Amazon Apocalypse 2: Chapter 77 (Patreon)

“And what—exactly—did I just walk in on, Carter?” Sakura demanded, hands on her hips.

“Well…” I shrugged sheepishly. “I wasn’t cheating on you… though that’s probably what it looked like.”

“Or Bridget?” Sakura asked. “You weren’t cheating on Bridget, either?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Not cheating on you, and not cheating on Bridget, either."

“Or Myrina?!” Sakura poked me in the chest with a finger. “You weren’t cheating on Myrina either, right?”

I shook my head, this time stifling a laugh. My life sure had gotten complicated. “Nope. Not on Myrina, either.”

My Oni frowned, looking straight into my eyes for a long moment. Then, her lips parted in an impish grin and she planted a kiss on my lips. “I believe you. That woman wasn’t your type.”

“Yeah,” I chuckled, wiping relieved sweat from my brow. “I’m only into honest, hardworking, and capable women. There’s no place in my heart for tricksters.”

“No, not that.” Sakura slapped my butt playfully, then lifted her arm and flexed her bicep. “You’re only into tough, athletic, warrior women!”

“What?! Where’d you hear that?”

Sakura giggled. “Two’s a coincidence. Three’s a pattern, Carter. I’ve seen Myrina in the bath. Besides, weren’t you the one who made it so that every human woman who reaches D-Grade automatically ends up with an ass as firm as leather and is unable to be anything other than toned and athletic, no matter how many pastries Bridget feeds her? It’s pretty obvious you’re inflicting your taste in women on the rest of humanity…”

“That was completely by accident!” I protested. “I was just picking out the right fit for me, and… well… I forgot there was another tab for females. It just… it ended being implemented for everyone… including women.”

“Excuses, excuses…” Sakura waved me off. “That’s what we thought you might say.”

“You haven’t been talking about this with everyone else, have you?” My voice cracked on the last part of my question. If that was the case, I was sure I’d break out into a cold sweat. “Please tell me this isn’t a thing…”

Sakura’s laugh was all the answer I needed. I let out a shaky sigh.

With Sakura happy with me once more, the two of us turned to study Kyle and Marcus. Without Lisette nearby, the two of them became completely unresponsive.

“Crap. This is bad,” I said as I pushed Marcus and Kyle each to sit down so they wouldn’t be standing for who knew how long.

“What’s wrong with them?” Sakura asked.

I sighed. “I don’t know. Whatever Lisette did to them, it seems to be permanent. I had hoped just talking to the two of them, beyond her presence, would fix it. But apparently that’s not the case.”

I massaged my temples as I took a few deep breaths. “And it looks like killing her didn’t work, either. If she wasn’t dead, maybe we could force her to release them or something, but that fall had to have killed her…”

With Sakura throwing her out of a seven-story window and putting her out of my misery, once and for all, that was no longer an option.

“I hope she was worth a good deal of experience—she should have been, for a level 52,” I told Sakura.

Sakura glanced at her notifications. “Uh… Carter… I didn’t get anything for her?”

“What?!”

Sakura shared her screen with me. Sure enough, she’d received no experience points for killing Lisette. Which meant Lisette wasn’t dead.

Suddenly, I realized why I hadn’t gotten a notification for defeating the Three Kings and uniting this shard once and for all by completing the System’s main quest. I hadn’t united the shard because I hadn’t killed the last of the Three Kings.

The men I’d killed had never been the real Caesar. They were just puppets forced into action on invisible strings pulled by the woman behind the curtain. Lisette had been the final member of the Three Kings, all along.

It was the perfect cover, really. If anyone were to challenge Caesar, they’d end up fighting one of Lisette’s puppets. If they won, she simply claimed them as her new, upgraded puppet. That was probably how she’d survived as long as she had.

Had she even been captured by Cromwell, or was that a lie as well? She was in this far deeper than I could have ever imagined. Only luck and a gut feeling had prevented her from doing whatever she had in the prison here in Crownhill. I could hardly imagine what trouble she could have made if I hadn’t caught her early.

