Rolling her eyes, Laura prepared to deal with the pest. Then she side-stepped, narrowly dodging a massive glowing lance. She hovered in the air to avoid the lava that oozed onto the ground around it. Blue flames coated her body a moment later, but they were snuffed out within moments.
Laura landed behind Nathan and snarled at Fei and Seraph as they took defensive stances in front of him.
“Couldn’t your pets have stayed away? This only makes things more awkward,” Laura said. “If they were smarter, they’d get to live and enjoy you after I’m finished.”
“I feel I missed something,” Seraph said.
“Nothing important,” Nathan said. “I need you to cover me while I prepare a spell. Then distract her so I have an opening.”
Seraph’s expression tightened, but she nodded. Fei was more enthusiastic, probably because she hadn’t realized how ineffectual her gem ability was.
So far as Nathan could tell, the issue with Laura was actually hitting her. She wasn’t invulnerable, but her spatial manipulation prevented anything from touching her. He needed something strong enough, and timed right, that would take her out in one hit.
A meteor crashed down where Laura stood, and she bounced backward to avoid it. The motion made certain parts of her body bounce noticeably. Nathan gestured for Seraph and Fei to attack.
While they darted around her, he prepared another fifth rank spell. Sixth rank would be better, but he wasn’t sure if he had a whole minute or two to cast it.
Seraph yelped as she was sent flying, her body flickering almost twenty meters in the air from one of Laura’s punches. Fei’s flames seemed to protect her from Laura’s magic, however. But Nathan’s plan didn’t look good. Sen’s spells were too predictable and easy to dodge—she’d even stopped casting them because they were so ineffectual.
With Seraph out of action, Laura easily kept an eye on both Nathan and Fei. Her smirk didn’t shift, and she even made crude gestures at Nathan.
Around them, the demons overwhelmed the courtyard. Sen might have retreated to the inner wall. Maybe she was preparing to cast a sixth rank spell, although Nathan hoped not.
“Hmm, this usually goes poorly, but why don’t I have some fun,” Laura said. “You there, kitten, aren’t you awfully repressed?”
Fei ignored the succubus and continued to circle.
A moment later, the catgirl’s tune changed. She began gasping for air. She collapsed to the ground, her face flushed and hands pawing at her body. Her scimitar rattled on the ground, abandoned.
“That’s so cute. You have an adorable kitten, Nathan. Although maybe she wants your cock a little too much.” Laura smirked.
Nathan stared at Fei. She stared back and tried to crawl toward him.
Her eyes had glazed over, and her ears were flat against her head. Given her other symptoms, Nathan had no choice but to assume that Laura had somehow activated her rutting.
Which left him without any Champions to defend him. Seraph had been blown away. Sen was retreating and preparing another spell. Now, Fei was incapacitated by physical need.
“Now, then, playtime,” Laura purred. “Give it up. You can’t beat me.”
A few demons crept up on Fei while she pawed at the ground. Laura laughed and turned away.
But things weren’t going to turn out the way Laura thought. As Nathan looked into Fei’s eyes, he remembered how rutting worked and got an idea.
He gripped his sword tightly and stopped casting his fifth rank spell. Then he charged the succubus.
Laura laughed and grabbed his arms, effortlessly stopping him. She pulled him against her. He let out an exaggerated grunt of pain, then another. His sword clattered to the ground.
“I’m being gentle,” Laura said. She was, in fact. But her grip loosened even farther.
Behind her, a bestial scream of rage erupted. Sounds of movement in the dirt. Laura laughed.
“Sounds like somebody is enjoying their time with your pet,” Laura taunted.
Nathan stared back at her, expression stony. “You’re rather new at this, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Because that wasn’t a demon’s scream.”
Laura furrowed her brow in confusion. Several moments later, she seemed to realize what he meant. Footsteps clattered on rock.
Pushing himself out of her grip, Nathan kicked Laura in the stomach. She gasped and rubbed her stomach in shock. Darkness shrouded her limbs and she spun.
