Mia hesitated a moment.

  “A slight caveat before I begin: as you may recall, my lady, all of your skills must be passive. They are less spells and more… if you’ll forgive the effusive language, natural extensions of the puzzle that is Donum Jax. So while a Warrior-type Class of the kinds could temporarily enchant her weapon with elemental damage via the mechanism of chanting… as per your example, my lord—”

  I nodded along, remembering.

  “—it is not something you would be able to replicate without resorting to multiple point expenditures or some complex skill interplay between your sister Dolilim. Which reminds me… I really should check on them soon…” she mused. Her voice trailed off as the sound of a pen on paper scratched in my ear.

  Jax’s face twisted with confusion. “So… I can nay take the skill?”

  “Slap my titties! Hem… not exactly. Or not as requested, in any event. However, if we remove the ‘enchant weapon’ subcomponent—namely that the skill functions with your axe—the doors are thrust wide with possibilities. So I propose—”

  “Now, wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Jax’s Life drain works with her axe. I don’t see any reason this shouldn’t too.”

  Mia clucked with disapproval. “‘Works’ is a stretch. ‘My Claws Hunt for Master’ pulls a resource away from an already opened wound. It is in the nature of wounds to bleed Life Energy, so there is little difficulty in harvesting it. That said, you should have noticed a severe drop-off in the ability’s trigger rate when using a weapon versus, say… teeth? Or claws? Hence the name? Which brings us around to—”

  “Aww! Blighted… festering fud pump!” Jax swore, cutting our resident skill monkey off yet again. “Why’d ye nay say so before?! Months, I been cursing that bloody thing. Master even had to take an aura to get it to work more’n twice a day, and it’s half the reason we’s all got an incurable itch ‘twixt our legs!”

  “Don’t blame me—knock-kneed troll dong! You know very well who is responsible.”

  That would have been the Demon Queen, of course. I doubted we would ever be free of the ramifications those few weeks under her control had caused, and short of finding a means of starting over, like Arx had, the sheer amount of Gems it would take to course-correct would have cost us a fortune. And been a massive waste of potential. It was not a casual decision, but I really could not see any other path for us than taking the bull by the horns and making the whole fucked-up demonic horndog thing work.

  Maybe it was the recent influx of influence talking, but I was beginning to wonder why I was even bemoaning the matter. Sure, it was perverted as hell, but was there really that much difference between fighting with swords and fire versus… orgasms? Our opponents would probably even prefer it! And was getting laid multiple times a day really so bad?

  “Aye, ye polyp,” Jax growled in acknowledgement. “That don’t change the facts. Ye seen how I fight. Ye know me skills. Not once did ye ever hint I been doing sommat wrong.”

  “You expected otherwise? I’m already breaking thousands of years of protocol by telling you this much,” Mia replied primly. “But never mind all of that. Your kind and Class combination is simply unable to push an effect into a target without direct physical contact—especially not intending to override pain sensors.”

  There was a certain logic there, even if I did not like it. Taking the axe away would sacrifice one of Jax’s primary combat advantages. Sure, she had claws, but you could not underestimate the value of that little bit of extra reach… or the ability to lop a thing’s head from its neck.

  “What about that thing we were doing with Arx?” I countered, thinking aloud—and ignoring the consequent carnal exaltations. “You know, with her…” I gestured, “…lubricants. Couldn’t we make it so that Jax could, uh… anoint her axe?”

  It would make for an awfully interesting pre-fight routine. That was for sure.

  “Of course,” Mia replied. Eventually. “You can do almost anything if you invest enough points. But Poisons are not a native skill-set for the Warrior Class; they would need to be enabled first. As a Scout subtype, Arx does not suffer this restriction. I had assumed you would want to avoid that so you could work toward rejoining the others as quickly as possible.”

  I scrubbed at my eyes tiredly. “Yeah… I guess you’re right. What do you think, Jax? Should we move you to more of a hand-to-hand style?”

  She grunted sourly. “I’m gonna have to, ain’t I? From the sound of it, be what I should’ve been doing from the get.”

  “It’s not all bad. I haven’t even told you what the skill will do! I’m rather proud of this one. It’s called Claws of Corruption. …or the Sadist? Masochist? Hmm. No, I like Corruption better. Anyway, each successful strike will attempt to upgrade the target’s current level of Lust Ailment, starting from zero of course, with a pleasure response appropriate to that level. Initially, it should be quite mild, but the more the target succumbs…” She chuckled ominously. “Well… I would quite like to see the result. Of course, by that point, Jax will have had free rein to devour their Life Energy, so they may not last long enough to see it to the end.”

