Adon rested.
His body had adapted to the acidic environment in which it rested, and now he was capable of drifting into that sleep-like state that he had periodically entered during his life as a caterpillar.
Even semi-conscious, he continued acting on the program that he had begun before, of trying to search through his human lives and find examples of good social skills that he could copy. Sadly, his past selves had been uniformly socially unsuccessful, but on the bright side, h...
2024-06-11 14:30:26 +0000 UTC
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The descent brought Mina, Alice and Zora down just a few feet from a massive, run-down mansion.
“I never knew there was anything like this in the area where we had our apartment,” Mina said. “It’s strange—” She giggled as she realized what she’d just said. Then she shook her head. “Do you think she built it for herself?”
“Wraiths are pure evil,” Zora said, her voice a slightly melancholy whisper. “They create nothing new or good. They only twist and pervert...
2024-06-10 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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As the scouts rose to their feet and faced off against Dave and his vanguard, he forced himself to remain steady and not back down.
Identify.
Amalia Rosario (Possessed), Lv. 8
Damn it, they really are being controlled—but does that mean we can save them?
The thing wearing Amalia’s body leaned in closer to Dave, leering at him. Obviously enjoying his discomfort.
“What’s wrong, soldier boy?” the thing said in a shrill pe...
2024-06-09 02:41:33 +0000 UTC
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Dave exhaled.
“All right,” he said. “You, you, and you.” He selected three more people. “That completes our scouting party.”
A few people groaned, but Dave raised his hand for silence. To their credit, they immediately clammed up.
“Unless something immediately happens to the scouting party, the rest of us will be joining them shortly.”
A little hoot of excitement went up, and Dave grimaced. Whatever. I guess it’s better for people to be excited th...
2024-06-07 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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James wished Dave luck and then walked away from him and back to Mina, Alice, and his mother.
He was quiet and resolved. He believed this was his best plan, and he allowed himself to mentally detach a bit from the people he was sending into harm’s way.
Can’t worry about them right now. If I do, I won’t make proper use of the risk they’re taking.
He looked around as he moved. There were still a few people lurking outside, looking at the forest and the force t...
2024-06-05 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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“Go ahead,” Queen Maud pronounced calmly, gesturing for the messenger to speak.
In the intervening years since the time skip, she seemed to have acquired a calm and steady quality.
She was confident now, not just on the battlefield, but also on the throne and in council chambers.
Rosslyn’s lips curled into a smile as she looked on. Even though she thought she knew the tragedy that was about to unfold, she enjoyed seeing her predecessor more comfortable in her own skin ...
2024-06-05 16:00:19 +0000 UTC
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Rosslyn dreamt.
She knew she was dreaming and that the visions that presented themselves before her eyes did not represent her reality, nor even, as far as she could tell, her own past lives. She remembered fighting a group of assassins and losing vision in one eye. She remembered her life from before this great sleep.
Instinctively, she felt more and more, the longer the visions went on, that something must be wrong. Although time was always distorted in sleep, she was almost cer...
2024-06-05 14:37:05 +0000 UTC
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Once Goldie had thought about it for more than a moment, the choice became obvious.
You have to start with the Brown Recluse Spiders, she thought. If you leave your eggs alone to fight them, at least you know that they are occupied with you.
If she attacked the Common House Spiders first, she would be worried about her eggs the entire time.
With that decision settled, she opened up her Status. She would make some improvements before she went hunting.
...
2024-06-05 03:02:44 +0000 UTC
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“Where is that spider?”
Goldie heard the voice from behind her, but with most of the wall in between her and the speaker, she could not tell whose voice it was, only that it was a woman speaking.
She desperately pressed herself more forcefully into the crevasse—and then heard a sound that made her whole body freeze up. The smallest cracking noise.
No, my eggs!
She had thought the thick and tough silk wrapped around them would protect agains...
2024-06-03 18:15:44 +0000 UTC
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Goldie measured twice before spinning her silk once in constructing her web, as she tried to do consistently when she was not in a hurry to build a new home.
Normally, with the practice she had accumulated over her life in the garden, it only took her around an hour to build a basic web. But she liked to take longer. Goldie preferred to make more ornate and beautiful webs.
On this occasion, though, she emphasized function heavily, almost entirely ignoring the beauty of her creatio...
