WIEDERGEBURT

by Varnell, Brandon

  “Hmm… I guess she really does know what she’s doing.” Fay clicked her tongue as the metal segments of her gauntlets clacked together.

  “Do you still have hard feelings over what happened during the Spiritualist Grand Tournament?” I asked.

  Wearing a minuscule frown, Fay shook her head. “Not so much anymore. That said, I still can’t say I like her.”

  “So brutally honest,” I teased.

  Fay blushed but said nothing more.

  It took most of the day to cross the valley; by the time we had reached the exit, the sky was growing dark. Catalyna ordered us to set up camp once we were outside of the Pteranodons’ hunting ground. This time, our group had an easier time setting up the tent now that we had experience, and we managed to finish quickly enough that Catalyna ordered us to gather firewood and food.

  Fay and Lin went off to find firewood. Kari and I journeyed to gather food.

  The area past the valley was a large plain with grass even taller than me, so we didn’t bother trying to hunt over that way, instead sticking to the edge of the valley. We wandered over to the river. This area was shallow enough that we could stand in it.

  “This looks like a good spot to catch some fish,” I said.

  “And we can get our feet wet at the same time.” Kari was wearing her enthusiastic smile as she sat on the pebbles near the river’s shore and pulled off her boots, then removed her stockings. I watched as the black fabric was slowly peeled away from her skin. Centimeter by glorious centimeter of porcelain thigh was revealed to my eyes. I drank the sight in.

  After she finished removing her stockings, Kari let out a content sigh and wiggled her now free toes. Like the rest of her, Kari possessed very elegant feet. They were small but had high arches and five cute little toes. Back in my past timeline, there were quite a few times where I’d play with her feet during sex, licking her soles, nibbling on her heels, or sucking on her toes. Kari thought it was dirty, but that was exactly why she loved it so much.

  “Feel better?” I asked as I took off my boots and socks, though I remained standing while doing so. I also rolled up my pant legs until they were just above my knees.

  “Much better.” Kari reached up and massaged her feet. “Walking through such rugged terrain all day really killed my poor feet.”

  “Which is an absolute atrocity.” I went up to her and held out my hands. “Seeing such cute feet get abused by so much walking is a crying shame. If you want, I can massage them for you.”

  “Maybe later.” Kari stuck her tongue out at me as she placed her hands in mine, allowing me to pull her up. I let go of her hands and waded into the brisk water of the river. Following me into the water, Kari released a slight yelp, having clearly not expected it to be so cold.

  “You’ve never caught fish before, right?” I asked. Kari shook her head. “The key is to remain perfectly still. If you move, any fish swimming by will sense the movements through the water and avoid you.” As I spoke, I looked down at the water. There were no fish yet. “Once a fish comes close, you have to react quickly. Don’t try to catch it with your hands. Instead, use a swift scooping motion to toss the fish onto the river bank. I’ll show you how it’s done first.”

  I watched as one fish finally swam up to me. Narrowing my eyes, I waited until it got closer, and then swung my hand through the water like an eagle snatching prey. Rather than dig my fingers into the fish like the claws of an eagle, I scooped it and a large amount of water up with my cupped hand, sending the creature onto the riverbank, where it flopped around.

  “Oh! That was really something!” Kari clapped her hands together, causing me to smile.

  “Wanna try?”

  “Sure!”

  Wading further into the water, Kari stopped about a meter from me, and became completely still. She kept her eyes on the water. I watched as her eyes darted to and fro, then landed on a spot some distance away. There was a fish swimming toward her. Kari raised her hand in preparation to catch it, and, just as it came near her, she swung her hand just like I had done—

  “KYA!”

  —and fell into the water with a loud splash.

  Trying to hold back my snickering, I wandered up to the girl as she sat in the water, shivering from the cold, and held out my hand.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine. The only thing I injured was my dignity,” she groused as she grabbed my hand and let me pull her up. Then she got a good look at my face and her cheeks swelled. “You’re laughing at me.”

