Chapter 115

 

“So let me get this straight. You need to force a skill to activate that you haven’t used before?” Asakura asked innocently. She has her hands gripping mine while trying to push me down. She is interested in the problem even though she’s very distracted though.

Of course right now I’m still feeding off her in sex. It’s inevitable. Because I’d woken up with a lot of fatigue and extreme loss of physical stamina I have to make up for it in other ways and extra feeding is the only way. It started with me feeding off her milk until her nipples are bright red and sore. I don’t mind since the buildup of everyday making her nipples sore is also making them thicker and more rubbery. After that we’d had a whirlwind of sex for several hours to feed and replenish energy with intermittent napping together in a blanket.

“I love you Shun! I love this! Hic* We should do this more often!” Asakura said in a dreamy tone of voice.

Darn pheromones. Asakura was real and genuine but it was weird how suggestive the pheromones made them.

Rina wasn’t happy when I had her buy us time with the dwarves to not be disturbed the whole day, due to feeling sick and exhausted from fighting…which is true. We switch positions for a little while. But I can’t call in sick everyday and the dwarves will want to know what’s up.

“I don’t like you training this way. What if you are trained to think sex is a chore and just something like punching a time card? You need to remember this our love and not a to do list,” Asakura said, voicing her concern.

“I’m surprised to hear you of all people say that,” I replied.

Right now we’re still trying to force feed. I’d gotten tired so I’m letting Asakura be on top.

“Well I enjoy this more than anything. It’s actually scary how much I like it. But I would be really hurt if you ever got tired of me,” she said honestly, looking at me deep in the eyes.

“That’ll never happen,” I said, kissing her hand which is entwined with mine.

“Well what’s going on? I know this is more than usual. I don’t know magic, but I can tell,” she countered, even as she never stops pushing her hips up and down onto mine, rolling them back and forth. I never get tired of her form. It’s become slimmer since coming to this world, and more athletic with the right lines. Plus watching the giant boobs fly up and down while she’s going at it is really hypnotic. I don’t think she notices how much they swing around when she does that, but that’s because she really gets into this.

“You are making too much noise. Try to …make it quieter please,” I interjected.

“Sorry Shun. I’ll do better, but it’s hard to not make noise. You have no idea what this feels like. I wish we could stay in bed all day every day too,” she said while winking at me. The noise dips just a bit but she’s not able to fully kill it.

“Well…suffice it to say I’m fighting a dream demon in a way,” I said.

“So you had a nightmare or something?” she asked.

Her attention is riveted to me now. She looks very concerned.

“You know you are my ghoul familiar right?” I said.

“Yeah, we’ve been over this before. I’m your ghoul familiar, you are some kind of human demon hybrid or something as far as we can tell, but we don’t know when it will progress or if it will stay like now. But it isn’t bad right? My skin and hair feel healthier since those changes,” she finished for me.

“But what I was trying to figure out too, is how many others and of different types there are; and how many other creatures too. We’re so blind and need to be more aware of what’s out there and how to beat it,” I said. “I don’t know anything yet and haven’t told you guys yet partly because I was worried about scaring you and Rina. I also am under more risk from being killed if anybody finds out the changes that have been…forced on me.”

I proceeded to explain first to her more about what Fox and Sunghee had told me about this world being a clash of two different worlds and the war of the demons and demi-humans of this world. It also sounds like we’ll have more clashes with demons for territory in the future between both people and demons and ourselves individually. As I explain it, she’s so fascinated she almost stops helping me feed several times, which I have to correct.

She got really quiet after that. I should have known.

“Are you mad?” I asked.

“…No…I’m glad you told me. But this world seems to have a lot of problems.”

We’ve been living together this long that she can’t hide it all. She’s I think taking it a bit hard that I haven’t told her all of this yet.

“Sorry,” I said.

She brushes it off, “I get it. You were trying to shield us a bit more to get stronger first before telling us right?”

I nodded.

“You know I couldn’t tell you everything yet, because it would endanger our lives even more,” I said. “What if I’d told Rina and Yumi about what was going on? They’d have a 100% certainty of blabbing to the wrong people at the wrong time or probably going crazy and making things worse. That’s how it was.”

