Divinity Rescue Corps
61- Triumphant Return

Night was well and truly on, now, brisk in an uncomfortable way on my naked skin.

After a short rest to get our breathing back to normal, I helped Cinzy to get to her building, and then to her room. With both of us ignoring the leaking that was going on down her legs, she took slow steps on unsteady feet. She clutched at me, and actually fell asleep kissing me in the perfect dark of the bedroom. She perked up again, grunting and falling into bed, where she pulled a blanket over herself and immediately began snoring softly.

I was also dead tired.

Still, I couldn’t help but take a gander at the night sky, as I had done most nights I’d been in this new world. Thousands of glittering stars stared back. They sat in nebulous fields of reddish, orange, purple and greenish dust light years away. Only a few stars remained stubbornly in patches of absolute blackness. It was a breathtaking sight.

I definitely was not too tired for a bath in the marsh and brushing my teeth back in the laboratory. You could hardly be a sex fiend satisfying multiple women without keeping clean and fresh.

Back in the hatchery, Alan had reappeared, and was trying to perform the enlargement spell on several of the newspaper-sized tablets from Rainer.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he answered.

“You passed on a message to HQ?”

He nodded, but didn’t say more.

“I’ll assume that means you can’t get a response yet, or they didn’t give you any news regarding the problem we have.”

He nodded, holding up one finger. The former then.

“You don’t have to do more of these. We’ll pick it up in the morning.”

He only grunted in response, and cleared space for yet another one of the tablets and started the incantation.

By now the hatchery was just chock full of them. Neatly arranged under the workbenches, leaning up against the walls in careful stacks, side by side on any of the workbench that wasn’t my main alchemy workbench. The whole thing had been carefully numbered, and a few of them were even painted, glazed, and fired, but they’d run out of time, so most were the dull white of fired, rough porcelain, or the earthy orange of fired, unglazed regular clay.

I only really had enough brainpower to check over what had happened between Cinzy and I with the sex. I hadn’t brought her into the fold using Entwined Ecstasy, so there was no special super power to get. That would be for later, if I felt it possible to have a straight talk with her, and she agreed to be my, uh… third girlfriend? Third human girlfriend?

Still, Pleasure Seeker had gained xp, as it always did when I had sex… which was happening an awful lot these days. I stared at the little experience point bar long enough that I nodded off. I roused myself and shook my head, trying to focus on anything except the notion that I’d just had my first anal experience ever, and it was with the girl of everyone’s dreams.

I ended up falling asleep trying to read over the clay tablets, and Alan fell asleep trying to enlarge several more so I didn’t have to squint at a magnifying glass.

***

When I awoke the next morning,warm sun was pouring through the tent and making motes dance in the scant illumination coming in. At some point during the night, I must’ve roused myself and zombie walked outside to the tent, but that part was a blank. I was so, so thankful that the sleeping bags worked, and didn’t immediately vanish when I covered up each night, because that night had been quite brisk. Like very chilly.

Another thing that had helped to rouse me was excited chatter outside. With no clothes to put on, I instead stretched out, a lot, rolled over, and realized with a start that I wasn’t alone in my bed.

“Greetings, bonded one,” came the sleepy voice.

“Oh! Hello,” I said awkwardly.

“It appears there is a kerfuffle outside,” she said. “I don’t know as I would recommend taking time out to mate again.”

“Oh. Good idea, definitely. Yeah.”

“I’m unsure how often humans are capable, or if your species simply timed the mating season with the Marshin mating cycle in a burst of excellent luck. So I… oh.”

She had gotten a look at Mr. Morningwood.

“This is normal? It is not an illness from one of our sick gods?”

I chuckled. “No, humans are able to mate multiple times a day.”

It was like the floor had fallen out from under her. “Multiple… a day? Every day?”

I stroked her side. “Until I’m in my forties maybe? We don’t have to this morning, if you don’t want. It will eventually go back to normal.” Fat chance of that, with a naked and willing creature as beautiful as Vellenia in my bed.

“It is my duty as bonded companion to assist you in any way I can,” she said, and hesitantly encircled me with one hand, like it might jump out and bite her if she wasn’t careful.

“That can’t be true,” I said, thinking about Fairy Poppins. 

“No,” she breathed, already sliding her body on top of mine, “but I cannot deny a strong urge to…” She slotted my heat seeking missile in the place where it most desperately wanted to explode.

And then there wasn’t any more talking.

Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that Vellenia’s tongue was actually a half dozen small, independent muscly tentacles. When we kissed, these wriggled in my mouth strangely. They wrapped around my tongue and slid over it in ways no human had ever done before. They dragged against the roof of my mouth and gripped my tongue, then squeezed it gently before letting go.

