Chapter 33: Safe Leaf 14

A fireplace was crackling with heat, the dry wood that had been lit with magic slowly transforming into ash. It was a simple construction, a thin stone slab laid across two stunted boulders, a gap for a fireplace in between. The blackened sides on the otherwise reddish grey stones indicated that this wasn’t the first time they had been used for this.

The fact that it was located right next to one of the few sources of wood, not to mention the way it looked, made it an easy assumption that this was left behind by some prior adventuring group, rather than being a natural formation. It laying within a depression within the landscape, protecting whoever claimed the place from the winds in a limited capacity, only lent further credence to that idea. A place to spend a last night before entering the dungeon.

The group currently occupying it, consisting of a slime with a multitude of odd protrusions, a tiger girl with a happily curved tail and a large fairy (but small person) in black and white, had no interest in staying the night, however. It was barely past noon, and they were just hungry from post-coital exhaustion.

Well, Reysha was, Apexus had already eaten and was eyeing the fish frying atop the stone slab doubtfully. He had never had cooked food before and was generally predisposed against it. Why ever somebody would ruin perfectly red meat through the application of fire was beyond it. Then again, all Gizmo had ever eaten was some goo made out of plants boiling in a pot until all that gave away their origin was the fact that the end product was green. Maybe cooked meat wouldn’t be that bad?

“Can’t wait – can’t wait,” Reysha’s excited voice sang out into the landscape. She wasn’t nearly as melodic as Aclysia was and obviously lacked any training in that school, but she had the right kind of voice for that line of work. Although the unstableness of her tone made it clear that she didn’t have the mindset for singing. “Finally, meat, cooked fucking meat.”

“Your enthusiasm seems unbecoming, given how interested you were in the flesh of dungeon creatures,” Aclysia pointed out, sitting atop Apexus, as the tiger girl nimbly grabbed the tailfin of one of the fish between her light red tinting claws and turned it around. Some of the scaled skin stuck to the surface as she did, but she didn’t care.

“I know, I know,” Reysha continued in her little melody. “And, not gonna lie, I kinda want to get back into that dungeon and see if I can rip open a rat or something, but still. I am out of there, I am alive, I can eat something that’s not raw for a change!” She flipped the bird in the general direction of the dungeon.

They continued waiting for the fish to get done, with Reysha continuously babbling to herself little words of happiness and curses. The firewood cracked, collapsing on itself and causing embers to scatter through the air, a conveniently dry thorn-bush. It had developed a naturally dead, withered texture to be unappealing to the landscape’s prime omnivores, the slimes. If a slime did try to eat the plant despite that, they would usually be dried up from within. That kept the bushes safe, but also made them great firewood. Good for them that adventurers were much rarer a predator in these parts.

Apexus looked at the flames from a nice distance, but his attention lay definitely with the double spheres that were softly depressing its surface with their curvature. Although bigger, Aclysia had no intentions of stopping using her awakener as a chair. As this didn’t happen out of disrespect or a sense of superiority, but rather the want to be close to him and the fact that the gelatinous mass was incredibly comfortable, no objections were raised or would be even if she reached Reysha’s size.

It was really convenient that her new and improved curves stayed despite her clothed state, as her sensitivity apparently vanished when she wasn’t nude. Something about her clothes and nakedness being two different modes of existence. Shifting his mass a bit, the slime adjusted his shape to be an even better seat, by creating a backrest for his beloved fairy.

Since losing his virginity earlier, the slime felt it’s much easier to retain changes in his shape. Picking a gender, effectively, had stabilized the slimes mass, currently holding the potential for both at the cost of some smaller features of being what he was. His default colour had also gotten a bit darker, in response to the outer membrane, keeping the acid that made up most of its internals from constantly burning at everything, growing thicker and denser. With it the colour of his eyes had shifted from a colourless pale to a light blue.

Even with the shapeshifting being less of a pain to keep up, it was far from a reliable tool. The makeshift limbs were soft and slow, inferior in every regard to whatever Growths Apexus tried to emulate through them. Still, while that newfound elasticity wasn’t going to be useful as limbs, being able to be around in shapes that weren’t the usual ellipse would be useful.

“Looking goooooood,” Reysha grabbed one of the fish off the plate and began juggling it between her hands as she waited for it to cool down a holdable degree. “Food, grilled fooood, grilled fissshhhh,” the tiger girl didn’t care that her enthusiasm for seafood reinforced some stereotypes against her people, she was just happy to sink her fangs into the meat.

The flavour exploded in her mouth like the rancid smell of a shoe that hadn’t been taken off once during a seven-day march through a swamp being held right under her sensitive nose. Rather than the meat going down, she felt bile wanting to go up her throat as she quickly spat out the fish and threw it aside. “Bad one, probably spoiled,” Reysha explained under the questioning gaze of her comrades, grabbing the next one.

Again, with much enthusiasm, she bit into it. This one tasted like some had taken rotten meat, ground it down, had fed a pig with nothing but it for its entire life until it died of food poisoning, taken that entire pig, let it decay until the meat grew eyes, ground that abomination down, repeated the process three times and then had thrown just a sprinkle of salt on it to make that little bit bearable. Reysha quickly threw that one aside as well.

The third one she only nibbled on carefully. Even that simple act caused her stomach to revolt. All the while the fish smelled fantastic, making her mouth water. The dissonance between taste and smell affected her balance to a degree and she sat down. “These fish taste like absolute ass,” she stated.

