Unfortunately, when he turned around to try and run off, he found himself staring at a very unhappy Kiara.
“And just where do you think you’re going?” the woman asked, cracking her knuckles. Eric backed away, but all that meant was that he’d traded one angry female for another—no, two others.
Kirihime’s psychotically gleaming eyes caused his soul to quake, and the way Kotohime prepared her katana really didn’t inspire much confidence in his survival. And where had Kirihime pulled those knives from?
“W-wait!” Eric raised his hands in a warding gesture. “C-can’t we talk about this like civilized people?”
“Coming from a pervert such as yourself, I find such words almost amusing,” Kotohime said. Her smile widened. “Almost.”
The group of women closed in. Eric’s girly screams soon echoed across the hotel.
***
“KYYYAAAA!!!”
Alex, Andrew, Justin, and Heather all looked at the wall, as if doing so would allow them to see through it.
“That scream was…”
“That was definitely Eric.”
Heather pressed a palm to her face. “Really, Apprentice, trying to sneak into the women’s side of the hot spring without being fully trained in the ways of peeping. What kind of idiot are you?”
“OH, MY GOD! PLEASE! STOOOOPPPPPP!”
While Eric’s friends turned pale, Heather merely sighed. “That Eric, I keep telling him that he’s not ready for this level of difficulty yet, but he never listens.”
“I-is he going to be okay?” asked a worried Alex.
“They won’t kill him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“OH, DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS! I’M GONNA DIE!”
“They’ll just torture him until he wishes he were dead.”
Alex and Andrew shuddered.
“That really doesn’t inspire much confidence.”
“MOMMY!!”
Eric’s echoing screams of horrendous agony became hoarser and hoarser, until they eventually died down, leaving a stilted silence behind.
“So,” Heather started, smiling as if nothing had happened, “who wants to peep first?”
All three boys shook their heads frantically. They were no longer interested in peeping. In fact, each one made a vow never to try and peep on a woman ever again.
It would be the best decision they’d ever made.
***
“Can someone please tell me why we’re stripping?” Christine asked, even as she began the laborious process of undoing all the straps and laces of her Lolita outfit. “I mean, I’m pretty sure this isn’t one of those hot springs where you can just wander around in the buff, and is that something we really want to do?”
On the opposite side of the changing room, Lilian slid her shorts down her long, beautiful legs.
“Aren’t we doing this because that’s how it’s done in Japan?”
“Don’t answer my question with another question! And this isn’t Japan, damn it! It’s America!”
Iris rolled her eyes, even as she pulled off her shirt, allowing her breasts to bounce free. “The reason we’re doing this is because the author’s an idiot who’s obsessed with Japanese culture.”
“Eh?”
“Yeah, he’s got it in his head that in order to appease the fan-base, he needs to have a hot spring episode.”
“Huh?”
“You know, have the girls strip naked, show a little T&A, maybe get some random boob groping in there. It’s like a staple in Japanese pop culture.”
“What?”
Iris smirked. “You don’t understand a single word I just said, do you?”
“I would understand if you didn’t say such stupid stuff!” Christine snapped in response to Iris’s taunting.
Lindsay, already bereft of clothing, grabbed a towel hanging from a nearby rack and wrapped it around her torso. “Could you two please not argue? We’re here to enjoy ourselves, remember? So let’s just do that, okay? Have a good time and relax, while taking a nice soak in the hot spring.”
“W-whatever.” Christine huffed and crossed her arms. “It’s not like I care or anything.”
“Uhuhu, don’t be like that, chibi.”
“Shut up, wench!”
As one, the group of females walked into the hot spring. It was already occupied by several familiar faces. Kiara, Kirihime, Kotohime, and Camellia lounged around in the steaming waters. None of them were wearing clothes either.
Christine and Lindsay both took one look at Kotohime’s and Camellia’s breasts, which appeared to have unusual buoyancy as they floated on the water’s surface. Then they looked at their own breasts.
