Vortena

by Neven Iliev

  It was upon crossing the dungeon’s invisible boundaries that Valeria’s link to the crystalline core was severed. She found herself a hostile spirit inhabiting a young woman’s body against her will. Bound and gagged as she was, she could do nothing to speak or communicate with the young adventurers, but it gave her a good opportunity to properly come to grips with her situation. She remained in silent introspection until she realised that the party was taking her to the church, where she would undoubtedly be destroyed by a senior Priest.

  Not wishing to taste death a second time, she quietly undid the Possession and withdrew to a side alley next to the church, watching silently from her hiding place as the group walked into the building. She knew a thing or two about the undead, enough to be aware of what a colossal mistake it would be to dare set foot on hallowed ground. Though she desperately wanted a beautiful flesh-and-blood body to call her own, she regretfully abandoned the idea of pursuing that particular sack of meat any further.

  She instead possessed the body of a homeless woman squatting in the basement of an abandoned house, a much easier target to dominate. After settling in, Valeria immediately tried playing with herself, desperate to once again experience the pleasures of the flesh. However, that didn’t exactly work out. Even though she had a body, it was not one that belonged to her. The sensations it gave her were distant, disconnected, and somehow only made her even more frustrated.

  She eventually gave up on her futile efforts at self-satisfaction and waited until nightfall, after which she began roaming the streets and alleys of Monotal. Valeria swiftly made her way towards her own house, a plain hovel at the edge of the slums. It had already been broken into, not surprising considering its only resident had been dead for weeks.

  Rushing into her old bedroom, she dove under her bed to pry up a loose floorboard. Relief washed over her as she realised that the only truly valuable thing in that dump had been left untouched. Her slender hand reached into the secret compartment and withdrew a dusty, leather-bound tome.

  This was her uncle’s journal. She had managed to dredge up the memories of its existence after she’d calmed herself down somewhat, but part of her wished that she hadn’t. The rotten, hateful old drunkard had abused and sexually assaulted her when she was still a child. His unforgivable behavior and her mother’s unwillingness and/or inability to protect her only daughter had steadily turned the energetic and cheerful Valeria into a cold, twisted bitch. It was a change that had only truly manifested itself when she had murdered them both at the age of seventeen. As for her father, she’d never even met the deadbeat, though she was fairly sure she’d have killed him too if she’d ever gotten the chance.

  With the only family she had dead by her hand, Valeria had quickly taken everything of value from her home and left that painful place behind. She had travelled alone through the Empire, whoring herself out to survive when necessary, or resorting to stealing if prostitution didn’t work out. It was during this time that she’d developed her heretical ‘hobby.’ People in certain circles paid good coin for her so-called ‘donkey shows,’ and Valeria was both twisted and desperate enough to deliver some truly inspired performances. It wasn’t long before she’d begun to enjoy the depraved acts, to the point where she could no longer feel satisfied with a human or elven partner.

  After several years of that lecherous lifestyle, she had finally saved up enough money to finance her adventuring career. Though it was a good way of making money, adventuring wasn’t exactly free. Gear and equipment needed to be purchased, guild and training fees had to be paid, and on top of everything else she still needed food to eat and a place to sleep. That said, while she probably could’ve left her vagrant lifestyle behind much earlier, she had never regretted putting the transition off for so long.

  The same could not be said about her decision to become a Necromancer, mostly because it had ended with her getting brutally murdered by a box.

  And now here she was – a dead woman controlling the body of a starving vagrant. But the journal in her hands could hold the answers to her current dilemma, so she left the hovel behind to return to the abandoned basement. She thought about staying in her house since it was, after all, her house, but it just didn’t feel right, somehow. Once safely back underground, Valeria spent the majority of the night poring through her uncle’s journal.

  The man in question had been an Enchanter working as a researcher for Arcaneum some forty years ago. His journal contained a multitude of interesting things that he probably was not supposed to have written down. He gave surprisingly detailed descriptions of the experiments he and his friends had performed on the undead in some remote outpost deep in the Sawblade Mountains. He had also gone into much greater detail describing the ‘assets’ of his female co-workers, which made Valeria want to puke. Though that could have been the rat that she had stuffed into her mouth to silence her rumbling stomach.

  None of this was exactly news to her, though. She had skimmed through the book a few times before, but it still took her a while to find the information she was after. Her uncle’s team had been studying a phylactery, a heretical vessel that allowed one to obtain the power and eternal life of a lich by storing their soul within it. The scholars were trying to learn if there was a way that it could be used to command the undead without sacrificing one’s humanity. That last bit had always given the human Valeria pause whenever she’d considered retrieving the thing, but the banshee she had become no longer had such reservations.

  This was the solution to her current problem. A lich’s body was forged from mana by the power of the phylactery, allowing it to feel things that normal undead couldn’t, such as touch, smells, taste, pain, and most importantly – pleasure. Supposedly, it wasn’t quite the same as when they were alive, but it was without a doubt Valeria’s best hope of finding a solution to her presently lifeless circumstances. And while the journal did not contain the actual instructions to create a phylactery, it gave her a lot of hints as to where she could start looking for the one described within its pages.

