4 Class Skill points available.
[Bound to the Fallen] Class Skills available:
Triumvirate's Armory
→ Paradoxical Mending
Aspect Manifestation
I selected [Paradoxical Mending], confirmed the selection, then paused. The girls both waited with bated breath, although with my blurry vision they were little more than silhouettes in the fading light of the day. Behind them, the sky was purple with splotches of black. Only when I tried to see through their eyes did these patches of color become trees and hills and mountains far away. But they were strange.
"Well?" Vespera asked. "What are you waiting for?"
I kind of wanted to make them sweat a little just for the fun of it, but I was the one hurt, not them. Besides, Elyra didn't look quite in the right mood for that after the demon teased her earlier.
I activated the skill. Our mana pools emptied immediately. Then, all three of us were enveloped by two streams of magic that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
One was dark, the other was very bright. One churned and moved about like tar, bubbling with red streaks. The other was all angles and circles, thin lines and delicate radiance.
I was intimately familiar with both kinds, of course. They illuminated the darkness, but thankfully the workers had all left a while ago and we were alone.
The magic entered my wounds. It burned while at the same time feeling like my limbs were freezing over. I looked up, gritting my teeth, and saw that the light had left the girls to focus wholly on me.
"Unfair," I muttered. My body started to convulse, and I felt a delicate hand seek mine.
Then a second hand, with a firmer grip that betrayed her tension.
The pain was excruciating. It was hard to concentrate, feeling like—
The light vanished without a trace. All in all, I confirmed by linking with the girls that the whole process must have taken less than two seconds. Phantom memories of the pain remained in my mind, echoing and bouncing around my body, and they stayed for much longer. Even after several minutes, I still had the shakes.
"Zero out of ten," I said. "Hurts more now that it's done than when I was actually hurt."
I gingerly got up, testing my limbs. They all worked fine. More than fine, really. My eyes could focus again, and the first thing I sought to see were the faces of my girls. There were tears on both of them.
"It was just a healing," I said to ease the tension. "And it used all of our mana."
Elyra punched me. "Silly. Idiot. Dumb!" With each word, another punch. I let her work it out of her system.
Vespera too was a wreck of emotions. "You really are a bit dense sometimes, spacer boy. Do you have any idea how it hurt to see you in that state?"
She pulled me close and kissed me deeply.
"Don't do that again, or I'm going to beat your ass."
"She is right," Elyra said. She punched me again for good measure.
"Hey!" I cried out in defiance. "She threatens violence and you deliver it?"
"Shut up, dummy," she replied, wiping away her tears.
She pulled me away from Vespera and hugged me so tight she drove the air out of my lungs. Was she… stealing my stats to hug me tighter?
She kissed me, thrusting her tongue into my mouth with desperate, greedy need. She tasted every inch of me, almost scared that what she was seeing was a mirage and not the real me. When we broke apart, she was panting, barely able to restrain herself. Her eyes were glazed over, but they cleared for a moment before she dove in again with renewed gusto. Except this time, right in the middle of a fiercer and much hotter session of kissing, she bit me.
I tasted iron in my mouth. "My tongue?!"
"There," she said, smirking teasingly. "I marked you."
Vespera walked over. She only moved one finger, in the gesture of 'come here.'
"Ehm, there's no need for that," I said, looking at her sharp fangs. Elyra had drawn blood already, and I dreaded to think what she could do.
"No, no, she's right. We need to punish you for forgetting about the healing skill and for making us worry and—"
"Wait a minute," I said. "You also forgot about the skill."
Vespera made a face and looked at Elyra, putting a hand over her ear. "Did you hear something, little angel?"
"Nope," the girl in question replied. "Must have been the wind."
"Oh, the wind, huh? Then I'm delaying the next skills—"
"Now that you mention it, I must have blurted something out without really thinking about it," Vespera said. She amended her plans rather quickly, didn't she? "I was actually saying that it's a bit unfair that we punish you when we all share the blame. Yep. Totally."
I chuckled. "Silly."
"We are all silly," Elyra said, taking our hands. "But we have each other, do we not?"
"Alright, you win. Let's choose our next skill, shall we?"
Actually… I looked at them.
"I just got an idea. We have three skills left to choose, right? Let's do one each. You go first, Vespera. Elyra goes last because she was mean to me."
