Chapter 219

◈ Chapter 219:

Opal nodded at the many headed monster standing idly atop a rise before the fortress known as Lighthold. It seemed to be barely paying attention to the vicious wall to wall fighting and the screams of the dying echoing across the cavern.

"That hydra sorcerer monster is very strong, even for one of their kind. Every few years one would appear in my dungeon and they would bring so many under their control by force, and then they would make a grab for territory. Usually, the panthara would kill it, but sometimes it would be levelers. Either way, it was best to keep your head down as a gobbo. Lots and lots and lots of death follows that monster wherever it goes."

Rain made a mental note to avoid such a creature. He didn't fancy his chances being struck by a bolt of lightning of that staggering scale.

Before he could turn to go however the cloud cover above them parted, and with a cry a mass of feathered harpies descended, bows already strung and taking aim at their small group on the ledge. Rain raised his paw over his head to shield Opal, and in the same motion, grabbed for Lyra, thrusting her behind. Just in time as a shower of arrows fell on them, rattling off Vash's armour, and thudding against Rain's flesh but failing to penetrate, and doing nothing at all to Quistis as a sheet of stone rose before her.

"I think it best we move before we draw any more attention, yes?" said Vash, glancing back at the hole they had emerged from. A horrifying mass of undead panthara crawled from the dark, a tangle of mangled limbs and gore that had become connected in flesh.

Lyra looked positively ill as she looked the thing over.

"Please keep that thing out of my sight."

"Why? Are you too lowbrow to appreciate art?"

"That's-"

An arrow tinked off the stone beside her, sending a scattering of sparks over her wool.

"Look, just keep it the hell away from me and move! I don't want to be turned into a woolly pincushion!"

Like that, Rain backed along the long ledge, shielding the girls with his body until, under Opal's instruction, a second section of the cavern wall misted to smoke, burrowing back into the stone and into a small cave and toward the spot Opal was guiding them.

They swiftly stepped inside as the enraged harpies cawed promises of various extremely painful deaths in illustrative detail.

Rain glanced over his shoulder, looking one last time over the battlefield as they entered the new much more reasonably sized cave. His sharp eyes followed as hundreds of levelers were butchered by a wave of monsters sweeping up over the walls of Lighthold, lost in an orgy of death and killing. His gaze drifted across the cleared grounds below the walls, and then finally to the one watching over it all, the Hydramancer standing atop a rise, one head overlooking the conquered fort, and the rest… were looking at him.

Their eyes flashed and chromatic electrical lines arced toward the crackling piece of coal which was glowing a cherry red from its last discharge, but already alighting with white once more.

"Move! Block the way!" he roared, turning and grabbing for Lyra and Vash before leaping from the entrance into the depths of the small cave.

A brilliant flash of light, and everything within the space beyond became lit up bright as daylight for a moment before an ear-shattering roar overtook everything, the ground shuddering and bucking into the air, throwing him from his feet.

A moment later Rain raised his head from the stone and blinked motes of light from his eyes. Turning, he found the light from the vast cavern beyond spilling into the small cave they had entered, the wall entirely blasted open and stone still sloughing away to fall hundreds of feet to the forest floor below.

That is with the exception of one section. A smaller section of wall had remained intact. A slightly frazzled-looking Quistis stood before it, one hand pressed flat against a sheet of solid diamond. She did not look very pleased, especially when she noticed that the ends of her hair were smoking. She slapped the smouldering flame out and scowled.

"There's a damned good reason that my Abattoir was so successful. Any leveler with a lick of sense knows this place will take your life sooner or later."

She flung her hands out to either side and slabs of granite several meters thick rose to reform the cave wall, once more dropping them into gloom.

She turned and moved, pausing besides Rain as she passed him by.

"You want to kill a man, I understand. This is hardly the first time I have dug up under an estate to do such a thing. But I really would prefer it if we avoided staying in this godforsaken dungeon any longer than necessary, especially with such a troublesome monster nearby."

She noticed that Lyra was looking at her in dismay, "What did you take me for girl? Some kind of innocent pampered dove? I've done things that would make your fingernails curl. Now come. We have a man to kill."

Rain watched silently as a grand spiralling staircase formed beside him, the steps rising up into the darkness.

—

Lyra laboriously climbed a step, a large step, as apparently Quistis had made it suited for Rain's size, which didn't exactly help with trying to catch her breath. How freaking far up was this estate?!

She noticed Opal sitting on a step ahead of her. The goblin girl had experimented with walking for a bit, but had quickly given up and had instead taken to teleporting through the dark to keep up with their group.