“I can still tell there’s more than you are telling me. But I’m OK with it. I just want us to be together always and not just for sex. I mean a real romance. We’re really lucky that we always treat each other with respect and we don’t fight. Have you noticed how even in this world people fight about money and all kinds of ridiculous stuff?” Asakura said. We’re now taking a break. She’s trying to be mad, except she’s still impaled on me and squeezing me tightly without letting up. She can’t help that even though she’s upset, she’s being controlled too.

“I guess you are right,” I admitted.

But it made me wonder…if the pheromones weren’t here, how much worse would her reaction have been?

“I wish you’d told me Shun! I would have been there for you! From now on, don’t leave anything out OK?” she said with anguish, while still squeezing me.

“I was…trying to figure out how… I’m sorry. I’ll keep you more in the loop from now,” I said sincerely.

“So what is this dream demon thing?” she asked.

“Well it’s actually some kind of doppelganger, not a dream demon but it’s attacking me in my dream,” I said.

“OK, so what’s a doppelganger?” she said.

This brought out a lot more mixed feelings. At one point during the explanation she started crying and has her arms folded across her expansive chest defiantly because she’s both upset and mad that she’s not my only woman now. I had to explain now how much hate this world has for demons and how the demi-humans and humans are losing the war. I’d told her about the war but hadn’t told her we were losing it before as a species. But then she’s also got mixed feelings too in that she sees why I need more people with us permanently and why they’d be other women.

The pheromones will take the sting off that part…yeah.

That made her stop and listen a bit more. “Eh? This world has that many problems? Seriously?”

“Yeah, wish I was kidding. I’m not.”

“If what you say is true then we’re in over our heads Shun,” she said calmly.

“That’s why I need to feed extra today. I need to get as much energy as I possibly can. I will have to fight that thing again tonight when I fall asleep and it comes back,” I said.

“Shun! Please! Don’t hide anything from me anymore! Tell me more! Let me be your bodyguard! I know…that I’m changed. And I’ve been doing that before but we never had a sit down talk and said ‘hey lets commit to each other!’ Or maybe before it was always implied and acted up but not voiced? Our love is real! These changes in my body, they are because of our love Shun! But please that hurts when you hide things from me! We’re closer than that! I can take the truth! Please!” she is squeezing my hand affectionately while her face is full of crying.

“Sorry.”

She wipes away the crying and sniffling. “Don’t hide anything from me ever again! Starting today tell me everything!” Although I wasn’t hiding anything before; I just hadn’t worked out reconciling my team with each other and this world yet.

So I did explain a bit more of what I’d learned. Some of the things I had just learned recently and didn’t know much about yet. Like so far, we’d only met imps in the demon realm. I had no idea just how many varieties of imps there were.

She didn’t like the parts about hearing that there were two other allies, named Fox and Sunghee.

That made her sullen for about an hour and she wouldn’t speak to me. She now realizes at least one of them is girlfriend number two, though I was a bit vague on that.

So I had to counter that with more ‘feeding’. It was the only option and that did break down her being upset. In fact, I think she totally forgot she was upset at me after that. I needed the extra energy too.

It’s also strange that while I woke up feeling like I’d gone 24 hours with no sleep, which worries me. Bit by bit the more I feed, the more refreshed I feel. The aching of my tired bones is slowly being replaced with a feeling of less stress, my mind is calming too.

“I’ll help you,” Asakura finally said while bent over on all fours. I’d been doing her from behind for a long time. I even felt like taking a break but if I can get my energy back…

It’s been the only thing she’d said for the last two or three hours, she’d been that mad at me. While she had forgotten that when we stopped having sex then she remembered it. Now I’m trying to make her forget it again. For a long time there had been a stare of anger directed at me, but now it had melted away and there was pity instead.

“You will?” I stopped in mid stride.

“Just remember though, I’m wife number one. Those others are just mistresses. I’ll permit it for now, but don’t get too many OK?” she countered.

“Ri-right. But I haven’t made them mistresses yet, well except Sunghee I think.”

She wrinkles up her nose in clear and open jealousy. Her hands are on her hips. “I knew it. I could tell. I just didn’t know which one it was.” But she waits two seconds to release it before responding, “so let’s go see if we can come up with a defense,” she said breaking off our session.