2024-06-03 18:13:36 +0000 UTC
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Goddess damn it! The King again…
If the King saw Goldie again, he would surely throw her back outside at the least, if not decide that she was better off killed. It seemed unlikely that the human would understand the bond that connected her and Adon. If he had understood before, he would not have left her all alone when he took the chrysalis inside. He would have brought them in together, especially considering that her bite could not harm him.
Goldie resolved to remain...
2024-06-03 18:09:18 +0000 UTC
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Goldie fumed helplessly.
How dare he? What gives him the right to just pluck Adon away like that?
But of course, she knew what gave him the right. This was his garden.
In the week that had passed since Adon entered his chrysalis, Goldie had purchased Claustrian Language Comprehension. Listening in on the whispered conversations among the gardeners who regularly moved through the space near her new web was a way to pass the time in between consuming cre...
2024-06-03 18:07:08 +0000 UTC
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King Alistair stalked out of the palace, his body tense as a compressed spring.
Scurrying behind him came the figure of Lord Callum, quiet determination running through his posture.
“Your Majesty—”
The King abruptly turned and walked in another direction, moving more quickly than his advisor could follow. He had a moment of quiet before Lord Callum caught up with him.
“Your Majesty, please, we must discuss matters of state!” Lord Callum exclaimed.
The K...
2024-06-03 18:02:24 +0000 UTC
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Adon lost sight of the sunlight and the outside world in an instant as the Evolution process finally kicked into gear.
He shed another layer of skin and realized that suddenly, what had been his insides felt wet and exposed. And outside.
This doesn’t seem right, he thought. Liquid moved around him within the chrysalis, and he was fairly certain that some of them had been his bodily fluids. But now they were next to him instead of inside of him.
Stay c...
2024-06-03 17:50:51 +0000 UTC
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“All right, I’ve gathered all of the volunteers,” Dave said. “We’re ready to invade the forest.”
The sun was already below the horizon as he spoke, and the whole Fisher Kingdom glowed under a brilliant, quickly fading orange halo—except the part that stood in the shadow of the evil spirit’s forest. The darkness there seemed almost impenetrable, as if there had never been the touch of light there. And yet that was where the Fisher Kingdom’s eager volunteers stood, armed...
2024-06-03 17:34:14 +0000 UTC
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As Adon stepped foot into the thick tissue of discarded skin, the fabric of it moved, and he instinctively jerked back as if scalded.
He was a little nervous, he realized. Even though he knew Goldie was his friend, her species was a natural predator of his. That was only made more obvious by the fact of her Evolution into another species that was clearly much larger than she had been.
Then he saw her head poking out. Goldie was stepping onto the surface of the bits of exo...
2024-05-30 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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“Haunted?” Mina repeated. “I don’t really know. I think it’s something like that. People seeing the dead. James told me about seeing—” She cut herself off.
“My dead husband,” Zora finished for her.
“Yes,” Mina said.
“You don’t have to be so delicate about it,” Zora said, smiling softly. “It’s been twenty years now. I still miss him, but I can talk about it without feeling sad. We had good times together. Now they’re just fond memories.”
2024-05-29 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Adon felt the tension in his body suddenly relax.
There’s something left, he thought but did not transmit.
I’m so glad you saved some, he sent after a moment.
I was just lucky, Goldie thought. We were both lucky. I know how wasps are. They hit like natural disaster. That kind we fought is not unique. They came once when I was young. A different breed than the ones we saw, but similar. I always hid from creatures like that. If ...
2024-05-28 17:00:08 +0000 UTC
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James allowed himself to bask in the glory of the crowd’s approbation for a long few seconds.
He smiled, wiped some gore away from his mouth, and then waited for the cheering to die down.
“Thank you to all the brave fighters who accompanied me here,” he said. “There will be other battles, but for now we have won the day and secured peace.”
There were further enthusiastic cheers, but James saw the bats staring down at the ground, looking uncomfortable, and he instan...
2024-05-28 01:38:35 +0000 UTC
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Adon, Goldie thought.
Her inner voice sounded tired and muddled to him. As she formulated the thought, she was still wiggling her legs as if she could turn right side up by dog paddling through the air.
I’m here, Goldie, he replied instantly. He moved around to her side to help her up.
I was in the space between this world and the next, I think, she thought. I saw the Goddess—unless it was all in my head. I feel confused. Everything hurts. ...
2024-05-26 17:00:13 +0000 UTC
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Adon tried to run, though his body was still worn down from the fight with the Queen and the bulk of the Red Slayer Spider Wasp colony, and the burden of the silk-wrapped wasps slowed him down.
