It involves some speed-reading...

You told the small group of assembled cultists that your trump card was going to involve some speed-reading.

"You actually think that you can read faster than that vampire? Newsflash: I don't care how brainy you are, you can't even hold a book!" Pike scoffed at the idea, then shrunk into her shoulders as everyone stared in her direction. "What? I'm right, aren't I?"

"He's not talking about a speed-reading contest, you treacherous elf. He's talking about reading one of his skill-books. Of course, none of that's going to matter in a second. I'll defeat Countess Bathory in the very first challenge," Evilward announced, pressing her thumb to the chest of her flasher coat and smiling like the cocky Sheriff bastard she'd transformed from. "No one on the whole server can outdo me when it comes to bomb-crafting; that's including people who class changed into the new Bombadier class."

You nodded, although somehow, you felt like Evilward was the unlucky type... You didn't want to hitch your cart onto that horse. Still, as long as the girls could buy you enough time, you could finish reading some high level books and pose an appropriate challenge. However, you'd need some help, even to accomplish the reading part. You asked Winnifred if she could be the one to do it.

The priestess put on a haughty (roleplay) frown and crossed her arms in a standoffish way. "Why me? You know that I hate you most of all, monster! I won't relish holding a tone in front of your face while you red from it!" she scoffed, fixing you with her large, almost child-like blue eyes.

You were suddenly thankful you just needed her to hold the book and flip pages... If she was narrating the whole thing, you'd probably retain about half of it from all the mispronunciation. You told her that you valued her skill as a cleric and reminder her that in ancient times, clerics and monks were the ones who made all the books! That meant she should be well-suited for, erm, handling books! What you didn't tell her: she was the most expendable of your cultists in these contests. If one of them had to be tied up doing this instead of challenging Bathory, it ought to be her.

"Are you almost through deciding the pecking order? Who will be the first to challenge me?" The vampire called down from her throne, surrounded by fawning lesser vampires. You thought she was looking pretty impatient. As a boss monster, she probably wasn't used to being overlooked for another of her minions, even when that minion was a loot monster.

You didn't have a chance to strategize on that point before your Justicier stepped up, flourishing her cloak around herself in dramatic fashion. On the Sheriff, that movement had been something out of a cool comic book and showed off his fancy tunic and high-rank gear. On her new form, it gave everyone a look at her erotic, naked, tanned body underneath, well muscled but filled out supernaturally in the chest. Evilward's face began to glow red as she realized what she'd done, but that challenging smile didn't leave her face. "I've always wanted to best a high vampire! You're the chance I've been waiting for!" Nice recovery.

"Ah, yes, the tall one." Bathory stood to her feet and began to tap her high-heels down the short staircase. "What is our contest? Are we flashing pedestrians and gauging their reactions? We really are going to have to fix that exhibitionist behavior you've sewn all throughout your cult, Ickibod."

"I'm not an exhibitionist!" Evilward defended, hugging her cloak to herself more tightly while her legs trembled in a mix of embarrassment and anger. "The only exhibition is going to be an exhibition of my powerful bomb-making craftsmanship! As if a vampire knows anything about that sort of thing, ha ha ha ha! My challenge to you- let's see who can make the more potent disability bomb!"

"And upon what shall we test these bombs?"

The woman paused, tapping her thumb against her lip. The obvious answer was the PVPers outside, but you sensed she still had a bit of that moral compass that told her to protect the RPers of this realm, so she came up with something else instead. "The lesser vampires. Line them up against the wall there. We're not going to kill them anyway, just disable them."

"Very well then." The lady vampire ordered the lesser ones to line up against the wall, as instructed, one to each competitor. You again felt a surge of annoyance, seeing how they obeyed her orders without protest, even though you were the boss monster in charge of this domain. "Do you need time to craft your bomb, Miss Flasher?"

