by Tom Harem
My experiment bar was half full. I was almost at level 3 and was already starting to think about the subtype I was going to choose at level 5. Hell, I didn't even know what these were. The game had no walkthrough and the old man in the tutorial was gone. It was a total adventure and, for better or for worse, I was enthralled.
"We better get going." Jany said and got up, still naked, her hair fluttering.
As she leaned over to pick up her clothes, her abdominals contracted, and she let out a muffled groan as traces of my sperm slip down her right leg.
"Are you okay?" I asked her.
"Yeah yeah, sure. Damn it. This is so good." Jany said, "You better not tell them anything or I'll knock you down."
"I like your horny version better." I answered her and giggled.
"Funny. I'm serious. Until I know how they're going to react, it's best to keep what we had low profile. But if you want something with any of them, be my guest. I don't think your body will be the only thing we'll share once we're out there."
The conversation died there. A few seconds later, I got up. We got dressed and went back to town.
Chapter VIII
The city was starting to fill up. Groupings of three and four people strolled through the city, some silently, others sulking over any foolishness. The blacksmith's line was still only a third the size of the previous day. The arena already had a good dozen people asking for the next fight which started within 10 minutes as announced by a man with a hoarse voice, probably due to the excess of cigarettes that he had smoked. He had one in his hand and a package about to slip out of his pocket.
"They even smoke in here?"
"You'll realize there's nothing you can do in real life that you can't do here with no real consequences." Jany answered, as we were halfway to the bar.
"Why isn't this game more recognized then?"
"I've already asked myself that question. They don't have good trailers, pretty pictures, nothing. There aren't even big streamers playing. It's our little secret." She said and smiled.
Whenever she did, her face muscles protruded and the lines that separated her nose from her cheeks became creased.
"Finally!" Emma shouted from afar, as soon as she saw us, "Did you meet on the way?"
"Yeah, something like that." Jany answered before I could do it.
The three other girls were also at the entrance: Mimi with her bow in her hand, and her sachet of arrows on her back, Kendra with a wooden bat by her leg, and Carly with her spear of metal by the wall. I didn't know them well yet, but I'd have time for that.
"Let's go to the market first," Jany said, "the boy needs a stronger sword. See how much money you have."
I said status and waited until the table came up. I had 220 gold coins and only two 20HP potions. My HP was still 100%.
"Yes, but fast." Mimi said, "I don't want to be here when the city fills up. With the misfortune I'm used to, we might get caught by the governor."
"Does he know your faces?"
"I think so. He likes having us around. We're a reminder that he's above us. I can't believe he'd let us out if he saw us. Luckily some of the guards are recent players." Mimi answered me. Her voice was slightly thicker than the other girls except for Jany.
Unlike the day before, she had round glasses that concealed the two blue diamonds that were her eyes.
"Come on, let's get going then." Emma answered. Just as the day before, she was excited; her hands were shaking, her eyes gleaming brightly.
They grabbed their weapons and we headed for the market. There weren't more than three people in the tents that flooded that wide street. Every NPC's salesman was in the center of his countertop, looking straight ahead, hoping someone would come. Just me and Jany moved in while the rest of them waited for us.
"He's looking for a sword." She told the NPC.
"A level 2, almost 3.... I have the right sword for you." The man said, looking at me, and he turned his back on me.
He shuffled through some boxes that looked empty to me and pulled out a sharp two-edged sword, much thicker than the one I had, "200 gold coins.
"Excellent. I accept." I told him and he handed me the gun.
The 200 gold coins were cashed out and my attack went up 25 points.
"Come back again." The salesman said before Jany and I went back to the girls.
We were already on the other side of town when a level three guard stopped us.
"Where are you going?" He asked. He was wearing a shiny, brownish yellow armor.
"Where does it look like we're going? We're going to train outside." Jany said.
"You can't talk to me like that! "The guard said and walked towards us. The ground shivered with every step he took, "Maybe the best thing is to not let you out."
"And you're the one who's going to stop us?" Jany answered him.
"Jany..." Mimi said, "You're going to get in trouble."
"We better get going before he calls more guards." Carly added. Her soft voice spun around like a beautiful puff in the ear, "we don't want trouble," she said to the guard, who already had the spear pointed at us. It had a metal tip with two steel curves that could slit the neck of one of us with a single scrap. Jany grabbed her ax firmly, closing her fingers around the stick. Even I had my hand on the sword handle, ready for whatever it was about to happen.
"Come on, let's go." Kendra said and pulled Jany's arm, "Let's go."
"We can't let him talk to us like that," Jany answered, "none of us should let them talk to us like that." She said and took a step forward.
Another guard, who was a few steps away, approached. He, too, was level 3 and had a sword in a hem on his back. The atmosphere got heavy. The temperature rose. The clothes stuck to our bodies and sweat ran down our tanned faces. For a moment, no one said anything. Thoughts swirled around my head. I had just spent everything I had on a sword and there was no way I was going to die there and go back to level 1 with no money and no sword. If we had to fight, I'd fight till the end. Although I'd rather not have to. We would have to spend all our HP potions just to recover the damage.
