I hit [HIDE] with my whole arm, as I could physically slam the button, and waded.
The reeds grew thick off the bank, a wall of them between me and the direction of the footsteps, and I went in to my ribs, hunched low, letting the stalks crowd over my head until only my face hung above the water. Warm murk crept up my body and got reacquainted with everything the morning had already done to it. The crunch of underbrush came again, closer, heavier, each footfall landing with a weight I could feel through the water.
A blue window folded open beside my ear, bright and helpful.
TIP: SWAMP TROLLS POSSESS EXCEPTIONAL SCENT DETECTION.
HIDING EFFICACY: REDUCED BY 80%.
"When," I whispered at it. "When were you planning to tell me? Before the wet footprints? Before the cum?" The window glowed at me, serene. "You could have led with troll."
The reeds rattled, and it came through the trees.
Nine feet is a measurement. It is not a preparation. It moved on its knuckles like a gorilla built out of river stones, shoulders bunched high, arms thick as the log I'd been railed against an hour ago, and every time a hand came down, branches snapped under it like green kindling. It was heading nowhere near my reeds. It was heading straight for my log.
It stopped over the spot where I'd left my tunic and put its nose to the wet wood. I could see its nostrils working from thirty feet away, flaring, sucking. It hunkered down, and with one claw, delicate as a tea drinker, it dipped into the water where white threads still drifted in the murk, the bullywug's entire afternoon, suspended. It lifted the claw. Watched the strands trail off. Its head came up.
Yellow eyes opened across the marsh and dragged across the reed line. Slow. Row by row. I was chest-deep in its bathtub, marinating in everything it was smelling. My sweat. My skin. The mess still leaking out of me in slow warm pulses that I could do absolutely nothing about, each one threading out into the water like a dotted line pointing at my hiding spot.
I didn't need the tip screen. The swamp had already filed my report.
The reeds exploded.
A hand closed around my ankle, and then I was moving, ploughed through the mud on my front, chin dragging a furrow, and hoisted. The world flipped. Blood poured into my head, the swamp rotating around me, and I hung upside down at eye level with a face like a cliff. It pulled me in and inhaled, long and slow, a breath that went on for days, hot swamp air washing over my bare skin, my thighs, everywhere. A sound came out of it that I felt in my teeth.
"Warm thiiing," it said.
Between its legs, a sheath swelled and split, and its cock came out into the open air and kept coming. Longer than my forearm. Curved up, heavy at the tip, ringed along its length with blunt ridges, like something built by a very confident person with no interest in my opinions. Beneath it, balls hung fat and full, swinging with the troll's breathing.
It lowered me, arm extending until my face hung level with the crown, my own weight pivoting me gently on its grip. The tip bumped my lips. Warm. Silky over iron, and about the size of a plum, and the plum was the entire problem. I opened my jaw as far as it would go and got the crown in. My lips snagged on the first ridge behind the head and stopped there, because there was no more mouth. None. I had a forearm of cock an inch from my face, and one mouthful of it in my mouth, and the math was not going to improve.
The troll rolled its hips anyway, slow and patient, and the head knocked against the back of my throat and just stayed there, plugging me. I gagged hard around it, eyes streaming, and it crooned, low and soothing, and held still. Letting me work.
So I worked.
I sealed my lips tight behind that first ridge and sucked, cheeks hollowing, and the wet sound of it was obscene in all that quiet. The troll shivered from heel to shoulder. My tongue did what it could reach, tracing the split of the crown, the rim where head met ridge, the slow heavy pulse of heat through the skin. Everything else got my hands. Both of them, wrapped around the shaft above my face, and I couldn't close my fingers around it any more than I could my mouth, so I stroked what I couldn't swallow, and when I needed air I pulled off and licked up the length of it instead, flat-tongued, base to crown, taking my time. Upside down, everything ran the wrong way. Drool ran toward my hairline, pooled in my eyebrow, dripped off in long threads that hit the swamp water below me.
Its free hand found me. One blunt finger, huge as two of mine, slid up the inside of my thigh and split me open, spreading the mess of me around, and the pad of it settled on my clit and circled. Careful. Curious. Startlingly, insultingly delicate, this thing that snapped branches for walking, treating me like something it was afraid to smudge.
I hung there, jaw at its absolute limit around the head of it, played at the other end, blood drumming in my skull, and the system, helpful to the last, chimed.
SUCK / [TWIST] / PUSH AWAY
I looked at the menu hanging in the green-grey light, taking my order mid-blowjob like a waiter who hated me.
And I twisted.
