Empath Rising

by Archibald Bradford

  The man was turning purple, slapping futilely at her arm. The Hornets began to buzz and hover slightly, their barbed lances at the ready, eager to deliver on the Amazon’s promise.

  “So I will tell you again, and this will be the last time. STRIP! NOW!”

  Those who were still clothed quickly weren’t, several heartstones were recovered, as were a few weapons, the men holding them now happy to part with them.

  Soon the pitifully naked men were formed into a line and shivering in the night’s chill, each man’s hands bound to the man in front of him.

  The Amazons were a proud people and were not at all shy; many openly pointed at the cowed men’s exposed genitals and laughed at their unimpressive size.

  The Tenebrae was loaded into a wagon, still struggling mightily against the vines that bound her. It took three Amazons working together to heft her hammer into another wagon, its weight causing the cart to creak worriedly.

  Soon the commandeered wagons, now loaded with freed monster girls of all kinds, were meandering out of the trees and on to the main road to Greyhaven.

  Dawn broke and despite Yana’s efforts to prevent it, rumours had spread about the girl they guarded.

  “Dammit, Juni! I told you to keep it to yourself!” Yana threw over her shoulder at the gourd still on her back.

  She had just overheard several Hornets talking excitedly about their orders regarding the Tenebrae.

  “But Yana! It’s just such good news! If there is another-” The Undine’s words were defensive and excited all at once.

  “Silence!” Yana yanked the gourd off to address the girl directly, glaring at the blue face peeping over the rim; “IF it is true, and I mean IF! Then secrecy is paramount! You telling every girl within range of a drinking fountain will do nothing but harm in this!”

  “Alright, I’ll stop telling people.” The undine looked somewhat chastised; “So… is it true though?”

  “I do not know, I have my orders and I will follow them. But for the sake of the poor creature that we carry with us, I hope that another Empath has indeed been born into this world.”

  Chapter 21:

  Bad First Impressions

  Jan licked her mistress awake in the early morning, she had learned a long time ago that Miranda was not a morning person and she had a cup of Paul’s coffee ready for her.

  “Mistress, here drink. Nalia sent me to fetch you, Dawn wants to talk!”

  “Bwaa, I just reported yesterday…”

  “I know, I think it’s about the raid.”

  Miranda was up quickly at that.

  Within a few minutes she was in uniform, though her hair was slightly ruffled as she greeted Commander Morrow, Nalia’s hands waving through the water column in Paul’s spacious bathtub.

  “Miranda, I see you still aren’t a fan of mornings.”

  “It’s my injury ma’am, healing is exhausting.” Miranda said with a straight face.

  “Heh. Fair enough.” She sighed, knowing Miranda would want the facts; “The raid last night, a few dozen dirt-bags taken alive, several injured on our side, one dead. Yana and her people captured a Tenebrae.”

  Miranda sucked in her breath at the news, the bastards put up a fight.

  “What happens now?”

  “Booker already gave the order, Yana and her girls are coming to you, they’ve been traveling all night, but they have a lot of ground to cover. They’ll be there a day or so after Lady Essig I imagine.”

  “Popular place.” Miranda face grew pensive; “The casualty?”

  “Didn’t catch her name, Wolfen girl, one of Lilly’s pack.”

  “Damn, poor Lilly.”

  __________

  Erica and Milly woke Nameless on the love seat with some naughty shenanigans that ended all too soon with both girls swallowing greedily as he felt utterly spoiled.

  Ophelia still suffered the lingering effects of the Blomma nectar despite Milly’s milk so she remained in bed. He snuck into the bathroom to clean up and after a quick shower found himself staring at her sleeping form, watching her breasts rise and fall under the thin sheet.

  “Want me to jerk you off onto her tits while she sleeps? I bet she’d like that…”

  Erica’s voice made him jump and he retreated with her from the room with a blush, not wanting to disturb Ophelia’s rest.