  “What? No, I’m not.”

  “You totally are! You even looked away from me because you can’t stop laughing! That’s rude.”

  Kari continued to give me that childish pout, which was more innocent and pure than the ones I’d seen on the adult Kari of the past. This Kari was so similar yet so different from the one I knew, yet I considered this to be a good thing. Kari hadn’t been forced to go through the terrible hardships that stole her innocence, that made her colder, harder, and more brittle. She hadn’t married Grant Leucht, and if I had my way, the Demon Beast Invasion of Nevaria wouldn’t happen either.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Kari, frowning at me.

  “I was just thinking about how much I love you,” I said with a smile.

  Despite how I often told her this, Kari’s cheeks gained a pink coloration as she looked away. She moved her leg in an unconscious gesture. I could see her foot drawing circles against pebbles at the bottom of the stream.

  “You know… actions speak a lot louder than words,” Kari muttered.

  “I suppose they do.” I leaned down as though preparing to kiss her. In response, Kari tilted her head up and closed her eyes, but just as our lips were about to touch, I paused. “But I’m not sure it’s appropriate to display such affection in the middle of trying to catch dinner. Maybe if you hurried up and helped me catch some fish, I’d be more willing to show you how much I love you instead of just telling you.”

  I moved away from Kari before she could say anything. The girl had opened her eyes wide now, and she stared at me in shock, like she couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to kiss her. As I presented her with my brightest grin, Kari’s face turned red and she kicked a large amount of water at me. I laughed and kicked water back at her. Kari squealed before retaliating with return fire, which resulted in us engaging in a full-blown water war.

  We would eventually come back with about twenty-five fish. Everyone would ask the two of us why we were soaking wet.

  I had drawn the first shift that night. The dark sky overhead was speckled with stars. Perhaps it was just because of my changed location, but the stars looked different that night than when I saw them in Nevaria. It was probably my own perceptions changing, however. The stars themselves never changed. Even now, I could see the many constellations that I’d seen thousands of times before.

  The other person with me that night was Finn, but he’d gone off to patrol the grounds.

  Thinking about the Nevarian Spiritualist made me frown. I wouldn’t say I was suspicious of Finn, but at the same time, I didn’t trust him either. Throughout all yesterday and today, he had been glaring at me as if I had personally offended him. There was no ill-intent in his glare. Even so, the looks he sent me were getting annoying.

  While I considered whether or not I should do something about him, I also knew it wouldn’t be wise to create drama within our group. Still, I remembered the assassin from last night. They had been using a rapier similar to Finn’s, but the design was different. I had already checked, and Finn’s had a different cross-guard. Even so, given what happened with that assassin from the previous night, I was understandably wary around him.

  I cast another branch into the fire while thinking about what I should do. If I’d just thought to use Spiritual Perception, I’d at least have been able to get his Spiritual Signature. Everybody had a unique Spiritual Signature. No two Spiritual Signatures were alike, not even in identical twins, so it wou
ld have been easy to figure out who attacked me.

  As I sat by the fire, sighing and lamenting my own foolishness, the sound of footsteps came from behind me. They were light and soft. Feminine. I could tell who it was from the distribution of weight and the steady rhythm as they crunched against the ground.

  “Kari,” I greeted. “Can’t sleep?”

  “You didn’t even turn around to see who I was.”

  I could hear the pout in her voice, which made me smile.

  “I don’t need to. I can always recognize the sound of your footsteps.”

  “That’s a pretty impressive thing to recognize.”

  The footsteps started again, growing louder until Kari reached the log I was sitting on. She sat down herself, so close to me that our thighs were touching. Her arms were covered in goosebumps.

  I wrapped an arm around Kari’s shoulder. Pulling her near, I let her snuggle into my torso. In return, Kari wrapped her arms around my waist and hugged me as she shifted her body to get more comfortable. The warmth of her body was even more lulling than the fire. I wanted to close my eyes and fall asleep.

