Adon rested.
His body had adapted to the acidic environment in which it rested, and now he was capable of drifting into that sleep-like state that he had periodically entered during his life as a caterpillar.
Even semi-conscious, he continued acting on the program that he had begun before, of trying to search through his human lives and find examples of good social skills that he co...
2024-06-11 14:30:26 +0000 UTC View PostThe descent brought Mina, Alice and Zora down just a few feet from a massive, run-down mansion.
“I never knew there was anything like this in the area where we had our apartment,” Mina said. “It’s strange—” She giggled as she realized what she’d just said. Then she shook her head. “Do you think she built it for herself?”
“Wraiths are pure evil,” Zora said, her ...
2024-06-10 17:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostAs the scouts rose to their feet and faced off against Dave and his vanguard, he forced himself to remain steady and not back down.
Identify.
Amalia Rosario (Possessed), Lv. 8
Damn it, they really are being controlled—but does that mean we can save them?
The thing wearing Amalia’s body leaned in closer to Dave, leering at him. Obvio...
2024-06-09 02:41:33 +0000 UTC View PostDave exhaled.
“All right,” he said. “You, you, and you.” He selected three more people. “That completes our scouting party.”
A few people groaned, but Dave raised his hand for silence. To their credit, they immediately clammed up.
“Unless something immediately happens to the scouting party, the rest of us will be joining them shortly.”
A little hoot of ex...
2024-06-07 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostJames wished Dave luck and then walked away from him and back to Mina, Alice, and his mother.
He was quiet and resolved. He believed this was his best plan, and he allowed himself to mentally detach a bit from the people he was sending into harm’s way.
Can’t worry about them right now. If I do, I won’t make proper use of the risk they’re taking.
He looked arou...
2024-06-05 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post“Go ahead,” Queen Maud pronounced calmly, gesturing for the messenger to speak.
In the intervening years since the time skip, she seemed to have acquired a calm and steady quality.
She was confident now, not just on the battlefield, but also on the throne and in council chambers.
Rosslyn’s lips curled into a smile as she looked on. Even though she thought she knew the tr...
2024-06-05 16:00:19 +0000 UTC View PostRosslyn dreamt.
She knew she was dreaming and that the visions that presented themselves before her eyes did not represent her reality, nor even, as far as she could tell, her own past lives. She remembered fighting a group of assassins and losing vision in one eye. She remembered her life from before this great sleep.
Instinctively, she felt more and more, the longer the visions we...
2024-06-05 14:37:05 +0000 UTC View PostOnce Goldie had thought about it for more than a moment, the choice became obvious.
You have to start with the Brown Recluse Spiders, she thought. If you leave your eggs alone to fight them, at least you know that they are occupied with you.
If she attacked the Common House Spiders first, she would be worried about her eggs the entire time.
With that decision...
2024-06-05 03:02:44 +0000 UTC View Post“Where is that spider?”
Goldie heard the voice from behind her, but with most of the wall in between her and the speaker, she could not tell whose voice it was, only that it was a woman speaking.
She desperately pressed herself more forcefully into the crevasse—and then heard a sound that made her whole body freeze up. The smallest cracking noise.
No, m...
2024-06-03 18:15:44 +0000 UTC View PostGoldie measured twice before spinning her silk once in constructing her web, as she tried to do consistently when she was not in a hurry to build a new home.
Normally, with the practice she had accumulated over her life in the garden, it only took her around an hour to build a basic web. But she liked to take longer. Goldie preferred to make more ornate and beautiful webs.
On this o...
2024-06-03 18:13:36 +0000 UTC View PostGoddess damn it! The King again…
If the King saw Goldie again, he would surely throw her back outside at the least, if not decide that she was better off killed. It seemed unlikely that the human would understand the bond that connected her and Adon. If he had understood before, he would not have left her all alone when he took the chrysalis inside. He would have brought them i...
2024-06-03 18:09:18 +0000 UTC View PostGoldie fumed helplessly.
How dare he? What gives him the right to just pluck Adon away like that?
But of course, she knew what gave him the right. This was his garden.
In the week that had passed since Adon entered his chrysalis, Goldie had purchased Claustrian Language Comprehension. Listening in on the whispered conversations among the gardeners who re...
2024-06-03 18:07:08 +0000 UTC View PostKing Alistair stalked out of the palace, his body tense as a compressed spring.
Scurrying behind him came the figure of Lord Callum, quiet determination running through his posture.
“Your Majesty—”
The King abruptly turned and walked in another direction, moving more quickly than his advisor could follow. He had a moment of quiet before Lord Callum caught up with him. 2024-06-03 18:02:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Adon lost sight of the sunlight and the outside world in an instant as the Evolution process finally kicked into gear.
He shed another layer of skin and realized that suddenly, what had been his insides felt wet and exposed. And outside.
This doesn’t seem right, he thought. Liquid moved around him within the chrysalis, and he was fairly certain that some of them ...
2024-06-03 17:50:51 +0000 UTC View Post“All right, I’ve gathered all of the volunteers,” Dave said. “We’re ready to invade the forest.”
The sun was already below the horizon as he spoke, and the whole Fisher Kingdom glowed under a brilliant, quickly fading orange halo—except the part that stood in the shadow of the evil spirit’s forest. The darkness there seemed almost impenetrable, as if there had never been t...
