The New World
Copyright© 2024 by Dark Apostle
Chapter 43: Ari’s
Fan Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 43: Ari’s - The story follows James Smith, a man who dies and finds himself in a surreal afterlife courtroom, where his life is judged as "zero sum"—neither good nor evil, just utterly average. Dissatisfied with being consigned to eternal mediocrity, he manipulates the cosmic bureaucracy into granting him a second chance in a new world, where he is reincarnated as a child with his memories intact and perks... - edited by my lovely Steven.
Caution: This Fan Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Ma/ft Mult Coercion NonConsensual Reluctant Slavery Lesbian BiSexual Heterosexual Fan Fiction Farming High Fantasy Rags To Riches Restart Alternate History DoOver Extra Sensory Perception Body Swap Furry Magic Incest Mother Sister Politics Royalty Violence
“Sunlight streamed through the window in long amber bars, and somewhere outside the cockerel announced the morning with his usual self-important shriek. Jan heard it distantly, the way a woman hears things through the pleasant fog of a body run completely to ground.
James was already shifting beside her.
She didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t need to. She could feel him moving, the mattress adjusting to his weight as he sat up, apparently ready to face the gods-damned day—and where he found the energy after what he’d done to her cunt the night before, she genuinely did not know. She ached in places she’d forgotten could ache. The insides of her thighs throbbed with a deep, specific heat, bruised purple from his grip and darker still where his teeth had been, those crescents of sensation that had blurred the line between sharp and sweet until she couldn’t tell them apart. He’d bitten her everywhere—her breasts marked up thoroughly, her hips, the soft curve of her belly, the tender inner flesh of her thighs where the skin was thinnest. He’d gone down on her like he had a grudge to settle and used his teeth there too, against her cunt’s most delicate folds, and she’d arched clean off the mattress. And then that one bite—deep into the meat of her inner thigh, high up where she was softest—that had broken skin, and the scream she’d let out had not been the practiced kind. It had been wrung from somewhere fundamental, involuntary and total, the sound of a woman unmade.
She’d been feeling overlooked lately. Watching Alice and Freya—her own daughters, her own blood, both of them golden-haired and effortlessly young—absorb James like he was made for them. Especially Freya. Jan had started to feel like a woman fading at the edges of her own life. But lying here now in the wreckage of the sheets, body mapped in bruises and bite marks and the bone-deep satisfaction of hours of relentless, pile-driving fucking, the answer seemed rather obvious: he simply hadn’t had the reserves for three blonde women at once. The magic training had fixed that. She was the evidence, written in purple and red from her tits to her thighs.
Her lips curved. One thigh twitched faintly against the linen.
James pressed a kiss to her temple, warm and unhurried, before he rose.
She smiled without opening her eyes and let him go.
The main room was quiet in the early morning, golden light slanting through the shuttered windows in lazy bars. Christine sat at the long table with a cup of something hot, a ledger open before her. She looked up when James descended the stairs, smiled, and said nothing about the hour.
He settled into the chair across from her, running a hand through his still-damp hair.
“Things have been so hectic that I have lost touch. Thank you for taking charge of the tourney. Everyone says our part was a big success. Did Jan tell you how happy Mallow was?”
“Yes, she made sure to tell me.”
“Have we make any money?”
Christine set down her cup with the faintest suggestion of a smile. “James, we all made coins hand over fist. The contestants spent coins like they were drunken sailors. I’ve made sure that the farms and town merchants who helped us shared in the bounty. They were all appreciative. Many of the farms want to continue supplying us, only directly instead of going through Garrick.”
That was a surprise. “Do we need extra suppliers?”
“Jacky thought that we should have each farm specialize in one unique item. Things like honey, squashes, tree nuts, and such. If you agree, I will identify the items for each farm and secure their agreement.”
James turned it over in his mind—the logic of it, the supply chains, the margins. Back on Earth he’d have called it vertical integration. Here it was just good sense. “In principle, I agree. But we don’t want to hurt Garrick and his family.”
Christine nodded, closing the ledger. The shift in her posture was subtle but unmistakable—the businesswoman setting down her pen, the mother picking it back up. “What are your plans, James? Kael is gone, and you no longer have a trainer.”
“Mathin is training me on healing spells. I intend to keep practicing the things that Kael taught, plus try the spells he left. And I need to get back to my physical training. I do not know how much time I will have for the tavern in the foreseeable future.”
She studied him for a long moment. He recognized that look—she’d worn it every time he’d walked through a door she hadn’t been sure he’d come back through. “I can tell your mind is made up. How can we help?”
“You, Jacky, and Jan need to take over the running of the tavern. If you need anything, tell me immediately. I doubt you will have any problems with the town’s authorities. Mallow and I have an agreement.”
“For how long?”
“Mom, I don’t know. Ask me in a month.” He pushed back his chair, already reaching for his pack. “Now I have to meet Mathin. I found out yesterday that I own Ari the Bold’s house. So Mathin and I are going to clean it out and then sell it to the Glassblowers Guild’s headman.”