They suddenly weren’t so eager to enter the hot springs anymore.
“Kotohime, Kirihime, Camellia!” Lilian greeted her vassals and her mother with a sunny smile as she stepped into the water, allowing her towel to fall by the wayside.
“Hawa! Lilian! Iris! Hullo!”
“Hello, Lilian-sama.”
“Lady Lilian, Lady Iris, I hope you enjoy the water.”
“Oh, sure, just ignore Kiara,” a certain inu said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s just pretend she’s not here. Maybe then she’ll go away.”
Lilian stuck her tongue out at Kiara as she sat down next to her maid-slash-bodyguard.
Her breasts started to float.
So did Iris’s.
“I’m suddenly feeling this intense urge to run back inside, get dressed, and pretend this never happened,” Lindsay said. Christine agreed, even if she didn’t say anything.
“Aw, don’t be like that.” Iris patted the spot next to her. “Come on, get in and relax. No one cares if you two are flatter than a billboard.”
Christine snorted as she stepped in. There was no way she’d back down from this pretentious bitch.
She sat several feet away, followed closely by Lindsay. Neither of them discarded their towels. Unlike the kitsune, who lacked many of the nudity taboos that humans possessed, and Kiara, who just plain didn’t care about such things, they were still very self-conscious about their bodies.
“You’ll never find a man if you keep acting like that,” Christine said to Iris’s taunting.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Smirking, Iris raised a single index finger, which she stuck into her mouth and lathered in oral secretions. Her eyes gleamed mischievously as she pulled out the saliva coated finger and poked her own chest. “But I beg to differ, my frigid little friend.”
Lindsay and Christine went beet red.
“There’s a difference between being sexy and being a skank,” Christine snapped, recovering with admirable swiftness.
“Which you clearly wouldn’t know about,” Iris returned fire.
Christine stood up in the water and glared. “What was that?”
“You heard me.” Iris, also standing to her feet, smirked down at the other girl, who only came up to her chest—her obscenely large chest.
Christine saw red. “You wanna fight? If so, then just keep talking. I’ll freeze your ass to this hot spring and let you stay out here all night!”
“Ho ho. Is that a challenge?” Iris chuckled. “Sorry, flatty, but I’m not really interested in fighting.”
“F-f-flatty?!”
“There’s only one thing that I care about.”
Lilian only had enough time to notice the devious grin on Iris’s face before the other vixen pounced.
“Kya! What are you—Iris, let go!”
“Uhuhuhu, have these gotten bigger since I last groped them? I think they have!”
“N-no! You can’t touch these! Only Kevin—kya! Please stop! Let go of them!”
“Don’t be such a prude and let me see how much my Lily-pad has grown.”
“I’m not—iyahn! What are—ah! Ahn! Ah! Not there! —oh! Oh! Oh!”
“Uhuhu, they really have grown. You’ve become quite the big-breasted bimbo, haven’t you?” Iris taunted, laughing in a frightening and creepy manner
.
“Your breasts are just as big as mine!” Lilian wanted to scream. However, the way Iris roughly fondled and squeezed her breasts made doing anything besides screaming in a mixture of surprise and pain impossible.
Meanwhile, everyone else just watched as Lilian was molested by her own sister.
“Hey, Christine?” asked Lindsay, not looking away from the scene.
“What?” Christine, half-disgusted, half-aroused, found herself unable to disengage from the sight of Lilian being fondled.
“Is it wrong that I’m turned on by this?”
It took Christine a second to compute that sentence.
“What?”
When she looked over at Lindsay, it was to see the lithe blond’s eyes locked onto the struggling fox-girls with the sort of fascination one might expect from someone like Eric.
Her nose was bleeding.
Christine buried her hands in her face and bemoaned her fate. “Gods help me; I’m surrounded by perverts.”
