Author's note:
Once again, the following chapter was commissioned. If you'd like to commission a story of your own (a the chapter for an existing story), details are on my profile. If nothing else, it's a sure-fire way to get another chapter to a story that I haven't updated in a while.
Responses:
to Guest on Mar 19, 2025: Stay tuned for next chapter and keep an eye peeled for any early warning signs of back-blowing.
to KongKing94: It was bound to be, after our heroines (and hero) fought through what was probably a platoon or echelon of demons. Fights like that really take it out of me, as there's a lot of parts to keep track of: positioning, wounds inflicted, terrain, etc. A nice, easy chapter of everyone chilling is as much for me as it is for the characters.
to Thunder Dragon: As I said, stay tuned for the next chapter. If Echidna, Leina, and Rowin are going to get it on, it ain't going to happen because someone tried the old "I got a bucket of chicken" line.
Rowin stood up and stowed his instrument back in his pack. The reactions he took in were a bag as mixed as Nowa's blood. Leina, Tomoe, Laila, and Nowa were enraptured, nay, hypnotized. They stared at him, as if unable to believe the sound he'd just made with his voice and fingers (which he found a little worrying, frankly). Shizuka and Echidna seemed to be enjoying the second show, drinking in the expressions of the other women. Shizuka looked to be on the verge of giggling.
Naturally, the first thing Rowin felt like doing after singing a song while surrounded by beautiful women? Pick on the odd one out: his wife, and the usual stoic look that was betrayed by her mesmerized eyes.
"Figured you'd have left already," Rowin said, shooting a grin at Alleyne. "A kiss on the cheek for another song?"
Alleyne harrumphed and turned her own cheek towards him. "Nowa wanted to hear you sing. Now that it's done, we'll be leaving."
"But Captain," Nowa said, sitting up, "that's not entirely true. W-"
"Now, Nowa," Alleyne said, already on her feet. She hefted her meager rucksack and turned away quickly, inadvertently showing Rowin her bare ass beneath her fluttering skirt. "Until we meet again, Rowin."
"Love you, too, lovely wife!" Rowin called cheekily.
Nowa's pink monkey friend hopped off her shoulder and landed before Rowin. Strangely, he pointed at Alleyne while hopping up and down, and then clapped his tiny hands.
"Come on, Ruu, stop fooling around!" Nowa called. Ruu scampered back over to Nowa and quickly scaled his way back to her shoulder.
Rowin looked around at the others, who were all, in turn, looking at him. "Ah, come on, now, it wasn't that good."
Rowin made it clear that he wanted to survey the battlefield one more time before they moved on, which Leina and Laila were incapable of denying him. Leina, for her part, scurried away once she realized the snake in their grass, Laila following suit. Echidna smirked at their exposed backs as they left.
The carnage looked no less brutal than it had the previous night. Bodies of peasants had been bisected, disemboweled, dismembered, quartered, torn to pieces, just about every way to die that involved sharp objects and a monstrous lack of empathy. The people of the village weren't searching among the dead, which hopefully meant they were tending to survivors.
It was the demons that interested Rowin, though. His eyes swept every horned, hoofed, or winged corpse he came across, looking for pouches or shiny objects they might have brought or taken. Most of the bodies looked undisturbed, others half-disintegrated. The abyssal energies they were made of left when they died; their soul-flesh had nothing to stop them from decaying. It was an eerie sight, but not enough to stop a portly hooded man from gathering all manner of corpses onto a large cart. Hunched slightly as he hefted a human carcass, he seemed to shy away as Rowin approached.
"Say, mind if I take a look at these before you haul them off? Might be someone I know."
The man mumbled something and nodded, turning away to poke and prod at his corpse collection. Rowin caught a glimpse of the man's fat face, much fatter than the sinewy peasant corpses he was loading onto his cart, and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"I appreciate the work you do," Rowin said earnestly. "Without corpse-gatherers like you, this place would have a miasma stink and even more would drop dead by tomorrow."
