Visiting Lucifrena had been a priority of John’s since he had heard she was in the area. Going there immediately had not been in the cards and going there first thing in the morning just did not align with his personal priorities. Part of that was because the angel was just a powerful actor in this war to him. He scarcely knew her and the fact that she was Gaia-sent made knowing her a low priority. She was among the few entities in this whole conflict, outside his harem, that he could trust to have benevolent intentions.
Mostly, he delayed his visit because there were two people that also wanted to see Gaia’s angel. One was Lyndell, who had been busy providing material to Delicia all morning. The other was Ehtra, who found the idea of a sinless person so preposterous she had to see for herself.
Getting down to Goblin Capital was a power trip. When the Guild Hall had teleported over to the existing Protected Space, it had done so adjacent to it. Obviously, John had not wanted to be on top of the city, which would have effectively created a 10-kilometre-wide cave. While goblins enjoyed their dark spaces, that was a bit too dark. There was, thus, an overlap zone on the western edge of the initial barrier and eastern one for the Guild Hall.
This had been by design, as this put the Harbour as close as possible to Goblin Capital, which made the mode of transportation they had theorized as viable as possible. A mode that was now in full operation.
The Guild Hall had settled on the ground. A 200 metre wide strip of its outer rim had been lowered into a massive water ramp that connected into a lake that Undine and Gnome had created overnight.
John, Lyndell and Ehtra sat together in one of the Guild Hall’s ferries. It was one of the many vessels, most of them manually operated, that went down the slope of the water. The angle would have been gentle for a wanderer, but water should have rushed down at an absolutely rapid speed. It was not the case, the magics of the Guild Hall keeping it nice and steady. The whole ordeal had quite the mana cost. The passive production of the island could easily pay for it though.
Lyndell leaned over the edge of the self-driving barge. Her fingers glided through the waters. “The sensation of touch is satisfying.” After lifting her arm, she observed the way that the remaining liquid dripped from her fingertips.
As always, watching Lyndell do anything gave John the immediate wish to hug her and tell her it would be alright. He had come to understand that there were a lot of differences between women of the gothic aesthetic. Nightingale was a graceful variant, oozing quiet charisma. Siena was the sadistic variant, giving him the feeling she was planning rituals in a graveyard. Undine was closer to Lyndell, but even her melancholy was more of a quiet control over emotions that would be too strong if left to rage. Even in the ancient entity’s happy moments, sorrow hung about her like a shroud.
Not acting on that urge was made simpler by having Ehtra by his side. Not only did the grey angel mean he had someone else occupying his attention, she also gripped his leg with all of the willpower of a maid with a mission. A mission that either Momo or Lydia must have given her.
‘Well, I assume there is such a mission, I don’t actually know,’ John thought. ‘I’m not going to ask either. Either she’s doing it of her own volition or she’s acting in the interest of the harem’s keepers of reason. Whichever it is, this is entirely appropriate. They should have an eye on me.’ A little smirk appeared on his lips.
“What’s so funny, smug creature?” Ehtra asked instantly.
“Just thinking that there’s certain aspects about being owned that I find quite pleasing,” he responded. “This must be what they call ‘being a kept man’.”
“I wish you would keep still.”
“No, you don’t.” John’s smirk turned sadistic. He grabbed the ring that kept together the thick braid that wove the back of Ehtra’s hair together. A pull on the somewhat messy, silvery-white hair forced the dark-skinned woman’s head back. “You fell for me, at least in part, because I am quite capable of seducing half the planet.”
Ehtra’s green eyes glared back at him with a clear, animalistic attraction. For better and for worse, the First of Hatred was attracted to those that were willing to use their power. They both knew it wasn’t one of her virtuous traits. John was in no position to judge her, he had a thing for crazy and dangerous, which was arguably worse.
“Want to prove it to her?” Lyndell tilted forwards, putting herself in kissing range.
Ehtra proved that John was right about her by loosening her grip on his leg. There was a not small part of the First of Hatred that did genuinely enjoy him taking other women. That was more than John had bargained for, however.
