Chapter 37: On the Road

After about an hour of walking, the road leading south from the dwarf village changed from cobblestone to simple packed earth, though it stayed just about as wide. Jadis was no tracker, but to her untrained eyes it didn’t seem as though anyone had walked or ridden on the path in quite some time. Still, the way was clear and consistently aimed southward, so she stayed on the road.

As she walked and the day progressed, Jadis occasionally spotted bone thieves stalking through the trees, most of them at a far enough distance that she didn’t bother hunting them down, though a few came close enough to catch sight of her and attacked with their typical mindless abandon. None were more than a few moment’s delay, the skeletal demons of negligible threat to her.

Since Jay and Dys were saddled with carrying the supplies, Jadis had Syd range out and around the road, acting as a forward scout. Other than the pine trees she was used to and the occasional skele-demon, the only thing of note Jadis found all morning was the brook running roughly parallel to the road, about two hundred paces away. By her guess, its source was the mining pond on the top of the hill.

Around noon she stopped, taking a moment to rest and drink some water. She didn’t feel particularly tired, a fact she attributed to her increased endurance. So, after what she guessed was only a quick fifteen-minute rest Jadis was back on her several pairs of feet and heading down the road again.

Eagerness to see new sights was definitely edging Jadis on. Every step she took now was bringing her ever closer to strange places and stranger peoples, a whole fantastical world to explore. She couldn’t help but smile at the thought of what she would hopefully find sooner rather than later.

“I am so looking forward to meeting an elf,” Syd murmured. She was several hundred feet ahead and to the left of Jay and Dys, far outside of earshot, but talking out loud was performative for Jadis anyway. “I’ve always wanted to touch those ears. With all this forest, I’m betting elves are what we run into first.”

“Nah, it’ll be dwarves,” Jay countered. “That village was made for people dwarf-sized, so wherever this road leads probably means more of the same.”

“Boring answer,” Syd complained. “But probably correct. Still, I want pointy ears to play with so I’m sticking with elves as my bet.”

“What, don’t want to play with a dwarf beard?” Jay laughed. “God, I hope they aren’t the old school bearded-lady type dwarves. That’d be a real buzzkill.”

“You’re both wrong,” Dys chimed in from the back. “First thing we’re finding when we get to wherever this road is going is more demons.”

Both Jay and Syd booed Dys, shaking their heads.

“Doesn’t count,” Jay rejected Dys’ guess. “We’ve already run into demons. You can’t bet on more demons.”

“They’ll be different demons. Not bone thieves.” Dys gestured with her maul, waving it like teacher would a ruler. “Something like ‘fire spitter’ or ‘soul sucker’ or ‘acid—acid fucker’, I don’t know.”

All three giggled a bit, the laughter bubbling out of Jadis due to her good mood. She truly was quite happy to be on the road, even if she wasn’t certain of where she was going to end up.

“Fine, fine, Syd bets elves, I bet dwarves, and Dys bets on demons of some non-bone variety,” Jay reiterated the choices made. “What are the stakes?”

“Winner waited on hand and foot by the other two?” Syd suggested.

“Fine by me,” Dys agreed.

With a laugh, Jay agreed as well. “Done deal!”

No matter which of her self’s guesses were right, Jadis would be a winner. A simple game of guessing what was coming did wonders to keep Jadis entertained as she travelled the otherwise fairly uninteresting forest landscape.

By the time the sun was reaching the end of its path across the sky, Jadis had travelled far enough south that she felt she was no longer in the valley she’d started in. The mountains she was used to seeing to the east and west of her were now more northeast and northwest. Other than those distant landmarks, all she could see around her were pines, pines, and more tall pines. She took the lack of mountains to the south to be a good sign, however. To her limited understanding of history and civilization, most human settlements were built around water and water always headed to the lowest spot it could. Heading south felt like she was going downhill, and the brook that was still running roughly parallel to the road supported that hypothesis.

Jadis just hoped the existence of magic on Oros didn’t invalidate her assumptions on where people would choose to build their towns.

