NOVEL NEXT Books and TV
6/14 night day 4
I lay sandwiched between my prime consort and my high priestess, kissing them each in turn. I’m honestly more of a fan of only moderately large breasts, D cups are just fine, but Talaada seemed to be making them slightly bigger every time she changed her visage. I wasn’t complaining, but they were starting to get distractingly large. Oh well, they were fun to play with and she had decided on them for herself.
I’m actually not sure if it was sticky fingers or the fact that she literally saw me as a divine being, but she really got into me fucking her tits. I hadn’t actually recieved many titty fucks at that point, but together we figured out how she could press her massive fun bags together and fully engulf my cock. Lividia entertained herself by trying to distract my high priestess with small licks and bites. The finger in her ass was particularly effective in breaking Talaada’s rhythm.
After we finished, Talaada was feeling extremely cuddly. She wrapped herself around me with a contented smile on her face, and relaxed to a degree I had never seen from her before. I finished Lividia off with my fingers carefully, so as to not disturb Talaada, and relaxed. I’d been catching up on my sleep this week, and we were planning on heading over to Zuldazar tomorrow to help lock down the city.
Thanks to Time Savers I didn’t actually need all that much sleep, so I did a bit of bookkeeping while I luxuriated in the good company. I had a few new rewards, mostly minor things unfortunately. Normal, if strong, magic items didn’t really matter but they would be put to good use. I did, however, get two pieces of company swag. A lucky minor mission gave me Peddlefeet’s arrow, which was essentially one of Cupid’s arrows except Azeroth had a little goblin mascot instead of a reimagined Greek god. We had also assassinated a minor functionary in Pandaria’s imperial court for 1 credit and a reversing mirror.
Pandaria: Defeat Emperor Shaohao
Reward: Legacy Megapixel (one use)
Legacy Megapixel: an old binding that was discontinued for being too powerful, but we still have a few laying around. Allows you to apply a stamp to one person if you can get a picture of them with your amulet’s camera. - add full description in proper format Auriel.
Nice. Taking a quick photo of someone is pretty damn easy. This seemed absolutely worth the trouble, even setting aside that Pandaria is another lovely empire with a strong central authority that I could subjugate in this timeline. Speaking of subjugated empires, Soridormi successfully sniped the rulers of Zuldazar and earned her regional upgrade. Let’s see our options.
Strength: Lesser Dragon Break- Soridormi can open a small hole to any known reality once per primary-timeline day for about five minutes. While open, it can be used to communicate or exchange small handheld items, but nothing alive. Tempest Jewels can be passed through, but their settings shift to match whatever functions are enabled in the alternate timeline. This generally does not include Jewel based capture.
Agility: Born to be yours: Soridormi was born captured. This had no effect until she met Erich, but at least half of the bronze dragonflight are descended from her and thus automatically captured.
Stamina: Canon Death: members of your retinue who have canonically died will automatically resurrect after 24 hours unless the circumstances of their death in some way mirror their “official” death.
Intellect: Wayfinder- Soridormi becomes dramatically more able to pick out potential alternate timelines that have certain desired qualities. For example, time dilation of a certain magnitude, a certain character in a vulnerable position, a specific point in the timeline, or world wide cultural shifts.
Spirit: Across all worlds- once per day per amulet, when a member of your retinue wearing a Tempest Jewel comes into physical contact with someone who has been captured in another timeline, that person is instantly captured.
I took in the extremely powerful options on offer and started finding justifications for eliminating them. Otherwise I’d just sit there for a while. Stamina would be nice, but permadeath already wasn’t as spooky or likely as it once was for anyone in my retinue. Agility was tempting, but I’d get all that and more if I was just patient. Intellect would be… complicated. Useful, I was sure, but easily the largest investment.
That left the two perks that would help my isekais. Of the two, I decided on spirit. Strength was nice and all, but spirit would effectively turn into a full binding if I kept sending people to other settings. Anyone in the Warcraft setting would find themselves tripping over new recruits at every turn, and it looked like everyone was being sent to Blizzard universes. If I kept throwing people into the fray, soon a reasonable selection of individuals would be poised to be taken over by my isekais. It would get passively better over time, unlike Strength which would demand a new item to pass along every time.
Speaking of my isekais, I checked their status as well. Ursula was slowly making her way closer to her objective of saving Deckard Cain in stages. I was honestly quite surprised at the efficient military manner that the arrogant lesbian was approaching the whole process with.
Each day she would lead her slowly growing unit of warriors and neophyte witches with at least one clear primary objective and a few secondary ones: Activate the teleportation circle in the ruins of Old Tristram and loot some of the nearby farms for supplemental rations, for example.