***
Kevin had decided not to join his friends in the hot springs. Tempting though it was, he had a lot to think about, and he didn’t believe that relaxing in the hot waters with a bunch of other guys would help him. After taking a quick shower, he’d grabbed one of his manga, and found a quiet place to sit and contemplate the many important issues on his mind.
Sobre el Natural resort was home to more than just a hot spring. There were a number of places for people to lounge at: three pools built to look like a lagoon, surrounded by comfortable chairs for sunbathing; verandas housing numerous tables; and a number of grass lawns with large, ornately-crafted gazebos that appeared to have been directly transported from Greece. Yes, there were a lot of places for someone who wanted to enjoy the peace and quiet.
Kevin passed a number of other guests in his quest for a place to relax. Some people were lounging by the pool, others dined on the verandas outside, various resort staff catering to their needs. Still more simply enjoyed the fresh outdoors, meandering along one of the many paved trails for people to walk through. Kevin found a small bench and sat down. He opened his manga and perused through the pages.
This particular manga was about a group of mages who were part of a guild. They took jobs and fought various bad guys. The main character, a young woman with blond hair and boobs the size of Camellia’s, could summon spirits with keys that opened the gates to another dimension.
“Fire Dragon’s Iron Fist, huh?” Kevin looked at the image depicting a pink-haired mage smashing a fire-covered fist into an enemy’s face. “That’s such a cool name. I wish I could come up with a name like that, but I don’t have any super cool powers that would be worthy of such a name.” He sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for the ability to use magic.”
Kevin was a human, and as a human, he lacked the supernatural powers that Lilian and her family possessed. He wasn’t jealous or anything. Still, sometimes being the only human among them made him feel a little inadequate.
As he continued looking at all of the awesome magic powers, something rubbed against his leg.
“Nya?”
Looking down, Kevin saw the cat that he’d brought with him. The feline stopped her rubbing to look up at him with her big, yellow eyes.
“Nya?”
“Hello there.” Leaning down, Kevin scooped the cat up and deposited her onto his lap. “Maybe you can help me out with my problem.” Fingers idly caressed the cat’s back, the furry critter purring under his ministrations. “You see, I’ve been trying to come up with awesome names for my attacks, but I seem to be having trouble. None of my attacks have any magical abilities to them like fire or ice or what have you. They’re just punches and kicks—not exactly conductive to kickass names, if you know what I mean?” He looked at the manga in his right hand, blue eyes narrowed in thought. “But I really, really want to think up some cool names, you know? So, would you mind being my sounding board?”
The cat just looked at him. Kevin couldn’t read a cat’s facial expressions, but he assumed she was giving him the go ahead.
“So, for one of my attacks, I was thinking of calling it the Combustion Fist of Manly Souls Punch. What do you think?”
The cat stared.
“Okay, how about Iron Fist of the Heathen’s Divine Fury?”
More staring.
“Um, then what about the Angry Fist of the Dragon Lord’s Pantheon?”
The staring would not be stopping any time soon.
“Ugh, so not that one either, huh?” Kevin sighed. “Well, dang.”
“Ara? Kevin-sama, what are you doing all the way out here?”
“Oh, Kotohime,” Kevin greeted as the graceful katana-wielder approached him. “Did you enjoy the hot springs?”
“Ufufufu…” Something in that laugh caused the hairs on the back of Kevin’s neck to rise in unpleasant ways. “I suppose you could say it was enjoyable, to a point.”
“That’s good… I think. Wait.” He blinked. “To a point?”
“And what about you? Did you not partake in a dip within the hot springs?”
“Naw, I thought about it, but I’m a little too busy trying to think up cool names for my attacks.”
“I thought all you could do was punch and kick.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me.”
“Ufufufu.” Kotohime sat down next to him. She set the katana in her lap. “Speaking of attacks, how goes your training with Kiara-san?”
Kevin winced as he thought of all the bruises and broken bones he’d received during his training sessions.
If it wasn’t for Lilian’s healing ability…
“Eh, it’s going well, I guess. It’s tough, but I’ve gotten a lot stronger, and I’m learning a lot, too. Kiara really knows her stuff.”
