“You’ve got this, Jax,” I rumbled sensuously. Pulling her tight to my chest from behind, I allowed a hand to slip beneath her gown at her bosom, while the other dipped between her legs. She whimpered with appreciation, helplessly grinding her backside against me. “You are sexy as fuck, and you know it. Now get in there and convince that bear.”

  It was a strange sort of pep talk, I realize, but Dolilim were a strange lot. A good leader has to understand what motivates his people.

  “Language,” she managed through the hitch in her breath.

  “Oh?” I firmed my grip within the damp of her lower lips, then allowed my voice to deepen further with seduction. “You don’t like it when I talk dirty?”

  A shiver rolled up her body before she could meet my eyes. “Master, please. Not while them others are listening.”

  Mia folded her arms not two steps to one side. “And when are we not? You know I’ve heard most every word you’ve exchanged since my birth.”

  Our five-foot executioner was thankfully clothed now. The moment she had been free, and entirely without my prompting, she had confiscated the provided rose-colored bedsheets and fashioned a simple tunic-and-belt getup using nothing but her own claws and a few softly spoken Words to magically hem the cuts—sans panties, of course. It seemed even lesser Dolilim suffered that restriction.

  Does that mean Lynnria has thrown hers out, too? I had not checked in a while.

  Regardless, the combination looked decent enough, and I was grateful Mia understood the need without my having to explain. I loved naked women. But if naked was the norm, it lost that certain je ne sais quoi that made it special. Then again, none of us had cracked anything like a 20 in Charisma yet. We would have to see if there were levels of hotness to which the human mind could not adapt.

  “The master’s got the habit of it, be all,” Jax muttered in her defense—even as she brazenly worked at my finger. “And we’s got a Servant now! Someone’s gotta think of his reputation.”

  Mia stepped to one side to regard Fekinell, but if the caged monster could hear us, there was no sign. She appeared to have some sort of energy saving mode she could switch on or off at will and would only respond when directly spoken to. It was kind of eerie, but I was looking forward to springing her loose so we could finally get to the bottom of it.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Mia observed before turning back to deliver a prodding shove to Jax’s shoulder. “Now, come on. We’ve made our plans, and you have all the confidence you should ever need.”

  Jax pulled away from my arms, only to direct a mournful look backward. “But I be all worked up again.”

  I allowed the corner of my lip to stretch into a sultry smile. “Good.”

  And without breaking eye contact, I ran the tip of my tongue through the juices now coating my finger.

  Jax shivered again.

  Yeah. I knew my audience. And hopefully, this little performance would help her fight like a madwoman. She would need the boost.

  Mia stepped past her quickly—though perhaps flounced would have been a better description. Her body’s origins seemed to have imparted a certain hop to her stride that she had yet to shake. Not that I was complaining. It was always a joy to watch an athletic woman move with confidence. And the live bunny ears were pretty neat, too. Most of the time, they were twitching about, scanning for sounds too faint for my human senses to pick up, but when she walked, her natural momentum carried to their tips in a hypnotic sway.

  Pausing at the door, she tapped at the upright crystal heart to remind us of what we were about to walk into. Whatever Faen was manning the installation seemed a tad annoyed by it, too.

  “Again?” came the voice with a tsk. “Fine…”

  "A mighty roar blocks passage true,

  With claws that strike and strength undue.

  Yet whisper soft, and waters wake,

  A gift to drink—but not to take.

  Should courage bloom where wisdom fades,

  The way ahead will soon be made."

  As the stanza came to a close, the voice sighed. “I’d wish you luck, but you don’t have a prayer of getting this right.”

  Jax stiffened. “Ye wanna bet?!”

  “Sure!” our invisible interlocutor responded, immediately brightening at the prospect. And it seemed she already had something in mind… suspiciously enough. “If you can’t figure out what to do without backtracking, then I get to have my way with your master.”

  “Your gingin’ fanny, ye do!” Jax shouted.

  “And if we can?” Mia asked coolly.

  Jax whipped around, glaring daggers. And frankly, I agreed. This was my virtue we were talking about!

  Then again…

  “Oh, I don’t know. Extra treasure?” the voice returned indifferently. “Magical items? It doesn’t really matter. Name your price.”

  Jax stalked forward, growling. “There ain’t naught ye can offer what’d be worth e’en a second of the master’s—”

  “One Maximum Attribute Crystal,” Mia interrupted. “Each.”