Rowin then walked away, keeping an eye out for any scattered coin or anything he might scavenge from the chaos of the battlefield. He turned a corner behind a half-burned hovel, then flattened to the wall and peered back around. Now, the corpse-gatherer was making off with his cart, despite plenty of space left in the bed and plenty of corpses to gather. Rowin sniffed the hand he'd laid on the man's shoulder: a corpse-stink all too familiar to him. Add that to the hollowed-out bodies he'd seen the previous night…
Finnean's voice echoed in Rowin's head. What if he's just fat, lazy, and smelly?
"Then I'll start with the flat," Rowin replied, racing adjacent to the corpse cart. He pulled ahead and darted into the man's path, gesturing with Finnean. "Hold there, sir! I think I saw something with horns up ahead."
The man once again mumbled and hid his face, so he didn't see Finnean's blade turn bright green in the daylight. "Would hate for another to die today. So, I'll check it out, while you…"
With the flat of Finnean's blade, Rowin tapped-
-passed it through the man's shoulder, like a ghost.
Rowin grinned maliciously. "Gatcha."
Six quick cuts to the corpse-suit and it became a corpse once again. The brilliant energy of Finnean's blade left the unliving flesh unmarked, but the oversized pink-stained demon worm that leapt from the corpse's mouth looked deflated as it hastily pulled itself free.
"Thought you were being slick?" He stomped on the vermlek's body and pointed at its tulip-like head. "You thought wrong."
Finnean's blade became corporeal again, just in time for the coop-da-grah. Rowin would've normally burned both bodies on principle, but left them for someone else to find.
"Is that a vermlek?" said a voice.
Someone like her, for instance.
"Sure is," Rowin replied, correctly surmising it was Zara's voice. The blonde and her puppy-sized Wolf greeted him far more politely than they had the night before, though still covered in blood and dirt.
That wasn't enough for Leina, though, who showed up just in time to slot herself between the two. "What do you want, Zara?"
"I want to know more about these demons," came the reply.
"And?"
"And nothing else."
"You're not going to apologize?"
"I won't apologize for being deceived," Zara said, glaring at Leina. "Your friend smells like these demons did. There was nothing wrong with how I came to my conclusion."
"Except where you didn't talk to him!"
Zara paused. "...I'm talking to him now, aren't I?"
Leina's teeth grew less bared. "I just want to make sure you know what your mistake was." She stepped aside.
"These demons," Zara said, "how do we kill them more quickly?"
"There's a few ways," Rowin said, "to get around how tough they are. Anything blessed with power of law and goodness doesn't agree with them, like that water I had. Cold iron works, too."
"'Cold' iron?" Leina repeated. "What's that?"
"Don't know, honestly." Rowin folded his arms. "It's some kind of special iron that comes from deep underground and has to be forged at low heat. Of course, any demon'll fall if you just hit it hard enough."
Leina looked down and away. She'd been the only one in the group who couldn't reliably kill a dretch with one swing of her sword.
"Anything else?" Zara asked.
"Yeah," Rowin replied. "Can't poison them, can't use lightning magic against them, and they're just as tough to cold, fire, and acid as they are normal weapons."
"Where do these things come from?" Leina asked.
"The short version? Souls of evil people," Rowin said. "The kind of demon they become depends on what kind of evil they were into. Arsonists? That's how brimoraks come. Grave robbers and necrophiles?"
He nudged the vermlek's corpse with his boot, then wiped his toe off in the dirt. "Vermlek. That nabasu that tried to eat me was probably a big tub of lard or a cannibal when it was still human; gluttony's their game. Blue Balls was an incubus, so whatever horrible things he did in life most definitely involved nonconsensual deflowering."
"And, the long version?" Zara asked.
Rowin sighed. "That would take a long time to explain and I'm probably not the best one to do it. The longer short version is that not all souls are the same kind and not all souls go to the same places when they die."
Rowin pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing. "There's some that go one place and some that go another, and some people you meet might have two kinds of souls, others only one but not the right one, but point is…" He paused to take a breath. "There's sometimes openings that lead to these places. Magic people who don't know enough to leave well enough alone will open portals to these places or try to summon a demon from one."