“Indeed, the woman is most talented in the ways of unarmed combat, and she is an excellent instructor. Kiara-san’s philosophy when teaching is that people learn best by experiencing combat first-hand. I suppose you could say that she believes in the ‘trial by fire’ philosophy.”
Kevin felt a small trail of sweat trickle down the left side of his neck. “Yeah, I’ve kinda noticed that.”
The two sat in silence, with only the gentle purring of the cat breaking it. A little ways away, an old man squatted down to admire some flowers. They were fire lilies, Kevin noted from their dark red petals.
“Ne, Kotohime, do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Not at all.” The woman responded by turning her body to face him more fully. “What did you wish to know?”
“I was kinda curious to know how you and your sister became vassals of the Pnév̱ma Clan.” Kotohime’s stunned expression darkened for an instant, and Kevin quickly amended his statement. “What I mean is, well, it’s only if you want to tell me. You don’t have to tell me if it makes you uncomfortable or anything. I just thought I’d ask.”
Kotohime calmed Kevin down by raising a hand. “No, no. I do not mind telling you. It is just that I did not expect to be asked such a question.” Her smile looked a tad bitter. “You caught me by surprise.”
She looked out at the vast expanse of green, at the people wandering about. Some of those people stared at the two of them. They must have made an odd sight: a young man wearing faded jeans and a plain t-shirt, and a woman of clearly Japanese descent dressed in a dark blue kimono.
“My sister and I came from a small water clan. We were very few in number, less than two dozen, in fact, and therefore we didn’t have much strength. It was no wonder, then, that our clan would eventually be destroyed.”
Kevin was too stunned to say anything. Destroyed? How?
“Our village was attacked by a wandering group of raiders. They were a mixed bag of yōkai who were led by an, at the time, upstart yōkai called Nurarihyon.”
“I think I’ve heard that name in one of my manga…”
“That does not surprise me. Many of the manga that you and Lilian-sama are so fond of are often based on facts that are steeped in lege
nds and myths. Nurarihyon the Diplomat, as he is called in this day and age, is one of the most powerful yōkai in the world. He, along with The King of the Tengu Sōjōbō, and Shuten Dōji, the fierce king of oni, are yōkai considered to be on par with the three Kyūbi.”
“Back then, Nurarihyon was not the great yōkai that he is now, but he was still exceedingly powerful. He and his legion of yōkai were trying to gain more power and followers by fighting yōkai clans that were strong, but not strong enough that he and his followers would be crushed.”
“My clan happened to be one of those targeted. We put up a good fight, but two dozen River Kitsune were no match for several hundred yōkai. Our clan was defeated. However, Nurarihyon is an oddly honorable yōkai. After our defeat, he offered all of us a place among his group. Many accepted. I did not, and I took my sister, who had just gained her second tail at the time, and left.”
Kevin remained silent, entranced by the story Kotohime wove like a master crafter spun threads to create a gorgeous tapestry.
“We wandered the world for many years after the destruction of my clan. During that time, I acted as a mercenary and made something of a name for myself. I eventually met Delphine Pnevma-denka, who was only an eight-tailed kitsune at the time. She’d told me that she was looking for someone with my unique talents, and so she offered me the position of a bodyguard for her clan. I accepted, and Pnevma-denka christened me with a new name—Kotohime.”
“I’ve always wondered how you got your name, but I don’t understand why someone would name you ‘Thing Princess.’”
“Actually, depending on the kanji, ‘Koto’ can also refer to a Japanese musical instrument, of which I can play very well.”
“I didn’t know you could play a musical instrument.” Kevin’s eyes were wide and shone with an unusual luster. “Do you think I could hear you play sometime?”
Unable to resist, Kotohime ruffled his hair. Kevin pouted, but he was secretly pleased by the affectionate gesture. It had taken a lot of work, but the woman finally approved of and supported his position as Lilian’s mate.
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