Chapter 1

I stood in the rubble of King Thanitis’s camp. The pavilion where the king held his court had been torn to shreds and the supports thrown in all directions. Shattered furniture, strewn clothing, and bodies. Lots of soldiers dead from what had started as a simple raid to capture the man who had brought an army to besiege Astovin and kill me.

He wasn’t supposed to have a dragon. The simple raid to capture him had gone amazingly. I had sent my tunnels bursting out around his tent and rushed in. We had killed his royal mage, disabled his general, and captured him. Then he unleashed Agubnamus.

An ancient blue dragon. With the element of water, she had massacred my most powerful monster girls and nearly killed me. Even Isatu, my fire dragon, had done little more than wound the powerful beast.

But those wounds had added up. Death by a thousand paper cuts had brought down Agubnamus. And I had claimed her. I had fucked her and gained what my little sister called my dragon-MILF. Now Agubnamus stood at my sight as I faced King Thanitis. He knelt.

He had surrendered.

The siege was over.

Paetu flew in orbit above us, the djinn still in her whirlwind form. She seemed to be keeping an eye. An entire army was out there. They had started running when the dragon appeared. That had broken them.

My surviving monster girls were with me. Alizee, Garnet, Maya, Lana Fulmine, and Nina. Halia and Kassie stood at my side, the halfling mage trying to look imposing as she glared at the kneeling king. Halia didn’t have to try. The adventurer stood in such a powerful stance, her Blessed Blade of Light held in her hand.

King Thanitis had Priestess Lysila glaring daggers at me. The woman, robed in blue, hated that I had won. She quivered there, wanting to curse me. I could tell. She wanted to cry out to her goddess and smite me.

Knight-General Arthemar didn’t look much happier. He had a bandage about his arm, taking one of Crystal’s ice shards during the assault. He was an older man made of iron. He had no fat on him, just a face hammered into hard angles by a blacksmith hammer.

“My king, you can’t do this,” the knight-general growled. “You can’t surrender our noble kingdom to a dungeon builder! Myreman has never bent the knee to their filth! Never!”

Thanitis glanced at his general. “Even when we were little more than a city-state with most of our kingdom overrun by them? That’s not bending the knee? When we let them do as they wish in our territory and didn’t protect our citizens? Tell me that’s not bending the knee.”

The knight-general swallowed.

“We have left our people to the predation of the dungeon builders.” The young king, not much older than me, hung his head. He shook in his stained doublet, his green eyes squeezed shut. He wore a gold circlet that stood out against his short-cut, black hair.

“We had to survive!” the knight-general shouted, rallying. “And we’ll continue to survive. Defy him, my king! Don’t be afraid of death!”

“I am not afraid of death!” The king’s words rang with steel. He stared up at me with passion in his green eyes. “I want to protect my people! He claims the people of Astovin are happy with his rule. Safe. Halia Vobria, the daughter of the mighty Anguin, stands at his side with her father’s blessed blade in hand. If Lord Leo wishes to help instead of harm, I cannot turn my back on that.”

“The Gods oppose them,” Lysila the priestess said. She wore a circle of silver studded with sapphires amid her long, black hair. Her blue eyes were as wild as a storm-tossed sea. “You would be a heretic. The gods will turn their backs on Myreman—on you—if you do this, my king. The Lord and Lady of Water have blessed Myreman and Myrecilla. They gave us Agubnamus to defend us. You—”

Agubnamus growled and glared at the priestess.

She quailed for a moment then glanced at her king. “You would have them take all that away from our nation?”

“We lost,” Thanitis said. “We cannot prevail against Lord Leo. He has claimed Agubnamus for himself. Our army will be massacred against his might even if we could assemble them. But we can’t. They’re scattered. They’ll be running for days. It’ll be longer to gather them up and regroup. Right, General?”

“We have enough around here,” growled the general. He glared at me. “His monster girls are all but wiped out. We have enough to destroy him now!”

“He has me, Arthemar,” growled Agubnamus.

I winced. To properly use Agubnamus, it would take burning three mana veins. Not one, like to use Isatu. That was how powerful Agubnamus was. She was a nuclear fucking bomb. I couldn’t afford to do that. I didn’t have the resources to use her, but I couldn’t let the world know that.

Not now that everyone would know I had her.

Other dungeon builders must be spying on me. I knew how they could do it.

“I don’t want there to be any more deaths, General,” I said. “I don’t want to massacre your army. I’m sick of this. I am an ally of any who wants to change the world. The gods, the builders ... Something new needs to be done to break this cycle.”

“You’re interlopers!” cried the priestess.

“So are the gods! They came to this world from the same place—”

“Blasphemy!” The priestess recoiled. “What poison drips from your tongue, Leo the False!”

“Yep, it’s blasphemy!” Alizee said. My peppy wind sprite, and cheerleader back in the other world, bounced in place. Her white hair whipped around her pale-blue body. The current swirling around her only touched her. “We used to have God and churches and they told us to do dumb things like drowning witches to prove they couldn’t float and eat crackers! How silly is that! Crackers!”

I glanced at her, momentarily dumbfounded by the stupidest thing I had ever heard.

“Wow,” Maya said. My undine girlfriend blinked. She was made entirely of water, her body always rippling with the little waves that ran over her cute form. “That was ... special, Alizee. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome!” Alizee said and thrust her arm in the air like she held a pompom.

“Yep, super special!” Garnet said. My little sister threw her crimson wings wide. She was a petite succubus with horns curling out of her black hair that fell in pigtails over her shoulders. She had a playful tail and was always horny. “Alizee, you are definitely the right one of us to be the Wind monster girl!”

“Oh, you’re so sweet!” Alizee said. “I love you both!” She threw her arms around Garnet and kissed her.

The king stared in interest at the two girls pressing tight together, their lips melting into passion.

I cleared my throat, my cheeks getting warm. “You can call it blasphemy, priestess, I don’t care. I’m here to change things. I want to negotiate a treaty of mutual defense. I will be the protector of Myreman.”

“You’d protect us from Tuerien?” asked the knight-general. “You would care about a dungeon builder so far from your base of power?

“Yes,” I said. “I want to make a treaty between us. Figure out how we can help each other.”

“He’s willing to do what we won’t,” said King Thanitis. “I’m set on this course.”

The priestess shook her head. “The gods will strike you down. The Lord and Lady of Water will drown you!”

“Then they’ll drown me,” growled the king. “But I’ll protect my people!”

Siwang appeared on the periphery of my vision. His black robes were stained in places. He was a little older than me, yet he felt younger. Probably because he spent most of his life in a hospital bed dying of cancer.

He had died. Not just been nearly killed, like most of us dungeon builders. It seemed that we had to have some accident in the other world related to our element. For me, it was being struck by lightning. But Siwang had come here with the Death glyph.

He had to die for real.