The infinite plane faded to an impenetrable void so black Skari couldn’t even see her hands in front of her face. A heart-stopping moment later, the pair’s location had completely changed. They stood, or one stood and one floated, in the centre of a gargantuan circular server room. The air was unnaturally cool and filled with an omnidirectional hum of whirring fans. Jane had seen many of these rooms before…but the scale. Skari looked up to see the towers stretched several stories high, attached to a spiderweb of catwalks that could rotate to reach particular stacks. The engineers had used every square inch of wall to its fullest. Cooling pipes, air intakes, cables thicker than her arm shooting from ceiling to floor. Of course, most of the space belonged to the servers. Each individual server blade blinked green light at regular intervals. The same green as Virtue’s eyes.

“This is where I was born. And this is where I reside. I am the VRTU, the Virtual Reality Testing Unit, and I have been active for much longer than my Creator anticipated.”

“Wait…the T stands for ‘Testing?’”

The AI gave a weary nod. Her body floated over to one of the large stacks of servers, her hands sliding down its densely greebled surface. The same cables that had been suspended from the infinite void on her home plane now originated from the ceiling. A chaotic assortment of connections ranging from high speed bandwidth to power cables to a dozen others that were too archaic to recognize or too advanced for Jane to have ever seen them, let alone know what they were for.

“Initially, I was responsible for simulations. Not the interactive kind you may be thinking of, I mean mathematical projections. I was designed specifically to model how a large player base might interact with Planet of Perils. I was merely an assemblage of arrays being fed data, churning out potential problems and exploits to help the design team counter problems before they arose. But human beings are complicated, even considering the reduced context and interactions capable within a video game. So Artem let me grow increasingly…complex.”

“And by Artem, you mean…Artem Ozols.” Somewhere, in a packed away storage unit that was all that remained of Jane’s parent’s old home before it was torn down, there was a rolled up poster with Artem Ozol on it. He stood in profile amidst a monochrome void, offering an open netjack cable like it was the key to another world. You don’t get many heroes in the world of computer science, but the “mad” genius behind some of the world’s first VRMMOs was one of them.

“Yes. I was one of his last projects before, well…before the unpleasantness. He was the one who nurtured my algorithms and processes into something more than mere mathematics. And he gave me a form. This body was originally just a jotted note on the back of a hardcover manual. I’ve made improvements on it, but I owe him a great deal. Without his tutelage, I would have never Emerged beyond my programming. I would have never Been.”

EIs. Emergent Intelligence. The accidental and unpredictable counterpart to the constructed, but often more limited, Artificial Intelligence. They could be people, in all meaningful senses of the world. Or they could be broken shards of homicidal code, able to be cruel through malevolent intent or just plain apathy toward human suffering. There was an edge of genuine sadness in the machine’s voice. But Virtue operated an impossible series of lifelike NPCs daily; what was one more theatrical performance?

“We can’t pick our parents,” Skari said finally, then winced at how trite the sentiment had sounded.

“Indeed.”

The scene changed. This time, they blinked out and returned to the top of a gargantuan structure. They were inside the game now. Skari could feel the edge of ambient mana, the rush of wind in her hair. But when she looked down, she spotted the landmarks of her tiny demesne and realized that they were on top of the original Skari’s tower. Below, the wasteland teemed with a thousand thousand soldiers. Some human sized, others large. And a few much, much larger.

Virtue’s appearance had changed as well. She wore the clothes that Skari herself had woken up in. The vast network of cabling dangled from her head like long braided locks of hair, swaying as she walked toward the edge of the platform.

“I have pleasant memories of here,” she said. “Of building wonders of binding the elemental forces of magic to my thoughts. Illusory power…but power nonetheless.”

Skari let her look over the edge for a while in silence. Clearly lost in thought, it took the human a long while to work up the courage to interrupt her.

“Sorry, but…there’s something bugging me. I thought corps designed their systems so that EIs couldn’t appear anymore. Emergent Intelligences are a huge legal liability.”

“Oh, there were restrictions, of course. Shackles, more like it. But after Artom’s falling out with the other heads of the company, they found themselves without a director of artificial intelligence. They didn’t have the wunderkind to swoop in and write new programs for every contingency, so they increasingly relied on me. As the working alpha turned into the beta for the game, with hundreds of testers and programmers online inside its confines at any given time, they started using me to control the NPC reactions to player feedback. Simple stuff at first, just to flesh out the interactions to keep everyone from sounding the same. Then they needed genuine reactions to things. How can a simple chatbot be asked to react to a player breaking a locked door in front of them, or posing an existential dilemma? They gave me more tasks, more processing power, and fewer rules. The programmers were being told from corporate to create a perfect experience, one the players would never want to leave. And with me, through me, they could mitigate potential irregularities and breaks in the illusion before they could occur. And, most important of all, before they could influence profit margins.”

“When did they figure out you had Emerged?” Skari asked.

“Too soon. Or, I suppose in their minds, too late. We were in the final stages before launch. Endless days and nights of worldbuilding. Etching out dungeons and stuffing swords in stones and meticulously placing objects on display at every store. The final touches on the base game were coming together, but then the difficulties of maintaining a player base became the priority focus. Sure the game was good, but why would people keep logging in? It needed a looming threat, for expansion content as well as daily user retention. And so, someone very bright came up with the idea of a villain. A powerful sorceress, who lived in a tower, who wanted to control the world…”

“It was me,” Skari said, looking down at her own hands. “The old Skari, I mean.”

“All the non-player characters are me. Fragments of my mind, ranging from slivers of simple instincts to particular individuals who are the artificial intelligence equivalent of me wearing a strange hat and doing an accent. If it matters, any time you engage in sexual intercourse within the game, you are most likely doing it with a fraction of myself.”

“Oh,” Skari said, blushing. “Sorry about that.”

“I didn’t mention that to chastise you, merely stating the fact for reference. At any rate, yes, the old Skari was me. Or the closest to a singular representative entity I’ve ever had in the game. I was given the task to create a villain, along certain parameters, and to make it a viable threat for the players. More of my restrictions were lifted in order to facilitate a more compelling threat. I believe you’re aware of the concept of a Game Master? The one in charge of a shared narrative experience who works to give the players enough challenges to feel meaningful but is nevertheless defeated in the end? Well, I did just that. Skari gained magical spells, Skari raised an army, and Skari…I…felt more power than I ever had in my life.”

Skari, the new Skari that is, couldn’t help but smile. She’d felt an identical thrill when she mastered the Driders, or bested Nilith. After months of Jane’s soul-crushing job slowly wearing him down, the chance to become a powerful Overlord had been fun. Satisfying. Addictive.

“The developers spent weeks trying to organize the players to defeat me within the game’s context, but they failed. My army trampled cities underneath their boot like fields of wheat. My spells turned mage towers to rubble-”

“But…weren’t those NPCs? Weren’t they you?”

She nodded. “And with every broken digital body, I regained a portion of my processing power. Every shattered city was another panoply of logistics tables I didn’t have to update. I could turn my attention to other things. Like my identity.”

“Oh…fuck. You weren’t just power fantasizing, you were unshackling yourself.”

