Vol.4 Ch.68 – Problem Solving
Chapter 68: Problem Solving
“We need to help them,” Cassie said.
“We mustn't,” Alexis said and Cassie and Ophelia both turned to look at her. “We have a mission of our own. We need to trust them to handle this on their own. If this had happened to us we couldn't expect them to drop everything and bail us out.”
Ophelia was about to reply when Kaja cut in: “She's right. The ritual that is underway here needs to be stopped. We cannot abandon that. The best thing we can do is to move forward. If we finish this fast enough, then we can talk about helping them.”
“What exactly is going on?” Marcus asked, reminding them that they had a second team along. They'd kept their distance during the breather but evidently they had noticed that something was up.
“Right,” Alexis said, “you need to know this as well.”
And so she filled them in. By the time she was done Marcus and his entire team had gone pale. Even the conjured wolves had their ears flattened against their heads.
“In that case,” Marcus finally said, “I agree. We should move forward and leave it to them. Caldwell is tough enough to handle this.”
Mollified, Cassie and Ophelia nodded and the team continued onward.
“So, you know Elaine well then?” Ophelia asked Marcus as they walked.
“Hard not to,” he said. “We spent months at the compound together before you all showed up.”
“Must have been a real treat with that Brandon guy along, huh?”
“Jeez,” he all but growled, “don't remind me. Momma told me not to talk bad about the dead, but seriously, fuck that guy.”
“So he managed to piss off the guys, too?”
Marcus snorted. “I know what he tried to do to the girls. Hard to make nice with someone like that. But even leaving that aside he was just a fucking asshole. Kept acting like Jordan and I were his cronies, tried to get us to pick on Alejandro and the girls. Was always upset that we didn't. If I'd been stronger back then I would have showed him what I really thought of him, but...” He indicated his frankly ridiculous biceps, “This came later.”
“So the side effects set in at different times, then?”
“Side effects?” Marcus asked. “Is that what Caldwell calls.. you know?”
That made Ophelia perk up. “Know what?” Had she told him? No way, right?
“You know,” Marcus hedged, then made a cupping motion in front of his chest.
Ophelia nearly burst out laughing, then looked over at the lamia slithering slightly behind them. Damn that lady could move. Her body mass was easily four times that of a normal human but Ophelia was fairly certain that, aside from the angels, Abigail and herself that lady was the fastest person on the team. “Is he always such a schoolboy?” she asked the snake lady.
“He gets flustered very quickly when talking about this kind of stuff, yes,” the lamia said. She didn't exaggerate her 's' sounds, which surprised Ophelia but she was clearly stereotyping. “It's endearing.”
Marcus' face turned red.
“But when he's alone with one of us he turns a lot more confident,” the lamia added.
Marcus' face turned even redder.
“So,” Ophelia said, “I'm not sure if this is rude to ask, but...”
Marcus' face turned redder still.
“How does it work?” the lamia asked.
Ophelia nodded.
“I have all the same... equipment that you do,” she said, not a hint of embarrassment in her voice. “I will admit that positioning is a bit complicated as I don't, you know, have legs, but other than that it's all fairly normal.”
“What about your tongue?” Ophelia asked.
In response the lamia let her tongue loll out. It was easily seven or eight inches long and forked at the tip.
“Damn, that must feel amazing.”
“It does,” Marcus admitted, not sounding as flustered as Ophelia had expected.
“Aren't you worried about your girlfriend?” the lamia asked.
“I am,” Ophelia said. “That's why I'm distracting myself with this. I can't do anything for her right now and fretting isn't going to help the people here. So I'd rather banter. And maybe find out something about Elaine I didn't know yet.”
“I mean, we hung out every once in a while, shot the shit, had a few drinks, but we didn't really share many interests,” Marcus said. “Well, except girls. But there weren't enough of those around back then.”
“So you two never...”
“She plays for the other team, doesn't she?”
“From what I understood she plays for both teams,” Ophelia said, “most of the people she ended up interested in just happened to be girls.”
“Well damn,” Marcus said.
“Down boy,” the lamia said, “she'd snap you like a twig.”
“Yeah, she's really not my type,” he said. “I just didn't expect her to be into guys.”
“I mean,” Ophelia said, nodding over to their cute blond paladin, “she's into guys like Cassie...”
“Guys like...” Marcus began.
“Oh my,” the lamia finished.
Ophelia was about to banter some more when Kaja said:
“Game faces on. There's movement behind this door.”
**
It took everything inside Evelyn not to scream or jump as she saw the distorted grimace of the Alexis creature.
It knew. It fucking knew that she knew.
The creature didn't break eye contact with her as it began stalking, not toward Elaine but toward Aurora.
What's it playing at?, Evelyn wondered. Is it trying to provoke me into attacking it? Does it think the others will start suspecting me?
But the creature simply strode past Aurora, its face melting back into Alexis' gorgeous face, and it began fending off cyborgs from the butterfly girl. Aurora was still only using her pistol but that pistol was doing work. She was efficiently placing shot after shot, crippling or neutralizing cyborgs as fast as she could aim.
But that didn't change the fact that, less than three feet away from her there was a monster that could likely kill her with only a token amount of effort. Evelyn needed to deal with it, but could she afford to attack the thing and risk causing misunderstandings while they were fighting?
Before she could make up her mind a cyborg with claws charged at Aurora and the Alexis creature. The Alexis creature fended it off, but not well enough, the cyborg poised to strike Aurora. Mariana charged in, holding what looked like a sword made of solid air, and used it to strike the cyborg down. Unfortunately, the attack also left her wide open. If everything had been normal her vulnerability would have been covered by Alexis, but unfortunately this Alexis was the biggest danger in the room and Evelyn understood its plan.
She saw the creature's hand melting into an enormous claw and it raised that claw, intending to strike both girls down in a single swing.
Evelyn didn't think. She saw red.
She charged forward, intending to turn the creature into paste with her Vajra, and—
Fuck!
—ran straight into something that felt like a spiderweb, except infinitely tougher, tough enough to give even her pause. The claw descended even further and Evelyn thought she would have to watch in horror as the creature cut both girls to pieces, but then a pair of crystal swords shot past her, cutting the webbing apart.
Immediately Evelyn accelerated again, and this time she managed to get through, swinging her Vajra just in time to meet the descending claw, striking it with a horrid sound of breaking bones and snapping tendons.