A thunderstorm that smashes down from the sky. Through the dense, humid jungle of the subtropical forest, a handful of figures sprint forward, their footsteps pounding against the earth with a cacophony of splashing water and snapping branches. Lightning occasionally streaks across the heavens, illuminating them as they scream out some rallying cry, running blindly and desperately. Their ragged clothing and the frequent glimpses of bloodstains told the story: they were the remnants of a broken force.
Without warning, the trees opened up directly in front of them. It was a shallow river. It wasn’t always a river; during the dry season, it served as a common thoroughfare for travelers. The battered men hissed through their teeth and glanced back over their shoulders. Behind them, lightning flashed violently, repeated flashes seeming to slowly tighten the noose around their throats. As if admitting there were no other choices, the men plunged into the shallow but fast-flowing river.
“We’ve been waiting for you.” Before the men could cross, figures swelled up from the water. Five in total. The men halted their crossing, raising guards against the unseen foes beyond the veil of rain. Emerging into the twilight haze were misshapen Half-Orcs, their red eyes glowing in the downpour.
“Tch.”
“Razors!”
Stumbling in the swift current, the defeated men drew their weapons.
Broadswords, shortswords, winged-blade spears.
Such armaments were typical of a light infantry mobile unit, well-suited to this region where soldiers rarely wore armor and the footing was treacherous.
But.
“So that’s all you managed to bring? Pity.”
The Razors drew their own weapons with mocking disdain.
Great axes, flail clubs, or dual-wielded large tomahawks.
A collective gasp escaped the defeated men.
Even without armor, the Razors’ scaled skin, slick with rain, deflected and bounced away mundane attacks. And their heavy weapons required no such fine techniques as sword defense; they would crush both weapon and wielder in a single strike.
Moreover, this flowing current offered no advantage to the defenders. For Razors with their thick tails and low centers of gravity, the uneven footing was little different from flat ground. There was no escaping.
The men were at an overwhelming disadvantage.
“But compared to clashing with Overnight, a few lizards aren’t nothing!” The men roused themselves, raising their spirits. Then, without a shred of fear, they charged toward the Half-Orcs before them.
It is widely reported that no warriors display more consistent strength in wetlands than Razors. In water too shallow for Merfolk to navigate effectively and on footing too unstable for human-types, the Razors’ hunched posture and robust tails become potent weapons. The presence of a transparent nictitating membrane, which keeps their vision clear through any splash, likely contributes significantly to their combat prowess as well. But. “Not bad… for a bunch of bandits!” “Tch, don’t act superior just because you’re the pawns of some merchants!” Before they knew it, the engagement had devolved into one-on-one duels. Most of the remnants—no, most of the bandits—were utterly unable to land a blow against the Razors. Only one man, wielding a winged-blade spear, was different. He understood how to precisely and sharply strike the Razors’ weak point: the abdomen. The Razor squad, which had momentarily pressed its advantage to a 5-on-2 ratio, was cut down by piercing strikes from the winged-blade spear—two fell before only Gash Zappa, who wielded twin tomahawks, remained standing, marking their complete annihilation.
Gash survived thanks to defensive skills that were rare, even unusual, for a user of heavy weaponry. Still, the bandit wielding the Wing-Blade Lance should have been exhausted from the combat, dashing across the water’s surface like a river cicada.
Gash threw his axe, determined not to let him regain any stamina.
“Tch!!”
The bandit didn’t block with the Wing-Blade Lance; instead, he dodged by hurling his body low toward the water’s surface.
A tomahawk strike that blew up the river’s surface.
But immediately, Gash reeled the tomahawk back. The twin tomahawks were a family heirloom, connected by a thin yet incredibly strong cord known as “Silk Chain,” sometimes referred to as a Dragon’s Secret Treasure. In this rain, it might have looked like the bandit was pulling them back with magic.
Gash used both tomahawks as shields to deflect the bandit’s lance thrusts. Fortunately for Gash, despite his lizardman strength, the bandit couldn’t muster enough force to pierce through the forged tomahawks.
