Chapter 55 – Treasure

Content warning again.

Intentionally missing. It made perfect sense as an exploit, a way to make love whip deal environmental damage while circumventing its biggest weakness as a succubus weapon, the fact that it could only target organic beings. As long as there was an organic being in the vicinity, I could make love whip accidentally hit something else.

With a plan in mind, I needed to act fast. The mimic’s long slimy fingers and sharp nails were on Rosalia’s thighs, trying to pry apart her legs so it could forcibly penetrate her with its skinless cock, which was almost as long as two thirds of my arm and curved up like a scimitar.

“N..no!” Rosalia screamed in panic.

The mimic dragged its long nails down the robe covering Rosalia’s legs, leaving three vertical slits down her robe that exposed her skin underneath. Its long tongue licked the lips of its treasure chest mouth, wetting the curved jagged rows of teeth at the top and bottom. Leaning down until its torso and head casted a shadow upon Rosalia’s body, it extended its tongue onto Rosalia’s face, licking her face and leaving saliva all over her cheeks and nose.

The tongue swirled around, going up to her forehead before trailing down to her mouth, which she had clamped shut. Rosalia’s eyes were shut with furrowed brows as she let out a muffled cry and tried to scramble away, but the mimic was too heavy to push off.

Seeing Rosalia suffer like this at the hands of this skinless, hairless sphynx-like mimic made my blood boil with rage, but timing was everything in combat. I would only get one shot at this deceitful combination, and so I needed the mimic’s attention to be fully diverted.

Now was the time to start. Using a swift wrist flick gesture, I directed the whip to lash at the treasure chest mimic, who was squatting on the ground while trying to violate Rosalia. The whip smacked across its treasure chest face, knocking the chest to the side for a brief moment. Without wasting a beat, I directed the whip back again, cocking it back for the real blow.

Swoosh.

Brandished telepathically two feet above the mimic’s eye level, I made sure the svelte dominatrix whip carelessly hit the dilapidated bookshelf to the left of the mimic as it swung down onto its head again.

The whip made contact with the bookshelf with a crack, and the rickety old thing teetered for a second before collapsing. It had been a long, long time since anyone had been here, and the entire library was brittle to the point that a slight gust of wind could bring the whole thing down.

Noticing the bookshelf was about to collapse on him, the lanky treasure chest head mimic let go of Rosalia’s thighs and rolled to the side, its head clanking to the side cumbersomely. Rosalia levitated slightly off the ground using her [Angelic Hover] ability, and I ran forwards and grabbed her right as the bookshelf collapsed, pulling her towards me and to safety.

Heavy books and tomes flew everywhere, pages flying about as several books landed on the floor half open. The collapsed shelf set off a moderate chain reaction to its adjacent shelf, causing the one on the right to teeter and fall as well. Luckily, the rest of the library was still intact.

“Skreee!!”

Unfortunately for it but fortunately for us, the mimic wasn’t able to fully get away from the adjacent collapsing bookshelf. It scrambled to dodge out of the trajectory of the falling books, but the falling shelf pinned it down.

The mimic took a bit of damage, especially in its nether region where an entire section of the bookshelf landed on its long protruding cock, but not nearly enough to empty that still almost completely full red health bar above its head. All this was a temporary diversion.

I stood there stunned for a moment as I watched clear signs of life from the mimic’s long appendages. Raising itself back up with its spidery long arms and legs, it was only a moment before the mimic would be able to extract itself from under the bookshelf that collapsed on top of it.

A sharp pinch on my elbow brought me back to my senses.

“Spoon, hurry!” Rosalia said to me urgently as she pulled my arm towards her. She dragged me towards the crack in the wall, where Bjorn was motioning us over with an urgent gesture.

I just noticed that, yet again, Meat Shield happened to disappear right when things were about to get dicey. I couldn’t tell whether to chastise her for running, or appreciate just how good she was at sniffing out unmanageable danger.

Rosalia ran straight towards the crack in the wall and began to squeeze her way through sideways. Strands of saliva from the mimic dripped down her face, but she resisted the urge to clean herself off and diligently squeezed her way through the crack. Her breasts were getting in the way a bit, making the tight squeeze that much harder as her boobs were sandwiched between the space, so it was taking longer than expected for her to get through to the other side where Bjorn was waiting.

As I watched the mimic slowly drag itself from underneath the shelf, throwing books that were on top of him to the side with impunity, I knew that we were on a timer here. There was no way in hell we would be able to take on that monstrosity in a head on fight. Even at level 84, I felt way too underleveled for this encounter. Hell, even at the proper level, this would still be a tough fight.

Breathing heavily from the tight squeeze, Rosalia lifted one of her breasts and held it up, managing to squeeze through just a bit more. She then began to repeat the process with her other breast.

This was going too slow though. Did I have any other options available? My mind began to think.

Suddenly, I remembered the riddle written on the scroll in the other chest, the real one. Twice we drink, before the visitor rests. Maybe this mimic was the visitor that the scroll was referring to?