Lyra passed her unsteadily, tottering on her hooves, and the goblin girl hopped up and began walking beside her.

"Were you afraid sheepy?" she spoke, after a moment of walking together.

Lyra tried to catch her breath for a reply, failed, and managed to gasp out a breathy answer.

"Because of what— happened, back there?" She closed her eyes and shook her head fractionally. "Hah. That's— just my secret, I'm always afraid, you would be mad not to be, living like this."

Opal pondered that. "You worry too much."

"No, I don't worry enough." She managed to catch half a breath, and glanced ahead. Rain was out of sight due to the turn of the stairs, but she doubted he was far.

"You didn't tell me what you did to bring him back. What did you say to him? I want to know just in case that happens again so I can do the same thing in an emergency."

Opal hopped up a few stairs ahead and turned to look at Lyra.

"I told him that we would never have sex ever again if he didn't get his head on straight right now."

Lyra pinched the bridge of her nose, "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I just heard you correctly. Are you telling me you risked being torn limb from limb to tell Rain that you wouldn't bonk?"

Opal scratched her cheek. "Yeah. Pretty much."

Lyra stared at her.

"What!? Don't look at me like that! It worked perfectly, just as I thought it would."

"I… don't follow…" said Lyra feeling faint, or maybe that was just the way too many stairs.

Opal tilted her head. "That's because you're thinking like a leveler sheepy. Rain just became too monstery is all, acting all on instinct. He wanted to hunt and eat, obviously."

"Wait, are you telling me—

"Mhmm! Base instinct, to eat, to hunt, to survive… and to breed, like any living thing. It's something I figured out from watching. Even at his worst, he still has priorities, desires, needs, and obviously, that means a need to reproduce. He just needed to hear it."

"... I… I cannot believe that actually worked," mumbled Lyra feeling more than a little lost.

What the hell was she supposed to do if Rain became like that again?!? Strip naked in front of him or get eaten??? If it happened again, if she were alone with Rain, what would she do? She tried to imagine it. Just a poor defenceless sheep girl helpless before this giant masculine monster, left to be ravaged by a wild thing in the woods, nothing but base instinct and raw sex, his hips brutally thrusting as she was pinned, pounding over and over and over between her thighs, gasping and moaning as she came her brains out and—

"Hey, are you listening, sheepy?"

Lyra blinked. "Uh."

Maybe all this exercise was getting to her. She'd never been a cardio type of girl, and now she was even drifting into admittedly pleasant daydreams!

Opal looked the huffing and puffing Lyra over.

"You know, you could have asked Rain to carry you."

"I don't plan on being carried everywhere forever. It's embarrassing okay..."

Opal tapped her lip. "You might not have a choice depending on how big you get. You don't realise how heavy this is. If I couldn't move through the shadows, I don't know if I could do anything useful at all." She patted her rounded belly for emphasis.

She was indeed extremely pregnant with a taut round dome of a belly and popped out belly button. Her wrapped breasts, which had grown significantly larger with her pregnancy, rested heavily atop. The cloth wrap was stained dark over her nipples, not even regular milking was enough to keep up with her production these days.

Lyra gave her pregnancy a blank look, then glanced down at her own arced stomach, her own mass that was rapidly increasing as the days went by.

Apparently, it wasn't just goblins who had rapid reproduction. Whatever species Rain was, had a similar kind of speed, and she was taking the full brunt of that, life growing within her at an astounding rate.

She was sure she hadn't fully processed that fact, but there were so many other things to worry about that she just hadn't found the time to come to terms with it.

"Wait, hold on, you think it's heavy? But aren't you..." Lyra closed her mouth. She had recently discovered that Opal was surprisingly strong, stronger than herself who was naturally stronger with levels, stronger than any goblin she had ever heard of.

Which meant that if Opal was struggling with the weight, then it was a very heavy pregnancy indeed.

Thus her own pregnancy, which was liable to be significantly larger due to herself being larger than Opal, was also liable to be significantly heavier.

She let out a groan at the thought. Really, pregnancy seemed very inconvenient! She very much did not like the thought of lugging around what was likely to be an outsized weight, if what Opal said was true.

...Maybe she should just get used to being carried.

She was about to say as much when the person who would be doing said carrying came into view and Lyra realised that they had finally, at last, reached the top of this endless staircase from hell. She fell to all fours with a weary groan and tried to catch her breath.

Definitely carried. Being carried sounded nice.

Opal popped out of the shadows beside Quistis and Vash.