It was a cycle of repetition.
The bandit knew he couldn’t escape by running; Gash would catch him. Gash swore on the pride of the National Army that he wouldn’t let him get away.
Time flowed through the stagnant battlefield of these two.
Then, a sign of reinforcements appeared.
Lightning was approaching.
“Heh, your day of reckoning has come, rotten bandit!”
”…Is it?”
The bandit grinned with his mud-streaked face.
Gash concluded it was braggadocio born from the complacency of believing reinforcements were close.
As if to strip away that false bravado, Gash unleashed his trump card.
“At least let me kill you easily!”
He threw both tomahawks with all his might.
“Hiahaha!!”
The man twisted to dodge the axes… and then, corrected by the ultra-thin “Silk Chain” stretched between them, he fell backward.
Gash surged forward. His last weapon was a horizontal slash of his tail, honed through the tribe’s ancient martial arts, possessing enough power to snap a tree thick as an embrace.
Just as he meant to strike the man with it, a fist-sized rock flew toward Gash from beyond the rain.
”!!”
Gash involuntarily checked his momentum, catching the stone in his hand.
Beyond the rain, one of the bandit’s comrades—who Gash had thought he’d defeated—had climbed onto the bank and thrown the rock with a makeshift sling made from his belt.
Before bitter thoughts could take hold, the bandit directly in front of Gash sprang up quickly, raising the Wing-Blade Lance from the water.
”!!”
Zakuri.
Gash’s tail was severed.
The blade sliced in from the soft, underside flank, leaving just a single layer of skin to dangle in the air.
“Gh… aaaah!?”
Even a tail was an organ with blood flowing through it. Gash collapsed as a geyser of blood sprayed out.
”…I win, you lizard.”
The bandit with the Wing-Blade Lance stood up and grinned.
Gash pounded the riverbed with his fist. A real lizard might have lost its tail and kept running nonchalantly, but a lizardman’s tail was too highly developed to be that casual. He was on the verge of passing out from the pain. He had no more weapons.
The moment he let his guard down, defeat was sealed.
“Cu… ss… aaah.”
He waited for the killing blow.
…But it didn’t come.
”…?”
He raised his head. The Winged Blade Spear thief was gone.
All around him lay a pile of corpses, and nothing else but the torrential rain.
The thief had deemed Gash incapable of tracking him in this weather and fled into the depths with the survivors.
”……Damn it… damn you…!!”
Agony.
The loss of blood.
Humiliation.
Within his fading consciousness, Gash let out a shriek laced with hot, bitter emotion.
“Damn youuuuuuuu!!! ”
And he collapsed onto the riverbed.
Even for a Lizardman in water, hemostasis is diminished. Knowing that this would cost him his life, he had become reckless with sheer humiliation.
◇◇◇
A rainbow hung against the backdrop of the dawn sky.
When the intense rains of the wet season cease, a thick, beautiful rainbow can sometimes be seen.
Lizardman oral tradition held that its seven-colored form was the afterimage and flight path of the Origin Dragon, the ancient progenitor who gave birth to their kind.
It was said the Origin Dragon loved the race it had created.
That even in death, it became a spirit, escorting Lizardmen to the afterlife on ships to paradise with a kiss at the moment of their passing.
”……Is this my reception…?”
Gash gazed up at the rainbow and murmured.
He thought that was fine. He, Gash Zappa, a Lizardman soldier, had died in battle against a powerful foe.
It was easiest to believe he had perished from that single blow.
However, that comfortable delusion was met with a voice laughing through its nose.
“Hah, the story about lizards riding rainbows to paradise? Don’t make me imagine it, it’s disgusting.”
“Who the hell is this bastard!”
Gash widened his eyes in surprise and lifted his head.
Gash prided himself on having less prejudice against other races than most Lizardmen who holed up in their colonies, though he certainly didn’t find them sexually attractive either. Skin without scales or color gradients held no allure for him, and he preferred faces that looked more reptilian.