We spent the next few hours trying to work up a summoning technique. It seems like the solution, or at least one workable solution is working out how to summon people back and forth between the real world and the dream state. Then I could just concentrate my team and their firepower on that doppelganger girl.

I don’t know if it will work, but it’s my only chance.

Fox and Sunghee had talked about this with me. We’d thought it would be unfeasible to use though, since they believed it would use too much mana. But there’s no mistake that if I could ‘summon’ Sunghee she would be instantly be pulled out of the birdcage right? Plus then I could maybe even pull Asakura in there? Or would I have to tweak each summon sequence differently for each girl?

We spent the next few minutes trying to work out how it would feel and do. Asakura does have a few minor ideas even though she can’t do magic. She’s watched how I act thousands of times for casting spells, so she is able to help me optimize my posture and help me with meditation. Meditation does seem to help and work with enhancing mana regeneration too.

A summon technique spell would be very similar to a dimension door in reverse wouldn’t it? But to figure it out I had to take apart the spell sequence for dimension door and play with it. It’s harder than it sounds.

The first time I tried to reverse the dimension door sequence and modify it, was a complete failure. I was playing with the coding for directing mana and trying to figure out what parts were what and went where. The first try casting bits of the code resulted in failures that helped me learn however.

We found the part of the sequence for ‘door’. I used that part of the code to summon a partial door that looked like it had been twisted by some nightmarish hell. But because there weren’t the other necessary parts of the code with it, the door shattered like bits of glass, in a mini explosion of sparks and light.

“It’s a good thing we had shielding up,” Asakura said. She’s of course recording the bits of our experiments.

“Yeah, that’s good,” I affirmed. Then I had to put the shielding back on both of us. The old shielding had literally thousands of glass slivers embedded in it so thick it was almost like some icy glass fur. That would have hurt like a bitch if it’d hit us directly.

“Now we know the part of the code for door. So we just have to figure out which parts were for summon right and replace them for the parts for a specific named creature like this…Sunghee…girl or whoever she is,” Asakura stated openly. She did frown at me, but it’s not a look of disappointment anymore but like we’re progressing and mixed with jealousy. Her emotions are complex but she’s not hiding them from me.

“Should we try breaking apart some of the other spells first?” she asked.

“Well the light spell is low power but I’m not sure if we’d learn anything useful from it?” I guessed.

“So taking apart dimension door, is your only option? I can’t accept that. There has to be more we can work with,” she said confidently.

I snapped my fingers. “Oh, that’s right! There’s the summon equipment spell!”

“Eh? You had something like that?!” she’s giving me a look like I’ve been being ignorant or got an F on math test.

“Well it was only recently acquired,” I protested.

“Well let’s see it. It sounds interesting,” she said excitedly.

After I cast it, we open the huge wooden crate’s lid. I’m also curious and want to know if anything has changed, as per the description that it can.

“It’s only got clothes and some minor camping supplies. I doubt it will be of much use,” I said.

“Hmm. Wait a minute. There’s more than you are describing here,” she said. She’s looking over into the box. Her mouth is hanging open like she’d just gone shopping with free money. It’s the reaction of someone missing things from Earth plus desperately wanting some new equipment.

“Really?”

I came over also taking a look.

Sure enough, there are the normal camping supplies but the box has changed. There are sleeping bags, clothes which consist of our school uniforms, a dress uniform jacket to go over the clothes, and shoes, a six person tent, ME rations in sealed packets. Although there’s a funny twist in that while there are ME rations for my followers, there is a modified ME ration packet that is labeled ‘milk’ written in red with a spade tail dotting the ‘I’ in the word milk. I can guess what kind of milk it is, though it’s a bit subtle as to describing what kind of milk. It’s interesting too that the summon equipment spell changed the meals to have one adapted for my dietary needs.

But this time there is also two big hiking backpacks with hip support belts which weren’t there last time I’d used this spell. They are from our home world too, and not this weird magic world. The usual alcohol towlette packets and other minor toiletries are also there like toothbrushes, combs, T.P., and toothpaste. It’s really all cheap stuff that doesn’t change how you right or function much. The combs, tooth paste,T.P., and toothbrushes weren’t here last time either.