  There was a pregnant pause. But Jax did not argue. She just stood there, quivering in shock.

  “Two Crystals total,” the voice countered eventually. “You have no chance of winning, but even so, Mother would flay me alive if she found out I risked that much.”

  Mia looked to Jax for a moment, but the redhead did not appear to have the breath to speak. And I had no idea what we were talking about. The only gaming equivalent I could think of from the name was an item that could raise one of your stats by a point, which would have been nice, but not enough to have freaked Jax out to the extent it had.

  In this world, one Attribute point worked out to roughly ten percent of a person’s full natural potential, but there was a lot of variance. If you were six foot eight and built like a truck, a single point in Strength would probably stack another hundred pounds onto your deadlift bar, but that was a rare individual. And most Attributes were not so easily codified.

  “Deal,” Mia said finally.

  The pronouncement jerked me out of my stupor. “What a minute!”

  “We have a wager!” whomever it was agreed. “I’ll be waiting to collect when you inevitably fail. Toodles!”

  “Toodles?!” I squawked. “No! H-Hey!”

  But it was too late. The Faen had gone.

  “What the hell, Mia?”

  My erstwhile mind-virus twisted appreciatively at the unintended question, making me wish I could take it back. She did not deserve rewards after a stunt like that!

  “I can’t believe she actually agreed.” Mia chuckled. “Two Maximum Attribute Crystals against a single roll in the hay? That girl must be truly desperate.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “It is not a single roll in the hay. If we fail, she gets to ‘have her way with me.’ You didn’t put a time limit on it.”

  Mia turned with a scoff. “Come now. That’s completely against the spirit of the deal!”

  “And? Setting aside the fact that you just bartered away my chastity like I was a corner-side hooker, that was a Dungeon Faen! Tricking people is practically a part of their job description.”

  “Well… but… hmm.” Pursing her lips, she fell into contemplative silence.

  Groaning, I turned to the one person I could count on to be my staunchest defender. “Well, Jax? Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  She took a slow breath before answering, her eyes twitching and distant with greed. “We gotta get them Crystals, Master. We gotta!”

  My jaw dropped.

  “Damn… okay. Fuck me, I guess,” I muttered, hurt. It seemed ol’ Donum’s junk was for sale if the price was right.

  Jax chuckled darkly.

  “Don’t ye worry none, Master,” she assured me with a pat. “That bitch ain’t gonna win nothing! Ye remember that clue, don’t ye? Locked away all tight? No chance ye’ll forget?”

  “Yeah? That doesn’t mean I understand it. And what the hell is a Maximum Attribute Crystal, anyway?”

  “Just how it sounds,” she returned eagerly. “With one of them, ye can choose any Attribute to be like ye was born a miracle! A 10 afore a point were ever spent!”

  “Specifically, it boosts one of your base Attributes to its natural maximum,” Mia clarified, “which would be an improvement of some 4 to 7 points on average. They’re very rare.”

  “Sells for a right Copper, too,” Jax agreed, practically bouncing with excitement. “But we ain’t gonna be doing that. Can ye imagine what’ll happen when I put it to me Charisma? From 1 to 10 in a stroke!”

  Ah. Now I get it.

  That would be just the thing to compromise Jax’s morals. However, I already had plans on how to alleviate that little problem. And if I used these Crystals judiciously, I might be able to get far more bang for my buck out of them than she realized.

  Because the cost to increase an Attribute scaled exponentially every ten levels, a person should absolutely wait as long as they could before popping an item like that. To raise a stat past 30 was eight points. Past 40 was sixteen! It would take me four Layers to save up that much, so any free increases at those prices would be huge! But since the problem only ever got worse, there could never be an optimal time to use one—unless it was buried in some cost-to-effort formula I had never studied. You would always have that niggling regret in the back of your mind over what might have been.

  However, if used in a Tempered stat, there was no issue. There was never a cost to increasing those Attributes, so there could be no regret over maximizing their potential. Admittedly, that was more of a psychological balm than mathematical, but thanks to a certain divine pissing match, I now had an idea for how to double this little windfall and allow Jax to reap the benefits.

  Not that I would be telling her any of that. Or not yet, anyway. She needed some sense slapped into her first.

