To be fair, calling it a kiss was being very generous. Ara’s mouth was mashed violently and imprecisely against his. Meanwhile, her hands locked around his neck, stopping him from turning away.

His mouth filled with the taste of sunflower seeds and olive oil. Shortly after, it filled with searing pain centered at two points on his lips.

After that, it filled with Ara’s tongue, but he let himself disassociate for a moment rather than experience that physically.

There must have been something to her choice of words earlier. She had said “taste my venom” when implying that his struggle was futile. Perhaps the only way for her bite to work mechanically was if it was on the mouth for some reason. Or perhaps it was much more literal. A two-stage poison, one stage from ingestion, and the other from injection. It was more likely than it seemed; Monsoon seemed to have arranged her here to punish players for thinking they would cater to that kind of audience. She couldn’t poison you unless you kissed her. They must not have banked on whatever AI they’d let pilot this monstrosity learning about non-consensual assault.

He looked for a debuff on his UI near the poison stacks, but none appeared, even as he felt his muscles locking up. It felt like every muscle in his body was a second away from cramping. Like that feeling in the middle of the night when you’re half-awake and convinced that if you just stay still you can let your muscle relax and the pain will pass. His whole being was frozen in the moment before agony.

The feeling even filled his chest, and a blue bar appeared at the top of his vision.

It had been a while since he’d seen it; it was the breath bar.

Kaldalis’ heart was still beating, though - pounding, in fact. At least he wasn’t instantly dead. He had minutes before he suffocated.

Adrenaline roared through his system as he watched the bar tick down, counting down to his doom.

Ara’s grip on him relented tentatively at first, but when it became clear that his struggles were through her grip loosened, hands resting on him instead of pinning him, sliding over his body. One pair ran languidly over his horns, and he was truly aware for the first time of how sensitive they were to touch.

Kaldalis had a moment of purest terror when he wondered what was coming next, but she broke the kiss off and pushed off of him once his body was entirely immobilized.

He was slightly less disgusted than he expected when he saw her face had gone partially back to human. Her extra eyes had vanished, and her fangs were much smaller now. She reached up and pulled her raven hair out of her eyes, and her hands were pale and human again, no longer blood-red claws. There were still entirely too many of them, but she seemed to be changing back slowly. The weight on his body receded, and instead of a giant snake tail weighing him down, she was straddling him with humanlike legs. As she stood, he saw why her garment hid them. They were thick and muscular, drawing the eye, and covered in patches of blue-grey scales that didn’t go away.

“Finally,” she said, her voice once more purely human, even though her fangs were still notably prominent, and she still had eight arms. “You see your struggles were useless now, right? We could have had such fun together, Kaldalis. But you fought me. Cut me.” She rubbed one of her palms, where his spear had slashed her. “I can’t forgive that. The only thing I can do is cut you in return. Cut you where it will hurt most.”

She reached down and her hands grabbed him on his shoulders, locked elbows, and neck. He tried to flinch back, but his body was completely immobile. Her inhuman strength lifted him like a misshapen length of wood. He was in an unusual posture, arms bent upwards the way they’d been pinned, one leg straight and the other bent as he had instinctively tried to get leverage to push away as he had when she’d first pinned him.

He wasn’t sure what she was doing. For a moment, he had a horrible vision that she was going to drop him face down in the water. Of course, his breath bar was already ticking away. Being plunged into the water wouldn’t actually hurt him. She planted him on his side, arranged so that his head was above the grass.

She had pointed him at Dalgaard.

As she sashayed across the clearing towards the paralyzed healer, eight hands rearranged the sashes around her scaled legs, tying them off and tucking away her lower pair of arms. He watched in horror as the uppermost arms, poking out of the holes in her robe, contorted and withered, withdrawing into her very flesh.

“This is the nastiest cut, isn’t it?” Ara called tauntingly over her shoulder at him. “You take the protection of others so seriously. You noble soul. What could hurt you more than being forced to watch as you fail?”

He tried to do something but his body wouldn’t respond. Every muscle from his eyelids down to his toes was wracked with painful stiffness.