  “Wow.” I blinked slowly. “That’s… a lot better than I was hoping for. And with my aura buffing the initial Lust proc, she would be virtually guaranteed to drain Energy like crazy. It’s single target crowd control and a damage buff built into one skill. You can really do that much with a single point?”

  “You bet your sweet dick I can,” she purred before letting out a dainty cough. “That is… yes, my lord. Of course. I remain your faithful servant, as always. Using our resources to their maximum effect is of exceeding priority.”

  “Like telling me when I ain’t using my shite how it’s supposed to?” Jax filled in.

  “Gargle a chode, bitch stroganoff.”

  *

  It went without saying that, despite certain grumbles, Jax was over the moon at the potential for her new toy. She assured me it would have no effect on her fighting style either, as Tenebrous Dance still granted her an intuitive proficiency with all weapons, be they conventional, miscellaneous furniture, or her own claws. So she was confident this setback would be temporary and had already taken to excitedly babbling under her breath about what future skills she might take to one day enhance the ability.

  On my end, I had to spare a moment to recall the few times she had accidentally poked me with those things in the bedroom. This had better not awaken anything in me…

  But I was less concerned with that than with the additions to her back tattoo. I would have needed to be blind not to notice them. The moment she had accepted the skill, the glowing vines choking the monolith at her spine shot past her shoulders, along the backs of her arms, over her hands, and encircled her fingers to the very lips of her cuticles. But the new Words were not the only ones decorating them. A couple of the older, thicker vines had come along for the ride, carrying their Word-chains with them. At a guess, I had to assume this would mean some nebulous improvement to their function, but a guess was all it could be. None of the vegetation carried Words I knew, so I could only speculate over which vine might carry what skill. And I had a vague idea that this whole tattoo business was neither normal nor a thing Mia had control over.

  So who does?

  Sadly, the addition of one skill to her repertoire did not tip the scales enough for us to have a go at something as dangerous as that bear. Jax needed some practical experience with her new setup first, and that meant braving the hidden dangers of the other path.

  So I tapped the ‘upside-down’ heart at its entrance once more, just to bring what hints it might contain back to the forefront of our minds.

  "A path ahead, both lush and fair,

  Yet lurking teeth will bring despair.

  Tread with care, for the softest bloom,

  Holds the key to the darkest doom.

  To claim the prize, you must decide—

  Will beauty live, or will it die?"

  The opening couplet was pretty straightforward. We had already seen the path ahead; lush and fair seemed a decent description. And the warning about lurking teeth was a clear enough hint to look out for an ambush predator of some kind. The rest, though?

  “Easy, Jax,” I cautioned as she pushed open the door. “Try to keep to the paving stones, if you can. That bit about doom flowers worries me. Bad things might happen if we step on them.”

  She nodded silently before taking a slow step onto the carefully manicured trail, eyes kept wide and scanning for the faintest whiff of movement. Either from a lack of confidence or simple habit, she summoned her axe and hefted it to one shoulder, but she kept the claws of her left hand splayed and ready to strike. She stood there a moment, waiting for something to happen. But when nothing immediately jumped at her, she decided to send out a probe first.

  I nodded, acknowledging the strategy; scouting ahead was a crucial part of any hostile situation. Sadly, the bright, cartoonish levels of light did no favors for the shadowy duplicate she summoned. Without at least some level of shade to reinforce it, the clone was nowhere near as solid as it should have been, so if whatever was out there had appreciable levels of intelligence, this would do little to draw them out. And if they were actually smart, it might even attract their attention to us.

  But it seemed Jax was thinking along the same lines. The shadow had not advanced more than a step before my companion dissolved into smoke, leaving no other targets available beyond the bait that she was dangling ahead… and me.

  However, I knew better than to make myself vulnerable. That was the entire reason I had become a Summoner in the first place.

  It took a special kind of idiot to think an untrained office worker could pick up a sword, accidentally kill a thing twenty levels higher than you, and overnight become the biggest badass who ever badassed. As if the world would be kind enough to hand out levels like candy. Or that I might be lucky enough to survive encounter after encounter without making at least one fatal mistake. My girls were my front-line fighters, and they died constantly!

  Hell, swords were not even all that great as weapons. Those jousting tournaments knights were always getting up to were not just for show; it was a fundamental part of their combat strategy. Hitting things with a twenty-foot-long spike and then trampling it with your horse worked way better than waving a bit of metal around. Swords were backup weapons, and if things had progressed to the point where you actually needed one, something had gone seriously wrong. It was no accident that the second firearms had become even remotely reliable, anything related to melee combat had been quietly retired.

  No, my sweet ass was hanging well back from the door, lifeless as a statue, and unless we were dealing with something that could counter Forgotten in Stillness like Xyn had, I was content to watch the drama unfold from right where I was.

  The shadow clone looked kind of bizarre out there all on its own, skipping along the path, dancing and obliviously twirling about like a schoolgirl at a picnic. It was as if the world had glitched and forgotten to render any shadow but one. Eventually, the thing came to the corner ahead, where it stopped as though to mime peeking around the bushes, then it turned back to us and spread its arms into a wide shrug. If I did not know any better, I would have said it was trying to tell us the coast was clear.

  Just how alive are those things, anyway?

  That was when the rabbit went for its neck.

  It happened so fast, I almost did not see it. One second, the shadow was standing there, indolently swaying to a melody only it could hear, and the next, a streak of black fur darted from the azaleas. Before I even knew what was happening, the clone’s head was tumbling to the ground with all the ridiculous horror of the Cave of Caerbannog. I could almost hear Graham Chapman swearing in terror while John Cleese cackled in the background.

  The smoke where Jax’s head should have been shifted slightly. “Master,” her disembodied voice warbled, “I thought we left that bawbag back in its cage.”

  I glanced again at the rabbit-like creature before it shook off its confusion over its breakfast dissolving out from under it and darted back into the bushes. Sure enough, Jax was right; it was exactly like the one I had bought for Mia—the same black fur, the same twitching bunny ears, the same… mouthful of fangs. And a niggling voice in the back of my head was telling me that was nothing like a coincidence.

  Damn it, Xyn! I asked you to look after that thing. What is it doing in here?

  “You’re telling me we were carrying around a Vorpal Bunny this whole time?”

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  Jax shrugged. “That what humans call ‘em? In Bandit circles, they’s Axemen’s ’prentices. Usually left us alone, being Cursed and all, but they could still get ye if ye wandered too close.” She grunted with resignation, before adding a totally unnecessary warning. “Stay here. They’s all bite and no bark… but if ye can dodge that lunge, they ain’t nothing. I’ll catch the blighter.”

  I was reluctant to agree. But her gauntlets were still charged. That should be good to deflect at least one blow.

  “Keep your guard up.”

  What might have been a hand lifted in ethereal dismissal. “No worries, mate. Just give me a scanty to figure out how to move…”

  From the grumbling and lack of anything of the sort happening, it was abundantly apparent locomotion in full mist-form was easier said than done. I could imagine why. The skill was all about dissolving her mass into the surrounding air. I doubted there was anything included in its Word definition about flight or ways to control her drifting. However, Jax soon discovered that if she solidified her feet, she could manage a precarious scoot and drag routine by inching herself along with her toes.

  It was as slow as it sounded.

  “Do you want a levitation spell?” I asked finally.

  “Nay, I needs to work this out on me own.”

  I could respect that. “Maybe if you try the whole leg?”

  She sighed. “It ain’t like I can just snap me fingers. Gotta get me head ‘round it, first. Us lilim-types are a passionate lot. Once I figure how this be sexy… ha! Then ye watch.”

  “Your powers don’t work unless you think you’re sexy?”

  The second the words left my mouth… I do not know. It was strange. I just had this odd feeling I had said something so obvious it was foolish. Like I should have known that already. I had known that already. Except the knowledge had not come to me through experience or explanation, but through some strange bout of déjà vu. And it was not until this moment that I unlocked the memory.

  “Not how they’s supposed to,” Jax explained, her attention still focused on inching her way forward. “Be why I were so frustrated with me axe. Couldn’t get it figured… still ain’t got it figured. But this claw thing oughta help. Remember how I struggled so much to get me clones working at first? Same thing. The sexier I feel, the slicker everything gets. I had this one down, too, but now it’s all changed on me.”

  I quickly shook the feeling away, then gave the amorphous blob of smoke she had become a thoughtful once over. Sexy mist, huh?

  “Well, that’s easy. Just condense yourself enough to highlight your curves. Give yourself a nice little tush, a wispy hourglass, and boom. The next thing you know—” I hesitated to say the rest, but I had already made my resolution. It might have been tiresome and more than a little irritating to live amidst an inescapable bevy of dick-teasing nymphomaniacs. But it was what it was. Holding back at this point would only stunt our growth. “—the next thing you know, I’ll be fantasizing about what it might be like in bed.”

  Jax stopped, then turned to stare at me curiously—or perhaps to read me.

  “Do it,” she challenged after a moment. “Imagine. Now.”

