“Why is my womb being a bitch?” Helenn was more annoyed about the ck of news the next morning than he was. “Seriously, I get turned into a pastry with stud filling two days in a row and nothing? What does a chew toy have to do to get pregnant around here?”

  “It was only the second time,” Rykard said, finding himself in the rare position of being the reasonable one. Normally, it was his job to prove that he was the exception to every rule.

  “We need more times then!” Helenn decred.

  “We have an eternity,” Rykard told her and rolled his shoulders. “For now, we should get back on the road. After all, a dey of my conquests means a dey in growing my harem.”

  “We can’t have that!” the cherub of Subana agreed eagerly.

  A rudimentary, mostly magical, cleaning ter, they headed out. The majority of their newly acquired subjects were already up and about. One of them had even shot a deer, which was in the process of getting taken apart by Ivan. “I hope we have time for breakfast, my king,” he greeted Rykard. His tone was friendlier, although that did little to make his rough voice sound any less… rough.

  “We do,” Rykard decided, if only because he still abhorred his recent reliance on dry food. A rural stew sounded fantastic right about now.

  While all of that was underway, he opened up his map and contempted his next target. The young men that he had found here were best left here. Since he was going to take their leadership figure with him, sending them to do anything that required coordination just sounded like a bad pn.

  ‘Five more temples to check out,’ Rykard thought.

  _______________________________________________________________________

  “There’s a shortcut,” Ivan announced.

  “Making yourself useful already,” Rykard appuded and followed the musclebound guide.

  They had set out directly after breakfast. There was a saying among the people of this Hexagon: ‘A full stomach fuels the next hunt.’ Rykard rather liked it, although he had run into varieties of it several times in his life.

  “What does that shortcut look like?”

  “Nothing interesting. They made us dig out a road between the hills to connect the central temple to the northwest.” Ivan did not care to hide the resentment in his voice. “There’s nothing in the northwest. We just threw some dirt around for two summers. Could have been better spent building a forge.”

  “That does remind me, there’s a lot of basic tools around, but I haven’t actually seen any factories around.”

  “There was a city four days from here,” Ivan pointed to the direction they were going. Although the edge of the Hexagon was hidden behind the trees and the curvature of the horizon, the message was clear. “That’s where we got all our crafted supplies.”

  “Well, the situation hasn’t changed drastically then,” Rykard told them. “There’s a Hexagon filled to the brim with mountains and mines that hold more metal than you can even imagine. Don’t worry, you will soon have access to all the tools and food you can imagine.”

  Ivan grunted something in his rough voice and continued on the track.

  As advertised, they eventually found a nearly hidden gap between some of the hills. It was a ft trench that had taken advantage of an already retively deep system of valleys between the various small and rge elevations of this part of the ndscape. The result was a road that could be easily traversed, cutting the expected travel time by several hours.

  This road also was entirely covered in grass. Not even a hint of cart tracks on it. It appeared that there was infrequent usage of this area at best. Up above, Helenn kept scouting the area, checking for anything interesting up ahead. Rykard always had an eye on her, should anyone be foolish enough to try to shoot his property.

  “Tell me,” the king engaged in spontaneous small talk, “how many wars were you in?”

  “...One,” the veteran responded. “The only war. The forever war. I gave them the best twenty-five years of my life, thinking the gods would bring us victory if men like me just kept doing their part. It didn’t work. You?”

  “One,” Rykard responded in kind. “A rebellion against the rule of my parents, saying my father was controlled by my mother. A flimsy excuse for the simple wish of self determination. I gave them hell. It was over within a few months.”

  “Our experience of war must be different then… I have come to see it as a fruitless endeavor.”

  “Not entirely fruitless, if you decided to put yourself in charge of that ragtag bunch of upstarts,” Rykard pointed out. “I think what you needed was a goal that is attainable.”

  “...And now I will fight for a harem-obsessed king,” Ivan let out a dry ugh. “The gods py practical jokes.”

