The Chimera Summoner – Ch 40 – The Crawling Castle (Part 1/2)

Ch 40-

“I was only dead for like a FEW HOURS!” She whined. “Where is the little fucker?”

She straightened, running her hands through her hair like she was searching for something.

“What are you–” I started, before she removed a hand from her hair, trailing what I thought was a single, thick golden hair.

It glimmered in her hand, twisting like a living serpent.

“Skeleton wire.” Hera proclaimed smugly, as she brought it to my manacles.

The wire twisted out of view and I heard and felt some experimental clicking around my locks.

“You just have this on you at all times?” I asked, flatly.

She nodded.

Something in her face made me pause.

“Why is that not making you brag about how you’re the best or even smarter than you are pretty or something?” I asked suspiciously.

She winced. “I am pretty and smort. The smortest.”

It was halfhearted at best.

I wanted to know, but this seemed like the wrong time to interrogate.

With a click, my right arm fell free.

I gasped with relief, followed almost immediately by the searing tingle of blood coming back into my limb.

A minute later, I was gasping as Hera vigorously rubbed life back into my arms. I bit my lip and tried not to make too much of a fuss about it. But it felt like her hands were covered in thousands of tiny needles. And she was still covered in blood. She’d wiped off, but it was gnarly.

“Will that wire work on the door?” I asked, eying the enchanted thing.

Hera just nodded. Her strong hands were surprisingly soft, for a melee fighter.

“It’s enchanted.” I said. “The door is.”

Hera just nodded. “So’s the wire.”

“What the fuck is that stuff?” I demanded.

“It’s the best skeleton wire money can buy, it’s loot from a specific biome that can be found on the fifteenth floor and lower. My family has a trick to find the right biome and has kept it secret for generations. Even we don’t have much of a stock of it. This strand I have here is probably worth more than every piece of loot that the first and second years have looted since they got to Bayloft.”

“Hera.” I said.

“Yeppers.”

“Cool wire.”

“Thanks. Cool tits.”

She gave my chest a cheeky flick, irritatingly finding the exact tip of my left nipple.

I fought back a blush, scowling as dark as I could.

Hera’s eyes twinkled.

Were they a shade darker than I recalled…? Or was it just the light…?

“So. To business.” She prompted.

I nodded. Right.

We needed to escape. We needed to figure out where we were.

And we needed to find a way to either get back to Bayloft, or signal someone to come help us.

And see if they had taken anyone else.

Or maybe we shouldn’t escape and instead try to weasel information out of Carmine that would be useful after we were rescued, counter-intelligence style. Or maybe–

“Nyke and I have been talking, and we think it would be super fun and chill if you came over to our place one night, and we all take our clothes off and see if anything fun happens.” Hera said, standing and going to examine the door.

I could practically hear my train of thought crashing and burning off the rails.

Me.

And Hera.

And Nyke.

Naked.

Nyke with her thick, powerful arms, and grumpily protective demeanor.

Hera. A goddess on earth.

I wondered what those arms would feel like wrapped around my neck as she–

“Hera!” I hissed. “We cannot do this right now!”

She nodded. “Yeah, it would be once we were back at school. Nyke isn’t here, as far as I know. Though we should check if they caught anyone else… huh! Good idea!”

“No!” I snapped, getting unsteadily to my feet.

Maybe I had been sitting there longer than I had assumed, given how wobbly I felt.

Hunger gnawed on my stomach, abruptly.

Gotcha. Probably at least a day.

“That’s cool,” Hera said, her shoulders slumping. “I just figured I would ask. Hope I didn’t make things weird between us.”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” I groaned, flapping my arms in an attempt to waft my thoughts into an organized pile.

Images of Hera and Nyke naked kept cropping up, for some reason.

Hera brightened, looking over her shoulder hopefully.

“So then you’d be open to it?” She asked. “Jennie would be welcome too, if you two are like, a package deal. Or Lucy. Or Violette. Or Serenity, geeeeeeez! Does Lorna even do that kind of thing? She’s so serious.”

