by Dante King
“It was perfect,” I told her, running a hand down her bare stomach. “I don’t know how you did it, but you purified that Core we took from Seth. Or I did it. Maybe we both did—I’m really not sure.”
Regina stared down at her hands in wonder. “I can feel it,” she whispered, a trace of power humming through her body. “You did it, Eric. You really turned me into a cultivator!”
I found myself beaming from ear to ear. Regina was just so excited about her new life—her enthusiasm was infectious.
“Did I turn into a weapon?” the woman asked. Now that we’d finished making love, Regina showed no sign of wanting to get beneath the covers or otherwise hide her naked body. I liked that about her. I was never a fan of women who got ashamed of sex after the fact. “I must have, if the Dual Cultivation worked. What kind of weapon am I?”
Pulling her against me, I explained what had happened in great detail. She seemed pleased with my description of her weapon form, though her eyes narrowed when I told her about the strange Core and the flood of energy that had occurred while she had her orgasm.
“That’s not a good sign,” Regina whispered, playing idly with my chest with her long nails as she spoke. “It sounds like it took more power to Dual Cultivate with me than it did with your other women. Do you… do you think it’s because I did something wrong?”
I shook my head. “It’s a natural progression,” I told her. “Each additional member of the roster requires more power to activate. Eliezer warned me about this, although he did it in his own way—I didn’t realize it at the time. I’m going to have to get a lot stronger to keep walking the path of the Eternal Dao.”
Regina mulled this over in silence for a minute or two. “You’re going to need more Cores like the one you pulled from Seth,” she said, resting her head in the hollow beneath my shoulder blade.
“Indeed. If we want this plan to go off without a hitch, we’re going to need a lot more power.” I tilted my head to the side, meeting Regina’s eyes. “Do you have any idea where we could find some?”
Regina’s eyes went dark, her gaze suddenly a thousand miles away. “Yeah, I do,” she said, her tone taking on a wicked turn. “More Cultivators. Like that son of a bitch who tried to kill Hazel.”
It was an audacious thought, to be sure. If it had come from Anna or Hazel, I might have dismissed it as one of their bloodthirsty ideas, but from practical, mild-mannered Regina, I had to look at it from every angle. I’d been warned about the hazards of practicing the darker methods of cultivation before, but Eliezer didn’t seem to have any moral standards at all. The Peak Supreme God wanted me to get more powerful in a hurry, and he didn’t really care how I did it—just that I achieved the desired result.
The Hollow Frog Guild could be worth more to me dead than alive, I thought, picturing all those high-level Cores. Thinking about that made me remember the strategy session we’d had down in the garden, and an idea began to take root in my head.
“Lyra’s plan,” I murmured.
“Hmm?” Regina had been lost in thought, stroking my chest idly while she rubbed my thigh with the back of her leg. There was a naughty gleam in her eyes, and I thought she was just about ready for another round. “What about Lyra’s plan?”
I’d already thought it most of the way through as I said it. “Lyra said there are Hollow Frog outposts all throughout this province,” I explained, turning the idea this way and that in my brain. “I passed one when I was on the road with her once. It looked like a medieval baron’s palisade, or one of the wooden forts the first settlers built in North America. Not that I expect you to know where that is.”
“I’ve heard you and Anna mention it a couple of times,” Regina said, sliding the blankets over her smooth thighs. “I know exactly the buildings you’re talking about, Eric. Jalen used to trade contraband with one.”
I nodded. “Lyra’s idea was to take them over one at a time, slowly pull the rug out from under the Hollow Frog Guild. Take their land from them piece by piece. But that’s not what we’re going to do.” A grin stretched my face in the darkness. “They’ll think we’re coming for the land, but it’s actually the cultivators we want. The Cores. One outpost would give us enough to turn every unmarried woman in the town into a cultivator—every one that Lyra can convince to join us, in any case.”
My excitement was infectious. Regina’s eyes opened wider, her mind whirling with the idea. “It just might work,” she said, throwing an arm over my chest. “We can’t beat the Hollow Frog Guild on their own terms—but all of us working together? We might be able to bring down one of their outposts.”
