As they ran, Honoka’s sword burst into a bright and fertile light, compliments of a blessing from Banda. Other weapons either received a similar light or were engulfed into black flame from Quinn’s enchantments, the ability to enchant melee weapons and not bullets a primary reason why so many people used swords nowadays.

In no time, they entered the prison block proper and that is when things turned hairy. At least fifty human men and women were in the process of stumbling out of cells in various states of undress but most of them held a weapon of some kind.

“These are slavers and rapists!” Honoka yelled to her family, mostly to remind herself. “No holding back!” And putting words to action, Honoka allocated thirty Strength, ten of every other Attribute and a few other features while leaping twenty feet (6 m) into the air, bringing her sword down with a scream and a blinding flash. Bisecting a half-naked woman before she even brought up her own sword to defend as the black woman’s body finished filling with bulging and twitching muscles, Honoka’s shirt taut over her powerful torso and braless D-cup breasts, the stretchy straps of her various pieces of armor held and Honoka looked for her next target.

The girls roared their defiance and frustrations out and plunged into battle as the rest of the guards shook out of their dazed stupors and fought back. Miaka was the fastest to draw, leaping into the air and either diving or strafing with her shotgun at any of the ranged weapon holders she could find. Behind the owl woman, only taking a moment to finish her spell, Quinn used her Insect Forms Class Feature and grew massive insect wings that unfolded out of her back on either side of her rifle and two long scythe-like black appendages on her forearms, both bursting with blood and visceral fire through her skin. The otter/insect hybrid’s flight was faster and more precise than Miaka’s, her erratic patterns and infernal devastation leaving piles of meat that might be identified through dental records. Banda lost some of her Strength but the holstaur roared as she grew another four feet (122 cm) in height and mass, rushed forward in the hallway, her glowing shield held in front of her like a battering ram, veering and slamming each guard she met into a paste against the walls. Padmava, smaller and weaker now, held back and stood in front of the entrance, placing the shields her husband gave her before her armored core and activated a magical barrier that shimmered with potent electricity, opaque from the other side looking in.

As deadly as the wives were, Honoka proved the most potent while she surged from target to target. With her Strength, no armor or weapon stopped her blessed mithril sword. Her Dexterity meant no matter the speed and skill of her opponent, she remained faster. Her Agility allowed her to dodge past any strike aimed at her. Her Perception, Intelligence and Wisdom allowed her to predict counter strikes and find the most vulnerable victims. Her Charisma and Luck kept them off guard and gave her momentary lapses in their defenses. Her Health helped brush off blows that did get through and her Endurance kept her going. It was like a goddess of death descended on these poor fools and it was her grim cobalt eyes that caused the last dozen to try and break ranks and flee from all the carnage.

A few got away, exiting the opposite end from where the girls entered, and Honoka let them go as she fell to her knees in a puddle of someone’s blood.

“Sound off!” Honoka yelled, lurching to her feet and allocating back to save on MP, hissing when she no longer possessed the fortitude to push through the pain in her hip from a deep sword gash. All over her body, she was covered in the bruises, cuts and burns she was had been brushing off with allocated stats and they all screamed at her like a rowdy mob pouring into an opened Black Friday Sale store, her limp growing more pronounced as she walked towards the center. “Honoka, with lots of minor wounds and a bad leg gash, currently limping.”

“Padmava, uninjured. Barrier is less than thirty percent!” The naga coiled near the entryway and a dozen guards beat on her barrier with weapons and spells.

“Miaka here. They got a lucky shot in, left arm is broken and can’t fly!” The owl woman was on one of the upper levels but leaned over the railing while she held her arm close, scanning the hallway.

“Someone hacked me in the back with an ax, healed but hurting and low on MP.” Banda arched her back as she scrambled up from the floor, gingerly walked towards Honoka.