"No need!" Your Justicier shrugged off that insult and produced a bomb from inside her inventory, grinning from ear to ear. "This is my most potent bomb to date, the one I was going to hit that damned Crowmaster with! It'll stop anything in its tracks and mess it up so badly, it'll forget its own name while its puking out its guts!" You felt pretty sorry for the vampire that was being sacrificed to said bomb, but you nodded; it did sound promising. On the other hand, you now felt even better about your decision to make a fool out of the Sheriff; if he'd managed to throw that thing at Colt the Crowmaster, he wouldn't have it for this contest! Feeling cocky, the cloak-clad lady began to rear back in a dramatic pitcher's stance to throw her bomb... before realizing that doing so shot her bare leg completely out of her cloak and nearly revealed her pussy at a diagonal, open angle. Blushing furiously, she corrected her stance and simply lobbed the thing across the room instead.

The effect was ungodly. Immediately, the unfortunate vampire minion was covered in a nasty looking, curse-scented powder that engulfed his form completely. You couldn't count all of the symptoms of various ailments he'd been afflicted with. He was stumbling around, indicating blindness. He was coughing loudly. He began puking. You saw from his health bar that he was at least poisoned, if not also bleeding. He'd been cursed. His stumbling suddenly ceased as he fell to the floor, completely paralyzed and immobilized. You wondered if this lesser vampire actually had it worse than the other one. Regardless, you spared only a bit more watching it before turning your eyes back to the important book Winnifred was holding in front of your carved face.

"Impressive! For a human. As for me, well... I prefer to go for quality over quantity. Have you heard about the vampire boss's transmogrification bomb? It's an especially tricky maneuver that a Halloween Boss like myself prefers to focus on the most troublesome member of an enemy raid party, taking them out of the fight for... mmm... 5 minutes?"

You could already see your Justicier sweating. She'd probably never heard of a transmogrification bomb and acknowledged that 5 minutes was a stupidly long time for any status ailment to be applied. "Hmph... Even if you turn the thing into a flopping fish, it's not more thoroughly disabled than what I did to my poor sod."

"During the time that the transmogrification bomb is active, I take full control of the newly created high vampire monster and control its actions completely. Its level is bumped to 40, like mine. Unlike your sad monster, I believe mine would relish the opportunity to try this out. May I?"

Evilward pressed her fingers together while gritting her teeth in frustration, realizing she'd already lost. "I... I don't think..."

You shook your head urgently. You needed Evilward to drag this out as much as possible.

"Fiiiine..."

With a sympathetic smile, the vampire countess chucked her bomb towards the lesser vampire. A thick green gas eminated around the point of the explosion and, in moments, the hunchbacked, misshapen, shriveled creature turned into an absolute beefcake of a gray-skinned vampire, looking every bit Bathory's equal, but male. "My mistress... Thank you for this gift," he bowed like a handsome butler, his new, silver locks billowing around himself. You decided: no more making vampires after this. These damn vampires seemed to get really full of themselves once they graduated from lesser!

"Would you say that I've won this contest? Which bomb seems more useful, in a combat application?" Bathory turned to you with a small grin, showing the points of her teeth.

You might be a tricky pumpkin who keeps some indecent company, but you couldn't lie in a situation like this: you'd definitely take a transformed minion for five minutes who obeys your every command over a disabled enemy, even if that enemy had been as wretchedly disabled as Evilward's target had become.

Next, Evilward took over holding your book for a moment, looking incredibly sour with tears in the corners of her eyes. You consoled her with a gentle "there there," patting her head with unintentional roughness using your straw hand. When you pulled it away, bits of golden straw were left sticking out of her dark, wavy hair.

She'd taken over because it was Winnifred's turn. She knew she couldn't win in a sewing or crafting contest, so she chose something else instead. "Although as a noble cleric it pains me to offend myself up for this task, I see no other opinion! I will defeat you in a contest of masturbation! We'll use our flingers and the first one to make the other squirt wins! But be waned: as a woman of the cloth, I am a bastion of purity and fidelity!"

"Flingers?"

"Fingers!"

The vampire countess wore an amused smile. "And we can start just the way we are, right?"

The cleric nodded, looking resolute and determined even as she made this ridiculously perverse challenge.

