Chapter 27

It had begun to get late so we decided to split up and meet again in the morning near the gate. Bella and I went back to our room and cuddled on the bed together.

I ran my fingers through her head fur while she leaned her head against my chest. We enjoyed relaxing next to each other for a while until I decided to ask about our day. “Hey Bella, how did you feel about our fight earlier today? I haven’t been in a real fight with monsters before, I was actually pretty scared.”

“You were? I didn’t get that sense from you at all, you seemed so confident and sure of yourself the whole time.”

“Well, I was resolved to fight in the moment. I wasn’t just fighting for myself I was protecting all of us. I needed to be strong but inside I was shaking, if I was on my own I might have run away.”

“You were really cool, I didn’t really get to do much… All I really did was heal you when you got bit…”

I gently kissed the top of her head before continuing, “You also called out the second one. Without you I probably would have been caught off guard.”

“Really? You told me to keep a lookout but everyone reacted so fast that I thought maybe everyone knew already.”

“No, I was still focused on the first one. I don’t know about the others but I had no idea it was coming. You did really well, I’m glad I put you in charge of that today.”

We sat in silence while I continued to stroke my fingers through Bella’s fur. When Bella finally replied it was with a quiet and wobbly voice like she was about to cry. “Thank you.”

I look down at her and see her watery eyes leaking. “Are you okay? What's wrong?”

She turns her head and hides her face in my bosom before she gathers her thoughts and replies, “I don’t really know… I think, I think I’m just glad you thought I did good. Maybe it’s just been a long time since anyone noticed anything I’ve done and… I really want to be useful, I don’t want you to regret taking me with you.”

The poor girl is pretty insecure. I suppose it makes sense with everything that happened with her family, her self-esteem is probably in the gutter. It’ll probably take a little bit of time to build her back up. I kissed her on the head and wrapped my arms around her in a hug. She leaned into it and didn’t say any more.

I decided to ask something that had been bothering me since our conversation at dinner. “Hey Bella, do you regret transforming into a beastfolk? I didn’t know there was so much hostility towards them. Ever since you changed you’ve been very mindful of it when I didn’t even know there would have been a problem.”

“I’m actually kind of glad I’m a beastfolk now. Even if some humans don’t like me anymore, I feel prettier like this. I already felt like a bit of an outcast, I never really had any friends and… I’ve already talked about my family… Somehow becoming a beastfolk lets me step away from my old self, even more than becoming a girl does. Or well… whatever I am now.”

“Hush, you are a girl. I don’t care what’s in your pants, I would accept you even if you weren’t adorably gorgeous.”

“Do I get to be a girl even if I still have a p-penis?”

“Of course.” I say before kissing the tip of her muzzle. “You just have a cute girldick now instead.”

“Hehe, that’s silly.”

“Pfft, it’s true.”

“At least I get to have these big breasts too, best of both worlds.” Bella says while gently groping herself.

I laugh a bit at that. “I can’t say I disagree, cock or not, I would be pretty sad if you somehow lost your nice round breasts.” I say as I slip my hand up to help grope her too.

From there she decides to get up and pull off her dress and pettycoat leaving her in just her lacy white underwear. She reaches back and undoes her bra before tossing it onto the desk with the rest of her clothes.

She crawls over me on the bed before sitting in my lap and grabbing my hands and placing them on her breasts. She bites her lip shyly before asking, “Will you play with them a little?”

I gently squeeze her breasts before running my thumbs over her nipples lightly. She moans at my touch and unconsciously grinds against my hips with her own. I trace my thumbs over her areolas where the soft fuzz of her fur is the thinnest. Her nipples have hardened now and I give one of them a tiny flick that elicits a gasp from her.

I let her nipples rest for a moment while I switch focus back on gently squeezing and kneading her grapefruit sized breasts. “Do you like having your breasts played with?”

“Yes,” she says shyly, “it makes me feel like more of a girl.”

“Does it hurt when I play with them? I know some girls find them too sensitive to play with much.”

“Mmm, they feel pretty sensitive but not in a painful way.”

“That’s good.” I softly pulled her down to me and took one of her pretty pink hard nipples into my mouth and gently sucked on it. Even though I wasn’t doing it very hard that got a strong reaction from her. She let out a cute moan and gently bucked her hips again. I pulled off and took a glance at her crotch before moving to her other breast. She was still wearing her lacy panties but they were now being strained by the cock that was starting to leave a wet spot in the white fabric of her underwear.

The glance was pretty stimulating but I respected her desire to focus on her more feminine parts for now. My tongue played with the hard nipple while the cute doe groaned and wrapped her arms around my neck. I was honestly a little surprised at how effective breast play seemed to be for her, her breaths were getting ragged now and her hips ground back and forth against me as she got closer to climax.

