Lara Croft's Last Treasure.
This is a story written in August 2012 and posted first back then on a different website. Even though I had polished the text attentively enough back then, I acknowledge that there might be a few typos left here and there or weirdly structured sentences. I might fix it at some point in the future (as version 1.1 or something), but even if I do that eventually, nothing is going to be changed in the storyline itself, so this is the absolutely final version.
DISCLAIMER: Lara Croft character and the Tomb Raider franchise as a whole are a property of their respective copyright owners. This story is not a part of the canon and is entirely a fanfiction written on the "fair use" basis, as a derivative work, without any intent of copyright violation. The author strongly does not approve any violence against the will of the subject. This story does not feature depictions of said person-on-person violence, but containts vivid and graphic descriptions of similarly themed unsettling scenes nevertheless; if you find such scenes uncomfortable, you should not proceed.
The story is long enough, containing more than 8000 words and being worth about 40-45 minutes of reading. For convenience of reading, it's split into 3 chapters - the story was written as a whole without any intention of having 3 chapters in it, so the chapters are just dividing it into parts of roughly the same size and don't indicate any logical beginning or a conclusion to each part. However, you can still read it part by part with taking breaks and it shouldn't affect the perception of the story anyhow.
SHORT SUMMARY: In this story, expect Lara Croft to deal with deadly traps of all sorts in an ancient temple-like structure, receiving cutting and scratching wounds, heavy beatings and such (and losing her clothes during all this for the sake of fanservice). Lara here isn't a superhuman of any sort, just a fit enough girl, without too much endurance for her injuries - overall, I tried to take a more or less realistic approach of what a human body can handle. Think of it as a real-life person put into a videogame-ish environment.
Lara's looks here are the same as she had during Legend / Anniversary / Underworld games. As for clothes / details: long braid of dark hair; a short sleeveless brown tank-top, breasts of larger-than-average but still not very big size, short shorts of rough material of khaki color with a couple of pockets on her butt, two black stripes on her thighs holding a pair of pistols, army-style boots starting from the middle of her calves, quite tanned skin.
Any opinions / reviews of the story would be much appreciated.
"Lara, I'm losing your signal," - the voice in the ear headset was covered in noise. "Yes, I'm getting into a cave now. Will report when I come back out with the disk. Over and out." The girl clicked a button on the headset and took it off her ear, putting it into the pocket on the back of her shorts. She was standing at the mouth of a cave in the middle of the rainforest; with tall trees surrounding it, it was really hard to find. Lara reached for a bag of glowsticks hanging on her hip and threw one into the darkness of the cave; its lime light showed that the floor of the cave was 3 or 4 meters below, the entrance she had discovered seemed to serve more like a window rather than an exit that you could walk out of. Going to one of the nearby trees, the girl took a rope from her other hip, made a secure loop around the tree base and threw the rope down into the cave. Turning around, she gave one last look around the surroundings and let the sun caress her skin for another few seconds, then grabbed the rope with both hands and started to descend into the cave.
Reaching the floor with her feet, Lara let go of the rope and took a small knife out of her backpack, cutting the rope at the ground level, grabbing the rest of it and putting it on her hip again - she might need it a few more times. She picked up the glowstick from the ground and took a look around - the caves seemed natural and untouched, but coming close to one of the walls, Lara noticed a faint layer of paint on it, reminding a very old drawing of a triangle with a circle inside it. The adventuress smiled - the temple surely was somewhere very close. It was believed to have been lost centuries ago, and the local tribes of that time are said to have concealed treasures inside it, most notably the golden disk of magical properties and, more importantly, great value.
The entrance she had found was indeed a window into the cave, so she now had a choice of two ways to go. Going a little bit further down one of the ways, Lara found another symbol on the wall which looked like an arrow pointing further in this direction. It seems the temple is this way - well, even if it isn't, she can always come back and check the different route. Watching her step, the girl proceeded down the tunnel - the floor was slightly sloped, and the cave was definitely going down. In a minute or so and after a couple turns, the dim light of the glowstick started to completely fade away, Lara threw it on the ground and, before she could stop it with her foot, the stick rolled down the ground further into the cave, soon disappearing behind a turn. With a quiet sigh, the girl reached for her backpack and tried to find the flashlight in it, surrounded in complete darkness. Finally feeling it in her hands, she stood up and turned it on - hitting the bat's nest near the ceiling with the powerful beam of light. Lara screamed shortly as the alarmed bats rushed at her, she instinctively stepped back and, tripping over her backpack, fell back, painfully smashing her elbow against the hard rock of the cave floor. The bats, however, weren't interested in her presense and simply flew away further, most probably into that window she had discovered; Lara quickly reached for the gun on her thigh, but realized it wasn't necessary at all. She winced a bit from the pain in her arm; pointing the flashlight at it, she saw a mild scratch and some blood. "Great," - she sighed, getting back on her feet and putting the backpack on...
