Chapter 155

“Hey Fox! I need you!” I yelled loudly while kicking the hobgoblin body out of the way. I need to check Ayumi’s vitals but she’s in panic mode and doesn’t know why she’s there. She barely recognized me but is also looking around afraid of boogeymen and other things coming out of the dark corners, not to mention trying to figure out where she is. I can’t touch her without the others helping me calm her down. They need to hear the story from others besides me.

“Just stay calm. Everything will be OK. I’m getting you out,” I said.

“What?! What is this place?!” she is panicking bad.

“Just hang in there. I’ll try to help you soon,” I said.

“Where am I? What’s going on?!” she cried out.

“You’re safe that’s what matters,” I said.

Somehow I barely made a dent in convincing her I wasn’t going to harm her, but it was also the fact that the poison sludge or whatever it was in her had made her weak too. She can’t really fight me, even if she were to try.

“I-I th-think I know you. It’s Shun right?” she asked in shock while looking around. She’s trying to figure out what was going on; but nor would she want to. She’s instead wanting help and comfort.

She’s disoriented and confused.

That will also make her heart rate and adrenaline race, which will spread the poison and other stuff more. That’s the last thing I need. It’s going to be that much harder to get her stable with her thrashing around, so I told her so.

“Who’s Fox? Shun? Are you going to get me out of here!” Ayumi pleaded desperately, looking around confused. She pounds at the door, since the holes in it aren’t big enough to get through. She’s trying to shake the door to her room that’s now damaged. But at the same time the strange poison black veins are racing across her skin and she’s turning gray.

Yeah we need to get in there and help her calm down.

I just hope it’s not an undead like poison. That would really suck.

I rush and finally get the door open and reach towards her. It took me a few seconds for the magic seal to recognize me as the portal dimension owner. She’s so sick she doesn’t even realize she’s not wearing clothes. And the spidery vein things and her sweating with the sick skin color make her look really awful right now. The sickness spreading through her makes her flesh look feeble and weak, invoking a pity response from the rest of us.

Is she really going to make it? It looks bleak.

“Oh I don’t feel good. Can you help me? Please, I don’t feel good. Something’s not right…,” she said. She would have fallen over, except I somehow caught her.

“Careful with her, any jarring even the slightest amount could aggravate her condition,” Asakura said.

“Easy, easy, let me help you put her down,” Fox said. She reaches out to grab her legs and hip while I’ve got her shoulders, neck, and head. Then Asakura started to help ease her down too.

“Easy…easy,” we all are working together to try to get her to where we can lay her down.

“Oh what’s…what’s going on? What is that? What was it?” Ayumi is near panic while standing there naked still trying to get out. She looked at Fox in panic.

“Everything’s fine,” I tried to say.

“Is she a monster?!” Ayumi is still wildly scared.

Fox flinched but didn’t say anything. Nobody likes to be called a monster.

“It’ll be OK, she doesn’t realize what she said. She won’t think that when we get to know her,” Asakura said to Fox.

Fox nodded.

“Just calm down. Don’t look at her, look at me. We’re going to help you so don’t move, you are hurt and I need to treat you,” I said.

“But…” Ayumi started to say while still feverish. She’s sort of caving in to some kind of weakness effect it seems.

I kept hold of her and pulled her closer and then tried to pat her on the back. “Calm down, Ayumi I need you to listen to me. I’m going to get you out of there, but you’re injured and I need to treat you to save your life.”

Ayumi is sort of unfocused in her eyes. She’s trying to listen to me and look at me but the poison is confusing her still and making her mind ever more foggy. “What? Where…” she collapsed into some mumbling and then she’s drooling.

“She’s too panicked. You better start without talking to her. My size will only increase her panic since to her I probably look like a big sexy monster,” Fox said quickly right next to me. It takes getting used to having an 8 ½ foot tall girl leaning over with her hands on her knees so her head and eyes can be on my level and be next to me.

Although Fox really does look sexy, that’s the last thing on my mind while trying to save Ayumi’s life.

Although, Ayumi isn’t taking it to well, she can also see the three swishing tails and …to be honest Fox’s claws look really long and murderously evil even though she isn’t like that. This probably could have been done better a different way but we were forced into it from needing to make every second count.

“My gosh, she’s a giant! Shun I’m scared!” Ayumi looked like she was hyperventilating.

“You’ll be fine don’t worry,” Asakura said.

“See, humans are scared of me huh?” Fox said in concerned mode.

“It doesn’t matter what others think, only what I think,” I said.

“Well eight and half feet tall and pretty…of course they are intimidated,” Asakura said.