  While he had showered Erica had already taken care of the morning milking and Milly practically glowed from her sister’s efforts.

  “How are you two doing with all of this? Everything just keeps happening so fast and we haven’t really talked about it at all.”

  Erica gave a careless shrug.

  “We got to know each other pretty well last night. Despite what you might imagine, it was actually pretty tame, more talking and stuff then sex. Some heavy petting, a bit of fingering, but I think she doesn’t want to go too far too fast. I like her.”

  “I told Paul yesterday that I thought she would be easy to love and I meant it.”

  Milly was lying face down on one of the love seats, her feet in the air while they each took a leg in hand to massage the soothing unguent into her hooves as she gave the occasional soft moo of pleasure at the attention.

  Her feet were greatly improved, the purplish bruises mostly faded.

  “I am going to check in with Paul later about your shoes. Hopefully we won’t need to do anymore late-night marathons but I want you to be able to run if you want to!”

  “Ha! You just want to see her titties bouncing around… actually, so do I! Let’s get you some shoes baby!”

  Milly laughed as Erica ran her rough tongue over the hide of her ankles.

  “Erica! Ah, that tickles!”

  Before their activities could devolve into something more intimate there was a knock at the door, Joe was there to start the day’s work and his arrival spurred them all into action.

  Erica had wanted to stick around to keep Milly off of her feet and to tidy up the cottage as it was starting to get pretty cluttered from their numerous shopping trips.

  And so Nameless was off to see Paul by himself with the milk and together they bottled it and brought it to the market.

  As the pair was selling the bottles, Tom Loskins showed up with a confused look on his face.

  “Hullo Tom! How’s life?” Paul asked cordially.

  “What? Oh fine. Or not, I don’t know. You’ve met Cordelia?”

  “Once or twice I think, she the brunette with the temper?”

  “Um… yeah. Anyways, she was right behind me until she saw you two then she just said she wasn’t feeling well and took off back home!”

  Nameless stiffened a bit, remembering the nasty exchange from the last time he was at the market.

  “Huh, kid, you’re not after seducing Tom’s daughter are you?”

  “Wh-what? No!”

  Tom glanced at him, his face suspicious now, before he regarded Paul thoughtfully.

  “You think maybe she has a crush?”

  “She’s at that age right? And despite this little peckerwood’s looks he does have a certain, shall we say ‘fiscal’ appeal…”

  Tom regarded the dumbfounded Nameless again, his face pensive.

  “Don’t know if I’m ready to have a son-in-law yet, let alone grandkids!”

  Nameless finally found his voice.

  “I’m p-pretty sure she doesn’t like me actually…”

  The older men both regarded him for a moment.

  “She been nasty to you kid? Cuz ya know, that usually means a filly really likes ya!”

  “N-no, that’s, there is-”

  After watching him squirm for a minute or so, Tom took pity on the boy and changed the subject.

  “Paul, you expecting the price to come down anytime soon?”

  Paul gave one last amused look at Nameless’s blushing visage before he answered.

  “Maybe in a week or so, I don’t know, we sell out in less than an hour every day. Speaking of which how many bottles do you want
?”

  Tom sighed as he looked at their remaining stock.

  “The pastries I make from it sell out just as fast, so I’ll take ten.”

  Nameless eyes boggled a bit at that, they only had thirteen bottles left. Paul completed the sale and took the baker’s money, Tom left to interrogate his daughter about his potential status as a grandfather.

  Within a few more minutes they had no bottles left and packed up to make the journey back to the farm.

  “Paul, what about the shoes for Milly?”

  “Ah, damn I forgot. You go check in with the smith. I can manage an empty cart!”

  With that Paul left him to pick up the shoes.

  Nameless had been doing odd jobs in Kettering for almost two years, and had more than once shoveled coal and split wood for Rory the local blacksmith. He was a surly man, all grunts and glares, but underneath he was actually a kindly soul.

  As he entered his sweltering shop, Nameless didn’t get more than three steps in before Rory spotted him and roughly handed him a heavy box.