It was good she did, because people were walking by and sliding their fingers along the rain fly of my tent, making a vrreeeeeeeep noise. Several voices chuckled outside, and a call of, “Wake up, sleepyhead,” came, from Cinzy of all people.

I ignored them and made Vellenia do her duty.

Twenty minutes of very quiet lovemaking later, Vellenia begged to be left here until I had taken the team on whatever mission we were going to get up to today. She was leaking out onto a towel we’d placed under her white and mint green butt.

“Bonded one,” she breathed.

“Hmm?”

“You have pleased me a great deal,” she said, and squeezed my hand.

“The feeling is mutual,” I told her.

***

In the address to the assembled team, I tried to soften the blow a bit, but they knew. Either Alan had already told them, or they understood by the way I said ‘dual affliction’ that it wasn’t going to be a quick or simple operation. This was a god we were dealing with, after all, and the first one I’d ever cured had taken a good three days to craft correctly. We were only in the workshopping ideas phase, and not even to the researching cures phase.

From Alan, the question here was what the god’s sickness represented. How long it had been sick and the degradation compared with the other gods we had all experienced. He wanted to look at this magical and spiritual problem from a scientific standpoint.

The rest of the team obliged him and listened without interruption, while his stutter slowed everything down to a glacial pace. The only real information came from the Guardians, who had helped with the God of Footfalls and watched as the days passed.

“Whatever it was bleeding, it was sort of rainbow colored,” Isabelle said.

“At the beginning,” Ivy confirmed. “It started going yellow toward the end.”

“The divine essence can manifest as many colors,” Chrysta said. “The pure ichor of a god is said to be golden in hue.”

Chrysta is correct. I have seen this, Larelle told us mentally.

I already knew a lot of this, given the way my skills injected knowledge and instinct into my brain.

“That’s fine,” Ivy said, hand on one cocked hip. “No problem. It’s your show and you run it as you will. We’re here because you picked us, so we do the job. The question to get back to the practical side of things: what can we do?”

Ivy was strong, fierce, took no shit, and was focused entirely on what could be done.

I took a deep breath. “We will need to replenish the ingredients, and look for rare plants and flowers. Regina knows—“

“I know too!” A familiar voice called down. “By the way, what the hecky Becky happened to my clothes and my backpack? Did they get teleported somewhere?” All of us turned and rejoiced to see Tara flying in from astride her semi-transparent Nakamamon, Airaconda. She rode it like a witch riding a broom, though I noted a bridle on the creature’s head with reins she had grasped in both hands. “I have to say I’m kind of glad you’re all naked too, because I almost turned around and flew back to town.”

What followed were several minutes of confused and delighted awkwardness, where everyone was both completely nude and wanting to hug one another. They settled for pats on the shoulder (Trent and Alan), delighted squealing while hopping back and forth from foot to foot (Izzy and Ivy), and dancing in a circle while grasping hands (Regina and Cinzy). Tweedle Dee, still ailing and not quite in great shape, came forward for chin and ear scratches. Muppin rumbled forward and nuzzled at Tara, nearly knocking her off balance, Fairy Poppins danced around her head, and…

Vellenia appeared, and had no such qualms about hugging. When I introduced the long-legged, bronze-skinned beauty to my bonded Nakamamon, the Marshin leapt into Tara’s arms.

“You are most welcome here, team member of Christopher Fletcher, savior of the eggs. His friends are our friends.”

Tara directed a very pointed look my way, and I blinked at her. The smile I got in return was knowing an impish, like she was already imagining what positions I’d taken Vellenia through. Her eyes darted down to my midsection and back up.

Tara had left before we ever arrived at the Marshin village.

“Wait,” she said. “Hang on. It took me like two days to get back to HQ, and then it took me four days to get here… and… you guys didn’t mention to HQ that there were no clothes?”

A lot of embarrassed grumbling and mumbling met her, with some scratching of the neck and back of the head.

“What about backpacks?” she yelped. “My backpack vanished along with all my clothes back over that way.”

“Well… shirt,” Regina said. Her flower-shaped freckles had grown, and now glowed so well that it was impossible not to see her at night. In the full light of day I only caught the stray sparkle here and there, since the freckles seemed like gems or sequins embedded in her skin.

“The pills were in that backpack, weren’t they?” I asked.

“They were indeed!”

We needed those pills to knock the surging mana out of our bodies so we didn’t… something. None of us knew what would happen if we absorbed too much mana, but HQ was adamant it was bad.

“Do you mean to tell me I now have to go all the way back to HQ to get another round of those fracking pills?” she shouted.

Everyone fell silent. This was both in the face of her frustration, and the realization that we were reaching dangerous levels of mana absorption. If you believed what HQ said, and there was no reason not to, we were about to pass beyond the limit they’d set forth as safe.