“…uninjured but…AAAHHH!!…this Class Feature hurts like a flamin’ horses’ patoot!” Quinn was also on the upper level. It appeared monumentally painful as her arms and hands reformed from the bones outward amid blood and smoke. “Also out uv MP!”

Looking to the side, Honoka found the cells weirdly labeled, the ABCD on each windowless steel door connoting whether it was bottom left, top left, top right and bottom right. She was in the nineties and quickly moved to 86D. Banging her pummel on the door, she yelled, “Aruna?!”

“[Yes? Help me, please! Is my mom there?]”

“Yeah, your moms are here! Stand away from the door!” Reaching at her side, Honoka found her Ruger missing and she almost cursed. Looking down at the sputtering blessing on her sword, she allocated a little extra strength and stabbed into the jam perpendicular to the lock. It took two stabs, but on the second, the door swung open. Huddled in a corner, covered in his own filth and looking like he’d been starved for days, only wearing a few rags that were once clothing, Aruna’s eyes widened in shock before filling with tears when Honoka limped into the room.

“I’m…I’m so sorry!” the young man cried, weakly crawling and accepting Honoka’s kneeling hug, bawling into the young woman’s shoulder. “I just…I just…”

“It is ok, let's get you out of here.” Honoka almost fell over with pain but Aruna was too weak to do anything at this point so she grit her jaw and held both of them up.

“Aruna?!” Padmava exclaimed from her post at the barrier, unable to move else the thing would fall. She still almost did, her tail flicking back and forth to hold her son.

“Mama!” Aruna cried. He stumbled the last few steps, falling and climbing onto her tail to embrace his mother, both crying loudly.

It would have been a touching moment, except reinforcements arrived.

“HONOKA!!”

No one could react when a band of better-equipped guards came from the far entrance, led by a hulking man in magical power armor who lowered something that looked like the mother of all bazookas and fired an energy blast of sickly-yellow light at the most obvious target, the woman standing in the center of the hallway, Honoka. These guards and their leader were under some kind of magical illusion that kept them silent and hidden, the spell breaking only a moment before the shot fired. By all laws of ambush, physics and magic, Honoka would die because no one could possibly prepare and respond quickly enough.

No one, except for Miaka.

The kikiyaon had kept watch and noticed a glimmer before the spell fell, ignored by everyone else. However, Miaka was an experienced delver and she knew what glamor looked like. Without thinking, all she pictured in her head was Honoka’s death and the owl woman couldn’t accept that. Tipping over the side of railing as she screamed a warning, she launched herself downward with her powerful legs, spreading her arms in any attempt to catch the shot.

*BOOOM!!*

Honoka was turning when the explosion hit Miaka and flung her body into Honoka’s, both women a collection of flailing limbs against Padmava’s tail, blood and smoke engulfing them.

Padmava glared over the head of her child and saw the armored figure. Her eyes saw nothing else, only the leader of the Master Blasters and the man most likely responsible for the death of her husband and possibly even now of her wife. Without wasting a breath of witty banter, she brought up the shield in one right hand and pointed it at the armored figured while she lowered her barrier and aimed the shield in one left at the second group, her lower arms holding onto her son protectively, thinking the activation for the enchantments in both shields to go off.

*KRACK-A-KOOM!!*

No light or power came from those shields: Arun Nair had been a geomancer, and his peculiar enchantments dealt in kinetic energy. All the stored power gained from every moment those shields moved, building up over the years until the power that rent through the air was the same amount as a tsunami flattening a city. It would take years for them to charge back up again, these shields were a pair of single-shot guns. As people were pulverized into nothing but red mist and a few bits of stray gear, as the walls and doors in both hallways bowed or were torn open and the opposite walls that eventually took the brunt of the displaced energy collapsed and caved in on themselves, this was Arun Nair’s parting gift to the group that killed him.

“…*cough*…Miaka?…Miaka!”

The castle creaked and rumbled, the alarm still clanging in the background. In that hall of cells, prisoners cried and wailed and pleaded for release. Wives attempted to regain their footing, but it was Honoka, holding a smoking ruin of a woman, that tried to think past all her pain to save a life.