  “Here you go boy. You wanna split some wood for me? I got a stack in the back I haven’t gotten around to yet. My deadbeat son is off somewhere being worthless.”

  He was about to refuse, but then he remembered Paul’s stance on idleness so he accepted with a nod and spent the rest of the afternoon wielding an axe just slightly too big for him.

  When he was finished Rory tossed him fifty coins and a gruff thank you for his effort and then gave him a speculative look.

  “You know boy, you are half the size of my kid, and yet you work five times as hard. I know that you earn almost three times what I just paid you for a single bottle of your girl’s milk. And yet you still stop to make an extra few coins just cuz I asked you to.”

  Nameless was flattered by Rory’s unexpected praise. It was very out of character for the man.

  “You should consider getting a trade. Everyone in town knows you got three girls hanging on you now. My son hates your guts by the way, like every other boy in town he pined for that Ophelia woman.”

  “Oh! Well, um, gee. I didn’t do so well in school so…”

  “School? I never finished myself, don’t need to know your letters to swing a hammer, just need the will, and more muscle, you really need more muscle.”

  The smith had taken one of Nameless’s tired arms in his firm grip and wiggled the limb around to prove his point.

  “Anyways, with the money from your girl’s milk, and your willingness to sweat for a living, there are a lot of things you could do to keep busy. Paul no doubt has told you much the same, good man, I like him.”

  He had released Nameless’s arm and retrieved a bottle from under the counter.

  “Drink?”

  Remembering the Amazon brandy he politely refused.

  “Well, anyways, Paul no doubt told you he paid for the shoes in advance. I haven’t shoed a cow in years, nothing but Lambdas out here. So bring your girl in if they don’t fit and I’ll take the measurements myself, though I doubt that will be necessary, Paul knows his stuff.”

  Taking the words for the dismissal that they were Nameless took his leave.

  Nameless walked back home in the early evening, his arms rubber from the woodcutting and hefting the heavy box. He was lost in thought as he considered all of the advice he had received that day.

  Cordelia was a beautiful girl, but she had been so cruel to him he was certain that both Paul and Tom were mistaken about her having a crush on him.

  As for Rory, he thought long and hard about what he said about getting a trade.

  While he mulled things over, he recovered the empty cart from Paul’s drive and dropped the box of shoes in it with some relief. Seeing no sign of Paul he then started down the trail home, the farmer was no doubt off with his hens somewhere.

  He wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings as he pulled the cart across the bridge several minutes later, therefore when a sopping wet cord wrapped around his neck and dragged him out of its handle and into the long grass of his field he had no one to blame but himself.

  He was bewildered by the turn of events to say the least. The cord was unlike anything he’d ever felt and he found himself lying in the grass with a diminutive girl wearing a one-piece pink bathing suit sitting on his groin.

  She was soaking wet.

  The fleshy cord extended from around his neck to her wide open mouth. The skin of her face and arms was pale green. But what Nameless really focused on was her eyes: She had enormous yellow-green irises that seemed to occupy her entire eyeball, with slit pupils like Erica’s only tilted more sideways and slightly rounded on the ends.

  He heard a feminine voice, but her speech was garbled:

  “Ka’aa! I caaauuh ah inghooooaaaa!”

  He looked into the girl’s strange eyes as he slowly clued in that the corded muscle wrapped several times around his throat was her tongue.

  She gave a huff of annoyance and Nameless watched the strange muscle unwrap itself from around his neck and snake back into her gaping mouth in a matter of seconds.

  “Kala! I caught an intruder!” She shouted again, able to articulate this time.

  “Wha… who?”

  “Quiet you criminal! Or I’ll… I’ll punch you in the nose!” The petite girl held up one tiny fist, her other hand was on his stomach steadying herself.

  Though her fist was tiny and he had little fear of her striking capability, he was still hung up on her eyes, not to mention her tongue!