Isabelle now looked a lot like a Nakamamon herself, she was so brightly colored blue and pink. Silvery threads that looked like filigree wound through her whole self. And she was… starting to grow a tail. Yes, a tail about three inches long now protruded from just above her butt.

Ivy’s entire body was thick with tattoos. It definitely hadn’t been that way when I hired her about a week ago. Those tattoos had very slowly crept around her body before, but they were surging, growing, coalescing, battling against one another in places. Also her thin stubbly hair was gone, leaving only the dragon tattoo curling over her skull.

The others were transforming too. The large patches covering Cinzy’s body were shifting to colors that were never people colors: rusty red, blazing orange, deep green, icy blue and still others. They were growing, merging and shrinking at around the same speed as Ivy’s tattoos. Her hair was now moving of its own accord, like she had a fan on it at all times. It had grown down below her butt. I knew because I had once noted how gorgeous the curtain of hair fell down below her shoulder blades.

Trent now looked a lot like he was made of dirt and rocks, with bits of moss covering his head, shoulders, and random places elsewhere. Alan… was becoming transparent. Luckily not transparent in a way that showed us his muscles and guts and digesting food, just transparent in the way that Chrysta’s upper legs and the edges of her were transparent.

“You guys have been working so much that you didn’t even notice what was happening to your bodies?” Tara demanded.

“We thought you’d be back with the pills,” I said lamely, “and it wouldn’t be a big deal.” You would be hard pressed to argue that healing up a god was less important than getting the mana out of your body, especially if you believed the cure was on its way.

Again, this was my fault, in a way. I’d brought Alan on board thinking he would level up and gain the capabilities we needed. Instead his inability to contact HQ in a timely manner cost us. He had leveled up, just not fast enough.

Tara was beyond upset. Her hands flew up in the air. “My whole backpack, gone!” She had lost more than just pills, of course. People carried some personal items with them, to remember earth. “Ach! Arrgggghhh! Ugh! Flaaarrrggghhhh! Flibbertyjibbet! Flack knackles! Worm… wobbles!” Then her finger flew in my direction. “You, on the air serpent, now! The rest of you, do whatever it is you’re supposed to do anyway. I have to have a private word with Fletcher and this failure of leadership, right this moment.”

Nobody countermanded her order. For a few seconds most everyone gaped at her, save Larelle, who trudged back to her post defending the holy items of clothing we had collected.

Shocked, I mounted Airaconda, the sensation very odd on my totally exposed backside and… the bottom of my sack. A very naked, totally furious and utterly gorgeous long-legged Tara strode over, mounted her own bonded Nakamamon, and looked over her shoulder. Without needing to be told, I put my arms around her waist and would have immediately started to harden, what with my midsection being pressed against her butt, but the situation was so surprising that I kept myself from insta-rection.

We launched into the air for my first ever, what I’ll call broom ride. Riding on the enormous manta had been like being on a huge tube and dragged around a lake by a fast boat. Riding the glimmerdactyl had been very much like riding a horse.

There was hardly anything to the Slitherwind. I clenched my legs against her sides and clutched onto Tara for dear life while it streaked into the air, quickly reached the top of the cliff we’d been on previously, and settled down.

I got off, feeling like I’d been on a roller coaster. While she started baby talking it, I got my wits about me, or tried to.

Using the Identify skill, I focused on the creature to put it into my Nakamadex.

Slitherwind

First Stage Nakamamon

These large serpents made of elemental air are rarer at low altitudes. They typically feed on wisps of airborne mana or the occasional small flying beast.

Typical length: 20-40 feet (large)

Typical weight: 2-10 pounds

Gender: female

Aspect: air

Transformations: unknown -> Slitherwind -> unknown

Slitherwind has been added to your Nakamadex.

I almost had to chuckle at the weight of the creature.

“That’s a good girl,” Tara was still saying, patting the air elemental serpent just behind the head. She commenced to scratching again, raking her fingers from the base of the creature’s head some six feet. It looked a bit like she was ripping apart the wrapping paper on a huge Christmas present. “Somebody’s been flying for days and days, hasn’t she? Somebody needs a massage again,” she said, as if she were talking to someone’s adorable Pomeranian. “Yes she does! Yes she does! You’ll get a nice massage later, yes you will!”

“Tara—” I went to start apologizing, only to have her whirl on me.

“Ohhh no,” she said, jabbing an accusatory finger in my direction. “I am going to get me some Fletcher deep inside me, and I’m not going back to HQ unless I’m leaking like a sieve.”

I mean, what could I say after that charged sentence? I stared at her, flabbergasted.

“You had better frack me a good one, Fletcher. I have been almost a week without a good fracking.”

This is a guilty Christopher about to do the duty that has been demanded of him, and without complaint.

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