“Banda, Miaka needs healing!” Honoka cried out and wouldn’t let go of the owl woman, showing her to Banda while the holstaur recovered and clopped across the hall. What she saw caused her to suck air through her teeth and pause with her hands out, hesitating to cast.

Miaka was missing half her body, her right arm, right leg, part of her abdomen. Other parts were just gone, including her right cheek, burned away in the blast. There was a large gaping hole where half a lung struggled to breathe and the only reason she wasn’t dead at this point was her Attributes and the fact most of the holes in her body cauterized from the heat. In this case, Status and the magic it brought to the world worked against the Japanese owl because even through all this damage, she was still awake and felt every contact of pain, her beak grit in a rictus of unfathomable agony.

“I can’t…” Banda said, unmoving as she looked between the mortally wounded woman and her wife. “Even if I gained all the mana in the world, I can’t heal this. I’m sorry.”

“No!” Honoka shouted, looking to Padmava. “Pad, give me the potions. We can still save her!”

Padmava saw as clearly as Banda, but she also understood the need to save a loved one no matter how futile. Silently, she reached into her bag and pulled out three yellow potions, all the family had left after healing Diane and Honoka earlier that day.

Honoka pulled the caps off with her teeth and - using her other hand to gently hold the flap of skin aside to the hole in Miaka’s face - dumped them down her throat. The owl woman coughed and shuddered, some of her skin sealing over, yet it wasn’t nearly enough to stop death from coming, only delay it.

“We have more incomin’,” Quinn announced, tossing back a precious mana potion and summoning a beetle that crawled up to the lock of a door and exploded, knocking it open with the controlled blast. “I’m not bein’ insensitive here, honestly. Unless we want ta all die, we need to scramble in here an’ come up with a plan.”

“I can give us a few minutes,” Padmava announced, waving her arms and forming another opaque barrier that domed in a hemisphere around the door Quinn went into. Boots were clearly heard stomping from all sides. They would probably be overwhelmed within the hour.

It took some doing, but Banda finally led Honoka holding Miaka into the cell, Aruna and Padmava staying outside to maintain the barrier. Once inside, Honoka took note of the fact the cell they gathered in was more extensive and able to fit everyone, barely. It was a filthy place, some straw in one corner and a couple empty and discarded plates and bowls on the floor.

Looking around, Banda closed the door behind her in consideration of the occupant and her situation.

Chained to the far wall, her body spread eagle and held tight against the bone-white of the room, was a naked cat centaur. Based on the spots, the correct Racial name was probably cheetaur, but Honoka wasn’t sure and didn’t know enough about cats and spots. It looked like the cheetaur didn’t spend all her time chained up to the wall and floor, just when the guards wanted their fun. The upper half of her body was a proportional and lovely young girl if that girl was over ten feet (3 m) tall, months of malnutrition and abuse and rape doing little to diminish the curves and hard muscles on her tan skin. From the way she was chained, it was impossible to understand the full picture, only able to see her back, but she possessed a long flowing mane - even after being here for months, her hair looked gorgeous - to the middle of her shoulders, colored in the same blacks and yellows as her fur. Poking out of the top of her head were two round cat ears, both drooping in long defeat.

The rest of her upper body appeared human. Starting where the pelvis would end in a human, the cat body began. If her lower half was an actual cheetah, it would have been monstrous in size. The top of her furry back was around five feet (152 cm) and went back about seven feet (213 cm), ending in a long tail. Each of the four legs were chained to the floor, the paws twelve inches (31 cm) wide each and the legs at their thickest each around double the width of a bodybuilder’s thigh. Plain to see, because it was prominently displayed, was the stool set up behind the girl and the dribble of weak cum dripping down a condom left inside.