“Oh those are nice. We can really use this stuff! Yes! Yes, yes! I’m so glad I’m with you Shun!” Asakura chirps happily and claps her hands laughing. She hops up and down excitedly. It’s pretty interesting seeing certain things bounce a lot too.

I’d forgotten how women love their creature comforts. To Asakura having toiletries to stay clean and beautiful were like finding Excalibur, the sword of all swords. It also reminded me I am still getting to know her and don’t know everything about her, even though I want to. I should have predicted she would be excited about these simple things.

“So the toothbrushes and combs won you over?” I joked.

“Hey that’s a big deal on a planet that’s hostile and doesn’t have those things,” she said blushing. She does also take all of that stuff, including the rations and puts them in one of the backpacks which she takes out of the box.

“I guess so.”

We then unravel more of the code as we work. Her seeing my spells have utility and not just combat has her more renewed with zealousness to help me figure this out and she’s hounding me like crazy with questions and trying to help analyze the symbols.

The next step we compared the spell code and glyphs of the summon equipment spell and the dimension door spell. It’s hard to work it out because there are strings of different things and we aren’t sure what will do what. We also have to think about if anything in the coding we’re doing can cause a bad reaction like before.

We find out from that experiment that summon type spells use a beginning and ending setup very similar to how sentences have punctuation, quotation marks, and capitalization at the front and end of a spell. There are guiding symbols too, which aren’t quite like punctuation and necessary, but I lack being able to describe them to another thing except for maybe like aircraft symbols on an airport runway.

“That’s good but where do we go from here?” Asakura asked.

“Hmm, that’s tricky huh? I wish we could speak Egyptian and this would be easier,” I sighed.

“Wait, let me show you something. This is kind of like math in a way. You’re lucky you have a math expert with you. You might just get this figured out because math and this have some similarities,” she jibed happily.

I’m glad she’s not mad. Every second she’s happy counts.

“See this string here?” She shows me the dimension door sequence. Then she proceeds to the next part, “this other one for the equipment box is very similar. But there are marked differences. We could try to interchange parts of this part of the code and see what happens.”

So we try it.

The first one exploded in flaming glass again after a really long casting sequence. Flaming glass isn’t fun. Its too hard to control and we nearly got hit by it. There’s no application for this either, because the potential for friendly fire would be awful. Your friends would definitely hate you if you covered their faces in molten glass and small magma bits.

“It’s not supposed to do that,” I said frowning and shaking my head. I sigh, thinking about all the effort I need to go through to figure out why it did that. I have to go over every single spell glyph and rune syllable.

“Yeah I think you are right,” she said.

“We were so close though. I thought we had something,” I sighed.

“Can you use the explody glass thing as a weapon?” she asked.

I shook my head, “the problem is the casting sequence was almost a full minute. In a battle that’s totally useless even as a suicide bomb or lured in bomb plus who knows if it will be different next time, not to mention the friendly fire problem. I have to be able to whip them out in several seconds, like three seconds or less to draw the runes in the air with my finger. Even three seconds is too long too, if I’m in close combat. For an enemy that’s a whole minute of them attacking with me occupied with not being able to fight back.”

“Ah, that’s too bad. A bomb would be useful for war though,” she had her hand on her chin.

Further experimentation showed something else. We found out failed spell effects were also random and not just explosions. So even if we’d gotten the friendly fire problem fixed and the cast time…we wouldn’t get a glass bomb every time.

To be safe we’d tried to duplicate one of the effects, wondering if we could produce a shorter cast time on a failed on purpose burning glass explosion with the right sequences. But instead we’re both shocked when instead of an explosion of glass, we get a pile ten feet high of wooden kindling bits that resemble bark.

Kindling…in that amount is totally useless for everything. Plus it’s not even stable matter. Some of it looks like its already dissolving near the bottom of the pile.

All the failures in this are shaking up my resolve. I have to keep telling myself we’re doing this to try to get a new spell out of it all at some point. Is this how other mages find new spells? I should ask Fox some more about creating new spells and see what she says.

“Weird. I thought it was going to explode again?” she guessed.

“I know right? At least we’ll have…huh?” I stopped in mid-sentence.

“Hey did you notice all the bits of glass from the two previous explosions have dissolved into thin air?” she said, noticing what I’d just seen.

