Godsforsaken

Chapter 21: Little Big Fox

“I am so sorry”, I told Yume, perhaps for the twelfth time. “If I hadn't stopped you you wouldn't have gotten hurt.”

“Can either of you shut him up already?”, Yume asked Selene and Alisha. “I already told him that if anyone needed to be sorry it would be me, for trying to kill someone we still wanted to pump for information.”

“Don't bother. He's got a stubborn streak a mile wide”, Selene told her.

“I'm not going to let you call me stubborn, little miss headstrong”, I told the blonde paladin and she stuck her tongue out at me. “Very mature”, I said.

“Alright, enough with the doom and gloom”, Alisha said. “We just beat a Dark Lord. It was a fight. People get hurt in fights. That's why you have me around. We should be celebrating and looting his treasure hoard... Not necessarily in that order.”

And so we did. Kind of. We began by breaking down the hydra's massive body and yeah, Selene hadn't been lying when she'd said the dragon horns had been all but impossible to break. We actually had to crack the skulls around the horns to get them loose. The meat was already partially cooked and so it was easy to have a taste and decide that we wanted as much as we could save. The skin, teeth, horns, scales and claws would all fetch an amazing price and so would the meat, except we'd be keeping a good portion of that for ourselves.

The barghests were a point of contention. Selene and Yume had wanted to just burn the bodies, given they were clearly corrupted by Outsider powers, but Alisha and I argued against them. Normal barghest pelts already provided a resistance to ethereal enemies and I had a suspicion that these barghest pelts, tainted by the Outside, would provide a resistance to Outsider forces like Darklight as well. In the end, we had agreed to skin them and then burn the rest of the bodies.

Once we were done with that we went in search of the Dark Lord's treasure hoard. Yume had wondered how I was so sure there would even be one so I had explained the basics to her.

Dark Lord castles, similarly to dungeons, were places rich with mana and if weapons and other equipment was left lying around in places rich with mana they would accumulate enchantments over time. If someone had exclusive access to a dungeon this could even be used to farm enchantments. If you left a barrel full of swords inside a dungeon for a couple weeks you would come back to find them all holding minor enchantments. If you brought those weapons to an enchanter, he could then extract the enchantments and recombine them and pass them on to other weapons. Afterwards you could bring that barrel full of swords back into the dungeon to let them accumulate more enchantments. So if the rumors were true that the royal family sat on top of an impossibly old dungeon, and I firmly believed that they were, they could be farming for better and better enchantments on top of farming all the other valuable materials a dungeon could provide. That would also go a long way towards explaining how all royal guards ran around wielding high tier magic items.

The same phenomenon was also the reason why every Dark Lord had a treasure hoard, as their castles had the same effect of slowly enchanting all the gear stored in them. They simply left all the weapons of their defeated foes in a treasure room so they could soak up the mana. This was why Dark Lords needed to be destroyed as fast as possible. If you let them operate long enough for the weapons in their treasure hoard to accumulate good enchantments they would become a much bigger threat as their orcs and goblins would all suddenly carry much better gear. As I said before, the issue with goblins is never that you are outclassed but that you are always outnumbered. However, if each of those goblins carried a high tier magic weapon, that could get ugly.

But that also meant that every Dark Lord, each and every one, had a treasure hoard for exactly that purpose and, well, we'd just slain the castle's owner and thus we were entitled to all he had collected.

To my surprise it took us quite a while to find the treasure hoard. They were usually easy to find but this Lord had apparently believed in hiding it away. Finally I got the idea of checking inside the cages his beasts had been in and, sure enough, at the very back of the hydra's cage was a door that led to the treasure hoard. And judging by the state of the treasure hoard we had arrived just in time. A whole mess of weapons, shields, armor pieces and jewelry, all of them with enchantments on them, was laid out before us alongside a small mountain of mun.

So what was up with the mun? No, the Dark Lord hadn't been trying to imbue coins with enchantments. But those same environments rich with mana also sometimes made coins and small gems multiply. It was an extremely slow and unreliable process but it was possible. Some merchants paid out of the nose for vaults rich with mana to leave their money in for just this purpose.

All in all, between the Chosen One's bag of holding and this treasure hoard we found about fifteen thousand mun as well as gear that would fetch another fifteen thousand if we sold it. And that was already discounting the stuff we kept for ourselves.

Alisha grabbed a ring that increased casting speed by 25%, Yume grabbed one that powered up fire magic by 25%, Selene found one that increased dexterity by 20% and I found myself a ring with an ability called Spring Of Life Force, which according to its description kept the wearer's exhaustion at bay but between Yume and me we figured out it would let me use more Qi techniques without feeling the strain. Yume had enough Qi reserves that she had no use for it, so I kept it.