The angel glared at me. I gave her my most punchable face in response.
She was about to speak, but Vespera sealed the deal. "Great idea, I like it!"
Thus, I summoned the skill window and let it hover between us. We huddled together near it, as the night around us deepened.
"Before that," Elyra said, interrupting me. A [Navigational Ping] went off, consuming what little mana we had managed to regenerate between all three. "Okay, all clear."
3 Class Skill points available.
[Bound to the Fallen] Class Skills available:
Triumvirate's Armory
Anchor of the Mundane
Aspect Manifestation
I looked at the various choices. They were all nice, of course. However, perhaps because my big rebar stick had just been dissolved by a huge-ass slime, the [Triumvirate's Armory] called to me the most. Given that we had no descriptions for the skills, it wasn't like we really knew what we were getting into. Even the healing skill looked like it had some nuance to it that we were missing because of our limited testing.
Well, that or it was stupidly broken for a level 1 skill. Just like the other class skill, for that matter.
Anyway. I went ahead and chose [Triumvirate's Armory].
The moment I did, something seemed to click between us. Vespera clapped her hands, excited. "Test it, test it!"
And who was I to deny her request? Under both of their watchful gazes, I… felt another ping. Right, the first one had worn off and we were once again just alone in the dark of the forest, open to monsters jumping on us from behind and all that.
"Alright, let's see…"
The moment I activated the skill, I was presented with a choice. It wasn't a System window or anything like that. Just a feeling. I could choose between two items: Light-defense and darkness-offense.
I looked up. Elyra stared at me with cold, calculating eyes. If I didn't know any better, she looked like an uptight, frigid noblewoman or a stereotypical white knight. Except I knew better. I knew how vulnerable she was underneath her facade.
With a snap of my fingers, a massive shield of light appeared in my hand. It was made of feathers, coming together in the shape of a wing, but it was weightless and partially see-through. Each feather was made of the same stuff the angel's magic was made of, with geometrical patterns of lines and circles. It was when the feathers came together to form the whole wing, however, that the pattern truly became breathtaking.
"It is… gorgeous," I said. I walked over to Elyra to show it to her, and then to Vespera, and we all stared in awe at the marvelous thing. "It really feels like you."
Her smile, right in that moment, was more radiant than the sun and more breathtaking than any shield. Then the shield vanished, my mana completely depleted, but the smile on my face remained. I ran a hand through my angel's hair.
"You know it's all thanks to you, right?" I told her. Lifting her chin, I kissed her again, feeling her wet cheeks as she cried happy tears.
I pulled her close, and my hand snaked under her plastic raincoat and her clothes, finding the bare skin of her back. I gave her a little scritch, coming close to the base of her wings. I brushed against them on my way out, and she shivered in pleasure.
"Such a tease," Vespera purred. "Teasing her while denying me. Come on, enough flirting, show me what weapon or armor you get from me!"
I wanted to tease her some more, and I had just the right weapon to do that. "Sorry, little troublemaker, I just so happen to be out of mana."
She stared at me blankly. "Okay, now you've done it."
Without saying a word, she began stomping over to Calyx's tree, dragging me along. She did not stop until we were in our underground bedroom, at which point she immediately unsummoned her armor and pushed me onto the bed.
"Elyra, keep him still," she ordered. The angel complied despite my glares.
Shit. Perhaps I really just gone and done it.
---
CHAPTER 49.5 NSFW PREVIEW
Our room inside the tree didn't feel very spacious, but that was due to the massive bed that took up most of the free space. Even for a bed built to accommodate three people, it was huge, and we almost never used all of it. We literally slept on top of each other, with me in the middle and the girls on top of me in various states of limb-tangling.
Now wasn't much different, although we were definitely not going to sleep just yet.
After pushing me onto the bed, Vespera straddled me. She was naked, and didn't seem to care about the fact that I was not. She started to grind her crotch against my pants, where my stiffening dick was making a little tent within the tough fabric.
Her fluids never seemed to have any wind-up time, already flowing copiously from her pussy. They soaked me thoroughly in a matter of moments, drenching my pants with their sticky wetness. I felt the slightly cool sensation reach my cock, my legs and even my balls, which were starting to feel rather cramped in my pants.
She smirked, grabbing my hands and interlocking her fingers with mine. She rode me back and forth...
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