“I just can’t get enough of User Battle League. I’ve been watching the preliminaries where they’re going over this season’s new faces.”
”UBL’s very good, but a friend in marketing heard I liked fighting, turned me on to something new.”
”What’s that?”
”X-3 pit battles. They’re brutal. Bringing in portal creatures to fight against, all sorts of stuff. Sometimes things get heated, and there are even versus battles. No filters. Raw.”
Vael guided me to follow my new senses to locate the guardian. I was trudging along in the forest, now cleared of monsters between me and my target. The pressure coming from the distance was guiding my steps. Guardians were the final bosses of portal worlds, more or less. In World of Divers they were the capstone of the portal world. Vael had told me that it was the same in the real thing.
Each portal world tended to have a theme, a lesson, or some kind of curated experience. They were still death traps that would happily rip you limb from limb in front of your team. They weren’t games, but they did have game-like qualities. Some more than others.
A relatively small piece of an alien world, with wildlife and potentially other challenges. Natural resources that could be harvested and extracted: monster parts, minerals, timber, and other natural materials. You could almost mistake them for the real thing, like space had been bridged and you were stepping from one world to another.
But they weren’t you traveling to another world somewhere out in space. Someone, or something, had made them, and while they were very cleverly constructed, they were artificial. Two of the biggest tells were the presence of guardians and the space constraints. There were invisible barriers that cordoned off the outer reaches of these spaces. Typically, terrain, natural features, or the overall layout ensured you wouldn’t encounter them, but if you were committed to fully exploring the space, you’d find them.
Then there were the guardians. Creatures more dangerous than anything else in the portal world were clearly differentiated from the rest. Sometimes they were just bigger, meaner versions of the things you’d found in the world. Other times, they were entirely different in their appearance and mannerisms. A totally different species. They tended to be the capstone of sorts to the portal world. If there was a portal world that was all active volcanic, with fire-aspected monsters everywhere, the portal world guardian might be something that really tested your limits beyond anything leading up to it had. Fail to meet the challenge, and you could be in serious trouble.
Portal stability degraded over time. The one we were in right now was very close to the end of its lifespan. Some portals were fairly stable, and you had a long time to complete them, which was great for the purposes of material extraction. Others were highly unstable, and you had days or less than that to complete them. Kill the guardian before the portal world destabilizes, and you “won,” and were granted an additional safe exit, and usually some goodies. Failing to complete the portal in time was bad. Like really bad. I’d had the mechanics explained to me in the abstract, but standing in one that was actively counting down towards rupturing made “bad” feel insufficient. Portal bursts didn’t just dump monsters–they’d taken whole Arks down.
Humanity had built nine Arks to ensure the continuity of the species through an asteroid strike of extinction-level scale. Distributed around the globe in places that put them central to human populations, and at sites chosen for various defensive or environmental reasons. Each one was a unique megastructure designed to make the most of its location and population requirements. Now, more than a century after I-Day, six of the original nine remained intact and operational.
Nobody talked about Ark 9. The Oceanic Ark, dead smack in the center of Australia. The one that had led the rest in restoring golden-era technology. Then, a little over thirty years ago, it went silent. No probe or explorer sent in had ever returned. Orbital imagery showed it intact and uninhabited. Nobody knew what had happened, and the not knowing sent a particular kind of chill down the spine of every citizen of every remaining Ark. We didn’t talk about it. It could be us next.
Ark 2 and Ark 7 had also failed, but unlike Ark 9, there had been survivors of those incidents. Hundreds of millions of them. Ark 3 and the other remaining Arks took on the survivors of those events, distributed based on capacity. Ark 2 had been lost to convergent megafauna in the early days. The megafauna breached the walls, and the city fell shortly thereafter. Ark 7 had fallen later to what we now call Portal Storms. When a portal failed to be completed, it burst. This caused several major threats simultaneously.