Of course, analyzing all those magic items had been a pain since only I had an enchanted appraiser's loupe that could glean information about magic items.

In one corner of the treasure hoard we found a set of gear with enchantments that were... off. They felt as if Outside forces had meddled with them and again Yume and Selene wanted to slag them and I found myself agreeing with them until Syr told us that they were almost certainly safe if we used them while wearing gloves. The gear itself was too good to waste, honestly.

A shield that could not just negate Darklight but also reflect it back.

A mace that could break through Outsider force fields when swung two-handed.

A sword that slowed the regeneration of followers of the Black Goat down to normal speeds.

A knife that could cut out the Black Goat's cankers without a chance of them growing back.

And finally a magic wand that could mess with the spells animating undead creatures.

Every single one of them was worth its weight in precious gems to someone hunting Outsiders and cultists.

Behind those we found another set of gear that we did end up destroying, by unanimous consent. The first one was the flayed face of a goat that, if worn as a mask, would give the wearer near-perfect regeneration but at the cost of slowly turning them into a creature of Shub-Niggurath. And that was the least vile of the bunch.

Weirdly, no matter how much I looked I couldn't find the collar Yume had been wearing anywhere. Not in the throne room and not anywhere else.

When we were done looting the place it was late in the afternoon and all of us were exhausted. So the last thing we wanted was to be held up for even a moment. So of course that's exactly what happened. As we exited the castle a ray of light shone down from the now clear skies and out of it stepped Athena.

“Felix Tailor”, she said by way of greeting. “You just couldn't let it go, could you?”

“What?”, I asked. “Did you think I would refuse this job because you told me to?”

“Tell me”, she said. “Did you take the quest because you wanted to take it or simply to spite me?”

I considered that for a moment, then told her: “Do you honestly think I base any of my decisions on what you say, one way or the other? You're giving yourself too much credit.”

As Athena fumed I felt a tug on my sleeve and turned around.

Selene and Alisha both had neutral looks on their faces but Yume, who had tugged on my sleeve, looked confused. She was currently wearing a simple tunic and a pair of pants, the pant legs rolled up over and over and a hole poked into the back for her tails to go through. Her weird garment had been salvageable but I would need to put a lot of work into fixing it up for her and so she was wearing some of Selene's cast-offs, though the blonde was a good bit taller than Yume. Alisha had offered her some of her own garments but anything that worked on Alisha's lithe frame looked obscene on Yume's much more generous proportions.

“Who is this, Felix?”, Yume asked.

It was only then that I remembered that Yume had never met Athena, had probably never even heard of her.

“Ah right. Yume, meet Athena, the Olympian goddess of”, I cleared my throat loudly and rudely before finishing on a flat note: “Wisdom.”

I felt a low growl coming from my little fox and she asked: “Is she an ally of Ares?”

I chuckled as Athena stood there dumbfounded. She probably wasn't used to mortals interrupting her conversations and even less used to mortals ignoring her for other mortals.

“No”, I told Yume. “Athena is overbearing, controlling and annoying, but if there's one nice thing I can say about her it's that she hates Ares almost as much as I do.”

At that Yume relaxed but Athena trembled with rage.

I thought I'd ignored Athena for long enough so I turned back to her and asked: “So, was there a reason you didn't want me to take this quest or is this another one of those 'mortal minds are too feeble to comprehend my reasons' things?”

Athena trembled for another second before she, too, relaxed and spoke, her cheeks red with what I thought was anger: “I do not know if I ever told you this, but I can look into the future. Of course the future is ever shifting but with enough practice I have learned to see the rough shape of how things might turn out. There was a chance of about eighty-five percent that you would die on this quest. Normally your quests don't break forty percent.”

I blinked. “You were worried about me?”, I asked, dumbfounded.

She chuckled. “Now you're the one giving yourself too much credit, Tailor”, she said, putting emphasis on my last name to remind me what I was supposed to be. “While I cannot overstate how much it pains me to admit this, you unfortunately do quite a lot of good in this world and if you had died here it would have been unfortunate.”

“So despite all the gods ignoring me I still do enough good that even you have to acknowledge it?”, I asked, grinning. “Guess I'm better than I thought I was.”

“Fuck you, Tailor”, she spat.

“So”, I said, trying to change the topic. “Was that seriously the only reason you didn't want me to take this quest?”

She shook her head, calm again but for the flush of anger on her face. “There were... forces at play. I am still trying to figure everything out, but something was off about this game.”

