Chapter 25: Bones Do Not Float

Bones do not float.

It took Jadis three days to realize the density of bones meant they would sink if put in water, not float on it like wood. Without the buoyance that came from flesh and lungs full of air, skeletons sank like stones. As a former medical student, she felt more than a little chagrined that she hadn’t remembered the simple biological fact.

Fishing with a net was not easy. Another fact Jadis discovered three days after moving next to the lake. Jadis had no experience with fishing of any kind, so she hadn’t expected to be a stellar success at the practice, but the sheer frustration that came from watching potential meals go slipping out from her grasp every time she tried to cast her net was driving her a little mad.

Three days after Jadis had moved her base of operations to the mining compound, she’d found herself hurling bones and curses into the lake at the mocking fish in a vain hope to strike one dead. She didn’t succeed, but she did discover the fact about bones not being buoyant.

“Okay, I guess we can toss all these bones into the water.” Jay said while frowning at the lake. “Lot more room down there than the cellar.”

“This is going to be a lot of back and forth trips,” Dys said, sighing at the prospect of spending hours carrying armloads of skeletal remains up the hill. “This is going to suck.”

“Let’s just do it. No time like the present.”

“Yeah, fine,” Jadis said through Dys, agreeing with herself. “This has been kind of a slow day, anyway.”

Since her move a few days previous, Jadis had spent her time hunting down bone thieves to slaughter for experience. The ease with which she was striking them down now was almost laughable compared to her first fights on Oros. On her first full day of hunting, she killed fourteen of the demons, then another twelve on the next day.

A big factor in her increasing ability to crush her opponents were the makeshift mauls. Solid and heavy, they cracked bones like walnuts. Combined with her Mirrored Strikes, her duo attacks were devastating against the bone thieves. She no longer needed to set up a deadfall trap in the temple, just wander around the village and surrounding forest until she came across her quarry.

With so many demons slain, Jadis had pushed her level up to twelve. Upon reaching level eleven, she’d been offered two new skills to choose from:

Both seemed useful to Jadis, but ultimately she had decided to choose the skill she’d been offered previously, Refracted Mind. She’d been a little anxious about the effects of the skill, concerned that once she had it, she’d somehow split her consciousness into two or something of the like.

She needn’t have been worried. Once the skill had taken effect, Jadis hadn’t noticed any immediate differences until she started having her two bodies act independently from each other. With the skill, she was able to multitask doing completely different things with each body with far less concentration or effort than had taken before. Having Jay prepare a meal while Dys gathered wood from the forest was now not only possible, but easy.

Jadis had breathed a sigh of relief once she’d assessed the full extent of the changes the skill had wrought on her. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if she’d actually manifested some kind of alter ego.

Upon reaching level twelve on the second day, Jadis had gained another attribute point and, true to her word, had decided to experiment with it. She’d put the point into Endurance, bringing its total up to sixteen. She wasn’t certain, but after doing so she felt as though she could exert herself for a little longer before she started breathing heavily, which made sense to her. She had guessed Endurance probably had something to do with a person’s staying power or ability to keep moving before running out of energy. She planned on bring the attribute all the way up to twenty just to make sure. She doubted it’d be a waste, even if it was doing something other than increasing her stamina.

On day three, Jadis had decided to rest. While she rarely took any bad hits from the bone thieves anymore, they still did some small damage. With so many fights over a short time, she’d amassed a fair number of wounds even with her nightly recovery. So, on day three she rested, doing very little in the way of combat.

Still, she’d found that she was a little too restless to sleep past noon, which is how she’d found herself failing at fishing and rediscovering some basic biology facts.

Carrying the bones up out of the cellar and tossing them into the small lake wasn’t difficult or even tiring, just tedious. Fortunately for Jadis’ under-stimulated mind, twice during the process she ran into bone thieves. Though they brought a little excitement into the chore for Jadis, they were dispatched too quickly to be of any real challenge. Even worse, once they were dead, they just added to the amount of bones she had to carry up to the lake to dispose of.

“Is it just me or are there more of these bony fucker’s running around then there were before?” Dys asked, chucking an armful of skeletal remains into the waters of the lake, tossing them as deep as she could get them.

“Yeah, I mean, compared to the, what, seven or so we got when we were trapping the temple? Definitely more,” Jay answered, hurling her own load into the lake. “Do you think there’s a reason?”

“Probably us, I’d guess. We’re stirring things up. Seemed like they weren’t doing much until we got here. Maybe they’re just all waking up?”

“Where are they coming from, though?” Jay asked as the two turned to walk back towards the village. They were close to done with the task and Jadis was eager to finish and find something else to do.

“My guess,” Dys mused, running her fingers through her hair while balancing her maul on her shoulder, “They’re coming from somewhere to the south. Haven’t really seen any coming out of the cave, and there’s nowhere to really hide in the village. Not that many bodies, not with how thoroughly we’ve searched it.”

“Maybe so. Makes me wonder if when we do leave, if we should head south or not.” Jay looked in said direction. She couldn’t see much, not with the ever-present tall pine trees, but from what she saw when on top of the mountain cliff, she had a general idea.

The valley opened up wide to the south, stretching outwards into what seemed to be a vast forest with a few rolling hills. There hadn’t been any sign of civilization from what she had seen, but the only road leaving the village headed south. If she went any other direction, she’d be striking out into unknown wilds without even a disused dirt path for a guide.

“Problem for another day,” Dys dismissed the thoughts. “We’ll worry about direction once we’re good and ready to go on a hike.”

