Chapter 20: Book 1: Chapter 9 (Part 2 of 3)

<Well done, Torin. Be sure to stab them between the shoulder blades. That is where the death puppet scarabs burrow into them and sometimes when the bodies are this fresh, they haven’t fully fused with the spine and can crawl away.> Quixbix commented.

“Are the scarabs dangerous?” I asked.

<Without a host body, not really. Their bite is mildly venomous and painful, but only a danger to those incapacitated by the death puppet zombies. You don’t even get XP for killing the scarabs> he huffed.

I grunted and followed his advice, stabbing both Constance parents in the back. As I was doing so Shana spoke up.

“Torin, can you help get Clarence off me, please,” Shana requested ruefully from the floor.

I looked over at her but didn’t move to assist her.

“No,” I told her coldly.

The shock was clear on her pretty face and it quickly shifted to hurt. I almost relented and aided her but held firm and watched her impassively instead.

When she realised I wasn’t going to help she put her bow down and wrestled his body off her enough that she pulled free and then stood up and brushed herself off.

“Not very gentlemanly of you,” she started to snipe, but gulped the last bit.

I had crossed the room with quiet menace once she was back on her feet and was now right up in her ‘personal space’.

Shana backtracked a few steps into the corner of the lounge and I followed, and backed her right up into the wall, giving her no room. I still wielded my scimitars, and belatedly realised they were sending the wrong message, so sent them to my inventory.

 “Torin, what’s the matter? You’re scaring me. Is this because I missed my first shot?” she gulped, her eyes wide and watering a little.

She had her hands up between us and they rested on my leather chest armour. There was a tremble in her lip, which was good. I was highly disappointed in her and wanted her to fully understand the depth of my discontent. I took her chin in my hand and raised her head and held her gaze with my own.

“That isn’t it. You disobeyed me, Shana. I told you the same tactics as the redcaps. I come in and you stay out there holding the exit. Instead, you came in and put yourself in danger. Am I going to have to use the bond to command you in the future or are you going to follow the instructions I give you?” I demanded in a calm but implacably firm tone.

“But…one of the zombies had hold of you,” she retorted in a small hurt voice.

“And I would have dealt with him. If I needed help, I would have called for you” I growled. When she seemed about to argue her point further, I talked over her. “This isn’t some macho bullshit, Shana. You were lucky. What if Clarence had got past the bracer on your forearm and bit you in the neck, huh. What if big momma zombie had been a bit quicker and held me back. Stopping me from cutting his head off when I did? You’d likely be dead or close to it.”

“I’m…I’m sorry, Torin. I didn’t mean to be disobedient. I will do better. I promise. I don’t want you to be disappointed in me,” she rushed to say.

This wasn’t precisely what I expected.

I had anticipated a bit more anger and a ‘go fuck yourself arsehole’ attitude. But I was grateful she was taking this seriously. I didn’t like being a dick, but this was important. If the damage prompts we received were any gauge to go by, Shana would have lost eighty or more Hit Points if zombie Clarence had got to her unprotected throat.

Without the armour we’d earned that would be near-fatal, even with her armour she would have been perilously close to expiring and I couldn’t have that.

She gazed up at me with those big beautiful brown eyes. I let go of her chin and brushed some strands of her long dark hair behind her ear. Her lips parted and she moistened them with the tip of her tongue and let out a small whimper. The timing may have stunk, and it was likely completely inappropriate, but I was incredibly turned on right now and Shana responded in a similar fashion.

I leaned down and pressed my lips up against hers. My free hand circled behind her back and then migrated further down and cupped her firm ass. Shana leaned back into the kiss and her lips parted as our tongues met and danced lightly with one another. Her tongue stud probed and teased my tongue.

My body reacted and strained against the denim I was wearing in an uncomfortable manner. Shana thrust her hips forward and ground herself against me, and I rubbed back against her in response.

I groaned loudly, the sound a strange mixture of joy and disappointment. Joy as I was very happy where this had been going, disappointment as this was neither the time nor the place for sexy fun.

I reluctantly pulled my lips away and took a small step back. Shana tried to follow, but my hand still cradled her head, and I gently held her back. She pouted at me prettily which sorely tested my resolve.

“Later, my lovely,” I sighed in a voice thick with desire. “When we’ve found someplace more secure.”

I’d never been this forward or sexually aggressive with anyone before, another marker of the changes I was going through. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since we met, but I didn’t care. I stroked her cheek with my thumb and Shana’s face flushed with want and need. She actually trembled in my grip and I could tell her lust had intensified.

“please…just a little more,” she whimpered pleadingly.

I reacted unthinkingly and my hand that had been holding her hip came around to her front and my fingers traced over the outside of her gym leggings between her legs. Shana let out a little moan of pleasure and my fingers trailed upwards to the top of her leggings and slipped down past the fabric. My fingers delved the delights held within for a moment. Then before things went any farther, I withdrew my fingers.

“more, please, sir,” she begged, panting, and then bit her lower lip softly.

“That’s enough for now,” I told her sternly.

Her demeanour changed immediately. She was still horny as hell but pulled herself together and stopped wheedling for more.

“Yes, sir,” she answered me, with a bit of disappointment.

“You like it when I’m in charge, don’t you?” I asked her meaningfully.

Shana blushed again and nodded. “Yes, sir, I do.”

I grinned at that. I liked to be in charge, and this wasn’t a change since the Framework descended upon us. I’d always preferred to be the dominant personality in a relationship and that meant my love life never lasted long with any particular girl.

