The minotaur pulling the cage suddenly gave an irritated roar. "Quiet down in there!" And slammed his fist against the metal bars with a dull thud, causing the whole structure to shake and some of the other prisoners to scream out in fear. Akira had to hold onto Lazuli's leg just to keep from falling, as the latter remained resolutely still.
"We have to do this before his buddies get here," Lazuli said to Akira direly. "Unless this kinky feeder slave shit is a huge turn-on for you. I won't judge."
"Hell no!" Akira retorted sharply. "But how are you gonna take that guy on? He's enormous!"
"Let's just say"—she gave a sly wink—"I have a nasty little trick up my sleeves."
Akira groaned. "You're not gonna seduce him, I hope."
"Eww! Of course not~ Just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I always have to resort to that!"
After this exchange, Akira quickly went and got into position, silently rounding up the other prisoners for their plan of escape to commence:
"Hey, ugly!" Lazuli yelled at the minotaur. "All that shaking is making me sick!"
"Eh?" The minotaur snorted, then peered into the cage with its beady black eyes. "Which one of you softmeats said that?! I'll pluck off one of your arms and eat it like jerky!"
Akira and the other prisoners shuddered at his threat.
However, Lazuli was unfazed.
"Actually, I'm all skin and bones~" she said in a low, sultry voice, sounding almost like whining, while pinching her slim torso. "Not what I would call 'soft' meat."
The minotaur honed its sights on her.
"It doesn't matter! We'll stuff you until you can barely walk!"
With an defiant glare she pulled closely to the bars of the cage, near to his face. "If you eat me...I'll be sure to give you a raging hard erection for weeks."
"Oho! Is that so?" The minotaur grinned in amusement. "And why shouldn't I want that?"
"Because it would be very painful, of course~" Lazuli grimaced, with a flirtatious giggle. "Haven't
Akira smirked knowingly at the spectacle, crossing his arms. Predictable? Perhaps. But it was the oldest trick in the book for good reason...
In bringing the ghoulishly laughing minotaur so close to her, Lazuli had him where she wanted him and could finally reveal her hand: an all-consuming piercing white radiance emerging from within the pupils of her eyes and depths of her mouth, casting the startled face of the minotaur in its purging otherworldly ethereal glow.
Then while in this light-possessed state, she spoke onto the minotaur in a deep, resounding voice:
"As punishment for your crime: of delivering your fellow man into the shackles of slavery, so that they may be reared as big beautiful livestock for the sake of consumption..."
Akira and the other animal girl prisoners looked on with bated breaths, in awe.
The minotaur's eyes bulged in terror.
Lazuli delivered her verdict, "I sentence thee: TO DEATH!"
The minotaur gave an agonized grunt, clutching at its chest with its beefy arm before promptly collapsing onto the ground—dead.
"H-how did you do that?" Akira asked Lazuli shakily. "You got all holier than thou, 'glory be his name hallelujah' for a second and then just"—he glanced down at the unmoving minotaur in shock with his hand held out, pointing toward it, then back at Lazuli—"pulled a straight-up Death Note with cheat codes!"
Lazuli did not answer. She was too preoccupied with reaching through the bars to take the ring of keys that were dangling from the minotaur's belt.
She handed the keys to Akira. "Alright, get moving. I'll be creating a distraction."
Akira opened his mouth to say something—to again beg Lazuli to reconsider—but was interrupted: by the sounds of an approaching stampede of running hooves!
There wasn't much time to deliberate—he had to think fast.
"Alright, screw it—"
Akira hoisted Lazuli over his shoulder.
"AH! Set me down this INSTANT, you idiot! I told you not to worry about me!"
"Change of plans!" Akira shouted back at her, starting to sprint. "I'm the MC, so I'll be the one to call the shots around here! No cute girl is gonna die on my watch!"
Akira fled, carrying Lazuli still, through a torchlit maze of corridors with the other escaped-animal girl prisoners in tow while being chased by a large group of the minotaur girl-slavers.
"Hurry!" Lazuli urged him, kicking he feet against his back. "They're gaining on us!"
"I'm running as fast as I can! Just with these things—"the giant, beanbag-like breasts of his new form were flopping in all directions, bouncing and hitting into his face, making it incredibly difficult.
"No wonder! Who taught you how to run by swinging your arms around like that?"
"I'm a guy! This is how guys run!"
"Well you're definitely not a guy anymore!"
"Quit criticizing me, woman! Don't forget that I just saved your life!"
"As if! NOW who's the one being a tryhard hero?!"