“Apexus doesn’t seem to mind,” Aclysia pointed out, the slime had a strict policy of not wasting food. Even if it wasn’t going to give him any Growths, there was no need to leave meat laying around. Cooked food, he decided, wasn’t that bad actually. Raw was better, but not bad.

“He is a monster made of stomach acid that eats things whole, what the fuck would he know about taste,” Reysha cussed, in a very bad mood due to her being both hungry and having that disgusting taste stuck in her mouth. Her tail whipped around in an angry frenzy.

Apexus took great offense to that, bolstering itself up like an animal ready to attack. In retort, Reysha hissed and lowered her posture, ready to pounce. “Control yourself!” Aclysia intervened, taking to the air between them. She was swiftly ignored as Reysha jumped on the slime.

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She landed right on his back, grabbing both wings to pin him on the floor. It was a great strategy for everything that had a bone structure, but for a slime it didn’t work, Apexus simply caving away under her leg and shaking violently. Its wings were much stronger than Reysha had given them credit for and they slipped from her grasp.

What followed was a succession of rolls, assaults and dodges over the stone floor, as Apexus followed right after her and tried to turn the situation around. She was much faster than him, however, and so it was a chase. Occasionally she would try to kick or scratch him, just as he tried to grab her ankles and immobilize her.

To say it was a messy fight was would have been an understatement. It was also, however, not a real one. Reysha’s claws were retracted at any given time and despite numerous opportunities, Apexus never opened his membrane to let a foot or arm sink inside and begin dissolving it.

Not that that would have been a smart strategy. Sure, the acid burns would have been nasty, but Apexus was much more concerned about the damage that a perforation of its membrane from the inside presented. The point was, anyway, that this was a tumble, not an actual fight.

It eventually ended with Apexus as the winner by virtue of the terrain. Sharp pebbles cut into the exposed areas of Reysha’s one-piece and the general hardness of the floor was suboptimal for rolling around. Breathing heavily, she eventually stopped resisting, letting Apexus spread over her as she watched with her blue-in-grey eyes.

“I give up, you have tastebuds,” she announced and the slime retracted after turning his dominant pinning into something like an appreciative cuddle. Sitting straight, Reysha was almost immediately made the target of healing magic. Small cuts were covering the V-shaped cut-out on her back, ending just below the base of her tail and just above the start of her butt crack. “Those are just scratches, no need to bother,” she told the healing fairy behind her.

“Scratches can still get infected, sit still,” Aclysia demanded in a snappy tone. Now that her advice had been so brazenly ignored, all of them were in a bad mood. It slowly cooled down over the passing minutes, just like the discarded fish on the floor. Exactly like them, however, the awkward air eventually dissolved, although not inside Apexus’ acid.

“Well, seems like I will go hungry for a bit,” Reysha eventually declared, getting up as her wounds were healed. They continued their way south. Apexus wasn’t strong enough to carry Reysha across the ocean, so they had to go with an alternative solution. Namely, the tiger girl had to take a boat back across. They idea was that they would escort her to the port, then fly over themselves and meet her back south of the town on the other site.

From there, they would make their way to Gizmo. Although Reysha wanted to leave this particular world, the idea of hanging around a slime, a fairy and an old man in the woods had made her giggle, so she had agreed to that plan for the time being. Interesting things were bound to happen if she did. Additionally, finding a group of adventurers was hard, so she might as well stay with this odd formation that worked. And she wanted to be fucked by those tentacles again. They were all equally good reasons as far as she was concerned.

A couple of hours later, they rested a second time. Apexus ate, Reysha found some more fish, this time trying them raw. While way more acceptable, it was still incredibly disgusting compared to what she remembered. It was odd, she had eaten these pond dwelling fish on the way and not run into any problems.

After a day of not having eaten a complete meal, Reysha forced herself, much to the revulsion of her stomach, to just eat one of them. Once she managed to get it down, it wasn’t bad and she felt sated, but that didn’t solve the problem of how excruciatingly vile the taste was. She may as well have drank a glass of pus as far as she was concerned.

On the third day of this, and with no signs of it getting better, she said in a scarily clear voice, “Something is incredibly wrong.” Not only was all food and drink she got in her hands disgusting, but her urges were also at an all time low. She had always been a horny one and in the dungeon, it had been five-times worse, now she felt about as interested in sex as a widowed grandmother. That was despite her witnessing Apexus and Aclysia happily shagging a few hours earlier.

For the cause of her condition, it was obviously something that had happened inside the dungeon. Was it the length of her stay? All the stress she had been through rebounding? The meat? Now that she asked herself these questions, it was fairly obvious that it had be the meat. The urge to consume the flesh of the dungeon creatures had only grown worse with time.

She looked at her nails. The permanent red tinge to them had stopped growing in intensity. Same was true for the grey in her eyes. It was easy not to be worried about these things when all they had brought here were greater delight in eating and sex, but now the drawback of these things became apparent.

Aclysia flew over. “You attempted to warn me,” Reysha noted.

“That I did,” the metal fairy stated factually, not wanting to rub salt into the wound. “Be at ease, Gizmo knows a lot of things, so I am sure he knows about your condition as well.”

Apexus hoped that was true, it had been hours since he had seen her smile even a little bit. Without that crazy grin on her face, Reysha looked about ready to let insanity take the reigns and that wouldn’t be fun for anyone around when she finally exploded. That and it just seemed wrong. The slime liked seeing her happy.

He realized that he was invested in yet another person.

There would not be a time when Apexus would let anything like Aclysia’s breaking happen ever again.

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