First, the reality inside the portal world collapsed, and all the “notable” occupants were summarily ejected back into what we thought of as our reality. Nobody really knew what made something notable, but the general rule of thumb was that anything we’d consider a monster, along with any Divers present. The entire monster population of a portal getting dumped out in the middle of a dense urban environment is bad, even with low-tier portals.
Following the monsters and occupants being dropped into reality, there was a deluge of mana that emanated from the location where the portal had been. High concentrations of mana in the aspect, or aspects of the portal world, and of the same tier. This uncontrolled mass release of mana does what mana wants to do, which is to change things. Material infusion happens, which is generally a good thing. Spontaneous mutation in living organisms also occurs, and that’s… less good. Finally, the sudden surge of mana can interact with ambient Dust in the area, which can then spawn more new portals.
That can cause a runaway: more portals than there are people to clear them in time to prevent further bursts. The cycle continues, escalates, accelerates.
We called Ark 2 The Fallen Ark, after the breach of its walls and defenses. Ark 7 was The Quiet Ark, because while the walls and structures were intact, the only thing that lived inside that city were monsters. Attempts had been made by the surviving Arks to reclaim them. The Fallen was so catastrophically damaged that it would take a massive, combined effort from every other Ark for years, possibly decades, to repair the damage. The Quiet was somehow worse, because it was still intact, and still habitable, almost like it was out there taunting us.
The way we avoided that happening to us was through the Civil Defense Authority. Based out of the Spire, they tracked the status of every portal within the city and its walls. Registered Divers, from individuals up to full guilds, worked with the CDA to make sure portals were closed with a good safety margin. The longer they ran, the better people were able to extract wealth from them, but there was a shared interest in not allowing our entire continued existence to come under threat, too. Corporations and the CDA somewhat notoriously did not see eye-to-eye on what they considered acceptable tolerances.
Then there was me, here and now, and this portal. I was an unregistered, unlicensed Diver. What I was doing was a pretty serious crime, but not the end of the world if I was caught. Primarily, it was tax evasion and failure to report on the criminal side, and a lack of proper licenses and training on the civil side. Now, what the people who operated this recurring portal were doing was major league crimes. The kind of stuff that could get you sent to a gulag, labor camp, or worse, for a very long time.
The city took reporting portals seriously. It took purposeful illegal operation of portals far more seriously, because both of these things could potentially wind up with the CDA having to call in the military and put a sub-sector on lockdown. Typically, these unregistered repeating portal worlds were under the ownership and management of organized crime. OC was sort of like Divers and Users in that it existed off to the side of the class structure. It didn't care where you came from or what you had; people of every background could be found in it, and more importantly, people of every background could be working for it without you ever knowing. Your upstairs neighbor. Your building super. The woman who ran the noodle cart on the corner of your block. Anyone. You learned pretty early not to assume you knew who anyone was working for.
Organized crime outfits tended to run these things tightly and professionally. That much I knew from the kind of knowledge that just accumulates when you grow up in X-3, and you keep your ears and eyes open. Combined with the application of ample bribery, it kept the city generally complacent enough to look the other way. The Spire and the megacorps knew these existed, and if they got their slice of the profits and the portals weren’t running the risk of bursting, everyone was happy.
I didn’t have any illusions about what my position was here and what I was doing. I was a nobody, less than a cog in a machine, just someone who knew a cog. Vael had some arrangement with the owners of the portal to close it in place of their normal people, and should I fail—or die trying—she would ensure the portal was successfully closed.
She still hadn’t told me what tier she was, but I had to assume that she was a mid-tier Diver. She knew too much, and there had been signs here and there that I couldn’t avoid noticing. The way she effortlessly pulled the tusks out of the skull of the monster boar, when I could barely get my knife to pierce the hide, let alone make any progress cutting it. Her depth of knowledge of Diving and portals. The suit she wore, made from materials I wasn’t even able to identify.
She could probably kill the guardian with the equivalent of a flick of her claws.