Akira had no idea where he was going, in more ways than one. Every turn along the dark corridors just looked the same, with no sign of any progress being made towards an exit.
"What kind of crazy new player zone is this!" he yelled at Lazuli. "There wasn't even a character select screen!"
"Didn't you read the new player's manual?" Lazuli said.
"Err, well..." Akira had a sheepish frown, his lips forming a sideways 'W'.
After a while of following many twists and turns through the maze that seemed to go on endlessly, the sound of stomping hooves of the pursuing minotaurs gradually faded.
"This is where I get off," Lazuli said, climbing off his shoulder. "It's safe for us to rest for a bit."
Pant, pant. Akira was catching his breath when he shot her a thumbs up, gradually slowing in his steps until he came to a full stop, falling against the wall with a relieved sigh. "This body, strapped with all these dead weights, definitely isn't suitable for running."
Lazuli knelt beside him. "I'm sorry for getting snippy with you. I should really be praising you for how well you've done."
"I'm...adaptable, if anything." Pant, pant. "But what were you planning to do, if I left you behind? Were you going to use that godly insta-kill power of yours and turn that place into a bloodbath?
Lazuli sat against the wall beside her, with a contemplative look in her attractive blue eyes. "I...was going to attempt to free the other captives. It's why I waited so long to try to escape: by intentionally allowing myself to be caught, I could be brought through the maze to where the minotaurs were holding their prisoners. All those low-level girls that have been mysteriously disappearing as of late." She smiled sadly. "To be honest, I probably would have bitten off more than I could chew. I have an insta-kill, but it can be exploited. Especially if I'm against a large number of enemies at once."
"Low-level…high-level..." Akira mused. "Is there, like, a status menu I can check? Don't tell me this game is so backwards that it doesn't even have that."
"Here…do this—" Lazuli gestured through the air with her finger, in the shape of an 'S'.
As she did, a translucent floating menu screen appeared in front of her, showing a long block of text and numbers.
"Woah!" Akira craned his neck to read what it said:
~~~~~~~~
Name: Lazuli Hirano
Race: White Faun
Level: 5
EXP: 158/729
Class: Lightbringer Paladin ★★★★
Guilds: Church of the Holy Crusaders
< Strength: 9 >
< Agility: 5 >
< Stamina: 7 >
< Willpower: 11 >
< Dexterity: 3 >
< Charisma: 14 >
< Luck: 5 >
~~~~~~~~
Skills:
Holy Intervention
Protects a target from attacks with a barrier of divine energy.
The strength of the barrier is increased based on the user's
~~~~~~~~
Legendary Skills:
Power Word: Judgment
Sentences Instant-Death on a chosen target or group of targets.
The maximum # of targets per casting is increased based on the user's
Limitations:
Targets must have committed a "Grave Injustice" within the caster's presence.
~~~~~~~~
"Now we're talking!" Akira chirped excitedly. "A system! I can't wait for all the annoying distractions of it telling me how much
Lazuli chuckled. "Everyone in this world has an experience level, tracked by the Deep Karma system," Lazuli explained. "It's basically a score of how powerful and skilled you are, since every level grants an automatic increase to a few stats, along with a few points you can use to spend on any stat of your choosing."
Akira's excitement had already waned. "There was a time when I would've thought this was cool," he said as he looked away, suddenly appearing bashful. "Way back...before I got a life."
"Wow." Lazuli rolled her eyes, scoffing. "Way to just casually insult me like that."
Akira shrugged. "Sorry," he said, briefly biting his lip in a sheepish way, then making a playful smile as he swiftly appeared up behind her. "Did I offend you, madame?" he said in a made-up voice to sound rather like a posh butler, while rubbing his hands across her shoulders and neck. "Shall I make it up to you, with a gentle massage? Or perhaps something else would strike your fancy. Anything else. Simply ask, and it shall be done."
"It's...fine." Lazuli was suddenly very serious. Seemingly very affected by Akira's prior words. "I'm just...surprised, is all. That really came out of nowhere."
"I'm not usually so volatile." Akira said smirkily. "Only when I'm passionate."
Lazuli pulled away from him suddenly with her arms crossed, looking at him with amusement. "Alright...Mr. Passionate. Your personal politics on gaming aside, would you like me to run you through how all those stats work? While we're at it, we can check what class you have, And since every new player is granted a starting skill—"
"No," Akira quickly said, turning from her. "I don't need to fill my head with all that junk. A run a big business in real life, so there's enough of a competition for real estate going on in there as-is."
