(Rewritten) Ch. 98 – Cleanup Continued

"If you didn't do it properly, you didn't think it was worth doing. Maybe figure out why, yeah? Now blast the fucking fuckers properly."

– Recording of Superkill speaking to a fellow samurai, who failed to protect civilians as he attempted to reduce collateral damage to buildings during the Global Incursion of 2057

***

I was thirsty, and I was unsatisfied. Leah had gotten her release, but mine was still outstanding.

So, it was only right that I shared that misery. Yup.

I'd…skillessly woven myself two new pieces of raggedy clothing to distract Leah with: A tube top that was kind of sheer and very skin tight, and a…miniskirt, I supposed. Also sheer, sorta. One could definitely see some skin color shine through.

For the bottom tube-skirt-thing to properly work as an, ahem, distraction, I'd discarded all the little scales covering my genitals and thighs. Now I looked like I was wearing glittering black overknee stockings. There was a little gap of bare skin between the silken wrap and the first of the scales.

Everything was squished in a yummy way. At least by the interested glances Leah kept throwing me, which just…had me smiling the entire way. And blushing

***

I was bent over cutting our cocoon apart to be burned topside, and giving Leah an eyeful, when I suddenly jerked straight.

"Oh, right!"

Leah twitched and looked my way with wide eyes, holding a hand to her chest.

"Fuck, Tinea! You scared me!"

"Uh, sorry." I went over to Leah and hugged her, but looking at her expression, it was obvious that the simmering heat I'd slowly stoked had died away.

Oops.

She put her chin on my head and sighed as my tail wrapped around her leg. It was a familiar thing now, the warm, slightly ridged artificial musculature of her prosthetic legs.

"So? What'd you scare me for?"

"Urgh. Sorry."

Leah squeezed me and giggled lightly. "No worries. What was it?"

"We gotta prepare the Antithesis we wanna kill. Shall I try catching one with silk?"

Her eyebrows jumped. "Is it strong enough for that?"

"Oh yeah, absolutely," I nodded. "If I make a thick enough rope, I'd probably catch friction burns before it broke. And AI-I's been tracking a rising number of Threes in the forest—probably from that underground nest."

"Yeah." She chewed her lips, busy thinking. "Say, do we wanna record the things eating and dying from the jars? As additional bait?"

"Um… Maybe? It'd be easy enough to make believable clips. But I don't know if we can actually use them? If we make the leak appear accidental, then our kidnappers might become suspicious of whether it's a trap. And if we post the footage intentionally, say, as a samurai reaction clip like it was just something funny we didn't really think about, then we'd have corpos racing each other to get here first. No way to tell who'd be our kidnapper."

"Oh, dang." Then, Leah suddenly looked pissed. "That's gonna happen anyways, isn't it? Considering our battles. There's probably already salvage teams on the way, right?"

I kicked myself. The big explosion had been mine. Fuck. Pacing back and forth I thought frantically, trying to figure out a way to make things line up again.

"Tinea, let's not be hasty," Leah said. "Ypsi, could you please check through the uplink if there's any news about samurai being active in this location?"

Okie!

I looked at Leah with probably an awful expression. I felt guilty about not staying stealthy. Of the two of us, I wasn't the one with cannons, yet I'd been a whole lot more…bombastic. I just so enjoyed fighting unbound…

She looked at me, snorted, and mussed my hair with an amused smile. "You look like one of my kids after they did a bad. Don't worry about it. We're samurai. I think super-size violence kinda comes with the job. We didn't think of it. That's all."

Then she turned me around, probably to escape antenna facials, to spoon me from the back in a nice, cuddly embrace. I caught her hands against my belly and rested my head backwards on her shoulder. Sighing happily, I gave her more access to my throat when she kissed it.

Ypsi eventually broke the quiet with an update.

Leah! I looked at everything! Super close! The space cameras did catch you both and the salvagers are aware, but there's too many samurai fighting everywhere. They have closer places to loot!