Only to have a scimitar slice her in half. Blue flames erupted along her body, melting her insides before they even hit the ground. Impossibly, Laura’s expression shifted even after her separate halves decorated the volcanic rock.
“Mine,” Fei said, holding a bloody scimitar as she stood over Laura’s remains.
A rutting beastkin was violently protective of their chosen mate. Fei refused to let any other man touch her, or any woman harm her mate.
A low thrum ran through the ground after Laura’s death, and the demons began to screech. They turned and tried to run for the portal. But it was too late. Within seconds, the demons began to melt away into motes of white light, as if they had never been here.
Nathan collapsed on the ground, exhausted.
He wasn’t going to find rest anytime soon, however. Fei’s lust-filled eyes locked onto him and she smiled at him.
It took a while before Sen and Seraph found Fei’s medication and dragged her off him. A long while. Nathan suspected they let her enjoy herself longer than necessary, possibly as thanks for defeating Laura.
The battle was over. The Twins were defeated. Leopold saw similar success on his side.
But Nathan wanted answers to some of what he had heard. He hadn’t seen Kadria before the battle. He needed to visit her soon.
Chapter 23
The sky above Nathan returned to its normal hellish red glow and purple light crept back into his vision. He wanted to say that everything was fine, but that would be a lie.
Bodies—living and dead—were laid out across the upper valley of the portal. A makeshift infirmary had been set up in a pair of large tents beside the entrance to the keep. Normally, the wounded were treated inside the keep.
There was no way this many people would fit inside. And Nathan doubted many would survive the journey, or the wait. So, field healing it was.
Healers walked along the ranks of the wounded, assessing their injuries and current state of health. Their hands almost never stopped glowing, and line of magic often crisscrossed between their blood-encrusted fingers. Most diagnostic spells were first or second rank, and easy for ordinary magic users to cast.
Vera was furiously weaving more complicated healing spells within a tent. Although Nathan’s Champions had made it out relatively unharmed, Leopold had taken significantly more damage. The old man’s chest had been a horrific sight. His armor had partially fused with his torso and Nathan had initially thought he was dead.
Without Vera, Leopold wouldn’t have survived. As it was, he still needed time to recover. Bastions regenerated at an accelerated pace, but they were unable to heal themselves directly using their binding stones. They still relied upon healing spells or enchantments.
In the end, Leopold was only human.
While everybody else rested and keeping themselves busy, Nathan ducked out of the portal. The Twins were defeated. The portal had closed back up. No signs of intrusion had been detected, and the princesses reemerged safely. Plenty of cleanup remained, but Nathan finally had the opportunity to talk to Kadria.
He half-expected to find somebody in his office. Seraph’s regeneration ability allowed her to bounce back despite the savage blow she took from Laura, and Sen had been in tears after failing to help in the fight.
Nobody was present, however.
Taking a deep breath, Nathan opened the black door that stood at the far end of his office. Once he stepped through, he blinked in surprise.
Kadria wasn’t here. The walls and furniture remained the same co
lorless outlines as per usual, save for the bed and the dining set. Nothing out of the usual there.
What caught Nathan’s eye was the steel door in the corner with a bright yellow sign on the front. Nathan couldn’t read the words on it, although the letters reminded him of those used across western Doumahr. Ignoring them, he stepped up to the door and ran his fingers over it.
It wasn’t made of steel, he realized. Whatever material it was made from, it was relatively soft. And almost artificial. The color was due to paint.
He tried the doorhandle and found it was unlocked. He turned it.
That turned out to be a mistake. Nathan’s vision went white.
“Amazing. Your connection was so awful and obvious that even he found it,” Kadria’s voice droned from nearby.
Somebody padded over to Nathan, the noise surprisingly loud given Kadria was always barefoot. Nathan’s vision slowly returned, but his hand went to his sword hilt out of instinct.
