Qhila

20,000 trillion years. Going by how they currently felt, that’s how long John would estimate it would take for his legs to turn from two lumps of overcooked noodles and pain back into legs. Logically, he of course knew it would be a lot shorter. In fact, there might even be a way to shorten it further, floating around somewhere in the biology knowledge he absorbed earlier today.

Unfortunately, while the knowledge in question existed in his mind and was fairly trivial to call up parts of, absorbing it hadn’t formed much in the way of useful connection between individual pieces of information, or any other such marks of actual understanding. But it was a lot quicker and easier to sift through than an actual, physical book. So he was doing exactly that.

He was also lying on the floor right next to the elevator shaft. When the rat ogre had finally died, the **** survival instinct, and probably a heavy supply of adrenalin, that had propped him up past his physical limits had finally relaxed, and as a result he’d collapsed where he stood. He’d just barely had enough presence of mind to at least fall away from the elevator shaft instead of towards it.

Even in the unlikely case of his new powers coming with some sort of extra lives mechanic, losing one to self inflicted fall damage right after beating a foe way above his level would be extremely sad. Granted, since leveling up had refilled his HP and MP, he might actually survive the fall now, but this was really not the time, or place, to test that.

Got it. John had found the information he needed. Or rather, found disparate pieces of information and put them together. The key was to get the lactic acid that had built up in his muscles moved to his liver. Well, mainly to get it out of his leg muscles, but the liver was where it would then go. The bad news was that the only way to do that without suddenly gaining a new spell needed him to be up and moving. A moderately elevated heart rate and low to moderate intensity leg movements, while blood flow to the muscles was still heightened from the exertion, was the key.

In other words, a light jog or bike ride for most people or just walking moderately fast for John under normal circumstances. At the moment, the best he would be able to do was probably weakly staggering along but that would still be better than nothing. Probably. And it’d get him back to Qhila sooner. Now that he thought about it, all he knew was that she was ****, not why. For all he knew, a few minutes could be the difference between life and **** for her.

With a mental effort that felt somewhere between herculean and superhuman, but was in reality probably closer to pathetic, he rolled over onto all fours, crawled to the wall and leaned against it as he slowly got back on his feet. Then he started the arduous task of returning the way he came.

—-----------------------------------------------------

Qhila was still ****. Or she wasn’t moving at least. But her name, class and so on was still written in the air above her, and he could see her chest rise and fall from her breathing. Her naked chest. He was still hurting, every staggering step an act of will and conscious effort, but evidently that wasn’t enough to suppress his lustful nature when he wasn’t in mortal danger. Quickly hardening, John didn’t stop himself from ogling her. In fact, if anything, he leaned into the impulse as a distraction from his hurting legs. He knew he should feel bad about doing so, given that she was **** and had been stripped by ****. It might help him close the last couple of steps a bit faster, though, so to Hell with propriety.

John hadn’t gotten a proper look at her earlier, being more focused on how to deal with the rat ogre, and it only now dawned on him how small she really was. About a meter from head to toe as best John could estimate, her nose would be level with the hem of his pants should they stand next to each other. Her hips were very wide, so wide, in fact, that they would have been wide on a normal sized woman. On her, they were sitting right at the precipice of becoming ridiculous rather than sexy. Her thighs were thick and shapely, and looked incredibly inviting, whether it was to grope, squeeze and nibble, or just to rest his head on.

Actually, attractive as she was, he felt exhausted enough right now to make that last option feel like the best one. Since she was on her back, he couldn’t get much of a look at her ass. He knew enough about the female form to tell from what he could see of it, as well as her hips and thighs, that it would be great at worst. In contrast to the thickness of her lower body, Qhila’s breasts were tiny. Sitting in the lower end of A-cup, there wasn’t much more than a hint of feminine curve when she lay on her back. They were crowned by puffy, verdigris green nipples, pointing at the sky.

That inhuman detail pushed John towards the characteristics that would likely draw first attention from someone less lecherous. Her hands and feet were clearly reptilian, complete with dull claws and scales, and she had a lizard tail. All of those had copper-colored scales with a metallic sheen, scales that extended up her arms and legs as well. Despite those elements, her overall body and facial structure remained human-like.

The scales on her feet, lower legs, the top of her tail, the back of her hands and her outer forearms were all visibly textured and looked tough, like crocodilian scales. Her palms, the underside of her tail and the rest of her arms and legs had finer, smooth-looking scales reminiscent of snake skin. That left her with normal skin with a coppery tan covering her face and about the same amount of her body as a leotard would.

As he lifted her torso into a half-sitting position, he discovered that her fuzzy, shoulder-length back-comb of silver hair, complete with a metallic sheen like her scales, had strangely stiff bits in it as if she had hidden a few dozen hairpins there for some reason. Whatever was up with her hair, it was not something to bother with at the moment. Instead, he brought out the healing potion he had gotten from her clothes, unstoppered it and poured a bit into her mouth. It went down without issue, so he fed her some more. She didn’t have any external injuries that he could see, so he didn’t really know how much it was helping, but when there were only a few drops left, her breathing changed subtly. Then she spluttered for a bit, and blinked several times rapidly.