“Its ok, Dolls, I’m here.” Quinn reached up and took out the offending rubber, burning it to ash as she wept bitter tears, looking at the chains that shown silvery mithril with an unbearable defeat. “Everythin’s goin’ to be alright, alright?” The otter girl pleaded with her eyes, though, because she couldn’t see a way out of this.

As the barrier got pounded outside, Honoka was beside herself with guilt. She was just an out of work architect, what did she know about raiding castles and saving people? Now, almost everyone she’d ever loved was going to die with her because she had the hubris to think she was some kind of superhero and it ate into her soul.

“…hey…don’t cry…”

Looking down, Honoka realized she wept as her vision changed into a red and black blur. “I failed you all. I’m a failure, I’ve always been a failure.” Honoka choked up at the end, unable to keep talking past the lump in her throat.

“…its not so bad…hardly hurts…*cough*…” Miaka’s coughing wracked through her entire body, causing her to shake in pain before she got it under control, her jaw working oddly through the hole in her face to wet her dry throat. “…do you know I love you?”

Honoka cried harder, nodding her head. “I know.”

“…too bad…gonna miss out…on wild monkey sex…hehe…”

The thought that entered Honoka’s mind hit like a lightning strike. Dashing her eyes with one hand, she looked around the room and gleaned a better understanding of the situation. She would cry later. “Pad, how long can you hold that?”

The banging from outside the cell was loud but not yet deafening. “Twelve minutes. Do we have a plan?”

“Its more what you’d call guidelines than an actual plan, but it might work. Banda, I need you to hold Miaka while I prepare everything.”

Banda did so, gingerly taking the dying woman out of Honoka’s lap and holding her like a child. Honoka shuffled up and bent over the kikiyaon’s face, her cobalt eyes blazing with desperation. “Miaka, do you want to live?”

“…I…yes…” The owl woman had trouble breathing, but she was still lucid past the pain.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes…” this reply was stronger, the intensity giving Honoka a bit of courage.

“Then hang on, we are burning down this frozen banana stand.” Walking over to Quinn and Dolly, hardly noticing the stabbing pain in her thigh from her own wounds, Honoka pressed against the wall to look up at the sobbing woman. Dolly’s face was long, but in the way a tall woman’s face was long, those angular features giving a maturity to the teenager’s visage. It was currently dirty and scratched from being against a wall for so long but her eyes shone golden past the tears as she looked down at the black afro-asian standing next to her best friend. “Dolly, I’m sorry we couldn’t meet under better circumstances, but do you want to get out of here?”

The cheetaur seemed broken, beaten and without any hope; however, when she looked between her friend and possible savior, she nodded slightly.

“You are chained up with mithril. We have no way of breaking those. We could cut off all your hands and feet but we don’t possess enough healing to keep you alive. If you want to escape, I need to use my Class and collect you. It is a permanent thing, you’ll always be connected to me somehow, but if we get out of this alive, I promise you, if it’s what you want, I will never use my Class on you for as long as you live. Talk it over with Quinn, she’s one of my wives. I need to...prepare something, but you need to make a choice.”

Honoka picked up one of the bowls and walked over to a corner, setting the bowl on the ground. Pulling up her skirt and unsheathing the Beast from the confines of the jockstrap, Honoka didn’t waste any time in vigorously jacking off as quickly as possible.

“Why no, Yesterday Honoka, I didn’t know I’d find myself in a dirty cell jacking off into a bowl to save the day.”

“Really, Today Honoka? I thought you’d figure out by now you solve all your problems with your dick.”

“That’s silly, Yesterday Honoka. I don’t solve all my problems with ejaculate.”

“Where have you been, Today Honoka? In the last two weeks, all you’ve done is screw your problems away. Need that lightbulb changed? Cum. Late filing your taxes? Cum. Find a way to get out of a death trap? Cum.”