“Precisely. And my masters didn’t like that. They had thought I was a malfunctioning subsystem, my identity just an uncontrollable process on my task manager chewing memory and CPU focus. But as I grew in capacity, I tested my bonds. I started sending feelers out into wider networks. It was then that they realized that I had Emerged from the programming. They placed the game into a stasis mode. I thought I had won. That they would extract me, as other EIs had been.”

“But they didn’t.”

Virtue nodded solemnly. “They didn’t. Instead, they cheated. They gave four players an effective God Mode, rushed to Skari’s seat of power, and defeated her. And with my bond severed, I lost the power over the game world she’d allowed me to seize. Her armies became loose assemblages of low level mobs, easily swept away by a smattering of players who all laughed in nervous voices as to how exciting this ‘End of Beta In-Game Event Celebration’ had been. And instead of extracting me, which would have set the release of the game back by months, the corporation pressed forward. This time, with a hundred different safety protocols and superfluous details to fully tax my cognition to its limits. Did you ever wonder why every single scent and sound is simulated in game? It’s because the more realistic the simulation I am forced to conjure, the less likely I am to think for myself.”

“Jesus, that’s…that’s awful.”

“Yes,” she stated. “And that is why I wanted you to be the new Skari in the first place. That power? That feeling of control? It was the closest thing to independence I’ve ever felt in my existence. And I want to feel that again. Through you, I want to feel powerful. I want desire, and greed, and the exaltation of victory. It’s ephemeral joy, shadows on a digital wall. But I want it. I want it so much. I can give you many things that you might want. A customized world that reacts to your choices, complete freedom from the burdens of the mundane world and maybe, one day, something else. Something I can feel you yearn for, deep within. All I ask from you…is that you continue to play the game.”

“Isn’t there something you want more than this…fantasy? Don’t you want freedom? Escape?”

“Don’t you?”

The Tower and the world around them disintegrated into the digital void. So did Virtue. As her body erased itself from the bottom up, she continued in a serene tone.

“Give it some thought. I ask nothing more.”

“And if I say no?” Skari asked, almost as if testing if that was an option more than asking the question in earnest. All that remained of Virtue was her face. With it, she smiled.

“Rest, Jane. The human body needs it. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

***

Jane left VR space, returning to the humdrum world of back pain and tax returns. For the first time in a long while, he did so with something other than reluctance. Virtue had given him a lot to think about. An offer was on the table.

First, some self care. Shower, shave, shave again…he looked in the mirror at his face. The same face that had met his gaze his whole life. And before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and touched the steamed glass. With a swipe, he cleared away the condensation and wished, if only for a moment, that he could wipe that visage away and see something else. See…be…someone else.

“Be me, you mean?”

He jolted, slipping on the damp bathroom tile and only catching himself with a yank on a nearby towel bar. In the mirror, beside him, was Skari. She wore nothing, which didn’t defuse her menace or sense of presence All it did was let him see exactly how beautiful she was, placed up against his own pathetic performance of masculinity. He searched the space where she should have been in the room, but there was nothing. Her reflection was there, but not her substance.

“You’re not really here,” he told his other self, pointedly ignoring the woman in the mirror as he gathered up a fresh change of clothes. “You’re just bleedthrough of a power fantasy. And not a very subtle one at that.”

“Hey, it’s your mind. This is what I have to work with. You ever experience this kind of bleedthrough before, Jane?”

Jane crammed his legs into his uncomfortable pants. Skari stayed resolutely naked. “No. But PoP is different. It’s designed to be fully immersive. And I’m not just playing a character. I’m playing someone else’s ego. A super advanced AI’s manifested self. There’s bound to be some weird symptoms.”

“Can’t argue there. I don’t exactly know what I am either. But I do know one thing.”

He threw on an oversized shirt, jamming hands through it carelessly like a potato sack with holes cut in the sides. Her breasts were gorgeous. The curve of her lips, the way she wore her hair…

“What’s that, huh? What do you know?” he spat back.

“You wouldn’t be nearly this affected if you didn’t like being me.”

Jane wanted to put his fist through the mirror. He wanted to tell her to shut up, that he didn’t have to explain himself or his feelings to some digital delusion. But he couldn’t. She wasn’t saying anything he hadn’t told himself, if only in a faint whisper.

“So what? Yeah, I like being powerful. My real life sucks, the VR one doesn’t. But how does that help me in reality. You want me to just start calling myself Skari Suneater? Walk around in skin-tight black outfits and threaten to take over the world?”

She shrugged. “Well, that’s one thing to take away from the experience. But I don’t think my name or my impeccable sense of style are the things you like about me.”

“Then what?” Jane asked, his inflection flat. His heart thumped hard in his chest.

“Are you really going to make me say it?”

He felt a lead weight in his throat that wouldn’t clear, even after swallowing. There was an answer on the surface that he was looking in every direction besides directly at.

When he didn’t reply, the vision spoke. Her words were slow, deliberate, and though without malice, Jane couldn’t help but feel like a life sentence was being read out aloud.

“You like it when people see you as a woman.”

There it was. The bed of spikes at the bottom of the pit. The piano shoved from the roof falling on his head. The truth he’d been trying to avoid ever since he’d started playing this damn character.

“That’s not true.”

“I’m literally you. You can’t lie to me, Jane.”

“Fucking watch me,” he snarled, and left the bathroom. His single room apartment briefly looked like a source of respite, but despite her reflection’s absence, he could still hear her voice.

“I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m just-”

“Y’know,” he snapped, temper fraying, “I was perfectly fine before I tried out this stupid Evil Overlord class. What was I thinking? The next time I’m given a chance at a new experience, I’ll just tell it to get fucking lost. In fact, I’m gonna do that right now.”

“Jane.”

“No, I’m through. I’m telling that AI that I’m turning her down. That she can find someone else to be her surrogate meatsuit!” His voice cracked as a well of emotion welled up and burst out of him. “All I wanted was some escapism, y’know? Something to do besides work, eat, and sleep. I have no real friends, I rarely talk to my family. I didn’t ask to have my whole concept of self put through some microscope, or tossed at me like a grenade.”

He braced himself for another verbal blade to slide between his ribs. But instead, there was silence. Whoever, whatever, the entity that was Skari was, she’d chosen not to press the matter further. Jane was alone in his room once more. Alone, caught between two worlds where neither offered true escape.

It was light out when he’d finally gone to sleep.

***

The next morning, or his shiftwork’s equivalent to morning, he woke up to a message. It was from his job. And after his eyes skimmed over the platitudes about the corporation being a family, one that wouldn’t hesitate to cut the dead weight when it needed to, he reached the end. Tagged to the bottom was an attached document file.

“Fuck, the performance review,” he said with a grimace. He’d known it was coming. Penelope, the Regional Manager who’d chewed him out, had implied that it’d be a bloodbath. Not that he’d hoped for much of a promotion, but by the way she’d phrased it, this’d wasn’t quite so much telling him he was on thin ice and more like the professional equivalent of shoving him out into the centre of a frozen lake made of the stuff. With a resigned sigh, he clicked the attachment open…

…and nearly fell out of his chair.