I swung my hips with everything my abs had left, scissoring my legs wide open in the air, and put my dripping cunt on full display, an arm's length from its face, plump and flushed and leaking. While I swung, one white drop of an earlier patron's business fell out of me and landed square on the troll's knuckle.
Its eyes dropped to the drop. Locked. Stayed locked.
The cock came out of my mouth with a pop like a cork, and my jaw sang with relief. Its hands flipped me end over end, and suddenly I was upright, my back pulled flush against a chest like a heated boulder, my feet dangling a foot above the water, its heartbeat rolling slow against my spine. The crown of it nudged up between my legs from behind.
And then the heat hit.
It bloomed through my pelvis like someone had poured warm honey straight into my bones, and everything in me went loose. Open. My thighs fell apart across its forearms. Deep in my body, doors I didn't know I had quietly unlocked themselves.
NYMPH'S EMBRACE — ACTIVE, said a small, smug window at the edge of my eye.
The skill from an hour ago, clocking in for its shift.
The troll bore me down onto it.
The crown squeezed in, inch by inch, my body yielding around the impossible taper of it, and I watched my own belly tense as the ridges began rolling through me, one at a time, each one a held breath, a stretch, a fullness that rearranged me on its way in. My nails found its forearm and dug in. It didn't notice.
"Sm a lll," it rumbled, wonder in the gravel. "Tiiight."
Then it bounced me.
There was nothing human in the rhythm. Full strokes, root to crown, its hips punching up while its arms dropped me down the same length, and my whole body became the toy. On every stroke my ass smacked down flat against its groin, loud and wet, and those heavy balls swung up and slapped the soaked mess of me where I took the root of it.
Plap. Plap. Plap-plap-plap.
The flat percussion rolled out across the swamp, echoing off the water. Somewhere the frogs had given up entirely. The squelch of it was louder than they'd ever been, cream frothing white around the thick base, churned up stroke after stroke, and I heard myself making sounds with no consonants in them.
The pressure built in me like a sneeze the size of a building, and when it broke, I broke with it. My whole body seized, cunt clamping down on that ridged length, and I squirted, hard, a clear spray jetting out from where we joined, arcing down into the swamp water below.
The troll froze.
It went completely still, cock hilted in me, and stared down between my splayed legs at the dripping evidence with what I could only describe as religious awe. Then it crooned, deep and long, wrapped both arms around me like a treasure, and started again, faster, chasing the exact thing that had just squeezed it. Every clench of mine got a happy rumble. Every shudder got a faster stroke. I was steering it. Me, dangling and wrecked and coming apart, and this nine-foot engine of the swamp was taking its cues from my body like I was holding the reins.
That thought, absurd and filthy and true, pushed me straight into a second rolling orgasm, and the troll bellowed.
It buried itself to the root, the sound scattering birds out of the canopy in a black panic, and came. I felt the pulses of it, thick and endless, heat blooming deep, my belly swelling faintly outward with the volume, and I hung there and took all of it, gasping against its chest. Its regeneration didn't let it soften. I could feel it, stone-hard and patient inside me, already not done.
It waded, me still impaled and bouncing gently with each step, out of the water and up the bank, and it laid me back on the peat, moss cool under my shoulders. Then it came down over me, mounting me properly, hips between mine, chest blanketing me, its frame blotting out the entire grey sky.
And here is the thing I learned about myself, flat on my back under a swamp troll, stuffed past capacity, its weight pinning me into the earth:
I loved it.
Not tolerated. Loved. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to decide and nothing could reach me, because nine feet of muscle already had, completely. Covered, crushed, held, filled. My brain, which had been screaming tactical calculations since the moment I woke up standing in a marsh, went quiet as the inside of a cathedral. My legs wrapped their waist on their own. My heels drummed its lower back. "More," I heard myself say, wrecked and shameless. "Don't you dare stop."
It obliged.
Loads two and three blurred together into one long shrieking tangle. The light moved. The peat turned to mud beneath us. I came twice more than I could count, once screaming into its shoulder, once with no sound at all, just my mouth open and my body wrung out like a rag, and through all of it the rhythm never faltered, plap, plap, plap, steady as industry, cream and cum frothed to foam around the root of it, puddling under my hips.
Load four, it slowed. Long, deliberate, grinding strokes, each ridge dragged through me inch by inch, its croons dropping lower and lower, and I felt it swelling, thickening, the pressure climbing past what even Nymph's Embrace had signed me up for. When it finally hilted and let go, it flooded me. Overfilled me. Cum pulsed out around the seal of us in fat squirts on every throb, schlick, schlick, adding to the puddle, and I came one last weak, sparkling time just from the sheer volume of it, belly taut and rounding, and then the pulses finally, finally wound down.