  “I don’t know, Jax. It seems kind of selfish to just assume we’re going to use one on you. What about Arx and Lynnria?”

  She froze mid-bounce.

  “Eh?!” Jax whimpered piteously. From her face, you might have thought I had just swiped her slice of birthday cake. At her own party. “But Master!”

  “There’s only the two. We should at least give the others a chance at one. Maybe with a lottery…”

  She gripped my arm and began shaking it as she sank to her knees. “Master, nooo… Please!”

  Mia grinned at me. As the only one of my girls who had borne witness to my most recent conversation with the Demon Queen, she had likely deduced where I was going with this. Not that I had forgotten her part in this treachery, but her punishment would have to come some other way.

  Hmm, no sex for a week? Eh… that’s a tad harsh. Of course, I doubted normal people in normal relationships would have thought so. If any of this were at all sane, I would not have been unjustified to tell her to pound sand. Gambling with someone’s chastity was the kind of thing human traffickers got up to, not your supposed girlfriend, but that was life when you were involved with a bunch of quasi-succubi.

  No sex for a week… if we lose. I nodded to myself firmly. She could not argue with that. And if she dies before her sentence is up, it doesn’t count! She has to do her time.

  “Do I get to partake in this lottery?” she asked, all innocence.

  Jax leapt to her feet. “Not on yer bag, ye moistened bint! Yer body be temporary.”

  “It might still carry over from one body to the next,” she argued. “We don’t really know much yet about how the Words will interpret the intricacies of—”

  “Ye wanna have a go?!” Jax screeched. “Once’d I choke the life outta ye, we’ll find out all about them intri-a-caseys!”

  Struggling not to smile, I stepped between them before things could escalate. “Lets not count our chickens before they’re hatched. That Faen seemed pretty confident. I doubt she would have bet anything if she thought we could win.”

  Jax sniffed. “I’d gut her first.”

  It was unlikely she would have the opportunity—or that reneging would be at all wise—but the sentiment did make me feel better.

  By that point, she must have calmed down enough to clock the just-contained mirth roiling through me, because her next words were full of suspicion.

  “What’s funny?” Her eyes widened with realization. “Wait a scanty… Ye be plotting again!”

  I returned her glare as placidly as I was able. “The only thing I’m plotting—”

  “Lie!” she hissed before I had even finished. But I was not about to let that deter me.

  “—is how we’re going to kill that bear. Now get going!”

  With that, I delivered a stinging slap to her backside. And as the little masochist struggled not to collapse from the unexpected surge of pleasure, I finally allowed the grin I had been suppressing to overtake my features.

  There. That ought to keep her occupied.

  *

  While Jax and Mia silently crept through the door, I could not help but run that poem over and over through my head. Solving it was critical for more than just the rewards. This was my reputation on the line!

  Hmm… if it begins with ‘A mighty roar blocks passage’ and ends with the way ahead being made… does that mean the poem is about how to get past that bear? If that were the case, the most pertinent information would be contained within the middle stanza. Whispering. Water. A gift to drink, but not to take, uh… do something stupidly courageous? Gah! It doesn’t make any sense!

  There was a frustrating pattern with these poetic clues that you never really understood them until after you had solved the puzzle. And the Demon Queen was a big fan of layered meanings. One line was likely to hint at multiple aspects of what was to come, but there was no way of knowing which or how until you had seen the larger picture.

  Okay, I know there’s water near Lynnria. But Lynnria is past the bear. Do I need water… to pass the bear? That can’t be right. I had a gut feeling I was on to something, but I was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. Unsurprisingly. I’ll bet there’s some outrageously simple way of getting through all this hidden plain sight, too.

  For now, I had no choice but to keep my eyes pricked and my ears peeled.

  Our plan for the moment was simple. Jax, buffed to the nines, would keep the bear’s attention while Mia rushed in to cut it down to size. There had been some debate over whether an application of Detonating Sap Varnish would be appropriate, now that Jax had her pleasure-dealing claws, but it had been decided that the substance’s armor-penetrating properties outweighed how painful it could be. Bears had thick fur and a thicker hide. Getting through that had to be our first priority, and once it had been subsumed by Lust, it would not matter how much pain the creature was in. So each Dolilim had received a liberal coating.