"Okay…" I hummed. "Still just a matter of time, isn't it?"

Leah said, "Yeah, but maybe that's not a problem. The people we're after would either beeline for this facility instead of the closer battles, which just makes 'em easy to see, or if they are patient and smart, they'll piggy-back off of the eventual scavengers. Either works for baiting them."

Right. Nodding, I absentmindedly played with Leah's fingers. "That's the good thing about infohazards. They can travel human minds in a way that an electronic hack cannot…"

Grinning, I looked at Leah and was instantly distracted by the beautiful blush on her cheeks and ears, until I realized that I'd moved our hands against my jigglies at some point. Which were doing jiggly things from the gentle movements of my fingers twiddling Leah's fingers.

I was utterly seducing Leah without even noticing. And teasing myself in the process.

I groaned. Ever since I'd…played Leah, I hadn't quenched my own heat. And it has been hours.

Oh god, I am so fucking blue-balled. Uh…clam-jammed, I guess it is now?

The thought had me snort and Leah's gaze snapped up to mine. I freed her fingers from temptation and tempted her in other ways with a rather wet kiss on the lips.

I wanted more, and my fingers definitely wanted more, but I browbeat myself into patience.

Later, Tinea, I told myself. You'll get your satisfaction as soon as we're home. You promised.

***

"Leah!" I called across the court. "Gonna fetch a Three! Be right back!"

She smiled at me, slightly tense. The separation anxiety thing wasn't as bad as the last time, but it wasn't gone. I sighed, a little stressed, a little tired. Things were getting to me, too, and the prospect of future nookie wasn't quite enough distraction.

On the way out, I emptied a bottle of water in one go. I was enjoying the invigorating sense of full-body hydration when I passed Leah's old cell and saw the two cadavers in there.

Once more my fists clenched against the ghosts of stuttering heartbeats.

Fuck.

With an angry breath I grabbed the bodies and stacked them on top of each other, binding them with silk for transport, and glued them atop a silk sheet. They barely even smelled.

Thank fuck trash food's made more of preservatives than nutrients, I thought. At least your corpses will be of use. You fucking owe it, too.

"Tynea, mark the closest group of isolated Threes, please?" I asked as I emerged from the building and took a moment to wear the Myriad and the harness with the Sentinel and torch.

Done, and the path is marked. Three hundred meters.

On the way past, I set the pile of silk refuse on fire, then quickly scampered off when I heard Leah huff her way up the stairs with more of the cocoon.

I didn't want her to see the bodies if she didn't have to.

***

I jogged along, patching the grim ball and chain occasionally, and closed in on the critters after a few minutes. The trap was built quickly, too, with the corpses placed in the middle of a series of sticky strings.

Then I hid myself up in the trees before firing a low-powered round, subsonic to keep it from ringing very far.

The two Threes' heads perked up at the quiet crack and came closer to investigate, until they caught the scent of the dead. From there I only had to wait seconds for the beasts to touch the first string, get entangled, scrabble like insects caught in a spider's web, and wrap themselves up in a messy bundle.

"Well, that was easy." I said with a snort.

Fangs uselessly gnashed in my direction as the aliens heard my voice, but they merely wriggled harder as I dropped into the muddy grass and secured both with spun rope.

"I've left some silk lying around here and there, haven't I? Will they be able to use it to get a genetic profile of me?" I asked as I gathered up the leftover silk and threw it onto the cadavers.

No. The silk itself might be an interesting material to study, but it carries no markers. And the rather acidic rain will soon destroy any other residues.

"Good."

Feeling a bit down, depressed, and generally not great with a vague, empty annoyance plaguing me about fresh blood on my hands for the first time in many years, I torched the bodies and quickly grabbed the alien double delivery to return to the facility.

At least, I pondered with a mild smile, I'll have a beautiful and gorgeous waifu to hug in just a second. Yeah. That'll make everything better.

***