That was the case, at least.
But here was a naked girl, apparently of the Human race, straddling his waist and pulling back her hair, and to his surprise, he felt a throb of lust.
”……Wow, it got big.”
”!?”
The girl spoke with zero seduction in her voice, phrasing it as if describing an insect’s movement.
In that instant, Gash realized one of his hemipenes was inserted inside her.
“What… w-what are you doing?!”
“Saving a life. …Wow, wow, wait, is it still getting bigger?! Does it usually get this big?!”
“N-no, wait a sec!!”
Gash was confused. Feeling lust toward a Human was a first for him, as was waking up to find he had already been having sex. And the fact that, despite being near death, he felt surprisingly energetic was another miscalculation; he had no idea what was going on.
This man was used to inconvenient miscalculations, but this was an experience in reverse for him.
”…Ugh, forget it, just let me finish!!”
In his confusion, he decided to completely surrender to instinct. Having already decided he was dead, rational handling of the situation seemed ridiculous by comparison.
“Huh? Huh?”
The girl was in a complete state of panic, her body reacting to the hemipenes—both external and internal—that had swelled with rapid, violent erections. She hadn’t imagined for a moment that once Gash woke up, his eyes would go wide and bloodshot as he demanded sex right off the bat.
Without warning, Gash grabbed the girl by her waist and arms, forcefully thrusting one of his fully engorged bifurcated penises back and forth against her. There was no romantic atmosphere or foreplay—just a brutal, forced reverse cowgirl position.
“N-no… it hurts… w-wait up, this is… !?”
“What are you acting so innocent for when you’ve got a stranger’s dick down your throat?!”
“No, h-hey, that’s not… ugh, don’t! …!!”
The girl slapped Gash across the face with her free hand.
Gash didn’t flinch. He continued pounding his hips up and down with heavy, labored breaths. Being a Lizardman who could brace himself with both legs and his tail, he was a natural at delivering hard upward thrusts.
She realized mid-thrust that her tail was missing from the middle section out. It dawned on her in a daze: this wasn’t heaven, and that battle hadn’t been a dream.
The girl had been slapping Gash’s face repeatedly, pat pat, but she seemed to give up—no, it seemed like she was getting off—and stopped hitting him.
“Y-you idiot… stupid lizard, ungrateful bastard…!”
“Hah, hah… what do I know? Not my problem. It’s indecent of a little slutty girl to start doing perverted things while the person is slowly dying…!!”
“…I’m going to make you do deep kowtows later, you hear me?! …!!”
“I said it doesn’t matter!! Ugh, this feels so good. Your womb!”
It was a rape by any definition. Gash ruthlessly ground his penis against the girl’s twitching vagina as she writhed and squirmed in agony.
He had mated with female Lizardmen before, but the sensation was completely different.
His instincts commanded him. He wanted to empty himself into the girl’s womb. He wanted to lay eggs deep inside her.
He wanted to force her to cluck out eggs imbued with his essence one after another.
Pre-cum began to overflow from the penis that was outside, and Gash slammed that one against her belly just as hard as he pounded his hips, finally climaxing.
“Guh, ohhhh!!”
“Nnhhh… n-no… ah, it hurts… ah… hahhh!!”
He ejaculated massive amounts of seed onto her womb pocket and her belly simultaneously.
Deep inside the womb pocket, onto her belly, onto her navel, onto her breasts, onto her nipples, onto her chin, onto her collarbones.
A viscous amount of semen, surprising even himself, shot out in a flood.
“No, idiot… my stomach is going to burst…!!”
The girl sweated profusely with pain and pleasure, beads of fat-sweat beading on her skin.
She was enduring the repeated cycle of her lower abdomen swelling weirdly as it deflated along the shaft of his penis, which was stabbed into the os uteri by a member that had grown larger than expected, while being persistently flooded with an impossible volume of sticky semen for a human.
