Drip-Fed
Trauma Monster 4 – The Last Stop

Aliande arranged their passage swiftly. It was not difficult to find one. Stallious and Finaven were in regular contact with each other. It was just a few days by sea and the loot the Level 75 Warrior gathered from the Necro Lord’s Crypt was more than worth the 3-day journey. In return, Finaven sold passages and fish.

Its name was a simple abbreviation of Final Haven. As a settlement, it was entirely focused around the fishing and the adventuring industry. It was the third largest settlement in the world, after Drowse and Altuan, for no other reason than being the frontier outpost. While the Sleeping Empire poured their funds into the west, the Adventurer’s Guild sent steady resources to the east.

There were mysteries still to discover on this Leaf. The north-eastern Influence Zone was just one of them. Few had grown strong enough to venture into the Necro Lord’s Crypt and they had made their base there. As the party itself had proven recently, the Temples of Temptations were far from completely mapped either.

They were on the third and final journey across. The ship was decently large and the wealth of the Necro Lord’s Crypt was apparent even in this vessel. Rather than one big room for all of the visitors, there were compartments for each party. Not large compartments, but enough to make this seafaring more pleasant.

“You know, that shit is pretty cool,” Reysha commented.

Apexus smiled lightly. It was a short lapse in concentration, making the surface of the bubble of water on his finger ripple. Immediately, he returned his attention to it, stabilizing the sphere. He tilted his hand, letting it ‘roll’ down his palm. The pull of gravity eased the motion somewhat.

“The virtue is to channel and direct forces, rather than create them,” Apexus explained.

A sudden, small gesture launched the water into the air. It almost lost its cohesion, removed from Apexus’ tactile sense and thus the extent of his telekinesis. The Edge of his other hand bifurcated the sphere horizontally. One half was pulled along his left, the other pulled into a smaller sphere on his right.

He balanced the spheres for a bit, then clapped his hands together. The violent impact splattered the water. Rather than scatter in droplets as they ought to, the two spheres turned into a connected web of droplets, an explosion frozen. Like glue, the liquid stretched between his palms as he drew them apart.

“Virtue, ey?” Reysha hummed and sat down cross-legged. The boat ride had given her some more time to attempt to tune into Apexus’ meditation exercises. So far, she had been failing miserably. ‘He said it was hard to be aware of all of one’s own impulses but man, I think I got a lot more impulsive thoughts than he does… or I just got negative discipline… probably the latter.’

Aclysia was contently watching her darling and the redhead meditate. One was gesturing esoterically, drawing the water into more and more challenging shapes, the other was rolling her neck and scratching her ears. Reysha’s inability to truly concentrate on her inner self was apparent to everyone, but they did not mock her for trying. Jokes to that end had been made plenty of times before.

All of the concentration came to an end when Korith burst in. “We are rich!” she declared.

The water had been in the shape of an arch between Apexus’ raised hands. Now it was a splash that soaked his hair and pants. Reysha opened up one eye, then the other when she saw her wet man. She broke out laughing.

Channelling his frustrations, Apexus gave her a light smack on the cheek. Reysha responded in kind. This escalated until they were wrestling on the floor. Shoulders hit the wooden walls with loud thumps. Someone on the other side of the wooden wall hammered back. “CAN YOU NOT FUCK FOR A FEW HOURS?!” the annoyed, muffled voice of another passenger came through the wall.

“Not… your… problem…!” Reysha would have growled louder, had she not found herself in a chokehold. Her face was gradually turning darker, her intense tan masking the colour until it turned borderline unhealthy. Just as her vision began to swim, she tapped the ground in surrender.

Reysha took trembling and excited breaths. Suggestively, she rubbed her ass against Apexus’ crotch.

Aclysia turned her head away from the impending noise complaint. “It sounds as if negotiations went well?”

“Really well.” Korith closed the door behind her and joined Aclysia by the tiny table inside the room. “Got everything sold and here…” she dropped a fat bag of coins onto the table. “…is what I got for it! 170 Platin!”

The sum was enough to make Reysha disrupt her experiment of how deep she could get her tongue into Apexus’ throat. “For real?!”

“Yup, yup.” Korith puffed up her chest and smirked ear to point ear. “I have haggled and I have wrestled and I have talked the money straight out of their bags.” She gestured at the ship around them. “Wasn’t that hard. You just have to recognize when someone has more money than they know what to do with.”

“Considering how many high level adventurers are present in this half of the world, the local inflation must be quite high,” Aclysia reckoned. “Still, 170 platin for what loot we had to sell feels excessive. You did not sell the intel on the Dungeon, did you?”

“No? Did not even mention it, as instructed. We just went to a Temple of Temptation.”

“Although if our busy-body neighbours have sharp ears, they now think we are conspiring.” Reysha pointed at the wall that had been beaten on not three minutes earlier. “By the way, are you using that erection or not?”

“I’m not a regular male. My libido is not tied to the responses of my desire.” To prove the point, Apexus made the phallus deflate between Reysha’s firm thighs. There was some protest by his animalistic side. Wrestling down and mastering that urge was another reason to go ahead with denying Reysha her advances. “We will be on land soon. You can wait.”

The redhead hissed. Anger and disappointment tumbled together into a mixture difficult to swallow. Alas, he had made his decision and she refused to be the kind of crazy that shouted over not getting fucked. A bit of pouting, that she allowed herself.