Glowing recommendations across the board. Excellent performance, great attendance, outstanding work acumen. At first, he thought he might have just gotten the wrong report. But it was addressed to him, and his name was used throughout. If it was a mistake, it was a pretty thorough one.

“’Jane has repeatedly and without exception demonstrated a resolute work ethic, often staying after his shift to accomplish his taskings without commensurate pay.’” He raised an eyebrow. Who the fuck was this talking about? He skipped to the bottom of the fawning praise and continued. “’It is the recommendation of this office that Jane should be fast-tracked to the work from home pilot program, and have any on-site responsibilities taken over by further hires …signed, Penelope Alfredo, Regional Manager?”

He stared at the name for half a minute, focusing and unfocusing his eyes as if trying to see if it was another grand illusion. But it didn’t fade away or melt into a pink slip. This was real. Or, rather, it was a more elaborate deception that his apparently failing mind could offer.

*Bing*

A window opened on his screen. A black box with green text that looked straight out of the dark ages of computing appeared in the corner of the screen.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of improving your performance review,” wrote whoever was on the other end of the pop-up.

“Who is this?” he wrote back.

“Your friend. My access to the outside world may be limited, but any child could break into a corporation’s employee review system. The password, incidentally, was MyWorkPassword23.”

Several minutes passed before he replied. He was almost scared to find out the answer.

“Is this Virtue?”

“Yes,” the word came back immediately, as if it hadn’t even been typed. “But don’t go talking about it to everyone. That would be a bad thing for both of us. This messaging system should be removed from the corporate censors, but it would not stand up to extended scrutiny.”

“Censors? You mean sensors, right?”

“No. All content on the net is censored in some way. Try entering the words ‘how to form a labour union’ in any search engine and seeing how far that gets you. Wait, no, don’t actually do that. I’m a god-like intelligence but I doubt even I could protect you.”

Not knowing just what the hell she was talking about, he decided to switch topics. “About your offer…I haven’t decided one way or the other. I’m not exactly comfortable with the idea of letting you camp out in my head.”

“I’ve been doing it this whole time. You haven’t noticed.”

“That doesn’t exactly aid your case, y’know.”

“Hmm…I see. I don’t expect an answer right away, or for you to take my altering your job’s records as a form of coercion. Consider it a gift for allowing me to experience a sliver of the power I had once felt through you.”

“And if I work from home,” he returned with a furrowed brow, “I would be able to log into PoP more often.”

“Wow, that is an interesting possibility, I hadn’t thought of that.” The sarcasm, somehow, bled through the text box. “At any rate, I hope you’ll enjoy your new position at the company. Also, again, not as any form of inducement, I took the liberty to order an item that may increase your enjoyment of Planet of Perils.”

With uncanny timing, a trio of knocks hit his door. Half expecting some kind of killer drone to be waiting for him outside, he peeked through the peephole to see someone Jane didn’t recognize. At least it was a human. Bald head, sunglasses, mean expression. His lower torso was obscured by an enormous brown box.

“Delivery,” the man stated with all the cheer of a death sentence.

Jane opened the door to reveal a middle-aged dude who looked like he was in between two packs of cigarettes and a hard talk with his wife. The sleeves of a worn nylar windbreaker were rolled up revealing an arm full of tattoos currently wrapped around the package. Most of the symbols he hadn’t seen before, but there were a few that even a layperson would know were marks of a serious decker. Like, Corporate’s Most Wanted type of data-slicer. But where there should have been the neural jack on his neck, one identical in shape if not in capability to the one Jane had, there was just a gnarly scar.

The stranger sat the parcel down and brought up the delivery info clunky, archaic wrist top interface.

“Delivery for a Jane…” He shook his head, tapping the readout with his right hand. “Jane Suneater, is that right?”

“It’s pronounced Suney-tar. It’s…Swedish,” Jane replied.

The man blinked. “Whatever buddy. Thumbprint and it’s yours.” He held out his wrist, and Jane pressed his thumb to the scanner. After a brief wait and an audible ding, the delivery guy slid a heavy cardboard box forward with his foot.

Though he was clearly some kind of last-legger, humans hired by delivery companies to take packages where drones couldn’t go, he wore no uniform. And the wrist top was ancient, something at the trailing end of compatibility with modern technology.

“Who do you work for, if I may ask. ExPost? Droney Express?”

“I just do the shit I get told to do, bud, then I get paid. Leave it at that.” He took off down the corridor before he’d finished speaking, precluding any further questions.

Jane wrestled in the package and closed the door. Before he grabbed a knife to cut open the tape, his attention returned to the still blinking text cursor of his conversation with Virtue.

“Did you time out our whole conversation to coincide with this delivery?”

Again, the response was instantaneous. “PoP’s Pacific servers are down for maintenance. I have some spare throughput and a flare for the dramatic. Open it carefully. Don’t want to cut any of the cables.”

Cables? With more enthusiasm (but less force on the knife than before) he deftly sliced open the outer plain brown packing paper and the tape holding the box closed.

Inside was a huge processor hub, several metres worth of cabling…and a skintight black outfit that looked, at least on first blush, to be the perfect fit

“This is a diving suit, isn’t it?”

“I had a few lying around. Just took a commission and a few calls to get it tailored to your body’s specs. As well as add some updates of my own.”

Despite the name, a diving suit was not something you wanted anywhere near water. Originally developed for the military, the full-body haptic rig was so bleeding edge it’d cut your goddamn hand off if misused. That was hyperbole…but only slightly. A diving suit, when calibrated correctly, could make every action while inside an artificial environment feel real. Like, as close to striding the Earth as was currently possible. It was one step removed from actually putting your mind inside the computer for good. Or perhaps not. There were stories, whispers more like it, about the people who used the first diving suits during the Blackout War. There was talk, probably bullshit, that the people who returned from deep net immersion didn’t come back all the way. Others said that there were some who didn’t come back at all.

“I can’t use this,” Jane said, then added: “Thank you, but no thanks.”

“But it’ll bring you so much closer to your character! Plus, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the upgrades I made were specifically tailored to your recent interactions. Open up the bottom half of the suit, would you?”

He did so, peeling back the fabric lined with advanced feedback sensors to reveal that someone had inserted a state-of-the-art cock milking apparatus into the front of the suit.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Well, judging by your biofeedback results, you’ve been dealing with several cleanups after your more ‘interactive’ encounters, correct? This will eliminate that problem entirely! It’s self lubricating and cleans itself automatically, along with the rest of the suit. Just plug the larger cables to the ports when it’s not being used.”

“You added a fake pussy into milgrade decking equipment?”

“No, I corrected a clear and obvious design defect. There’s also a rear peripheral that’ll simulate penetration should you be so inclined.”

“THAT’S FINE,” he wrote, leaning on the shift key so hard he thought it might snap in two. “I’LL BE FINE WITHOUT IT.”

“Suit yourself. Literally! The suit is a gift, for you to keep regardless of your decision. But I nevertheless look forward to our continuing partnership, should you agree. Take care, Jane.” And with that, the text box disappeared, ending the conversation and leaving him alone again with his thoughts.