“Hah… hah… you’re a good one, human female…”
Gash still seemed ready to keep going. Since he thought he was dead, there was no need to think about anything else. Or so he told himself—he just didn’t want to think about it.
However, the girl finally punched him in the face with a fist.
“Not… not human!! I’m an elemental spirit! A water element!!”
“…Hah?”
—a legend passed down through the lake and swamp regions. Somewhere in the swamps of this region lives a water elemental. Its power can sometimes surpass even that of dragons, and it is described as being identical to nature itself. People must revere that power and be grateful for being kept alive. Otherwise, this region would dry up just like the northern Russell Desert, becoming a barren land inhabited only by desert lizards and monsters────.
“Why are you fucking a water elemental, dumbass?” “You saved my life and you’re talking like that?!” The naked girl, now freed from between Gash’s legs, was furious, puffing up with anger. “That was just a convenient position to send ‘ki’! I don’t need some lizard-man offspring of yours!” “…Mmm”
I had heard of it.
The Art of the Boudoir.
A bogus health regimen employed by a select few dark elves and female ogres.
I had always assumed it was nothing more than exaggerated advertising from the sex industry.
I hadn’t imagined that it would be something I could use to save myself.
“…So, uh… what is it? Why did you save me?”
“Is there a rule against saving someone?”
“There are plenty of others who died besides you.”
Gash wasn’t particularly special among lizardmen. He wasn’t the strongest, and his lineage wasn’t particularly noble either.
“It smelled like something from the past.”
“Hah?”
“The scent. That’s all. Also, you happened to be dying right where I was standing.”
“I… don’t get it.”
“Does it matter? It doesn’t.”
Gash felt a bout of dizziness at her audacity after she had just saved him.
“But if you want to repay the debt,”
The girl bonked Gash on the head with a stick (she had picked it up because hitting it didn’t work).
“Cooperate a little. Gash Zapper.”
“Hah?”
“I, see, I want to watch the Spirit Festival.”
“The… Spirit Festival?”
A festival held nationwide once every six months to express gratitude to the spirits of heaven and earth.
Originally, it was supposed to be a raucous party dedicated to the spirits.
“You don’t know about that? You haven’t seen those things?”
“How could I see them if I didn’t go there? The core elements of spirits can’t really move in directions they prefer on their own.”
“…………”
Spirits were recognized within the country as an omnipresent existence—present everywhere, yet nowhere to be found.
The shocking fact that this was actually not the case was revealed to Gash, who had taken little interest in it up until now.
“No good?”
A sigh.
“…Fine. I’ll do it. This is a life you picked up off the ground where I dropped it, so consider it paid. …Where do we go? What do I need to do?”
“Yes! Well, take water from around here, specifically this spot here, and fill some kind of bag or container with it…”
◇◇◇
Time passed since that scorching summer day, and the season for the Spirit Festival arrived once again. “The time is coming when you can see what you want, Heely” “Yeah” In a cheap tavern located in a certain city situated between a desert and a lake-maraish. A lizardman without a tail and a beautiful elf girl with an oddly strong presence were sitting together, drinking sake. Gash Zapper and Heely Water. A retired soldier and a pseudo half-elf. The water spirit, who had taken to calling herself a half-elf because humans could barely use magic and thus displayed their long ears, but also so she wouldn’t be troubled by genuine elves asking about her background, had somehow become Gash’s good partner, despite his hot-headedness.
”……Hey, once the Spirit Festival is over……” Before Gash could finish asking what they were going to do, Heely struck him with a solid pok on the head using that short staff she’d made from a tree branch back then. She let out a small smile and held up her index finger. “We don’t talk about how things end before a fun festival even begins.” “Even if you say that, doesn’t that mean we can’t even discuss what’s coming next year?” “Mm. The most I can say right now is……” She leaned in close. “Something like ‘What are we doing tonight?’ at best.” ”……This lusty spirit,” he muttered. “Don’t some lecherous lizardman up the wick every single night, or is it?” Despite their constant bad-mouthing and insults, the two of them looked surprisingly happy.
(To be continued)