How, exactly, a situation as poor as this one had arisen, was absolutely unknown to the poor Sage Harpuia. For all the claims of might, battlefield prowess, and divine power, held up by backing proof, what would ultimately come to be the man's undoing was little more than lateral planks of wood combined with their horizontal brethren to form a flimsy blockade designed for mounts. The one thing that the lithe warrior lacked was physical strength, drawn up of lean muscle and vague airs of starvation from long travels to reach the kingdom.
Part of the gate happened to be the exact size required for one such as them self to lodge their helmeted cranium in it, struck through a hole that chanced damage to their collar should they make any sharp or forceful movements. The hands were off no better, locked uncomfortably between two beams. Trying to reach through was a given for retrieving the evangelical sword dropped on its other side, but the gauntlets went much better in than out.
The predicament had lasted for what felt like an hour, although closer to half that time, before the sun began to set outside of this accursed stable and one of the male's most heavily despised traveling companions came walking in. Adorned in steel armor modeled akin to a demon, four-horned headpiece ducking under the doorway, was Zero, sent to find the other on behalf of X. The way that his flat features smugly contorted into a grin made the emerald knight wish that much more for their blade.
"Are you stuck in a damned fence?" Were the first words to leave his mouth, a man of well over six feet, but not near seven. An equilibrium that met in between for the bordering forty year old mercenary, voice rough like raw quartz and somehow smooth as the refined gem. His face was lacking in lines and had only scars, deadpan as ever, despite amusement, artificial hand resting over a scabbard out of habit.
"It's not a fence, you cur." Was the blatantly more feminine of the two's response, earning only a chuckle. Marching over, his aqua eyes trained onto the trapped foreigner's frame, palms sliding up onto Zero's hips in condescension that he could not even begin to express through words. "Those aren't the words of someone that wants help, Harpy."
"He sent you, did he not? Mock me all you had like, the young lord will chastise thee without end." 'Harpy' retorted, hoping to goad the taller male into belatedly assisting. It, unfortunately, had no effect, Zero throwing one leg over the makeshift hurdle, and then hopping it, onto the other end and out of sight. If only he could be just as out of mind.
"Are you even listening to me?" Came next, and a scoff departed his assailant. Dropping a hand atop the dull-green helmet, he cooed sickly; "You're going to have to remove this, if you want out." And of course, he responded flat, with a blunt "No." Zero always had an odd fascination with why he left privately to bathe, why he was always at odds with the physically superior individual, and most flatly, why he looked so boyish. He'd seen girls worse off, and being shameless as ever, Cain's elite Maverick Hunter cupped Arcadia's missionary around the cheek, metal fingers brushing across the straps that kept his helmet in place.
"What are you doing?" Spat Sage, very clearly unenthused by the prospect of being touched in a state as vulnerable as this. A voice like gravel responded, hooking digits under the furred leather and moving to find a clasp, undoing the metal tie until the assembly came loose. "Helping you." And the answer could not be more aggravatingly simple, helmet sliding off and hitting the dirt floor.
A gauntleted hand wrapped itself up in the mid-length blonde locks that spilled out, thumbing over a few strands much to the other's extreme discomfort. He hissed, writhing against the impromptu restraints. "I will lop that other arm off, if you continue this!" And as is expected, neutral, monotone, nonchalant- Zero spoke without any relevance to the complaint. "I'm sure that this is soft, girl."
The line was not affectionate. It was an announcement amid the two of them, and one that utterly froze its target. It was almost poignant, if not calloused, rough, and brutish. What he expected from a mercenary that just a few nights ago had gone on a tangent about the prospect of man's desire to kill. He paled and ceased, outrage collapsing, just like that. "...What did you call me?"
"What you are." Zero answered toneless, stroking through and combing golden hair with a gauntlet owning far too many places for it to catch and rip. The 'gentle' act was composed entirely of sharp, stabbing pains, in uneven intervals that occurred at seeming random. Harpuia twitches unpleasantly to every pluck, never subtracting a significant amount. The second a whimper left the exposed woman in hiding, he relented, dropping her head back down.