  I just had to hope Jax could get her Life steal working enough to refund my recent expenditures. Then we might make an attempt at creating another lesser Dolilim out of the enormous beast… but that was a distant afterthought at this point. Setting aside how we would even begin to capture the thing, Mia wanted to see what Gem of Power dropped from it before I tried again. After all, the stronger the creature, the more Life it required, and allies would do me no good if my own spell turned me into a smoking husk. Which meant there was little for me to do beyond watching the imminent chaos from afar, healing spells primed.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Jax swayed into the open, exuding the brash confidence my recent coaxing had instilled from her every pore. She was a woman on a mission, and that mission was to eat any living thing that might cross her path alive. I doubted the bear cared all that much—or even recognized the signals she was putting out, what with the species division—but that was not the point.

  The instant it surged to its feet, the redhead whipped around to face me, legs spread wide and hips grinding. But it was clear, even as she bent to expose herself, that her attention remained laser focused on her adversary. This was an odd combat style we were cultivating, but it was what her species and Class seemed to require. And it was working, to a degree; the lumbering beast did not spare the second Dolilim a moment’s notice, even as Mia slunk forward, step by careful step.

  Lowing in what I had to assume was confusion, the bear approached Jax like she was a downed electrical wire. It was a fascinating response, and just as unexpected. But I understood it readily enough. Only a prey animal would turn its back on a predator… yet Jax was not running. Even a Dungeon monster would be thrown by a turn of events like that, but it could not repress its instinct to challenge all that approached, even when it sensed the jaws of a trap closing about its neck.

  The ensuing exchange happened so fast it took me a few seconds even to process. The bear reared onto its hind legs, perhaps hoping that by smashing the strange, gyrating interloper into paste, it might avoid whatever trick she was plotting. In that instant, Mia made her move. The lesser Dolilim went from perfect stillness to a full sprint so quickly she could have outpaced an F1 car off the starting line. Within two steps, her scythe had appeared; within three, her arms had cocked; by four, she was past, and the towering animal suddenly found itself missing a hind leg.

  And then Mia went screaming, out of control, into the bushes beyond.

  Of course, by that point, the bear was already descending, ready to flatten whatever was unlucky enough to be in its way, hind leg or not. Jax had only the barest of seconds to react before the beast collapsed atop her.

  For a moment, I feared the worst. I could only see that Jax had not dodged. But then her shadows began popping out all around, harassing and confusing the already-injured animal even further. The beast did not know what to do beyond swiping its great claws through phantom after phantom. That was when I saw the brackish smoke escaping between its limbs, and I knew Jax had to be using the monster’s distraction as an opportunity to reform. But it would take time to fully regather herself after being so thoroughly dispersed, and she would need more than shadows to strike from safety.

  That was when I had a stroke of inspiration. Whether it would work was anyone’s guess, but I was a wizard, damn it! Insane magical experiments were in my blood.

  Okay, not really, but I had to do something besides stand there.

  In a rush, I scurried to kneel by the door, only to be stymied by my near-complete lack of Vocabulary. I knew what I wanted. I just had to figure out a way to convey it so the magic could understand. Okay, start with the visual. That always helps.

  With no more thought than that, I buried my recently elongated nails into the lawn and began carving out a large set of human lips. Next came the defining label: just a single noun, three strokes in a gesture carefully cut through the interconnecting blades of vegetation. But the Word had nothing to direct it yet—no means of further refining the purpose of its being.

  So I popped to my feet and shouted, “What a stupid bear! It can’t even fall right. She was just standing there, waiting, and it still missed!”

  That was all it took. I felt a brief pull of Life slip from my body, the Rune I had just carved flared with power, and the lips I had drawn plumped into something akin to foam rubber.

  “Do you think that bear is trying to kill her or audition for a ballet?” an extremely familiar voice asked… only to be answered by an equally familiar voice not a moment later, “Ballet? With those moves, he’d be lucky to get a job as a rug!”

  “Doh ho ho ho ho!”

  I blinked in shock. “What the fuck?!”

  All I had done was carve Cynic, hoping for something that might blend a Magic Mouth spell with Vicious Mockery. And I got the Muppet Show? Here? How the hell…?

  “Oh, look, the genius is talking. Quick, write it down. It might actually be intelligent.”

  “I doubt it. From the look on his face, I’ll bet he was hoping for a different kind of lips!”

  Oh, no. What have I done? “Guys, that’s… that’s uncalled for.”