Once her men were starting to show signs of fatigue, she would fall back to the nearest waypoint and return to New Tristram. There, she would train her new sisterhood of apprentices and spend the experience she accumulated before retiring… always with company. She had just reached the Cathedral where Deckard had been lost when the recording shifted to a livestream. Apparently the assault was currently ongoing. I changed channels, figuring the highlight reel would let me know about anything exciting.
••••••••••
Gamon was also leading his army, mostly ignoring missions for the moment. He had a tribe of troggs to slay, and any prisoners were added to his roster. He’d negotiated a modest bounty on Trogg ears with Anvilmar and established some rudimentary trade relationships with a few individual dwarves. The Frostmane trolls had very little proficiency in smithing, so Gamon’s new chainmail coat really set him apart.
••••••••••
Imriss, as Garrosh, hadn’t had any luck figuring out the ritual circles while out on the rolling fields of Nagrand. He had, however, successfully captured an ogress in his travels. Whatever else one can say about Garrosh, he was a damn fine warrior. As such, when he was ambushed by a team of three ogres he managed to kill two of them with remarkable speed. The last, startled by his brutality, had started begging for her life. Mixed in with the blubbering had been an oath of service in return for her life, which thanks to Cairne was just as good as a declaration of love.
He’d sensed the shift as the oni-like woman had gotten a few inches taller and calmed down substantially. More importantly, several things clicked into place. He was chieftain of the Mag’har; how hard would it be to extract oaths of fealty from the majority of the tribe?
••••••••••
Vashj, in contrast, was an absolute shit show. She’d successfully kidnapped a handful of archers and added them to the retinue before getting caught. Given their current precarious situation, Commander Kashya responded to the discovery of a traveler brainwashing some of her troops with “shoot first and don’t bother with questions”. Two of the captured rogues had been killed right there, and Vashj was driven out of the only safe haven in a hundred mile radius.
She’d been indignant to discover that clearing out the Den of Evil (losing another rogue in the process) didn’t cause the Sisters of the Sightless Eye to instantly forgive and trust her. Out of sheer spite, she used the Price on Love she got from that mission on Andariel, the Rogues’ archenemy. As such, a mission was granted to her to secure the capture of the Maiden of Anguish, one of the seven highest leaders of the forces of hell.
Wipe out the Sisterhood of the Sightless Eye
Reward: Instant capture of Andariel, the Maiden of Anguish
Patron: Tsundere Service is upgraded so that if you break someone’s spirit, their anguish will be twisted into devotion to you. The stronger their will initially, the greater the fanaticism
Naturally, the psycho elf noble was more than happy to do just that out of pure spite. Well, at least I’d profit from it if she succeeded, and there was technically nothing stopping her from finishing her other missions in the area. She could conjure her own clean food and water, and occasionally found holy shrines in the wilderness that could provide multiple boons, but which she only used in a restorative ritual as a replacement for sleep. A bit irritating to me, as one of the other options she sensed would have converted the shrine’s energy into a physical form, granting both her and me a free bit of company swag. That’s credits down the drain, and the breaking peoples wills reward really wasn’t my style.
••••••••••
Onyxia, aka Aerith, had made her way to the Amber Ledge with her new boy toy Caroud. He was an elite soldier in Dalaran’s armies with a giant enchanted sword, but he was also just a guy and fairly susceptible to a pretty face saying all the things he wanted to hear. From there, she had started leveraging Red String of Fate and her prodigious social skills to get some missions done. First up had been talking a group of mages into allying with the nearby DEHTA encampment.
Drive out the poachers found in the Borean Tundra
Reward: pocket arcane tower
Patron: Wild Talent sharing
DEHTA were a bunch of fanatics that believed that all sentient life should be either vegan or dead, but “Aerith” managed to convince a small delegation of mages, including Caroud, that they could be convinced to join in the war against Malygos. She didn’t actually care if that was true, it was just something to do while she trained with Caroud with the sword. She had discovered something very curious, you see.
She looked like a normal girl, and felt like one. She didn’t have any scales under her outer layer of flesh. Despite that, her regional mission upgrade was still in play. She was, without a lick of training, stronger, faster, and more resistant to physical harm than the spiky haired blonde elf she’d followed here. That absolutely didn’t remove the need for training with the blade, if anything it made it the obvious next step so she could capitalize on it. She’d already learned the Mission-made Dalaran frost armor spell to sheath herself in a transparent and flexible bodysuit of super hard ice, and was nearly competent with the blade already.
I smiled as I watched her casually interacting with the members of DEHTA; shortly before the recording switched to livestream she brushed the hand of a druid from the Cenarian Circle who was instantly captured by Soridormi’s perk. They both felt it happen, though Hierophant Liandra was quite a bit more affected. Aerith was the local representative of the retinue, so the formerly quite heterosexual druidess was seeing her in a brand new light.