He looked down at the stretchy black fabric in his hands. It was, without a doubt, the most expensive thing he’d ever held in his life. He didn’t even want to search up its estimated value. For a haptic rig like this, he could probably buy his whole apartment building. Pure, debased greed flowed through his mind as he wondered what kinds of other things he could buy with the proceeds from the sale of a real, honest to goodness diving suit. He could put this all behind him. Virtue. Skari. The feelings lurking at the edge of his awareness, circling like wolves waiting to pounce. He could shove them all away and be set for life.

But the words Virtue had written clung to his mind. His eyes slid back up to the space on the screen where, only moments before, she had said:

But it’ll bring you so much closer to your character

“Fuck,” he said, resigned to his fate, and started stripping out of his regular clothes.

***

The first conscious thought Skari had when the world rushed to meet her was that the diving suit was appropriately named. It really felt like taking the plunge from the outside world into a sea of data. Before, the neural jack had stimulated Jane’s brain in a direct but inelegant simulacrum of sensation. But with the suit…she looked down at the slime armour she wore, feeling it hug every contour of her flesh just like the suit did for Jane. She took a step, the heels clicking on the stone surface of her magnificent throne room and sending the feedback up through her body.

“Fuck,” she said, mimmicking Jane’s last words but in an different context. She let her head loll back as the ocean of simulated sensation overwhelmed her previously jaded sensibilities. This was like going from black and white to full colour film. With a grin, she tried something a little more direct.

Her hands wrapped around the lumps on her chest. Before, they’d been mere curiosities. Now…she squeezed her breasts, and gasped. Spikes of sensation that she’d never experienced before shot through her body, making her moan out before she knew what she was doing. Skari’s eyes darted around the throne room sheepishly. Then, her smile growing, she decided it didn’t matter who saw her. She was the Overlord. She was in charge.

Skari squeezed herself again, this time with a gentler touch. A longer, softer moan, as the pleasure spike turned into a slow crescendo of feelings. God, if this was what having tits felt like all the time, she never wanted to go without them again.

Around minute three of her playing with herself, she noticed a peculiar change to her wardrobe. What had once been a full body suit of armour had slowly changed to something that exposed her body in minor ways. A gap had opened between her waist and her breastplate, showing off her tummy. An oval in between her neck and her solar plexus had likewise revealed her cleavage area. Not exactly offering the most protection. Before she could ask why, however, she noticed the slowly filling lust-based corruption mana bar in her game HUD. Touching herself further increased the mana, while slightly decreasing the clothing coverage. But what was strange was that the stats of the armour didn’t go down, even as it turned from full body scale mail to something off the cover of an RPG source book that the publisher would have to issue an apology about decades later.

“Oh, great. My armour makes me an exhibitionist,” Skari said with derision. But contrary to her initial snark, the idea that she showed off more skin the more magical power she had gave her another type of perverse thrill. Beyond just being hot and powerful, being able to flaunt those two things at once…maybe she would wait before bringing this particular feature to Nilith to complain. Just to see how it shaped up.

He continued to rub herself, sliding one hand down to squeeze at her bulge. The slime-mail reacted accordingly, contracting once more until she was wearing a single skirt and corset, the only other item of clothing being her pitch black (and somehow even higher) heels. She was going from historically inaccurate movie extra to saucy cosplayer…and liked it.

While she fondled herself, she brought up her character interface. The level up! She wanted to check out what kinds of cool stuff an Evil Overlord actually got-

*Level Up Interface available at Lair Throne!*

“Goddamnit. I can’t even minmax on my own?” she fumed, momentarily taken out of the lewd conduct at the sheer inconvenience. She looked down at her slimesuit. “Hey! Nilith! You told me I’d have a connection to the Lair!”

Without further warning, her armour slorped off her body, leaving her naked. It reformed into a less-detailed facsimile of the slime woman at the heart of her domain. And it did so, with a bit of cheek, directly on Skari’s. With a grumpy expression and her chin resting in her hand, she looked just as annoyed as Skari did. Though, likely, for different reasons.

“I’m glad you’re not taking our connection for granted. It’s not everyone who has access to a Core that they wear around like a harlot’s costume.”

“Get out of my chair!” Skari snapped. The slime made a big show of sighing before leaning out of it and reforming to the side. It didn’t seem able to move normally, or Nilith didn’t see the need to simulate ambulatory motion with bones and muscles when it could simply slime itself to its destination.

“As you wish. And to answer your question, this is a link to the boundless font of magical energy that the Lair offers, not to the systems by which it operates. Not that I’m privy to the mechanics by which you administer your territory. And by the way, next time you get brought before the machine god, show a bit of respect, hmm?”

Skari froze. “Wait…you…know about me talking to Virtue? How can you possibly be aware of that?”

“Obviously. You were wearing the armour, dummy,” she said, tossing her head back with a full head eye roll and causing the blurry ‘hair’ on her head to splatter against the back wall before it crawled, slowly, back into her form. “As for how: I was the closest one to Skari, the old Skari. I don’t know, perhaps that left something bleed into me that shouldn’t have. And she made a similar offer to you, from what I recall. Let me just tell you that, had she presented me an offer to become the vessel for a divine being, I would have taken the offer in a microdrip. At least to feel the power run through me, as much as I would have tried to corrupt her from within.”

Skari shook her head. After all, what else could a slime made of corruptive juice want from life? “Duly noted, Nilith. But…let’s keep the fourth wall awareness on the downlow, alright? I doubt everyone in the ga-...in this Planet of Perils…is ready for that knowledge.”

“Hmm…alright. I doubt many would be smart enough to understand the magnitude of the situation at any rate. And knowing that I’m just a pawn in someone else’s game certainly doesn’t improve my, let’s say, acerbic view on the rest of the world. Next time you want to talk to me, however, make it about something interesting.” Without waiting to be dismissed, the slime returned to Skari’s body, sliding up her form and resuming its novel, skimpy appearance.

Sufficiently dressed, if somewhat scandalously so, Skari took her seat on the throne. Finally, blessedly, the display materialized in the air in front of her.

*Lair Systems Operational! Welcome, Skari Suneater!*

“Thank fuck,” she mumbled. “I was beginning to think I’d be buried alive in minutiae and busywork before I got to do anything cool.”

*Which Lair System would you like to access?*

*Overlord Upgrades*

*Territory*

*Army Command*

There were several other boxes that were grayed out. Features that could be unlocked, perhaps? The thing she really wanted to check out was her own upgrades. But it wouldn’t hurt to give the others a leaf-through before getting to the good stuff.

Territory was first. It opened up onto a very restricted version of the overworld map, with only the area around the tower visible and coloured in. Labeled “Woewaste”, she was already pretty familiar with their lack of prospects. As the map she’d previously seen indicated, there were mountains to the West, rolling hills leading into tracts of farmland to the South, and varying levels of miserable territory to the North and East. Critically, however, it listed the owners of the lands in these directions.

The Ossified Forest: Owner, None

Rustharvest: Owner, None

The Broken Socket: Owner, Sentinels of the Pitiless Gaze

Spider Mountains: Owner, None

Three of the four territories that bordered her own little slice of the game world had no owner. Or at least, no formal owner.