Christine blinked. Then she laughed, a short sound caught somewhere between exasperation and fondness. “Every time I turn around, something is going on with you. Shouldn’t you slow down?”
“I wish I could. But there is so much to learn. I will see you tomorrow.”
Ari the Bold’s house sat on a narrow lane near the craftsman’s quarter, its façade unremarkable—deliberately so, James suspected, the way a man who dealt in dangerous magic learned to keep his home looking like nothing worth investigating. The door was solid oak banded in iron, and it stared back at them like it was keeping its own counsel.
Mathin arrived as James was studying the threshold. The older man planted himself in front of the door and went utterly still, the particular quality of stillness that James had come to recognize as active concentration—magic moving behind calm eyes.
“When I left, I just closed the door. Alice, Freya, and I were still recovering; traps were not even a consideration.”
Mathin didn’t answer immediately. He studied the door for several long minutes while James let his own awareness drift outward the way Kael had drilled into him—feeling for the faint shimmer that active enchantments left on the air, the subtle wrongness of compressed magical potential waiting for a trigger. Around them, the men on the street moved on without acknowledging them. Carters steered their loads wide. A woman hanging laundry from an upper window found something urgently fascinating about the opposite rooftop. Were they afraid of us? James filed the thought away.
“I cannot detect anything,” Mathin said at last. “Since you came out of the door, it should be possible to enter successfully.”
James caught his arm before he could reach for the handle. “Wait—what are you looking for? I need to know this.”
Mathin paused, then turned. There was no impatience in his expression, only the measured attention of a man who understood that knowledge passed carelessly was knowledge wasted.
“James, first look for active magic. Then look for concentrations of magical energy, which may power the spell released by the trap. If you cannot detect any, then look for non-magical traps. Those usually have pressure plates or ropes that act as a trigger. I have looked for all of these and cannot detect any. Thus, it is safe to enter. Are you ready?”
“Yes, but I will go first.”
He brought his shield up—the familiar weight of layered mana settling across him like a second skin—and turned the iron handle. The door swung inward in silence, which was somehow worse than a creak.
Ari the Bold lay where they’d left him, sprawled across the floor of the main room. The pool of blood that had spread beneath him in those last moments had long since thickened to something black and tarry, its edges cracked and curling. The flies had found him. They rose in a brief, irritable cloud as James stepped over the threshold, and the smell arrived a half-second behind them—the deep, sweet rot of meat.
Mathin stepped in behind him, his expression unmoved by the sight, and raised one hand in a short, economical gesture. A word of power left his lips at barely a murmur.
Every fly dropped. Not scattered—dropped, straight down, dusting the floor around the body in a fine dark ring. The smell cut off, leaving the air flat and neutral.
“This is a useful spell on a battlefield,” Mathin said, already scanning the walls. “I will show you later how to cast it.”
“Thank you. I can see it would be helpful for the area where we butcher the meat for The Fenrir,” James said.
The smell was gone, but Ari’s body remained, a sunken, darkening thing on the flagstones. James had been around death long enough that the sight of it registered as information rather than horror—something learned early, in harder circumstances than this, and calcified into habit. He noted the body the way he noted the cracked plaster on the south wall: a problem to be categorized and dealt with in its turn.
“What a mess. It has been over a month since the fight, and no one has entered.”
“Look at Ari. What should we do with the body?” James asked.
“Let the new owner handle it. Let us make sure the house is trap and treasure-free. Now, do not move. Scan the room for power flows or concentrations. Since this is the house Ari lived in and had your women as spell-controlled slaves, there should not be any trip wire traps.”
James activated Observe and began methodically working the south wall—stone by stone, corner to corner, letting his awareness feel along the mortar lines for anything lurking beneath the surface. Nothing. He pivoted to the western wall and repeated the process, the silence between him and Mathin stretching tight as a bowstring. The older man stood perfectly still, watching without intervening, the particular patience of a teacher who knew better than to interrupt a student mid-work. After many tense minutes, James let his focus settle and exhaled. “I do not see anything.”
“Are you sure?” Mathin asked.
“Yes.”
“When you scanned, you never raised your eyes to the ceiling. You spent your effort on the walls, skipping the floor and ceiling. Now examine the ceiling.”
James felt the specific embarrassment of a mistake that was obvious in retrospect. He tilted his head back and ran Observe across the ceiling in the same careful grid—and found them immediately. Four small hotspots, one embedded into each corner where the ceiling met the wall, dim but deliberate, compressed potential sitting patiently as a coiled spring.
“You are right. I did miss those.”
“This is age and experience. These points need to be deactivated. How would you go about doing that?”
James turned it over. “Throw a lance into the spot? Or grab the spot from its hiding hole.”
“Those might work, but there are safer ways. Try tapping the dedicated storage device and draining its magic.”