That brought a grin from me. “You’d help me too, wouldn’t you? After all, you’re one of my weapons now.”
Regina placed a kiss on the tip of my nose, then smiled sweetly. “Yes, sir!”
Oh, I like that, I thought, rolling onto my back. I like that a lot.
And what I liked almost as much was the plan. Breaking the Hollow Frog’s territory into bite sized chunks was exactly what we needed to turn our goal of overthrowing them into something manageable. With the high-level cores we’d pilfer from their fortresses, I could build an army of beautiful women who turned into deadly weapons—and take this whole province for myself.
Let Eliezer still be pissed off at me after that, I thought, closing my eyes. The Peak Supreme God will have to recognize my achievement with a province under my control and an army at my back.
I’d talk it over with Lyra in the morning. More than anyone else I knew, she’d have a good idea of which outpost to strike first. We’d spend a day or two drilling Regina, along with any other girls we could get to sign up for Dual Cultivation, then send a strike team to the outpost she’d selected.
The best part was, they’d never see it coming. I chuckled in the darkness thinking about it, beginning to doze as I pulled Regina closer. Once I got a little bit of rest, I fully intended to get a little more Dual Cultivation ‘practice’ in with her. It’d been a long time since I’d met a girl with her enthusiasm.
It felt like only moments had passed when I opened my eyes next. Regina lay snoozing next to me on her stomach, the blanket kicked down to just beneath her fabulous ass. For a moment I entertained the idea of giving it a slap, then waking her up from behind—then I realized what had woken me up.
Screams. Coming from the public square.
I sat up, tossing off the covers and walking naked to the window. A sense of growing dread assaulted me at every step. I knew some of those voices. What the hell was happening?
The window glowed gently in a way no window in the middle of the night ought to do. As I reached for it, I had a late realization—that it wasn’t even close to morning, so the smell of cooking I kept picking up couldn’t be Lyra or her girls getting breakfast ready. Which meant it was—
“Regina!” I roared, startling my sleeping partner into wakefulness. “Get up! We’re under attack!”
Half the town was in flames.
Chapter 17
Hell. That had to be it. Hell had overtaken Lyra’s town while I’d been asleep.
Directly across the street, the blacksmith’s forge blazed like a fucking bonfire. A half-dozen villagers carried buckets of water, desperately trying to quench the blaze, but it couldn’t have been clearer that they were losing the fight. Even if they’d somehow stopped it, half the buildings on the street had tongues of flame lapping at the windows and from the roof.
I would’ve liked to believe it was an accident—that someone’s house fire had burnt out of control, or the forge had overheated and started a blaze. My head knew different. The Hollow Frog Guild was here. They’d been waiting for us to return to the town. All this time we’d been planning how to react to their assault, and they’d snuck in under cover of night and tried to burn down our homes.
Oh, they’re fucking dead, I told myself, the flames dancing in my eyes. No forgiveness after this. These fucking monsters just tried to kill my friends, my guild—my wome
n.
I hoped Guildmaster Ji had come himself. If he had, tonight was the night he died.
Regina stumbled to the window, her expression going slack at the sight of the carnage. “Oh no,” she groaned, shaking her head back and forth as if she didn’t want to believe it. “Oh no, no no no…”
I had no time to console her. “We need to get everyone together,” I said, grabbing a shirt off the floor. “They haven’t hit the Hungry Herb Tavern yet, which is a blessing, but it looks like they’ve lit fires all throughout the town. They’ll be here soon enough. The big open square in the center of the Market is probably the safest place for the villagers right now—”
“It’s all burning,” Regina moaned, tears springing to her eyes. “Our homes. Our crops! My warehouse, and all the goods—”
“The houses can be rebuilt,” I told her, needing her to focus. “But the people are dead forever. We have to save them, Regina.”
The words cleared her mind like nothing else. “Tell me what to do, sir,” she said, nodding grimly.