  “Kala! Where are you?! He’s staring at me and I don’t like it! I think he’s gunna try and rape me!”

  Nameless was flabbergasted, that certainly wasn’t his intent! Although flat on his back with the strange girl squatted on his groin was not the optimal position from which to launch THAT argument!

  “He’s going to do WHAT?!”

  There was a crash as a blonde woman who could almost match Milly in stature landed on the ground right beside them and thrust a giant spear into the grass.

  She wore nothing but an animal hide halter over her healthy breasts and a similarly cut skirt around her waist. Due to the way her knees were bent and from his vantage point on the ground he also knew she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

  “Hmmm, yes he is trying to ogle me as well, you were right to label him as a rapist. Well, don’t fret little warrior! Our wife will be most pleased when we bring her his head as a trophy!”

  Nameless turned white as her booming voice pronounced his doom.

  “Do we have to take his head off? You keep saying that but I don’t think Mistress would like that very much. Not at all.” The long tongued girl looked at him with her enormous eyes for a beat.

  “Ha! Silly girl, our wife is of the Aegis! Noble warriors all! She would not approve of us going soft on rapists, would you seek to dishonour her?”

  The green clad girl shook her head so hard her narrow shoulders wiggled with the motion, her dark green tresses flinging droplets of water to each side.

  “No, if she’s mad she probably won’t let us have sex with her as much…”

  Nameless was pretty sure that he’d hit his head somewhere along the path home because this whole encounter was surreal.

  “Great! That’s settled! Now you, tiny man who tried to rape my sister-wife!” The large woman gripped his skull with one hand; “I am going to remove your head now. Try not to bleed on my dear companion, that’s a new bathing suit and we both want to look our best for our wife, we have missed her dearly and I will not have your blood sully our reunion!”

  Nameless felt an incredible pressure on his skull, but it was almost instantly relieved when he heard a familiar bellowing low. The closely packed group all felt the ground shake at the approach of the charging Minotaur.

  Thank goodness! Milly! Save me!

  But the hide-clad woman leapt up impossibly fast and stopped her charge cold.

  The blonde caught both of her horns in mid-stride and pushed her to a stop, the soft
ly tanned flesh of her arms and legs belied the strength hidden in the muscles beneath as twin furrows opened in the ground at her feet from the force of the impact.

  Shocked as she was by the girl’s strength, Milly recovered quickly, shaking her horns out of the blonde girl’s grip.

  “Leave him alone!”

  “Calm yourself, mighty cow-beast! We were merely dispensing justice, my companion and I captured this rapist and I was about to remove his head when you interrupted us.”

  “R-rapist?!”

  “Yes, it is a sad reality for men like him; their penises are too weak to properly attract a wife so they resort to using force instead.”

  “His thingy isn’t weak! How DARE you call his thingy weak!!”

  “Oh! I think I get it!” The bathing-suit clad girl, bouncing on Nameless’s weak penis, seemed to finally clue in… or not; “Kala, he probably holds her heartstone and forces her to help him with all of his raping!”

  The blonde girl was beyond excited at the news for some insane reason.

  “Oh hoh! So you are his unwilling accomplice! We will smite down a rapist AND rescue a helpless monster girl! Truly we become warriors this day Jezebel! Well, I’m sure that you are a good girl and have just been led astray by his wickedness, but since you refuse to let me rip off his head and rescue you…” She paused, assuming a ready stance; “TO BATTLE!!”

  As the two titans came together exchanging heavy blows Nameless realized that standing between the giant blonde maniac and the enraged Milly was probably not a healthy idea so he scooped up the tiny girl and fled through the grass to safety.

  “Kala! He’s raping me! He’s raaaaaaping me Kala! I don’t like it at all!”

  She squirmed wetly in his arms but he managed to hold on as he heard the sound of the intense melee behind him.

  “Jez! No! You cur! Release my sister-wife at once or I will rip your head off!”

  Nameless finally found his voice.