  They wandered through the day and arrived in sight of the central temple towards the night. Large crosses had been put up in the surrounding area. “The more I hear about them, the less I am concerned with how you treat them,” Rykard confessed, when they arrived at one of the crosses.

  On the wood hung the corpse of one of the priests. Although stripped of all his worldly belongings, his rotund shape clearly identified him as what he was. They stepped past the example of what happened to the undesirables and instead inspected the temple itself.

  It was, apparently, abandoned. No light shone through the window, no camp had been erected in its proximity, and Rykard spotted no immediate movement within either. Granted, the building was intact and even rger than the st two temples, being the apparent center of the local, theocratic administration. That it hadn’t been put to the torch was a good sign that at least some of the locals had the sense to keep beauty and effort standing, while scraping the rot out of its insides.

  The question was how to proceed from there. Ivan would know where some locals lived, so they could pick one out to talk to them. They could also investigate the temple itself, check if it really was as empty as it seemed. Those were just the first two options that came to mind.

  “Let’s pick a non-corpsey spot to rest,” Rykard stated. “We’ll investigate the temple in the morning. I don’t feel like stalking around inside a vast structure without daylight.”

  Ivan and Helenn supported the decision, and so they found a patch of the nearby forest to settle down. It was easy, as this part of the Hexagon was the most ‘developed’ of them all. That development was restricted to a little bit of agriculture and pleasure gardens, though. The decadence of the clergy was on dispy even beyond the rgest of the seven temples.

  They woke up early the next morning. That was to say, Ivan and Rykard woke up early. Helenn remained fast asleep. If there was one bad thing to say about his newest harem acquisition, it was that she cked the physical capacity to be a caretaker of his morning wood. Fundamentally not the greatest issue, Vyra and Miyo certainly fit the bill, but they weren’t around and cuddling those enormous tits all night made him eager to begin the day the proper way.

  However, by the time Helenn was up, his morning wood was gone, and working it back up and then dropping it inside her would have taken too long. “I’m so, so sorry Master,” the cherub babbled. “I know it’s my job to be a cocksleeve and all that, literally that’s my only job right now… man, I have a good life… but I just get soooo tired.”

  Rykard let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Don’t worry about it,” he told her, against the compints of his full balls. Every submissive had their drawbacks and advantages that he had to contend with - except for Miyo, for the sole reason that they had shaped each other’s tastes. To have Helenn to empty his lust into every day was already good enough to keep him happy. To ask for more was to grow just that little bit more entitled than even the king was comfortable with.

  They headed towards the temple.

  In the daylight, the structure was even more impressive. Three stories tall, with a great many arches and towers serving simultaneously as decorations and ways to oversee the surrounding area. A massive belltower extended from the northernmost point, each of its five stories possessing a stained gss window of immacute creation.

  That the foundations of the structure had the shape of a giant cross struck Rykard as ironic, considering the field of crucifixion that surrounded the area. Ivan knelt down and mumbled, “Why is…”

  “So you noticed it too?” Rykard asked, his tone serious.

  “Noticed what?” Helenn asked, looking around. Her eyes did not stray away from the corpses, nor the trails of ichor and organs that had been left in their wake. The angel looked and somewhat behaved like an innocent little creature, but she was far from childish or weak of will.

  “The blood trails all originate from over there,” Rykard expined and gestured over to a patch of the surrounding fields, more than a hundred metres away from the entrance of the cathedral.

  “Huh,” Helenn hovered up a bit and got herself a better picture. When she came back down, she reported. “So the priests all came down and faced the locals in direct combat… why would they do that?”

  “One or two I could understand.” Ivan straightened up again, dusting off his hands. “They may have gotten caught off-guard or something, but for all of them to go on a suicide charge? It's not like the fields would have let the locals set up an ambush. The clergy just ran right into their knives.”

  A trail that connected the main entrance of the cathedral to the location of the sughter only further consolidated that reading of the situation. “There’s only two reasons for the clergy to have done that,” Rykard mumbled. “Supreme idiocy or this building hides something they wanted to get away from…” He smirked widely. “Ivan, Helenn, wait here while I find out which one it is.”

  “With all due respect my king…!”