He quickly used his silk cutters to cut the royal guards’ corpses away from him and marginally increase his speed.
As he raced across the distance that separated him from Goldie’s web, Adon’s mind went over everything he had done that day. Was there some way he could have prevented th...
2024-05-24 17:00:12 +0000 UTC
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“I can’t believe I agreed to fight naked,” James grumbled as he placed the last piece of his equipment into his magic satchel. He now stood in the dense, humid air with no protection from the elements but his boxer briefs.
“Lord Anansi wants you to know that you negotiated well, sir,” Hester said. “You preserved what was most important. ‘A king must maintain his dignity,’ he said.”
James wanted to tell Hester to can it, but he could tell that she was genuinely ea...
2024-05-24 15:00:06 +0000 UTC
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“Ambush!” Rosslyn shouted.
Thinking quickly, she mentally calculated the distance that she and her party had traveled.
We are closer to the fortress than to the city, right? She shook her head. Either way, we need to risk it.
She made a snap decision, conjured a burst of fire, and shot it high into the air. Any scout on either side of the border could not fail to miss that. But hopefully it would bring the attention of the soldiers from Fort Alista...
2024-05-23 15:15:41 +0000 UTC
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Rosslyn tucked her head and rolled as she landed on the ground outside Stalenton.
Her body was only lightly reinforced with Mana. Some intuition told her that they might not get away as easily as the lack of glaring obstacles suggested. She needed to save her strength.
The landing was relatively quiet. Even if there had been someone on the wall to hear, they likely would have missed it amidst the usual night sounds.
She heard several thuds after her. A couple of the soldiers...
2024-05-22 15:21:44 +0000 UTC
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A knock came at the front door, and Mina sighed to herself.
“Sweet, could you please get that?”
Just when the baby is almost done eating and just about ready to sleep, someone is knocking…
And Mina felt like a nap herself. She knew she would be working hard through the next few days, trying to help James deal with Sister Strange and the forest specters. If she could get some rest now, she’d have an easier time staying awake later in the evening.
She he...
2024-05-22 15:00:11 +0000 UTC
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Now that the Black Bloodsucking Bat Queen was speaking with him, James was no longer on a hair trigger, waiting to learn whether he would have to order an attack or not. He found it possible to retake control of the situation.
“Lower your voice, please!” he barked. “I’m not deaf—yet!”
“You have no grounds to complain about being yelled at, trespasser,” she replied. But she did speak at a noticeably much lower volume thereafter. “Why are you here?”
“My t...
2024-05-20 15:22:20 +0000 UTC
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James and his war party reached another tree that he sensed was occupied. This time, there were more than two dozen creatures huddled together.
We’re probably going to have to abandon stealth, he assessed.
“Another volley like the last one,” he ordered. “Everyone with firearms, be ready to pick off any creatures that try to fly away. With this many, they’re not likely to all fall with the first wave of attacks. The noise doesn’t matter as much as not letting a...
2024-05-17 17:00:09 +0000 UTC
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The caterpillar and the wasp spiraled down together, away from the rooftop, falling toward the soil. Adon’s home terrain.
As if the battle had not already more or less ended in his favor, he added a bit of insult to injury by pulling his mandibles out of her body and positioning the Queen so as to shield himself from the brunt of their fall.
Their combined weight made it the hardest landing he had ever endured, though it still was not particularly forceful compared with what he ...
2024-05-16 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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James looked on in near awe as a half-dozen bats fell from the sky, shot through with bullet holes that, in several cases, had visibly shredded their thin wing membranes. As they fell, fireballs and small bolts of lightning struck them. Even a few carefully aimed rocks undoubtedly hurled by the Goblins using their slings.
But he was most impressed by the fact that manmade weapons had brought down creatures he thought were out of his own effective attack range.
How are their ri...
2024-05-16 02:00:01 +0000 UTC
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Adon heard and felt, rather than saw, as the wasps attacked him.
Their stingers stabbed and jabbed and careened off of his armor like so many bullets striking a thick steel plate. Some of them whizzed by, but most of them struck home without penetrating.
The attacks were utterly harmless—for now. In fact, to the extent that they were damaging, they were only harming the wasps. Adon felt some of his venom spines impale the creatures he could not see and break off inside their bod...
2024-05-15 17:00:09 +0000 UTC
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