Cambrian

The Grimoire's Chosen Ch. 23 (Worm)

Added 2024-11-05 16:01:44 +0000 UTC

A/N: Blood Magic! Blood Magic everywhere!

-x-X-x-

After thinking through all of his options, Jason only hesitates for a moment longer before making his decision as well.

“I think I’ll go for Regeneration.”

Taylor blinks at that, eyes widening slightly.

“Wait, that’s an option?”

A chuckle escapes Jason’s lips before he’s able to get control of himself. For a second there, he’d forgotten that Taylor didn’t have all of the knowledge he had. In fact, she was working off of whatever literally fictional information about Blood Magic that she’d been able to find online. Shaking his head in amusement, he gives her a nod.

“Yes, it’s a thing. But like you said… the Empowerment Ritual builds on what’s already there. A human’s natural healing abilities are quite low. A Regeneration Boost will allow me to heal from cuts and bruises in hours, and broken bones in days. It’ll allow me to regrow lost digits in weeks, and lost limbs in months. So long as I stay alive I’ll be able to heal any injury, but time will still be a huge factor… at least at first.”

If he kept building on Regeneration through these Empowerment Rituals he and Taylor were planning to do, then eventually he would have some pretty rapid healing. Like wounds closing up in mere moments, that kind of thing. Shrugging, Jason tries to explain it another way.

“Basically, I’m going for Minor Regeneration while you would be going for Major Agility. I’m playing the long game, but yours will definitely have more benefits early on.”

Taylor mulls that over for a long moment before finally nodding.

“Alright. I’ll stick with Agility for now then. My original reasons remain true, after all. I need to be able to move quickly if any of our enemies find me.”

Jason smiles at that. He appreciates Taylor sticking to her guns. If there’s one thing that the tall young woman has shown so far, it’s that she’s in no way lacking in her convictions.

Together, they start preparing for the Empowerment Rituals. Where Demonic Summoning requires Ritual Circles, Blood Magic Empowerment does not. Instead, it basically involves a lot of painting on naked flesh. Taylor doesn’t hesitate to strip naked for Jason, but she does hesitate to bring herself in reach of the Demon Blood he’s about to use to mark up her body.

“Uh… not that I doubt you Jason, but we’re absolutely certain that Demon Blood isn’t going to have any side effects, right?”

Jason smiles a little bit at that. It’s a fair question honestly.

“I’m positive, Taylor. While you’d be right not to want to come into contact with Demon Blood out in the wild, there’s a key difference between that and this. This Demon Blood is ‘freely given’. Demon Blood forcibly taken is as hostile and aggressive as the Demons it was taken from. But by making the summoned demons bleed of their own accord, we’re basically bypassing those protections.”

Then, because why not, Jason turns the brush on himself first.

“And just to make sure, we’ll start with me.”

Taylor’s mouth opens to protest this, but she can’t get a word out before he’s already brought the paintbrush down on his skin and started drawing runes. Her teeth click shut and she watches on concerned as Jason applies the runes for a Regeneration Empowerment to his flesh.

One might think, based on the fact that these rituals had to be performed on a body, that someone would be limited in the number of Empowerment Rituals they could perform. One would be wrong. Even as Jason covers large swathes of his flesh in bloody runes, he’s unconcerned about ‘wasting space’. The reason why becomes more readily apparent when he finishes the last stroke… and the correctly dune runes all glow with power for a moment before disappearing from sight, absorbed into his body.

Taylor’s eyes widen and even though she doesn’t ask, Jason is happy to explain.

“I’ll have to do that four more times for the Empowerment to properly take hold. This is why Demon Blood in particular is so valuable to us… if we were using simple animal blood, I would have to do it a hundred times without taking a single break. If we were using human blood, I’d have to do it over twenty times. Not only would that be taxing, but it would also require gallons and gallons more blood.”

Swallowing hard, Taylor lets out a faint laugh.

“W-Wow. Guess… guess we’re lucky your powers are bullshit then, aren’t we?”

Yes. Yes they were. Though in the case of Blood, Death, and Demons, it seemed likely that the power was made to synergize with itself. Of course, it definitely hadn’t taken into account him getting his hands on the Staff of Magnus. Negotiating with demons for freely given demon blood so he could empower himself through Blood Magic would likely have been a lot more treacherous and a lot more costly if he couldn’t just bully them into doing what he wanted.