“Crap!” I stuck my head out the window, expecting to see a red smear on the ground roughly in the shape of a woman. “We need to go after her.”

The two of us raced down the stairs two or three at a time, breaking out onto the open street in the midst of the celebration, which was still ongoing. I couldn’t see Lisette or her body anywhere nearby, but there were plenty of people. So long as she didn’t have an invisibility ability or one that helped her remain unnoticed, there would have to be some witnesses.

“Did any of you see someone fall out of a window around here?” I asked.

“Of course we saw her! Who misses a gorgeous woman like that running naked through the streets!” A man selling skewers of meat clutched his belly and laughed heartily. “It was quite an entrance, and an even better exit!”

“Fantastic! Which way did she go?” My grin slipped from my lips as I watched the smile on the face of the meat seller fade.

“Uh… maybe that way?” He pointed off to his left. “Or that way?” He pointed the opposite direction, to his right. “I’m not really sure.” He gave me a helpless shrug.

I asked several more people. All of them had seen Lisette scramble to her feet and take off running, but nobody could agree on what direction she’d run off to. It was like everyone had seen different versions of the event. To me, that suggested she had some sort of escape skill after all.

“I’ll help,” Sakura promised.

“Thanks,” I said, “let’s party up.”

I sent her the request and when she accepted, we decided to split up and search different nearby buildings—though we planned to stay close enough to respond to a shout if we found her. The two of us spent the next few minutes attempting to hunt down Lisette ourselves, even entering various apartment complexes and scoping them out from room to room. Perhaps with Terrance’s help we could have been more thorough, but this was going to be hard. Very hard.

Lisette had proven remarkably adept at keeping me from following her. She could be anywhere… and she could be recruiting any red-blooded man to become her accomplice. She’d be impossible to find and even harder to trap. And for all I knew, she could seduce women as well—which would make her impossible to contain.

After searching with Sakura for more than an hour and coming up empty, we talked things over and decided we needed more information. Myrina would hopefully know something about Lisette’s odd class. I only hoped she was still receiving our messages through our teleportation network.

I alerted Terrance to the problem, and warned him and his men to be on the watch. I also gave a warning to the council. Of course, I had to bring Frank and Margaret up to see the state Kyle and Marcus were still in.

“Bizarre. It’s like they’re frozen…” Frank said as he poked Kyle in the chest. “Freaky. Well, if I see any strange women, I’m not going to let them blow me—no matter how pretty they are.”

“You might not have a choice,” I replied. “She’s got a powerful seduction skill. We think women might be immune, or at the very least resistant, but everyone should keep their distance, in either case. Maybe stick close to Margaret.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him.” Margaret nudged Frank. Her eyes flickered over Kyle and Marcus with a sad motherly expression. “Come on, Frank. You can guest star on my radio show today.”

With our friends suitably warned, Sakura and I returned to the farmhouse. Bridget was in the kitchen busy cooking up a victory feast. I felt bad that I’d have to disappoint her.

“So, how is my glorious Shardlord feeling after his final victory? I hear you went and conquered the place without us.” Bridget’s smile slowly faded when she saw my expression.

“I’m afraid not, Bridget. I beat Knuckles and the guy I thought was Caesar. But it turns out Caesar was mysterious for a reason—he wasn’t a guy at all. The slave girl every Caesar kept behind the curtains was the real power in the shadows, all along.” I grimaced. “Her name is Lisette, and she’s big trouble. Until we deal with her, we won’t be able to complete the System’s quest and unite the Shard under one banner.”

Bridget pulled off her oven mitts and picked up a pen and paper. “Tell me everything, and I’ll bring Myrina up to speed.”

“Let me add you to the party, first, before I forget.” I sent her a party invite. “Then I’ll tell you everything I know.”

After Bridget accepted the invite, I dictated a brief summary of events here on Earth: the Three Kings, Knuckles, Caesar, the strange behavior of the people at the prison, and the brief glimpse I’d gotten of Lisette’s true level and class.

“She was a Courtesan, and a high-leveled one at that,” I concluded. “Hopefully Myrina’s got that in her book on classes…”

I shrugged. If she didn’t, I didn’t know what to do.

