“Little one!” Luxnilae screamed as she bolted to ‘Olga’, who had fallen due to overexertion and exhaustion just before being able to finish off her most intense abuser.

“Well…” Lyrhea said in a mixed tone, “It looks like you lot will live, for now.”

The sighs of relief coming from the three surviving bastards were too soon, though, as the Mother of Lyrheans shot to each of them, impaling each with a single finger to the body and dropping them like sacks of grain. One of them, Johann, tried to fight back, but his body locked up and he realized that he had not merely had a finger jammed into his body, he had been dosed with a paralytic toxin that worked absurdly fast.

“Y-you s-said w-we w-wouldn’t d-d-die…” he managed to get out before his body refused to obey his brain and locked down.

Lyrhea merely looked down on him coldly and scowled.

“I didn't say you wouldn’t die eventually. She still needs to beat the tar out of you until she is satisfied, and then, and only then, will we permit you to die. No sooner, and no later.”

As the three had their vision fade out as their body unwillingly shut down any non-vital system within it due to the toxin, Lyrhea walked over to Luxnilae and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Why?” Luxnilae asked. “Will she..?”

“No,” Lyrhea said calmly. “She’s just starving, and that is the big issue. She’ll only die if she both doesn’t eat quickly and doesn’t get stable and conscious enough to eat. Do you have anything that can stave off such a threat for a few minutes or so?”

Though panicked, Luxnilae nodded. “Yes, I do, but it will take a bit out of me, and I’m already feeling rather empty... Are we going to have to deal with this from now on? I’ve never seen you eat, so…”

“I’ve stuffed my face to the point that my reserves could last another few hours of straight combat.” replied Lyrhea, “You’ll learn, in time, how massive our stomachs are, and how paramount that it is to eat anything you can whenever you can. Stay here. Alleviate the issue as best as you can, and I'll be right back.”

Lyrhea turned and walked off.

“Where are you going?!” Luxnilae asked in fear, dreading the idea that she and her charge would be abandoned.

“I’ve got to head to the store and pick up some meat.” Lyrhea said jokingly as she walked off, eventually breaking into a sprint and hoping that a bit of humor could soften the dour mood.

Luxnilae turned to her charge and sighed. She had done this before, but she hoped beyond hope that she could do it just as well now as she could back then.

She pulled energy from around her and from within her and channeled it via a few tendrils of wispy light into ‘Olga’. The light connected, and ‘Olga’ began to breathe a bit easier, he gasps less labored and intense and her body no longer being as sore as it was previously.

“Please, Mother…” Luxnilae murmured as she felt the effects of the channeling spell begin to creep into her body. “Please, hurry…”

…

Lyrhea bounded from one place to the next, smacking smaller creatures with a few good hits here and there to simply knock them out rather than kill them outright. She knew damn well that both of her ‘daughters’ would need to learn to deal with eating live food sooner rather than later, and while the Lyrhean formerly known as Olga could be exempt from this in the current situation due to the urgency of it, she, too, would need to learn to banish those original human feelings from her mind.

Each prey item she knocked out was quickly stuffed into a space-time distorting bag that she had snatched from those three bastards from earlier. They would no longer have any use for it, so why not reuse it, rather than recycle or simply discard it?

Besides, what better way to additionally mock them and punish them than to use their own tools as a means to bring about their demise? It was a poetic bit of justice, in her eyes, at least.

Once she had gathered what she assumed would be more than enough, she sped on back to the place where her ‘daughters’ currently were, grabbing yet more animals and shoving them into her own mouth. She had already long since grown to feel a dark sense of joy each time she shoved a still-living thing into her mouth and swallowed it whole and alive, and while normally that would have disturbed her, she was, as stated earlier, used to it.

And, as stated before, her new people would need to adapt to it as well. It took her far too long to get used to it herself, so now that there were more of her kind it would fall to her to help them adapt and overcome the lingering human feeling against such acts.

She herself was still overcoming some of them even as she lived now, but many heads of an inhuman variety would no doubt help the collective move away from thinking in a truly human sense. She was, after all, already losing touch with her human side, and each time she interacted with humans it only further drove that point home to her.

Well, that would all be for later, when she had time and didn’t feel like she was running against the clock. She really hoped that the dosage that she had given to the three pedo bastards was enough to keep them down for long enough for her to return and give them another dose.

If they were already up and about, though….

She simply hoped to her New God that they weren’t. And, of course, that they had not expired due to an improper dose of ‘venom’. She would never hear the end of it from her daughters and Patron alike if that happened, and she figured things would only get worse if the greater of two potential misfortunes happened.

And so she increased her speed, hoping beyond hope that her luck would manage to win out yet again, but also seriously worrying that her luck might turn yet again.