Chapter 41: Danica

After wrenching her sword free from the giant’s bloody and bruised corpse, Lexi glanced over at her companions. Seeing that they were both quite worse for wear, but definitely alive, the paladin stuck the blade straight down into the ground so that it would stand up straight, and plopped right down there, leaning her back against the flat of the blade like a makeshift chair back. Breathing heavily, Lexi closed her eyes for a moment, silently basking in her party’s extremely hard won victory over the pair of would-be slavers.

These guys seemed way tougher than anything we’d faced before, which makes sense if the game’s central AI is arranging encounters based on our increases in skills and abilities. But still, this was pretty fucking brutal. Samantha and Gretel both look super rough too. I wonder if we’ll even have enough spell points between the three of us to get healed up? And, shit, if the encounters are already THIS hard two-days out from the quest’s destination, how fucking hard is it going to be once get there?

The internal monologue was only broken when Lexi realized that there was a popup message waiting her her, hanging politely in the periphery of her heads-up display.

Attribute

Modification

New Value

Reason

Experience Points

+4,000

19,250

Defeated Slaver (Level 4)

No wonder that guy was so tough, level four! I didn’t even get bumped up that high with this new crop of XP, shit. Still, that puts me right on the cusp of the next level, so that’ll be happening pretty soon given the way things have been going for the last three days. This makes me wonder, though, can I see Gretel and Samantha’s XP and levels? I mean, they’re not just any NPCs after all, they’re my followers.

Lexi decided to test out the generic subvocal command structure that Felicity had instructed her in, and was happily surprised to see that it did in fact get her precisely the kind of data she was hoping to see.

Get Party!

Role

Name

Race

Class

Level

XP

HP

SP

MP

Leader

Lexi

Human

Paladin

4

19,250

17/35

7/8

9/9

Follower

Gretel

Human

Mage

2

7,000

9/22

17/20

6/6

Follower

Samantha

Human

Monk

2

8,250

10/25

3/6

7/7

While Lexi was more than happy to see that not only had both Gretel and Samantha gotten themselves up to level two, but they were both also steadily approaching the third level as well. However, she was still somewhat concerned by the relatively low power level of her party — as clearly evidenced by the sheer volume of damage both she and her two friends had incurred. If this had been a typical J-RPG, Lexi would have been extremely wary about such a low-level party, with no magical weapons, even considering attacking a potentially fortified goblin temple.

But, it’s not like I have any real choice in the matter. After all, if we don’t somehow manage to retrieve this Starseed, then it’s pretty much game over for me anyway.

An idea struck the paladin then. If Lexi had been a cartoon character, she imagined that a blinking light bulb would have suddenly appeared over her head. In her initial cursory sweep of the situation, she had noticed several arrows sticking up from the black robed mage’s back. Since none of her current party members were archers, she assumed that this had been the handiwork of the elf maid they had been attempting to rescue. If Lexi could convince this elf girl to join her party — which might just have been the reason the game’s AI constructed this scenario to begin with — then she could really be a force multiplier.

Struggling back up to her feet after the all too brief respite, Lexi pulled her enormous broadsword free from the ground, resheathing the blade on her back. She then limped over to where Samantha was, propped up on one knee, sweat dripping profusely from the monk’s shaggy white banks to run down her exposed bronzed musculature in glistening rivulets. The paladin extended an arm to the monk, who gripped it around the forearm. And, with a heave on both their parts, their collective powers — diminished as they might be — managed to get the injured Samantha back onto her feet.

“You look like shit,” Lexi said flashing a snarky grin.

“I have certainly felt better,” the monk replied, the hint of a smile pulling up at her lips. “Though, I certainly count the price well paid, for us to have defeated so mighty a foe.”

“Seriously!” the paladin said, wrapping her arm around Samantha’s waist to steady her as they walked. “What the everliving fuck was up with that guy?”