”You’re doing the thing again where you’re letting your mind wander when you should be paying attention to your surroundings.” Her voice made me nearly jump out of my skin sideways. It was a good thing I didn’t have my gun in my hand, I might have accidentally shot myself.
Her snicker from behind was a reminder of what I’d been thinking about. She seemed to be able to disappear and reappear at will, without me being able to track her doing it.
“You are going to give me a heart attack and kill me before the monsters even get the chance,” I complained at her grinning countenance.
”Isn’t it better if I’m the reason instead of a monster? Sounds like a much better way to go, being startled to death by a beautiful Sul’vari woman, as opposed to being mauled and eaten alive.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “I’m getting close, aren’t I?”
She shrugged. “You tell me.”
I could tell I was close. The pressure had been steadily growing and weighing on my shoulders the closer I got. I noted that it wasn’t a linear progression, either. At the outer edges, it was harder to discern direction and distance, but the closer I got, the more obvious the sensation became until it started feeling burdensome. It was in my head; I didn’t think it was actually making me weigh more.
“I know I am, yes. I can feel it. Like another layer to gravity, almost.”
She smiled and tapped a claw on her temple. “There you go. A word of caution, Kiera. Don’t ever underestimate a guardian. They can be quite different from the other monsters in the Dive. Smarter, tactical, even vicious and sadistic. I’ve seen them take hostages and torture Divers to throw teams off, causing them to rush and make mistakes.”
I swallowed and gave her a sharp nod. They were more dangerous in WoD as well, but the thought of them playing with people was sobering. I usually ran solo, so I wasn’t used to how they might change their behavior in group situations.
There was a big clearing up ahead, and this time, rather than having haphazard heaps of fallen tree trunks, it had a big earthy mound covered in tall grass in the center. It was the size of a large workshop or small warehouse.
I’m not sure I like the scale this is implying.
I remembered to dump my kit before the fight this time, something I’d gotten much better about throughout the Dive. Getting flailed around by my gear one time was more than enough for me.
I had my knife, my puncher, two mostly full mags, and a nervous energy ready to go. My tail seemed to mirror my anxiety about this fight, silently rippling and lashing in the air behind me. I pulled my pistol, double-checked the chamber, and reached around my back to run my fingers over the base of my tail.
You’re a weird, nasty creature sharing my nature, but I have to admit… You’ve been earning your keep, saving my shit more than once now.
I crossed the border into the clearing and did my best to circle the outside edge as silently as I could. The grass and bushes here were trampled flat against the ground, many of them crushed and looking like they were barely holding on. An opening came into view on the mound, wide enough to drive a cargo truck through with room to spare.
A foul odor became harder to ignore the closer I came to the entrance, a mixture of overripe dumpsters, rot and decay, and feces. I had to suppress the urge to gag. A rhythmic rumble was coming out of the entrance along with the smell. I made my way up to the entrance and peeked inside. It was heavily shadowed, but the light in the clearing was bright enough to scatter its way into the burrow.
The guardian was a massive black, gray, and green lump of putrid fur. I could see chunks of dirt and shit, moss and mold clumped into and growing throughout the fur.
I wished that I had some kind of firebomb or grenade or something I could lob in there and blow it up with to start the fight off in my favor. It was snoring and fast asleep.
Does that mean… That I don’t even register as a threat to it? Or am I just lucky with it being passed out at this hour?
I deliberated what I wanted to do. Getting close to it to try and get some kind of strike to the vitals seemed… really extremely dumb. This thing was huge, and with the confined space of the burrow, it could just roll over on me, and that’d be the end of my run as an amateur Diver. I’d gotten better at using my puncher against the pig monsters, but their skin was thick and tough as hell, and usually only the penetrators from the bullets pierced it, poking tiny holes that didn’t go deep enough to really damage vitals.
I was mildly resentful of having to face an “I told you so” later. I could be a stubborn stick in the mud all I wanted, but it didn’t change the fact that the guns that I was capable of using, and that I could afford, were not great in this Dive.