"Very well. Please begin."

Winnifred the White approached with a gulp, reaching out both hands and making herself look as perverted as that BigDickOldBastard must have coming after Pike. However, as soon as her hands grabbed hold of the vampire's heavy black skirts, the woman reached behind Winnifred with supernatural speed and clapped both hands onto her juicy, bikini-clad ass, sending a ridiculously powerful ripple through both cheeks and immediately reddening them. "Ack! How vile!" The cleric protested, with a lewd smile that showed she was very much looking forward to being mistreated in this way.

You struggled very, very hard to keep your attention on your reading as this played out. At times, your Justicier had to reach out and physically screw your head back into place to keep you from watching. From the corner of your candle-lit eyes, you saw Winnifred lifted into the air by the vampire's seemingly slender hands and turned upside down; the pumpkin bottoms were then magically pulled down (up?) her legs and past her feet to float mid-air beside her. Those quickly shot into her mouth like they were fired from a slingshot. The cleric shouted through the bundle of cloth indignantly as you wondered whether this intrusive vampire was really kinky, super sadistic, or else, just correctly guessed that having her mouth filled with her own panties was the kind of thing that would serve as effective foreplay for Winnifred.

Winnifred's extremely moist womanhood was now revealed and her tormentor wasted no time in wrapping up the competion. Bathory thrust two fingers in and out of the girl's pussy at impossible speeds; she had released the legs, now holding them splayed towards the ceiling through a mixture of telepathy and mesmerism. Bathory's wrist and upper arm were a blur, going in and out of your cultist's wet hole, even while her face held a look of serene peace and dignity. In no time flat, Winnifred was cumming her brains out, shooting a spray that missed the vampire and hit the floor next to her uselessly.

The vampire set the young girl down gently using the powers of levitation, then stroked the cleric's blond hair with obvious sympathy for the girl's quick loss.

"R-Rematch... Rematch...!" The cleric panted, with her legs splayed uselessly to either side and her arms sprawled onto the steps behind her. You could still see her pussy, twitching and sopping wet from that rough action, while her eyes sparkled with want for further humiliation.

"No, I think not. Perhaps we'll revisit the issue once you're my pet instead of the pumpkin's." She gave the girl another gentle pat on the head, then turned back towards you. "I believe that just leaves you, Miss Pike. What did you have in mind?"

Pike was your last line of defense remaining. The vanquished Evilward had become a glorified bookholder- a duty which your failure of a devout cleric had been relieved from, given how much she had been, well... relieved. You hoped against hope that Pike might have come up with something that the countess hadn't accounted for. As the elf paced the floor of your inner sanctum, you privately suspected she may just be stalling for the sake of buying you more time to read, but soon enough, she spoke up. "You know, you've been pissing me off since the moment you got here, Bathory. You act all high and mighty, but really, you need our help just like Ickibod, don't you?" You wondered if she was actually curious or if she just liked shit-talking. Maybe she was stalling after all.

"I am no mere pumpkin, Miss Pike," Bathory laughed, leaning forward in her throne with an amused smile. "I told you, I'll prove to you that I am the best raid boss your cult and your dungeon could ask for."

"That so? Well, our boss has a lot of limitations, but there's at least one thing he can do that you can't!" With that, Pike stepped to the door and grunted, pulling open the heavy stone slabs to let in the light from outside. You saw the haughty vampire begin to wince as light trailed across the floor, stopping just short of the throne. You made a mental note to fix that somehow... you were still really endangering your vampires. One of them had a singed wing-tip from where that surprise attack had just hit him. "My challenge? We're going to have a foot-race outside, from this cave to the abandoned cabin in the north! But not just any foot race..." The elven thief steeled herself... then began to shrug off the shoulders of her bikini! "A naked foot-race!"

You shouted: "Oooooh! Nice going, Pike!" You liked this idea on multiple levels. Either you'd get to see two cute girls running around naked in broad daylight, or else, you'd get to see the vampire cursing and humiliated as she failed to rise to the task!