It wasn't long until the cave lead her into a clearly man-made room, or more like a corridor of some sort, with the cave entering it in the middle from the side. Lara carefully peeked at both sides of it, noticing nothing that would seem strange... Interesting. This corridor had to have some function, but it didn't seem much like a continuation of the path, rather than just a room crossing the path... It had a few torches lying on the ground, though. Lara stepped forward to pick one of them and as she moved her leg forward for another step, she felt a very slight touch of some thread against her foot, similar to tripwire... The same moment something quietly clicked in the left wall of the corridor, and before the girl realized anything, three arrows shot out of the almost unnoticeable holes along the corridor, two of them just flying past her into the opposite wall, and the third one digging deep into her bare thigh, a few centimeters lower than her pistol-holding stripe. Lara screamed from pain, falling to the floor of the corridor and clutching her injured right leg, shock and pulsating pain paralyzed her thinking; howling loudly from pain, she managed to sit down and lean against the wall, picking up the flashlight with shaking fingers and taking a look at the wound with a short cry of horror...
It was bad. The arrow entered her thigh from the inner side but didn't completely pierce it; its head was stuck deep inside her flesh without protruding from the outer side. Lara carefully touched the arrow shaft and tried to move it; even the slightest move of the arrow caused so much pain that the girl couldn't help howling. This whole situation turned out to be much worse than anything she had been expecting here... With arrows like the tribes of that time had - actually, with almost any arrows - it's impossible to get them out by simply pulling out, despite all movies an novels tell otherwise, and Lara knew that well. If the arrow is stuck deep in the flesh, the only way of getting rid of it is to push - push it deeper until its head comes out on the other side, and then break the arrow in two and pull it out. It seemed like she didn't have any other choice, her transmitter had no signal inside the cave, and there's no way she would be able to climb back up there with an arrow stuck in her thigh... Lara shuddered, realizing what she would have to do now. For this, she'd need a bandage to stop the bleeding, and something to put into her own mouth while she gets rid of the arrow in order to not bite her tongue... Except that she didn't take anything like that with her into the journey. Lara double checked the contents of the backpack - nothing. One thought, however, flashed in her mind... "Oh fuck me..."
Carefully and very slowly, using the corridor's wall as a support, the girl stood up, trying not to put too much weight on the injured leg. She unzipped her shorts and pulled them down a little bit, just to the level of the arrow, exposing her white panties. She had changed clothes during a quick bath in the small lake, just half an hour before going down into the cave, the panties were still very clean and would do good as a bandage. Now, there's only one problem - how to take them off. A knife flashed in her hand, and Lara did a couple of cuts - one at the side and one at the very bottom, pulling them out of her shorts, pulling the shorts back up and zipping them back, and then slowly sitting down with the panties in her hand. She bent the arrowed leg a bit, bringing the thigh closer to her hands, folded the cloth a couple of times and put it into her mouth. Now is the hardest part... Grabbing the arrow shaft near its tail, she pushed it into her leg, the very same moment letting out a wild cry and biting hard into the cloth in her mouth. Lara felt the arrow head move a little bit inside her - it was working, but at the cost of so much pain... Catching her breath after the first try, she started to push again - and yet again her mind was almost paralyzed by the pain, her crying was a prolonged cry of desperation, and tears appeared in her eyes... A few seconds after she had let go of the arrow and was able to think again over the pain, she could feel the arrow head under the skin on the opposite side with her fingers. One final push, there's very little left to go... Several more seconds of howling, hands holding the arrow tail so hard that the knuckles on them turned white, and teeth leaving marks in the fabric of the panties - and the arrow head broke through the skin on the outer side of her thigh with a juicy sound, and the arrow shaft slided inside the wound some more because of the pressure Lara was applying to the tail, with some blood dripping from it.