  Which she did, almost immediately. Carrying things such as books and maps was tricky as a ghost, however, so she had to drag her pathetic meatsuit out of city bounds and into the wilderness. When a monster eventually killed her host body, she took over the creature instead, using its limbs to carry her physical possessions. She repeated the cycle several times as she made her way up the treacherous Sawblade Mountains, making such frighteningly fast progress that she never saw the flash of the dungeon core detonation that wiped out Monotal a mere three days after she’d left.

  Eventually, she came upon the old research outpost detailed in her uncle’s journal. The land surrounding it had already been tainted by Blight, meaning that this was undoubtedly the place. She set about searching the tower, using her incorporeal body to ferret out any secret rooms or compartments.

  And, as luck would have it, she had managed to find an unused phylactery behind a bookshelf on the fourth floor, along with the notes detailing its creation. Valuable information, to be sure, though it seemed one needed to be at least a Level 80 Necromancer to reliably create one of the things. This particular outpost had been spearheading research on a method of mass producing phylacteries with the aim of somehow weaponising them. At least until their Imperial bosses had run out of patience and shut down the project, relocating both the people and their resources.

  However, the researcher in charge of the place would have none of it. The man had spent over three decades on the project, and he had refused to allow his life’s work to disappear so easily. Which was why he had selfishly hidden their jury-rigged phylactery and research notes, more to keep them out of the Empire’s hands than anything else.

  Now that Valeria thought about it, it was likely the phylactery’s presence that was causing the Blight. Normally this sort of place would have had people on hand to make sure that the undead plague didn’t spiral out of control, but that only worked if there was someone willing to pay them to d
o it.

  Though the documents Valeria had recovered had been most informative, they’d ultimately lacked the one thing she needed most – the method through which she could become a lich. She had wailed her frustration and rage, her voice echoing through the barren wasteland surrounding the tower. Eventually she’d realised that even if those eggheads had created an instruction manual for the phylactery, it was unlikely to be of any use to a non-human entity like herself.

  That was it! She was a banshee now, and as such, she could do something no ordinary human could – she used her Possession Skill on the phylactery. Literally putting her soul into the fancy egg seemed to work, as it greedily accepted the offering and triggered a premature Rank Up into a Lesser Lich. It then created a remotely-controlled body for her out of pure mana, just as she’d hoped it would. Though the colouring was a bit off, it nonetheless bore a striking resemblance to her human form, especially the face, hair and figure. More importantly, however, it finally felt like her own body. Even her special place was fully restored to function, much to her great joy.

  Valeria spent several hours doing nothing but pleasuring herself. She didn’t need to eat or sleep, and never grew tired, so she just kept going at herself over and over and over. After relieving some of the stress and frustration that had built up after her death, however, she began to crave something… bigger. Her fingers just weren’t enough anymore, and any undead she could create remained as ill-equipped for the task as ever. And even if she were to capture a random wolf or troll, it would be far too terrified to get in the mood, assuming that it didn’t just die from the Blight.

  Of course, that would no longer be an issue if she could manage to get her hands on a Monster Tamer Job… which was so far out of her reach it wasn’t even worth thinking about. She decided to distract herself by raising her Jobs and Skills, which she was able to do with frightening speed, growing from a Level 20 Banshee to a Level 25 Banshee and Level 41 Lich in under two months. Which was right around the time she received an unexpected visit from a gnome Paladin and was murdered for the second time by one Boxxy T. Morningwood.

  Her physical body regenerated next to the phylactery in the basement about an hour later. Having cooled down considerably by then, she was able to think through her options. Using her incorporeal form, a leftover from her Banshee days, she was able to confirm that the Mimic and its gnome were searching for something. And considering that the only thing of value in this shithole was her phylactery, she decided that it would be best to act quickly and just kill them off before they could find it. Their bodies should have been weakened by the Blight, so she’d decided to ambush them before they had a chance to leave and recover.

  But she’d been over-eager, and her inexperience had led to the worst-case scenario. Her phylactery had been captured, and her spirit was now trapped within the dark, claustrophobic confines of its egg-shaped vessel. And while for some reason she was unable to regenerate her body, the fact that her gilded shell appeared to still be intact gave her some peace of mind.

  Though it felt as though a few days passed like this, in reality it had been only around seven hours before her body finally began to regenerate. It appeared inside a shallow cave, which was obviously nowhere near her Blighted home. Valeria found herself staring down at a murderous box, a pint-sized Paladin with a crazed look in her eye, a heavily-breathing succubus holding a staff and a four-armed, gigantic fiend that looked as though she really wanted to smash something – or someone – into paste.

