Trouble With Horns

39: Return and Ambush

“We! Have! Been! Online! For! Five! Fucking! Minutes!” I roared, punctuating each word with the distinctive crack of breaking bone.

The guy had been dead after the first or second blow, but I had a little anger to work out of my system. Dawn and I had spent the last few days lovingly basking in each other’s company, and we’d logged in expecting to have at least a little time to reorient ourselves.

That was not what we’d been greeted with.

“Tami!” Dawn called urgently, ducking under a blast of water magic. “This chick with the water spells needs to die, preferably before I do!”

The mage in question scoffed and spat, “Oh you’re definitely going to die before I do, bitch!”

Oh she did not just call my girlfriend a bitch. My dash was charging mere seconds later, and the mage chick’s eyes went wide. She scrambled to get a shield up before her, but she apparently hadn’t done enough research when she and her friends had decided to ambush us as we stepped from the inn.

I let loose with the thump of thunder, but rather than going forward like she’d expected, I went to her left, then at just the right moment I transferred my momentum sideways, effectively bypassing her shitty little shield. My lightning empowered knee caught her directly in the stomach, and as she flew backwards struggling for breath, I grabbed her ponytail and yanked down hard. Her face hit the same knee with a sickening crunch, but she’d gone limp just a moment before the impact.

That was the new measures against trauma kicking in. If a blow was certain to kill you, the game now took charge and cut you off before you had to experience the actual blow itself. My little sister was smart, as well as cute.

While I was thinking about May and her intelligence, Dawn raised a dismissive hand and casually bathed some poor bastard in flames, earning a scream that was quickly cut off while he was cooked inside his armour. This left just one more to deal with.

I stalked towards the healer of their group, who had already backed her way against the outer wall of a shop and was clutching at her staff like the little twig could save her.

The girl looked out of place among the rough group behind us, her robes were stereotypical white healers robes, with a little bit of gold here and there. Her staff was a straight piece of dark wood, ending in a little orb of pearl that was snared into place by a twist of roots. Her fluffy blond ponytail shook from side to side as her head and blue eyes swivelled, seeking a way out of this situation.

“What the fuck was this about?” I asked gesturing to her dead friends.

“I was just hired! I’m sorry! Please don’t hurt me!” she cried, her fingers white knuckled around her staff.

“Alright,” I sighed, my anger subsiding. If she wasn’t lying, I kinda felt a little bad for the girl already. “Let me rephrase, why were you hired?”

“Please don’t hurt me!” she cried again, tears beginning to build in her eyes.

“Playing with your food?” Dawn joked softly, coming up next to me. Her hand found the small of my back and her lips brushed my ear. “What are you going to do?”

I rolled my eyes and leaned over to kiss my girlfriend on the cheek. “My Dawn, you’re my food, if anyone is. As for her… well I’m going to talk to her, and then she gets to live.”

Chuckling, my girlfriend raised her hands in a be my guest gesture and stayed silent, giving the girl a suspicious glare like she was still one inch from cooking the terrified healer.

“Right, so anyway,” I said, turning back to the healer. “Why?”

“Why?” she squeaked, then yelped as an arc of lightning casually snapped between my arm and hip. Oh, I forgot I was basically a walking tesla coil in this lightning charged fallen angel lookalike form.

“Yeah, why did you and your buddies attack us?” I asked in exasperation, motioning yet again to her dead comrades.

“It was for money! Real money! Someone said they would pay real money on the forums if we just killed some players once. I didn’t even know them before this, and the quest was just to kill you once and stuff! I’m sorry!” the healer explained, beginning to tear up again. “I thought like, it’s just one kill and I need money so bad, and it’s just a game anyway… I didn’t think you’d be this… scary!”

As much as I wanted to get angry at her for taking a bounty on myself and Dawn, I didn’t have the heart. Money problems was something I was all too familiar with, especially recently.

“Fine, understandable,” I nodded, then on a whim I asked, “What’s your name?”

“My name? Uh… my game name is Civette, um… or Civ,” told us, looking a little confused through her tears now. “Are you just going to… let me go?”

The poor girl was scared out of her mind, I wonder what money problems out in the real world were causing her to go this far out of her comfort zone. I know I probably would have gone to some pretty crazy lengths for money to get shaped if my family hadn’t paid for it. Hell, apparently there was a Cora camgirl industry popping up. If I hadn’t met Dawn in here, that might have been fun, if I could have gotten over certain privacy hangups. This girl though, she didn’t seem like the type to do that kind of thing.

“Yeah, why not let you go Civette? It’s not like you’re particularly malicious or anything?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “So long as you leave us alone, you get to live. I have a soft spot for healers I guess.”

Healers, and people struggling for cash.

“Thank you!” she choked. “Your fists look… I really don’t want to die to them.”

I looked down at my huge, gore covered gauntlets and chuckled, “Yeah, they’re a little intimidating I guess.” Then I made a shooing motion. “Now get lost please.”