  “Are you sure, Master…?” The two spoke simultaneously and stopped when they realized. Rykard capitalized on the confused pause.

  “If there’s something truly powerful in there, I don’t want either of you getting in my way,” he stated ftly. “You might be able to help,” he pointed at Ivan, “but I won’t leave my Helenn unguarded. These are my orders. Understood?”

  “”Yes,”” the two answered in unison, then Rykard stepped inside.

  Even the vish carpets that covered the floors did not entirely swallow the echo of the sovereign’s footfalls. If the previous temples had been luxurious, the central temple was pure decadence. There was more gold in the religious iconography covering the walls than cycled through the coin purses of most merchants in an entire year. That was before Rykard counted in the various sacraments, furniture decorations, and other items whose sole purpose was to look shiny for the ‘spirituals’.

  ‘Quite difficult to take people so utterly material in their lifestyle seriously as being spiritually focused,’ Rykard thought. The only thing worse than traitors were hypocrites.

  It took Rykard very little time to catch that something was off. The air smelled of cherry and rosewood. It was a faint smell, wafting from somewhere deep within the walls. It was out of pce, infiltrating an ancient combination of salvia, herbs, and book dust. It was a sensuous, lustful, and feminine smell, the kind the exclusively male clergy would not have created in a hundred years.

  Rykard followed, getting the first idea of what had happened here. There was nothing more likely to have made a bunch of fat religious men charge straight into a popution of hardy rural folk than a woman. It was the eternal truth of all sapient civilizations that females could drive males crazy in all manner of ways.

  The smell got more intense as he progressed further into the empty cathedral. He found a number of… interesting stains on the floor. The white kind, which he refused to investigate further than a cursory gnce. There were also signs of pillows and beds having been moved around constantly. Neither of them had any of these stains. At worst, they were nearby such pillow forts.

  Rykard imagined it involuntarily. A bunch of crusty old men, kneeling around the piles, masturbating furiously to whatever or, more aptly, whoever was kept comfortable atop them. It was the first time Rykard saw these signs in person, but he had read about the kind of creature that inspired such sexual adoration, especially among corrupt priests.

  The smell eventually brought him to a half-hidden mess hall. It was even more ornate than the main praying room. The local clergy must have considered that, what little actual use the locals got out of the cathedral, still had to be second rung to their private retreat.

  In the back of that room was an altar. On the altar was a five-forked construct, representing five of the gods of the local pantheon. It was a massive thing, gem encrusted and forged from various metals. It also was a puzzle as Rykard immediately realized. The smell, now intermingling with the exciting sweetness of vanil, originated from underneath the foot of the altar.

  The puzzle took Rykard only seconds to solve. The grubby hands of the priests had left marks all over the altar, rubbing away what little oxidation had been happening. Tapping various hidden buttons and little sliding mechanisms, he eventually caused a click and the altar began to drift aside.

  The smell hit him with full force, filling his lungs with erotic energies, and arousing what he had not taken care of this morning. Eagerly, he stepped into the shaft that was revealed: a downward staircase that spiraled deep into the underground.

  Ever stronger was the sweetness that surrounded him, until it almost burned in his eyes. Cherry, rosewood and vanil, intertwining into a whisper that was practically audible. Promises of lust awoken and taken care of. Then, he turned the final corner and stepped into a chamber.

  A second prayer room, less opulent than the one above, but simultaneously steeped in many sins. Banners of handwoven cloth hung under the ceiling, each depicting a woman in a sexual position. They were tied together, creating a long band of debauchery that spiraled towards the center of the room. There, surrounded by a great ocean of pillows, was an icon of pure ruby. It depicted a deity that Rykard knew too well: Lucia, Mother of Lust, one the many demon gods.

  Although her local form was taller and bustier than what Rykard remembered from his homeworld, the six horns that protruded from her hair were unmistakable, as was the mark that her husband had engraved above her womb. The heart and the many winding patterns surrounding it were the only part of the solid gemstone that were bck. All else was crimson.