2024-06-03 17:34:14 +0000 UTC View PostAs Adon stepped foot into the thick tissue of discarded skin, the fabric of it moved, and he instinctively jerked back as if scalded.
He was a little nervous, he realized. Even though he knew Goldie was his friend, her species was a natural predator of his. That was only made more obvious by the fact of her Evolution into another species that was clearly much larger than she had ...
2024-05-30 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post“Haunted?” Mina repeated. “I don’t really know. I think it’s something like that. People seeing the dead. James told me about seeing—” She cut herself off.
“My dead husband,” Zora finished for her.
“Yes,” Mina said.
“You don’t have to be so delicate about it,” Zora said, smiling softly. “It’s been twenty years now. I still miss him, but I can ta...
2024-05-29 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostAdon felt the tension in his body suddenly relax.
There’s something left, he thought but did not transmit.
I’m so glad you saved some, he sent after a moment.
I was just lucky, Goldie thought. We were both lucky. I know how wasps are. They hit like natural disaster. That kind we fought is not unique. They came once when I was yo...
2024-05-28 17:00:08 +0000 UTC View PostJames allowed himself to bask in the glory of the crowd’s approbation for a long few seconds.
He smiled, wiped some gore away from his mouth, and then waited for the cheering to die down.
“Thank you to all the brave fighters who accompanied me here,” he said. “There will be other battles, but for now we have won the day and secured peace.”
There were further enthusia...
2024-05-28 01:38:35 +0000 UTC View PostAdon, Goldie thought.
Her inner voice sounded tired and muddled to him. As she formulated the thought, she was still wiggling her legs as if she could turn right side up by dog paddling through the air.
I’m here, Goldie, he replied instantly. He moved around to her side to help her up.
I was in the space between this world and the next, I think, sh...
2024-05-26 17:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostAdon tried to run, though his body was still worn down from the fight with the Queen and the bulk of the Red Slayer Spider Wasp colony, and the burden of the silk-wrapped wasps slowed him down.
He quickly used his silk cutters to cut the royal guards’ corpses away from him and marginally increase his speed.
As he raced across the distance that separated him from Goldie’s web, Ad...
2024-05-24 17:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post“I can’t believe I agreed to fight naked,” James grumbled as he placed the last piece of his equipment into his magic satchel. He now stood in the dense, humid air with no protection from the elements but his boxer briefs.
“Lord Anansi wants you to know that you negotiated well, sir,” Hester said. “You preserved what was most important. ‘A king must maintain his dignity,’ ...
2024-05-24 15:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post“Ambush!” Rosslyn shouted.
Thinking quickly, she mentally calculated the distance that she and her party had traveled.
We are closer to the fortress than to the city, right? She shook her head. Either way, we need to risk it.
She made a snap decision, conjured a burst of fire, and shot it high into the air. Any scout on either side of the border coul...
2024-05-23 15:15:41 +0000 UTC View PostRosslyn tucked her head and rolled as she landed on the ground outside Stalenton.
Her body was only lightly reinforced with Mana. Some intuition told her that they might not get away as easily as the lack of glaring obstacles suggested. She needed to save her strength.
The landing was relatively quiet. Even if there had been someone on the wall to hear, they likely would have missed...
2024-05-22 15:21:44 +0000 UTC View PostA knock came at the front door, and Mina sighed to herself.
“Sweet, could you please get that?”
Just when the baby is almost done eating and just about ready to sleep, someone is knocking…
And Mina felt like a nap herself. She knew she would be working hard through the next few days, trying to help James deal with Sister Strange and the forest specters. If she c...
2024-05-22 15:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostNow that the Black Bloodsucking Bat Queen was speaking with him, James was no longer on a hair trigger, waiting to learn whether he would have to order an attack or not. He found it possible to retake control of the situation.
“Lower your voice, please!” he barked. “I’m not deaf—yet!”
“You have no grounds to complain about being yelled at, trespasser,” she replied. B...
2024-05-20 15:22:20 +0000 UTC View PostJames and his war party reached another tree that he sensed was occupied. This time, there were more than two dozen creatures huddled together.
We’re probably going to have to abandon stealth, he assessed.
“Another volley like the last one,” he ordered. “Everyone with firearms, be ready to pick off any creatures that try to fly away. With this many, they’re not li...
2024-05-17 17:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe caterpillar and the wasp spiraled down together, away from the rooftop, falling toward the soil. Adon’s home terrain.
As if the battle had not already more or less ended in his favor, he added a bit of insult to injury by pulling his mandibles out of her body and positioning the Queen so as to shield himself from the brunt of their fall.
Their combined weight made it the harde...
2024-05-16 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostJames looked on in near awe as a half-dozen bats fell from the sky, shot through with bullet holes that, in several cases, had visibly shredded their thin wing membranes. As they fell, fireballs and small bolts of lightning struck them. Even a few carefully aimed rocks undoubtedly hurled by the Goblins using their slings.
But he was most impressed by the fact that manmade weapons had brou...
2024-05-16 02:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostAdon heard and felt, rather than saw, as the wasps attacked him.
Their stingers stabbed and jabbed and careened off of his armor like so many bullets striking a thick steel plate. Some of them whizzed by, but most of them struck home without penetrating.
The attacks were utterly harmless—for now. In fact, to the extent that they were damaging, they were only harming the wasps. Ado...
2024-05-15 17:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post