“Right! Thank you!” she gasped gratefully, sliding along the wall until she could safely rush off.

I watched her go for a few seconds before I turned back to Dawn with a wry expression. She was already skimming through a menu or something that I couldn’t see, a frown of concentration on her beautiful character’s face. It was the mannerisms and not the face that really caught me in that moment though, the way that despite having a different body here, she still had all the same expressions.

“What’s up?” I asked, gently bumping her shoulder with mine as I tried to get a read on what she was thinking through her glowing orange eyes.

“Looking for that forum post,” she murmured, then nodded in satisfaction. “Here we go. Looks like someone figured out where we’d be dropped off by the ship while we were logged out. Not that surprising really, given the number of streamers we spoke to during the evacuation of Gienia. They posted under their game name, not their real name annoyingly, and it appears to be a lore friendly name, Limruel Zulnara.”

“Any mention of why this person pulled out a real money hit on us? Is that even allowed?” I asked, a little incredulously.

“It’s allowed apparently, so long as… wow, so long as the company gets a cut,” she grumbled derisively. “Fucking scumbag corporations. My parents would probably masturbate to this shit. Anyway, no reason was given, they just wanted us dead.”

“Well they should have paid better, might have attracted people who could actually pull it off,” I said darkly, kicking the burnt corpse of the tank who Dawn had cooked. “We’re not even that high level and this lot were complete trash.”

“Speaking of, let’s loot them,” Dawn said, her grimace turning to an evil grin.

The abrupt turn into kleptomania had me laughing, “Fuck I love you.”

“Love you too Tami,” she smiled, reaching over to run a thumb over my cheek and earning an affectionate spark in return. “Ow,” she chuckled as my lightning got all possessive of her thumb.

She turned and shook her hand absently as we surveyed the bodies for loot. I walked over to the guy I’d begun merging with the wall of the inn earlier and opened up the loot menu to take a look. Some coins, a bunch of trash… oh, a ring of Endurance, don’t mind if I do! That could be useful for… later. Extra endurance made bed time that much more fun.

Moving to the mage, I listened as Dawn gave a considering hum of surprise from over at the body of the tank. “This dude has a necklace that boosts energy affinity. Interesting that he still died when I flamethrowered him, but I guess he tried to come prepared.”

“That will be good for you, energy affinity boosts your damage with fire and stuff right?” I asked, proud of myself for remembering the tidbits of game knowledge that she’d imparted on me between furious lovemaking sessions the past few days.

“Lightning is energy affinity too, so either of us could use it,” she nodded extracting the necklace from the menu rather than sifting through the charred corpse to retrieve it manually. She offered it to me with a questioning look.

I shook my head, “Nah, you keep it. I want to see your fire burning so hot that it’s like a laser made out of the sun’s plasma or something. Oh, could you make a spell like that? That would be sick!”

“I can look into it,” she remarked, giving me a lopsided smile of affection.

The rest of the players dropped money, which we took, and random garbage that we didn’t want, and it was during that time that the city guard showed up. The city guard were an interesting lot, technically military, unlike modern day times where they were civilians.

We were in Vallas, the capital of Jingan, which was in turn a duchy of the fractured Kingdom of Parcosia, not to be confused with the Duchy of Parcosia. The whole Kingdom hadn’t been unified in hundreds of years, since the last king had gone and gotten himself and his only heir killed on a dumb quest find a sword that would have solidified his rule. Queue a bloody war of succession that was now nothing more than periodic conflicts and trade squabbles.

“What happened here?” the guard lieutenant grumbled warily, eyeing us both up as he approached.

“No idea dude,” I replied honestly. “We walked out of the inn there and this lot jumped on us. They’re blessed by the way, so they should be respawning in the temple in a few hours.”

“Hmmm, so you say,” he nodded warily, before one of the other guards gasped and rushed forward, almost tripping over her boots to whisper in her commanding officer’s ear, “Sir, those two are from the Gienia evacuation. The Lightning and Fire elemental girls that everyone talks about!”

“You’re the blessed who was crazy enough to fire herself out of that cannon?” the lieutenant asked, his demeanour changing drastically as he expressed surprise.

“Oh yeah,” I laughed awkwardly, suddenly feeling a little weird that I was being recognised. “That was me.”

Now eager, he grinned, “I wish I could have seen it! The stories they’re telling over in the taverns are mighty wild! Are they true? Did you kill a whole battalion of them, or is that just a drunkard’s exaggeration?”

I shrugged in embarrassment. “I don’t really know, I didn’t count. Each time I was launched, I died before I could see the damage I did.”

“Creation’s tits! You blessed are something else,” the woman who’d recognised me breathed, her bright eyes flicking between Dawn and I.

“Well, I wouldn’t be able to arrest either of you even if I wanted to, so you two can be about your way, and we’ll make sure to catch this lot as they leave,” the officer said, before grimacing at the charred tank. “He might be a little hard to identify though… do try to leave the faces intact next time, if you want some justice.”