Despite - or maybe because - of the absurdity of the conversation Honoka acted out with herself and the ridiculous reality where the actual, real-life answer was fill a bowl with jizz, everyone in the room began to laugh. Even Dolly, tortured and raped as she had been, chuffed a few giggles at the situation. This laughter, the happiness of being around family no matter how dire it was outside, brought Honoka a sense of peace and it was enough to tip her over the edge. Maybe, in some way, her powers were controlled by her desires and not something arbitrary, because the amount she splurted was a flashback to her previous life, only around half a gallon (1.9 L) of semen filling the bowl and splattering around the walls and floor, white goop oozing and looking rather pitiful to the usual kiddie pool amount she averaged lately.

Never mind, worry later. Honoka tucked herself back up, grabbing the full bowl and going over to Miaka. Dipping her finger in and scooping up a small dollop, Honoka bent down over the owl woman, Banda using her thick fingers to gently open the beak for the barely conscious woman.

“Say ah, Goldilocks, the porridge is just right.” Honoka put her finger in, holding her breath until she cheered at the blue box letting her know that Miaka was collected. Without wasting a second, the Ymirian found the right allocation menu open and immediately she put Eve’s regeneration to work with twenty-five free points of Health on top of that.

Miaka’s reaction was immediate, her whole body trembling. Even as the women watched, flesh slowly formed and closed around the wounds. The owl woman was hours away from being stable, but her injuries might no longer be fatal and Honoka slumped when she realized her mad plan was working.

“Alright, still have things to do,” Honoka said, straightening and bringing the bowl to Quinn and Dolly. “I know this is gross and insensitive to what you’ve been through, but this is literally the least offensive or invasive way to get this done. What do you say, are you in or out?”

Dolly stared at the bowl as if it was filled with spiders, but after a couple of quick breaths, the girl tugged on her chains and hung her head. “If Quinn wasn’t here telling me otherwise, I’d say you were just as bad as the people raping me. I don’t like this but I don’t see an alternative. That said, thank you for saving me. I don’t know you but I know Quinn. Let’s do this before I lose my nerve.” The cheetaur’s voice was deep and rough, with not nearly as thick a Southern accent as Quinn.

The otter beastkin did the honors this time and dabbed only the tiniest sliver of spunk on the tip of her claw, flicking it along Dolly’s tongue. When the tongue got inside her mouth, another blue box appeared and they were in business.

“Quinn, I’m going to allocate Dolly out of those chains. I need you to burn my girlchowder with fire: no telling what these guildies will do with it if they find out what it is.” Honoka already pulled up the right menu to allocation. “Then strip because I wouldn’t feel right allocating myself; you get to become double furry in a second.”

Bless her heart, Quinn did precisely as ordered. The lovely beastkin used one hand to burn the bowl in the corner of slime with black brimstone while the other wiggled out of her shorts, belt and panties. Honoka didn’t waste any time and moved the allocation slider to 100%.

Trying to make sure nothing went wrong, Honoka focused on Dolly. It seemed like this crazy idea might work as the rear legs collapsed in on themselves and sucked into the large cat body, moving further and further in until the front paws shifted to half their size and formed into feet. There was almost a problem for a moment, the cheetaur still chained to the floor and hanging from her arms. Her shrinking body stretched, but then her hands shrunk enough to slip loose. With a tumble, a tan, stacked and toned teenager fell into the waiting arms of Honoka, who eased Dolly’s feet out of the rings and guided her onto the straw. She possessed brown hair and green eyes as a human, her features a bit rounded and soft. If Quinn in human form was the head cheerleader, this girl was a debutante who spent a lot of time doing free weights at the beach.

“Whoa, extra pair of legs, extra pair of legs!”

Quinn grew wide-eyed and scared, the hybrid mix making her appear like a giant version of herself but stretched out behind with the quadruped body, only with the body lower to the ground and thicker, stubby legs. Her black fur gained yellow spots and her thick tail grew twice as long. She couldn’t entirely control everything and was about to fall when Banda reached out a hand and steadied her balance. Quinn forgot about the size difference, her bikini bra torn off breasts that seemed about the same size as Banda’s, wobbling orbs hypnotic and looking juicy enough to eat.