Game. That's what the gods called the fights between Chosen Ones and Dark Lords. Games. As if all those deaths, all that pain, all of these sacrifices, were just an evening's entertainment to them. I wanted to hurl insults at her, but instead I asked:

“You mean besides the fact that this Dark Lord was sponsored by Shub-Niggurath?”

Her eyes snapped up to me. “He was WHAT?”, she asked, utter shock in her voice. “Are you quite certain of this?”

I was going to point at the creepy canker wall or the trees that looked halfway through a transformation into Dark Young but as I looked around I saw that all of that was gone. There had been some of it left even after Alisha's Cleanse miracle so they must have disappeared when we killed the Dark Lord himself. So instead I dug around in my bag of holding for one of the flasks of red milk and held it out to her.

“If you don't believe me, the Dark Lord had an ice box full with these”, I said.

She took the flask and stared at it, her eyes going out of focus as if looking at something only she could see. After a few seconds of staring she yelped and threw the vial on the ground as if it had bitten her.

“Why would you keep this?!”, she demanded.

“If you have a poison you can use it to brew an antidote”, I said simply.

“Is that the only reason?”, she asked, narrowing her eyes.

I rolled my eyes and held up a hand, then intoned: “I swear upon my power that I had no intention of drinking any of this substance or of giving it to anyone else for the purpose of consumption.” The oath snapped into place and as I had told the truth I did not drop to the ground in pain.

“Good enough”, she said. “So, a Dark Lord of Shub-Niggurath. How did he get that power? If the Black Goat were active in this world we would surely know.” I considered how much I could tell her. The last thing I wanted was for her to want Syr's body dead before I had a chance to get the body-snatcher out of it. But there was no need to hide the most basic information.

“He spoke of a woman calling herself the Holy Maiden”, I said. “This Holy Maiden claims to be the Black Goat's mouthpiece in our world and he claimed that he had gained his power through her.”

“That is worrying”, Athena said. “If anyone can hand out this much of an Outer God's power they must be incredibly dangerous. She would need to be at the same level as a Saint, if not a Great Saint.”

“Or maybe even stronger”, I said. “Consider that Necromancers are much more dangerous than the average wizard.”

“True”, she said. “I will need to monitor this situation.”

“You two get along surprisingly well when you're talking shop”, Selene remarked.

Athena and I stared at her, then turned to glare at each other and then we both turned away in a huff.

“You said there was something else off about this situation, goddess Athena”, Alisha said. She was still polite to the goddess but no longer showed her even a hint of deference. I guessed I was rubbing off on her.

“Right”, Athena said, catching herself. “Frankly I still do not know quite what is going on, which is vexing, but Ares was very insistent on handling this situation himself. In fact, I only found out about this game by chance.”

“The Chosen One's miracles all came from Ares”, I mused. “Maybe he just didn't want anyone to interfere?”

“Yes, but why?”, Athena asked. “Why would he need to keep this a secret? If Ares were fighting worshipers of the Black Goat father would likely reward him for it if he learned of it.”

“Maybe he wanted to keep all the glory to himself?”, I asked but Athena ignored me.

“Oh, that reminds me”, Athena said, then turned to Yume. “Who is your new companion? The priestess and the paladin I've been introduced to, but you are new to me.”

I shut up and nodded for Yume to answer.

“My name is Yume. I am a... I guess your land would know me as a witch. I was captured by slavers, sold to the Olympian Ares and then gifted to his Chosen One like a piece of equipment. Felix freed me.”

Athena's response shocked me. She began fuming and for a moment I thought I'd set her off again. “Ares, you spawn of a mountain goat's asshole”, she muttered under her breath, then looked back at Yume: “Lady Yume, as a member of the Olympians I wish to formally apologize for my... cousin's behavior. It was unacceptable and if I have any say in it he will suffer consequences for it.”

I could have called her out on that because there was no way the Olympians would ever punish one of their own when they could be punishing some innocent mortal instead but I held my tongue. I wasn't the one who'd been wronged.

“I thank you for your sympathy, goddess Athena”, Yume said.

Athena looked at me, a little smug. “What a polite young lady. You should follow her example some time, Tailor”, the goddess said.

“That ship has long since sailed, oh goddess of wisdom”, I told her. “You had your chance to prove that you were worthy of my worship and you squandered it.”

That wiped the smile off her face. She glared at me and then turned to leave.

“Any more cryptic warnings?”, I asked.

She looked over her shoulder at me and smirked. “Beware of tulips”, she told me, then walked back into her pillar of light and was gone.