Ayumi still is clutching at me tightly for cover. Hmm, I hadn’t thought having Fox…err Sylvie here instead of Asakura would help me get close to Ayumi. This seems to be working even though it was unintended.

“She’s not a threat, calm down. She’s here to help,” I said.

Ayumi is trying to scramble and get away. She’s all wild and uncontrollably led by her fear. It will be hard to get her calm. She then seemed to panic again; was that from adrenaline kicking in at the wrong time?

“If she runs, we don’t have time to save her. I’ll have to grab her Shun,” Fox said.

“Got it,” I said.

Stepping over me Fox is easily able to reach and grab her wrists while still she’s sort of behind me. Ayumi can’t run now. Ayumi wanted to bolt through the door trying to run for fear of Sylvie. Or at least she tried but then collapsed.

“Help! Help me! I don’t belong…here. I’m supposed to be at work…teaching kids trying to get a real position and ughhhhh,” her voice croaked while I turn her naked body over in my arms with Fox’s help. She’s semi-conscious and staring at me with some kind of feverish look.

“Shun…I don’t…understand…” she gasped, while breathing hard.

“Hurry Shun. Center the regeneration and heal spells over her vital organs first with the cure poison and cure disease stuff. You need to penetrate the organs specifically particular heart, lungs, head, liver, and in that order also. Concentrate on cardiovascular and circulatory first, head, and then branch out afterwards,” Fox coached.

At some point I think Ayumi lost it and passed out.

But by then I’d already been spamming the technique over and over into her, not wasting any time.

She’s right to coach me. This isn’t typical and is scary. It’s good to have a coach and a backseat driver for something like this, even if it’s just to cut down on hesitation time while I’m feeling nervous. Normally I’d know where the wound was centered if it was like a sword trauma. With this poison crap it’s going everywhere and that makes pinpointing the source harder.

The next few minutes are a blur.

I’m spamming stuff as quick as I’m able. Both…actually all types of my skills are necessary. The only one I didn’t use was the mana stitches since her flesh is already together but just infected. I’m also trying to sense with mana what’s going on with her body while doing the other things and it takes a lot of concentration.

The regeneration spell hits her and slows the growth of the poison vein like symptoms with the cure poison, but I don’t have a way to change the cure poison into regenerate so the only thing I can do is hope that by atom circulation of mana or whatever you call it that centering the cure poison inside the regeneration spell’s center will have a bleed through to help each other. I’m spamming cure disease one after another with regenerate and heal.

“Don’t be afraid to leach mana from me if you have to, Shun,” Fox said.

“Are you sure?”

“You have to. You’ll need every bit of juice,” she countered.

Heal!

Cure poison!

Regenerate!

Heal!

Cure poison!

Cure disease!

Regenerate!

I shake my head. Ugh…feeling weak from so much spell spam. I try to toughen it out.

Crap, I’m still losing the battle.

I lost track of how many times I had used the combination of skills on her.

I then pulled out several vials of medicine that we’d acquired from the dwarves and being in their city. Fox force fed them down her throat for a few minutes while Ayumi chokes on it. “Don’t fight it, it will save your life,” she ordered with her hand over her mouth. Sylvie…Fox, is trying to hold down Ayumi’s arms now that she’s semi awake again.

It takes a long time for us to get anywhere. We’re basically trying to hold Ayumi’s body together. The ash grey almost zombie like skin rash effect is gone but she’s still looking really sick with blood shot eyes.

Sylvie is still trying to push mana into my back somehow. It’s like a reverse mana leach somehow.

After another series of heal spam Fox is now changed position. She’s using some kind of mana sensing over the body. Despite not having heal skills, Fox is still better than I am at mana sensory skills like this. She goes over every part of the body trying to see what’s going on with the blood circulation and organs under the skin.

“Find anything? Talk to me please?” I asked while pleading nervously.

“Hmm. Hang on a sec,” she added.

She’s reluctant to answer while both of us keep working.

“I think it was some kind of orc shamans’s breeder ritual spell and some potions like that with similar effects. But he overdosed her. He put way too much stuff in here. It’s a good chance she’ll die from shitty goblin drugs and dosages not designed for a body this weight,” Fox grudgingly admitted while we worked.

“Eh?!!”

“Don’t worry they didn’t take her virginity yet. It’s all there. There will be plenty of time for you to tap that ass later on after we save her,” Fox patted her hip intimately.

I was sort of horrified at what she said. But the pheromones do weird things to peoples minds. You have to be forgiving sometimes.

“That’s the wrong thing to say,” I growled.

“Um, that’s the last thing he wants to think about right now,” Asakura said.

“You and I have to keep her down so she can’t get away while he’s treating her,” Fox reminded Asakura.