Maybe it’s bad luck. I’m fighting monsters that are more defense-oriented or more durable than average at this tier.
The rise and fall of the snoring was interrupted by several snuffling snorts, which kicked up a cloud of dirt on the opposite side of the guardian.
Well, shit. Not like I had much I could do to capitalize on the element of surprise.
The bulk shifted, rising and turning in a slow, lazy manner. Two round ears, huge glowing eyes, a muzzle with terrifyingly large teeth, and a hanging flat tongue dripping thick slime watched me. Very bright hazel-colored eyes, emerald with dark brown striations throughout.
It was the former. The former! It doesn’t give a single fuck about the threat I pose to it!
It was a bear. A bear the size of a full box truck. And one with a sapling growing out of its head, packed with branches full of leaves.
I need to get it outside of the burrow.
“Well, are you just going to sit there and stare at me, or are we going to fight!?” I shouted at it.
No response, other than it licking its wet, black nose.
I raised my puncher and took careful aim. I wasn’t under any false impressions about the effectiveness of body shots, and this thing was several times the size of the boars, whose skulls I couldn’t penetrate.
Not a shot. Have to go for the soft targets.
I held my breath and steadied my hands as much as I could, which was easier with the pistol not feeling as heavy as it had previously.
And squeeze.
The puncher barked with its loud, sharp report, and my shot struck true. The right eye of the guardian exploded outwards in a shower of gelatinous chunks of flesh and gore. Clear, syrupy blood ran down its cheek as it opened its muzzle at me and roared. The smell was overwhelming, and nauseating, rot and decay, mulch, and sewage, and the force of the bellow shook me.
Time to go!
I booked it off to the side of the entrance to try and get some distance. If I could get distance and time to line up accurate shots, I might be able to blind its other eye.
Part of the burrow wall at the entrance exploded, pelting me with hard-packed clumps of dirt. The guardian came around the corner at what looked like an almost leisurely pace, except for the fact that, with its size, it was moving at a decent clip.
I repeated the tactics that I’d developed while fighting the boars. Running around the outer perimeter to get distance, and pelting the guardian with shots as accurately as I could get them between repositioning. The guardian knew what I was doing and was keeping its one good eye angled away from me. I aimed for other weak spots when able, shooting its snout and into the mouth.
Putting a pair of bullets into its sensitive nose got me another bone-rattling roar, and it used the frontmost pair of its six legs to swipe a pawful of soil at me.
I wasn’t sure what it was doing at first, and then by the time I realized what it was doing, it had been too late to react. Clods of soil smashed into me, knocking the wind from my lungs and sending me flying backwards into a heap. A rock or something hit my right shoulder, and my entire right arm was fully pins-and-needles and partially numbed from the impact.
I scrabbled on all fours around the side of a larger tree trunk to take cover for a moment. I put my last stick into the puncher and racked the slide, then stuffed it back into my holster. I couldn’t shoot right now with my hand half asleep.
Hot, wet air blew around the sides of the tree, and I probably would have pissed my pants if I had anything in the tank. The top and bottom of a muzzle that could swallow me whole were wedged open around the trunk of the tree I was hiding behind, and the trunk was cracking loudly as the slimy teeth jerked and jumped closer.
I rolled forward and kicked off the tree trunk to send myself into a forward dive. Once again, I pushed myself up from being sent flat to the ground, a cacophony of crunching and snapping coming from behind me.
The fucking guardian ripped the entire tree out of the ground by the trunk, leaving a big, shallow crater and stubby, shattered roots sticking out of the cone of dirt adhered to the bottom of the tree. It swung the tree trunk around like it was a staff and was smashing it into the other trees around me, causing them to snap and topple over.