**

Meetings with gods were exhausting. Even when there was no chance for things to turn violent they're scary. I always had to make sure to walk a tight line between insulting them and not giving them a reason to escalate. I had a decent rapport with Athena but she was still a little volatile and my women were much more cowed by a goddess talking down to them than I was.

When we had relaxed a little Alisha was about to use her Homeward miracle to take us home, but Yume stopped her.

“There is something I need to show you and I would rather do it out here than in a city”, the little fox said.

I already knew what was coming but Selene and Alisha didn't. I assured them it wasn't anything bad and then led them to a nice clearing.

“Go ahead, Yume”, I told her. “I've been curious.”

She walked up close to me and whispered: “Promise you won't hate me”, she said.

“I would never hate you”, I said as I hugged her.

She stared into my eyes, looking for any hint of deceit but finding none. Finally she nodded and walked off, her back to us, and began undressing.

“What is she doing?”, Selene asked while Alisha was way too busy staring at the cute fox's tails. Or maybe just at her cute round butt.

“You'll see”, I said.

Just then Yume, now fully naked, turned around. I felt myself admiring the curves of her body but she didn't give me much time for that before she bent forward and began glowing. A light blue glow suffused her body until she looked to be made entirely of light and then her form shifted, becoming more bestial and growing in size. The tiny little fox woman kept growing rather alarmingly and when she was finished and the glow died she had become a fox. A fox as tall as a draft horse. Except foxes had much shorter legs than horses so while she was as tall as a horse she was much longer and her three tails added yet more to her intimidating size. In this form she was easily big enough to wrap her jaws around my head and pop it like a tomato, but that really wasn't what I was thinking about at the time.

She was gorgeous.

Her entire body was covered in fur the same fiery red as her hair in her humanoid form, with white fur on her underside, around her muzzle and at the tips of her tails. Her fur looked luxurious and silky soft and the whiskers around her muzzle twitched adorably as she took in our scent. But the most striking feature were her light blue eyes, something I'd never seen on any real fox ever.

If she was expecting revulsion she'd be sorely disappointed.

I looked at her with awe and reached out a hand. I stroked over the side of her muzzle, tickling the soft white fur on the side, then followed the lines of her long jaw and scratched the soft fur under her head.

“You're gorgeous”, I told her.

I didn't know whether she could speak in this form, but she surprised me when she asked: “It's not weird?” She didn't need to move her mouth to speak, the words just sort of projected outward from her. It was still recognizably Yume's voice, but louder and more powerful.

I positioned myself in front of her, grabbed the huge fox head by the cheeks, the rounded spots along the side fitting perfectly into my hands, and leaned forward until our foreheads rested against each other's. I looked her right in the eyes as I said:

“Absolutely not.”

After a few seconds of just sharing some intense eye contact I turned around and looked at Selene and Alisha. I had been a little worried about their reaction but I needn't have. When I stepped back the two of them walked over to her and started petting Yume as well. Selene even poked Yume's big black nose, causing the huge fox to sneeze.

“So”, I asked her eventually. “Are all kitsune this big when they transform?”

She shook her head, which looked really weird on a fox. “The more tails we grow the bigger we become”, she said. “When I had one tail I was as big as a wolf. When I grew the second tail I grew to the size of a pony and so on.”

“So when you grow the ninth tail...”, I began.

“When I grow the ninth tail it's a good thing I'll be immortal because I'd be so big that most people would assume I was a walking calamity”, she confirmed.

“Immortal?”, Alisha asked. “It seems there is a lot we don't know about you yet.”

“I'm sorry”, Yume said. “We haven't really had much time to talk yet. But I promise I'll tell you everything now that I no longer have to pretend to be with the Chosen One.” Then she laid down on the grass and asked us: “Lay with me? It's nice being able to take this form again.”

I nodded to Alisha and Selene and we all laid down against Yume's side and she curled up around us, wrapping her tails around us like a fluffy blanket and her head resting on our legs.

We were huddled up for hours, just talking about everything and nothing, mostly Yume and me filling Selene and Alisha in on everything we hadn't been able to share yet and then Yume talking about the country she was born in. After a while I extricated myself and began setting up a campfire and then roasting some of the hydra meat on it. It was surprisingly tender meat, about the consistency of some of the more tender cuts of beef, with fat generously marbled through it but no big blubbery concentrations of fat anywhere, which made it great for roasting up over a fire. Just a little salt, pepper and butter were enough to turn it into a decadent meal and soon we were ready to eat. When I told the ladies that dinner was ready Yume shifted back into her humanoid form and when I asked her why she had shifted back she blushed.

“I don't really feel comfortable eating in that form”, she told me. “I would probably need way more food that way and I'd rather eat with my hands.” Then she added quietly: “I am... a little protective of what's left of my dignity...”