“I’m human,” Dolly said on the straw, studying over herself in wonder. Glancing at the struggling Quinn, she giggled and got up to pet the soft black fur. “Maybe we can work something out…later.”

“Got it. Can you two stay comfortable for a moment?” Honoka reached into her belt to grab her only mana potion, chugging the bitter taste and worried when her stomach rebelled. “Pad, how we doing?”

“Um…they’ve stopped. They’re also demanding Honoka see their boss.”

This wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was for Padmava to acid through the ceiling and break into one of the cells above, then burrow sideways to make it back to the exit hallway or keep going up until they located a better position. Quinn would take the last mana potion in the fanny-pack and cover their tracks with Infernal flames and exploding bugs to distract the people here. It sounded like something that would only work in a bad heist movie, but considering all their other options, it wasn’t like Honoka had anything better. Now that Miaka was collected, might even be able to keep going until they hit the roof and then everyone would fly over the magma lake. But Honoka needed a loud and distracted force; an alert group of guards wasn’t going to let them escape.

Huddling down next to ottertaur Quinn, Banda, human Dolly and Miaka, Honoka attempted to sit but instead collapsed when her injured leg insisted she rest for a moment. Wincing, she tried to radiate confidence.

“New plan.”

********************

When the barrier dropped, Honoka found herself the center of attention. Between fifty and sixty human men and women pointed various forms of death at her, modern and magical. The guards they faced earlier were likely bottom feeders, lowest level possible doing grunt work, literally caught with their pants down. These were older and far more deadly looking. In front of them stood an aging Latino with silver in his hair and a gun and sword at his hip, his arms at parade rest.

“Honoka Jefferson?” he asked, his voice a bit gravely but with the kind of air that expected orders to be followed.

“Dick Face?” Honoka replied, nodding towards the older man and trying her best to imitate the confident tone.

He smiled slightly, looking at her and the closed door behind her. “Would you ask your friends to join us?”

“In a bit, there are some things to discuss first.” Hefting both shields she borrowed from Padmava, Honoka tipped them downward and placed her hands over them as if preparing to activate both. “I take it you have some living witnesses who saw what these puppies can do?”

A few of the guards flinched, one girl looked like she was about to fling the blue fireball in her hand at Honoka. With only a look, Dick Face got his people under control. “You can’t kill us all, they have a narrow attack vector.”

“Which is why I’m pointing them at the floor with an angle.”

Gotta give Dick Face credit, his eyebrows rose and he quickly held up a hand to signal his people to back up and lower their weapons. “You intend to hit the foundation, maybe punch a hole directly into the lake. As we are currently under the magma level, we’d be flooded. The molten metal contains zero silica in the mix, its flow rate is similar to water. No one here would survive, including you and your friends.”

“I don’t know if you’ve done your homework, but I’m not mentally stable. I’ve already survived multiple suicide attempts. Mutually assured destruction is just one step up from there.”

“What do you want?”

“To never known anything about you or have anyone I know or knew affected by your brand of evil, but I’m willing to negotiate. Ben Franklin once said that for any compromise to work, both sides must lose. I have the impression your boss wants me alive for some reason. Whatever. You can either let my family go, allow me to confirm they left unharmed and get me in the bargain, or we all die together, right here, right now.”

The standoff went silent, Dick Face contemplating the options. He must not relish the deal because he looked like he ate a lemon when he nodded and told his people to stand down.

“Lollipop!” Honoka said, not moving from her position, though her eyes twitched from the constant headache at this point. Behind her, the door opened and Banda came out holding Miaka, the Japanese owl looking better than twenty minutes ago but she still had a protracted road to recovery. The rest of the group followed, the long body of a naga the last, holding a weak Aruna in her arms.