Silence. The frogs crept back, one brave test note at a time.
The troll blinked. Twice. Its eyes cleared the way the bullywug's had, awareness creeping back in behind the yellow, and it looked down at me, pinned under it and pumped absolutely full of it, and made a small bewildered sound, like a man waking up in someone else's house.
It pulled out.
The withdrawal was torrential, a long obscene schlorp and then a hot rush flooding out of me, pooling in the mud. It sat back on its heels, staring at the ruin of me, breathing hard.
Then it gathered me up with both hands, and set me down.
Gently.
On my feet, in the shallows, adjusting its grip twice like it was scared of dropping a teacup. It backed away, stood, and lumbered off north, and twice it stopped and looked back over its shoulder at me before the fog took it.
"Bye," I said weakly, to nobody.
I lay down where I was, halfway on the bank, chest heaving, thighs wrecked, cum cooling in long, slow trails down my skin while the swamp filled its silence back in around me. HP 40/50, said a quiet corner of my eye. Recovering.
The chime came back, chipper as a bird that had seen everything and judged nothing.
QUEST COMPLETE: THE PATROL
+60 EXP
NOTICE: SWAMP TROLL SEMEN VOLUME EXCEEDS STANDARD CONTAINMENT. MINOR OVERFLOW EXPECTED.
"Expected," I repeated. The game had expected it. The game had notes on the carrying capacity of my own body, filed somewhere, with a little flag on it.
"Glad somebody ran the numbers."
The fanfare hit before I'd finished being offended. Trumpets. Actual trumpets, blaring out of the empty air over a woman lying in a swamp with a troll's ransom leaking out of her.
EXP: 110 / 100
LEVEL UP! LV 1 → LV 2
A stat screen bloomed, and I dragged myself up onto one elbow to read it.
STR Lv. 1.
DEF Lv. 1.
AGI Lv. 1.
CHARM Lv. 99.
"Level two," I said. "Big day." A whole extra level of experience, earned horizontally, and not one point of it in anything that could block a claw. My build was a dead end with a body count, and the body was mine. I let the screen dissolve.
ITEM ACQUIRED: TROLL-BLESSING OIL (RARE)
A LUBRICANT OF REMARKABLE QUALITY. DOUBLES THE STAMINA OF THE NEXT CREATURE APPLIED TO.
I read it three times.
"Doubles," I said. "The stamina." Of the next creature. I had just survived five bullywug rounds and four troll loads, and the game's idea of a reward was the option to do that again, but twice as long.
"That's a punishment. You put a bow on a punishment and called it loot."
I turned the little glass vial over in my muddy fingers. It sat warm and amber and innocuous in my palm, and I had no intention of using it, and I did not throw it away.
Then the light changed. The windows around me shivered, drew back, and reassembled into one enormous pane that took up half the sky, and its hum was different. Deeper. Older.
ROUTE SELECTION NOW AVAILABLE
THIS CHOICE IS PERMANENT.
ROUTE A — MONSTER-BRED CONSORT
THE DEEP WILDS LIE WEST. ESCALATING CREATURES. AN ENDING RECORDED ONLY AS [REDACTED].
ROUTE B — CROWNED BY CHARM
THE LANTERN LIGHTS LIE EAST. CIVILIZATION. COURTS. KINGDOMS. AN ENDING RECORDED ONLY AS [REDACTED].
ROUTE C — THE UNCHARTING
HUNT THE SOURCE OF THE ANOMALY. AN ENDING RECORDED AS [DATA CORRUPTED — ASSOCIATED WITH TRUE ENDING].
ROUTE D — [???]
CONDITION NOT MET. LOCKED.
Three doors and a wall, and every door's label for what lay behind it was blacked out. Except the corrupted one. Of course the broken one was the one that promised a true ending. Of course it was.
I got my feet under me, wobbled, and stood in the ruins of my afternoon, and I looked east. Through the thinning fog, far off, a smear of orange light. Lanterns. Streets. People, with hands and doors and laws. Then I turned and looked west, where the trees grew older and blacker, the water lay darker, and the swamp went back and back and got deeper and stranger until the fog swallowed any guess at what was past it.
Civilisation or the wilds. A crown or the dark. Or the long dangerous walk toward whoever had written [REDACTED] over my stats and [TRUE ENDING] over my future.
The menu hung in the air in front of me, patient as the troll's footsteps had been.
ROUTE A / ROUTE B / ROUTE C