"We're right below the big leveler house," she looked up and around at the stone of the ceiling, "So uhm, that way?"

Quistis frowned. "Do you not know the location of the target's bedchamber?"

"I didn't exactly have time to go on a tour last time I was here..."

"...That is decidedly not a piece of information you want to lack when executing an assassination."

"Doesn't matter," said Rain. "Your ability can guide us. See to it."

Quistis did not look pleased with the impromptu nature of the job, but after a moment got to work carving at the wall, smoke descending down the stairs behind them to backfill the path they had taken.

Lyra haggardly climbed to her hooves and followed after the others as a passage was carved into the stone.

It didn't take long before the Lamia was stopping, forming a few steps to climb, then brushing her hand creating a small space for her head above. A bronze slot appeared and she peered through. She hummed and pulled back allowing Lyra to step up and see.

From low down near the floor Lyra was given a view of a grand hall in a state of devastation. The roof had been punctured and the rooms above obliterated, as if something massive had crashed down upon it from the sky leaving a crater in the hall's floor. Early morning light filtered down through the hole above.

Whatever had caused the crater was no longer there, although the masses of blood stains that covered most of the hall's floor remained. So did the water damage, and the shattered furniture that had been piled up against the walls.

A slightly dazed-looking maid tottered through this. Well, Lyra couldn't really blame her for that. What had happened here had been horrifying and would understandably take some days for any of those who witnessed it to recover. This was where the horrible predation stuff Rain possessed had been given free reign as one of the most awful monsters Lyra knew of, a panthara. It had been a slaughter, but it had given them their chance to escape.

Now they were back. Perhaps that was her fault. If Eliza the watermage hadn't been accidentally obliterated then Rain wouldn't be on the verge of losing his mind.

She drew back, firming her resolve. She couldn't lose him. Even if she had to sacrifice her already faltering moral compass. She was carrying his offspring for crying out loud!!

"Not here, this is just the main foyer."

Finding the sleeping quarters ended up taking longer than Rain would have liked, having to descend back down and peek back up as they navigated through the mansion.

As they continued deeper the chambers grew more extravagant, each room furnished with ever more luxury and opulence. Of course what they were after wasn't at ground level, and after some debate, Quistis cut off the end of a hallway and crafted a hidden stair up into the upper floors.

She only had to do it twice before they came across what they were looking for.

"This is definitely the right kind of part of the building for it," said Lyra as they came across the first of the bedrooms, a grand thing with a silk clad bed. Rain nodded in agreement. They didn't bother descending back, instead crossing the bedroom and peeking into the room next door, finding it empty and having Quistis form a door, and then another as they traversed through the rooms directly.

Quistis cut a small pinhole to peer through into the next room. "Hmm. The target, I suppose," she spoke, voice barely a whisper.

Rain took his turn and peered through the hole. It wasn't just that it was the largest and grandest room they had seen so far, there was someone curled up in the fetal position underneath the heavy duvet of the large bed. It was Brax, it had to be, Rain recognized the clothes of the man when he had last seen him strewn across the floor. Along with the clothes were over a hundred empty glass potion bottles scattered across the room, a few drips of whatever orange substance had been in them all that remained. No doubt some kind of booze, which likely meant a heavy sleep. Rain was vaguely aware Brax had liked his drink in Lynthia, renting out entire inns for decadent messy parties…. And finally, the spears that Brax had used to casually dismantle Rain in combat were leaning against the wall, one of them marked with dried red, his blood.

It was him. He drew back from the wall.

Rain no longer had any interest in fighting Brax. He would kill him while he slept before the powerful leveler could do anything. He didn't care even in the slightest that it was effectively a furtive assassination, not when his sanity was hanging in the balance, not now that Lyra and Opal were in constant danger from himself.

The only question was, how to do it?

He glanced at Quistis.

The lamia could potentially end Brax's life with ease, filling his lungs with smoke and then suffocating him to death, and perhaps that would be the ideal way to do it... But he knew well it wouldn't be instant, and the minutes or seconds it would take for him to die could result in some very bad things. A desperate and powerful leveler was capable of a lot of scary things.

Brax might get up and simply kill them all in the time it took him to die.

He didn't want to leave it to chance.

…Alternatively, there was Lyra, her unique kind of invisibility was ideal for assassination. But that was not something he could sit back and watch, and besides, with the way the sheep girl was looking at him, she very clearly didn't want anything to do with this particular deed. She had attempted to take Wranvyre's life, and accidentally taken Eliza's, but in the end, this kind of thing went against her nature.