Kaldalis couldn’t even speak.

He wanted to try and bargain with her. Even if it meant appealing to her base urges. But he couldn’t even make the attempt, paralyzed as he was. He wanted to beg for mercy, or taunt her, or anything, just to try and stall her in the hopes Dalgaard’s paralysis might wear off.

If that didn’t work, he could console Dalgaard. Let them know what would happen. That everything would be okay.

But the venom left him helpless.

All he could do was watch as her two remaining hands stretched and crackled, turning to twisted crimson claws again.

“Oh,” Ara said, her voice sing-song as she approached Dalgaard. “It’s worn off enough for you to breathe again? Can you speak? No? It’s alright, darling, you don’t have to. I know that look. You’re hoping for another taste of me before what comes next.” She lowered her voice and purred something Kaldalis couldn’t hear from here, but then she looked over at him, and repeated louder for his benefit. “I told them it wouldn’t help. My venom only stops the muscles. It doesn’t numb the body.” She looked down at the healer again, baring her fangs. “You will feel every second of this.”

Her clawed hands raised up and then came down. There was a soft tearing noise. Kaldalis wondered if Ara was taking her time, ripping apart Dalgaard’s robes first, but when the claw came back up, it was wet, shining in the moonlight. That tearing sound was flesh.

Kaldalis didn’t know why he expected there to be a scream. He couldn’t move enough to speak, why did he expect Dalgaard to scream?

While he could see Ara hunched over his friend like a ghoul, he couldn’t see Dalgaard themself. He was grateful for that for only a moment. The tearing sounds were horrible, but he couldn’t see what was actually happening. But once he saw her lift something to her mouth, his brain filled in the unseen horror.

Ara held up a kidney, blood dripping from dangling viscera. She examined it for a moment, and then bit into it like an apple, carefully tipping her head forward to keep the blood from smearing down her chin.

She wasn’t just raking her claws across them, then. She was tearing them open and ripping out their organs.

Kaldalis felt fear-fueled adrenaline flooding his system all over again. Ara looked at him and gave him a sweet smile as she chewed. The kidney in her demonic claw was at odds with her beautiful features, and he wanted more than anything to be able to scream.

But the fear just kept building, locked away in his chest along with what he assumed was going to be his last breath.

“Don’t worry, noble spirit,” Ara called to him. “Once they stop squirming, you’ll get your turn. I’m a picky eater. Once they go still I can’t stomach another bite.”

Kaldalis felt his chest hitch. Despite what she was doing to them, they were still alive? His vision swam as he felt tears forming in his eyes. He couldn’t blink them away. He just had to watch the blurry figure of Ara take another bite of Dalgaard.

She was a very meticulous eater. She took every bite carefully, trying very hard to keep from getting any blood or gore on her face or clothes. The only thing she had no care for were the crimson claws on the ends of her hands, plunging them back into Dalgaard at regular intervals to fetch the next organ to be devoured.

She started with the kidneys. Ara picked over them one small bite at a time, as if adhering to some particularly prudent table manners. She dug around for a moment, the sickening tearing sound coming again as she found her next morsel. He didn’t recognize this part. It was just a featureless red mass. She dug into this with a bit more gusto, letting out a happy little moan with each bite. He tried to ignore that she was making eye contact with him the whole time.

Every little sound was her way of telling him he was next. He only hoped it would be over quickly. But as the minutes passed, it seemed more and more unlikely.

She reached in one last time and dug out a big floppy purple thing - Dalgaard’s liver. Ara held it up carefully, her claws visibly biting into the soft organ. She took the smallest nibble off of the end of it, and her eyes fluttered closed in rapture.

As soon as she took her eyes off of him, Kaldalis blinked.

He didn’t notice that it happened at first. The adrenaline still flooding his system had narrowed his awareness down to Ara alone. It wasn’t until the tears his blinking had freed tickled down the side of his face that he became aware of what was happening.

He was blinking. His muscles were coming unstuck.

His chest hitched again.