"I'll give you one more chance. Take it or leave it. Go back and nobody gets hurt." The soldier said, "We're two level 3 guards against a bunch of noobs girls and a boy who probably doesn't even have the strength to lift that sword."
I laughed and walked until the shadow of his body was over mine, "Do you want to repeat that?"
"Look, who do you think you are?" The soldier said and shoved me.
"We must teach them a lesson." The other guard said, "The governor was very explicit. No one can disrespect us."
The limit had been crossed. There was no turning back. We were going to have to fight our way out of there.
"Are you ready?" Jany told me and smiled as the younger guard pulled the sword out of the hem, "Stay back." She told the other girls.
The guard with the spear tried to strike me with it, but I swerved on time. Still, he ripped off some of the fabric on my shoulder. I took a step back, raised my sword and retaliated. The metal hit the soldier's armor and the sound echoed throughout the street. The muffled laughter under his helmet creeped my skin out.
When I looked to the side, the younger soldier was trying to cut Jany, but she was moving away gracefully, sometimes using the axe as a shield.
"Time to finish this. You're not going to be left behind, are you?" She told me and suddenly raised the axe to her head, swung her arm and slammed it right into the soldier's helmet, knocking him to the ground and taking away half his life. Blood flowed through the small open space between his head and chest.
"Of course not." I told her, looking at her. She had an arrogant grin on her face and sweat running down her bloated muscles.
The guard's teeth shriveled. He took off his helmet. His eyes were red and swollen and he sweated like a desert, far from civilization. Anger and frustration were consuming him. I loved that moment when people's irises turned to red, laden with blood. It was at that moment that th
ey lost everything. When they stopped thinking about what to do and acted solely in order to see the other person suffer as quickly as possible. He went ahead and tried to stab me with the spear, but this time, instead of just dodging me, I seized the opportunity to draw closer to him. With such a large spear he could not recover the space he had lost, and I threw him to the ground with only the impact of my shoulder. He fell to the ground and so did the spear. 20 life points were lost. He tried to get up, but his body weighed too much in that armor for him to be able to do so.
"More guards!" Carly said, "We have to get out of here."
I looked away. A dozen guards were running towards us. All of them between levels 3 and 6, including a fire magician in the center. It was like they were trying to protect him.
"Mimi, Emma, shoot at their feet. Delay them," Jany said, "damn it. These soldiers could still give us good items. Maybe some other time."
Mimi and Emma pulled arrows out of their back bags and fired as fast as they could. Several arrows flew, blocked by the sun, striking the ground in front of the soldiers who were forced to stop. One of them even hit a guard's toe. The man was promptly rescued by another colleague who pulled him to the back line.
"Run!" Jany screamed.
Chapter IX
We crossed the city exit. Unlike the other side there was only a man-made rock road and no sign of guards. As soon as we got to the other side, we followed Jany through a desert terrain to some brown sand dunes, where we hid. Five of the guards still tried to look for us outside the city but ended up giving up minutes later. Our blood pressure was at its peak. It wasn't just my heart that I was hearing. It was all of them. The sun couldn't reach there. The cactus and the plant-free trees shivered with the wind gusts.
"Damn it." Mimi said. It was the first time I'd seen her so serious, "Why aren't you more like your sister, Jany?" She asked, looking at Carly.
"Are you sisters?" I asked, still trying to figure out what was going on.
"Yes, we are. Half-sisters. We live with our father and my mother." Carly said, "As you may have already realized, we're not exactly alike."
They were all a little angry at Jany, but I didn't think she cared. I already knew her a little bit to know that she was willing to let them stay that way if she knew that she had saved them.
"I did what I had to do." Those were her only words.
"We could have avoided all this." Kendra said, "But it doesn't matter now. Where do we go now?"
Their personalities were being built before me. From what I had already realized, Kendra was the smartest, Emma the most emotional, Jany the strongest and most impulsive, and I still had to meet Mimi and Carly, although both seemed to be insightful. From the way she looked at me, Carly still seemed to be skeptical of me; with her black eyes, as if sifting through my soul, looking for a reason to knock me over.
"Yeah, we better hit the road." Mimi said, "Now we can't get back into town until we're stronger."
"Well, that's why we ran away from it, right?" Jany said, "Follow me. And be careful. A few more meters and level 2 and 3 monsters will emerge."
"I'm ready." I told her, "Better level up before we move on to a castle."
"Yeah, you're right." She answered me as she straightened her clothes, rubbing them until little pebbles fell to the ground and crumbled, "Thank you for helping me there."
"No problem. You can see me as your security guard. I won't let anyone hurt you."
"Gentlemen do exist after all." Mimi said, "But we don't need protection."
"No?" Jany said, "Can you handle a level-three monster on your own?"
"It's not like you ever let us try," Carly answered her. Unlike her half-sister, she didn't have a British accent, "And I still don't trust him. He's too... much of a good guy."
"I can't say that anyone has ever complained about my sympathy." I answered her and laughed. She spat on the ground and climbed the burnt sand dune by herself.
"We better go too... " Emma said, her voice trembling and her eyes humid, "We've just left the city and they're already arguing."