Reysha moved to the bed. Apexus drew the moisture out of his hair. Rivulets moved over his skin at a crawling pace, gathering at his fingertip. “That is so cool!” Korith exclaimed. “I mean, you’ve just been manipulating water, but it’s still pretty cool!”

“I will graduate to something larger in due time,” Apexus informed her.

Reysha closed her eyes again, crossed her legs, and tried to blend out the sounds. Her own breathing, the chatter between Korith and Apexus, Aclysia counting the coins, all of that was just noise. Noise she liked to listen to too much to get rid of.

“17 times 10 coins, all present,” the Priest said and transferred the coins into the party’s fund. “After we have found new equipment in Finaven, I will distribute the remaining money between us.”

“Crazy that we’ll finally get there,” Reysha chimed back into the conversation. “How long have we been on the road for?”

“101 days,” Aclysia answered immediately. “I asked the captain for a calendar and he provided me temporary access. As I had written down the date of departure, finding the length of the journey was quite simple.”

“Over 3 months, ey? Could have sworn it was both more and less time.”

“The Lanaan grinding session we did is likely skewing your perception.” Aclysia shuddered at her own words. Recalling the weeks upon weeks of waking up, fighting, sleeping, and fighting again, all under the demanding gaze of Apexus was… not her definition of a good time. It was the closest she had ever felt to disliking something about her darling. It had also been efficient and necessary, so she did not actually hold a grudge for it.

“Probably,” Reysha answered. She did not remember it as poorly. Exhausting, sure, yet exciting for the constant combat. She and Korith had been battered a lot more in the process as well. “Still, we’re almost there and we’ll probably need way less time on the way back – right?”

“Considering that almost half of the journey duration has been spent inside Dungeons, this is a safe assumption,” Aclysia remarked. “I simply hope that our journey will be fruitful.”

“Adeline confirmed that it was real,” Korith said. “So that should be worth a lot, right?”

“It assures this journey is not for naught.” Aclysia tied her Adventurer’s Bag to her waist again. “Her vagueness does inspire reluctance.”

The kobold gave the metal fairy a funny look. “That’s a weird way to phrase that.”

“Can something inspire reluctance?” Apexus asked, in agreement.

“I would say so.”

“Yeah, ‘course ya would, bubble butt, ya just said it.”

Debates on diction were halted by the loud ringing of a bell – the signal that they were pulling into harbour. It was also the signal for them to put on their clothes, tidy up the room, and move to the deck.

Finaven was an impressive settlement. Unlike Stallious, it was entirely natural, located in a natural bay, surrounded by steep, rocky cliffs. Taming them initially had been a difficult endeavour, but now they offered fantastic protection against the monsters that roamed from the Trauma Influence Zone up to this adventuring outpost. The houses rose, segmented row by segmented row, up the sides of the mountains encapsulating the bay.

Only in one place did the structures extend all the way to the ridge. It was an estate on a 45-degree angle, its various buildings connected by stairs that cut through slanted gardens. At its heart stood a round construct, as wide as three houses and two stories tall.

The local Guild outpost.

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“Yeah… that’s going to be impossible,” the craftsman said.

It had been difficult to get access to one in the first place. The Adventurer’s Guild had, in response to the large number of requests the locals brought, effectively monopolized the crafters. They still belonged to whatever crafting guild they actually belonged to – it was just that a large salary was offered to be at the beck and call of adventurers. An advertisement for other crafters to move there, more so than a matter of local practicality.

Guaranteed money bred a degree of laziness and being all under employ also meant that it was the Adventurer’s Guild who dictated who got access when. The Inevitable party had not had the patience to wait for weeks to get through the backlog, so they went through one of the few local crafters who worked by commission.

“I don’t have any Lanaan Hides in stock. Neither do I have the means to repair that robe properly. The Guild takes all of the good materials before they trickle down to chumps like me.”

“That was to be expected,” Aclysia sighed. “Do you happen to have anything that could serve as an improvised solution?”

“For you, I can offer you a protective shirt to wear under the robe. It won’t be as effective, but it’ll be better than nothing.” The man scanned her platonically. “Should have something in your size, your upper half is not unusually shaped.”

“As opposed to her lower half,” Reysha threw in.

“I was not going to comment… as for you, I could probably cobble something together from what I have. It won’t sit as tightly as a bodysuit, but your right side won’t be exposed anymore.”

“What will all of that cost us?”

“70 Platin.”

The benefit they had reaped from the local inflation also took its toll.

Two hours later, both Reysha and Aclysia were freshly equipped. For Aclysia, she had a simple white shirt beneath her robe, its striking cleanliness visible through the holes in her red robe. For Reysha, other leathers had been stitched onto the Lanaan hide. It was a patchwork solution, quite literally. Belts kept a leather shoulder pad in place and the sleeve was more of a series of strips held together by crafting magic and a prayer.

“This won’t last you forever, but it should be good for one Dungeon dive,” the man said.

Reysha rolled her shoulder, making sure that none of the bits and pieces made a sound. Silence was the currency that Rogue’s exchanged for the death of their enemies. “It better be, ‘cause if it I ain’t I’m finding you.”

The crafter shrugged, it wasn’t the first time he had heard that kind of threat. “I’m not moving. Have fun in Trauma.”