I could be happy in a partnership of equals and would always respect the boundaries of others, but if a girlfriend started getting pushy or tried to dictate to me, then it ended pretty quickly. Things were different now and I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t take advantage of that if Shana seemed game.

“Back to work. Let’s loot this lot and check the rest of the house,” I ordered.

The arrow Shana missed with had hit the wall and was a write-off, leaving her with nineteen. The three zombies coughed up their starting coin of six Gold and their Silver and Copper, two scarab venom sacs and a piece of armour.

Shoddy Mail Gloves

Mail Armour (H) You are reading story Corsairs & Cataclysms at novel35.com Damage Mitigation: Medium HP +20 Durability: 10/10

 

I donned the gloves. As much as I would like to give them to Shana and further boost her Hit Points, she was already using all her armour slots. Both the boots and cuirass used up two each, as she was a Civilian and didn’t get the -1 armour offset my class provided. The mail gloves used two of my seven and the two leather armour pieces one each leaving me with three more slots.

We searched the rest of the downstairs and then swept the upstairs but found nothing else and returned to the lounge.

“I don’t understand why they dumped their swag from the BuyMart like that?” Shana mused, gesturing towards the pile of widescreen television sets at the front end of the room. “Did the zombies knock them over?”

I inspected the area myself and noticed there were other expensive smaller items and even packs of junk food strewn amongst the mess. Under one of the sets was a BuyMart apron with Clarence name tag ironed on the inside.

“I don’t think they did this deliberately,” I suggested after a moment’s thought. “What I think happened was that Clarence was killed in here and then when the scarab reanimated him the contents of his inventory was disgorged around him.”

I walked over and had a close look at the elderly male zombie.

“Shana, come here and look,” I called, and pointed at dried blood around his nose and eyes.

She joined me and peered down at the dead man with a disgusted scowl on her face.

“You see this blood here. We didn’t cause that, but who does it remind you of?” I prompted her.

Shana thought about it for a moment before saying. “It’s just like Reg back at your apartment complex.”

“Yeah, I think so. I’m guessing that Constance’s dad here, didn’t make it through the transition, maybe her mum too. Anyway, sometime later the death puppet scarabs find his body and reanimate him. Either they do the same to his wife or he kills her and then they reanimate her as well. After that Constance and company come back in the early hours of the morning, maybe find the place empty or she assumes her ‘rents have turned in for the night. They help themselves to some lasagne leftovers and then are attacked by the zombies, with Clarence being killed in here,” I explained.

“That makes sense, but where are the rest? Did they run away?” Shana asked.

My answer was interrupted by a disturbing ruffled movement under big momma’s voluminous tribal print dress where her legs were. Shana and I stood up and backed away a few steps. Then a dark-blue beetle emerged from under the hem of her dress, it was about four inches long and it was swiftly followed by a second.

 

Death Puppet Scarabs x2
Grade: - Level:  1
HP: 1	Value: N/A
Threat: Abysmally Low	0 XP each
Death Puppet Scarabs are insects with a rudimentary hive mind that burrow into the flesh of dead intelligent creatures and reanimate them. They use these dead puppets to find or bring fresh corpses for their nest-mates to reanimate. The fresher the corpse, the more mobile and useful it is to the scarab nest. They have a mild venom which they pump into living, incapacitated, victims that kills over hours but embalms the body for maximum usefulness. The victim is often aware, and it is an agonising way to die. The scarabs are otherwise no more dangerous than a regular beetle unless already fused with a dead puppet.

 

The scarabs tried to scamper away, but I was too quick and squished the pair of them under the heel of my boot and then scraped their remains off on the carpet. The only thing more disgusting than having bug guts on the soles of my boots was contemplating just where the pair of them had been hiding under that dress.

“Oh, that is just foul,” Shana scowled with distaste. “I hate creepy-crawlies.”

“They aren’t my favourite thing in the world either,” I groused.

Then my gaze followed the path the scarabs had been running in before I stamped on them. I noticed there was a faint trail of blood or viscera that led out of the lounge and back into the dining room. I followed it and the trail continued up to the open sliding door we had neglected to close in the excitement. That was an oversight I resolved not to make again.

“Shana, was this trail here before we checked upstairs?” I asked her.

“I don’t think it was, Torin. What does it mean?” she answered.

“It means these two weren’t the first scarabs to make a break for it and the others went out into the backyard,” I suggested and led her back out into the yard with the patchy grass.

The trail grew fainter until there was only the occasional spot on the earth, but it was enough to highlight the insect or insects had absconded into the copse of trees that lined the back of these houses.

I walked up to the treeline carefully. It wasn’t particularly dense woodland and with dappled sunlight piercing the canopy of leaves I could see clearly.

Up close and with the unfinished pool house no longer blocking my eyeline, what I had earlier assumed was dumped rubbish, was actually a pile of discarded high-end electronics about thirty feet inside the copse.

“More stuff from BuyMart. Another one of them died just inside the woodland,” I observed.

Shana nodded when she saw where I was pointing. “What are we going to do?”

“It’s still early and we haven’t located Constance, Vincent, or any of the others apart from Clarence. We will follow the trail they’ve left and see if we can locate this nest and them. Keep an arrow nocked and let me tank, you’re too precious to lose,” I instructed.

Shana smiled shyly at the compliment and we advanced into the shady wooded area. We were headed South back towards Corunna Road which was a mile, maybe a mile and a quarter away. I’d paid attention to the terrain as we rode past and the land south of Saratoga Drive was open fields, so this stretch of trees couldn’t go that far, a few hundred metres at most.

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