Just as he told Taylor, Jason draws the same exact set of runes across his body four more times, each time watching as they glow brighter than the last before disappearing. Finally, after the last time this happens, Jason can feel it finishing… and he knows he did it right too, because he gets a Feat a moment later.

Feat Achieved! Get stronger without the direct intervention of the Celestial Grimoire!! 100 Points Earned!

You now have 400 Points saved up!

Grinning, Jason shares his success with Taylor, who ends up grinning just as goofily as he is. Well, right up until he goes over to the kitchen to grab a knife, of course.

“Wait, what are you doing?”

Jason shrugs.

“Just testing it out real quick.”

“Wait!”

But he’s already applied the knife to his arm, giving himself a small cut barely an inch in length. As blood wells up, Taylor squawks and rushes over in concern. This just means she gets to watch as, right before their eyes, the wound starts to heal already. It’s not immediate or even particularly fast, but by the time Jason wipes the blood away from the cut with a paper towel, the healing process has already visibly begun. By the evening, he won’t be surprised if there’s not a single mark left on him.

“Wow… do me!”

Jason snickers at Taylor’s enthusiasm, but far from being embarrassed by her double entendre, Taylor just grins wickedly.

"And I do mean in BOTH ways once you’re done Empowering me.”

Instead, Jason winds up being the one who’s blushing slightly. Honestly, Taylor was incorrigible. Still, performing the Empowerment Ritual on her is even easier than it was on himself. After all, using his own body as a canvas forced him to think about all sorts of angles. With Taylor, he could just face the project head on.

Once, twice, thrice. And then a fourth and a fifth. Five times, Jason paints out the runes on Taylor’s naked pale body. Five times they glow brighter and brighter before disappearing. Until finally… it’s done. Taylor hops to her feet once he tells her she can and begins bouncing up and down, eyes wide in delight.

“I feel so… loose. Holy shit, this is amazing.”

In a burst of agility, the tall bug controller lunges across the room, touching the far wall and then bounces back across to touch the wall opposite. Jason’s eyes can still follow her, it’s not necessarily super speed… but damn if she isn’t a whole lot faster now.

“This is great. This… deserves a reward~”

Taylor is suddenly in Jason’s lap. He grunts at the impact; his body jarred a bit by her speed. But he doesn’t let that stop him from reaching out and groping her ass, his cock steadily rising to full mast between their bodies as she grinds down on it with a lecherous grin.

“You’re insatiable, Taylor.”

Huffing, Taylor wiggles in his grasp.

“I mean… do we really have time for anything else?”

Jason raises an eyebrow, causing Taylor to pout and continue on.

“We’re not going out and doing any hero stuff while we don’t have costumes. We’re not due at Vicky’s for a while yet. And we don’t really have the time to summon more demons and perform more Empowerment Rituals, do we?”

Jason sighs. She raises a good point, actually. Even freely given demon blood, while completely safe to use for Blood Magic, isn’t safe to keep around in containers all willy nilly for anything longer than a few hours. You risked all sorts of hellish contamination of the surrounding area if you just left unwarded Demon Blood sitting on a shelf or in a refrigerator or something.

So yes, they didn’t really have any time to do much else… besides have sex.

Rather than admit Taylor is right verbally, Jason simply lifts her up… and proceeds to impale her on his dick, filling her with his cock right then and there. The newly empowered woman squeaks and then moans as she stretches along his length, descending his mast and shuddering in abject pleasure once she’s fully impaled on his cock.

“Mm, that’s it. That’s the good stuff. Fuuuuck~”

Jason growls and buries himself in Taylor’s chest as he grips down tightly on her ass and begins to bounce her up and down on his cock. If you asked Taylor, she’d probably say she didn’t have a chest to bury oneself in, but that wasn’t entirely true. While she wasn’t the most well-endowed woman he knew, there was still plenty there, and if nothing else he enjoyed focusing on her nipples and the way she reacted when he did so.

“J-Jason!”

Grinning wickedly, he attacks her nipples with greater fervor than ever before, going to town on her teats as he thrusts up into her from below. Taylor rides him while moaning up a storm and clinging to his back, her fingers clawing at him. He doesn’t let up for even a single second though, enjoying the sounds she’s making and the way she squeals for him.

For a time, he just sits there, fucking her up and down on his cock… but eventually, Jason lifts them both off the ground, somewhat unsteadily rising to his feet as Taylor squawks and grips down on him all the more tightly to avoid falling.