  It was simple enough to guess what she was thinking. I had been engaged in a never-ending battle to defend my virtue from pretty much the moment she had begun her transformation. So for me to suggest this? After having come up with one of the most perverse weapon mods conceivable? She would know something was up. But rather than ask, she had decided to test my sincerity.

  Frankly, I was offended. It was not like I was some prude. I was just… a normal level of horny.

  But I had a hack for situations like these. I did not have to imagine what it would be like or create some spur-of-the-moment fantasy of Jax’s ghostly hands guiding mine over a spinning pot of clay. She was no mind-reader. How would she even know what I was thinking? No, all I had to do was to summon the right frame of mind, and thanks to the Hammer of Glory, that was as easy as flipping a switch.

  The two of us stood there for what felt like an eternity, staring at one another. Or well… I was staring at her. It was hard to see where her eyes might have been within the thick blob of smoke she had become, but I knew where they would be focused—right on the pulsating organ straining against my robe. Yet gradually, her form started to coalesce into something vaguely resembling the gorgeous creature she was.

  And the second that indefinable quality of allure registered, everything snapped into place. There were her horns. Her luscious thighs, her sweeping hips. Her hair continued to move as though animated with ghostly fingers and she was all in grayscale, but it was indisputably Jax.

  Predictably, she was gazing at me with eyes swimming with barely contained lust, but she resisted the impulse long enough to look down at her flexing hands. A swath of color rippled through her form, and she chuckled darkly.

  “Oh, aye… that be the right of it. I feel incredible—like me proficiency jumped 20 points in a go.”

  “18 points,” Mia corrected. “Congratulations. You have undergone a leap of insight. Shadow Shift, Mark II, is now at Low Competent. Using the skill will no longer represent a challenge… though using it well may yet.”

  My jaw dropped. “That’s a thing?!”

  I guess I was wrong. The world will hand out scads of levels at a go. You just had to find the right set of circumstances first.

  If I had known I could help the girls bypass their daily skill-up limits just by getting a hard on, I… well… I would have come around sooner, anyway.

  Jax had been languishing with an Intelligence of 5 for the longest time—though it might have improved to a 6 now that she had passed her Boundary—limiting her to only two skill-ups per day. That was fine if you had the time to practice and someone to push you to your limits, but we were constantly on the road. The only way she could improve the abysmal rate at which her ever-expanding list of skills could grow was to keep investing into Intelligence. For a Warrior, that was a questionable-at-best distribution of Attribute points. So this was a massive revelation.

  I had a feeling our nightly routine was about to get a lot more interesting. After all, sex was nice, but sex for a reason? Sex make numbers go up?! Suddenly, Donum the intellectual and Donum the idiot monkey were in full agreement.

  “Hold to that thought, Master,” Jax said huskily. “I gots me a ‘prentice to catch.”

  With that, she turned and sashayed off with no issues at all. I had little clue what mechanism she had discovered to propel herself along, or if she herself even knew. It looked pretty close to how you would imagine a ghost trodding about… if said ghost was a supermodel strutting through a garden photoshoot. Watching her move in this newly sensualized form was a treat. Her every sway and footstep was warped and delayed, as though there was Jax-shaped void passing through the world and the smoke that gave her form was constantly being sucked into it. Regardless, once she reached the spot where her clone had disappeared, she halted to scan the rows of nearby flowers.

  “Yoohoo…” she called, tauntingly running her hands up until they had cupped her breasts. “I got sommat here for ye, Vorpal Buns. Don’t ye just wanna… take a bite?”

  I certainly did. But that might have been the Hammer talking.

  And her taunting was effective on more than just me. Within moments, a black streak shot from its cover straight for Jax’s neck—and passed harmlessly through. Before the creature could even plop to the ground, the demonic redhead had re-solidified, claws splayed, and she tackled it into the flowers.

  My heart leapt into my chest. I still suspected there was more to those peonies and pansies than met the eye, so disturbing them before we had to was something I had wanted to avoid. Yet Jax came up with the rabbit in her claws just the same, oblivious and happy as a lark.

  “I got ‘im, Master,” she called in triumph, shaking the creature by the scruff of the neck. It did not appear to be struggling all that much, but that might have had something to do with the little pink spear I noticed between its legs. “Tasty little blighter, too. This new skill be working a treat! Barely had me claws in ‘im before he were Lusted to bits. If I let ‘im go now, I’d bet he’d waste away fer pumping me ankles.”

  Colorful imagery aside, I assumed her instant success was more to do with my aura buffing her proc chances than an indicator for how reliable the skill might be. Still, it had worked. That was all that mattered for now.

