The aftermath of the deluge left Nerith feeling hollowed out and utterly violated. As the sensation of the sen and bile began to settle in her throat, the reality of what had just occurred crashed down on her.
The experience wasn’t the graceful, spiritual connection the druids spoke of, but this was a conquest. She had been used, her body forced into a rhythm she hadn’t chosen, her dignity swallowed along with Rex’s seed.
A sob, sharp and jagged, tore from her chest. Then another.
The tears ca hot and fast, blurring her vision as she collapsed inward, her forehead nearly touching the dirt. She wasn’t just crying from the physical ache in her jaw or the sting in her throat, but she was crying because she felt broken, a vessel that had been forcibly filled and then discarded.
"It... it was too much..." she choked out, her voice trembling with a genuine, soul-deep misery. "He didn’t... he didn’t even ask... it was like being swallowed by a beast..."
Talyra imdiately knelt beside her. The playfulness was gone, replaced by a soft, maternal warmth.
She pulled Nerith’s shaking fra against her chest, stroking her hair with a gentle hand, oblivious to the ss of saliva and sen coating them both.
"Shhh, don’t cry. It’s alright," Talyra whispered, her voice a soothing balm against Nerith’s raw nerves. "Don’t fight the tears."
"It’s okay to feel overwheld."
"You’ve just experienced sothing most won spend their whole lives trying to find."
"It was intense because it was real. Everything is going to be alright, Nerith. I promise."
Nerith clung to Talyra, her sobs turning into quiet, rhythmic hiccups as she tried to find her center again, the scent of Talyra’s calm perfu helping to ground her amidst the lingering musk of Rex.
But the mont of solace was shattered.
The sll reached them before the sound did. Rex, who had been standing tall and satisfied, suddenly stiffened. His nostrils flared, his eyes losing their lustful haze and sharpening into a hunter’s focus.
He registered the acrid, sharp scent of burning canvas and treated wood, a scent that didn’t belong to the ancient, damp forest.
Talyra’s head snapped up, her senses catching the change in the air. "This sll..."
"That’s the carriages," she said, her voice losing its softness and gaining a sharp edge of alarm.
Nerith, still leaning against Talyra, wiped her eyes with the back of a trembling hand and looked toward the road. Through the trees, she saw it.
There are two thick, dark plus of gray smoke rising into the afternoon sky, marking the direction of their companions.
"Both carriages..." Rex muttered, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous growl.
He reached for his pants, zipping them up with a hurried, efficient motion that signaled the end of his leisure. The predator was back, and the ti for pleasure was over.
The three of them had been about forty ters into the tree line on the south side of the road, following a secondary druid survey path that Nerith had identified as worth checking for the sa root system variations she’d been tracking since morning.
Rex had suggested it in the casual and practical manner he typically used when he wanted things to happen without seeming to have orchestrated them.
He was already moving back toward the road.
Talyra had her bow out before they cleared the first line of growth, an arrow nocked and not yet drawn, which was the correct configuration for soone moving through variable terrain toward an unknown threat.
Nerith ca behind Rex with her staff in both hands and the amber leaves tight against her hair, the posture of soone who had decided to be ready without having decided what she was ready for.
’At least she’s locked in after I do so fucked-up things to her...’
’Good.’
The road resolved through the last stretch of undergrowth, and Rex assessed it in the ti it took to take two steps out of the trees.
Both carriages were burning. The carriages were not just smoldering or partially alight; they were fully engulfed in flas, the type of fire that had progressed beyond the point where it could be extinguished without a large amount of water applied imdiately and at significant cost.
The canvas covers had already burned away, leaving the wooden fras blackened and collapsing inward on both carriages. The absence of horses suggested that soone had cut them loose.
The area around the carriages showed signs of a quick but fierce battle: burn marks spreading eight to ten ters in different directions, deep scratches in the road showing heavy digging, and a mix of weapons and gear that had been dropped or thrown instead of neatly put away.