At that moment, I’d never loved her more.
“First, I need you to transform,” I said, holding out a hand. “No offence, but you don’t really know anything about cultivation right now. You’ll be a lot more useful to me right now as a weapon.”
Regina nodded. “I’ll try,” she said, turning away from the flames.
I was already putting a bullet point list together in my head. “We’ve got to get everybody out of here before the Hollow Frog Guild decides to burn the place down,” I mused, flexing my fingers. “Then I need to find Lyra.”
A faint smile curled at the corner of Regina’s mouth. “Because she’s the de facto leader of the town, and the fulcrum around which everyone else in this entire province revolves?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head with a chuckle. “Because she can summon big-ass walls of water and I want to save as much of this town as possible while I’m murdering the fuck out of these cultivators.”
“Damn right,” Regina said, already beginning to shimmer. “Alright, I think I’ve got it…”
She did indeed. A wave of light rolled over my newest harem girl’s body, transforming her in an instant to the rope dart I’d been playing with only a few hours before. The weapon felt good in my hands, if a little less familiar than Anna’s scythe or Lyra’s snake spear.
Lyra, I thought, my grip tightening on Regina’s rope. Anna. Where the hell are you?
Lyra could be anywhere—but Anna should have been in this suite with me. She would have been, if she and the rest of my women hadn’t decided to give Regina and I our privacy while we practiced Dual Cultivation for the first time. Maybe she’d ended up going to bed with Lyra, or even Hazel.
I threw on some boxers to go with my shirt. There wasn’t enough time to fully put on my robes—not running around the town naked would be a decent start.
Time to get to work, I thought, readying the rope dart over my shoulder as I prepared to exit the room.
“Yes, sir!” A female voice whispered in my head.
I was so surprised that I did a double take. “Regina?” I thought, making the word echo on the interior of my skull. “Is that you?”
“Yeah!” Her voice was a little watery, but still recognizable as the woman I’d been in bed with only a short time ago. “This is really weird. But it feels good, too. Is this what it’s like for the other girls?”
Mostly, I thought, chuckling to myself at Regina’s naivete. “Normally Anna’s howling her head off by now about how horny she is for blood, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same.”
I felt a tremor pass through the back of my mind. “Oh, I’m definitely horny,” Regina purred. I could almost feel her doing the mental equivalent of crossing her legs. “But it’s… different somehow. Maybe I’ll have it figured out once you use me to slay a few of the people trying to burn down our home.”
Maybe. I shouldered open the bedroom door and moved out into the hallway, only for the smell of burning to redouble itself. With a start, I realized the Hollow Frog Guild was moving even faster than we’d feared. A plume of smoke rose from the stairs leading down to the first floor common room—small, for now, but soon this whole place would be ablaze.
I had to take action.
“Alright!” I yelled, making my voice as loud as I possibly could. “Everybody get up! This is an emergency—evacuate the building, right fucking now!”
With an almost agonizing slowness, doors began to open up and down the hall. Beleaguered, sleepy faces greeted me—almost none of whom had any idea what was going on in the town. A few people blinked, concern filling their expressions as they saw me and the plume of smoke, but most were still blinking sleep out of their eyes.
“This is not a drill!” I raced for the stairs, intent on getting everyone on the first floor out, as well. “The building is on fire! Get to the market or get out of the village! They’re lighting everything on fire!”
That got people moving in a hurry. By the time I made it to the bottom of the stairs, most of the guests on the second floor of the Hungry Herb Tavern were hot on my heels. More than a few of them were in a state of undress—however, none of them resembled Anna, Lyra or Hazel in the slightest. Wherever the rest of my harem had wound up laying their heads last night, this close to me and Regina wasn’t it.
Gotta find them, I thought, scanning the common room as I descended the steps. I doubt the Hollow Frog Guild sent their entire force—if they did, they wouldn’t bother burning us out. Together, we might be able to take them down…
A terrified face lurked just behind the bar. It was Kij, who looked like she’d fallen asleep back there just after last call. The barmaid didn’t even see me. Instead, she only had eyes for the door leading into the kitchens, through which tongues of flame and black smoke emerged.