  “Just be careful not to kill it, my lady,” Mia called. “I doubt that creature has more than 2 or 3 points in Toughness to drain.”

  That sounded about right. All bite and no bark was an extremely accurate description for the little monster. It was the epitome of a glass cannon; it either achieved an instant kill or it was itself caught and eaten. That made them dangerous as shit, but if you knew to look out for them and had a plan, you could counter them with relative ease.

  However, just as I was about to ask a follow-up question, I noticed some movement in the nearby bushes.

  “Look out!” I shouted.

  Jax turned just in time to cross her armguards in front of her face, and our black rabbit’s white counterpart rebounded off of the magical shield. Before she could retaliate, it had scurried back into the cover of the flowers.

  Jax summoned her axe and threw it toward the spot the creature had disappeared into, anyway. “Take that, ye little shite! Mess with me, will ye?”

  The moment she did, another of the creatures hopped onto the path, this one with a pleasant spotted pattern.

  “Behind you!” I warned.

  Jax whirled at the same moment the little monster went for her face, and in a panic, she puffed into smoke. Her latest assailant passed harmlessly through and into the hedge wall beyond, but without a hand to hold it, so too did the rabbit she had been trying to keep. In her scramble to snatch the thing out of the air, her fumbling claws again sank into its flesh. I winced as the beast let out what must have passed for a leporine cry of ecstasy.

  “Be careful, I said!” Mia yelled.

  “Clap yer shitehole, fannybaw! Lessen ye want ter come here and catch the bloody thing yer ownself!” Jax shouted. “Ye think—feck!”

  She saw the next one coming just in time and managed to dodge away before it could sever her limb from limb. Her axe followed it to the ground, slaughtering it on impact, but then two more hopped ever-so-innocently onto the path.

  “Aw, what utter cockwobble! How many of these blasted things be there?”

  One too many, that was certain.

  “Run, Jax!” I shouted.

  I did not have to tell her twice. The next few seconds were a chaotic scramble of flashing teeth and pelting feet. Jax’s axe was everywhere, trying to thin the herd as ever more of them appeared, but mostly to block incoming decapitation attempts. Again and again, she dissolved into mist, only to reform just in time to catch her singular prize. She looked like she was running through a minefield with shrapnel made of bunny rabbits.

  By the time she made it back and slammed the hedge door into place, she was a sodden, bloody mess. Deep gashes crisscrossed her arms, legs, and back from the few instances she had dodged or misted just that half-second too late, yet she still had her little black executioner. It was hard to say whether that was through her own efforts or its steadfast refusal to stop jackhammering away at her arm, though.

  Maybe some of both.

  Whatever the case, I was quick to hurry forward with Words of healing on lips. Her flight, however brief, had procced just enough Life steal to share a point or two with me, so I had the Energy to burn. Still, that had been a near miss. One wrong move, and she would have been minced meat.

  And here I had thought this would be easy. Those rabbits were total bullshit! Sure, we could handle one or two, but dozens?! Each with the ability to instantly kill? We were going to need one hell of a strategy to get through there.

  While Jax writhed about, indulging in her well-deserved regeneration session, I plucked the horny little bastard from her arm by the scruff of its neck and scowled. “What Rank are these damned things?”

  “I wouldn’t imagine them worth more than a Greater Rank I, my liege,” Mia informed me—between a few exaltations of her own, anyway. “One by itself might be enough to take out an unsuspecting and low-Layered Questing party, but it has no weapons beyond its Agility and the lone skill… albeit a highly dangerous one.”

  “That… seems fair. I guess,” I allowed, grudging.

  We had faced worse, though never from such an overwhelming numbers disadvantage. The Demon Queen was definitely earning her keep with this one.

  I sighed, surveying the little creature critically. Jax’s claws had really done a number on it. If it had not been so focused on finding a willing hole—or even an unwilling one—it probably would have passed out from blood loss by now. “Damn it. Well, do you want this thing for your first body or not?”

  “Yes~ please! I need your cock in my—ahem. That is… I’d rather have had the bear. But I will take it… for however long it lasts. And don’t heal it. The spell should take care of that.”

  “Speaking of cocks…” Jax breathed finally.

  Puffing into smoke, she wafted beneath the hem of my robe only to re-solidify between my legs. Her hands—and lips—found my still-throbbing member not a second later. And from her thrilled moaning, I was pretty sure I had left the Hammer on its pleasure setting.

  I cleared my throat. “Um… give me a minute, Mia.”

  “Of course.”