“W-What are you doing?”

Smirking, Jason continues to squeeze her ass, even as he takes one step after another towards his ultimate destination.

“What does it look like I’m doing? At this rate, we’ll be late to Vicky if we keep this up. So… we’ll have to multitask.”

As they reach the bathroom and Jason turns on the shower, Taylor isn’t exactly complaining. In fact, she’s moaning all the harder. That said, at the mention of Vicky, Taylor does eventually respond.

“Jason… I think we should tell Vicky about all of this.”

That… gives Jason pause. Because truth be told, he was still leery of spreading information about him summoning demons around to too many people. Still, Taylor has some pretty good reasoning.

“If the three of us are going to be a team, keeping this from her forever will be impossible. Eventually she’ll realize you’re helping me get stronger. Then she’ll want to know how… and then she’ll want to know where the blood is coming from.”

That was… a fair point. Jason could even imagine it in his mind’s eye. Vicky with a stormy expression on her face and hands on her hips, asking where they were sourcing their blood to perform Blood Magic in the first place. And while sourcing it from demons instead of animals or people really was far more morally correct, saying ‘oh don’t worry, it’s demon blood’ definitely wasn’t going to appease her.

Reaching up, Taylor caresses Jason’s cheeks as they step under the hot spray of water from the shower, her back pressing against the shower wall.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of, Jason. So rather than let it come out later, when it becomes apparent we were hiding something… we should just be honest with her from the start. You’re hurting demons. Literal hellions. That’s not a bad thing and if you own it, Vicky will understand it’s not a bad thing too.”

Jason lets out a shaky breath. Heh, whenever he thought he was hiding something from everyone for both his own good and their own good… here was Taylor, to explain why he needed to open up more. Still, he couldn’t deny that she was right.

Leaning in, he kisses Taylor deeply, their tongues interlocking for a moment before pulling back.

“Alright. I’ll tell her.”

Taylor’s smile is blindingly bright at that, and they go back in for another kiss as the hot water continues to run down their bodies. They’ll get around to taking an actual shower… eventually.

-x-X-x-

“Holy shit, that’s so cool!”

Jason blinks as Vicky… gushes over what he’s just told her. Admittedly, she might be at least partially gushing over Taylor’s new agility. The bug controller had challenged Vicky to try and catch her, and then gave the blonde bombshell the run around for a couple minutes before Vicky had finally, cheerfully, admitted defeat.

To be fair, if they weren’t in Vicky’s own apartment, she might not have been so willing to let Taylor ‘win’ their little game of tag. Alas, if she’d gone any faster, she might have put a hole through one of her walls and even Vicky was smart enough not to do that.

Regardless, he’d still expected her to have reservations about what he and Taylor had done. You know, the demon summoning. But instead, Vicky’s eyes are sparking bright with excitement as she turns her gaze onto him.

“This is the solution to our biggest problem!”

Huh? What even was their biggest problem?

“Can your Empowerment Ritual do brains? Like increasing processing power and memory retention and all that junk?”

Jason thinks about that and slowly nods.

“It’d be a general Intelligence Empowerment, but yes.”

He hadn’t bothered even considering that for himself because of Alchemical Prodigy and there being other, more important things for a squishy human like him to worry about. Jason also got why Taylor hadn’t gone for it, because as she’d explained her power working, it seemed like it took care of all the extra processing needed for controlling as many bugs as she did at one time.

But Vicky was already a flying brick. An ‘Alexandria Package’ as they called it.

“Don’t you see? Give me a boost to my ‘Intelligence’ and we’ll blow through all of the material that will be on that Exam at the end of the month in like two or three days. I’ll read everything you’ve got for me, know every answer, and be guaranteed to pass. And then… we won’t need to worry about tutoring anymore!”

Jason’s mouth opens at that… and then closes. Vicky, meanwhile, continues on without pause.

“You’ll have more than earned my mom’s money too… do you know how much a power-up like what you gave Taylor would probably be worth to the right people? Shit, you could make more money than Ames with that sort of thing! You can literally make Capes!”

Well… shit.

-x-X-x-

A/N: Will try to keep this up to date at the end of every chapter, get on me if I forget please. Though if it gets too out of hand, might have to change it at some point.

Jason's current banked points:

400 Celestial Points

Jason's current banked power: