Anthony woke up lazily, arching her back and yawning as her blanket fell from her baggy sleeping robes. Still sleepy, she considered simply calling in sick at the temple for a moment, it was friday anyway, most people would leave their rites for the next day if the last month was anything to go by.
Not like there were many other half elfs around for her to help anyway. There simply weren't many others of her race at the moment, though the same couldn't be said about the future thanks to the amount of werebeasts, beast kin and mons... greens that had moved into their society recently, which somehow seemed to also coincide with an unnatural rise in elven fertility.
The patron deity of elfs was really something, to make the high and mighty guardians of nature submit and settle down with such mild temperament that it was questionable wether the time of the elven empire happened or not.
*KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK*
Expression growing serious, the brown haired young woman quickly shot out of her bed, eyes glowing as her vision now revealed the exasperated looking 'courier' sent to call her. His robes and hair were a mess, but he had no ill intentions to her. Still, her alarm had not... had she seriously been holding the bell this whole time? She'd need to have someone make adjustments to the thing and it's location again.
"Your eminence, are you awake?" Came the call from the older priest.
"Just woke up, come in." She said, storage ring quickly changing her sleep clothes for the black robes with white and silver linings, the silver fractal blazon at her right breast the only thing really showing her to be a bishop, the moment it took for her visit to open the door more than enough to mask her momentary nakedness.
"I'm sorry for the sudden intrusion your eminence, but all the high clergy is being summoned, a catastrophy level event is happening and her holiness has called for all immediately." The man didn't have much time to say his piece, for the moment she heard the reason, Anthony was rushing through her windowed veranda and flying with a burst of air towards the white, red and gold tree at the center of their forest-city.
Leaping from tree to tree, rooftop to rooftop and even one specially large bear walking the streets, the half-elf charged feet first into a veranda window of the holy tree, rolling on the ground only to sprint towards the parliament chamber without doubting her route for even a second.
"Third place at two minutes and forty nine seconds. Nice." Snorted a young man she did not recognise. Looking at the other two confused bishops, she took it to mean she wasn't the only one. Seeing as their leader just rolled her eyes and hit him in the arm, this was probably not an enemy.
He didn't look very special, though to be fair she was comparing him to elves mostly, but he certainly had a boyish charm. Short brown hair, a cute small smile that reached dark brown eyes, a fine dark green tunic, dark blue pants of an unknown material and brown boots. On his neck line he had a silver chain holding a finely carved gem that looked like a small bird with some more silver details. A ring on his right thumb, index and middle finger, plus a blue silver band on his left ring finger.
More importantly however, she could not actually guess how powerful he was. While she could tell he was doing something with his voice that made it very attractive, it was hard to tell exactly what that was. As the room quickly filled with all six bishops, he comented on each and everyone's arival, giving out seemingly random times.
"Well that's everyone? Ok, i think we can start now then. Hello everyone, nice to meet you in person. While i would like to be an asshole that just called you here because you needed to meet me, there's also the fact that there will be a divine war not two days away, and you should all start preparing. Each and everyone of you will be maning our defence, ussing my divine domain and artifact under the direct comand of my crazy subordinate. She's not here because she wanted to study the whole array before anything, but you can consider Elizabeth to be the subordinate goddess of glutony, dark and deep elfen, so she has quite the power as well." The young man now sitting on the arms of the grand priestess' throne calmly explained, all taking in the information despite the irregularity of the situation.
Obviously that didn't last for long though.
"Your excelency, would i be right to assume..."
"Unless you were going for a sexual innuendo, the answer the answer is likely yes." Aki nodded, interupting the elf with deep blue skin bordering black and silver hair. While he was not a master, it was easy enough to tell she was an empath, which is to say say a mind mage that knew how to manipulate emotions, and if the smell and heat from her body were indication, she was very horny.
That was the bishop of lust, most definetly. His church was basically fixated on the bright sides of the seven deadly sins, most of it being a philosophy to live for rather than a guide on how to worship him. This translated to the fact that whatever peverted got admitted as the representant of love, lust, sex and focus would become even more of a nympho while also becoming a hopeless romantic banked by his desire for happiness to those he loved and the very laws of carnal desire in the realm.
"So you and the high priestess are maried and constantly having mental sex during prayer?!" She excitedly jumped, eliciting a groan from most in the room, though Vanes was very much blushing and daring her parter to say something. The would be god just grinned at her. How could he not be proud of any moment he spent with such an amazing person?
"I am not allowed to say anything about that." He shrugged, then turned on his back and picked his lover's head between his hands, fixing their lips together and stealing her tongue for a moment before the embarassed elf could protest in any form. A small gleaming bridge formed between their parting lips as one of them pouted and the other grinned. The bishop standing in front beamed in happiness too, though she was mostly happy for a friend. "If no one else has any question then i'd like to have some alone time with my priestess. I only came back some fifteen minutes ago, so we have a lot of cuddling to do."
The tomato by his side pinched his sides, finding mostly only compact muscle knitting softly beneath her fingers, the hardness increasing the more pressure put on it. It wasn't fibrous, more like she was pushing through a layer of high quality cloth surrounding metal.
"Don't mind him, we will be figuring out the best contingencies and action plans. Expect news soon." Nes added with a grumble.
"One does not stop the other dear." Aki slowly brushed her hair, the golden locks pushed behind her ears with small and precise movements. "I promise not to be much of a distraction. It's not like i'm much of a strategist to begin with, but keeping you at peak mental state is easy enough." He nodded with a sweet smile. "To work everybody, we're feasting on divine flesh by the end of the week." The grin he had at the end of his sentence wasn't nearly as pretty however.
*****
"Harder."
"Dear, i'm already being heavy handed, it's just..."
"Harder!" She begged in a moaning voice. Aki couldn't finish his sentence, but since she was indeed in a bad shape, he decide to try some acumputure with his claws, allowing some relaxation medicine to drip into the muscles below.
The idea itself wasn't exactly the kind of thing a doctor would recomend, but any normal doctor would also note how ridiculously tight and tense were most of the muscles in the elven priest body's. Despite having enough dexterity and experience to categorise as a masseur, the young man simply could not untie or undo a lot of the damage caused by excessive stress on his lover.
He'd honestly expected to have some sexy times after he'd relaxed her enough, but this was more in line with something that would need severe muscle surgery and terapy. His blessing granted her plenty of room for phisical growth and greater healing, but those seemed to only make her feel more pain instead, because Vanes had somehow been straining herself to the point that her already enviable phisicality just couldn't keep up.
His first thoughts about her excessive temperature had been that she was doing something related to fire or running a spell to reinforce or train herself, but no, it'd aparently been her body simply growing and deconstructing at a rate that'd make a novel protagonist proud. Without his teaching, she'd simply have died, but at the same time, it was exactly because of them that she could even begin to strain her growth potential in such a manner.
Vanes had, surprisingly enough, had just as much growth in her magic as he did despite the time disparaty caused by the system, learning how to run two mind constructs, which gave her extra brain space and processing capacity, and how to force her body to exercise even when standing still by exciting it with ridiculous amounts of energy that generally broke her flesh and muscles down while using the very same energy to heal herself.
This was not a streamlined process however, and neither did she have someone else check her body because she wanted to maintain an image of power and leadership, which ended up amounting to a worrying amount of problems and redundancies that ended up reducing her speed of growth and causing a lot of pain, which in turn made her more likely to develop these problems.
Aki theorised that she would eventually reach a tipping point where she'd instead grow weaker or become a flesh abomination full of cancerous growths, seeking more and more energy while loosing her mind in favor of pursuing even more power in the form of more powerfull flesh. The later was actually more likely thanks to him and how much she could regenerate naturaly because of being a high elf.
It was possible to simply knock the madwoman out, void parts of her limbs and grow them back part by part, but that would simply get rid of her grownth as well, and it was simply not an option to allow for her to become weak when he'd be making so many enemies so soon, so instead he dealt with her problems one by one, destroying and reinforcing flesh as he kneeded it.
This also caused plenty of pain, but because of his methods involving plenty of healing and some numbing medicine, there was also plenty of pleasure. Thanks to her transformation when they'd firmed a contract, the elf was honestly enjoying the process. Another good thing was that he already knew how to fix the problem at the root, though that would be done through a treatment of continuous reinforcement of her soul rather than an intantaneous button press or the like.
Stop gap measures would also be quite simple, he just needed to give her a personal nurse capable of detecting these 'hidden complications' and ask her to rein in her intusiasm until she'd properly reached a balance. The amount of time she'd spend like that would be rather long, progress mostly focusing on her utility and flexibility in battle, but as long as the person helping her was trusthworthy....
Aki looked down at his lover's nacked back. He'd been stradling her for a better position for a while now. Her perfect, sculpted arms, smooth and cute hands, defined back, lovely long neck portrayed by soft and lustruous golden hair. Her clear eyes asked him why he'd stopped as her blushing cheeks turned towards him, her parched throat sore from her enticing voice leaving her so often.
Giving her a quick peck as he leaned forward and kneeded her shoulders, the young man decided he'd just have to slaughter some more divine beings to quickly be able to deal with any problem himself.