said.

  Before I knew it, I heard the sound of hurried footsteps. When I turned to look, Sephara was already jumping into my arms, so suddenly that she almost knocked me over.

  As she put her arms around me and pulled me in for a kiss, she giggled. “Lucky you, Earthman, because I’ve got a new spell for you as well!” she said, just before she planted her lips on mine.

  SKILL UNLOCKED: FRIGHTEN UNDEAD

  EFFECT: CAUSES MINOR UNDEAD TO FLEE WITHIN 20 FEET OF USER

  “This spell works on any undead up to an apprentice lich,” Sephara said as I relished the taste of her kiss.

  So far in my travels, it seemed as though the undead could only feel very few emotions. They felt confusion and rage, that much I was certain, but not fear…at least until now.

  I grinned to myself when I imagined what I could do with this spell, how handy it would have been in my previous battles with the undead. Had I known this spell, I could have disoriented the blood ghoul horde back in Aegis Winterhollow’s keep, for one.

  “I was locked away by Lord Necromorph for so long that I lost touch with many spells that I’d known,” Sephara explained. “But the longer I’m free, the more they’ll return to me. As your restoration skills grow, I’ll be able to show you more powerful spells.”

  “Man,” I said, marveling at my new knowledge. “If I would have known sparring with you two would mean I get to learn new spells, I’d have let you guys double-team me more often.”

  Pandora laughed. “That’s assuming that you could handle us, Earthman,” she said. Then she put her hands on her hips and cocke
d her head to the side. “Because correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you lost that last sparring session.”

  “You got lucky,” I said, grinning.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it, idiot Earthman!” Sephara said. “The only luck was you breaking my spear before I could run it through your eyeball!”

  Sephara, still in my arms, punctuated her joke with another kiss on my cheek. I was just about to kiss her back when I heard footsteps approaching.

  It was the squires, Robbin and Piper. They were staring at Pandora and Sephara, rendered nearly speechless by their beauty. When we caught them staring, they both looked away, blushing and red in the face.

  “E-E-Excuse us, Lord, um…Lord Gamelord,” Piper said.

  “’Gamelord’ is fine on its own,” I said. “Shit, you can just call me Mack, or even Earthman. What’s up, guys?”

  “Duke Gladios requests your presence,” Robbin continued, only slightly less petrified than his buddy. “The city cartographer has completed your map. Plus, the shipment from Silverton has arrived. The duke says you may take any equipment that might suit you.”

  Sephara, with her usual social grace, scrunched her eyebrow at the pair. “Earthman, Pandora,” she began. “Are these two old enough to play with wooden swords?” She said this honestly, without a hint of humor or sarcasm.

  Of course, that only humiliated the squires further.

  The squires looked at each other, each one trying – and failing – to come up with an answer, before they promptly ran off without a word.

  Chapter Three

  Before bed, we met with Duke Gladios and the cartographer, who’d made an easy-to-follow map. He’d spoken with the soldiers who’d patrolled south of Homehold, who had a working knowledge of the hills and woods where Corvus Gavrus was sometimes spotted.

  However, I couldn’t help but frown when I saw the big red circle, indicating his most likely location.

  “He lives in Darkwood Forest,” I said, shaking my head. “Well that ain’t good.”