Jadis got her task done in a few more trips, tossing the last of the bones in the water while giving a contemptuous middle finger to the agitated fish swimming within. She’d only been eating soggy crackers mixed with honey for three days and she was already thinking about just diving into the water and swimming after the scaly bastards just for a taste of variety.

Well, at least she was always full now.

Jadis spent the rest of the day napping, resting, and engaging in some more pleasurable pursuits. The first morning after her move, Jadis had found that her morning wood had returned with a vengeance, something she guessed had to do with how she was no longer short on food and wasn’t sleeping off terrible injuries every night anymore. A quick, immensely satisfying, session of giving each body head had become Jadis’ morning routine.

Perhaps she could have simply ignored the erections, or thought about wrinkly old men or something equally unappealing to kill her arousal, but Jadis didn’t want to. She’d asked D specifically for her fun new appendages and she was going to use them. Even if D might be spying on her from his living room, watching her suck her own mirror self’s dick through his little tablet, she didn’t care. Hell, she’d put on a show for him, if that’s what he wanted.

Despite the somewhat flippant thoughts that went through Jadis’ head while she played with herself, putting on a literal show for D had not been Jadis’ intention when she’d started her forth day. Yet, as the day progressed, she found herself in just that position.

The morning had started well enough. After a quick sixty-nine and breakfast, Jadis had tried to fish a little, with no success. While fishing, she noticed a few dark clouds overhead but though little of them. Overcast days had been common in her experience on Oros so far. Once she was done frustrating herself with fishing, Jadis set out into the village to hunt down more demons.

There were a few stalking the between the old buildings, none of them quite so challenging or dangerous as the bear-like one had been. She set up her attacks against them by using her old trick of letting one rush her self left in the open as bait while the other self waited around a corner. The strategy was effective, though perhaps no longer strictly necessary. Jadis didn’t really need surprise attacks to kill the demons anymore.

After the fifth demon, the well ran dry in the village and Jadis couldn’t find anymore demons to hunt. With a shrug, she set about dumping out the squished remains and putting the bones in a pile for her to carry up to the lake later. As Dys dumped one of the dark purple many-tentacled bodies into the every growing pile of dead and rotting corpses Jadis had made in the middle of the village road, she stopped to stare at the eyes.

Almost all of the demonic cyclopean eyes had vibrant orange irises. However, a couple, including the one Jadis had just dumped onto the pile, had a different color. This one was more yellow. Jadis had no idea if that made any kind of difference in judging the nature of a demon, or if it was no more significant than the difference between brown and blue eyes on a human, but she did wonder.

The challenging bear-like bone thief had had a red eye. It had been the first noticeably different demon eye she’d seen and it had been her most dangerous enemy to date. This yellow-eyed demon had been much smaller than the other bone demons she had fought. Smaller, weaker, and just overall far less of a challenge. In fact, Jadis was fairly certain she could have taken the pathetic monster down no weapons at all. She probably could have just picked it up and smashed it against a tree a few times like the horror movie villain she’d seen do with a teen camper in a sleeping bag.

Cheesy horror movies aside, the thought that eye color might indicate strength level with a demon percolated in Jadis’ mind. Jay and Dys stood around the pile of bodies, staring at the decaying corpses, thinking about levels and how to identify them. Did demons have levels? That’d make sense, at least to her, but did it make sense on Oros? If they did have levels, did they spawn at their specific level and just stay like that or did they have to earn levels the same way she did? Was that why some of the bone thieves were weaker while others were stronger? Or was it just some kind of natural variable?

Jadis let her mind wander heedless of her surroundings for far longer than she likely should have, especially when there might be enemies patrolling nearby, only coming to her senses when she felt a cold splatter start to fall on her head and shoulders.

Looking up, the dark clouds she’d seen that morning had multiplied, covering the sky from horizon to horizon. A few fat drops of rain quickly escalated to a full downpour in the few seconds it took Jadis to think about what to do. Hating the idea of being caught out in the rain, Jadis ran into the closest building she knew for certain had no demons waiting inside.

The stone temple was dark and more than a little eerie  with the sound of rain and thunder echoing in the open space, but Jadis had grown used to exploring dark and spooky environs. The shadows didn’t bother her anymore. Briefly she’d considered running all the way back to the mining compound, but in Jadis’ experience heavy downpours never lasted too long. She hoped the rain would pass in a few hours and once it did, she’d resume her hunt.

“Well, what do we do now?” Dys asked, shaking herself to try and dry off a bit. The rain had been cold and she was already wishing she had a towel and warm fire.

“Nothing much to do…” Jay answered, watching Dys as water dripped from wet hair down the sides of her face.

Both looked at each other, studying the droplets that clung to lips, dripping from chins and rolling down pale skin.

“I can think of a way to warm us up,” Jay said, watching one particular water droplet as it charted a course down Dys’ neck to her chest, disappearing under leather armor.

“In here?” Dys said, her own heart starting to beat a little faster as blood rushed to her lower body. She gestured with her head, “With him looming over us?”

The statue of D still stood tall over the dais, arms spread wide, mischievous and mocking smirk barely visible in the gloom of the darkened temple.

“Why not? He watches us anyway.”

“Yeah, true,” Dys said, drawing close to Jay, wrapping hands around her waist as she reciprocated the gesture. “Besides, if he’s got a problem with us having a little bit of fun in his temple, he can come down here and tell us himself.”

Jay nodded, biting her lower lip. She glanced at the statue on top of the raised stone platform of the temple as she began grinding her hips against Dys’. “Might as well make it a front row show for him, yeah?”

“Fuck yeah,” Dys agreed, violet eyes burning with lust.

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