I ran, screaming. There were twenty-centimeter-long dagger-shaped chunks of wood shrapnel flying every which way as trees were pummeled into shattered chunks of log, and leaves rained down so thickly that it might as well have been a smokescreen. I ran around and back into the clearing. The trees weren’t useful cover for me; chunks of log were being tossed around that could break me into a dozen pieces.
Pain in my left thigh drew my attention away from the guardian. The guardian hadn’t noticed me go yet, still methodically destroying everything where I’d been trying to take cover. Clenching my teeth to avoid drawing its attention, I pulled one of the knife-sized splinters out of my leg. It didn’t want to come out; it was ragged and practically serrated from how it’d been shredded. The wound wasn’t too deep and was on the outside of my leg. I tried to pump mana through my leg to get the bleeding to stop.
Wait a minute. It’s half blind, probably smells its own blood more than anything, where I sent hot lead up its nose. Maybe I can use that to my advantage!
I pulled my knife from my belt and held it firmly in my left hand. Glancing between it and the black, furry butt and stubby tail, I felt my heart clench in my chest.
Using this is going to be like trying to kill someone with a toothpick. Fuck my entire life right now. But where!? I’m not getting between its legs to try and slice at the belly, that’s instant death. I can’t reach the neck, eyes, ears, or nose!
Or can I? This might be my dumbest idea yet.
I was thinking about a multiple-group difficulty boss monster from WoD. The thing had weak spots, but they weren’t anywhere you could easily get to or aim at. It too was fucking humongous, far bigger than this bear-guardian. The tactics there were to scale the lizard or drop down on it from above to lob explosives and spells down its breathing holes along the back.
I ran back at the rear of the guardian while stuffing my knife back in my belt. My gait was lopsided as hell, my wounded leg was faster and stronger than my uninjured one.
I might be the dumbest User of all time. Of course! Buffs before battle, Kiera!
I pushed more mana out of my circuit, and not just to the one leg, but my entire body. I could feel my mana pool draining, but the drain was gradual. I’d be able to keep this up for a good while. The difference was both immediate and dramatic.
The weight had left my limbs. Every muscle felt coiled and immediate, like the gap between wanting to move and moving had been cut out entirely. I waited for the guardian to plant its four rearmost feet to swipe with its forepaws, which it used to topple and send trees flying. I crouched and jumped, arms held wide to try to grab fat handfuls of the thing’s long, disgusting fur.
I’d expected to grab low on the flank; instead, I was nearly at the shoulder, the ground an uncomfortable distance below me. Pushing my mana through my body like this was really amping up my muscles, because I was able to pull myself up hand-over-hand, something that I couldn’t remotely do with my nonexistent upper-body strength now.
I kept a tight grip on the fur and moved carefully, not wanting to give it a reason to notice me. I had to hold my breath as I got near the top, because the smell was making my gorge rise and I nearly hurled all over myself. Once I was on top of the thing, I had plenty of room to move; it was the width of a street lane. Halfway up the back, it must have felt my feet on its hide, because it dropped the battered tree and spun around.
Shit, shit, shit!
It knew what I was doing, and it reared up onto its hind legs. I jumped up the slope as it rose in front of me, making additional progress towards the head, and latched onto the fur once more. It was wet and greasy between the shoulders with a mix of sweat and copious skin oils.
The guardian twisted around on its hips and waist and tried to fling me off, and I was swinging around like a pendulum and getting the hell beaten out of me. The fur, as nasty as it was, was working in my favor because it was padding the blows and reducing them from being hit by a truck to being hit by a truck with mattresses strapped to the front. Unable to shake me loose, it dropped back down with a crash that sent me flipping around vertically this time, and my back thumped into the neck of the beast.
I wheezed and sucked a lungful of the air that had just been knocked straight out of me. Rolling over to my front, I made a mad dash for the top of the guardian’s skull while I had the chance. I figured it was just a matter of time until the thing rolled and squished me into the ground. I had to act before it had the chance; I just wasn’t sure what that act was going to be. I wasn’t much closer to figuring out how to actually kill this thing with what I had available.