"Then, last night was no accident," Zara said darkly. "I have to go."
"Care to come with us?" Rowin offered.
Now it was Zara's turn to shake her head. "There are two scents leading away from the village. Both reek of demons, the way these corpses do. One is familiar, but the other…"
Rowin thought back. "You know, I don't think we accounted for that red bastard, 'Son'. I think he was a cambion, a half-demon born and raised in the Abyss. If that be the case, it wouldn't surprise me if he ran for it; cambions are usually weak, and they know it."
Zara's gauntlet clanged against her chest armor. "Then I'll find him and destroy him. Farewell, Rowin."
Rowin nodded at her. "Till next time, Zara."
It was here that Rowin wondered why Leina hadn't chimed in during the conversation. He turned around and discovered her with a blonde that wasn't him, one that made him smirk.
"Just can't get enough of me, can you?"
Alleyne looked at him deadpanned. She might not have known it, but he'd distinctly caught the phrase "Look after that foolhardy male" before he'd spoken up. She nudged her red beret with the knuckle of her green glove, then reached behind her waist, beneath her gold-trimmed red cloak. What she produced looked like a cheese knife for how small it was.
With a hard thrust, Alleyne embedded her stone-ended staff in the smooth dirt road. Next, she pulled taut the braid in front of her left ear, most of it dangling past her glove. Then, with the cheese knife, she cut the braid where it started, leaving an unwound lock of blonde hair to float limp against her head.
Finally, she presented this braid to Rowin. He looked at the braid, then at Alleyne, then back at the braid, then at Alleyne, then-
"Per the ancient ways," Alleyne said. "I must give you a piece of myself to take with you. With no braid in my hair, all other elves will know I'm not one to be courted."
"Well, in that case…" Rowin snatched the braid from Alleyne and tied it off on his belt, right behind the buckle of his cutlass's sheath.
Alleyne nodded. "Good day."
"And to you, pretty lady."
"Excuse me, Alleyne," Leina said, "does this mean your view about the marriage has changed?"
Alleyne spun faster than she'd bowed and walked away.
Rowin chortled, amused. "Yup."
While Rowin was looking at the shrinking form of his (seemingly) reluctant elven wife, Leina's eyes remained glued to the new belt accessory Rowin wore. Thus, she missed it when Rowin opened a pouch on his belt and slipped a peculiar ring onto his finger, one with a multicolored seven-pointed star set upon it.
XXXXXXXXXXXX
Zara let Wolf down from her arms as they left the smoldering village for the trees of the woodland. Wolf's puppy dog nose pressed to the ground as he picked up the trail. Zara smelled it, too: the stink of demons, the same that lingered around Rowin and which remained marinating the village's air. One of them had escaped, just like the last raid she'd tracked, and Zara was determined to find it before it could lead her on another wild chase to another unsuspecting village.
More peculiar was the faint stench of blood in this scent. Wolf's nose was more sensitive than hers, but this stink was strong enough for Zara to pick up. No other demon, not even Rowin, had smelled like this. As Wolf led her through the woods, hopping over roots and rocks, keeping himself small so as to give anything that watched a false sense of security.
As they crossed a worn trail and back into the brush, Wolf's head perked up, alert.
"Breathing," Wolf said. His deep voice belied his true form, not that anyone would know that.
Zara knelt down and patted Wolf on the head, using the cover of the greenery to draw her size-changing dagger from her corset. "Find it."
Wolf went towards the sound of breathing while Zara kept on the scent. It was much stronger now, starting to resemble the smell of the corpses of demons back in the village. The more she pushed through the bushes and dead wood, the stronger it became, until she found its source lying atop a cracked, broken, fallen tree.
It was the babau, or at least a babau. Zara couldn't be sure if this one had attacked them last night. It smelled the same, but she'd never smelled another babau and the numerous demons she'd fought had their individual scents mix together; she couldn't have distinguished one schir or brimorak from another. Still, she knelt down and examined its corpse. She saw that the red slime, both in its wounds and smeared on a nearby log, was still wet; its corpse was still fairly warm. Again, without another babau to compare it to, Zara took the cautious conclusion: whatever had killed the babau had done so recently, and might still be nearby.
