Chapter 44

“How are you expecting to find this place at night?” Kashka asked over the bond.

“With my eyes.”

“Of course, with your eyes but ... oh, I see,” she said as he sent the feeling of filling himself with magic.

“A large number of slave collars should be visible to those eyes of yours,” said Ikuno as she continued thundering down the road, “but will you be able to see them from the air?”

“I believe so with the help of darkvision, but I’ve never tried something like this. From the information we have, the place should be fairly close to the sea since it sounds like the problem slaves arrived by ship. I’m keeping my eyes open, but if I miss it, I think I’ll fly to the coast and try to find a small harbor or boat dock. From there, we can trace it back to the building. If you think of anything I may have missed, let me know.”

“Wait, Kal,” said Ikuno as they quietly approached the building.

Finding the place had been easy as the wards set to detect intruders and warn against attack created faint shimmers in Kal’s eyes. Against an almost black landscape, the shimmer may as well have been a beacon. It only took a few minutes to find the path leading back to the main road, where he found a low invisible bridge leading from the road to the forest and a wide illusion of the forest at the end to hide anyone traveling along the path.

He waited for Ikuno and Kashka to arrive before walking through the illusion. On the other side, they found well-traveled carriage tracks leading further into the forest.

“Interesting,” said Kashka after a few minutes. “They trapped the surrounding woods extensively, but not the road.”

“Most enemies of a place like this wouldn’t stroll up the main road,” said Ikuno.

“And I imagine disabling and resetting traps every time someone came and went would be a hassle and make them more likely to be noticed,” Kal added.

It took just under an hour to reach the first ward’s boundary. They could just barely make out the building ahead through the trees.

“I don’t like this,” said Kal. “When we took back Anika’s home, she had done extensive scouting beforehand that let us plan out our attack. We don’t even know the building’s layout.”

“If they were delivering the entire crew of the Scarlet Bitch, then I think it’s safe to assume it has a basement, and maybe floors below that,” said Kashka as she reviewed the aerial views Kal got before coming to meet her and Ikuno.

“That would make sense,” said the mage. “The wards make it difficult to judge distances with my sight, and lower floors would explain some of the distortions I saw. But that also means there must be some strong magic on those lower floors.”

“Slave collars? Containment for the slaves that went feral?” Kashka suggested.

“Dungeons where buyers can... ‘play’,” Ikuno growled, “with their purchases.”

Kal shivered. “I could have gone a little longer without thinking about that.”

“Better to prepare yourself now,” said the oni.

“So, how do we tackle this?” Kal asked, glancing up the road.

“It looks like visitors are dropped off at the front door, but there are wagon tracks that go around the building as well. I imagine supplies and new slaves are dropped off there.”

“The building is probably for visitors and their servants with a greeting area and a showroom along with administrative offices and quarters. Since there are dormers with windows on the roof, the second floor looks like it has rooms for the tamer clients. I imagine the floor belowground would be guards’ barracks and housing for staff and any personnel, as well as slave pens. If there’s anything below that, it will likely be slave cages and the dungeons,” said Ikuno.

“Have you been in a place like this before?” asked the mage.

“An underground slave market? Yes, on both sides of the cage. The difference is that the girls who end up going into this place don’t come out with new owners. They just don’t come out.”

“You’ve been on both sides?”

“I wasn’t always the thousand-year-old powerful oni that you know and love. I also wasn’t always the most compassionate person. Becoming strong can get in your head and make you think you are better than everyone and everything else in the world. Unlike most who become such a horrible person and end up with a knife between their ribs, I got a second chance ... and maybe a third before I finally stopped being a monumental bitch to the world. Before you ask, no, I’m not sharing either of those memories with you. I understand you can see them whenever you want, but I won’t give them to you. I’m ashamed of both for different reasons.”

“Now isn’t the time for that anyway. I want this done and over with before dawn.”

“You’re expecting this to go far better than it likely will,” said Kashka. “Can we get over the wards?”

Kal shook his head. “I checked that. It’s a large globe around the entire facility, not a cylinder.”