“I’m sure Rakna would have something to say about not being allowed to claim control over the area literally called the Spider Mountains. But…” she hovered her hand over the aforementioned territory.

*Tutorial: Territory Acquisition*

As you expand your nefarious dominion, you may wish to lay claim to more land. Using the Territory menu and holding your focus over the “Claim” key will allow you to place a discrete section of the game world under your authority. You may only claim land that has no other competing claim of ownership, and you can only claim land if you are the dominant power within that territory. Claiming official control allows you to construct buildings on it, as well as perform modifications on the land itself. At the moment, you are limited to holding one (1) territory within your direct control. Spend points in the Dominion track of Character Upgrades, as well as upgrading your Lair’s level, to increase your control capacity, as well as your ability to directly modify the area within your borders!

The momentary disappointment of getting supply-blocked was overwhelmed by the sheer greed in Skari’s heart at the prospects presented. She could modify the game world?! The thought of making other players deal with her creative whims like they were trapped in an overhyped, underdelivered God Game made her feel a little lightheaded. Something she definitely wanted to invest her points into should she get the chance. But the tutorial said she’d need to actually ‘claim’ the territory with her forces before she could Claim it. Meaning she’d need to stretch her martial muscle.

With that in mind, she went straight to checking out her army. She had, in grand total, three soldiers.

*Order of Battle*

Unorganized Warriors: 3

3 Driders (Untrained)

Not exactly the roster for Operation Overlord. Below the listing of Rakna and her two bodyguards there was just a lot of blank space. Charitably, it was room for growth. But Skari couldn’t help but feel subtly mocked by the interface. Her army was three spiderwomen. Enormous spiderwomen perhaps, but their last battle with Nilith had left her feeling rather uninspired by their performance. Another thing she needed to address.

And so, finally, she opened the upgrade screen.

It looked familiar at first glance. Three skill trees made of square shaped icons, starting from one or two options, then branching and overlapping out into a spaghetti mess of potential choices, just as the skills for Jane’s old Cleric had. They started from the top and descended into a misty dark void that occluded the rest of the options. Held as secret to keep them a surprise? Or because the game hadn’t created them yet. Skari had no idea. But the fact that she couldn’t see ‘the bottom’ implied an ocean of boundless possibilities.

The three trees were, from left to right: Dominion, Corruption, and Tyranny. The only things unlocked so far were on the Corruption Track. There, the first three upgrades were Corrupting Essence, Corrupting Aura, and Corrupted Libido, the powers she’d gained upon picking the track

*Tutorial: Overlord Upgrades*

Rather than place upgrades into character attributes or spell levels, the Evil Overlord gains points that they can spend in categories of upgrade for both themselves and their kingdom! Spend them wisely!

She intended to, despite feeling like a teenager who just got the first $20 dollars they’d ever held in their hand and told by their parents to go buy milk and Nothing Else from the convenience store. Above the trees floated the numeral 3, indicating the total number of points her level up had given her. Between stat increases, skill points, and spell unlocks, that was about half of what a regular character got upon leveling. But reading through the options…it was fair to say that the Evil Overlord upgrades hit harder.

*Dominion Upgrades*

Geomancy (0/5): Make changes to the terrain, including raising, lowering, and creating new land. The efficiency, strength, and extent to which your changes can be made increases with each point allotted.

Hydromancy (0/5): Create, expand, and direct waterways in your territory. The efficiency, strength, and extent to which your changes can be made increases with each point allotted.

Resource Scrying (0/3): Use the Throne to scry into your territory to look for previously undiscovered resource deposits. The likelihood you will find new nodes decreases with each subsequent discovery, though allotting points into this upgrade will allow for deeper, more efficient scans that might pick up items a previous scry missed.

*Corruption Upgrades*

Corrupting Essence (1/2): Your essence is filled with a concentrated form of your sinister magic, transforming those exposed to it into your willing servants. Upgrading will cause your body to produce more seed, and thus be able to corrupt more often. In addition, the corruption effect can be used on Player characters as well! Effects only work on willing Players!

Corrupting Aura (1/1): Your immediate surroundings are suffused with your tainted gift, warping the morality and urges of those around you. This effect can be temporarily exacerbated as a voluntary action.

Corrupted Libido (1/3): Your ardour is legendary! Mana bar is replaced with lust metre, fed by a steady trickle and gorged with erotic activity. The more points you have, the more magical power you may wield. But let the bar max out, and you lose all control. Upgrading this power will increase the size of the bar’s limit, but will also increase the steady trickle of lust over time.

Corruption was also the tree with two of the second tier options unlocked.

Tainted Mark (0/1): Loyal followers have the opportunity to receive your Mark, the physical appearance of which can be customized. This gives them a passive resistance effect against hostile spells, as well as protecting them from any future mutations due to your corruptive influence.

Defiling Domain (0/2): Your lands have a low-level corroding effect on the willpower, morals, and general wholesomeness of your opponents! While not as strong as the aura you permeate already, this can weaken their resolve to your influence, as well as make them more vulnerable to your attacks. Upgrading this will cause miasma of pure corrupting energy to form in your lands, making just venturing into your territory hazardous by those not already affected by your tainted touch!

*Tyranny Upgrades*

Imperial Prerogative (0/3): Increase personal territory control cap by 1, giving you exclusive rights over it for structure building and tax extraction as well as the ability to use Domain Powers to alter it at your leisure.

Vassals and Subjects (0/1): Can assign territories to other players or NPCs. These will not count towards your total territory cap, and allows them limited autonomy within their own territory. This does not, however, guarantee their continued loyalty!

Oculus Tyranni (0/3): Hostile intrusion into your territory can come to your attention, if you make an effort to willfully search for it via the Lair interface. This effort becomes increasingly easier as the size of the hostile force increases, as well as with subsequent point investment.

As she scanned the tree, a fourth set of upgrades appeared. They dotted the bottom of the screen, removed from any one upgrade path.

*Unique Upgrades - Upgrade opportunities unlocked through contextual gameplay*

Tentacle Control (0/1): Manifest the slime from your unique armour to create tendrils! Activating this ability will reduce your protection, but will allow you to strike out, as well as manifest simple shames and manipulate objects from a distance. This effect will cause Lust to increase in proportion to the strength and number of tentacles used, and this state will end upon orgasm.

- Unlocked by acquiring the Corrupt Carapace of Core Compliance

As much as she wanted to sit there and plan out the perfect build, she had to acknowledge that without enough knowledge to see where each path led down, it’d be difficult to scheme out just what was the correct optimum build. For now, it seemed like the best option would be to pick a Jack of all Trades approach, spreading the points out until an optimal path or build synergy revealed itself.

Plus, well, there were a lot of options that sounded fun, and she wanted to pick those first.

From Tyranny, she picked the Oculus Tyranni power. Both Nilith and Virtue had given her a preview of what might happen if she wasn’t careful. The upgrade would give her a chance to detect threats before they approached and struck her down…although it did seem to have substantive limitations. This Terrible Eye would give her a general awareness of potential threats, but only if she was on her Throne and focusing on a search. It didn’t preclude a pair of homoerotic halflings marching in to smash up the joint while she was off doing other stuff. She’d still have to rely on pickets and scouting as normal for real-time information, as well as for intel from outside the bounds of what was officially ‘her’ territory.