"THERE you are!" Wolf boomed from nearby. Zara could see Wolf from about twenty yards away, full-sized, his front paws digging into a tree as he snapped at something in the branches. Zara paused to stab the babau in the face, ensuring it was truly dead, then bull-rushed her way through the undergrowth.
Wolf's immense strength uprooted the tree and toppled it over. What she saw leap from the branches mid-fall was most definitely a demon. It might've looked like a shirtless, muscular human, but for the grievous scarring and wounds on its body and face. Blackened scabbing on long, deep scars marked its bare torso and what could be seen in the holes of its tattered brown pants. Its haphazardly cropped blonde hair was similarly marred with matting and its scalp parted along one side by another cut.
The way it tucked and rolled on the flat trail reminded Zara of Nowa's pet monkey, Ruu. What she thought had been a grimace turned out to be gums and teeth but no lips: the demon's mouth was completely exposed as the flesh on its lower face had been completely torn off. Black scabbing lined its broken, ragged flesh, like a sick parody of a troubadour clown.
"I have your scent, demon!" Zara declared, her sword growing massive. Its yellow eyes widened as she swung, but once again its monkey-like agility saved it. It dove towards Zara, rolled again, then drove its head into her chest. Zara was strong but her weight was driven to her back foot. As the demon looped an arm around her rising front leg, she shrank her sword to a dagger and slashed again. The demon caught her wrist in its other hand and used its newfound leverage to spin her in the path of Wolf's snapping jaws. Wolf closed his mouth and so rammed Zara with his snout and face plate. The two went down in a heap.
Still, Zara was determined. The blood-demon smell was strongest, and now she knew it came not from the babau, but from this stronger demon that had killed it. From the sharp, open bone protruding from what would've been its left wrist, Zara could guess how.
The blood-demon cocked its head, its lipless mouth attempting to form words.
"'Denon'?" it said. "An I tluly so hideous?"
"Wit won't save you, demon," Zara said, picking herself up as Wolf did the same.
"You'd de sutliiised at what wit can do."
Zara and Wolf split up and moved to flank the demon. It once again attacked Zara, ducking her swing and side-sliding around her knee when she tried to smash its broken face. Before Wolf could pounce, Zara's arms were forcibly spread wide by the demon's arms looping under her limbs and around the back of her head. She felt the blunt point of its bone-weapon push against the underside of her jaw, the tip most definitely sharp enough to pierce her flesh if the blood-demon wished it.
"You see?" said the demon. Between its foul breath and the rancid smell of its scabby, exposed bone, Zara's eyes began to water.
Zara still had her dagger, but she couldn't turn it around fast enough in her hand for it to change size and impale her captor, not before it impaled her mouth and brain.
"You should learrrrn," the demon slurred, "not to junt to conclusions."
"Oof!"
Wolf's face broke Zara's forced stumble. She touched her neck and felt no blood, only a little leftover scabbing from the blood-demon's bone. The blood-demon itself sprinted down the trail, not caring who saw it, its limbs pumping and shoes pounding the earth so fast and hard that it left toe-prints in the packed-down dirt. While Zara vowed to make it regret that mistake and chased it down, she was thwarted when they pursued it to a small creek and lost its scent. A jaunt to the other side didn't find it, either: the demon had used the water to both mask its footsteps and wash the horrible odor from itself.
However, all was not lost, for Zara and Wolf picked up another, older scent on the bank of the creek, one that smelled distinctly like entitlement and cowardice.
"'Son'," Wolf snarled.
Zara nodded. "We have our new quarry."
XXXXXXXXXXXX
In the capital city of Gainos, row upon row of laid stone crisscrossed the many districts and streets. The buildings, too, were made of stone; as the center of power, Gainos was also the center of commerce for the continent and kingdom of Zanan. The streets could be wide enough for an army to march in thirty-man rows, or narrow enough for naught but a single horse-drawn cart to squeeze through.