“Then will the wood bits also? I thought they were shrinking but now it’s confirmed. And what does that mean?” she looked over and sure enough the huge pile of wooden debris was already evaporating. Her nose is scrunched up as she thinks about it.

Although she’d said shrinking, I thought it was melting. In a way her perspective isn’t quite wrong and hearing it thought about in a different way is helping me learn from this.

“So it’s not a permanent summon if the spell isn’t done right,” I said.

“If the spell is done right, it might still not be permanent though? And these summoned clothes that I’m wearing might not be permanent either,” she suggested right after.

“I suppose that’s true. I haven’t tested the duration of the equipment from the summon equipment box. I would think the duration isn’t forever but at least enough to be safe to use or there wouldn’t even be a useable purpose for this spell,” I admitted.

“So until we do, those summoned clothes might not be safe,” she frowned. But then after she realized what that might mean her frown twisted into some kind of dirty look.

Gulp, “sorry.”

To my surprise she waves it off and isn’t mad. “It isn’t like you haven’t seen me before. As long as other people don’t see me you can see me whenever you want lover,” she blushed cutely.

“Thanks lover. I appreciate you too,” I squeezed her hand briefly.

But then I changed the subject again, “OK, so the next part…let’s try reversing the sequences again but on the other spell instead with its string?” I suggested.

“I’ve got the results. So let me go over it again real fast,” she said.

This time we put the dimension door’s spell sequence inside the larger sequence for the summon equipment box, but without the words for summon equipment. So it looked like we had a spell sequence for summoning a dimension door in a box? But it’s not a perfect workout and it meshes weird with the door bent and partly broken looking like fiberglass with pustules made of crystal despite supposedly being made from wood from the concept of ‘mashing a square in the circle hole’ type of fix.

This distortion in the spell and how it’s not balanced makes the end product look totally freaking bizarre. I’d never thought you could bend reality this particular way, but it’s also so dangerous I flinch every time we try to cast something. We’re also using the huge summoned box from the original clean and solid spell and its heavy wood for extra cover to hide behind while we experiment, in conjunction with the shielding now.

“It doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be used this way,” I said noting how sloppy it looks.

“I agree,” she echoes after me.

Then it collapses prematurely because the matter forces are being put in such a weird contorted mess that it’s strained the duration of the spell. But it’s still better than what we were getting before.

So we make a small adjustment and try again. This time the spell fizzles.

“What did we do wrong that time?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure?” I guessed.

“Maybe the sequence is too long? Or you changed the wrong parts,” she guessed.

She went over the code again, “OK, you remember order of operations in math right? There’s the part about doing the inner parts of the parenthesis first and doing a proper order of the formula in question. I think the same principle would apply here too right? It has certain parts that have to be in place before other parts.”

“Oh, that sounds like a good comparison. Like what?”

“Well the coding for software to do math problems will glitch out and get syntax errors if you have an uneven number of left parenthesis marks compared to right parenthesis marks. It’s possible some parts of the code were like trying to double parts of that part, but also were unbalanced too,” she said.

“Ah, I get it. Your brilliant!” I said making her smile so big she blushed.

Sure enough she was partly right. The spell fail we found was caused by a syntax error from duplicated glyphs. The Egyptian writing of this world was I think more developed than our own world’s Egyptian, but still uniquely looking and feeling like real Egyptian. It had more than one word for some grammar particles, like periods, quotations, and so on.

So we had to account for that while not understanding everything we’re doing, which is really aggravating.

Now she has a homemade measuring stick out, with notches cut into even spaces for feet and inches. She’s using it to compare different distances and ratios with the previous numbers that she’d recorded with each sequence changing.

“We won’t end up with like a black hole, or opening a door to the sun would we?” she asked.

I had to stop to think about that. “That would suck. But I don’t think I’m using enough mana for something like that to occur right time. At least I hope not.” I try to brush away the worry but I can’t now that she said it like that.

Two hours later we’d identified several other particles, which Asakura is making sure we can look back on for further study and spell manipulation.

We’re both sweating, “We have to hurry. It will be dark in a few hours,” I said.

Asakura is also getting more nervous. “I know. We can get it. I know we can!”

“But there’s another problem too. Do you even know how to write Sunghee’s name in Egyptian?” she said.

“Fuck.”