  “I like this,” Kari murmured. I couldn’t see her eyes, just the crown of her head, but I knew she had closed them.

  “You mean snuggling with me?” I asked.

  “No—well, yes, I do like snuggling with you, but that isn’t what I was talking about.” Kari paused long enough to gather her thoughts. “I mean this, all of this, being outdoors, traveling through a place I’ve never been to before, going on an expedition to explore ruins and find adventure. This is like a dream come true to me.”

  “Do you feel a little like Anderil?” I asked, referring to the character in The Tale of Anderil , the first book she and I had ever bonded over—both in this life and my previous one.

  Kari was silent for a moment before shaking her head. “No. Anderil was a man who left his home and everything he knew behind in search of adventure. I haven’t left everything. The people important to me are right by my side, going on this adventure with me. To be honest, I think this is so much better than Anderil’s adventure. He was alone. I have you, Fay, and Lin with me. You three make adventuring even more fun than it would be if I was by myself.”

  Her words made me happy—happier than I would have thought possible. A warm joy had spread through my chest. While my leap back through time was likely nothing more than a freak accident, I liked to believe the reason I had been sent back was to create and protect moments like this.

  “Hey, Kari. I never did give you that kiss back at the river, did I?”

  Startled, Kari removed her head from where she’d been using my chest as a pillow to glance up at me. Her pure blue eyes were glimmering in the light of the fire, but I couldn’t help but think there was something more ephemeral to the glimmer in her gaze than mere firelight.

  “No, I don’t believe you did,” she mused before smiling. “I think you should correct that.”

  I smiled back as I pulled Kari onto my lap. She was sitting sideways, legs perpendicular to mine, but I placed my hand on her cheek and turned her to face me. Kari’s eyes slowly fluttered shut as I lowered my head and pressed my lips to hers.

  Our kiss started soft, a mere peck of the lips, but when we pulled back and looked at each other, I could see the same desire in her eyes that I felt boiling inside of me. We shut our eyes again. This time when I kissed her, Kari’s tongue was pushing its way into my mouth. It was so like her to take the initiative that I responded naturally, opening my mouth to allow her wet appendage inside, then closing my mouth around it to suck on her tongue.

  “!!”

  A gasp escaped Kari’s lips, followed by a muffled moan. The sounds she made and the feeling of her butt grinding into my crotch made me spring to full hardness. It had been so long since I’d been intimate with anyone. Not counting the time I had spent after traveling back to the past, I’d say it had been about twenty or thirty years since I last had sex. Part of the reason I held myself back from displaying too much affection was that I feared I wouldn’t be able to control myself if I let go.

  None of that mattered right now. As Kari shifted against me, I reached out and placed a hand on her chest. She wasn’t wearing breast bindings at the moment, which meant my fingers sank into her tits through her clothing. Her breasts were huge. The only person I knew who had a larger chest was Feinrea, and Kari’s would get bigger than hers when she grew older.

  “You’re poking me,” Kari murmured between kisses.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” I could feel Kari’s lips twitch into a smile as we continued to kiss with intermittent pecks between conversation. “I’m glad… that I can do this to you. It makes me happy that you find me so attractive. I-is that strange?”

  I shook my head but didn’t say anything else, instead choosing to stop kissing her lips in favor of her neck. Kari’s breathing hitched as she tilted her head to grant me access to her skin. We hadn’t been able to bathe. At most, we had washed ourselves off with rags inside of the tent. The taste of Kari’s sweat was a little stronger than I was used to, but that just made me more ravenous.

  I wanted to devour her.

  “Big Sister?”

  Yet just before we could go further, a voice spoke up from several meters behind us. It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on us. We jerked apart and looked toward the source—Lin, who stood not far away and was staring at us with half-lidded eyes that let me know she wasn’t fully awake.

  “What is it, Lin?” asked Kari as she scrambled off my lap and tried to make her clothes more presentable.