“I cannot say,” Samantha replied shaking her head. “Certainly such a spell is well beyond me, but my knowledge of such things is quite limited.”

“Yeah, same here. Still, those combos you came out with were really fucking killer!”

“Thank you,” the monk said blushing deeply, her eyes going wide as they stared rather intently at her feet. “They can be difficult to execute in the heat of battle, and if I happen to miss with the initial strike from the combination, I have no real way to adjust.”

“Ahhh, gotcha,” Lexi nodded. “No course correction, which leaves you open to a counterstrike from the other guy.”

“Just so,” Samantha agreed.

“Well still,” the paladin said, giving the monk’s amazingly striated abs a quick squeeze. “You were fucking amazing back there, and I’m glad we’ve got each other.”

Samantha made no reply to this, but from the deepening of her blush, Lexi knew that her words had struck home.

“Anyway,” Lexi continued. “Let’s check on Gretel and this oh-so-mysterious elf that we just risked our asses to save.”

The paladin and monk barely made it to the edge of the clearing where Gretel and the elf were huddled together before collapsing once again from the combined fatigue and sheer exhaustion of the battle the two had just waged. Samantha’s large muscled ass hit the ground, as her legs folded themselves into a cross-legged sitting position. Whereas Lexi less gracefully dropped to her knees, tossing her sword to the ground and rolling her head in clockwise circles to loosen up the knots that had formed in her neck from the repeated blows she had taken to the face.

The paladin took a breath, intending to ask Gretel and the elf how they were doing, but as soon as Lexi made eye contact with the elf girl, the latter’s mouth exploded into a torrent of rapid-fire speech that left Lexi — and the rest of the party — completely dumbstruck.

“You’re all super amazing! Are you all fighters and magic users? I don’t have any spells per se, but since I’m a ranger I can talk to flora and fauna, and sometime get them to help me, but that’s nothing compared to what you three did. I mean, wow! My name’s Danica, by the way, Danica Woodbine, and—”

Lexi realized with growing shock that if she did not cut the girl off, then who knew how long it would be before the paladin could get a word in edgewise.

“Danica!” Lexi said loudly, jolting the elf and breaking the train of near continual rapid-fire run-on sentences she had just fired off. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Lexi, and these other two are Samantha and Gretel.”

“Lexi, Samantha, and Gretel — awesome!” Danica said in her mile-a-minute pace. “You girls showed up in just the nick of time. If you hadn’t jumped in right when you did, I don’t even want to think about what would’ve happened to me, I mean—”

“Right!” Lexi cut in, understanding implicitly how conversations with the elven chatterbox were likely to go. “We just happened to be heading this way, but I’m sure as fuck glad that we were. Those assholes seemed like really bad news. How’d you end up all alone out here anyway? I’m new here myself, but from what I understand, this part of Aeternia is, like, super dangerous.”

“For real!” Gretel chimed in. “Apart from Astyanax itself, almost everything between the Zin and Soraothian ranges is totally riddled with greenskins. Only a lunatic would venture out here alone. Did you get separated from your party or something?”

“Well,” Danica said looking thoughtful. “I did have a huge party right before I left my homeland — I’m from the Isle of Tarynth — but I think pretty much everyone, or at least everyone I know had a big coming-of-age party when they had their fiftieth birthday. Buuut, no one from that party came with me when I went off to do my roaming — something that some elves, but all rangers, do for the first thirty or forty years after coming of age — so, when I think about it, I haven’t really had any parties for the last, I guess, about twenty-eight years, so—”

“Holy shit!” Gretel exclaimed. “You’re almost eighty?!”