I caught a glimpse of red and indigo on the upper branches of a nearby tree.
So that’s where she disappears to. Can’t get distracted!
The furry, padded surface under me rocked and lurched. I lost my footing when it dropped away, then found it again when the back bucked upward. I absorbed the impact with my legs, dropping into a crouch, and jumped for an ear.
Once again, I latched on with handfuls of hair while I was bodily flung around. The earlobe was far better to be bouncing off; it was springy and soaked up almost the entirety of the hits. The shaking stopped, and I saw the next attack coming. A paw that could flatten a car was rearing back.
I had a split-second decision to make. Drop off, risk getting mushed, and reset the progress I’d made. Or clench my guts and make the risky play of taking cover in the recess of the guardian’s ear.
This is going to be so disgusting! Ahh!
I swung around the earlobe and tucked into a ball. The space was tight, with me wedged in it like a human earbud, and the smell was even worse than being around the thing’s ass had been. I hurled over the crusty inner ear hair while grabbing on for dear life. Given the present circumstances, I was mostly successful in mentally blocking out the crab-sized parasites occupying the ear along with me.
A full second passed, and then a crashing boom rocked my entire world. The ear flap came down under the paw and pressed me into the hollow like a special little pearl. My hearing protection was doing real work, because I mostly felt the percussive force in my lungs and guts, rather than having my eardrums blown out. That was good.
Daylight and fresh air rushed in when the ear snapped back upright. I wanted to get to the other eye, but with the amount of time I had between this swipe and the next, I didn’t think I could make it.
I’d found safety from being smeared into meat paste, and in doing so, I’d quite effectively trapped myself.
Fuck!
I had another idea to buy myself more time to get out of this situation. I kept one handful of fur securely gripped in my left hand, pulled my puncher, and aimed it for the part that led deeper into the ear canal.
Here goes nothing.
I fired off five or six shots as quickly as I could. Everything shook with a sudden and intense roar, and my frame of reference inside the ear went all topsy-turvy. My inner ears told me I was getting flipped around with plenty of force. I planted my feet and held on for dear life. There was a tremendous crash, and I was flung up and out of the ear from the impact. Flattened grass and packed soil welcomed me back to the outside world. I bounced, slid, and rolled off the impact.
I shot to my feet, more than a little wobbly myself. I didn’t want to get rolled out like a sector flatbread.
The guardian was lying on its side, head on the ground in the clearing, and seemed stunned. I didn’t know if it was the gunshots clapping directly into its ear, or it smashing its own head into the ground that did it, but I was going to take what I was given.
The sapling in the middle of the guardian’s head was lit up as bright as the sun in my aura vision. That was my target while I had the opportunity. I dashed over and dropped to my knee pads. With the head rolled over partially, the small tree was chest height to me currently. I stuck my puncher back in the holster until it clicked and pulled my blade.
Grabbing the trunk of the sapling, I felt the texture was weird. It was warm, and the bark, while looking like smooth bark, felt more like skin.
Extremely gross, but better for me. I pulled the trunk away from the skull hard and brought my knife down, hacking at the root where it met the skull. It took several strikes to get through, but I hacked it off entirely to the sound of more bowel-quaking groans and roars. Clear blood–sap–sprayed out in regular jets to the pulse of the guardian. It wasn’t dead. This might have been a weak point, but it wasn’t an essential one. I stared at the spurting hole in the skull, out of ideas and out of time. Then the glow of what lay below, filling my vision, clicked.
I didn’t think, I just acted. I stuck my index finger in the hollow of the trunk as deeply as it would go. It went all the way to the base of my finger while sap tried to shove my finger out and all but covered my entire front. The blood vessel, or whatever it was, went through the skull.
Yanking my puncher out, I stuffed the muzzle brake into the hole and shot until it wouldn’t shoot any more. The guardian twitched and shook, and my heart raced in my chest. This had to work, or I was going to have to ask Vael to finish what I couldn’t.