Opal… would likely love to do it, but he found he couldn't ask it of her, definitely not when she was so heavily with child, if she could even manage it.

Vash? There were no undead here beyond perhaps a rat. The mass of panthara had been obliterated by lightning. And unfortunately no undead rat would be able to use a blade with the stealthy precision needed… neither could an undead panthara for that matter.

Which left himself.

He had levelled it seemed, when he had been caught in the panthara ambush, which meant he was a little stronger, a little better, a little faster, reaching level twenty-two… But he was once more disappointed to find he had acquired no Class. Nothing. He was beginning to strongly suspect that there was something wrong with his levelling, which maybe wasn't surprising considering he wasn't technically a leveller.

His limited set of base Skills were of little use for assassination.

On the other hand his predation was singularly ideal for dealing swift and sudden death.

He rolled his digits and dark oozed from his fur, coalescing over his claws, extending, becoming a set of five scythe-like blades that extended from his paw well over a foot.

But no, this plan too wasn't ideal. He could admit to himself that he was hardly built for assassination. Assassins weren't typically over ten foot tall.

The answer was simple then. He would do both of his best options at the same time to maximise success.

It didn't take long to explain the plan to Quistis, and as she silently pulled apart the bedroom wall smoke drifted and curled through the air to settle on top of the duvet in a cloying shroud, slipping bit by bit beneath as Brax drew in breath, drawing more and more of the deadly smoke into his lungs.

Brax was already a dead man. He just wasn't awake to know it.

But before too much of the deadly smoke was breathed in, Rain took his first cautious step into the room.

Thankfully the floor was stone. If it had been wood, there was a snowflake's chance in hell he could have managed any kind of stealth.

All the same, it was very difficult to lower each massive foot paw down against the flagstones in such a way to create no noise. He went slow, glancing behind to see Opal peeking around the corner as Lyra stood out of view, clearly not willing to witness what he was about to do.

Vash watched with his arms crossed. Rain had little doubt the necromancer would immediately try to resurrect Brax. Lastly there was Quistis, her brow furrowed and hands raised as she focused on carefully feeding Brax her deadly smoke.

Another step and Rain was looming over the bed, his breath coming shallow as anticipation filled him, the answer to his problem was just below the covers.

His paw clad in predation was raised over the bed, over Brax's head, and he tensed, ready to punch down and instantly kill the occupant.

He began to move, and in the same moment, the occupant spasmed, letting out a retching cough as the smoke filled their lungs entirely, unable to breathe, and then completely unable to breathe as the smoke became solid stone, a negative cast of their lungs.

His paw smashed down in an instant with his full strength behind it, torquing down with arm, torso and hips.

He hit so forcefully that the scythes sliced through the covers as if they weren't even there, through the head of the person below, through the mattresses, and then obliterated the wooden frame of the bed beneath, shattering it in two and smashing the bed to the ground, his paw crushing wood to splinters against the stone floor which cratered on impact, his paw piercing fully through the floor.

A flicker of blood red caught his eye through the shredded covers, goose feathers filling the air.

He had done it. Brax was dead, and the relief of it filled him.

Then the red bloomed and the bed exploded.

FWOOMPH!!

The duvet was turned to flecks of ash and Rain was blown off his feet, blasted back from the bed. He smashed into the wall behind, the thing collapsing around him as he hit, and was sent tumbling into the room beyond.

From the bed rose a figure made of living fire, a transparent elf made of flame of a female form, one with her head split in two.

The figure seemed confused, staggering around on the mattress, igniting it, the wooden frame lighting up.

And then the figure's head eased back together and a moment later solidified, real flesh and hair forming from what had been sculpted fire.

A stark naked Myra stumbled back from the bed, her wavy brown hair tumbling around her shoulders, the tanned elf clearly in a state of utter confusion.

She scrabbled frantically at her head, fingers feeling and touching to see that she was still whole. A shuddering helpless gasp escaped her mouth, almost a sob of relief, as she found herself uninjured.

Apparently she had fully experienced having her head divided in two despite whatever Skill she had used. A Skill that had allowed her to escape the solid stone block that her lungs had become and had also saved her from having her head shredded.

Rain rose from the rubble of the wall with a growl.

To his great irritation this wasn't Brax, and to his even greater irritation, Myra had escaped what was effectively two attempts on her life at the literal same time, the first attempt interfering with the second to prevent its success.

Nevertheless, this was one of his murderers.

Her life would do to staunch his steadily leaking sapience.