... You noticed Pike hadn't finished taking off the pumpkin bikini top. She had both arms crossed at her breasts and seemed to be awaiting an answer... It was pretty easy to tell she expected the vampire to just give up when faced with this logical impossibility.

Pike was the only minion of yours you hadn't seen naked yet. You kind of hoped the challenge ended up happening.

"N-Naked? You must understand that I intend to rule over all of the creatures here. I can't just appear naked before them-"

"And yet, anyone else here can! Even our Pumpkin Lord is perfectly willing to go naked!"

"Yes, well, have some dignity! Is this some nudist cult?! What are the Halloween eventers going to think, when they show up and everyone's parading around in their birthday suits?!" The vampire seemed increasingly flustered, though, surprisingly, more for her dignity than her own safety. "I notice you still haven't dropped your top yet either, little elf!"

Your cultist's eyebrow twitched and her face reddened. "I'm... just waiting to make sure you accept!"

"Well, I do! I'll utterly defeat you!"

Score!

...

Moments later, you were faced with the amazing spectacled of two beauties, naked as the day they the gods ran them through the "character creator" you'd heard talked about here and there, the point from which new adventurer life was spawned. Did high vampires ever go through that? They were pretty like adventurers, but they were still monsters... At any rate, now wasn't the time for ruminating upon the mysteries of life! Now was the time for reveling in life's splendor! Perfectly splendiferous was the cute body of your naked elf friend, who was timidly clutching her arm around her small breasts and the other between her legs as you shamelessly looked her over. A very small part of you felt guilty, while the rest was raging with excitement at finally getting the long-awaited spectacle of seeing her nude. Her bare body was so tiny and precious...! It might not be the soft, pillowy type that Winnifred had, but you wanted to hug her all the same.

"Holy wow, this is like, super pumpkin perviness. You actually had your zombie bring you outside to watch this?!" She ranted wildly as, her tan, freckled face grew increasingly unable to hide her embarrassment. Part of her gambit had obviously included you, her friend, staying inside and not watching her streak across the daylit, deserted PVP area. You could see her legs shaking and actually did start to feel a little bad about it... But not so bad that you were going back inside!

You lied and told her that the reading light out here was actually preferable. You saw Evilward roll her eyes close-by.

"Yeah, I guess it is." Having your manipulation check pass that easily just made you feel worse!

On the other side... and by the other side, meaning behind you, still not having stepped into the light... was Bathory, clutching her body just as modestly as the thief. Neither one of them could run like that, could they? She'd shed off her dress, the lighter garment underneath that, the corset beneath that, the underwear beneath that... gothic fashion apparently came at the expense of a lot of layers. Nothing was left to her now and the paint on her black nails stood out against the stark grayness of her skin, as did the trembling of her red lips. "This is... a terribly uncouth idea for a challenge. You're making me use my brain a bit, thief. I-I suppose it will be a pleasure to have such wits in my company when you're **** to follow my leadership..." she murmured, though you noticed she still hadn't stepped out.

"If you don't get out here on the count of three, Count Drag-ula, I'm gonna win by default! One! Two!"

"Do you realize how much reading you could have gotten done by now if you'd actually focused on that?" Evilward complained, turning your head to look at your book again. You immediately wrenched her hand away and refocused your attention on the two girls. You couldn't stop staring!

Before three could be counted, the vampire moved to the mouth of the cave to join Pike. "I'm ready. I swear..." You didn't know what she swore; it seemed to just be a generic curse.

Finally, Pike counted three, then removed her arms from her perky nipples and the small feathering of brown hair just above her slit. You captured the details in your mind as though through some mental camera, the way players might use their fabled "screenshot" function. With a burst of speed, kicking up dust behind her feet, Pike sprinted full-on towards the north, as though moving fast enough would keep anyone from seeing the details of her nudity. Right now, she wasn't wearing a single bit of pumpkin branding... she'd look like some wood elf who'd just decided now would be a good time to return herself to nature and go au natural.

She was so fast! There was no way the vampire was going to be able to match that!