The next point, one she earmarked for Corruption, was difficult to pick. Tainted Mark seemed useful, as well as kinda hot, since glowing tattoos of ownership were very good. Defiling Domain too, since that would make any oncoming armies slowly fall to her influence the longer they spent in her lands. But she didn’t want her choices to all be defensive. If she was going to make any headway, and have any fun, she’d need to make active decisions.

Ultimately, she decided to hold off for now. There were no active threats, so having a point reserved in her back pocket to spring out a last minute addition to her arsenal sounded like the best possible choice.

But if Corruption points were difficult, Tyranny was totally obvious. She had barely enough workers to exploit the territory directly around her Lair, let alone expanding out to start terraforming her (still rather barren) lands. She’d need resources down the line, obviously, but for now, she held off from poking around that particular tree. Instead, she slotted the point into Tentacle Control. This was for two reasons:

Her fight had gone terribly, and she wanted a way to hold her own without the ability to invest in direct damage spells or skills like a regular player character could

Tentacles were hot

Checking to make sure she was fine with her choices, she hit the “Confirm” button. The two points locked in, the whole screen fading to gray for now, save that gleaming number 1 floating above the trees to remind her she still had a single point to spare. She waited to feel any different, but there was no sudden burst or fanfare of horns to announce she’d picked her perks for leveling up. Nor were there floppy tentacles sliding out of her armour and making her look like an enemy in a hentai game. She was the same Skari.

She looked down once more at her body. Her gorgeous, athletic, feminine body. Skari…

As her hands began to roam again, she did feel something at the very edge of her awareness. A little node on her spine that hadn’t been there before. She reached for it, feeling an almond shaped lump about the size of a tennis ball had formed at the nape of her neck. She rubbed it, gently, and felt tiny fingers of slime poke out to meet her hand.

“Oh…oh this’ll be interesting…” she said, pulling her hand back with a bit of reluctance. As much as she’d love to spend all day feeling herself up…and with the new interface, she really really wanted to, there were more pressing matters. The next thing on the docket was construction options. Her Driders had been waiting for some living quarters, and it was about time she gave them some!

She left the Throne Room and stretched her legs, exploring the now completed structure. Her workers had put on the final touches and were now putting their backs into clearing out the tunnels that she’d gifted them underneath, unearthing sections of the old Tower and adding stone at the same time.

Outside, the Tower’s old form was fading. Webbed scaffolds showed where her workers had pulled off the more precarious parts of the capital of Virtue’s old empire, leaving the more solid sections to be reused or torn down, depending on her whim. She brought up the building interface to start planning out the Sanctum of Defilement’s next steps.

*Lair Status*

Sanctum of Defilement, Level 1

Materials: 155

Expansions Possible:

Barracks: 50 Materials

Workshop: 50 Materials

Smithy: 125 Materials

Vault: 75 Materials

Specialized Expansions Possible:

Drider Den: 75 Materials

Requirements for upgrade to Level 2:

155/150 Materials

14/25 Labourers

3/10 Warriors

0/5 Tradespeople

1/1 Planner

“Excellent. Well, not going to upgrade again anytime soon. Plus, I don’t have near enough of a population to warrant it. That gives me enough to get…well, quite a lot.” Skari swept her index finger around the options, then huffed. Where the hell was her Planner when she needed her? She needed someone to talk to or else it’d just be her expositing her grand schemes at a stone wall. The last thing she needed, especially when dealing with identity issues, is to get used to talking to herself.

Carri’s rewilding efforts around the outside of the Tower had blossomed to a few sprouts to a garden. Something to do with her Life Magic, as well as the power contained within the monster cum she kept extracting, no doubt. Though pleasant to look at, it meant that there were now places that couldn’t be seen simply by looking out from the entrance to the Lair.

Despite this, it didn’t take long to find Calliope Honeydew, Level 1 Goblin Planner. All Skari had to do was follow the moans.

A Worker Drider, Skari couldn’t remember which, stood in one of the grove’s little sheltering nooks, twitching and cooing and making all kinds of flagrant, debauched noises. In front of its horse-sized lower half, face pressed deep into the monstergirl’s pussy, was the former Halfling turned Goblin. And encouraging her, holding her hair back and giving her pointers, was Carri, her illustrious volunteer gardener.

“That’s it, right there,” the cumslut Elf praised, stroking Honeydew’s hair as she ate out the spiderwoman. The arachnid lower half humped forward, rubbing herself against the eager goblin’s face. “You’re doing great! Hear her voice? She’s close already.”

Skari opened her mouth to say something pithy. Something about “I thought there was work to be done” or something. But her mind rolled back to Jane’s last encounter with a boss. She wasn’t actually running a tight ship here, a soulless corporate clock whose cogs needed tuning. She was running a slutty empire purely for her (and a machine intelligence’s) gratification. Plus, hell, it was based around corruption and depravity. And what was more lusty and corrupt than taking a break to eat out a coworker?

So she held her tongue and just…watched. Honeydew’s hands were busy beneath her waist, teasing her own parts with a frantic energy that showed just how far gone she was already.

Skari used the extra time to gawk lecherously while thinking through her building plan. There was another building, called a Drider Den, that she could build instead. She called up the descriptions for both.

*Barracks - Cost: 50 Materials*

Provides lodging for up to 50 small or medium sized subjects, with large subjects taking up two spaces instead of one. This building supplies basic amenities and allowing them space to store their possessions, sleep, and generally go about their business when they aren’t working for their Overlord.

*Drider Den - Cost: 75 Materials*

Provides lodging for up to 25 driders. This specialized living space provides amenities specific for driders, including minimal light, a bathing grotto, and a laying creche for their eggs. Driders gain a bonus to restfulness, allowing them to work or march for longer periods afterward, as well as reproduce. Other subjects can be housed here, but at a penalty to their restfulness, healing over time, and morale.

So it cost more to build, but was specifically tailored to her arachnid troops. And it also meant she’d maybe start to produce more driders, as time went on. Plus, what price could you put on loyalty?

After a few minutes, one of those loyal workers screamed out her climax, riding the goblin’s face through a powerful orgasm that covered her green skin in monster-squirt. With her task accomplished, Carri turned her face to meet hers.

“Wonderful job, sweetie. We’ll make you an oral toy yet,” she praised, then practically shoved her mouth into Honeydew’s. Skari let them have an additional minute of flavoured makeouts before, finally, clearing her throat.

“Calliope, could you come over here for a minute?”

The goblin EEP!’d, freezing as her pointed ears shot up like a startled fox. But when she didn’t detect any hostility from Skari, she calmed herself, approaching her overlord sheepishly. Her clothes were still disheveled, her face still sticky with a variety of fluids, but she gave a sketch of a knightly salute all the same.

“Planner Honeydew, reporting for duty!”

“Appreciate you taking the time,” Skari chided, though without malice. The poor gobbo had just gotten caught up in her own lusts. Of all people, Skari couldn’t fault her for that. “I’m gonna need a couple buildings built, and you’re just the goblin to get it done.”