"We were just swapping views, Emma," Jany replied. She had taken a maternal roll especially when it came to Emma, "she'll calm down. Don't worry about it. If this persists, I'll talk to her when we get out of the game."
"If you say so..." Emma answered.
We, too, climbed the dune. Carly was waiting for us on the other side, the metal tip of the spear scraping on the ground, while she waited for us with her back turned. She had hips that would make any girl I knew jealous and an ass that I didn't even have hands for. She also wore black pants that fit her like a glove and gave the impression of two perfect round buttocks.
"Follow me," Jany said, "please," she added, looking at Carly.
Carly mumbled something to herself but didn't throw a fuss. We followed her half-sister down a road full of boulders, dead bushes, some stripped naked, others grey, and a vomit-like smell that sickened us. Emma had already covered her nose with one hand, keeping her bow in the other. The further we got away from the city, the lower the temperature dropped.
They all had a fur coat to protect their bodies from cold. Luckily, Mimi had an extra one she didn't mind giving me.
"You better give that back." She told me, the light blue eyes gazing at mine.
"It's not like I can run away." I said and looked around.
Aside from the icy mountains in the background, the rest was just cloudy skies which seemed to have no end. I could run away but I'd end up getting lost and probably being attacked by a group of monsters. Mimi didn't laugh.
After a few minutes walking, we reached a place where all the soil was plain sand and full of level 3 monsters. They had an orange hexagonal structure and, from afar, appeared to be made of goo. Still, we couldn't underestimate them. They had sharp peaks attached to their bodies, jumped up to three meters and a few could spin across the air like flying saucers. Each gave 40 experience points and had 100 HP.
"At least they don't have magic," Jany said, "but go on, go there by yourselves. I want to see what you can do without me." She said, this time genuinely angry looking at Carly.
"Come on, I'm sure they're counting on you to help them." I told her.
"No, not this time. We'll beat one alone. Right?" Carly asked the rest of them.
They all agreed wholeheartedly except for Emma who hesitated for a few seconds.
"You can't help them." Jany told me.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yeah. I'm starting to think you were right when you said that I couldn’t do everything for them."
"Funny. I'm wondering if I really was or if I talked bullshit.” I added.
"I suppose it's time to know if they can do it or not," Jany said and stepped forward. Meanwhile, the girls were looking for a beast who was all alone.
Mimi and Emma already had an arrow in their bow and were pointing it at any monster that showed up on the way. Kendra was dragging the metallic bat across the ground and, finally, Carly was leading the hosts with the spear on the horizontal.
Their mouths were widening but I had no idea what they were saying. Jany had a serious face and a closed fist, next to me, and was snarling furiously when she saw the girls circling a prey. One of the monsters had isolated himself from the pack and roamed the sandy terrain with the two small metal feet that were separated by one of the sharp triangles of the hexagon.
The fingers moved away from the bows' trigger and the arrows were fired towards the tacky body. They perforated his skin but didn't cut him. There was nothing to cut. The arrow tips were swallowed by the goo and vanished into the monster's body, leaving behind the wooden stick that landed on the ground. The beast lost 30HP besides the orange liquid that dripped down her body and leaked onto the ground.
"They're doing fine," I said.
"They...are." Jany answered me, her British voice trembling. When I looked at her, I noticed that she was trying to contain her tears, "I am proud of them. I thought they were no
t listening to anything I said, none of my advice," she added.
"You should have a better opinion of them."
By this time, Kendra had already hit the beast with a substantial part of the bat to the point where she had taken 20HP from him. If this was a baseball game, she would have just thrown the ball out of the stadium with the strength she had used. The bat was covered in goo. Carly raised the spear but had not even placed it horizontally when the monster leaped and spun through the air. It knocked her out and tore up part of her clothes as well as slicing her belly. Carly dropped the spear, using one hand to stop the blood and the other to hold the fine fabric before it fell off and her breasts popped out in front of us all. Not that I cared, of course, but we couldn't risk losing a member so soon.
"No, don't come." Carly said, as soon as she saw me and Jany running towards them, "We got this! That didn't even hurt!"
She'd lost 30HP. She only had 50HP left and wriggled with every step she took. The monster was still hovering in the air, in the same place, as if it was recovering energy before coming to finish the job.
"Damn it," Jany said, "Take care of it fast."
We were now close enough to hear them. It was Mimi who was giving the orders. She had demanded that Emma, along with her, fired arrows at the opposite poles of the monster's body. Once they hit her, or even if she strayed, Kendra would have to pop up and smash her with the bat using all her power. They all agreed. Carly had retreated and was drinking a 30HP potion.
Emma's arrow struck the right side of the monster, but she placed herself horizontally, deviating from Mimi's arrow, which only scraped her body. The beast didn't even know what was waiting for him when it landed on the ground again. The metal of the bat hit him right in the center, throwing him across the air, where he ended up fading, already with his HP at zero.
Each one gained all the experience points. The four of them were close to reaching level 3, just like me. After the beast disappeared, everyone, including me and Jany, ran to Carly's rescue. The blood had already dried up and there were only scar tissue remaining that couldn't be seen from afar.