The ferry stopped at the pier, giving John an out before he could get past the internal screaming phase. “We have somewhere to be,” he said firmly and rose out of the ferry with all of the confidence of a dom used to masking any kinds of doubts that could ruin the scene for his partners. It looked like a cold shoulder to most people. It was crack-cocaine for women of the submissive bent.
Lyndell’s eyes drilled into his back as he made landfall.
The moment he was on sturdy ground, she suddenly rushed past him. Her shoulder brushed against his, her skin bare despite the cold of the mountainous west in deep December. The lack of clothes caught his gaze less than the scandalous amount of thigh she showed with every hip-swaying stride. The shape of her grown dress conformed to her category-Rave ass with almost the same intensity as a bodysuit. Her back was exposed, same for the translucent fibres of the black veil that grew past her head.
The sashay had John almost drooling. Ehtra saved him by pinching his cheek and pulling just enough to snap him out of the trance. “Men, creatures of lust one and all,” she grumbled.
“Do you know the way?” John shouted after Lyndell.
The confident stride of the woman came to an immediate end. Robotically, she turned one way, then the other. When she pointed at the nearby bridge, it was impossible to say if the gesture was hesitant or thoughtful.
Ehtra amusedly blew air out of her nose, yet kept her sour expression. An arm around his grey angel, the Gamer caught up to Lyndell. The pattern recognition part of his brain compared the slit of Ehtra’s maid uniform to that of Lyndell’s dress and found them identical, down to the amount of leg the horny mushroom tried to show with every step.
‘Oh, goddammit Jane,’ the Gamer thought when he realized the nickname had wormed its way into his brain as well.
He focused on the environment. Although most of the lake was within the goblin part of the overlapping Protected Spaces, there was an edge that was still in the Guild Hall. He had put a ferry outpost there, along with a teleportation outpost. The only reason he hadn’t used it was that he enjoyed long boat rides down a gargantuan water ramp. What was the point in all of this if he didn’t enjoy the wonders of his own powers every now and again?
That bit of land connected to the actual city via a bridge made from boulders. They crossed it into a city in the middle of cleaning. Masses of soldiers and elementals were hauling around pieces of rubble, throwing them into containers which were shipped off to a gathering site where everything that could be reused was reused. Everything that could not was heading up the stream in big cargo ships to be dumped into the Maw. John didn’t expect any cool items to come out of that, it was just a very clean way to get rid of what they didn’t want. New materials, metal, lumber and stone, were coming down in return.
There were few goblins seen in the reconstruction efforts and those few were male. All of the female goblins were, guaranteed, inside the vast amount of tents that were behind the big sign that said: ‘Relief tools for soldiers here!’. Attached beneath it was a smaller: ‘Free Use breeding in this direction.’
This degree of sexual permissiveness was still a bit much for John, but goblins were goblins and he wasn’t going to deny his men and women the company of shortstacks.
The reconstruction sites were not where the trio was headed. John and Ehtra took the helm, Lyndell keeping an almost indecent distance from them. She was skirting the line where it looked like she would grab his arm at some point, yet never did. Her eyes remained focused firmly ahead. The closer they got to their destination, the bigger the distance between them grew.
The camp for those made homeless by the recent attack was a horrid den of groans. That was not a feature of most of them, only of this specific one. Most whose houses had turned to rubble could find simple shelter within tents or the rapidly growing blocks of replacement buildings. Even the fortresses, soulless as their architecture was, could serve as temporary shelter for most people.
These were not just people that had been attacked, they were the people that had gotten… stung. Through a flash of exposure to the Lorylim, be it spores or a literal sting, the people in this encampment had gotten enough of a dose that the parasite had taken hold, but not enough that the takeover was quick. Repeated surgery and healing magic could keep the infection at bay, but no permanent solution had been available.
That was until Lyndell arrived at the scene.
The primordial entity marched towards a child whose head was partially deformed by a bloated mass of exposed tissue and black veins. For as much as John wanted to heal that immediately, he had to stop Lyndell from just ripping out the infection right then and there. He grabbed her arm, then met her hateful glare with steady determination. “Without a healer, you’ll hurt more than you will help.”