Wow…Fox talking in gangster mode?

She totally wants me to conquer her now even though it’s a bad time.

We keep working some more while Asakura is afraid to even talk for fear of messing things up. Everyone can feel this is a walk on egg shells type of situation where everything is on the line. There’s more medical and healing spell spam over the next half hour while I try to blank at how shitty I feel for losing mana quickly.

“You think she’ll live?” I asked after we’d worked further.

“I know we’ll try to help her live. I can’t guarantee anything yet,” Sylvie said.

Ayumi probably didn’t even get half of what we said. “Hey…that’shh mine,” Ayumi said, almost as if she was drunk.

“Is she drunk on them too? That concoction of whatever they gave her?” I asked while feeding threads of heal spells into her still.

Fox shrugged, “who knows. I don’t know what the base of the potion was, but it could have been infused with alcohol too. A lot of people probably get slipped stuff with alcohol as the base in many cultures actually. An orc shaman might think like that and it’s been done by them in the past. You just dumped a shit ton of potions into her too though yours didn’t have that stuff so I don’t know how it will stack over them, plus all the crap the orc boss gave her that’s not been able to effect till now because of her being in stasis.

“Orc bosshh…yeah, I remember that guyshh took ush and orcsh everywhere. We couldn’t get out,” Ayumi is pitiful, drunk and somewhat restrained by Fox. Then she starts crying. The trauma of that is still in her mind as something recent. Her chin falls forward against her chest while she flopped around.

Cure Disease!

Heal!

Heal!

Cure Disease!

Heal!

Cure Poison!

Heal!

Regenerate!

We keep working it out. I wipe sweat off my forehead. We keep trying to work things as hard as we can.

Fox even added some kind of weird Foxkin mana fed purification circle painted on the floor to it, with strange candles, but I don’t know if that will do much.

An hour later we’re very weary and sweaty from working. I feel like falling over and so sleepy I might pass out. But Asakura is helping me stay awake.

Ayumi is still alive. Barely, but she could still relapse at any second and her breathing is so faint that sometimes I’m not even sure if its there. None of us wants to wake her up anytime soon. Even if she recovers she’s probably going to be really weirded out for awhile and wonder how she got to this world.

We take turns making sure her breathing and pulse stay at an even rhythm.

Should I keep all the girls in the dream state pocket dimension from now on?

I didn’t realize I could be attacked and this was a tough battle. The dream state area is where I’m most vulnerable. And someone must have tipped off those little hobgoblin and goblin casters.

Heal!

Regenerate!

Cure poison!

“Is it working?” I asked.

“It’s …I don’t know. But you have to keep trying,” Fox said.

“It seems for now we have to watch and wait,” Asakura said sadly.

My arms are starting to ache from all of this effort.

The others are tired now also from also helping nurse her back to health.

Then an hour later they ache even more. I’m having to slow the spell work down and I’d also energy tapped Fox as much as I dared. Fox now looks sick because of my energy tapping her so much.

Finally we get Ayumi to sleep after she’d woke up again. She still looks pretty awful. This is one of the most hard hit heal cases I’ve seen so far. Her original appearance was so beautiful, even rivaling Asakura. But I wonder how much of the damage is permanent?

But at some point, during the night it finally got to where we had the feeling that Ayumi could possibly survive!

“What do you think? You know more about this and what to expect. I know nothing,” I stated simply.

Fox leans in close and looks her over carefully. “Yeah I was afraid of this.”

“You mentioned a breeder ritual thing they do?” I asked.

“The breeder ritual is a vile spell they use in conjunction with potion crafts of sick shit to corrupt people into becoming their breeding machines, often mixing in demon blood infusions. It enhances their body but changes them. You’ll have to use every skill you can to keep her human Shun. She’s been given transformation items also to boost the breeding skills they wanted in her. Just pray she doesn’t become an orc or goblin. I’d heard rumors that their shamans were working on a way to make female orcs and goblins so they weren’t trapped by the success of other species. If they had something like that then they could take over the world without needing other races’ females,” she said.

“Fuck.”

“If it comes to that, do you want me to …use …mercy?” Fox choked up.

Ugh. She’s just raised another concern.

Giving her ‘mercy’ sounds like the last thing I want right now.

I’ll have to think about it.

If it were me, I’d rather die than be an orc. But I also have to weigh out the possibility, of what if there’s other medical techniques that we don’t know yet that could help out. What if we can cure it?

“Don’t get too eager to give her ‘mercy’. Its not guaranteed she’ll become an orc or goblin yet,” Asakura reassured me.

“I wasn’t going to do that,” I stammered.