Lazuli was incredulous. "But, Akira...if you're going to get anywhere in this world—"
He snapped back, with a severe look, "I'm NOT going to 'get anywhere' in this world—at least not for long. After nearly being force-fed, raped and eaten—and worse: humiliated—at Level 1, I've decided it would be in my best interest to log out of whatever this game is the first chance I get, and never coming back."
During all this back-and-forth, the pair hadn't been paying much attention to their surroundings.
"Listen!" One of the other girls that was freed from the cage—the Naruto-like cat girl—suddenly said, holding her ear out in the direction of a faraway noise. "I hear them coming!"
Akira and Lazuli exchanged worried glances. "Let's go," the latter said, her eyes narrowing into a glare ar Akira. "We'll talk more about how much of a reckless idiot you are later."
Continuing along the dim, dungeon-like passageways, it wasn't long before they made it to a wide-open room which appeared to be a guards' barracks, with bunk beds and weapon racks containing swords and axes and spears, as well as a small kitchen area with a stove and a small wooden table and chairs.
Seated at the table was a group of four minotaurs: these ones fully armed and equipped with crude leather armor, all glancing up at the girls curiously. Evidently caught in the middle of a card game.
"Shit," Akira said under her breath. "They look tougher AND drunker than the ones downstairs."
"I won't be able to use my [Power Word: Judgment], either," Lazuli said. "Unless I witness them committing an immoral act." She glanced back toward the mouth of the hallway through which they'd come. "And if we dawdle here for too long, the ones pursuing us are going to catch up. So we need to act fast."
"Women," one of the minotaurs mooed, rising from its chair with a swaying stagger.
"He's drunk!" Akira exclaimed, at that time noticing the bottles of liquor that were on the table and littered across the floor.
"So what? If anything, that just makes it worse for us!"
Akira considered all the variables: neither he nor the other captives could fight, and Lazuli was heavily handicapped. Unless she witnessed the minotaurs committing an immoral act.
"What constitutes an 'immoral act,' for the purposes of your skill's requirement?"
"Well…" Lazuli thought about it for a moment. "It's based on what is written in the Codex of Lawful-Good: a sacred text among us acolytes of the Church of the Holy Crusaders."
"Basically the Ten Commandments?" Akira suggested.
"More or less. With a few differences." She wondered where Akira was going with this.
Akira was smiling, a plan coming together in her head.
One of the other prisoners was near to her, frozen and trembling in fear while staring vacantly at the looming danger of the minotaurs…
The mouse girl.
Oh God, he thought, why'd it have to be the dummy thicc kawaii mouse girl?
The solution in Akira's mind all came down to a simple principle of supply and demand as, in a flash, Akira pulled the mouse girl toward him while their allies watched in horror, uttering a quick, unconvincing "whoopsie" before tearing away their slave top as she let out an incredible shriek. All in one swift and decisive motion.
Lazuli yelled, "what the Hell are you thinking, you bastard?"
"I'm supplying the goods!" Akira replied, holding the struggling girl in a secure throat-lock, forcibly turned her so that her bare chest was exposed to the minotaurs. "How's that, you disgusting cow-fucks?"
All the minotaurs rose from the table at once, licking their chops and impatiently snorting.
The other animal-girls were losing it: frantically yelling and pulling on Lazuli to get her to act; to make Akira stop…but she wouldn't budge. All except for hat-girl, who simply stood there and watched it all happen with an ominous, wide-eyed stare—almost with a stupefied look of pure awe at the CEO's vile handiwork.
"You're insane," Lazuli murmured under her breath, fearful of what was to pass, and being unable to stop it.
As with a horrible high-pitched squeal, the mouse-girl was then shoved from Akira's grasp—
—directly into the waiting arms of one of the minotaurs!
And what proceeded from there went exactly according to Akira's plan: At once, the pack of severely inebriated minotaurs assaulting the poor girl who lacked any power to resist them. Their brutality was unmatched, ignoring their victim's pleas that gradually waned until she became listless—tragically accepting of the cruel fate that had befallen her.
Akira, remaining coldly expressionless in spite of his pivotal role in the crime, merely glanced over at Lazuli while she was conversely brought to tears by the savage spectacle.
And to her, Akira said, simply and without a hint of remorse but instead a faint mischievous smile:
"Thou shall not commit adultery."
Lazuli understood, now. Thou she hated that she understood.
Feeling the divine light growing within her, overflowing through her eyes and mouth, she knew that she would be able to cast her [Power Word: Judgment] spell.
"As punishment for your adulterous actions, I condemn you all: TO DEATH!"