Chapter 11: Chapter 11: The Living Need, The Dead Provide

Jadis had to admit, she was a dirty girl.

“…Do I still call myself a girl?” She pondered, eyes turning to her half-erect dicks. She shook the thought off. She’d been calling herself by feminine pronouns for way too long to change now.

In any case, she was exceptionally filthy, and not just in a figurative sense. Having gone two full days now without any kind of bathing, she would have been a bit rank even if she hadn’t been rolling around in the dirt fighting for her life against multiple bone demons. The morning’s activities, as pleasurable as they were, had not helped matters.

Jadis used her hands to swipe at the sticky mess coating her, still impressed by the sheer quantity of seed she’d pumped out. She didn’t think she could honestly complain, since it was a definite turn-on for her, but the volume was causing her problems when it came to cleanup.

“Okay, first things first,” she said, licking her fingers clean, “I’m starving. I don’t know how much I drank from myself there, but I need some real food.”

“Then, I need a bath. Hygiene is important, especially with all these cuts—Oh!”

Jadis cut herself off, realizing that she still needed to check the status of her health pool. Since she’d gained the Knight’s Rest skill, she was hoping she’d healed more over this last night than the one before. Concentrating, she pulled up her menu.

Jadis grinned at the sight of her health pool. Compared to the last time she’d checked, it had gone up by a full twenty points.

“This Knight’s Rest skill is no joke! Three more nights of sleep and it’ll be like nothing ever happened!”

She laughed in open delight at the convenience of living in a magic and leveling based world. At the same time, she checked her dressed wounds, finding that many of the worse ones looked a week old rather than from the day before, and some of the minor scrapes and bruises had disappeared completely. Jadis ran a hand over her knee where she knew a bad scratch had been from her first encounter with a bone thief. The flesh there was completely healed, smooth and free of scars.

“Well, shit,” she gave an incredulous chuckle. “I wonder if I even can scar. If I can’t, is that because of magical healing, or is it because I’m not human?” She considered the possibilities idly, knowing she wasn’t going to get an answer until she found someone to ask.

Self-examinations completed, Jadis ate another two jars of preserves, both some kind of mild-tasting cucumber-like vegetable, except with purple flesh instead of green. As she finished the jars, she found her stomachs still growling for more, but held off. She had a little less than a dozen jars left with no guarantee of finding any more food in the village. Rationing seemed prudent.

Picking up her clubs and a couple of clay jars, Jadis opened the door to her hut carefully, peeking out and keeping watch for any sign of movement. Or anything even faintly resembling a bone.

Nothing but the overgrown clearing and the pine forest greeted her outside.

Cautiously, Jadis left the protection of what she was starting to think of as her home and headed for the small flow of water coming from the cliffside not too far away. Once she was there, she took turns with her bodies, stripping down completely and washing off the sweat, grime, and gunk that had built up over the past couple days. Dumping full jars of cold water over her head wasn’t exactly the hot shower she would have preferred, but it did the trick. What’s more, the chilly mountain water did a lot to bring her mind to full alertness.

“Woo! Shit, that’s better than coffee,” she said, leaving her clothes off while she dried as best she could in the open air.

“I’m thinking I should resume my search of the village for supplies,” she thought aloud, keeping her voice soft so it wouldn’t carry far in the quiet of the forest.

She nodded to herself, not seeing many other choices that made sense. “I could try foraging in the woods, but I don’t have a clue what to look for. Or I could try finding a road and following it away from this valley.”

“But who knows how long it would take to walk to anywhere with actual civilization? It could take weeks on foot for all I know.”

“Yeah, fair points. I’m sticking with the looting plan for now I guess,” Jadis said somewhat distractedly. She’d started looking at herself again, watching her tight muscles move under smooth skin, perfect breasts still slick with water and pert nipples taught from the cold.