"X gave me an hour to find you, help you, and get back, before he would come looking personally. It's been a quarter of that, spent just about entirely on walking, and I am very frankly pissed to understand that I did absolutely all of that trudging just to pull you out of something that even a cat would be wise enough to avoid." His voice finally took a direction, and it was not one that Sage enjoyed terribly much.
She stayed silent. He was much of the same, although keyed in difference by the shuffling of metal, leather, and assorted clasps, punctuated finally by the thud of something crashing into spare hay. Another mystery item followed in suit, and then quiet became omnipresent once more. "So I am going to spend what's left of that hour making sure you learn a lesson." The way that he pitched up into an almost sweetly line made her wish that she were disgusted enough to retch.
That which composed ore met with the other side of her face, stroking along it in increments until the black material touched her lips. Harpuia could not jerk her head, twist it, or even try to break away, so they sealed shut tightly as the fragments of her prematurely broken will. The false hand's appendage pushed and probed, providing unpleasant pressure to the teeth behind them. The woman's focus diverged yet again when he trailed off elsewhere.
The straps to her breastplate quite abruptly snap. All that it took was one tug from the man of whom had been training since teen years to swing a sword equal to his height, strength immeasurably boosted by a dormant strain of the virus. Her legs instinctively shut together and the younger fell to their knees, finding the state of bending over to be quite unpalatable. "You can't do this."
And all of that venom turned to pleading in just a second. And all of that pleading turned to noises of protest as two black digits sunk past Harpuia's maw, pushing down on her tongue and keeping words from spilling out. She gagged instantly, drool trickling to the knuckle before sliding down to impact the floor. It was a spectacle she could not take her eyes off of without closing them, and shock prevented even that.
"I hope that you know how much blood is in your mouth right now." Zero taunts, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. Sage reflexively bites down on them, something she is responded to with their splaying out to touch each side to the opening of her throat. Protests resume, desperately. They certainly do not quell down when a sharp point slips past the chain under her arm, angling sideward before a sharp jerk rips several loops out of place. From there, a fleshy finger works in, and then the hand of which it is attached to, grabbing the gambeson past mail and tearing the entire front half of her outfit off. She unwittingly mumbles a vague sob at having her breasts exposed.
It was vehement. The taste of copper singed her every sense, and the only reason that she had not lost the contents of her stomach was due to there rather unfortunately being nothing to lose. She thought that the worst of it was done when they sealed back together and began to retract from her mouth, but that was quickly dispelled by them hitting the back of her throat, and the ordeal repeating itself in cyclic motions.
The woman produces shuddering little moans of discontent, miserable to description. She had never liked Zero, but to imagine that he was capable of committing such an utterly vile act? It was scarring. Her first excursion into the outside world had already been betrayed by a confidant, and the thoughts began to hurt more than the reality. Her eyes closed tightly, sobbing away. It was no longer a fazing experience when his large hand enclosed around a single mound of fat, leaving light red streaks across the pale skin.
She was a sage. Something that was supposed to be a pillar of serenity and holiness, untainted by evil and corruption. The sole heir to her house, now being violated by the illegitimate son of Albert Wily. Worst of all was that she couldn't stop herself from attempting to get even the slightest amount of relief from friction, armor preventing an inkling of forbidden enjoyment.
What snapped her out of the pent up trance were the words leaving him, and moving directly into her unprotected ear. When he had gotten close, she did not know. "You're with the rest of us, now. There's no god to fall back on when one is among men." He whispered sharply, pumping past her thin lips habitually. "And there's no god to punish you for sinning." Zero continues, pressing a kiss against cartilage. How he was capable of being so gentle, yet unadulterated in cruelty, was beyond the female.
Harpuia finally broke, and she lurched, a spurt of clear, bitter, and throat-scalding fluid spilling out of her and onto his hand and then onto the hopeless for absolution floor, which had frankly accumulated enough wrongness to light an angel aflame. He stopped after winding down painstakingly, removing from her and smudging the uncleanliness off onto the section of Sage's underclothes that had so ungracefully been shredded.