  “Will you come back to the futon?” asked Lin. “This princess is really cold with just Fay there.”

  “Oh, yes.” Kari smiled. “I’m sorry. I’ll be right there.”

  Coughing several times to compose herself, Kari walked over to Lin and took the girl’s hand before, giving me a single apologetic smile, she turned and headed into the tent with the half-asleep Lamia.

  As I sat there with a raging boner, I wondered what I’d done to deserve this. Now I’d have to deal with this problem myself. Well, it wasn’t like I had intended to use Kari to satisfy my lust right now anyway. I’d prefer our first time to be on a bed or someplace more comfortable than outside in the Demon Beast Mountain Range. That didn’t scream romantic to me.

  Just as I was preparing to find some place to deal with my problem in private, a loud rustling drew my attention. I looked toward a pair of bushes by a nearby copse. When no sound emenated, I activated Spiritual Perception, but of course, by this point, whoever had been hiding there was long gone.

  Chapter 3

  Demon Beast Mountain Range - Part III

  The secret passage that Hreidmar had used to escape from the mountain palace of Hovebrann was, to put it bluntly, a maze. There were so many passages that neither Kari nor I knew where we were going. We were relying entirely on Hreidmar, who continued to race down one passage after another, sometimes turning into a lateral passage and other times continuing straight ahead.

  “How much further do we have to go?” asked Kari as she and I ran beside the stout Dweorg. Erica and Tungsten were a little further behind us. I could hear their armor clanking together at our backs.

  “Not much further,” Hreidmar said, huffing. His legs were shorter than ours, so it took more effort for him to keep running at this pace. “We have... just a little ways left...”

  I didn’t know what he meant by “not much further,” but we did eventually reach the end of the long series of winding tunnels. A doorway sat at the end. It was locked with a strange mechanism that Hreidmar tapped buttons on. I didn’t know what kind of lock that was, but it clicked upon unlocking, and our companion pushed the door open.

  What lay on the other side was a staircase. We went up the darkened stairs, guided only by the light Kari had summoned, and soon reached a blank wall—or so it seemed.

  “This passage leads inte the throne room.”
Hreidmar placed his hands on a tile that was sticking out further than the rest and pressed it. As the tile pushed inward, a soft rumbling resounded within the small room as the wall withdrew to reveal the back of a gilded throne. “Come. Let us not waste time here.”

  We exited the passage and stepped into the large receiving hall, which appeared to be a more massive version of the throne room in Jordiskger, but with more decorations. The throne itself was an impressive piece of architecture that seemed to have been made with gold. The columns lining either side of the room were equally impressive. As I looked up and stared at the ribbed ceiling, I saw even more motifs and designs etched on them.

  But I didn’t have time to admire this room.

  We were not alone.

  “I had wondered why the Dweorgs suddenly attacked after years of scurrying about and hiding,” a voice, deep and rumbling like distant thunder, boomed. The sound echoed all around us. “So there are a couple of humans and a little godling who hasn’t even stepped into his power yet. Are you a half-breed or the real deal, I wonder? Not like it matters. All of you will die here.”

  I wondered how it was that we hadn’t noticed this colossal figure standing beside the throne until now. This Sekbeist, another Warlord type, literally took up an entire third of the elevated platform upon which the throne sat. His rusted armor was covered in scars and pockmarks. The battle damage to his armor was secondary to his height and bulging muscles. He glared down at us with bright red irises surrounded by black sclera.

  “I wish everyone would stop calling me a half-breed,” I muttered with a frown.

  “Is that really what you should be worried about?” asked Tungsten.

  “You haven’t had people constantly calling you half-breed for the past several days without telling you why,” I said bitterly.

  “Hmph. Whether you are a half-breed or not is of little concern to me. I’m guessing you are here to use the Warp Gate,” the Sekbeist said, grinning at us. His tusks made that grin into something ferocious and foreboding. “But I have no intention of letting you use it. The five of you and those Dweorgs fighting outside shall all perish.”