Perhaps an hour before night fell, Jadis picked a small clearing a little way away from the dirt road to set up camp. Splitting up duties between her three selves, Jadis cut down some of the smaller pines with her mauls, setting up a basic lean-to. The sky had been clear of clouds all day, but in her experience so far, the mountain weather brought rains on quickly and unexpectedly.

Making a firepit with a few rocks, Jadis gathered wood and used her tinderbox to get a campfire going. It was easy enough to fill the cauldron up with water from the brook and get a meal started.

As she pulled a few bricks of hardtack from her supplies, Dys checked on the jar with the demon egg inside.

“Still hasn’t hatched,” she announced, watching as the faint blue glow of the eye within the translucent shell turned up towards her.

Jadis wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about the little unborn eyeball staring at her. The idea of the demon somehow being aware of her despite not yet hatching was… disturbing.

“Take your time, I guess,” she said to the egg with a flat stare before closing the lid. Almost as an afterthought, she wedged the jar back in place so it couldn’t be opened. Just in case.

All three of her selves sat down to share a monotonous meal that was, frankly, becoming unbearable. Jadis was about ready to start mixing pine needles into the slurry, just to get a new flavor. She refrained, though, since she wasn’t sure what that would do to her stomach.

As she ate, Jadis went over which of her attributes would be best to improve with her Lascivious Empowerment ritual.

“Considering the description states the amount it multiplies a stat ‘increases per number of participants involved in ritual’, then it’s either going to multiple by three or by one when we do this,” Jay started the discussion.

“Depends on if it counts us as one person or not,” Dys added.

Syd shrugged her shoulders before stating, “I’m pretty sure we’ll only count as one. I mean, I know we’re just one person. We just happen to have three bodies. I feel like if the number of bodies involved was the determining factor, it’d be phrased that way. It says ‘participants’ though, and we’re just one person participating.”

“Probably true,” Jay conceded. “Whatever the case may be, however, it doesn’t say how much it’s multiplying per participant. It’d be nice to know how much it’s potentially giving us before we make a choice on which skill we boost.”

“Does it matter?” Syd asked. “We can just do the ritual again if we want to put it elsewhere.”

“Yeah, but a two hour break for ritualistic fucking, while fun, isn’t very practical,” Dys said while washing down her hardtack and honey mush with some water. “At least not when we’re out in the wide-open woods like this.”

“Right, same issue as Debauched Duplication. Can’t switch all that easily so we want to pick something we know we’d find useful all the time.”

“Strength, then,” Syd immediately said, following up Jay’s assessment. “It’s our only real method of dealing damage, thus our only way of defending ourselves. All our other stats are much lower, though not as low as they were thanks to—”

The realization struck Jadis like a thunderbolt.

“Motherfucker!”

“Why the fuck didn’t we put our free points into fucking Eldritch!?”

“I am so fucking STUPID,” Jadis cried out from multiple selves at the same time, berating herself for her own unthinking actions. She was so used to ignoring her abnormally high eldritch stat that even after gaining the Minor Fractional Spread skill and Eldritch Overlay spell, she’d gone right back to disregarding the now extremely relevant attribute.

“Okay, now that we’ve realized the freaking obvious,” Jay huffed, “We’ll be using the ritual to increase eldritch. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Syd nodded.

“Agreed, however,” Dys paused, thinking things through from what she’d experienced already, “Unless the ritual boosts the skill by ten or more points, we won’t see any tangible difference for most of our attributes. Fractional Spread gives us a tenth of our eldritch attribute, and from what we’ve already seen, the system doesn’t round up on percentages.”

“True,” Jay allowed, “But hopefully it will give us a good boost to eighty or above. Even if it doesn’t, we need to be putting everything we can into eldritch to maximize our gains. Whatever stat we put Overlay onto will also be benefiting from Lascivious Empowerment.”

“Then that’s that,” Syd said, smiling broadly. “Shall we get started?”

With eyebrows raised suggestively, Dys looked at Jay and crooned, “No time like the present!”

Heart already beating fast at what was to come, Jay stood and stretched, feigning a bit of nonchalance for no reason but Jadis’ own amusement.