The blue bar at the top of his vision was gone. He was breathing, however shallowly.

His mind found some miraculous way to race faster than his heart rate. The adrenaline. The fear. It had to be eating through the poison. He had to keep his pulse elevated and pumping adrenaline into his body.

It was just like that Jason Statham movie. As long as he stayed terrified, he could break free.

As Ara let out an orgasmic moan with a mouthful of human liver, there was no shortage of fear. He was next, and if that wasn’t terrifying, he didn’t know what was.

She was still eating, though. That meant Dalgaard must still be alive, right? She said that she couldn’t keep eating once her prey went still. Despite all the blood loss they’d probably suffered, a human could live without a functioning kidney or liver for a long time, right? Sure, with a reduced quality of life, but people on the organ transplant list lived for years with occasional dialysis.

All he had to do was power through the venom. Charge to the rescue. Fight Ara off. He could carry whatever was left of Dalgaard to safety and administer a potion.

His muscles waking up was agony. The anticipated cramps came in full force, and he tried not to grimace at the pain. He had to remain perfectly still, or Ara would know what was going on. If she saw him moving before he could fight, she would just kiss him again, locking him in place.

That he broke free in only a few minutes would mean she wouldn’t hesitate to rip him apart this time. He only had one shot, and that depended on holding until the time was right.

Fire ripped up the inside of every limb as control returned to his arms and legs. He felt himself trembling as he tried to hold himself up in place, struggling against every muscle’s searing complaints.

Ara finished the last bite of Dalgaard’s liver, and looked over at Kaldalis, licking her lips slowly. Her tongue was blood red, and smeared gore across her lips rather than cleaning them. She turned back to Dalgaard, and her clawed hands thrust in with force and vigor. The tearing sound now accompanied by a snap of cracking bone.

Kaldalis felt a heave in his gut, and he realized that the paralysis had been the only thing stopping him from vomiting. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind did his dinner splatter into the grass in front of him.

Ara whirled instantly at the sound of his retching. All eight eyes snapped open at once in shock.

“I guess the jig is up,” he tried to say. It came out as a mumbling groan. He stopped trying to hold position and collapsed into the grass. His whole body was on fire, but nothing fueled his fear quite like seeing all of Ara’s eyes open again. He hurled himself up to his feet, brandishing his spear. He wasn’t sure if he could fight like this with every muscle screaming, but he didn’t have a real alternative.

“I should have started with you,” Ara hissed. Her transformation came slowly now, and all in front of him. Fangs grew as she held up her claws, licking the blood and viscera off of them. “Such delicious vigor. So much life within you. Damn my gluttony. I wanted to save the sweetest meal for last, and now it’s trying to squirm its way off my plate.”

As she spoke, her uppermost arms sprouted from her shoulders. The sashes on her robe wiggled and writhed like snakes as her lower arms visibly pushed and wriggled their way out of her clothes, untying themselves as they went.

Something was different about her now. Kaldalis immediately guessed that she was stronger after feeding. The crimson red of her claws had deepend almost to a maroon purple hue. Her legs joined together, and she briefly fell to her knees as it formed the snakelike body that lifted her back up to standing height. The scales were darker now, a deep navy instead of blue-gray. As her fangs finished coming in, the secondary set behind the first was larger and more prominent. The largest pair of eyes in her face - the ones that had been human - clouded over, turning the same beady black of the others.

“I will make no more mistakes,” Ara said. “Your only way out of my coils is gone now, along with any hope of mercy.” She beckoned to him with three different hands. “Come to me now. Accept my venom willingly, and you will not live long enough to regret making me force it upon you again.”

Looking into those beady spider eyes, Kaldalis knew he couldn’t push his face up next to hers even if he wanted to. He tried to shake the last of her venom out of his muscles and found that now that he was standing against her, the pain was fading.

Though that was probably the latest dose of adrenaline.

Kaldalis was going to crash and pass out once this was over.

If his heart didn’t explode in his chest first.

He hoped he would live long enough to find out, as Ara slithered in at him, all eight claws bared and reaching.