••••••••••
Chadro’thar’s realm was slowly growing into something a bit more livable as he accumulated nexus shards. The currency of the lords within the nexus could be obtained in several ways, and the very act of having shards made the lord’s subconscious manifest in his realm as terrain, buildings, eventually even people. Thus far, had a large green field with a faintly glowing lake that was, he supposed, meant to resemble the Well of Eternity.
He was being paid in small installments when he politely asked the lords of realms he drifted by if they had any odd jobs that needed a few spare heroes for. With Raynor and three random heroes that changed daily, he couldn’t quite deploy a full team of five (the maximum most Nexus Lords could send somewhere at a time) but doing so would give him four loot boxes and any payment he could negotiate in advance. From his few cordial conversations with other lords, the loot boxes were unique to him but every lord had some kind of passive method to generate shards for themselves.
Queen Nightshade had been quite lovely, if erratic. She had extreme mood swings whenever the hourly day/night cycle in her domain shrouded the world in darkness. Regardless, she’d paid him a nice 5 shards for each shambling plant monster he helped her to grow. When she calmed down with daybreak she explained that the Shamblers were her primary defensive measure against invaders. Without realizing it, she’d given him some important advice: others would come to steal his nexus shards if he had them, and having them was the only way to have a stable and comfortable home.
They forged a bond, allowing him to contact her again in the future and sense when next their realms would be close enough to interact. He apparently could leave his automatically named realm, the Shores of Eternity, for short periods if he spent shards and Queen Nightshade hadn’t seemed opposed to the idea of a closer, perhaps intimate, relationship. It was a bit lonely with nothing but puppets, though apparently he could spend shards to make a unique, fully sentient variant of any hero he happened to own. At this point, that meant Raynor, and Chadro’thar had little interest in the companionship of a heavily armored legal official.
He’d worked his way through the loot boxes each day, taking that which he desired (a Terran bunk bed to sleep in, a haunch of roasted reindeer meat that could feed him for at least a day or two), and converting the rest (a trucker hat, a pair of flashy curved swords) into small quantities of shards.
He wasn’t lucky enough to get another hero, those were apparently quite rare, but he did get a few buildings which were almost as rare. A smooth metal fortification staffed by men with similar armor to Raynor formed around his Core, protecting it from attack. With an effort of will and a dozen shards, Chadro’thar turned it into a proper Highborn villa occupied by elven warriors, split evenly between heavily armored swordsmen and scantily clad archers. The shards were still his, just invested into the realm itself in order to bring it in line with his will. If someone were to invade and destroy the building, they could steal the shards that made it up to empower their own realm.
It would surely happen eventually; every nexus lord he made friendly contact with confirmed it was a matter of course, something to be expected and prepared for. Several even noted that they would do it themselves if he seemed like he could take the hit, without a hint of malice. He was just a small fish so far; there would be more opportunities to profit off of him later if they let him grow a bit, and he had fewer shards invested than it would cost to set up a proper extended invasion. One must establish a core to funnel shards back, and that cost at least a few hundred shards to do. The Grave Keeper had lashed out with a few extra disposable minions to give Chad a hard time, not to actually take anything from him.
Though he also availed himself of their charms more than once, Chadro’thar had the archers teach him how to use a bow. He didn’t want to be helpless if he was attacked again. The skill of an archer minion was fairly shallow, much like their personality, but it was better than nothing and it occupied his time. He felt just a bit more secure after a few days, when he was awarded a trio of large dog men and heavily armored fire breathing constructs that seemed quite a bit more formidable than his normal minions. He grudgingly invested shards to make them part of his world, allowing them to be reborn if killed. The dog men were unchanged, but the constructs became more graceful and crystalline like the arcane sentries back home.
He was content to let chance dictate the rewards granted to him for now, but he did want at least one companion that was a bit more substantial than the minions. A true companion, instead of just another puppet. That meant 300 shards, minimum, for a hero and another 75 to create a unique skin and make them into a full person within his realm.
The cheapest tier of heroes available was mostly ill suited to his needs; of the options only two were even female, and one appeared to be a pandaren child. Valla, a pale “human” woman with midnight black hair and glowing red eyes, appeared to be the most accessible option to be his first bride.
After her, he would consider his next steps. More heroes would increase his income and allow him to project more strength beyond his borders… but did he want to spend precious shards on anything that didn’t directly make his life more pleasurable? That Tyrande woman was only 500 shards, and had some rather nice thighs. Turning this realm into a proper harem seemed like an Excellent way to spend his shards.