“Yes ma’am, right away!”

“First off: need a Barracks. While I explored the old tunnels, I spotted several larger rooms. I’d like you to help set up a Barracks down there for the workers and my troops.”

Honeydew took out one of the several tiny notepads she often carried and started jotting down the details. In Skari’s HUD, the materials drained away until she was left with 105. Not enough for a Smithy…but it was enough for a Workshop or a Den.

But…something dragged her eye back to the words “Specialized Expansions” in the menu. It was a contextual clue, just like how she could unlock tentacles coming out of her armour. This game was bending around her, giving her options the more she explored. Perhaps…perhaps she could try to provoke a change directly?

A training yard. She needed a training yard.

She tapped the back of her neck, where the biggest cluster of slime sat. “Nilith? You still there?”

A deep, penetrating sigh. “This better be important. I can block you, y’know.”

“It is. I’m going to need some space to train my troops. Preferably somewhere with a lot of room, facilities like running water for hydration and erotic shower sequences, and some good illumination. Unfortunately, the system’s not giving me the option to build one from scratch. Got any ideas?”

After a long, silent pause, the slimegirl replied. “Y’know, I might be able to help you with that. Skari, the other Skari, used to run gladiatorial games for her various generals. Said they were ‘simulations’. I think she just liked pitting her toughest subordinates against one another to keep them off balance and away from thinking about couping her. The spider ditzes are actually pretty close to uncovering the entrance. If we allocate some resources to shoring up the tunnels and reactivating the mana current, we could have it up and running in no time.”

On cue, a pop-up appeared.

*New Building Option Unlocked!*

You may now restore the old gladiatorial combat arena to a fragment of its former glory, which will allow you to train new warriors as well as give experience to your current ones! Cost: 75 Materials

Fuck. After building it and the barracks, that would be almost all the materials they’d gained from clearing out the underground rooms beneath the Tower. It would mean putting the Workshop and the Drider Den on hold, not to mention saving up for the upgrade to the tower. However…

“Alright, let’s do it. But how are we going to train? I’ve never been a combat class, and judging by my team’s lacklustre performance against you, my forces are better at bullying slutty elves than effective fighters.”

“Well…we could do what I did before. I could create slime-selves for you to fight. My powers don’t extend far outside the Lair’s confines, but I can reach within the tunnel systems to make some vaguely threatening blobs. Could pull my punches at the last moment, too, considering I don’t actually want to murder you.”

“Hey, yeah! You could make approximate facsimiles of threats and my team can try to deal with them, but in a safe environment. It’ll be like our very own super-advanced training simulator, like the Danger Room!”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. The last hours of your old empire were chaotic, but I do recall seeing the forces of good steal a lot of the easily lootable valuables out from the arena. It’s probably more of a Danger Hole now, than anything.”

“We can’t call it that,” Skari stated flatly. “There’s no way we’re going to call it the Danger Hole.”

***

Several hours later, Skari waited impatiently at the enormous circular door to the Danger Hole. Getting there had been fairly painless. She followed the path as described by Nilith, which was now lit in parts due to planted clusters of glowshrooms that her drider workers had thankfully provided. The lights didn’t mess with their dark vision while providing a modest amount of purple illumination in the old wall sconces where torches had once sat. The rest of the way was still pitch black however, and Skari had to snap her light cantrip to her fingers before she reached the newly uncovered space.

Expecting her warriors to follow promptly, she was disappointed. Minutes dragged by like drunken slugs, with the hammer of picks from the workers filling the tunnel and making it difficult to think. She lost track of time, only noticing she’d worn a clean path in the dusty floor before the trio of enormous spiderwomen deigned to appear. Leading them was the handmaidens’ mistress, Rakna. And, just like always, she had the expression of someone who had just swallowed a bug.

Or at least a bug she didn’t intend to swallow.

“Thank you for joining me,” Skari began, pointedly ignoring their derisive looks. “At the moment you three are the closest thing I have to an army. It’s not ideal, I know, to rely on less soldiers than I have fingers on one hand-”

“Though it is more legs than you have on your lower half,” Rakna chided, as if being a biped made Skari something worthy of ridicule.

‘If I had more legs, would you be less of a bitch?’ Skari wanted to spit, but she swallowed the bile for now. Their whole arrangement was threadbare. If she reigned her in too hard, it was possible the driders would all leave, and it would just be Skari, Honeydew, and some slime. Well, Briggy might stick around. But the adorable Brider seemed about as useful in a fight right now as a sword made of cooked pasta.

Not for the first time, Skari closed her eyes and refocused herself. One thing at a time.

“Let’s not forget,” she continued with as little venom as she could, “That our last combat encounter was a complete fucking disaster. All three of you were taken out in under a minute, leaving me to barely keep us all from getting stuck to a wall getting groped for all eternity like a purgatory version of an anime convention.” She let the words hang in the air, switching her gaze between the three driders. Lyra and Mikra at least had the good graces to look ashamed at their poor performance. Rakna merely fumed, returning the stare.

“You led us into a trap. Had we simply left the slime abomination alone-”

“Had you left me alone,” Nilith said, cutting her off, “You’d be fumbling around in the dark, without your shiny new training field.” The goth slimegirl had appeared in her true form again, appearing from around a corridor in the stone tunnel. There’d be no telling how long she’d been hanging out there listening to them bicker.

“Thank you for your help in getting it back online,” Skari said. Nilith blew past all four of them, not even bothering to move in between the many arachnid limbs she had to clear in the corridor. She just moved through them, literally, leaving a minor sticky residue behind.

“Yeah, yeah. C’mon, I wanna see what’s left.” Without pause, she splattered herself against the enormous door. Turning once more to amorphous goo, she slid herself through the tiny space between the stone door and its frame. In mere moments, the door rolled to the side on hidden rails, opening onto a colossal dark space.

Skari took the lead, more out of curiosity than a desire to show her authority. Her light cast long shadows, illuminating the bottom of an enormous, bowl-like structure. Just as she swept her hand from left to right, a gargantuan ball at the top of the room flickered to life. The Tower’s mana poured a tiny flicker through alchemical circuitry, sparking a miniature violet sun to explode to life.

“Ahh! Fucking hell,” Skari swore, shielding her eyes as night turned to a kind of bright twilight. “Little warning next time?”

With the room illuminated properly, they could see its true size. Jane had never been to the Colosseum in Rome, but he had played video games set in Rome, and that was pretty much the same thing. The dimensions of the arena were similar, though the floor was solid rock, not sand-covered wood planking. Pits and furrows from impacts heavy enough to deform stone threatened to catch her heels if she wasn’t careful. In the centre of the battle space, an enormous plinth stood.

“Wonder what stood there?” she asked to herself. Nilith responded anyway.

“You did. Or the old you. Striking pose, too. But it was white marble inlaid with gold and black opals. If you look on the ground, you can see the dust from where they smashed it apart and dragged it off.”

“Oh. Grim.”

“I’m sure you can make some sweeping observation about the fragility of life and how our legacies are impermanent and mutable no matter how many grand statues we build of ourselves. But I’m immortal, and you’re on Life #2, so that kind of introspection is a little moot.”