Both of us are stunned, and demoralized realizing what that could mean, since we’d have to include her name as part of summoning her as far as I can tell.

“So if you can’t write her name in Egyptian what will happen if we write her name in our own language but have everything else in the proper spell writing system?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure exactly. It’s a gamble. I’m just worried we haven’t done all this work for nothing,” I sad sadly trying not to cry.

“Our survival depends on freeing Sunghee,” I said.

Two hours later its already sunset and we’re still working.

Rina is watching us but can tell by how stressed out and scared we are that something is really off and that she better not interrupt us. But she is helping herself to the ME rations from the summoned crate and playing in the box.

“I think we have a spell sequence,” I said after our 38^th experiment.

“Really?”

We’d gotten this far by marking a big rock with a red X mark on it from some of the dwarven supplies that were spilled in the wreckage and already damaged. It was some red dye or primitive paint that had been abandoned.

We figured out how to get a spell sequence to summon the red rock with the marked X on it.

“I think we should probably test it a few times to make sure it’s safe,” I suggested.

“I agree,” she countered.

We did get the spell to work the first time.

But on the second try the rock explodes in a shower of gravel.

“Fuck,” I accidentally swore.

If that’d been Sunghee we would totally be crying for days. This is so frustrating. Are we even getting anywhere? The lack of morale is making me feel lethargic and tired.

“What the hell?!” I exclaimed. “This is beyond banging my head against the wall.”

“Well, technically the summoning spell did work. It just exploded after it was teleported thirty feet away,” Asakura noted.

I think she’s being too optimistic because she’s blinded by love…and lust too.

“Guess that means we’re not able to do human testing yet,” I said sarcastically.

“Well…you could use goblins?” she suggested.

…

…

That’s not a bad idea. In fact, it could be a little bit fun in a way.

Suddenly Asakura and I start laughing as we think about it.

“But that’s vile and evil isn’t it?” Rina interjected. She’s been watching but not for the whole time. But she’s been quiet and hanging back since it looked like we were playing with TNT until recently.

We both look at her funny at the same time. It makes us laugh even harder.

“What? I’m trying to help,” she said defending herself while munching on an ME ration. “You know these rations are pretty awesome, by the way.”

“We don’t have time to be distracted,” Asakura said to her.

“Actually why can’t we use prisoner goblins? I’m sure the dwarves must have some prisoners around her somewhere,” I offered.

“But they are live, intelligent beings,” Rina protested.

“That tried to kidnap and rape us on almost every battle!” Asakura contested with seething anger.

“Yeah, but is it humane to do testing with them?” Rina wondered curiously.

“They are demonic beings though. They aren’t children of any divine being,” I pointed out.

“But are they even intelligent? They have no ability to live symbiotically with their environment or anything around them. Some might argue that makes them more like a virus or cockroach than an intelligent form of life,” Asakura said, folding her arms over her chest.

“I suppose that’s true. I don’t know maybe it’s not bad since they are goblins, but I’m not sure,” Rina admitted.

“So we should test using live goblin prisoners. I’m sure the dwarves have some somewhere around here,” I again affirmed.

“But…Shun! Even if the goblins are live, you are a hero and a good guy! You can’t do things like that!” Rina said.

“If they were humans it would be wrong. If they didn’t have demonic blood it would be wrong. But even if we get the rock version of summon rock to work, we would still have to do some testing on live animals after that as part of the next phase of testing. So its either goblins or helpless farm animals or squirrels,” Asakura said to her.

“Yeah I suppose that’s true. Squirrels would be sad,” Rina looked a bit sad.

“Goblins aren’t pets Rina. They aren’t domestic able. They live for murder and pillaging, even right from the womb its already manifesting. We’re trying to do the least damage we can,” I said.

That was the wrong thing to say. I can see her face fall as she innocently wipes away a tear. “That’s…so awful…” she started to say.

“I think what’s important is that we’re trying to do some good. We aren’t trying to be callous about the food web and environment. We are trying to save it. This is like a triage situation in war,” Asakura explained to her.

Somehow it sinks in but takes some time for her to accept it.

“Yeah, I guess you are right,” she said.

“We better hurry though. They probably don’t plan to have any of the goblin prisoners kept around very long,” I said.