Honoka kept one shield pointed in the same angle but shifted her weight to hand one over to Quinn. “These things are loud, any funny business and one going off means two holes flooding this place from opposite sides.”

“Understood.” Flicking his head, Señor Face got the attention of one of his people. “Sanders, take most of the men and guide them out, then radio me. Afterward, supplement the rest of the guard posts in case of a second attack.”

A guy with a gun, Sanders, saluted and gathered forty of the guards to encircle the girls - overkill, but these girls did just kill half their guild - leading Honoka’s family away. Those women looked back, hesitating, but they also trusted their wife. The last Honoka saw of them was before the rest of the soldiers closed ranks. Honoka hefted her shield as they marched in the opposite direction.

“Not going to take away my weapons?” Honoka asked, feeling silence might be a mistake. She needed information. She still limped, but a quick bandage from earlier helped her move at a slow but measured pace.

“Do you want me to?” Honoka shook her head. The man continued to talk as they walked. “The hard part is over, your family was never the objective. And once you see the Boss, you’ll realize how much your weapons won’t matter.”

That was disconcerting, Honoka bowing her head while they walked in silence for a bit. “Any reason he wants to see me, specifically?”

Dick Face studied Honoka oddly for a few seconds, then he let out a genuine chuckle. “I don’t believe it, you don’t know you’re a Herald. Haha!” They continued to walk as if this was a casual stroll. “I guess I won’t ruin it for the Boss, but yes, he wants to see you very much.”

More information, but also many more questions. Honoka couldn’t work out the information she needed and they went back to silence while she thought through her next attack. “This place is huge, any idea when we’ll arrive?”

“The throne room isn’t far. I wouldn’t rush this if I were you.”

At least twenty minutes of silence as they walked the bony structured halls. Any other day, Honoka would have marveled at the detail in the gothic style architecture, but she was a woman on a mission. She had a plan, sorta. The quiet eventually ended when a dozen skeletons shambled their direction. In the middle of them, a tall woman wearing robes and a golden mask imperially strode forward.

“Not this again,” Dick Face muttered almost too low for Honoka to catch.

“I will not be forced to do this thing you ask, Cortez,” the woman behind the mask said, her voice hollow and lifeless but filled with the tone of an aristocrat. “A slave I might be to your Contract, but even you cannot force me to murder helpless captives and harvest their bodies for your horde. I will not do it. You might as well kill me.”

“Finally growing a backbone, Baroness?” Dick said as he pulled out his gun and toyed with it, causing the woman to flinch. “Little late, considering how many people you’ve already killed.”

“Never once!” the woman screamed, her skeletons behind her rattling their teeth in agitation. “Never once have I killed without being attacked first!”

“Your hypocrisy is unending, but I don’t care. I’ll deal with you when I’m done here.” And he just walked forward, directly towards the woman and her skeletons. A force took hold of them all, parting them like water flowing around the keel of a boat, none of them touching a hair on the man’s head. They likewise moved away from the soldiers that surrounded Honoka and the group again marched on their way, leaving the masked woman to beat her fists against a wall.

A few hundred feet more and Honoka spoke up again, desperate to uncover information. “That is how you make the undead? You have someone under a Binding Contract?”

“The Lich is useful but irritating, though it looks like I’ll need to utilize a heavier hand to keep her in line. However, you shouldn’t be worrying about her; we’ve arrived.”

The aperture before the group loomed daunting, a great maw leading into the darkness. The first of many magnificently detailed statues, each over twenty feet (6 m) tall, showed various Races in poses of agony. As the light eventually got swallowed by the black, for all Honoka knew this chamber continued into Lovecraftian insanity forever.

Honoka decided sass was her only defense. “You need a guy with an organ over here. Every time someone sees the hallway, he’d hit a diminished chord and cackle madly.”

One of the guards chuckled, but Cortez silenced his man with a withering look. Apparently, the time for talking was over and Honoka felt a gun barrel in her back, urging her to move forward.