Chapter 895 – Corrupted Physicality
Chapter 895 – Corrupted Physicality
John was quite thankful for the cumload slider he had gotten. In situations like the drive, where the lack of showers meant the mess had to be minimized, cumming just the normal amount was quite useful. The inside of the car and their bodies could be wiped down or cleaned up by Undine, if need be, but the extreme amounts of semen leaking out of the girls would have been more than a bit awkward. To avoid this, the loads were minimized and John tried to cum down their throats more often than not.
Because he had to keep the Mobile Barrier running, John couldn’t sleep and continued to fuck for the entirety of the drive. They fooled around sometimes, encouraging Beatrice (and later Metra, when they switched for the second half of the drive) to drive next to the road for a few metres. The bumpiness of the lawn made the experience of Eliza bouncing in his lap a little special.
When there was only about twenty minutes left of their drive, they cleaned themselves up and just cuddled. Eliza was as enjoyable as ever in that regard. Her small frame fit so snugly in his lap and she squeaked in such a delightfully insane manner when he squished her soft body in his arms. Gnome was the best hugger in his harem, there was no doubt about that, but when it came to being an object of cuddling, Eliza was above her. Maybe even the best. It was a contest between her, Sylph and Undine. Squishability and size were important factors.
John enjoyed the happy thoughts for as long as he had them. The closer they got to their target, the more his analytical mind took over until they only cuddled with eyes turned towards the black tinted windows. They were rolling quite a bit off-road now, cutting across an empty field. Eventually, the rainbow-coloured display of two barriers phasing together appeared around them.
Tense, the entirety of the group held their breath for an ambush. They were spared, at this time. “Back up until we leave the barrier, and find the nearest parking spot,” John commanded.
“As you wish, my king,” Metra obeyed and backed-off. “Urgh,” she made a deeply unsatisfied noise, while looking over her shoulder.
“Am I sitting in the way?” John asked. It would have been odd. This was a new and fairly high-tech car, equipped with a rear camera.
“No, I just hate automatics,” the First of Wrath complained. “Where is the fun if you don’t work the engine yourself?”
“The fun is in just driving where the fuck you want to be,” Eliza stated, as they left the barrier again. They all relaxed at that point. Whatever awaited them, it wasn’t strong or skilled enough to wrestle control of the Illusion Barrier from John. They could always flee.
“You drive just to get somewhere,” Metra said, as the wheels touched smooth asphalt again. “I drive because it’s fun. The roaring of the engine, the speed, the way the acceleration presses you into your seat.” She let out a deep, erotic laugh. “Fantastic.”
“Don’t understand, just want to be wherever the fuck I am supposed to be,” Eliza agreed to the berserker babe’s hypothesis. With the topic effectively done, Metra just parked on a corner between the proper road and the fenced entrance to a field.
“Here is good, my king?” she asked.
“It’ll do,” John responded, and they got, still naked, out of the car. Measuring the distance, John told them, “Just put on your regular clothes. I’ll make a barrier to walk the distance.” The last thing the Gamer wanted was to get into trouble with the farmers. Chances that they were the crazed ‘get off my property’-types were slim, but John didn’t want to get stuck in any way.
Beatrice grew out her maid outfit. Metra put on her tiny hot pants and crop top, both were dark grey with partly see-through elements. Eliza wore her leather bra and thong. A metal ring between her boobs and two at the sides of her hips secured those in place. If it hadn’t been for the black robe she put on top, she would have worn even less than Metra.
What John especially loved about the skimpy way they dressed was that the Lover’s Will mark was blatantly visible just above their legwear (which hardly qualified as such). It was simply satisfying.
As a last thing before they left, John scribbled a note and stuck it under the windshield wiper, alongside a twenty-dollar bill. In case they were somehow in the way of whoever that land belonged to, that message would let them know they would be gone in due time and the money would hopefully keep them content. The only thing even worse than a bothered farmer would be a bothered farmer that towed their car away.
Finally, he discontinued the Mobile Barrier, only to open a regular one. They started walking back into the direction they had just been down. “You’re fucked if someone looks under the hood, you know that, yeah?” Eliza asked. “Gaia’s stuck-up cunt will envelop you and you will wish you were only in the worst unbirthing porn ever.”
“I did take that into account, but it’s exceedingly unlikely,” John responded. “Someone would need to find the car, take interest in the car, unlock the security on the hood and inspect the inactive mana engine with enough scrutiny to see it can’t be a normal one.” Taking a dramatic pause, he then added, “In other words, it would just be my luck to have Gaia’s Ire pop up in the next twenty minutes, probably in the middle of the battle.”
“If it kills you, I am murdering the entire fucking world and then her,” Eliza giggled with a bit too much seriousness in her eyes.
“Which reminds me that I should probably freeze some sperm,” John thought out loud.
“How about you just don’t fucking die?” the blood mage suggested.
“That is the plan, but, you know, just in case.” The Gamer smiled. “Don’t worry, I will do absolutely everything to give you a live breeding.”
Eliza seemed satisfied with that answer and they continued to walk through the empty field. Whatever the farmer had put there last must have been harvested a couple days ago, as remains of plants still stuck out of the soft soil. The trees around the border of the field and in the distance were rid of most of their leaves, making the wavy hill landscape an orange and brown tinted ocean. It was quite serene. John could imagine living in an area like this or at least building a vacation home somewhere out here. Far away from the business of the city. Only the speed of the internet connection would be an issue.
The landscape changed drastically when they entered the Protected Space they had sought out.