He prepared to cast a spell. For whatever reason, the reserves of the binding stone reacted to his call first. Nathan found it difficult to use his internal magical power or to draw on magic from the surrounding air. There didn’t seem to be any leylines nearby, either. So, he let the binding stone’s strength wash over him.
“And whose fault is that?” Laura’s nasal voice whined.
The Twins were here? Was this a trap?
“Yours? Because the two of you are dolts of a magnitude I thought impossible until now.” Kadria was right above him now.
Her foot prodded him in the shoulder. Stars swam in his eyes, but he now saw enough to understand that he was inside some sort of ballroom or hall.
“You can get up. And drop the spell. This isn’t a wise place to throw around magic unless you know what you’re doing,” Kadria said. “You came from my world, so that means you’re under my protection here.”
“Huh?” a much deeper female voice grunted out. “What makes you think you can keep him from us, little goat?”
Nathan looked up as he stood. The first thing he saw were the Twins, lounging on an oversized golden throne with plush red upholstery. Laura looked exactly as she had earlier, only in one piece and not on fire.
Next to Laura was an almost identical succubus who wore a black dress, instead of Laura’s white. She must be Maura. Her eyes were also different to her sister’s. Where Laura’s eyes had looked almost human, save for her red pupils, Maura’s eyes were decidedly not. Her sclera were pitch black, in the same way that Kadria’s were violet. The combination of black sclera with red irises gave her a genuinely demonic look. The haughty scowl she wore only completed the look.
The room they were in was far stranger than the Twins, however. If Nathan didn’t know better, he’d say he was inside a painting.
Actually, he didn’t know better.
He had stepped through a black door that didn’t exist in Doumahr, as far as the most accurate magical detection methods were concerned. On the other side of that door had been a black void that contained outlines of a room and furniture. Then he had stepped through a door made of a material he didn’t know about and covered with writing that he couldn’t read.
He was also staring at a woman he had seen cleaved in half and her body incinerated only hours earlier.
So, for all he knew, Nathan had gone insane, and this was all in his head.
Despite that grim thought, Nathan focused on trying to understand what he saw.
The walls and floor looked real. The flooring was some sort of gray stone tile and mottled with black chunks of other rock. The hall itself was enormous, with stone and iron arches supporting a vaulted ceiling. White light shined through windows in the wings, and stone reliefs rested in the very top of the ceiling, staring down at Nathan.
Everything reminded Nathan of the palaces in western Doumahr, particularly the use of arches and stone columns.
But that was the part of the room that looked normal.
Displays and dioramas sat within the walls behind glass panes, but Nathan couldn’t make out any details. Everything beyond the glass looked like a washed-out watercolor painting. Above him, some sort of skeleton hung in the air, longer than any non-magical creature he had ever heard of. But rather than a painting, it looked like a sketch. If Nathan turned his head, the skeleton shimmered like a pencil drawing on a page, and always looked the same from every angle.
It only got worse from there. The reliefs in the ceiling had no details, and Nathan hurt his eyes straining to look at them. Trying to look through the windows was pointless, as they appeared to be a flat light source instead of a window. The decorations on the columns and arches didn’t even reflect light and appeared flat and lifeless.
“Having fun?” Kadria asked him.
“This place hurts my head,” Nathan said.
“It’s the same as my world. The more you focus on it, the more it will hurt your mind. Let it wash over you, and focus on what’s real,” Kadria advised.
“How do I know what’s real?” Nathan asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
A sensation ran over the front of his pants and a hand tried to undo them. He reached down and pulled Kadria off him.
She smirked at him. “Shall I give you another reminder?”
Nathan shook his head.
“No fair!” Laura shouted.
She stood up from her throne and balled her fists. Maura’s hands pulled at her sister’s dress, to no avail. Slowly, the sullen Twin stood up and matched Laura’s pose.