"You can come from there, too? I thought that I would have cut enough open to learn everything that there is to know about anatomy." He jokes less than pleasantly, moving back a few inches in preparation for the inevitable consequences. And when they came, they were undignified, weak, and soiled, much like the young girl that he had just broken. She, shakily, manages; "H-How can he like-" A hiccup. "-You, m-more than..." And the rest blends in with weeping.
"He doesn't matter, right now. Believe it or not, this isn't out of spite- just... think of it as a friendly gesture, to keep you on your toes." The words loop in her mind as if impossible to digest, burning down the concepts she had built up over a lifetime. While Harpuia is busy falling apart, Zero leaves her to briefly recover, sitting back and fiddling with the aft section of her armoring. He needn't a guide on how to remove the pieces; if they would not come off, they were torn, and thankfully, they seemed to prefer to former, exposing more of the linen cloth beneath after a vee shaped section had cluttered to the filthy ground.
A much less terrifying sort of thumb pressed into an approximated spot, Sage again attempting to escape forward, only to cause the oaken bars to creak. There was an uncomfortable whimper in response, a noise that would have been better sheltered had she not spent the past five minutes crying until the tears simply stopped. He felt around as if it were no more troublesome than locating a chink, leaving an adamant source of dull ache when he found the correct button to crush.
"Sto- stop." A voice aside his own swells up again, wracked. "I'm not that cruel." Zero answers in turn, indenting further and migrating north again. Once there's an abrupt addition to the depth, he capitalizes on it, plunging and tearing another hole in the cloth. He's able to see a few droplets of red plop onto dawnlit soil from the end opposite of what he expected, muffled agonies following not too long afterward. He drags the extremity out, absentmindedly noting its state of 'damp-with-crimson, to the knuckle', but before anything else, catches it on the clothing and provides a similar fate to what the rest of its brethren had met.
"If you need something to bite that badly, I'll give you my hand, again." He asides, rising to a knee, with minor assistance from a grasp on her back. A very genuine stroke runs along her scalp, not for lack of tensing in anticipation for something else to be tugged out. It never came, and he sidled behind her, hooking one forearm beneath her still-covered stomach and propping her limp form up. "Almost done. You can hate me in a few minutes." Is the whisper that comforts her, so, so unhealthily.
She doesn't need to respond anymore. Shattered like glass, the Sage accepted it all. There were no concerns for how their relationship would play out in the future, and there were no concerns with how she would come to terms with any of this. She would brush it off as a dream, and life could continue as normal in the morning, as soon as the pain stopped, and she could complete her journey.
Harpuia slumped lifelessly against her entrapment and gave no comment to his form leaning over hers. She could feel his face behind hers, on either shoulder, and the sensation of cold metal latching gently to her bust made the cross-dresser wince. It was a stark contrast from the warmth that nudged her unused sex, providing gradually increasing pressure that again caused an influx of anxiety. Her insides twisted up and her body turned red at every point scarlet life could flow to, lungs lightly stinging amidst hitched breath.
That was the worst of it. When pain struck, it was incredible, uncontrollable, hysterical hyperventilation flooding the barn until his nose was against the nape of her neck. Humans were not meant to stretch like that, and the only reason that she did not yell or beg with him was due to literal inability. Something hit a wall and an utterly scalding, buzzing, fluttering heat climbed through her soul, Zero providing a nonchalant kiss to an exposed shoulder.
It was too hot. Everything burned like hellfire clinging onto the misdeeds of a sinner. She ran out of ways to process and react to the sensations, and no more predictable than the unenjoyable experience that was having her throat invaded, was the experience of having her womanhood invaded. She twitched and spasmed as if shot directly in the lobe with an arrow, unable to think or move, limited only to overflow.
Movements were slow, drawn out, and rough on the return, the maximum pace not being much quicker than the minimum for a petite virgin in a relatively unoptimized position. Part of her wanted it to stop along with everything, and the other, human part, needed it to be done. She lost herself in the entanglement of thoughts over and over again, until the searing signals of agony had reduced into a dull ache overshadowed by nerves firing in ways that the missionary could not comprehend.