  The undead woman briefly assessed the situation and, after confirming that her all-important phylactery was nowhere in sight, came to a singular, unfortunate conclusion:

  …I’m fucked, aren’t I?

  Chapter Two

  Unleashed

  Part One

  When the Mimic woke the next morning, it did so in its traditionally violent manner. It accidentally kicked the gnome sleeping next to it square in the head with a random limb that even its owner hadn’t been aware of. The hit was a relatively light one that failed to make Fizzy stir, let alone wake her up. It had only been five hours since the abused woman had fallen asleep, so her current condition was not dissimilar to that of a rock.

  Boxxy briefly considered the way that it had been treating the gnome up until now. It had failed to realise it at the time, but it now imagined that crude methods such as violence and fear could be unreliable means of keeping control in the long run. While they had certainly been effective, it nevertheless silently chastised its past, slightly dumber self for not thinking of a better way to keep the naive creature in line.

  That said, it still hadn’t thought up of an alternative method, so it decided that it might as well carry on as usual.

  *SMACK*

  “Ooof!”

  It kicked Fizzy for real this time, sending her flying into the cave wall. She crashed into it head-first, fell to the ground, and promptly stood, healing herself with a Holy Light. After which she turned to greet the creature that was, essentially, her owner.

  “G-Good morning to you too, Boxxy,” she said, forcing a weak smile.

  Though it was certainly violent, this sort of rough wake-up call was simply routine for her now. Besides, she had convinced herself somewhere along the way that the Mimic was only beating her for her own good. Vital survival Skills like Toughness, Holy Scriptures and Holy Mastery had all increased substantially over these past weeks, after all.

  Of course, if anyone of sound mind had been around to hear that, they would probably have pointed out that she was clearly deluding herself. It was far more likely that the Mimic simply enjoyed punting her around. Which was, of course, completely accurate.

  Thinking back on its methods of discipline, though, Boxxy once again concluded that fear and violence were perhaps not the best ways to keep someone in check. After all, while its fear of that detestable man called Edward had kept it from acting out while he was around, it had only fuelled its desire to escape. Perhaps if it had been shown a bit of leeway, offered a deal, or even just fed something, it might have felt differently about the situation.

  Granted, it would still have run away, but it might have hesitated for a second or two first.

  The point was, fear alone was probably an insufficient means of controlling a monster, and the lich it had captured wasn’t likely to respond to a simple thing like that. Boxxy expected that she would behave in the same way that it had during its own time in captivity – silently biding her time until an opportunity to escape presented itself. The same could be said of Fizzy, but the gnome had had every last bit of resistance thoroughly beaten out of her. An approach that had worked as well as it had only because she wasn’t a monster.

  Boxxy ordered Snack and Arms to stop playing around and come inside the cave to prepare for the confrontation with the lich. Just because it held her very life in its grasp didn’t mean that she wouldn’t lash out in desperation. The Mimic, in her position, would certainly have at least considered it. As such, after confirming a few things with Xera, it took the gilded egg from its Storage and hid it out of sight.

  The lich’s body began to materialise a short while later in much the same fashion that Xera and Kora’s had, only without the light show. Brown, dirt-like particles swirled from thin air, constructing what appeared to be a floating clay statue of a nearly-naked woman. The spectacle took about five seconds, at which point the brown-and-grey figure abruptly came to life and its pigmentation changed to the familiar pale purple and bleak black.

  Valeria opened her red-on-black eyes, observing the scene around her. Immediately, she appeared to arrive at a particularly depressing conclusion, as her shoulders drooped in defeat mere moments after taking in her surroundings. She had no out from the situation no matter how she looked at it, especially since her newly-formed body had a grand total of 0 MP. However, it was plainly obvious that her captors wanted something from her. Otherwise the animated chest that was clearly in charge would have already destroyed her phylactery. Grant
ed, the item was sturdier than it looked, but even a goblin with a rock could crack it open if given enough time.

  The lich let out a dejected sigh, then forced a bit of vigour back into her eyes as she stared resolutely at the short monster.

  “So, you caught me. What happens now?”

  Boxxy very much disliked being literally looked down upon. It was clearly in the position of power here, so why was it at the lower eye level? Admittedly, it didn’t have any eyes at all, but it couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right with this scene. Hence why its lid sprang open and the fully-formed pseudo-Xera made her first reappearance in a long time. Both Valeria and Fizzy twitched a bit at the suddenness, shifting their gazes between the uncomfortable-looking succubus and her dumbly smiling albino clone as they tried to get a handle on the situation.

  “I want you to work for me.”

  The strangely cheerful voice broke both the Paladin and the lich out of their respective stupors.

  “… I’m sorry,” Valeria said flatly. “Care to run that by me again?”

  “I want you to work for me.”

  So, she had indeed heard right the first time. It wasn’t quite what Valeria had been expecting, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  “Alright, I’ll bite. Why?”

  “Because you are strong. I need your help to get the things I want.”

  “Yeah? What things?”

  “Tasty things.”