I hugged her to me and said: “It's all good, my little fox. I know you need time to heal after what happened and you will get it.”

She looked up at me, her eyes glistening, and nodded.

“And now put some clothes on, you're distracting me”, I added and she blushed and growled. Not her usual fox growl, the one that made her whole body vibrate, but just the cute growl of an exasperated girl.

We ate in silence for a little while. Not an awkward silence, mind, just the silence of desperately hungry people digging into great food. We had the hydra meat basted with butter and then, of course, Alisha pulled out a small bag of fruits from her bag of holding and began digging in. She passed some around, but kept most to herself.

When we could finally talk again Selene asked: “So, Felix, will we make it in time for your mom's birthday?”

I nodded. “Yeah. If we travel back with Alisha's miracle we'll have a couple days before we need to get going.”

“What's this about?”, Yume asked and I filled her in.

I finished with: “You don't have to come along if you don't want to, but...”

“Of course I want to meet your mother”, the fox girl said. “And I know I don't have to. That's why I want to.”

I smiled at her and patted her head.

“So”, Alisha said, changing the topic. “You both said something about him claiming you. What does that mean?”

Yume blushed a little. “He... proved himself worthy of being my mate, proved that he was worth having me submit to him”, she explained.

“But what does that mean?”, Alisha pushed. “Does that mean you have to do anything he says or something?”

Yume and my eyes met and we smirked at each other before she answered: “Not at all. The reason I was willing to give myself to him is because he respects my strength and because he doesn't want me to be an obedient little thrall.”

At that Alisha nodded and relaxed. “Yeah, that makes more sense”, Alisha said, not explaining further so I explained for her:

“It was the same for her.”

Alisha blushed.

“What does he mean?”, Yume asked the elf.

“Felix was the first one who valued me for my skills and saw me for who I was.”

Yume nodded in understanding, then turned to Selene. “And what is it that you value about him?”, she asked the paladin who had been content to just listen to our conversation.

When Selene took a moment to answer Alisha grinned and made an up and down gesture near her crotch, as if indicating something big. Selene lightly punched her arm when she noticed.

“He saved me”, Selene finally said. “When I was at my lowest, he saved me and gave me the chance to take my life back. And he doesn't mind my scars.”

“I don't want to take credit for that”, I said. “If I hadn't been so stupid you wouldn't have gotten hurt in the first place. And of course I don't mind your scars.”

Selene glared at me. We'd had this discussion plenty of times. “It wasn't your fault”, she told me. “You couldn't have known that. And you still saved me. Not just by cutting me loose but by letting me kill the bastard myself.”

I glared back at her, then said: “I'll accept that it wasn't my fault when you accept that you look gorgeous with and without your scars.”

“What are you talking about?”, Yume asked.

In response Alisha sidled up to Selene and began rolling up Selene's long sleeves. The paladin resisted, but after a few whispered words from Alisha she relented. When she was done with the sleeves of Selene's tunic Alisha began to roll up the paladin's pant legs. With the cloth out of the way the crisscrossing scars along her limbs were clearly visible.

A Dark Lord had cut her up after knocking us out and Alisha and I had only managed to save her after he'd begun torturing her. She was desperately ashamed of these scars and thought they made her ugly, but I couldn't disagree more. They made her look like a warrior and the pale scars all over her fair skin looked amazing.

Selene looked away as Yume looked her over, the shame evident in the paladin's expression. After a few seconds Yume came closer and traced her fingers gently across Selene's forearms and whispered: “Gorgeous.”

“You don't mean that”, Selene said.

“I do”, the fox girl said. “They look like pale vines wrapping around your arms. They remind me of the markings of the followers of Raijin, the thunder god, as if lightning had traveled all along your limbs.”

“Exactly”, I said, then turned to Selene and said: “Looks like you're still the only one who has a problem with them.”

She grumbled at me.

“If you keep putting yourself down I'm not going to do that thing I told you I would”, I told her.

Her eyes widened. “That's not fair”, she protested.

I smirked. “All's fair in love and war”, I told her.

“What are you talking about?”, Yume asked again.

I grinned. “Well...”, I began and Selene cut me off:

“Nothing!” Then she turned to me and said: “Alright fine, you win, you bastard. My scars look fine. Now say it wasn't your fault.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, but then gave up and rolled them instead. “Alright, it wasn't my fault”, I said. “And because you were so honest for me you'll get your reward when we're back home.”

I couldn't believe I'd just successfully bribed her into accepting what we thought of her scars by promising her anal sex and, from Selene's expression, neither could she.