It was as if someone had taken a picture of the original area and done everything in their power to create a barely recognizable nightmare world from it. Trees were twisted masses of teeth, with fungal stems growing out of the gaps, replacing branches. The ground was covered with a film of some sort of liquid, intermingled with grains of sand. Blades of grass underneath slowly receded and then grew again, as if they were part of a movie that was slowly accelerating and then quickly reversed. Rather than the moon, above hung a massive human eye.
“…This was not here when we just drove i-“ John started, only for the entire landscape to flicker. The eye was replaced by the moon and the trees went back to normal. Indeed, the trees were suddenly everywhere around them and were in full green. It was a forest in the middle of summer, untouched by any sort of human hand. Before their very eyes, those trees devolved from fully grown, to sapling, until they were absorbed back into the earth.
Everything flickered again. Massive canines grew from the ground in chaotic distances but always in pairs of four. Four equally sized, curved, sharp teeth, which grew more teeth on their insides, before all pressing together like a vile flower or a four-segmented maw.
The grains of sand on the grass crunched when Metra called Rex Magnar and swung the halberd to the sound of eager electric guitar chords. The air in front of her tore open and rippled outwards. The teeth disappeared, but the grass continued to recede and return. “This is some advanced fuckery,” she concluded. “I tore apart some space manipulation, but I don’t know what the fuck causes that.” She pointed at one of the trees before them growing larger and larger until it died of old age.
“Several spells overlapping and creating some truly absurd effects, it seems,” John agreed. He wasn’t quite sure about the trees. It looked like there was something manipulating time. Which was exceedingly odd. Time manipulation seemed strictly limited to the dilation inside Illusion Barriers. It was a way of influencing reality Gaia seemed to have reserved for herself and the goddess of time. Yet, what he looked at bore no marks of plant related magic. “Sand… the sands of time?” The Gamer kneeled down.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Eliza asked when he extended his hand to touch the slimy layer on the grass. “This is some Lorylim fuckery!”
“No, it’s not,” John denied, but still stopped to explain. “At least not directly.” Whatever spell Metra had broken had now refreshed, causing eyeballs to pop up all over the surfaces. A cluster of them once more replaced the moon. Curious and red, they stared from above. Out of the pupils grew flowering fungal bodies. Their heads spread, covered the celestial ocular, only for it to vanish. “This isn’t what the Lorylim look like or behave. This is the imaginanings of someone that only knows the basic attributes of Lorylim. Which makes this weirder than an actual Lorylim attack.”
“How so?” Eliza asked, while John put his hand into the grass.
“So, it really is from the place Nathalia told me about,” John mumbled and got up, cleaning his hand with a cloth from his inventory. While he did so, his hand turned the pasty colour it had been before he had gotten his blood circulation fixed through increasing Endurance and Strength. That hand would have looked misplaced at the best of times, but with the still healthy, stronger and larger hand right next to it, it was especially egregious. “It’s odd because they have all the ingredients right, quite detailed even, but they just have the wrong version of it.” John looked around.
He had meant to check whether or not the car had touched the ground here. They would have needed to hurry back and put it back into a barrier if that had been the case. While he did not find any car tracks among the lasting footprints they left in the (most of the time) soft dirt, he found a mass sitting there.
He stared at it, the rest turned around as well. “What the fuck is that?!” Eliza’s disgusted cry represented his thoughts exactly.
It had, in the most basic sense, the shape of a frog. Its outline was completely distorted, swirling apart into reds, blues and greens. Even the smooth parts of its skin boiled with overlapping, unmixing colours. Its eyes bent out of place, duplicating themselves into other positions, only to vanish when it blinked. John blinked and it was gone.
“That’s disgusting,” Metra stated.
“You can still see it?” John asked.
“I wish I fucking couldn’t, it just grew a second head that’s even uglier than the- thank every glorified toilet paper in the world that calls itself a holy book, it’s gone.”
“I can still see it,” Metra reported.
“Try to interact with it.”
“Alright.” Metra slammed Rex Magnar’s spiked side into the dirt. It wasn’t exactly what John had in mind, but he had no right to be surprised. “Still there.”
“Blink.”
“…It’s gone now.”
John turned around to find the forest grow around them again. The mass was nowhere to be seen. Slashing the air again, Metra prevented the quickly aging trees from turning into teeth-leaved mushrooms.
“Are we sure we haven’t all taken a gargantuan dose of LSD and are currently having a fucking horror trip together?” Eliza wanted to know.
“As if LSD would last you longer than twenty seconds,” John joked. As far as nightmare landscapes went, this was one of the least concerning ones he had visited. Sure, it was as if he had entered the horror trip of a college student, but nothing was trying to kill him, corrupt him or liquify his mind. It was simply disturbing. Whenever he found the landscape too displeasing to look at, he simply focused on one of his companions for a couple of seconds. No matter what happened around them, it didn’t affect them, making them points of sanity in the shifting grotesqueness.
“Fair e-fucking-nough,” Eliza said and wretched. “There is that frog again,” she said and pointed somewhere.
John saw it too, which was strangely calming. Whatever that trippy mass was, it wasn’t a sign of individual corruption. It was completely possible they were all losing their minds together. “Alright, just for safety,” the Gamer raised his hand and exited the barrier again. The control was still his. “Lifeline remains secure,” he said, after going back in. Because they were in a group, they would enter and leave with him. Outside of dungeons, that feature seldom came to be used, but in moments like this it gave him peace of mind. “Let’s find whatever is at the heart of this mess.”
They advanced into the aging, rejuvenating, mutating landscape.
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