“What about your iron club, Ikuno?”

“Alarm wards are two-part spells. One is for the border, and one is for the alarm. Dispelling the border will also trigger the alarm. How did you deal with them as an assassin?”

“I didn’t. With my aim, I didn’t need to get close enough to trip the ward. Bosun gave me a special set of knives that shrank when they left my hand, then grew back to normal size just before hitting the target if I was going up against a projectile ward.”

“Why the shrinking and growing?” asked Kal.

“Most wards ignore small things like bugs passing through them, or they would trigger constantly, draining their mana source.”

“And the dagger bypassed that by getting tiny. It’s really too bad we didn’t get his gear before throwing him in the sandworm.” Kal sighed. “If we can’t dupe or dispel the ward, then the only option I can see is going in hard and fast. Emphasis on fast.”

“I’ll go in the front. Kal, you take Kashka up in the air and come drop through the ward at the same time I go through it down here. Then, drop her off on the roof so she can come in through a window while you come in the back way. I know you love coming in the back way,” said Ikuno with a suggestive butt wiggle.

“Not now.”

“Sorry. I was trying to lighten the mood a little. Besides, you might want to get it on with Kashka before we go in.”

Kashka shook her head. “We did that before fighting The Remnant Reavers. I know it helped in the fight, but it also felt forced. Maybe if we’d done it back out on the road, I would have been okay, but after thinking about what we might encounter in there, sex is the last thing on my mind.”

Ikuno looked up the road and sighed. “Yeah ... I think I was stalling for the same reason.”

“You’re that worried?” Kal asked.

“About you, yes.”

“Me?”

“You rescued those dog girls in Carriston before they were sold. If this place has lower floors like we think, you may see what happened to the girls who weren’t so lucky.”

Kal looked into her eyes and saw the genuine worry there. Biting back a sharp response reminding her he had seen a lot of horrible things in the time she was gone, the mage nodded and turned to Kashka. “Ready?”

The guards at the front door jumped as the alarm blared inside the building but quickly regained their composure and began scanning the surrounding forest with their darkvision-enhanced eyes. They heard the hiss of metal spikes cutting through the air a fraction of a second before one of them was thrown into the wall behind him by an iron club. The remaining man’s eyes widened as he saw his companion’s caved-in chest and the cracked and crumbling stained plaster of the wall where he struck. As the club vanished, likely returning to its owner, the guard quickly determined whoever was attacking them was likely beyond his abilities and reached for the door.

The shout that they were under attack died on his lips as an enormous hand closed around his throat and squeezed.

Ikuno felt the guard’s neck pop before tossing his body to the side. Normally, she would end the man as quickly as possible, but she felt no sympathy for those who would treat another living being the way they were treating the slaves inside.

She jammed the end spike of her club into the door, dispelling the strengthening enchantment. The spike’s penetration into the wood touched the locking enchantment, leaving only the mechanical lock, which shattered with a swing of the kanbo. The door swung open to reveal a group of armed men, swords or spears in hand and shields raised. Behind them, a flood of guards poured out of nearby rooms along with the occasional robed figure.

“Ah, my first real fight in this body,” the oni chuckled. “This should be fun.”

Berra gagged on her client’s cock as the alarms sounded, startling him and making his hips jerk. She knew there was something important she was supposed to do when the alarm went off like lock the door and windows to protect her client. But Berra didn’t care about protecting the man any more than she cared when the man snarled something in annoyance and grabbed her by the rust-colored, pointed dog ears on top of her head and began shoving his cock into her throat.

The entirety of Berra’s existence was focused on the tiny vial filled with green powder sitting on the nightstand. If she pleased her client, then he would reward her by pouring a little bit into his hand, or the tip of his finger, or even on top of his cock, and letting her sniff it off. She would do anything, no matter how debased or disgusting, as long as she could feel droosa’s euphoria again.

