Jacob’s hand tightened on his sword.
Vess was already moving.
They came through the chamber doorway.
The room was large. Carved from the natural rock. The ceiling was high. Torches in iron brackets on the walls — not goblin torches, something placed with deliberate intent. The floor was flat and cleared of debris.
At the far end was a throne.
Not constructed. Natural. A formation of rock that had been worn by something’s repeated presence into a shape that functioned as a seat. It was large. Everything in the room was scaled to something large.
The orc was seated on it.
It was not a standard dungeon orc. Standard dungeon orcs were the size of large humans. This one was the size of a horse at the shoulder — not in height, but in mass. The body was grey-green and built in layers, muscle on muscle, the kind of physical construction that suggested something had been eating and training and growing for a very long time in a very closed space. Its head was heavy-jawed. Its tusks were full-grown. Its eyes were red-orange, the same frenzy color as the goblins’, but intelligent where the goblins had been purely instinctual.
Its cock was out.
Twelve inches. Thick as a man’s forearm in the midsection, thicker at the base. Dark green, veined, the head a swollen, blunt battering ram that had been designed — evolutionarily, brutally — for exactly what it was being used for.
It was inside a woman.
The woman was human. Young. Early twenties. Her armor was gone — stripped completely, piled in the corner with the professional indifference of a creature that had done this before. Her body was pale and soft and being held in the orc’s both hands like a cup. Its fingers wrapped around her hips and her waist, the knuckles the size of her kneecaps.
It was lifting her and lowering her.
Using her as a sleeve.
Her tits swayed with each motion. Her head was back. Her throat was marked. Her eyes were wet and streaming but the irises were visible — she was conscious. She was aware. She was looking at the ceiling with the particular dissociated attention of a woman who had decided to be somewhere else while her body was being used.
"Hah— hah— stop— please—" Still the same small voice. Not performance. Just the last thing her body was producing automatically.
PAH PAH PAH—
"Aaangh~!! Mmgh~!! Hngh~!!"
Her cunt was stretched to a degree that was visible from the doorway — the ring of her entrance white and shining around the green shaft, pulled outward with each lift, pressed inward with each drop. The seed was leaking from her already, running down the orc’s shaft in thick streams and dripping from the base to the floor. Her womb was full. Her belly was slightly rounded with it.
The orc had not noticed the intruders.
It was focused.
"YOU BASTARD—" Vess’s voice cracked across the chamber.
The orc looked up.
Its red-orange eyes found the two figures in the doorway. Something moved across its face — not fear, not surprise. The slow, heavy calculation of something that had been at the top of this particular food chain for a long time trying to remember what a challenge felt like.
"GET HER OUT OF THERE!" someone from the party yelled.
The adventurers rushed in.
They moved as a group, the combat-trained muscle memory of experienced dungeon fighters overriding everything except the basic knowledge that the woman needed to be separated from the orc before anything else could happen. Two fighters went left. Two went right. Vess went straight up the center with her long sword raised.
The orc stood.
Still holding the woman.
Still, casually, impossibly, holding the impaled woman against its cock while it stood from the throne and turned to face the incoming fighters. The woman cried out at the movement — her body jerked, the cock shifting inside her as the orc rose.
"Aaaaaanghh~!!"
Jacob stood at the threshold.
He was not rushing in.
He was watching.
He watched Vess engage the orc — her long sword scoring against the forearm as the orc swept the woman out of the way, placing her on the throne like an object being set aside. He watched the other fighters circle.
He watched the orc move — heavy, slow by the standards of smaller creatures, but with the particular force of something that did not need to be fast because nothing had ever required it to be fast.
"I will have to—?!!"
SWOOOSH
BOOOOOM!!
The ceiling came apart.
Not from the orc. Not from anything in the dungeon. The explosion came from above — from outside, from the surface, tearing through three levels of limestone and carved stone and goblin-packed corridor like a fist through wet paper. The shockwave hit the chamber walls and the torches went out simultaneously and for one full second the room was dark and full of falling stone.
Then the dust settled.
The orc was gone.
Not fled. Not retreating. Gone. The throne it had been seated on was a crater of shattered rock. The walls behind it had a hole the size of a cart. The fragments of something — dark green, massive, unmistakably organic — were scattered across the chamber floor. An arm. A section of jaw still bearing one full tusk. The remnants of a chest cavity that had been turned inside out by the impact.
The adventurers stood frozen in the dust.
Vess had her sword up. Her training kept it there even when her eyes could not find a target. She turned. She turned again. The chamber was silent except for the soft patter of small stones still falling from the hole in the ceiling.
She looked up.
Through the hole, three levels up, the gray sky was visible. Morning light. And in the morning light, descending slowly through the column of dust and broken stone, a shape.
A man.
He was holding a woman.
The adventurer who had been on the orc’s cock — she was in his arms. Cradled. Her naked body against his chest. Her legs hung. Her head was back. Her hair was dusty. She was breathing. He had pulled her from the throne before the explosion had finished processing in anyone else’s mind.
He descended through the hole.
The dust parted around him. The light caught his face as he lowered into the chamber and the first coherent thought every person in the room had — fighters, mages, healers, Vess herself — was not tactical. It was not threat assessment. It was the involuntary, biological, completely undefendable reaction of human beings encountering something beautiful.
He was extraordinary.
The jaw was clean. The eyes were dark and warm and utterly without the self-consciousness that beautiful people usually carried.
The black hair had no dust in it. He wore traveling clothes that should have been common but were not.
He moved through the ruined chamber with the unhurried authority of a man who had just destroyed an orc warlord through three levels of stone ceiling and found the effort unremarkable.
In his arms, the woman from the throne stirred.
He looked down at her. He placed one hand flat against her abdomen.
The healing magic was invisible but its effect was not — the color returned to her face immediately, the labored breathing smoothed, the marks on her throat faded from deep purple to pale yellow to nothing.
The stretched, bleeding entrance of her cunt closed. Not vanished — healed, the tissue rebuilt, the damage undone with the calm precision of someone who had done this before.