Seven bandits were down at the road’s edge. They were not the sa caliber as the groups from the morning.
Their gear was better, their formation marks in the disturbed soil showed sothing closer to actual tactical coordination, and two of them had working-residue burns on their hands that identified them as system users rather than ordinary fighters.
The surviving mbers of the expedition were grouped near the right shoulder of the road.
Apollo saw Rex first, which was significant, and the expression that crossed his face in the mont between recognition and relief reflected that of soone who had been calculating a negative outco and had just received new information that changed it.
He crossed the distance between them in about four strides.
"Thank god... you three are all right," he said, and it ca out as a statent rather than a question because he needed it to be a statent.
He looked at Nerith first, then Talyra, then Rex, with the fast, comprehensive scan of soone checking for injuries rather than just presence.
"We’re fine," Talyra said. "We saw the smoke and ca back."
"What the hell happened here?"
"Those bandits attack both carriages simultaneously," Elizabeth said, coming up behind Apollo.
She had a cut along her forearm that Aisella was currently bandaging with the focused efficiency of soone who was doing the task and also simultaneously running a secondary assessnt of the imdiate area.
"Coordinated fire-working on the canvas while the main group ca in from the north side of the road, and it seems like... they knew what they were doing." She looked at the burning fras with the expression of soone calculating the cost. "They were not trying to stop us."
"They were trying to strip our supplies and slow us down."
"Slow us down or redirect us," Iris said from sowhere to the left.
She had cleaned her blades and was sheathing the second one. "They didn’t push the engagent past the point where it would cost them."
"As soon as the carriages were past saving, they pulled back."
"The ones who could pull back," Alexander said.
He was standing near the line of downed bandits with his arms crossed, and he had the particular quality he had after engagents that had required him to stop managing his output, a kind of settled readiness that hadn’t fully stood down yet.
Rex looked at the burning carriages and allowed himself to look appropriately concerned, which required no particular effort because there was a genuine calculation running underneath it.
The carriage loss was not problematic for the mission. They were close enough to the canyon approach that supplies could be managed on foot, and the gear they needed for the descent had been distributed across both vehicles in a way that Elizabeth had insisted on precisely because field losses were always a possibility.
What the carriage loss did was change the dynamic of the group’s movent, compress the party into a closer formation, and eliminate the separation between the carriage groupings that had been one of the natural modulators of who spent ti near whom.
He looked at Nerith, who was looking at the fire.
The amber leaves were still flat from the run back, which ant she hadn’t shifted registers yet. Her hands on her staff were not quite relaxed, and she was standing slightly apart from Aisella and Talyra in the configuration of soone who had not yet decided where they wanted to be in the grouping.
Apollo put his hand briefly on Rex’s shoulder and said, in a lower register, "I’m glad you were with them."
"When I couldn’t see the three of you and the carriages were going up—" He stopped himself and replaced the rest of that sentence with a single decisive nod. "Good to have you back."
’He’s fucking worried about this, huh?’ Rex thought. ’What a fucking bum.’
Rex looked at him with an expression that was appropriate for the mont, appearing honest on the surface while concealing deeper feelings. "Don’t worry."
"Nothing happened to us," he said. "We were far enough in."
"Except you didn’t know that I was busy with Nerith, and Talyra helped so that she can be good at sex, hahaha!"
Apollo nodded once more and turned back to the group’s logistics discussion, joining Elizabeth in the inventory of what had been salvageable from the carriages before the fire reached the storage compartnts.
"Alright then, let’s move."
Mireya had gotten three of the supply cases out, plus both of Elizabeth’s grimoire cases, which she had apparently prioritized above everything else with the instinct of soone who understood exactly what Elizabeth’s grimoires represented in a combat situation.
Iris had recovered the rope equipnt and the technical descent gear from the second carriage’s exterior compartnt before the fra went.
The food supplies were mostly gone. The tent canvas was gone. The spare weapons were partially salvageable.
’Fucking great... now we have to walk all the way towards the fucking cave.’
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