Another hour later the dwarves have come to watch after bringing the prisoners that they were about to execute. It’s apparently their request as a form of entertainment in exchange for letting us experiment on their prisoners. Of course another stipulation is that we’re not allowed to untie the creatures or let them free in any way. Even while doing the spell experiments they are required to be gagged and have their hands tied behind ther backs and even have a type of tied rope hobble between their legs.

The goblins look tearfully pathetic with their sad long faces and overly long noses. They tried to also deceptively do puppy dog eye looks to women and children. Because of it, one of the dwarf kids almost lost his fingers to being bitten by a goblin that viciously died in an attempt to do any damage he could to the child before being beaten to death by the dwarf guards interfering. The irony was the goblin that tried to bite him was probably younger than he was.

“Let that be a lesson to you Rina. You saw how they faked looking repentant and innocent. Then as soon as the kid was in range it tried to savage him,” I explained to her.

“My good hell…” she said breathlessly.

The dwarves are now cheering like it’s a ball game as we march the goblin prisoners up into a line. The dwarf guards are also happy to keep them orderly for us. They also are helping to keep them from getting out of line.

The first experiment makes the dwarven crowd cheer like we just hit a home run as he explodes right after we summoned him. He technically, again like before was summoned about thirty feet away like we’d expected, and to the exact position we wanted him to be at.

The other prisoners instantly want to run but they are chained in place. They are trying to even crawl away but the dwarf guards won’t let them. Its kind of interesting to see their reactions of fear.

“Why isn’t it working?” I huffed angrily.

Asakura thinks about it for a minute. The energy transfer is all good and right. Maybe it has something to do with the mass transfer rate and spelling out mass transfer being in the same form it came in, and something in the code about that?” she shrugged.

I briefly consider it, but we’re just not sure.

We tried two more goblins before making any adjustments. The crowd again goes wild as they explode, but we have to be careful and get behind a makeshift dugout provided by the dwarves so we don’t get stung by goblin intestines or their guts sliming us. But they don’t always explode, sometimes they turn into slimey goo that explodes in a shower much like a quick heavy rain, or melt into water which dissolved into the ground, and a few of them turned into an exploding sand cloud. One of them just turned into a balloon and started to float even after being turned into a balloon had long ago killed him with the corpse still full of air and goblin blood leaking from every orifice. But the balloon finally popped when it got really high up.

The dwarves happily let the guts hit them though. They take it as a right of honor or something, or maybe like a mud throwing contest? They have weird entertainment ideas, but I’m not judging. They are now having contests with their youth to see who can absorb exploding goblin transformation guts the most without actually getting burned or caught in the explosion. I think it looks pretty dangerous but the guards seem happy letting them do it.

We tried tweaking it several times more after that.

It still doesn’t work. We get exploding goblins of one form or another almost every time. We’ve also almost ran out of goblins too, even after we’d tried tweaking the code several times.

“Dammit!” I said, almost tearing my hair out.

“Is it a big deal if this doesn’t work on the first day?” Rina asked.

“Yeah, I can’t get into that now though,” I said.

Unexpectedly when we’d gotten down to the last three goblin prisoners one of the dwarven mages shows up. He’s not one of the two we’d done that other operation with so I’m not sure what to happen. But I can feel he’s powerful, and very old.

“Hmm, I thought I was picking up some strange energy readings. So it was you!” he is surprised to see me and Asakura. He’s been watching for a good two minutes I guess and caught onto the last part of the new sport we’d created for the dwarves.

“Sorry, we’re doing experiments. It’s not actually supposed to be some kind of sport,” I explained.

But he can’t miss seeing the dwarven youth having the time of their lives.

“Say, can I do the last three prisoners?” he asked politely.

“Huh?” Asakura and I are both stunned that he wants in on this.

“Please! I’m begging you! I need this!” we watched as he’s moved to tears begging us like a junky trying to get his last fix before the end. Who knew that dwarves had a sadist side when it comes to goblins. Fact is they probably are all a bunch of sadists.

Several times in the last hour the prisoners have also tried to escape too, and that’s been part of the new game as other dwarven youth not only try to catch the exploding guts, but also play ‘corral the goblin cattle’.

“I don’t know. We’re actually trying to develop this into something useful,” I said.

His face fell and …was that a tear?