“Let’s clean up a bit first,” Jay suggested, “then we can get down to business.”

Stripping her armor and clothing off, all three of Jadis’ selves walked to the brook to wash in the waning light of the evening sky. Strolling about the outdoors utterly naked barely registered to Jadis anymore, she’d grown so comfortable doing it. As she went about washing in the clear cold water of the forest stream, Jadis took her time to admire the beauty of her shapely form.

Powerful muscles moved under a soft and smooth covering of pure white skin, so defined at times that if she stopped moving, Jadis was half convinced she was looking at a marble statue instead of her own flesh. The shape of her breasts practically compelled her to want to touch them, to play with the small pert nipples. Looking lower, there was even more begging for her fingers and lips, her toned abs and trim waist exciting impulses inside her she didn’t know she had. Then there was the swell of her ass, curved and tight yet still plush to the touch. The sight made Jadis salivate.

Jadis didn’t care if she was being vain or narcissistic. She was beautiful and sexy and she loved it.

“Fuck, I can’t wait anymore,” Dys said, wrapping her arms around Jay from behind as they stood in the knee deep waters of the brook. “Let’s do it now.”

Grinding her hardened shaft against Jay’s ass, Dys nibbled on Jay’s ear. Hands roaming across Jay’s chest and stomach, she slid her fingers across smooth and hairless skin, raking her nails on sensitive patches, sending little thrills up Jay’s spine.

“Let’s just do it,” Syd voiced her own agreement, squatting low in front of the two entangled mirror bodies of her own self.

Syd grabbed hold of Jay’s throbbing cock, running her hands up and down it once before impulsively engulfing the head, running her tongue around the crown with intense eagerness.

A synchronized moan slipped from all three as Jay thrust forward, forcing more of her turgid length into Syd’s mouth. Pulling back, she gyrated her hips back against Dys, using her ass to grind against her dick.

Dys’ hands cupped Jay’s breasts, rubbing and squeezing in all the right ways she knew she loved, drawing out pants and moans from Jay in a lewd song that filled the night air. At the same time, Jay’s own hands wrapped themselves into Syd’s hair, dragging her head up and down her cock, reveling in the feel of her tight, wet mouth, though not yet pulling her the full length, working up to it.

Syd’s hands roamed, running up and down both Jay and Dys’ thighs, occasionally dipping into the dripping V found between both their legs, teasing the wet folds there, tickling and teasing, eliciting her own gasps from the two above.

“Wait, wait,” Jay said, pulling Syd off of her cock with a supreme effort of will. “We can’t do this here.”

“Yes we fucking can,” Dys insisted, Jadis’ excitement warring with her better judgement. The heat of the moment getting the better of her, Syd ran her tongue up the full length of Jay’s shaft, from base to tip, before ending with a lustful kiss to one side. At the same time, Dys ground against Jay harder, rubbing her own cock hard against the valley of Jay’s ass, her precum already flowing, adding a slippery lubrication to the vulgar act.

“Yes, we can,” Jay agreed, running one hand through Syd’s hair, the other reaching behind her to palm Dys’ ass. “But we’re standing in cold water and the sun is going down. And since we don’t want to catch a fucking cold and we really don’t want a demon to sneak up on us in the dark, how about we move this to beside the fire?”

The logic was entirely reasonable. What’s more, it was Jadis’ own logic coming from her own accurate assessment of the situation. She still wanted to ignore everything and just start fucking right then and there.

With one final lick, Syd abruptly stood. “Fine,” she growled. “Let’s fucking go.”

Almost angrily, Jay, Dys and Syd parted, bodies aching with need. Rather than immediately racing for the campfire though, all three moved towards a boulder sticking out of one side of the riverbank. It was a large mass of rock that had to weigh a ton if it weighed a pound and was just the right height for Jadis to sit on it comfortably.

Working together, the three ripped the stone from the ground and carried it back to the camp before tossing it down by the fire with a weighty thump.

“Take a fucking seat,” Jay whispered into Dys’ ear before giving it a kiss. “This is going to be a hell of ritual.”

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