My circuit was once again rung like a bell. Or maybe it was more like being struck by an arc discharge from the city mains. All I knew was that the thing must have died, because I was getting blasted by a torrent of mana unlike anything the boars had produced. It wasn’t just more, it was deeper somehow, like the difference between being rained on and being submerged. I did as Vael had instructed me and pushed it outwards from my pool, into my circuit, and then into my body. Resting on my hands and knees, I let the waves flow through me and tried to remember to breathe.
As I finished absorbing it, I was left feeling rejuvenated and energized. I felt great, despite being soaking wet in blood sap and covered from head to toe in filth. Rocking back onto my haunches, I worked to steady my breathing. My gun was lying in the slick, gloopy grass. Reaching over, I picked it up and wiped as much of it as I could off and then put it back in the holster.
I felt the weight on my hips shift and pull to one side.
Momentary confusion.
Realization.
Too late.
No. No! No no no!
I could feel the narrow ring of the guardian’s skull pinching the sides of my gluttonous other half. The push, then the tug inside it and inside me.
“Vael! Help!” My voice was raw from screaming earlier.
She came around the head of the guardian a moment later, saw what was going on, and frowned.
“Hold on, I’ll see what I can do,” she said, her tone edged with concern I couldn’t help but pick up on.
She wrapped her hands around my tail and started to pull with increasing force until I had to beg her to stop. The head of the thing was anchored in somehow, and if she pulled much harder, I was sure my tail was going to tear apart.
I could feel the food flowing up my tail, and I broke down, slamming my fist into the ground.
“Why!? It just ate yesterday!” My yell transitioned directly into a sob.
There was a vibration in the air, one I could feel on my skin and with my new senses. A split-second later, I saw reality blurring, and a new portal opened right in front of my eyes. A tree stump had manifested out of thin air next to it, with a flat top from a clean cut.
Vael was close, squatting down in front of me. She gave me a pretty smile and used her thumb to part the loose hair from in front of my face. “Do you want to see what your prize is? I can bring it over for you.”
I sniffed and nodded quickly. She stood, gathered up the items, and brought them over to me. Six metal bars that would sit comfortably in the hand. I wanted to wipe my face, but I was so filthy that all I’d do was wind up smearing more mess around.
“What is it?” I asked Vael.
“I’m not a craftsperson, but I’d wager based on the feel and color, it’s probably portal iron, or maybe steel. Not a mindblowing first haul, but certainly not bad, either.”
“No, it’s good,” I said, shaking my head.
She raised an eyebrow with an inquisitive “Oh?”
“Yeah, I can use it. I need supplies. Crafting materials to make gear.”
The corners of her lips turned up ever so slightly. “Are you telling me that despite everything you’ve gone through this Dive, you’re not dissuaded?”
“No. I might have fallen down the staircase to get to my destination, but I did it all on my own,” I responded with a surety I could feel cutting through my wallowing over my tail and my new ability to cry over the smallest upset.
Fucking… Estrogen.
Her attempt at holding herself back failed, and she broke into a wide grin, and there was a sparkle in her glowing orange eyes. “I had a feeling about you, Kiera. Tougher stuff than even you realize. But we’ll get you there.”
I could feel the signs of digestion starting in my tail.
“Urk. It’s going to start doing its thing soon, I can feel it.”
Vael nodded, her face shifting back to what I was calling game face. “I’d love to be there to help you through it, but we’re going to be pushing it as it is. Although… the exit portal did open late, which was odd. Not important right now. Make a decision. Do you want me by your side for what’s probably going to be a pretty intense overflow, or do you want me to take the time we have left remaining to harvest whatever I can from the guardian’s corpse?”
I swallowed. I wanted her to be there for the moral support. The veteran game Diver knew damn well otherwise. It wasn’t a question in my mind.
“Harvest whatever you can. I’ll survive. Probably.”