My hands now squeezed her ample bosom harder than I had before, rather than mind she moaned and only seemed to get closer to her peak. I sucked her nipple hard while I pinched her other nipple at the same time and with a loud groan she came and darkened her white panties with deer cream.

I finally pulled off her breasts and let her collapse to my side and cuddle me. Bella was gazing lovingly at me and smiled as she caught her breath. “You know, when I got this body, I never expected to orgasm purely from having my breasts played with.”

“I’m a little surprised as well, maybe later we can try it the other way around. You’re not the only one with big beautiful breasts you know.”

She smiled and ran her hands up across my covered chest. “I’d like that.”

After our quick little tryst I decided to work on my magic a little bit more while Bella cleaned up in the other room. I spent some time copying many of the magic circles from the ritual book onto my chalkboard for practice both with and without activating them. Through some trial and error I discovered I can activate magic circles using normal chalk or even just by visualizing the magic circle but each step down from doing it the proper way made it both more difficult to activate and much less mana efficient. And in the case of visualization, the possibility to activate the wrong magic circle by accident. The brain works pretty fast and without enough focus, a small lapse in concentration can have you activate a completely different circle you happened to think about while the mana is flowing through you.

Once I felt magic fatigue start to set in from repeatedly activating circles I decided to transcribe some of the more useful magic circles into my journal instead. I found out that it’s pretty common to stop a magic circle from activating by breaking the outer line with a diagonal slash in the bottom right corner. This is important because it’s not that difficult to accidentally activate a magic circle that’s been transcribed properly. A little bit of well known shorthand stops someone foolish from destroying whatever book or scroll they see a circle in. It appears to be a widely enough known convention that most people would understand what the circle break is without needing to explain it.

After transcribing a number of circles and copying some of the less useful ones onto my black board as practice I started to see a pattern in some of the more complex circles. I don’t know enough about them yet but it seems there might be some kind of logic to these patterns. It would be pretty interesting to be able to build my own magical effects using different parts of multiple circles. Unfortunately even things with similar effects can have completely different looking circles so I might just not have enough different circles to compare against each other yet. For now the best I can do is find circles that look as similar as possible and see which effects are common between them and keep a record of that.

I don’t think I was normally the kind of person who liked studying and digging through books but between the raw appeal of using magic and the visual nature of magic circles I find myself drawn to learning about them. Hours of practice flew right by and I would likely have kept going had Bella not convinced me to go to bed. As interesting as everything is, we do have a job to do tomorrow and it would be pretty rude to oversleep on our first official group quest with the twins.

Before I actually get in bed let me see if I got anything for all the practice I did.

[Ritual Magic has increased from level 1 to level 3]

A modest gain for sure but I think time well spent. I decide to read over the description of the skill again.

[Ritual Magic - Common Skill]The Ritual Magic Skill governs the ability to memorize, activate, modulate, transcribe, understand, deconstruct and create new Magic Circles. Higher ranks improves the ease of these tasks and improves instincts related to this skill.

The way that it’s written implies there is probably a feedback loop with this skill as well so I’m sure I’m just taking baby steps towards this skill’s progression as well. Everything right now seems so exciting. Tomorrow I’m going to take on my first quest at the adventurer's guild, I’m getting to study and practice using magic every night, and best of all I have a hot girlfriend that’s giving me the evil eye because I haven’t come to bed yet.

I slip under the blankets with her and cuddle up to her. It’s pretty warm under the covers but the heat doesn’t bother my new body. I nuzzle into Bella’s neck while wrapping my arms around her naked form. She wraps around me too and we’re twisted together like a pretzel. It feels really comfortable like this. I sometimes wonder if I left a lover behind in my past life. I wonder what kind of person I was. Was I as open and free with sex as I am now or is that the influence of being a succubi? Would I be ashamed to be the demon I am now?

These are all relatively unimportant questions compared to the things standing before me but it’s hard not to think about it, to wonder about myself. Should I resolve to work towards regaining my memories? Would I be better off without them? Would they change who I am now? I have lots of questions and not much to go on. To some extent I’m directionless, I want to explore and see everything I can of this new world but without a path I might just end up spinning my wheels without progressing towards anything. Would that even be a bad thing?

All I really know is that right here, right now, I’m in the comforting embrace of someone that I love. I don’t know where exactly this new world will take me but I’m excited that I get to spend it with someone I feel like I can truly rely on.

And with those thoughts in my heart I fell asleep in my lover’s arms.