“Shit!” I growled, racing to the door. “Was anyone in there?”
Kij didn’t answer. Her bottom lip trembled, horror reflected in her eyes as the flames burned right through the door.
“Kij, dammit! Answer me!”
She started like someone coming out of a trance. “There was a cultivator,” she stammered, pointing at the flame-strewn entrance. “He had a knife, and Hazel… she…”
Oh shit. Hazel and one of the Hollow Frog cultivators had fought in the kitchen?
She must be alright, I told myself. Hazel wasn’t an idiot. She wouldn’t stay in a room that was on fire. She’d get the hell out of there, and fight her way back to me. Right?
Unless there was a chance to take down one of the cultivators, I thought. She’d gladly sacrifice her life for revenge.
I had to be sure. “Get everyone out of here,” I told Kij, pushing her aside. “All the barmaids and the guests. Make sure every room is checked—this place doesn’t have long.”
My words knocked Kij out of her terrified stupor. “Yes,” she whispered, watching the approaching rush of guests and snapping back to her senses. “Don’t worry—I’ve got it! I’ll make sure the Hungry Herb is clear!”
I nodded at her approvingly. I kicked what was left of the door down and entered the burning kitchen.
Almost immediately, I wished I hadn’t. The heat was like an open oven; I could feel the tiny hairs on my wrists burning, the remains of last night’s stubble singing right off my face as I scanned the burning kitchen. The blaze centered around the big ovens near the back of the chamber, which looked as if they’d been turned on in an attempt to kickstart whatever spell played havoc with the building’s foundations. The beautiful stockpiles of herbs Kij kept hanging had been consumed, the pantry going up like tinder beneath the powerful flames.
“Eric, you have to get out of here!” Regina screamed in my head. “The ceiling’s going to collapse any minute!”
She was right. Looking up, I saw holes where the second floor landing ought to be. This fire was more than just a natural disaster—it was magical in nature, conjured by the cultivators who’d come to kil
l me and my guild. It spread like it had a mind of its own, hitting the weakest points in the structure without mercy. We had minutes, at most, before the whole building went down.
“In just a second,” I assured the living weapon, wrapping Regina’s rope around my forearm. “Hazel! Where the fuck are you?”
A black form emerged from the flames. My heart jumped into my throat, Hazel already forming in my mind’s eye—but the figure charging toward me wasn’t female. And Hazel didn’t wear the robes of a Hollow Frog cultivator.
“Die, dog!” the Hollow Frog screamed, brandishing a jet-black knife. Weakened as he was by the flames, it was easy to dodge to the side and avoid his attack. The man lurched, trying to correct mid-stride, and hit the side of a table with a grunt. He slid to the side, completely exhausted. This close up, I could see burns on the side of his face.
He lifted the knife—and I snatched it out of his hand, quick as thought. “Where’s Hazel?” I snarled in the cultivator’s face, piercing him to his soul.
He had to have known he was dead. If I didn’t kill him, the flames certainly would. But I had to give him this—he was no coward. He faced his death with a grim smile, rather than the begging and pleading that so many so-called ‘heroic’ cultivators resorted to when their time was up.
The man jerked his head toward the burning pantry. “Your little slut? I killed her. The flames will have her by now—”
That was as far as he got. I stabbed him beneath the chin with his own dagger, the black metal sinking hilt-deep through his jaw. It pierced his brain and he went still, sinking to the ground with a sigh as if he’d decided he just needed to sit down for a few moments. He’d never get up again.
I didn’t bother watching his death throes. I barely remembered the man—only his words about Hazel mattered. I charged through the flames, channeling the element of water as I did so:
Eric Casts Spout Level 2!
Torrents of water wrapped around my arms and legs, protecting me from the raging flames. They dissolved to steam in an instant, needing to be replenished from my body, so I couldn’t hold the power for very long. I had to go further into the burning building, I had to find—