“Well I guess we can let you do one of them,” I added testily. Actually it was kind of fun seeing what would happen to them upon summoning so I’m reluctant to give him the controller, so to speak.

An hour later something unexpected happened.

It turns out the whole day was a bust. We didn’t get a new spell out of it. It’s also impractical to use because the spell sequence takes too long to use in a real situation. Plus its too unpredictable and when it does work its only working on goblins.

But the dwarves have a new national sport.

Before going to sleep the dwarven mage has traded us the exploding goblin spell, and even put in the right references to name the glyph for ‘goblin’ for us in Egyptian. He also corrected our formula a bit better for proper mass transfer to show us how it should have been done to not make them explode. Although when he realized what he’d given us he hurriedly erased that part and changed it back because he actually likes it when the goblins explode and is disappointed when they do not. There’s a variation instead where the goblin melts, with his flesh turned to acid when he’s summoned to the next square.

He thinks it’s terribly funny but inwardly Asakura and I are both horrified how much they are enjoying it. What if…he wanted to do that to a non-goblin? He’s of course also drinking a beer with us while we’re at a sort of travelling tent saloon while he’s explaining it to us now. Asakura and I don’t dare drink dwarven beer because it looks too strong for humans while he’s doing that. So we’re worried about getting to our camp safely before he starts losing control.

But then he suddenly gets very serious. “Here, this is what you need actually.” It’s a magic scroll of some kind.

“But it’s written in dwarven,” I said as I looked at it.

“No problem. I’ll spell it out for you,” he said.

Opening it up and pulling out a quill and some ink he writes it out for us using the language enchant to write it in a different way so that we can rewrite it.

“How do we know it works?” Asakura asked.

“Yeah, it was pretty risky when things sometimes…or more than sometimes explode when summoned,” I echoed write after.

“It’s like this,” he explained.

He casts it, but then uses Rina as a volunteer before I can stop him. Asakura and I are horrified but couldn’t stop him in time.

She’s summoned about forty feet away harmlessly and doesn’t turn into goo, turn into sand, or explode. When she lands and appears there we’re all quiet. To our relief nothing bad happens.

“See? You really can do this if you do it right. The way you two were doing it you’d have blown yourselves up before you would have ended up with a real useful spell…well except for torture that is,” the dwarven mage wheezed out a nasty laugh like the sadist he is.

Well I guess I can’t be too judgmental of him since he did help us out.

“Wow, it worked Shun!” Asakura said in awe.

My heart skipped a beat. “But she’s a living person!” I protested.

The dwarven mage waves it off, “no worries. I haven’t failed a summon spell in years! Nothing would have happened.”

We’re staring at him in shock.

“Are you sure? That spell never fails?” Asakura asked skeptically.

“Of course when you first practice this spell, it will fail beyond really short distances until you’ve practiced it several hundred times. I recommend you don’t use it for more than about thirty feet the first few times. Also you are getting a simple familiar summon version first and then you can figure that out first and then learn how to tweak it,” he offered in sagely wisdom.

“Crap. That’s a bit shorter than the distance I need it for,” I exclaimed.

“Yeah but the distance will work better as you get more proficient with it,” he said quickly.

“But what about naming the person or think you are trying to summon?” I asked.

The mage thought about it. “I haven’t done it that way in a long time. My advice is to not push boundaries too much with this spell till you are good at it. Don’t do anything crazy and only very short distances till you can remember and feel this skill in your sleep.”

“Thanks again!” we said, when it was finally time for the dwarven mage sadist to leave.

He waves farewell to us smiling like an old grandpa, which is totally bizarre in a way.

So that means I can probably use it to get Sunghee out of the cage, but not for bringing Asakura into the dream state yet.

“You can tweak a spell?” Rina is shocked after he left.

“Sounds cool right?” I said.

“I suppose so,” she nodded seriously in awe.

“So we’re back to square one?” Asakura said.

“Well maybe not quite like that, but close. Wish we still had some goblins to experiment on,” I sighed.

To my surprise Asakura chimes in, “me too,” right after that. She has a forlorn look, since she’s worried I might try it out on her initially.

“You know we still don’t know how much the target being willing or unwilling to be moved affects things,” she said.

“That’s probably true,” I said scratching my head as we start walking back towards our tent.