He was wrong about not being able to stop us, obviously. The guards were equipped with ways of maintaining the law even against us players, but it was a little immersion breaking so I assumed he wasn’t going to mention it.

Dawn gave a snort at his words and nodded, saying nothing, her flaming hair giving a few little pops for emphasis.

“Thanks man, I guess we’ll see you around,” I said, nodding to the officer.

“Indeed, good luck out there,” he said in return, shifting his attention to his subordinates and beginning to give orders.

Dawn and I moved off down the street, away from the carnage and gathering curious onlookers. We each let go of our more flashy combat forms and took up our normal ones again. I was still getting used to the lightning form to be honest, the way that my lightning sparked between my limbs, including my now large, feathered wings. The sparks seemed to almost have a mind of their own, responding to my emotions and desires, as they had when they tried to keep Dawn’s thumb caressing my cheek.

Dawn on the other hand still looked the same, or rather, she looked like Aurora. It was strange seeing her back in this form and knowing that it was her behind those gorgeous orange eyes. To think that all that time in Cora I’d been making out with and making love to my old best friend. I knew now that it was no coincidence, that May had partially orchestrated our meeting, but at the same time… wow.

It made me pretty fucking happy to know that we’d found each other in more ways than May had intended, despite not knowing who the other was. Who was to say if we’d have found each other out in the real world after my shaping, or if we’d remained as enemies. I liked to think that we’d have fallen for each other like this whatever the circumstances, because loving her and being with her just felt so damn fundamentally right. Like my place in the universe was always going to be next to this wonderful woman.

“I love you,” I blurted as my train of thought came to its conclusion.

My tone must have been particularly intense or something, because she blushed, looked down at her feet and chewed on her tongue for a moment. She was so cute the way she flipflopped between bashful maiden and assertive war goddess.

“I love you too,” she smiled sideways at me. “It’s nice to be back in the game if I’m honest too… nice to see our connection just… casually affirmed in here, despite the different bodies and stuff.”

“We fell in love in here,” I pointed out, feeling a warm glow in my chest as I looked back on it.

“I know, but still… it’s so incredible how easily we swap from the game to real life and back with so few hiccups,” she said with heartfelt conviction. “Plus, fuck it’s hot when you’re getting all angry and forceful in combat, did I ever tell you that?”

“I don’t remember,” I laughed, unequipping my gore covered gauntlets so I could reach out and take her hand. “Likewise though. I’m being a total fuckin’ sap again, but seeing you go all pyro on that dude back there has my heart all fluttery.”

“Yeah,” she said with a cute little chuckle. “Nothing more romantic than torching a dude right?”

“So hot,” I punned with a shit eating grin.

“Oh wow,” she said with a return grin and a roll of her eyes. “Alright, anyway, let’s stop being sappy for a little second and you can send Taylor a message.”

“Right, my sister. I wonder how her and Millie have gotten along. They said they were going to hang out together in here right?” I asked, bringing up the menu to message Taylor.

“Yeah they were,” Dawn nodded, then asked thoughtfully, “Did they seem like they had a little spark to you? Maybe it’s just my lesbian wishful thinking, but they were totally making eyes.”

I was very convinced that my sister had her sights set on Millie, and if she could woo her despite the smaller girl’s currently confused sexuality, I would be so happy. Taylor was a romantic through and through, my opposite in many respects, and the way she’d been hiding and avoiding romance had obviously been hurting her, even if she’d hidden it well.

It wasn’t just for Taylor though, it was for Millie’s sake too. The girl was so damn lonely it broke my heart, and having my incredibly caring and attentive twin as her girlfriend might be just the thing she needed. They would be so damn cute together too! The thought of Millie riding Taylor into battle like some sort of angry armoured steed came crashing into my head, causing an involuntary snort.

“Nah you’re not alone. Pretty sure Taylor was interested the moment she laid eyes on Millie in the background of a call with me. Millie is straight, as far as I know though. I say that loosely, because she got very interested in my abs a few times,” I said with a chuckle, dropping her hand to begin typing out a message.

Tami: Hey Taylor, Dawn and I have just logged in. We got ambushed by a bunch of players who were going to get paid real money for killing us. Apparently someone put out a bounty on Dawn and I? Fucking weird, anyway, where you at?

It took a while for the reply to come back as Dawn and I walked further into the center of the city.

LipsAndShades: Those fuckers! Who’s hurting my twin sister? Maybe we can hunt them down in return!! Anyway, Millie and I are almost back to Vallas. I’ll check in again in an hour when we get closer alright? Stay safe til then.

Tami: Alright sounds good, love you sis!

“Well, they say they’re still at least an hour away, so what do you want to do?” I asked Dawn.

“Don’t know. We could look around for gear at the market in the middle of the city I guess. Otherwise I’d say we just find some food and wait?” she shrugged.

“Alright, let’s have a look around,” I said, reaching for her hand again.

It was so hard to stop myself from just constantly touching her. The last few days hadn’t been enough in my opinion. I needed more… I’d probably always need more. Shit I loved her so much.