The man’s body spasmed again, and he immediately began to soften. Berra sucked harder and began frantically bobbing her head. Anything to keep him hard. Anything to make him happy, so he’d give her more droosa. A moment later, the bitter taste of urine splashed across her tongue. She was accustomed to clients making her drink their piss, but this caught her off guard, and she jerked her head away as the softening cock continued to fountain urine in a slowly decreasing arc.

She immediately sensed something was wrong. Customers who wanted to use her as a toilet would have pinched off the stream until they had shoved their pricks into her mouth again. She looked up to see his head lolling to one side as his eyes stared at nothingness, the hilt of an ornate dagger protruding from the side of the man’s head. The weapon vanished as she stared, and blood began pouring from the wound.

But Berra didn’t care. Her client was dead, and she didn’t care who killed him. She also didn’t care if his murderer was about to kill her next. The thought never even crossed her mind. She scrambled off the side of the bed and grabbed the bottle of green powder. Her eyes lit up and lips parted in a rictus grin as she popped the stopper off the vial. Berra sat on the floor with her back against the nightstand and held the vial to her nose before taking a long sniff while tilting her head and the vial back. The powder burned her nostril all the way back to her throat for a split second. But again, Berra didn’t care. The dog-girl’s tail began to wag as droosa’s euphoria blossomed in her mind. She vaguely recognized that the cloaked cat-girl watching her was probably who killed her client before the drug fully took hold, and her wagging tail slowed, then stopped as she stared off into the distance.

Kashka watched the dog-girl’s manic smile soften into one of contentment and shook her head. She remembered the panic of racing over to Kal when he nearly died in the battle against the Reavers. The cat witnessed a similar expression on the dog-girl’s face as she hurried to grab the vial.

Shaking her head, Kashka took the half-emptied vial from the woman’s hand and replaced the stopper. She took a moment to be sure the dog-girl was still breathing before going to the room’s door and peeking outside.

There must have been an enchantment muffling the sounds from outside the room since she barely heard the rush of customers running for safety. Two guards were going from room to room, evacuating the building’s clients who had not heeded the alarm. However, some flatly refused to leave, declaring the emergency as unworthy of interrupting their pleasures or saying the guards were trying to scam them by cutting their time short.

Kashka swept up behind the nearest guard and slipped her dagger into the tiny gap between his helmet and chestplate, piercing into the base of his skull and up into his brain. She stepped in front of the man, pulling his arm over her shoulder and taking his weight as he fell forward. Her other dagger found a home in the argumentative client’s throat as Kashka dragged the guard into the room and kicked the door shut behind her before letting the armored guard’s corpse clatter to the floor.

The girl in the room was an Azumbahan cyclops, a katame. Her eye was bloodshot and irritated, and it wasn’t hard to tell why from the cum covering her face. Seeing her temporary master dead, the woman’s mind went in a similar direction to the dog-girl’s, and she reached for the vial of droosa lying at the foot of the bed.

The cat snatched the glass tube from the woman’s fingers. “We are trying to rescue you. Try to leave us something to rescue,” she said. After removing the stopper, she held her thumb tightly against her finger the way she had seen in Silvermoon and tapped some powder into the trough it made. She held her fist up to the katame’s face, and the woman wasted no time snorting the offered powder before sitting on the side of the bed and allowing the drug to work its way into her mind.

With the katame occupied for the time being, Kashka poked her head out into the corridor to find the other guard still arguing at the same door. She silently slipped out into the hallway, and seconds later, the second guard and client were dead on the floor in a customer’s room. The girl lying on the bed appeared to be a dark-furred rodent-girl, but she didn’t recognize the type, nor did she worry about it for long. The woman was covered with bruises, cuts, and semen as her eyes stared off into the distance. But the girl was still breathing, though she likely wouldn’t be for long. Kashka pulled a vial of healing potion from a pouch and flicked the stopper away before holding it to the woman’s lips. The rodent-woman swallowed the liquid instinctively, and Kashka watched as the cuts healed and bruises faded. When the healing potion ran its course, she was still covered in bruises, and a few of the larger cuts were still open, but at least the girl wasn’t at death’s door anymore.

“Not to sound cold,” sent Ikuno, “but rescue is our secondary objective, and I could use some help.”