“I never thought about that. Let me try.”
“NO! Stop.” Mathin’s voice came out sharp and sudden enough to jerk James half around.
Startled, James turned to him. “What is wrong?”
Mathin’s expression had shed its classroom patience entirely. “A good trap often has backup protection. The proper approach is to englobe the hotspot in a shield and then drain it. If there is tamper protection, then the shield will prevent the hotspot from injuring someone.”
James absorbed that, filed it alongside everything else Kael had drilled into him about the gap between knowing a thing and surviving it, and turned back to the nearest corner. He built the shield carefully—small, fitted close around the hotspot like a cupped hand—and once he was satisfied it was sealed, he opened the tap.
Power came in a trickle, thin and stale, the dregs of whatever Ari had last charged the thing with. It filtered into James’ reservoir and topped it off with almost nothing to spare. He maintained the drain until the spot went flat and cold beneath his senses, then let the shield drop.
Mathin examined it from where he stood, extending his awareness across the room rather than approaching. A long moment passed. “It looks good to me. You did a fine job, James.”
When James moved to englobe the second hotspot, he’d already settled into the rhythm of the first—shield, tap, drain—and that comfort nearly cost him. The moment the shield began to form, the spot detonated. The bang was sharp and contained, the force breaking against his barrier like a fist against glass, rattling his concentration but nothing more.
“See, this is why you are cautious,” Mathin noted.
James let out a slow breath and said nothing. Noted.
The last two hotspots were deactivated without incident.
“Now what?” James asked.
“We need to remove them from their resting point. They might recharge themselves and pose a risk to the new owners.”
“How should I do this?”
“Use your combat magic to pull the spots from the ceiling,” Mathin instructed.
James reached up with force and plucked each one free, setting them in a neat row on the wooden floor. Mathin crouched over them, examined each in turn, then passed his hand along the line in a single unhurried sweep. A quiet word, a brief shimmer, and all four crumbled into grey dust that scattered across the floor.
“We are finished scanning this room. Let us examine each of the other rooms.”
An hour later, both men stood in the last room and agreed the house was clean. Whatever Ari had been, he’d been thorough—but not thorough enough, and the dead had a way of running out of advantages.
“Let us now look for hidden items. I do not have a spell for this; we will have to check every piece of furniture and look for hidden compartments in the floor or walls.”
Mathin moved to the furniture with the focused attention of a man who had done this before—many times, James suspected, in places considerably less pleasant than a quiet craftsman’s lane. James started on the walls, knocking with his knuckles in slow methodical rows. The construction was plaster over lath, thin and resonant, and he was not optimistic. Hiding anything substantial in walls like these would have been more effort than it was worth. He was working his way along the third wall, the hollow sound of his knocking unchanged, when Mathin called out.
He crossed the room and found Mathin at the desk—a heavy piece, old oak, the kind of furniture that outlasted the men who owned it. A panel had been worked loose from the side cavity, cunningly fitted and easy to miss unless you knew what to look for. Mathin was already pulling items free and laying them on the desk surface: scrolls, three bags of varying weight, and a wooden box that sat solid and seemed to suck in the light.
Mathin was almost giddy with excitement. “Look at this treasure. We need to take these back to my shop and examine them at our leisure. Have you found anything?”
“No, the walls seem to be solid. But I will continue searching.”
Two hours of methodical work confirmed what the desk had already suggested. Ari had kept his secrets in one place, and they’d found them all. They left the house together, James shouldering the bag, and Mathin locked the door with the particular satisfaction of a man closing a chapter.
James stopped the first man he saw on the lane—a carter adjusting a load—and asked after the Guild Master. The man pointed them toward a narrow building three doors down, watched them go, then hurriedly moved down the lane.
Mathin led them inside. The place smelled of wood ash and hot sand. “Hello, is anyone here?”
A figure appeared from a back room, apron dusted with the fine pale residue of a working glassblower. “How can I help you?”
“We are looking for the Guild Master,” Mathin said.
“You are looking at him. I am Edward.”
“This is James, and I am Mathin. James killed Ari last month, and today, we removed all of the traps. James is interested in selling Ari’s house if the right price can be agreed to.”
Edward’s expression shifted into something careful and flat. “Why would I want it?”
“It is in the middle of your busy lane and would make a fine guild hall. It is almost twice the size of this one,” Mathin said.
What followed was the kind of silence that meant a man was doing arithmetic. Edward looked at the wall, as though the street beyond it had become suddenly interesting. When he spoke again, something had loosened in his jaw. “The mage has lived there for years. He walked in one day and threw Raul, the original owner, out. When Raul protested, Ari crushed him like a bug, leaving the body outside the door for us to clean up. Since then, we knew not to talk or even look at him. We knew there was a fight, but that was all. So he’s dead—wonderful.”
“His body lies on the floor where he was slain. You will be able to get some satisfaction for Raul’s family when you dispose of the body.”