“Yeah…” the elf said, actually blushing a slightly, the pink color rising across the ivory white skin covering her delicately pointed cheekbones, and spreading out to the tips of her long pointed ears. “I know, I know, I’m technically an adult, but just barely. That’s probably why I didn’t notice the trap that those two guys set for me before it was too late. But, that’s the whole reason I’ve been out here on the continent in the first place — to get experience. Tarynth is super tiny, and nothing every really happens there, so if I ever wanted to learn anything about the world, I had to just get out there and be in it, which is what I’ve been doing, making friends with all kinds of interesting trees and animals—”

Admittedly, with the amount of fatigue and injury to which her body had been subjected, Lexi was having a hard time focusing on the seemingly endless quantity of words that the tiny elf was capable of producing in almost no time at all. Still, the futanari found herself unconsciously admiring the girl’s beauty. Her motor-mouth excepted, everything about the elf was perfectly delicate and ultra-feminine, like an artist’s ideal rendering of ethereal beauty come to life. The juxtaposition of what should have been an otherworldly grace with the girl’s extreme wide-eyed naivete and blabbermouth was more than enough to quickly endear Danica to Lexi.

An eighty year old elf who’s been totally on her own for longer than I’ve been alive, and she sounds like any other teenage flibbertigibbet. She’s ridiculously cute, but apparently doesn’t know how to shut up? I bet I know a way to plug that pretty little mouth…

“Danica!” Lexi interrupted, cutting short whatever ramble the elf had been in the middle of. The futanari’s wandering train of though had begun leading in a direction that, despite Lexi’s poor physical condition, was bound to make for an uncomfortable situation — on her part if not Danica’s as well. “We’re all definitely happy to have met you, and it’ll be good to talk some more, but I think I can speak for every one in my party — which, by the way, is what we call a group of adventurers — that we need to take a little time and try to tend to our injuries. It looks to me like we all got kinda fucked up fighting those two slavers.”

“Oh! Right!” Danica said, clapping her hands and grinning widely, her ears bobbing up and down with excitement. “I wanted to say thank you for helping me, and I was thinking that you might all like for me to ask Mother Earth to lend me a bit of her healing energy that I can pass on to you. Like I said, I’m not a spellcaster — elven mages have to study for, like, a hundred years before they’re done with school, and I didn’t have the patience for that — but I’ve spent enough time building a good relationship with the Mother and her children that make up the forests that she likes to help me out sometimes. Since you three were doing such a good deed and helping me out, I’m sure that the Mother wouldn’t say no if I asked to—”

“Wait, really?!” Lexi butted in. “You can heal all of us, like, at once?”

“Seriously,” Gretel said, eyes wide. “That would be pretty impressive — and dead handy.”

“True,” Samantha added, crisply. “My own powers of healing, like those of my two companions, tend to be rather limited in scope. I would be most grateful and quite interested to see how your art differs from those with which we are familiar.”

“OK, awesome! I’d love to help!” Danica said excitedly, clapping her hands repeatedly. She crawled into the center of the trio, kneeling between the adventurers. “Alright, all you need to do is hold each others hands so that you make a circle, and close your eyes. And then, I’ll see what I can do!”

The adventurers complied, the three girls grasping each of the other’s hands tightly, sharing hopeful glances as they did so. Lexi closed her eyes, assuming the others were doing likewise, and waited. Danica planted both of her palms on the forest floor and leaned forward, nearly touching her head to the leafy bed beneath, closing her own eyes as she began to whisper softly but insistently to the earth itself — or rather, to Mother Earth herself.

Before the paladin knew it, she felt a tingling warmth begin to slowly, but distinctly spread throughout her body. It was like being warmed by a campfire on a cold night, except that the flame which had been kindled was somehow glowing from within her, filling her entire body all the way down to her fingertips and toes with the most wonderfully relaxing sensation of warmth and comfort. Lexi opened her eyes slowly to see that all three of the party looked both refreshed and healed. Cuts and bruises had all but disappeared, and each of the other girls was looking as well rested as if they had just awoken from a luxuriously long nap.

“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” Lexi whispered as the popup window that appeared in her heads up display showed that not only had Danica’s call been answered, but that it had single-handedly restored the paladin to full health.

You’ve Been Healed

+18 HP (35/35)