I spluttered, as my mind flooded with different combinations of us having sexy times together.

“Probably a maximum of one more person, besides you, though.” Hera continued, returning her attention to the door, and tinkering with her wire. “At least the first time. Nyke can get a little overwhelmed in a group setting. I want to start her off gentle.”

“What even are you two, to each other?” I asked.

Good. Glad my brain got the most important question out first. Not ‘can we escape’, ‘should we escape’, ‘what’s our plan’, ‘Strangers?’–

“We’re… seeing each other.” Hera tilted her head. “I dunno. It’s pretty casual. We’ve been fucking since like the first week.”

“Awfully vague.” I muttered, walking around the small cell, looking for any identifying features, or things we could use.

Hera snorted. “What’s the deal with you and Jennie? Or Jennie and Lucy, for that matter.”

I scowled around the room, like my inability to answer was its fault.

It was depressingly empty, and lacking convenient markers of where we were and who owned it. The stones were cold as fuck, though. So that was something….

And pressing my ear to the cold wall, I thought I could hear… running water? Some kind of distant clanking?

“We’re teammates.” I said defensively.

“I’ve heard you were a lot more than that. And now you’re living together?” Hera teased.

“I thought you and your team didn’t put stock in rumors.” I grumbled.

“Doesn’t mean we don’t HEAR them.” Hera countered. “What, so you guys didn’t have sex in the warrens on the first DAY?”

I put my nose in the air, and declined to answer.

“Right.” Hera laughed. “Well. Think about it, I think it could be really fun. And you’re super gorgeous and I want to kiss you.”

I shook my head, feeling a bit like a dog shaking off water.

“You gotta get more confident.” Hera admonished. “Why do you think everyone in our year has a crush on you?!”

I blinked rapidly. “No they don’t.”

“Ok.” Hera said, with wildly exaggerated eye rolling. “Shouldn’t we be focusing on an escape plan??”

I spluttered, outraged. MAD.

Then she casually swung the door open and poked her head out for a look.

“Bad news, babes.” Hera said, leaning back in. “I think we are in Gott.”

Fffffffffffffffabulous. Might as well be.

“How do you know?!” I dashed to the door, and peaked out.

It was a stone corridor, with metal piping running all along the ceiling. Some led up, some led into walls. A few big ones ran straight down the walls and through the floor.

“This is how they build their crawling castles.” She shrugged. “It’s exactly like what mom made us practice in, when I was a kid. Let's go.”

Crawling castles. Great artificial leviathans that patrolled the northern wastes. Relics of long past expansionist ambitions of the Gott empire. An unknown number of them still lurked in the endless storms that ruled the northern three quarters of Gott’s supposed territory.

I had always wanted to see one. So fucking bad did I want to see one. DON’T be happy about this. This is BAD news. PURELY. BAD. and very cool. I wonder if we’ll get to see the heart? Focus.

This was not a tour.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the cell and into the hall.

We crept along, peering around for guards or other threats.

It was a literal maze of hallways. Complete with dead ends, branching halls, and tight squeezes.

So awesome.

The temperature varied wildly from hall to hall, with many being swelteringly hot, whereas some were covered in frost.

“Is this normal??” I whispered.

Hera nodded. “It’s layers of security. The guts of this thing are a maze. There will be guards at all the actual exits.”

So we were definitely going the wrong way. But we couldn’t confront reasonable level guards as we were. So that was probably a good thing.

“Are we moving right now?” I asked.

She nodded. “They can’t stop.”

She kept on pulling me along in her wake.

“We don’t have to keep holding hands.” I whispered.

“True.”

She loosened her grip, but didn’t let go. I could’ve just slipped my hand out of hers.

If we needed to communicate silently, contact would be useful. And it would be faster if we already had a point of contact. Easy to squeeze for a signal or something. And it wasn’t like we had weapons to worry about.

I didn’t use one, but Hera would need one if we could find it. And I was pretty crippled without my Familiars.

The horrible wrongness of my bond to Lorna ached again. Ached like my bones were all being ground into fine, unhappy powder.

My knees hit the ground.