  Worship of demon gods, in Rykard’s world, had always been seen as a double-edged sword. There were ways to indulge in sin that were healthy and natural. Those that venerated the demonic deities were usually seen as eccentrics. Much like the difference between those that drank socially and true alcoholics, there was a dividing line. Usual religious practitioners became sanctimonious when they went over the line. Demon worshippers became steeped in various kinds of filth, literal or proverbial.

  That being said, Rykard had never cared much for either. The demon gods were not fundamentally evil, their tenets taken to the extreme were. It was true that it was easier to take their tenets to the extreme but that made neither their worshippers nor their spawn immediately adversarial - especially for someone such as Rykard, who was attempting to create a realm few ‘holy’ entities would speak for.

  That was why he did not become immediately adversarial when he spotted the demon in the pillows.

  She was a gorgeous being of red skin, almost as brilliant as the ruby icon behind her. She had enormous tits, gigantic to the point that they rivaled Vyra’s. A fact that made Rykard leer hungrily, eager to add a second pair of such size to his harem. Also like Vyra, this woman was quite tall, around 1,80 metres, but unlike the vampire dy, this demon had a fat ass to match her tits. Her waist was narrow. Her thighs were nice and thick. Her hair was a cascade of raven bck, intermingled with crimson red streaks, that reached well past her plush behind.

  Swirling and thorny patterns covered her shoulders, her thighs, her sides, and part of her stomach, extending down to her lower abdomen, but leaving a notable gap above her womb. A most unusual state of affairs. After all, this was a succubi and all succubi, upon being first penetrated by a man, bore the same mark as their mother.

  The succubus rolled onto her side, showing off the full, illustrious swing of her hips, down to her tiny waist, and up to her gargantuan tits, which sloped gently and firmly, despite their size. A spade-shaped tip rose from the cover of her hair, as bck as the majority of her wild and wavy strands were. The long, additional limb slithered through the air. Then, its tip began to trace up her outline, pulling Rykard’s eyes with it, until it finally arrived at her neck.

  His gaze jumped to her lips. They were of a fascinating dark red shade and Rykard found himself wondering if they were the source of the cherry scent. They would likely taste like it too. Forcing his eyes up further, he found her gorgeous features partly hidden by a curtain of hair, particurly her left eye. The right was on full dispy. A deep crimson iris, surrounding a slit pupil, partly dited in the dim light of the underground chamber. It was as bck as her sclera and as sharp as the mark that underlined her dense shes like erotic warpaint. Her forehead was put into soft winkles. Above them, a pair of short horns, a little taller than Rykard’s hand was wide, extended upwards, with a gentle curve to them.

  “Come closer,” the succubus spoke, as if she had expected him. Her voice was as smooth as oiled skin and just as alluring. Rykard found himself taking involuntary steps forwards and she looked him up and down like he was a new toy. With every step he took, she seemed less interested. She sighed, as if all of this was just one great disappointment. “You have fine senses, to be pulled in by my allure while I was trying to hide. You’ll be useful for something. Strip,” the word was said casually, bored even. “I allow you to relieve yourself once to my sight.”

  It was at that moment that Rykard dismantled the Charm spell she had cast on him. His willpower punched through the web of allure she had caught his thoughts in with ease. Typically when a Charm was lifted, the beneficiary of it diminished considerably in attraction in the victim’s eyes. Not so here. Rykard, who had let her catch him, found her to be every bit as gorgeous as before.

  She tilted her head softly, awaiting for him to follow his order. “Are you a eunuch, perhaps?” she asked. In her mind, it must have been the most likely expnation why a man would not immediately begin stroking themselves to her sight.

  ‘To be fair, lesser men would,’ Rykard thought and remained perfectly still for another moment. The succubus had not yet realized her Charm had been broken, presenting him with all manner of fun possibilities. He could py along with her little game until a choice moment. He could also reassemble the remains of the spell and turn it back on her. Perhaps he could even try and act controlled and extract some intel from her. All of those options existed, but there was also the doubtlessly entertaining choice of just jumping her immediately, surprising her with her guard down.

  So many fun choices…