“I asked you a question, little goat,” Maura said, eyes boring into Kadria’s. “Now that Nathan’s here, what makes you think you have any chance of keeping him?”
Nathan’s muscles tensed, but Kadria rolled her eyes. She crossed her arms behind her head and pressed one of her feet into the ankle of her other foot, effectively balancing on one foot.
“Isn’t this a problem?” Nathan whispered.
“I can hear you,” Maura said, her voice carrying across the hall.
Kadria looked up at Nathan with a bored expression, which was unusual for her. “I’ve made some minor mistakes so far. But they’re nothing I can’t fix, particularly at this point.”
“Hey, fuck you!” Maura said. She ran over to them, dragging Laura by the arm. Both of their chests did interesting things as they moved, and Nathan wondered how their spines held up those massive tits of theirs.
“Yeah, we may have lost the invasion, but the binding stone is ours,” Laura said. She pulled Maura against herself, eliciting a grimace from her sister. Their chests pushed against each other for a moment, before Maura pulled herself away. “We can turn you into an ornament for Nathan, use the binding stone as a foothold to enter this world, and enjoy him to our heart’s content. How can you stop us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I know how to use my magic without killing myself, or needing to flick through hundreds of timelines to find one where I don’t fuck everything up?” Kadria rolled her eyes. “All you had to do was defeat Nathan and you had me cornered. But you fucked that up like the idiots you are. I can understand losing to the old man, as he has some nasty tricks and this portal limited your full strength.”
Kadria pointed a finger at Laura. “But you nearly won and lost because you didn’t realize that the horny catgirl was also a berserker. I nearly died of laughter.”
Laura and Maura glared in response but remained silent.
“Flick through hundreds of timelines?” Nathan asked, a pit in his stomach reforming. He had a bad feeling about this.
Sighing, Kadria turned to face Nathan. A grimace marred her face. “You couldn’t sense this, but your bimbo used a spell beyond her control.”
“I can control it,” Laura muttered.
“Not when the portal is clamping down on your powers harder than your virgin ass would a man,” Kadria said.
Laura and Maura gave Kadria the middle finger at the same time. They refused to look at Nathan, their cheeks flushed.
“Lu
ckily, our spatial manipulation lets us pick which of the infinite timelines we end up in. To a point. I think I saw them blow themselves up fifty times. Maura nearly puked while doing it, which would have been hilarious given she was dilating time.” Kadria grinned. “Eventually, they found the right one. If they’d been together when they cast that spell, then they would have erased themselves from existence the moment they picked the wrong timeline.”
Nathan’s legs felt numb. The world seemed to spin. He reached out to steady himself and found only air.
Kadria grabbed his arm, a concerned look on her face. That was a first for her. Nathan placed his hand on her shoulder and tried to breathe.
A look of horror dawned on her face. “You saw it,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he croaked out.
So, he had died.
Did that mean Kadria had killed him as well?
Was there any way for Nathan to even know? When he had planned to destroy himself in his timeline in order to stop her, had she replayed the minutes of their conversation a thousand times in order to convince him?
After all, he wasn’t supposed to be able to sense the time manipulation of Messengers. Now, he could.
“That’s a face that says your mind is going too far, too fast,” Kadria said. “Trust me when I say that this magic isn’t very flexible. They prevented their own fuckup, but that’s about it.”
“You said they went through hundreds of timelines,” Nathan said. “In order to stop me.”
“It wasn’t that many,” Laura protested.
“I did,” Kadria admitted, ignoring the other succubus. “But only to fix their own mistake.” She ran a hand through her neatly trimmed black hair and huffed. “This gets way too complicated, way too fast. If I told you that they simulated the future a hundred times, and chose the future they wanted, would you understand?”
“No,” Nathan said instantly.
Kadria rolled her eyes. “Right, of course not. Let’s go with an example then. Imagine you’re walking along a road and encounter a fork in it. Whichever path you go down, you won’t ever have the chance to go down the other. That’s the way this works. Got it?”
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