I retrieved the two blood vials of unknown origin from my inventory and uncorked the first one. As soon as I uncorked it, I coughed at the stale and somewhat putridly sweet aroma spilling out from inside the vial. Holding my breath, I put the glass vial to my lips and drank the liquid.

It actually tasted a bit better than it smelled. Somewhat iron tasting and luke warm, but otherwise it was rather inoffensively bland.

As if to urge me on, the mimic’s first leg broke free from its collapsed shelf prison. It was now working to free its other leg, after which I assumed that it would reprioritize killing us.

Uncorking the second vial, I lifted it to my mouth and poured the contents down my throat. More of the same taste, more or less. This time it was slightly more sweet, almost like a more mildly sweet red wine with a slight putrid tang and a feeling of staleness from the age of the vial.

Then, the first wave of sickness hit me. It wasn’t from the taste of the blood from the blood vials. Rather, it was as if I swallowed something so vile, so bad, and so detrimental to my health, that my body was doing its utmost best to get rid of it, no matter what it took.

“Hnnhh….ack!” I belched, lurching forward as if I was going to vomit.

Immediately after my initial retching motion, my body began to convulse involuntarily. My chest rose and fell with an almost hiccup-like motion as I felt the extreme urge to throw up, although nothing came out even though my body and stomach were violently rejecting whatever it was I just swallowed. Soon after, there was a tight feeling around my chest, as if I was having a heart attack of some sort. Overall, this was an intensely displeasurable sequence of events that was making me lose control of my mental and physical facilities.

“Spoon!” Rosalia shouted with panic in her voice. “Hurry!” She managed to get through the crack less than a minute ago, and was now motioning me to come to her side vigorously.

“Get your ass over here, boy!” Bjorn shouted as well. “Thor damn it, that thing is going to get up soon! Come!”

I wasn’t fully in control of my body at this point, and my mental state was completely compromised. I just couldn’t think straight at all through all the pain, and gut retching wave after wave after wave of progressively worse nausea.

My chest felt like it was constricting even harder now. Then came the unrelenting shudders. I could only watch the mimic in apathetic horror-filled amusement as it began to successfully extract its second leg from under the shelf just as I suffered another fit of convulsions, this time even worse than before.

Cough.

Bits of blood came out from my lungs as I coughed and wheezed.

If the mimic was indeed the visitor in the riddle twice we drink, before the visitor rests, it was high time for the visitor to start resting now. But the mimic was showing no sign of slowing down its movements. Fuck!

Looking down, my skin was turning slightly blue, the same color it would be if my body was being robbed of its oxygen through slow internal asphyxiation. I felt a hotness throughout my body, as if there was some kind of magic being injected into me that my body was vehemently refusing. What the hell was going on? Was I going to die like this, completely helpless?

Suddenly, the warmth intensified into a scorching heat that permeated through my body and began to almost radiate out of my skin, as my hands felt hot to the touch. My skin returned to its normal color, and I began to breathe just a bit easier.

A notification popped up on my screen.

[Your attempt to change races has been unsuccessful.]

[Due to your body rejecting the changes, you have remained human.]

[However, some of the changes still linger in your system. You are now a demi-human race, with vampire blood in your system.]

[You will be unable to use most vampire abilities due to your status as a demi-human.]

[You will retain the majority of your human characteristics due to your incomplete transformation and partial acceptance of the blood seed.]

[Your statistics have been modified to accommodate your new racial status.]

[A new characteristic has been added, Blood Lust.]

So… this was what the riddle meant by when the visitor rests. It never referred to the mimic. After all, the mimic wasn’t a visitor, it was a resident of this room. The vampire race… it took the form of a foreign substance that visited my body, before being partially evicted. One hell of a metaphorical visitor, huh.

Despite the continuing nausea, I felt a bit sharper than usual. The change was slight but perceptible. I could hear just a little better, see just a bit clearer in the darkness, and smell just a bit more acutely. But as a whole, I felt more or less the same as before. Even as a demi-human, I retained the vast majority of my humanity and my human characteristics.

It wasn’t time to figure out what exactly changed. The treasure chest mimic broke free from the debris of the fallen bookshelves, and began crawling on the ground like a cross between a spider and a frog. Its spidery long pair of arms and legs crawled across the room in a nightmare inducing fashion towards me.

I had seen enough. Scrambling backwards, I threw my body at the crack and began to squeeze my way through. This was much harder to do under pressure than when there was no pressure at all. I suddenly began to understand why Rosalia struggled so much to get through. My thoughts were still cloudy as well, unable to think straight even after the transformation process was incomplete.

The mimic crawled even closer to me and lunged forward from its squatting position, its chest mouth fully open, and its tongue and two sharp sets of teeth flying towards me, ready to clamp down.

I just couldn’t get through fast enough. My vision faded to black in an instant, as the mimic closed its jaws around my head and bit down.