“Fuck do I need to stop staring at my own self,” she laughed, forcing her eyes away before they drifted lower. She had to remind herself she was standing naked in a clearing, demons that wanted to steal her bones possibly nearby. She could ogle her assets another time.

Wait, that wasn’t right. She shouldn’t be ogling her own assets at all. She was not a narcissist. She dressed quickly, hiding the most distracting parts of her anatomy as best she could.

Jadis very carefully kept her eyes on the trees around her as she walked back to her hut with jars full of water, doing her best to keep the body she had walking behind from staring at her behind.

After she had put the jars away in the hut, Jadis started on the path she knew would take her to the village, thinking about the skeletal monsters that might be waiting for her, rather than any amoral impulses she might be suppressing. She doubted the three she’d killed so far were the totality of the demons roaming the village and valley. She’d yet to have seen a single squirrel, much less anything larger amongst the wildlife, and she assumed that was the product of the bone-stealing demons. And there were the former inhabitants of the village to think of. She doubted the three demons were enough to have wiped all of them out, along with an entire forest’s ecosystem of vertebrates.

There had to be more demons around. Or did there? The forest was, from her experience so far, empty. Maybe the demons had largely moved on, only a few stragglers staying behind. With how dilapidated and overgrown the village was, surely that meant whatever had happened to drive everyone away, or worse, had happened a some time ago. Potentially years ago. If there wasn’t anything with bones to steal, would the bone thieves hang around or would they head to more fertile hunting grounds?

Once again, Jadis felt a pang of frustration at her lack of knowledge. There was so much she didn’t know about her current situation. In the most general sense, she knew that D’s stepfather and his second cousin were fighting by proxy, sending a hero and a demon lord to battle it out on Oros periodically. Had D said how long between instances? She felt like it was in the range of centuries, but wasn’t sure.

Did D send her to Oros during a period of downtime, or when the hero and demon lord were already in heated battle? Were there demons rampaging across the land, killing everything and everyone, or were these three she’d beaten the remnants of a long-defeated army? Did the demons even act in armies?

The bone thieves she’d fought so far hadn’t come across as particularly intelligent to Jadis. They seemed smart enough to try and ambush her, but most any predator in nature had that level of cunning. None of them had been using weapons or wearing armor. Did they not know how, did they lack the resources, or was there something else she couldn’t account for preventing them from wielding a sword or donning a suit of armor?

Jadis had no answers.

Reaching the edge of the village proper, Jadis put her fruitless thoughts on hold and held still. No sound of clattering bones reached her ears. Moving slowly and carefully, she headed into the cleared area around the village, anticipating attack.

No attack came. If there were still skeletal monstrosities about, they were waiting within the buildings where she couldn’t see them.

Deciding to resume where she had left off the day before, Jadis headed to the building she had been about to check before spotting the big-armed bone demon. House by house, room by room, she searched for anything of value to her survival. All the while she kept one of her bodies on the lookout, eyes and ears on constant alert for signs of hostile attention.

For the first few stone buildings, her luck was much the same as had been for the other houses she’d checked before. Nothing of worth was left behind, just scraps of wood and molded cloth, sometimes a few rusty cooking utensils. The fourth structure she searched, however, held a grisly prize within.

In the basement, for this building had one, Jadis found the remains of a dead person.

There wasn’t much left of the man. Desiccated bits of flesh and hair were strewn across a corner of the stone-tiled floor, some kind of leather and metal armor scattered in a pile of twisted bits. There were no bones left at all, but a braided pile of dark brown hair still attached to dried skin told Jadis this had probably been a man at one point, with an impressively large beard.

“Definitely dwarves,” she whispered, nose wrinkled as she crouched over the remains. “Gotta be with that kind of advanced facial hair.”

Other than the corpse, Jadis spotted something of real value tossed to the ground nearby. A leather backpack, probably once belonging to the dead dwarf, was left untouched by demon hands.

Slipping the straps open, she searched the contents. Laying out what she found inside, she catalogued her recovered loot.