Lara was breathing heavily, but the hardest part was done. It took just a couple of seconds to break the arrow with the help of knife, causing some uncomfortable, but bearable feeling in the leg, and then, clenching her teeth again, the girl pulled the shaft out of her thigh, finally letting out a long and loud moan of satisfaction, despite blood leaking from the thigh on both sides. Time to deal with the wound... Searching again in the backpack, Lara found a small bottle of scotch that she used to keep there "just in case". Well, the case finally happened - wincing, the girl poured a bit of it onto her thigh, sanitizing the wounds, and took the pistol from the holster, opening it and grabbing one bullet. She opened the bullet with the knife and emptied the gunpowder onto the wound on the inner side of the thigh, then took a lighter out of the backpack and took a deep breath... One flash of the lighter - and her wild cry echoed again in the abandoned caves, as the gunpowder was burning on her thigh, cauterizing the wound. Taking a few seconds to calm down, Lara moved her leg a bit and repeated the same procedure on the outer side of the thigh. Pain pierced her leg again, and her teeth left noticeable marks in the gag once more, but the bleeding finally stopped... The girl took the cloth out of her mouth and applied to the thigh, squeezing it hard with the self-made bandage. A couple of secure knots, and the cloth seemed to be fixated well enough - Lara carefully stood up, but the pain was bearable now, it seemed like the main source of pain before had been the actual arrow stuck in the flesh. The girl put the lighter into the back pocket of her shorts and picked up her backpack and the flashlight, taking a step back and looking at the cave she came from. Of course, she can go back and call for evacuation, but the leg, even though still aching, didn't cause so much problems now, Lara felt like she could walk without major distress. With the golden disk probably so close, it would be stupid to turn back - and so, limping on the injured leg a bit and noticing to herself that now, without panties, the rough fabric of her shorts felt a little too rough, she proceeded further down the cave intersected by this trap corridor...
Only to find out that it was a dead end. Confused, the girl returned to the corridor and this time watched her step with much more precision. There had to be some meaning to this room, except for being just a simple trap... Examining the walls and the ceiling, she finally noticed a small hatch in the ceiling. Lara carefully approached it, trying to make sure she wouldn't step into more traps, and jumped up, grabbing the hatch's edges, pulling up, and finding herself in another cave passage. This one had an incredibly flat floor - clearly a result of human work - so flat and smooth that it resembled the icy surface of the still waters of some lake. Intrigued, the adventuress proceeded down this tunnel and quickly came to a big slope going down for at least several meters. Pointing her flashlight there, Lara saw that the slope was leading into some bigger chamber... She threw another glowstick down there and tied her rope to one of the stalagmites nearby. Going down the slope would be very easy, but climbing back up could be quite tricky without the rope... Throwing the rest of the rope down into the chamber, Lara sat down onto the edge of slope and just started to slide down it on her butt, just like the children go down the slide at the playground...
However, upon landing into the chamber, she felt something wasn't right. It suddenly felt very hot from behind... A second later, she realized what it was. When she had put the lighter into her backpocket, it was left sticking out a bit, and now, upon sliding contact with the rock floor of the cave, the lighter ignited, setting her shorts on fire. Lara screamed shortly, quickly starting to pull the burning shorts down her legs and making them stuck in the pistol-holding stripes on her thighs. "Fuck... Fuck fuck fuck!" It took several more seconds to detach the pistol-holders from her legs, while the fire was almost burning her thighs and butt. Screaming louder, Lara finally pulled the shorts down her legs and threw them on the ground, starting to stomp them with her boots, but it was too late - the fabric had already charred, and there was no way that what was left of the shorts would be sitting on her hips again without falling apart. Lara hissed quietly, still feeling the burning sensation on her thighs, and reached for her backpack in search for a spare pair of shorts - finding nothing, because the only spare clothes she had were left drying on leaves near that lake up there on the surface... "Oh, why..." - Lara sighed, getting on her knees and starting to detach equipment from the burnt up shorts and put it into the backpack. Glowsticks, the rest of the rope, transmitter... The perspective of wandering around the temple while being completely bottomless didn't really comfort her, but on the other hand, there's no one watching... Lara picked up the backpack and took a look around...