“She reminded me of Ratt,” Kashka replied, mentally shrugging. Despite the oni’s skill with her club, the cat could tell the guards downstairs were pressing Ikuno from the strain in her voice.

The cat pulled a small bottle from a pouch and dripped its milky contents into her daggers’ scabbards. With her daggers firmly back in their sheaths and their tips soaking in poison, Kashka sprinted toward the stairs to the first floor.

Kal and Kashka dove through the ward just as Ikuno let her club fly. After dropping the assassin on the roof, Kal checked for guards at the back door. The lone guard was on alert from the alarms sounding inside, but his attention was directed out toward the surrounding forest, not up.

The mage’s spear pierced clean through the man’s helmet and into his skull as Kal dropped to the ground. He jerked his spear free as the guard fell, then attempted to remove the helmet from the shaft since the point had severed the helmet’s chin strap, and it decided to come with. Since the punctured metal dug into the spear’s wood, he had to turn it back into a staff and make the shaft metal before sliding it off the end.

“Naginata,” he said, turning the staff back to wood as the platinum flowed up to one end and made a wide, curved blade the length of his forearm and hand. Cursing under his breath at the loss of time over something so stupid as a stuck helmet, he summoned his shield and burst through the large, wooden door.

He was met by a cacophony of feminine shrieks as the slaves in the kitchen turned from the commotion caused by Ikuno on the other side of the house to see another intruder.

“Quiet!” he hissed, “We’re here to rescue you.”

To his surprise, the women all went immediately silent, and a few reached for their collars, whimpering in pain.

“I’ve had an interesting development here,” said Kal over the bond and aloud for the sake of the kitchen slaves. “It appears that Darrow was the official owner of all these slaves. I can command them.”

“Not all of them have collars,” replied Kashka from the roof as she slipped a thin wire through a gap in the window and quietly undid the latch. “This one appears to be a slave to the drug and doesn’t have a collar.”

“Good to know,” he said before addressing the girls in the kitchen. “Stay here and act as you normally would, but don’t speak of seeing me. Treat orders from a large, blue-skinned woman or a cloaked cat-girl as coming from me. Understood?”

The women all nodded in agreement before resuming their positions, staring toward the far door and the sounds of battle beyond while casting worried glances in his direction.

Kal heard the pounding of metal-clad feet coming toward the kitchen’s entrance. Someone had finally decided to check on their lone guard at the back door. The first man barreled through the door and directly into the swinging path of the naginata’s blade. Before the first guard’s head hit the floor, Kal planted his feet and thrust the naginata forward, impaling the next in line as well as the man behind him. Kal put a foot on the surprised man’s chest and kicked him while pulling the weapon free. As the men clutched at the holes in their chests and dropped to their knees, the last of the guards turned and ran, shouting down the hall that there were attackers at the back door as well. Kal reared back and let the naginata fly. The weapon wasn’t meant for throwing but still found its mark in the man’s back, knocking him to the floor and silencing his yells. Kal’s haste rune spun up as he ran past the prone man, grabbing his weapon on the way. The men responding to the guard’s cries fell beneath Kal’s weapon with hardly a fight as they couldn’t keep up with the magically boosted strength or the speed of his movements.

The mage darted through the hallways, swiftly dispatching anyone not wearing a slave collar, until they opened up into the large foyer where Ikuno fought with three of the guards, her iron club twisting and weaving through the air to fend off their attacks. Luckily, the room narrowed in the entryway, preventing any more guards from stepping up, or she might have been in trouble. The pile of bodies surrounding her was a testament to the oni’s prowess, but these weren’t low-quality, disposable grunts. The three men she fought were all quite skilled with their blades, and there were rows more waiting for their chance at the giant woman.

A trio of small fireballs streaked toward Ikuno from somewhere to Kal’s right. The oni hopped back and batted them away, her iron club absorbing and dispersing the magic. But this allowed the guards to advance. If they pushed her against the entrance, it would significantly restrict her ability to swing the club with any momentum.