The blinking revealed another small, inhuman detail of her body, in the form of a second, inner set of eyelids closing from the outside of her face towards the center. More importantly, he waking up revealed her eyes, and what eyes! Despite her pink lips looking very inviting, and John being a very horny man, her eyes were her most striking facial feature by far. They had vertical slits through amethyst purple irises so big, her sclera were reduced to thin, white frames mostly hidden by her eyelids.

As soon as she finished spluttering, coughing and blinking, her eyes quickly darted to his face, then the potion vial, then down her body, then back to his face. Then she said something in a language that John was pretty sure wasn’t a human one. Mainly because the hissing, ‘s’-heavy speech reminded him of parseltongue from watching Harry Potter movies as a kid. Because of the strangeness of the language, he couldn’t figure out the tone, and her expression looked deliberately blank.

“Uhm… I don’t understand that, but are you okay?”

“Mostly.” She paused briefly before continuing, tone as carefully emotionless as her expression, “I appreciate the save. If it is the same to you, I want to know how you will collect on the debt. I don’t have much. I do not wish to be a ****. I suggest that I work it off with alchemy…” A moment of hesitation broke through her mask of emotionlessness before she continued, “or with my body.” If there had been any doubt about what she meant with the latter, a hesitant gesture towards her nethers dispelled that.

“I- What? no.” That response sent John’s mind reeling for a moment, which in turn seemed to confuse the girl. He cleared his throat, got his thoughts back in order and tried again. “I’m not going to enslave you. Or **** you to have sex with me to make us even. I mean, under other circumstances I’d be very tempted, but not like this. You don’t owe me anything. If your honor demands repayment or something, I ended up having to use three of your… brews, or whatever, so we’ll just call that even. Okay?”

Qhila looked about as taken aback and confused by that as John had been by what she said. “Truly? This is no lie? No cruel joke?”

John was rather unsure what to make of that. Not in terms of what to answer, he’d meant what he said, but how that expectation even came up, let alone so strongly that she wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to do any of those things. Having an RS score to look at would be handy here. Which was the point where he realized he hadn’t used Observe on her, or he would’ve had one. So he did exactly that.

Qhila
Lvl 13, Alchemist
Runaway
20 years old
Relationship: 49

49 RS and those kinds of concerns? Seems like she had some severely fucked up expectations of reality, but thinking about why would have to wait. “No lies, no jokes. I did what I did because it was the right thing to do.” John tried his best to sound firm, but to his own ears he mostly sounded exhausted.

“I see.” She looked thoughtful for a moment, then continued, “I want to help you. Not for debt. Not for honor. For… as thanks. But I know not what you need.”

‘A new pair of legs sounds nice right about now.’ John opted to not voice that joke. Given that she kinda sounded like her English wasn’t the best, he wasn’t sure how well humor would even track. So he went with the serious answer instead. “What I need most right now is information, really. Stuff that’s probably very basic to you, about magic and stuff. For starters, what is an ‘Abyssal’?”

Qhila said something in the hissing language again, while her RS ticked up 2 points. Then she switched to English. “You are new to the Abyss? New to magic?”

“Yeah, I literally woke up to it this morning. Most of it’s been pretty cool, but the rat ogre was a bit of a downer.” John could hear how his tone really didn’t match up with his attempt to wave that ordeal off as minor. Thankfully, Qhila didn’t comment on it.

“I see. I will explain what I can. But not here. It will take time and we must leave before…” She paused for a moment, obviously thinking hard. Then she sighed. “Before others arrive.”

John didn’t know who those ‘others’ would be, and it seemed pretty clear that Qhila didn’t know how to say it in English. Or at least not how to say it in a way that wouldn’t need a bunch of explanations that it appeared they didn’t have time for. And given that the ‘others’ were likely not friends or allies with Qhila, the most immediate options he could think of were either more rat ogres, whoever had decorated the warehouse-turned-makeshift-hospital with skull imagery, or whoever had shot up said makeshift hospital. All of which were groups John wasn’t in a hurry to meet.

While John was thinking about the possible ‘others’, Qhila got up and took a look at what was left of her clothes. Aside from giving John a chance to check out her ass, a delectable specimen of a bubble butt, that didn’t really achieve anything. Her clothes were completely ruined. On seeing how fruitless her attempts at using them to reclaim some sort of modesty was, John quickly went from enjoying the view to feeling guilty that he hadn’t offered her the spare t-shirt in his inventory yet. So he took it out and held it towards her. “Here, you can borrow this.”

“Thank you.” She held it up in front of her, simultaneously getting a look at it and blocking John’s view of anything besides her face. Which went from curious to a light frown. At which point John realized that it was a Dragon’s Dogma shirt.

“Fuck, sorry. Is that racist? I swear, I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just the only spare shirt I have.”

Qhila simply responded with, “Will explain later,” and put it on. It was practically a very loose dress on her, reaching past her knees. Her response would’ve done very little to assuage John’s worries about having been accidentally offensive, but her RP ticking up by 2 calmed him down a bit.

Clothing situation resolved, she proceeded to use the biggest scraps of cloth and leather to make a carryable bundle with her remaining alchemical concoctions in it. Then she turned to John. “We leave. Follow me to…. nest.”

John nodded in response, but instead of her walking anywhere, she held her hand straight up into the air, palm facing the sky and fingers splayed out. And then she disappeared. From one moment to the next, without any fanfare or flash or smoke cloud or anything. Like a teleportation skill in a game that had failed to play its particle graphics.