In answer, the vampire took off... She overtook Pike so easily! You supposed you should have guessed from her hand movements earlier... all of her abilities were just unfairly strong. Perhaps the movement speed hadn't seem unfair to whatever god gave it to her when she was cooped up in her castle, but here on the outside, it was nuts to think how quickly she could traverse the entire world if she wanted to. But... She was still a vampire! That sunlight had to be burning her to a crisp. You recalled how quickly that vampire had been burnt to ashes when Evilswarm threw a narrow beam of light on him. In the end, Pike was the only one who'd return... right?

No sooner had that thought occurred to you than you saw Bathory returning. Impossible! Unfortunately, her body was such a blur you couldn't make out her breasts bouncing with that odd, unladylike sprinters stance she'd adopted. It was rare to see her break character and drop her elegant stride, but then again, this was a life or **** situation.

She was trailing something behind her, dark and leathery. Whatever it was, it seemed to be popping off from her body, catching on her head, then pathetically tumbling off to skid across the dirt. You really hoped it wasn't her hair or flesh. If she came back to you a decayed zombie and you were **** to serve something as nasty looking as the zombie minions you'd summoned, you were going to seriously regret letting Pike issue this challenge.

Evilward's eyes widened. "It's... bats!"

Aw, dammit! You remembered you saw her do that earlier. She was using the bats she could summon as some sort of temporary sunshield. That was definitely cheating! Or, wait, no... Pike was the one who'd been closest to cheating, issuing this sort of challenge against the vampire. Still, you felt a little bad for her. She was going to be pretty crestfallen when she realized she'd gotten naked for nothing.

To your surprise, that speed of Bathory's seemed to have come at a cost... She arrived back with smoke rising from her flesh, panting and huffing in exertion at the speed she'd been **** to pour on. You couldn't help but watch her breasts hanging and the way beads of sweat ran from the round curves down to the tips of her discolored, yet still quite healthy, nipples. You also managed to steal a glance at her otherworldly white pubes, groomed into a neat, small triangle above her womanhood, as she rested her long-nailed hands on the tops of each thigh and groaned for air. Finally, you noticed one more distinct part... Her hair had gotten so scorched, uncovered by any bat protection, that she'd lost about 3/4 of its total mass. The singed ends ended just a bit above her shoulders, making her hair only a little longer than Winnifred's characteristic bowl cut. "My... My hair... You minions are going to... Have to work extra hard to make... Make that up to me..." She complained, speaking as eloquently as she could while squeezing her eyes shut and gasping for air.

Finally, Pike came up from the rear; you'd been so distracted, you hadn't noticed her approaching. She looked just as out of breath... and just as upset as you'd expected. The elf collapsed to her hands and knees, sweating onto the cave floor, as you tried hard not to stare at the erotic path of sweat drops running from her brown hair to bead upon the freckles on her lean, athletic body. "I... I can't believe how fast she is... I fucked up... Sorry dude..." she apologized. From the way she couldn't even look you in the eyes, she seemed to have interpreted that her failure meant it was all over; you were going to lose your boss monster position and be **** to take on the hellish work of a loot monster once again.

You patted her head with your straw, then shook your pumpkin noggin reassuringly. No such thing! That vampire had been so hesitant to go nude and run out there, it had bought you a lot of time for reading... even if a lot of that time had been used ogling girls instead. You didn't say that last part. Instead, you pivoted to a reassuring message... you'd fully absorbed that thick skill-book and were ready to put its lessons to use!

"Oh, thank God..." Pike groaned, then pushed to seating position, sitting with both legs crossed beneath herself. She grabbed the pocket she'd taken off earlier and fished out a stamina potion, giving it a quick chug before clutching the leather belt and satchel across her chest modestly. While fixing you with a glare that told you to stop staring already, she finally asked the question: "What the hell have you been reading this whole time, anyway? You know I'm not good at reading... I can't tell what's written on the cover."

Your pumpkin grin widened slightly into a smirk while your candles burned brighter. The book you'd been reading was...