  They ignored me, of course.

  “But how can you see his face? We don’t have eyes.”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  “We don’t have backs either.”

  “Doh ho ho ho ho!”

  A wave of revulsion rolled up and over my body.

  Ugh! I might have taken actual psychic damage from that pun.

  Whether the bear had was an unknowable qualia, but the noise had been less than subtle… and there was a certain idiot standing foolishly near its source. So, with a roar that shook the surrounding foliage, the enormous beast surged to its feet, completely heedless of its severed hind stump, and came at me like a freight train at a stalled school bus.

  The squawk that emerged from my lips might have been a few shades north of manly.

  “Uh oh. You’d better shake a leg!”

  “Or maybe don’t. That teddy might take it as an invitation.”

  “I usually prefer it the other way around.”

  I had to assume there was a joke in there somewhere, but I was a shade preoccupied to parse the wordplay. My attempt at stumbling to safety had missed the door, and I quickly discovered the bushes surrounding it had leaves as sharp as razor blades. However, just as I was about to add being mauled to death by an overgrown Valentine’s present as a capstone to my list of life experiences, I abruptly found myself elsewhere—specifically about twenty paces to the bear’s opposite side.

  What… just happened? Teleportation was not a part of any of our skill sets. Had I stepped on a trap?

  Before I could reorient, I saw Mia leap skyward from the spot I had just vacated, almost to the top of the hedges and, with a graceful somersault, descend upon the charging bear’s head. Her scythe flashed, and she rode the severed brainpan to the ground. And then the bear swatted her back into the topiary.

  My jaw might have come unhinged for a moment when the now-headless ursine staggered upright, somehow still finding the breath to roar from its detached muzzle. In all the chaos, I had not noticed the complete lack of blood spurting anywhere, but seeing the beast up and continuing to swing wildly about itself after suffering what should have been a mortal wound, I was forced to take a second look.

  Not only was there no blood, there were no organs, severed bones, or anything that could have been mistaken for living tissue. Both the leg and severed neck were instead packed with white fluff.

  “The damned thing is stuffed?!”

  In hindsight, I really should have seen this coming. That heart on its chest had been a dead giveaway.

  “This just in: stuffed animals are in fact stuffed,” the mouth shouted. “More at eleven.”

  “More of what at eleven?”

  “A bunch of singing mops, probably.”

  They groaned.

  Shaking my head, I dismissed the color commentary. This was going to complicate things, but we should still have the upper hand. There was only so much amputation a thing like that could tolerate before it ran out of fluff. We just had to find the edge of the fray and run with it until it unraveled.

  But to do that, I needed to get Mia moving again. I doubted she had been killed outright—she would have been buzzing in my ear otherwise—but if she only had a shattered ribcage after that blow, I would have been surprised. So I zeroed in on the pair of clawed feet sticking out of the bushes like fletchings in a hay bale and directed a fully powered regeneration spell that way, then cast about until I found the fog bank only just coalescing into feminine form.

  “Master?” Jax’s alarmed voice wafted from it. “What be ye doing in here?!”

  “Dunno. I think Mia may have swapped places with me somehow,” I explained before pointing. “Quick, send your shadows out to blind that thing. If it can roar, it can see. And we need all the advantages we can get.”

  To her credit, she complied without argument or questions. And she probably had more than one. Like why was there a Muppet poking out of the lawn? Why was it needling the ‘overgrown taxidermy failure’ about its lack of tap dancing skills even as it tried to stomp the mouth into oblivion? Why did it think any of that was funny? Personally, I was just glad my improvised noise maker was giving us the chance to recover—even if it was a bit lax with the friendly fire.

  For some while after that, the combat entered an experimental phase. The bear was still exceedingly dangerous, and the main body seemed to have an intuitive sense for where it was in relation to the rest of its parts. Any attempt to attack the foot or the head would draw the mountainous ball of fur toward you like a magnet, but with Jax’s shadows constantly dancing in front of its eyes, its accuracy was terrible. So we were able to get in a few shots here and there before retreating. And the hecklers would draw it away soon after.

  My initial thought was to approach this like we had our last construct. We did not have a speed pill this time, so it was a much slower process. But slow and steady still won the race, and without Life to animate the thing, I had to assume it would eventually run out of gas. However, it seemed immune to Lust—not that surprising, really—so Jax’s ability only fired off sporadically. And adding Renewal of Consumption’s healing drain to the mix availed us little beyond a growing certainty that the bear’s Life well was bottomless.