It was smack dab in the middle of one of the wider streets that sat a grand yet modest church, its thick stone walls and arches a statement to the power yet humility of the sect that owned it. The heavy oaken doors were currently shut, embedded beneath a steepled wall which held a massive circular window of stained glass, a kaleidoscope of circles ringing a central one to create a greater whole. Bookending the front entrance's wall were two encastellated square turrets. Narrow thumb-shaped openings peeked down at the street from the very top of these turrets, metaphorical bodyguards for a similar opening above the central stained glass window, connected to the roof. The message was clear: this church was a consecrated house of God, but it had teeth to bare if provoked.
Within the church, praying on her knees before a stone altar, cast in the light of three stained glass windows, was the church's caretaker and currently sole occupant. She wore a blue cap on her head with a white, metal piece in the front, her religious symbol stylishly engraved into it: a pair of crossed trumpets, one vertical, the other horizontal, evoking the horns that the angels in ancient days would sound to herald their descent. Laurels circled the cap's rim at the back, as a reminder of the faith's origins. Glasses sat upon her nose, as she was somewhat near-sighted. Underneath her long blue dress, she wore a white, tight bodysuit that showcased her strong, smooth thighs. It did the same for her breasts: famously large, bigger than her head, so much that pilgrims and nonbelievers alike would journey to her church to see if the stories about her were true. The priestess didn't mind if their motives were impure. Her enormous bosom was a gift from God, as it brought alms to the church and listeners to her sermons.
Her dress only came down on the right side of her legs; a purple cloth covered the left side, though both halves would've left her nearly indecent if not for her bodysuit. She also wore a beige corset around her waist, to better accentuate her heavenly breasts as well as brown calf high-heel boots. Those outside the sect would find her appearance immodest or scandalous, but she knew better: beauty was a blessing from God, to inspire the faithful and draw the cynics to Heaven's teachings, and thus should not be hidden away for the sake of mortal society.
She had knee-length long golden blonde hair, which rippled along the floor when she was startled by a loud crash behind her. Standing up and hurrying to the middle of the pews, she found a hole in the roof shining light down upon an angel. Not just any angel, though.
"By the heavens!" she exclaimed. "You're Nanael, the Angel of Light!"
Nanael groaned and picked herself up atop the small pile of stone and shingles. "Urgh… That's right, mortal!" Nanael pointed a gloved hand at her. "I've come with a message of dooooom!"
"Doom?!"
"Yes!" Nanael declared. "The Head Angel has instructed me, the most dependable and righteous of angels, to tell you, Melpha, that doom descends upon the continent! Evil is afoot! The dead walk by the command of the Swamp Witch! Demons emerge from a new Hell to bring ruin to you lowly humans! BAHAHAHAHAAAA!"
"Oh my!" Melpha exclaimed, covering her mouth in shock. "What is to be done, Angel Nanael?"
"How should I know? The Head- I mean, rejoice!" Nanael exclaimed. "There is hope for you humans yet! A lone, handsome…" Nanael chuckled dirtily and drooled a little before refocusing herself. "-male has already led a defense against the demons! But, there will be more, no doubt about it! So make sure you're not slacking, Melpha, got it?"
"I won't!" Melpha insisted reverently. "I shall pray and practice my Holy Poses with double the vigor, if that is what shall be needed in the coming days."
"Good!" Nanael turned and started floating. "Anyway, I'm outta here. Easy merit points for meeee!"
Nanael flew back through the hole she'd left in the roof, leaving Melpha alone again.
A righteous warrior standing against this new unholy terror, she thought. A man, no less…
Author's note:
Somebody order a chesty battle-nun? Well, technically she's not a nun, she's a priestess, but you get my drift.
'The difference being?' I hear you ask? A nun takes a vow of chastity. A priest or priestess takes a vow of celibacy. Chastity means no nooky. Celibacy used to mean no nooky, but thanks to the way Catholic rebel dudes like John Calvin and Martin Luther did it (heh, puns), celibacy can also mean no nooky outside of marriage.
Care to guess which one Melpha swore to?