“She didn’t mean it. She’s just concerned,” Asakura said to me guessing that I was feeling queasy.

I need time to think about that. Emotionally and intellectually I’m not prepared and haven’t considered it before. I had forgotten that most women would rather die than become related to goblins …in any kind of form. But making the decision like that on someone is still not easy.

“You have to give me a chance to try to save her first,” I said.

“She wouldn’t want that if she becomes one of them or something icky or gross,” Fox argued back.

“I helped Akira survive becoming a goatman. Give me a chance,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound that impressive…” Fox said sounding depressed.

“I’ll admit it does sound pathetic. Goats aren’t exactly very elegant,” I countered.

“Well that’s true,” Asakura said finally after being silent for awhile.

“F-fine,” she said.

But did she even comprehend it? She’s still half out of it.

“We need to work harder on her and you need to treat her more aggressively,” Fox said.

She continues to check her pupil dilation, ears, and heart beat. Then she’s measuring the symptoms while I try to keep pumping the poison out of her.

“Wait…yeah she’s definitely changing race Shun and becoming some new type of creature but without your healing power she wouldn’t survive the changes. By this time tomorrow Ayumi won’t be human anymore. I’d give her some time sleeping for awhile too. It can’t be good to experience things this way,” she said.

I’m sure all of us are praying in our hearts, something along the lines of, ‘please don’t let her become an orc or goblin!’

“Well if it was a breeder concoction…does it always change her to something ugly and weird or other stuff? I mean I know you insinuated that, but couldn’t it vary? How are you certain?” I asked.

She shrugged, “It can vary, and be from among a list of races actually. Most likely she was going to be kept as the orc boss’s own harem. If that’s the case he’d want to preserve how exotic she is and some form of what she looks like, but not lose breeder benefits. So he probably wouldn’t turn her into an orc or goblin but I can’t be sure because their shamans wanted certain things and the head chiefs sometimes want something else which is why the world is probably still free. They clash with each other sometimes. They may have paid for the breeder potion to turn her into something with exaggerated sexual characteristics and oversized sexual organs or some other sexual benefits or with like a polymorph potion mixed in.”

“Eh?!”

“Well…think about it. If you are capturing beautiful human girls…and had your own harem and you were pathetic goblin or orc scum…that’s what he’d do if he had the power to do so. And he wouldn’t mind doing it even if the transformation killed a few of them, as long as he got one or two out of it. So whatever sick fantasy he was trying to make, he just did with her and that’s what she’ll turn into,” she said.

“I just hope he didn’t picture like something like a tentacle beast or worse…,” I moaned.

...

Later Fox briefly went over my skill changes from reading the blue screen to me. But the problem is she’s so depressed we didn’t really talk much about it.

Increases in skills;

Runic Mana Shielding +41%; can be applied by touch to team target, self, or any target within 21 feet of caster; Duration of up to 24 hours;

Resistance to elements and magic, +49% bonus absorption rate above base; target must be touched to apply buff or within 6 feet. (Cast range increase +1, + increase to raw efficiency);

…

Later also, we found out there was actually a third goblin caster, this one with green skin. He’d somehow cloaked or stealthed himself and the first thing he saw was Doppel-chan and had been captivated by her beauty. He’d gotten too close to her cage thinking he could capture, kidnap, and take her away and she’d snapped his neck and hung his crushed head and neck through the bars of the cage within a split second. But because it had happened so fast we didn’t see it until we’d done a thorough inspection and she’d intended it that way.

Yeah, it’s still not the right time for Doppel-chan to be let out. She’s too dangerous and too powerful in ways that I can’t even comprehend yet. I should have been happy that she’d helped out except if we’d gotten that close to the cage without some kind of stun then that would have been us. It also made more sense for them to have a team of three casters, rather than a solo or duo group. We’re lucky they didn’t have more firepower.

I had to use a series of stun ray and telekinesis combos to take his belongings away from her to prevent her from using them to attack us later or stage and escape.

All three casters would have done more damage if they’d attacked with unity instead of going off every man for himself. The first guy believed he was tanking and diversion for the other two. But I don’t know if they also were supposed to sneak behind us to either attack us from behind or using that cloaking ability steal Ayumi and Haruka while he was busy.

Either probably had been their original plan but they’d gotten compromised in judgment.

Yuck…

There wasn’t much mana left. We did manage to increase the tomato seedlings by two to practice the alter reality power which is still so small and weak as to resemble the small seedlings that I’ve created. Then two others were grown a bit bigger after turning them into coconut tree seedlings.

The experiment won’t do much, but it may help understand how we can change and alter reality in the dream state. Plus, also the idea of growing a bit of food can never hurt anyone.