  Eventually, we were left with no other choice but to extricate the now-healed Mia from the knife-like grip of the hedges, which was a delicate procedure all its own. The bear had lodged her in there pretty deep, so we had to be careful not to make too much noise for fear of drawing another attack. Nor could we simply yank her loose without cutting her to ribbons. But we did succeed in the end, and it was not too much longer before the bear had been effectively disassembled.

  It would have gone quicker, but Mia was still getting the hang of the whole ‘stopping’ thing, forcing us to draw the bear away, free her yet again from the greedy clutches of the shrubs, and retreat after each newly severed limb. It got easier with practice.

  “It still ain’t dead?” Jax complained, panting.

  She aimed a kick at the beast’s head, which earned her a retaliatory bite for her trouble.

  And of course…

  “Look out! Those teeth are sharp.”

  “Not much else around here is.”

  “I’d say her head was stuffed, but there’s no need to beat a dead horse.”

  The mouth neighed obnoxiously.

  Jax whirled at the sound. “That ain’t no Faen.”

  “I am inclined to agree, yet I wonder…” Mia approached my handiwork, head cocked to one side as she studied it. “Huh. That should not have worked.”

  Squatting, she quickly drew a canceling stroke through the Rune.

  “Hey, no! We need tha—”

  The voice faded like it had been tossed into a bottomless well, even as the mouth shriveled and cracked.

  Mia stared at it a while longer. “Had I not spent so long within your mind, I would have said this was impossible. Still, to see such manifesting without…” She shook her head. “You grow stronger by the day, my lord.”

  I scoffed. “You say that. Still feels like I’m close to square one on my end. I can’t even chuck a magic missile!”

  I was distracted for a moment by the sound of Jax taking her revenge on the bear’s head. Less than interested in our talk on the intricacies of magic, she had determined to instead find out what would happen if she removed the construct’s stuffing entirely.

  “Did the Rune resist you this time?” Mia asked, drawing my attention back.

  “Uh… no? I can handle one or two easily enough.”

  “So you say,” she returned, echoing my own words back at me. “I doubt your Dolilim could replicate such a feat unaided. Even Lynnria. Though with her Class…” She left the rest of the thought unsaid, her lips twisting into a speculative frown.

  I quirked an eyebrow. I had needed to literally join my consciousness with Arx’s the last time she had tried to Engrave something. Without my help, her fingers had not even been capable of moving. So there was no need to doubt. As for Lynnria, she might have had an Engraver Class, but I had thought her abilities were all skill assisted. What was Mia implying?

  “Ah ha!” Jax’s muffled voice crowed finally.

  Her claws burst from the beast’s helpless torso, and she began ripping her way to freedom. It would have been quite the gruesome scene had there been any blood involved, but as it was, her frenzied slashing only revealed more of the white fluff—and drew ever more Life Energy away from the thing. By that point, she had completely recovered my previous expenditures, and the creature had yet to cease its twitching.

  If it’s got that much of a Life well, its Toughness must be insane! How were we even able to damage it? Something fishy was going on here. But whatever it was, I was not about to attempt making a Dolilim out of it. I had been told many times that my girls were living Constructs, but there was something intuitively wrong with the idea of making one out of a Construct—never mind one that had been disassembled.

  “Lookie what I found!” Jax announced as she crawled from the mass of white. Chin jutting with pride, she held aloft a multifaceted pink crystal as big as her head. “T’were right in the middle,” she informed us. “Behind that great red arse on its chest.”

  “It’s a heart, Jax.”

  “It ain’t!” She actually looked indignant at the idea. “That be a wench’s backside, or I’s a tube! Take it from me. Cooked enough hearts to know the difference. They’s tougher’n most, but ye can make a class sausage out of ‘em.”

  Well, now I know that.

  “I’ll forgive ye not learning the difference, Master,” she consoled me, “ye being a noble’s get and all. This here crystal looks more akin a heart than that bit of fur. But a real one’s got tubes and such ye gotta cut to pull it loose. Then ye gotta drain it—”

  I held up a hand quickly. “Thank you, Jax. I get the idea.”

  “Is that… fluid inside?” Mia asked, walking up.