She nodded and pulled out her knife, and I lost sight of her as she walked around the carcass.
My tail started pumping digested mana into my body, and instantly, it felt like a gang heavy, bulging with muscle grafts, uppercut me under my sternum and punched straight through my diaphragm. I fell forward onto my elbows, barely avoiding smashing my own face into the dirt.
The first time, it had really hurt. Vael told me it would get easier the more I did it. I wanted to trust her, but this was an order of magnitude worse than the first feeding.
It must be because it’s a guardian.
The sensations were so overwhelming that I was having a hard time identifying them. There was a terrible heat burning inside of me. I felt hard pressure boiling up in the channels of my circuit, building ever higher, like the pressure had the first time. Then, sudden sharp pain started in my extremities and traveled back towards my core. It felt like I was being ripped apart from the inside, and maybe I was. My spine was acting like a conduit, my tail blasting energy into it that shot up and into my skull.
Maddening itching and tingling on my scalp, more heat and itching in my hands and feet. Pulling and tugging at all of my joints, dull aches and sharp spikes like nails being hammered into my skeleton. I panted, and I thought I saw yellow wisps jetting out of my mouth and into the dirt. Cycling my mana, I worked to offload as much as I could into my circuit, pushing it harder than I ever had before. It helped, but only marginally. Throwing a couple of liters of water into a burning cube.
My muscles were clenching and cramping everywhere, same as my joints. The aches were much more intense below the waist. Fabric shifted over my legs, and I felt the straps of my leg webbing pinching. My pants grew snug, then tight through my thighs, hips and rear.
It tapered off quickly, then ended. I was panting, my entire chest heaving as I worked big lungfuls of air in and out. Sweat dripped off my nose, and drool was dripping out of my mouth in long strings.
“Kiera? How do you feel?”
Mentally, I was running on fumes and held together mostly by the fact that I hadn’t yet had a quiet moment to process and fall apart. There was a lingering ache in my bones from head to toe, and I could feel my pulse steadily thumping away. The rest of me felt…
Amazing. Immediately post-orgasmic. Fulfilled and nourished.
“Somehow, like someone gave me the best workout, and like I was thrown into a waste processing macerator at the same time,” I croaked.
I didn’t want to move from my head-down, ass-up, resting-on-my-elbows pose. “What happened? That was sort of the same, only stronger, but also… different at the same time. Sorry, I’m not making any sense right now.”
Vael hummed a note. “You tempered again, pretty hard, as you were saying. You also mutated, though it looks fairly cosmetic from what I could see. We’ll get you fully checked out when we get back.”
I very slowly pushed myself back to an upright pose. My pants were tight as I kneeled in the dirt.
Mutated.
I was expecting to feel more weirded out than I was. I guess the thought of having horns or spots, or something, was taking a back seat to the fact I’d changed sexes already. Either that, or the oddly satisfying and pleasurable sensations I was still riding.
Vael had cut off a big swath of the guardian’s hide, rolled it up tightly like a carpet, and tied straps around it. She was carrying it on her shoulder and giving me a somewhat concerned look.
I took a deep breath to tell her I was doing okay, and as soon as I did, there was a terribly loud tearing sound.
I froze because there was a light breeze flowing somewhere it shouldn’t be. My face grew hot.
“P-please tell me that wasn’t what I think it was,” I stammered.
Vael took a few steps to the side, craned her neck, then looked back at me. Her voice wavered when she spoke. “That depends on what you think it was. If you think it was your ass burs–” She wheezed. She was trying so hard not to laugh at me.
I stood up and unbuckled my leg straps without saying a word. Now it didn’t feel like I was losing sensation in my legs, an improvement I would happily take.
“I know how we can–heh–fix this. Sorta. When we get on the other side, though. We’re pushing it.”
I pointed at the portal, and she practically bounced her way over and through it.
You could have fried mycoprotein composite on my cheeks with how they felt. Just add oil.
I waddled my way over and stepped through the portal.