And it happened again. And it kept happening, Zero encouraging with faint murmurs cut off by grunts or gasps, that she had no choice but to abide by and obey. She stopped differentiating between the assortment of fluids smearing her inner thighs, long past the point of caring whether or not it streaked and stained the innards of her well-chiseled greaves. Everything was already broken in spirit, so what does making the picture fit the frame do in terms of harm?
Harpuia did not notice when he became quiet, and when she became loud, but the flow of time seemed to merely be a dream, watching the blissful unknown from over her own shoulder, out of body, in form of soul. Ethereal bliss from a higher plane clouded everything and shone the gateway into heaven, the discomfort becoming nothingness and a bountiful light becoming all else. It lasted for eternity, in the arms of death until vision began to register again and she was disappointed to be alive.
A literal and proverbial emptiness dawned over the woman, when awoken by Zero's recollection of breath. He was mopping himself up with her obliterated, stained beyond repair coif- not that her neck could bend to that degree and not that her eyes could move that far- behind her, alerting her of the act only when he provided the common decency to swab her leaking self of blood and white globules and everything else kin with unearthly pleasure.
His armor was back in place by the time everything returned to ordinary, and there was, indeed, as predicated, incomprehensible ache. Movement of any kind hurt like death, the massive man that had just solved as many problems as he started staggering over. Words escape him, finally. "You're free to go." And are punctuated with an exhale, Zero granting her release with a single blow to the hinge of the gate. It shattered and fell loose, clattering open and spilling the girl inside across the ground.
She was really beyond words, still. He was sticky, saline drenched, and regretting any and all of his choices to proceed in nearly full armor, clambering over to assist Harpy up. He had to support her, because she simply cried out every time an ounce of pressure met her lower half. When he brought her up from the floor, at eye level for this brief moment, they exchanged glances, him, expression as mysterious as is expected, and her, like a wounded, chided child, that had just been punished.
He had not the time to spare morality or explanation, so, after a few moments of helping her get what covering she could back in place, pushed his firth against hers, without reaction, and hefted her up by the bottom of the legs, carrying her out on a shoulder.
The worries of humankind, and more predominantly, womankind, encroached upon her after a couple of moments outside the haze that composed recovery. Realization that the less-fair sex had just used her to completion, and try as she might, every qualm of being female could not entirely be brushed aside. It was almost difficult to focus whilst swimming in the sea of relief, hormones betraying her in providing tranquility despite her sorry state and even sorrier state of being humped down a discreet forest trail.
"...Why..?" She asks, minutes later, when they are on the forest trail leading back to camp.
"I care about you." Zero concludes.
"I'm ruined." She states back, miserable.
"No, you're not. You're broken in." He rebuts. When Harpy remains silent, the man continues. "You felt what it was like to be an animal, and now you'll be ready for whatever impasses your travels take you to."
Zero, as good a mind-reader as ever, provides another pause, as if allowing her to telepathically communicate. His boot smashes an idle rock to powder as he passes over it, startling her from deep thought. "I never wanted to be a man…"
"That's the life you choose, though. Men are horrible creatures. They break anything that they come across in fits of carnal desire and rage. Someone far less caring would have taught you that lesson, and forgot the point, while they were at it." And there he goes again- droning about care, lessons, and breaking.
But she understood. And that might have been the most crushing part. The attacker announces, honestly, after a minute; "I didn't enjoy that. I hate being touched. I can't stand being helpless, and you're braver than I am, to be blunt." Lamenting, they take another turn.
"It'll happen again, though. And it won't be me pushing your cheek into the dirt and trying to stake a claim." The adult finishes, stopping atop a perch that, with a short hop down, would make them both present amongst the still-moving world of the Maverick Hunter camp.
"You can tell X, if it makes you less discontent. I take responsibility."
"No," She sniffles. "Stay with me. Just for a while. You can't leave."
"I can't carry you into town to buy contraceptives." Back.
"Then don't." And forth.
"I'm not continuing my father's bloodline." Back.
"Then send X." And forth.
He sighed, back.