  “Aye!” Jax grinned, returning to her find with some enthusiasm. She gave the crystal a vigorous shake, frothing the liquid within. Whatever it was, it was too thick to be water. “I’m betting cracking this open be what stills the critter.” She thumped my shoulder. “Just like a real heart, eh?”

  “It was in the right place for one,” I agreed, before giving the scattered limbs a cursory glance. They might not have been a threat anymore, but they were still attempting to swat at us. Clearly, something was animating them. Hmm… a heart behind a heart? “I guess there’s no harm in trying.”

  “Aye, well, there’s the rub.” Grimacing, Jax scratched at the huge gem with her claws. “Yer Sap ain’t doing shite. And if that can nay put a dent to it, no need to ask after me axe.”

  Of course, it would not be so easy.

  I turned to Mia. “Maybe with your scythe?”

  It had been more suggestion than a true question, but she gasped and blushed anyway before she could control herself. Somehow, her being in physical form made the quirk less simple to ignore. Which she noticed.

  She caught my eye and allowed a knowing grin to curve one side of her lip, but you would not have picked up on any of that from her tone.

  “It is a manifestation of a skill, not a weapon, my lord—very much akin to our absent, er… ally’s ability to create blades. I suspect its current form has more to do with the shape you have given me than with the Words themselves. The kinds are rather different from an Axeman’s Apprentice, after all. Nevertheless, I shall make the attempt. Set the vessel to the ground and stand away.”

  Jax complied quickly enough, but when she saw Mia backing away too, she asked, “Do ye gotta run at it every time?”

  “Yes, it’s a part of the skill com—cum sock! Discarded whore’s cum sock!” She flinched. “Sorry.”

  Jax waved the apology away. “Meh. Just get on with it. And try not to aim for the bushes this time.”

  Nodding, she carefully adjusted her line, tensed, then flashed toward the crystal. There was a ting, and then she was past—though again, it was less a stop and more an uncontrolled roll to a halt. She definitely needed to work on that. The cost in post-attack heals were going to add up in a hurry.

  Jax scurried forward to inspect her target. “Mercy’s tits. There ain’t a scratch!”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  Curious, I joined her and ran a considering hand over the crystal’s surface. She was right. It was absolutely flawless. No dirt. Not even a smudge. I doubted its pristine facets would suffer a single one of our fingerprints.

  Jax scowled. “What kind of cheating fannybaws… I thought we was on the Demon Queen’s good side now!”

  “We are,” I said absently. “She wants us to get stronger. She and her Sister both. It’s pretty much the only thing they agree on.”

  “Then there must be a way to destroy this beast,” Mia concluded, dusting herself off like the path had fallen on her and not the other way around. “Else we’ll not gain its Gem of Power.”

  Frowning, I allowed my gaze to sink within the crystalline depths of the stone and into the liquid beyond.

  A liquid. A heart behind a heart… filled with a liquid.

  Unbidden, the words to the clue floated to my lips. “Whisper soft, and waters wake, a gift to drink—but not to take. Should courage bloom where wisdom fades, the way ahead will soon be made.”

  “Master?” Jax asked, curious.

  I held up a hand. I was onto something here. “Waking waters… waking waters. And I have to whisper…”

  Turning, I looked again at the ‘red arse’ emblazoned across the bear’s chest… and the kitschy Valentine’s message scrawled upon it. I had at first dismissed it as a simple nod that Xhinn—or perhaps Ahnbe—had invaded my dreams again. And it was. But perhaps there was more to it.

  Can it really be that easy? There was no way to know but to try.

  “I love you?” I said aloud.

  Jax’s face flushed crimson. “Master! I know that. Ye nay have to say it again.”

  I shook my head. “Uh… no. Sorry, I—”

  Before I could say anything else, the crystal cracked. And just as suddenly, every part of our dismembered foe stopped its twitching. In the ensuing silence, smiles began to break out all around. We had done it. The unkillable foe had been vanquished and the way ahead was clear. All with a banal pass phase. Finally!

  I guess it was hidden in plain sight.

  Then whatever fluid had been contained within began to seep through the microscopic opening. The smell of it hit me in an instant and with a shiver of recognition, I jumped back.

  Just as I had predicted, it was only now that I had solved the riddle—or a part of it, at least—that I understood the larger picture.

  “Damn it, Xhinn!”