Lyndell’s jaw clenched, but she nodded. “Lead the way,” she stated, while Ehtra picked up the child.
Their target was not far. They passed by people too dissolved in the trance of tolerating thrumming pain to really notice them. Between proper infestation and a healthy state of body, the people were basically the same as those in any other quarantine zone. At this stage, the Lorylim infections weren’t any worse than plague boils. They weren’t any better than plague boils either.
In the middle of the encampment was the surgery tent. In it, the medics went through the horrific task of repeatedly cutting open and healing the same people, all until the moment help arrived. “You must be wondering why I took the slow boat ride if there’s people suffering down here,” John spoke in low tones beneath the groans of those too used to torment.
“That question is on my mind,” Lyndell agreed.
“The pragmatic answer is that I wanted some more data. This condition will be encountered a whole lot more before the war is over and you won’t be there to solve it in all of them.” He paused and frowned. “It’s a horrid train of thought, to prolong suffering in order to learn more about the disease.”
“I understand it.” Lyndell had no further comment, instead heading towards the target of their visit.
Lucifrena wore a gown that had been a simple white, but had long since been stained in various bodily fluids. She was in her human state, a black woman with bright blonde hair. One of her hands was raised, emanating a weak, golden glow. Healing magic was evidently not her forte, but she tried all the same to bring relief to the old man in front of her.
“Can I help you?” the angel asked, audibly annoyed. John did not have to ask why. She knew why he hadn’t sent her more help.
“You can give me a list of the children in this camp. I hadn’t been informed that new ones had arrived,” John answered. People that suffered from the sting were discovered at a diminishing trickle. Although he had dispensed with his morality to learn more about the condition, he drew the line at having minors go through such pain. If there had been more that suffered it, he would have outright done it for volunteers alone.
“There is just this one, right now.”
“Good,” John let Ehtra place the kid down and then watched quietly as Lyndell and Lucifrena went through their work. It was a simple procedure, for the primordial entity to dig out the proverbial cancer and for the angel to seal the wound. Once the strain on its body was gone, the child collapsed to unconsciousness. ‘What do you see?’ John asked.
‘Nothing,’ Ehtra answered, with a degree of instinctual reverence. ‘She truly is without sin. I haven’t seen anything like it besides the Grim Reaper.’
‘Which begs the question of what exactly sin means here,’ John pondered. What a sin was varied massively from culture to culture. Most of the way Ehtra’s sensing of it worked was based on her own sensibilities, which skewed it more towards an understanding of the world grittier than John’s was. To be without sin entirely, regardless of customs, felt like it should have been impossible.
“You’re the entity I fought on that island…?” Lucifrena muttered.
“Yes. I wish to fight you again.” Lyndell frowned, an even more miserable look than usual. “Not now.”
“Good… good… We, uhm… can do that, I suppose.” Lucifrena then directed her gaze at the Gamer again. “I must protest against your choice of operation here. What could you need these people for?”
“I need them for-“
“MIRACLE WORKER COMING THROUGH!”
Delicia barrelled into the tent at rapid speed. Physical Stats were not her specialization, but she was still faster than a small car on foot. The moment she came to a halt by the operating table, she reached into her inventory and pulled out a spray bottle. A couple of pulls of the trigger spritzed a grey-red liquid onto the infested wound two healers had currently been working on. The black matter in it died with the same sound water made when it hit a hot stovetop.
“Oh, thank Gaia, I am this good,” Delicia exclaimed, more relieved than smug, then rammed the successfully tested potion in the hands of a healer. “Two spritzes per square decimetre should do it. Aim from 15 centimetres away. I’ll come back when I have more.” Just like that, she turned around. She stopped for a moment when she saw John, nodded towards him, then sprinted off again.
“…tests,” John finished his sentence. “Which, fortunately for me, has just been validated… not that I am defending it as the nice course of action.”
“It was far from it,” Lucifrena assured him. “Even if… I understand the logic.”
John stepped aside. “I’ll let you tend to the others first, then we can talk more.”