A rough spun shirt and a pair of patched leather pants. One steel canteen, free of rust. One length of rope, maybe forty or fifty feet long. A small leather pouch with a lot more of the silver coins she’d found before, in both sizes. A second pouch filled with a variety of simple jewelry, including rings, bracelets, and necklaces. A bag of something that had probably been food at one point but was little more than black mold. Four bronze candlesticks. One steel dagger a little larger than the one she already had, but with a less ornamental hilt. A tightly rolled up woolen blanket.

Jadis immediately threw away the sack of spoiled food, not wanting to even bother trying to recover the bag from that mess of decayed filth. The rest she put back inside the backpack and tossed it up the cellar stairs for her twin to hold onto.

Clearly, the dead dwarf had been looting the village, too. Though perhaps he had been looting in a more monetary focused sense than her, since he’d focused on coins and jewelry. She might have a use for the trinkets one day, but Jadis was most excited by the rope, dagger, and blanket. Those items seemed of far more practical value to her situation.

She wasn’t done searching the basement, though. If the looter had come to the village with the express purpose of searching for valuables, the man had no doubt come more prepared than with a simple dagger for protection.

There, hidden under an overturned shelf, Jadis found what she knew had to be somewhere in the basement; The dwarf’s weapon.

The dwarf had apparently been an axe man. The handaxe felt like a hatchet in Jadis’ hands, but it was made of solid steel and little rust marred its surface. The edge had a few chips in it but looked plenty sharp in her opinion. Giving it a few test swings, Jadis took the weapon with her happily, grateful to have expanded her arsenal.

“Thanks,” she said to the remains, “I hope you’ve gone off to whatever afterlife you were hoping for.”

As she came out of the cellar, Jadis spotted the sheen of metal partially hidden in the weeds a few feet away from the stone hut. Checking the spot, she found a partially rusted crossbow. The wood was rotting and the string was gone, so she left it where it was.

“Axe and crossbow, huh?” She mused as she gathered up her looted pack. “Guess those weren’t super effective against the bone thieves.”

Jadis continued her search of the village, finding more useful items here and there, but no more dead adventurers or whatever the dwarf had been. By midday, aside from what she’d looted from the backpack, she’d found two more usable blankets, a fur skin rug that had come from something large enough to be a bear, but with gray and black striped fur, a cast-iron frying pan that had avoided enough weather to not get unusably rusty, and a wooden box containing a sewing kit, complete with needles and thread.

The final score came from a building on the far southern edge of the village that had been surrounded by wooden racks and barrels. It didn’t take long for Jadis to figure out that this had been some kind of leatherworker’s shop.

The workshop had held dozens of animal skins and leather, much of it unusable due to exposure and rot. However, there was still quite a bit that wasn’t bad off at all, the leather on top protecting the stacks underneath. All in all, Jadis was able to salvage twelve good-sized cuts of leather and seven more cuts of less processed-looking hide.

Most of the tools she found didn’t look like they were useful or in good condition, so she mostly left them behind, but she did find a couple of wooden mallets that she could see possible uses for.

All in all, Jadis felt her excursion into the village had been a great success. Gathering everything she had found between the two of her, she headed back for her home base. She’d searched half the village and there were probably more buildings beyond the western side and into the woods, but what she had found so far was more than enough for her to carry. She still needed to keep a couple hands free for her clubs.

Jadis smiled a dual smile as she headed back to her little hut, already thinking up ways she could use the leather and hide to make some real clothes, maybe something that could actually serve as some kind of protection. As she walked and planned, she almost missed the slight movement of white at the corner of her home base.

Both bodies dropping low, Jadis hid behind a couple of pine trees as best she could, watching the edge of the hut.

As she watched, a skeletal abomination stalked into view, a gentle click of bone on bone the only sound audible. Jadis quietly lowered her salvaged supplies to the ground and readied her clubs. She had an uninvited guest to greet.

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