“If she doesn’t, then Marol the Theory Crafter will know about it,” Bridget replied with confidence.

I hoped she was right.

Dinner was a quick and somber affair. Most of Bridget’s feast ended up going to Gobgob and her goblins. They scarfed it all down in short order. Maybe there were more in that little tribe of theirs than I thought, but it seemed to me that more of them showed up when I announced a feast than I remembered there being last time.

While they ate, between waving a hand to acknowledge their cheers of ‘Generous Chief Humie!’ and the almost sexual moans I heard from the little green women as they licked their fingers, I flicked through my various blueprints. There was probably an Artificer’s solution to this problem.

I wondered if a talisman of protection from good and evil would work? I checked my inventory. Like before, I had all the resources except one. I would need a powerful elemental core—and I’d been planning to use the core of the lava elemental between my farmhouse and town for a talisman of protection from order and chaos.

I needed that talisman to reach the fourth level of Mania safely. Did I really want to expend it for a talisman that might be able to deal with Lisette, instead? It wasn’t like I had the materials to make more than one. Still, if there was even half a chance I could use it to cure Kyle and Marcus, I had to make the attempt.

Just as I was debating whether or not my companions and I were strong enough to take out the Lava Elemental as we were, the teleporter chimed. Myrina had gotten back to me even faster than I’d hoped. This was good news—not just because she might have an answer for us, but also because it meant she’d found the time to slip away from Elder Thalassa, check in with Misa, and then read and write out a response.

“Bridget! Sakura!” I called out. “We’ve got mail!”

The two of them rushed into the room as I practically jumped across the entire room to the teleporter and tore open the scroll I found sitting there. Myrina’s cramped and messy handwriting was barely legible, but about halfway through, she must have asked Misa to finish writing the message for her. That part was written in a far neater hand.

We all crowded together to read the note.

“Bridget, Sakura, don’t let Carter and his magic dick out of your sight! I had to talk this one over with Marol the Theory Crafter after getting your note. Courtesan is a rare class, and not one usually seen on Themyscira. It wasn’t in my book at all, but Marol had it.

“It’s a Charisma-focused class. The same way Sakura focuses on Strength or how Carter focuses on Intelligence, this woman focuses on Charisma. The class isn’t good in a fight, and even someone half their level can usually beat them. What they are good at, is forcing others to follow them and fight for them through various types of mind control.

“Carter having a Charisma-focused skill is bad enough. The class is even more restricted than necromancy classes, and is considered highly dangerous. If she were on Themyscira, this Lisette would probably get a C-Grade imperial enforcer on her ass the moment knowledge of her class went public. But on a newly integrated world, you guys have no such recourse.

“Carter’s already high Charisma should protect him, but if he’s seduced there’s no telling what could happen. He could end up draining all of the woman’s levels, or she could wind up with his magic cock at her disposal. It all depends on what abilities she’s picked up since the integration began.

“As for me, things are looking rough. Elder Thalassa should be punished for going against a vote from the Matriarch and the other elders, but Mother’s hold on the Samhain Clan is tenuous at best right now. She only has a bit more time here at home before she has to leave. Between that and the fact that the main family’s forces were devastated by the recent rebellion, we don’t have the political capital to force Elder Thalassa to do anything while also stabilizing things enough for Cyra to take over.

“Worse, apparently she made some new friends while the rest of us were off fighting, and she’s already promised something to them. And I think that something is… well… me.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if Mother goes, I’m going to need to hide out with Cyra. Maybe… no, I suppose it’s too much to ask. Just secure your shard so maybe I can visit? At least for a little while.”

Your loyal companion, Myrina.

<Note>

The hunt for Lisette continues! I always figure a minion based build like Lisette's would give the best chance of surviving an apocalypse like this. Personally, I would go for golems. Undead if I had to (but the smell would be bad.)

Also, I finally found my stat notes. Carter should be at 59 for Race in this chapter, and 58 for Class. I will reveal all stats... at some point. They've gotten lengthy, especially if I go through titles. It isn't really something I can go through in the book's text anymore.