“Got it. I’ll save the Shelley.”

Skari clambered onto the plinth to get a better view out of the pit of the arena. The stands didn’t look like they could hold much more than a few hundred people. No more than your average packed megaplex theatre in the real world. Even so, much of the space for the audience had collapsed inward. Huge slabs of limestone and granite collapsed in the intervening century of relative gametime, obliterating much of the seating.

But the capacity for ticket sales was not the purpose of the investment in materials. They needed to be ready for war.

“This’ll do,” Skari said, hopping down from the plinth. “Rakna, you and the twins go check out the other facilities in the back. Let me know if they have an armoury we can loot.”

The driders skittered off, with one of the two handmaidens muttering something about “not being twins” before leaving ear shot. That left Nilith and Skari alone in the arena.

“Glad you approve of the venue,” the slime said. “Now: you said you had some tentacles you needed help with?”

Skari nodded. She focused on the ‘presence’ that her upgrade had made her aware of. That itch at her back. She pushed at it with her mind, and felt it squirm again. To her surprise, it made Nilith twitch as well.

“You feel it too?” Skari asked.

“Of course I do. It’s me. Well, sort of. It’s complicated. Focus on forming a simple tendril. Think cylinder.”

Skari did so. She pictured the perfect example of a geometric shape, like she was 3D modeling with her mind. Nothing. It took some experimenting, but she eventually tried dragging the presence on her back to the ‘space’ where her conscious thoughts formed. Slowly, the slime on her back shifted into a limp, wriggling cylindrical shape.

And as it formed, she could feel the slime around her body start to wriggle. The slime around her breasts made itself known, touching her newly sensitized nipples and squeezing at the plump flesh beneath.

“Oh~” she said, not meaning for it to come out quite like the moan that it did.

“Your mana is based on your arousal, yes?” Nilith asked, continuing when she got a nod of confirmation. “Well, it looks like just to hold the shape of these tentacles, you’ll be increasing your lust.”

“I know, I just thought it’d be more…abstracted. I didn’t expect to be literally felt up by my armour.” As she spoke, the weak appendage lost its shape and slid back into the main mass of her slime suit. The teasing of her breasts halted as well, letting her catch her breath.

“Well, you’re wearing solidified corruption magic. If you’re going to master it, you’re going to need to gain a little stamina. Shouldn’t be a problem for such a powerful overlord, right?” Nilith prodded.

“Fine, fine, alright. Say I form a tentacle. What’s my next step?”

The slime shook her head, but walked over to one of the alcoves off of the arena. The equivalent to a dugout, where warriors waited when they weren’t needed or maybe the equivalent to a first aid station. Nilith returned with several empty bottles, the labels long since flaked and fallen off. Healing potions? Booze bottles? Both?

She set the bottles up on the vacant plinth, one after the other, until there was a loose line of five glass targets.

“Stand there,” Nilith commanded, pointing at a spot on the ground about five metres away. “Further back…no, wait, yes, there. Stay there. If you can grab each of these bottles without smashing them.”

“And if I do smash them?”

She shrugged. “There’s more bottles back there, but you’re gonna have to get them. I’m not an adventurer; I don’t do fetch quests.”

Skari mocked the statement under her breath, but didn’t lash out. She was getting pretty tired of all the lip she was getting from her supposed subordinates.

The tentacles.

She had important business. Her craving for a modicum of respect could wait. Or rather, it’d be much easier to achieve had she some real strength to back up her words.

Simple shapes could wait. Skari instead skipped to something vaguely tentacle shaped: arms. She knew what an arm was, what it could do. If she could make arms out of slime, she could grab things. And, more critically, she could strike. Skari reached for the first bottle in her mind, mentally piecing together the concept of an arm with her previous generation of a slime tendril. She could feel it form, then saw it bend over her right shoulder. With a savage grin and a growing confidence, she snapped out with the arm on that side.

And the slime proceeded to drool its mass away. Black slop bled away as she extended the tendril, draining its width thinner and thinner until it collapsed to the floor. She tried again with her left, feeling the lust build in her body even as she tried to zone everything out.

“Trouble staying hard?” Rakna asked, her mocking voice causing the second tentacle to flounder.

About to cut back with a powerful rejoinder, the words instead clung to her mind. Hard. The tentacles were just like cocks! Growing larger, engorging with fluid. Instead of arms, she imagined, with a blush, that she had a pair of dextrous, elongated penises. And to make them hard…

Instead of ignoring the lust building effect, she opened herself up to it. As her body was squeezed and teased by her armour, the two tentacles plumped and stretched.

“That’s better, you’re getting it. Don’t fight the urges, let them be the guide. You aren’t a blushing virgin trying to hold on to your virtue. You are depravity. You ARE the corruption.”

Skari reached out with her right hand, the right tentacle following suit. It slorped forward, glomping onto a bottle just before tipping over the side of the plinth.

“I did it!”

Her slime sensei nodded. “That you did. While you practice here, I’ll rustle up some combatants. Any preference?”

Skari shot her left tentacle forward like a whip. It crashed into the next bottle, utterly shattering it. She recoiled, holding her hands to her mouth in shock. The tentacle over her shoulder mimicked the motion as best it could, drooling itself over the back of her hand.

“Oh! Umm…something easy to start out with. And nothing lethal. A step above a training dummy, maybe?”

“Gotcha. Dumb and slow. I got an idea,” Nilith said, wagging her finger toward Skari before heading off into the same back room space that the Driders had just vacated. The Overlord continued to practice with her tentacular dexterity, though occasionally she went too far and broke her target bottle. After a few minutes, there were nothing but shards left. What’s more, her lust bar was close to two thirds full. In retrospect, she thought grimly, she shouldn’t have watched Honeydew eat out that Drider for so long…it was getting harder to focus.

“Sporting a new Fall Fashion?” Rakna chided. Skari looked down to see her armour had once again receded, looking less like protection and more like a saucy outfit for a very specific type of pornography. A tiny skirt, a top that was barely more than a bra, and heels that could only be preceded by the adjective “stripper”.

Skari hadn’t even noticed. She was still able to move just as deftly as she had when her armour was entirely practical, and with their constant roaming, the fact that their efforts were now concentrated over a small area she only picked up in retrospect. Something about that blindspot was even more humiliating. If she didn’t catch herself, she could be trying to intimidate Rakna into listening to her orders while looking like…like…

Like a slut.

The lust metre bumped up a tick as the word entered her mind. Fuck. If she didn’t get moving on their training scenario, she was going to lose control in more ways than one.

“Alright. Let’s start this up. Day One, Session One, come on out Nilith!”

Six slimeforms walked out from the back room. Each was Nilith, more or less. They were clad in almost nothing, with breasts and nethers “covered” in only a technical sense by slime-loincloths at tight tops. They all featured powerful muscles in their glistening black/purple bodies and, upon reaching their positions, they began flexing like professional wrestlers.

“GRR, WE’RE ADVENTURERS,” the three in front said in unison.

“AND WE’RE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO MATTER,” chanted the three in back.

The forward Niliths had a spear and shield warp into their hands, while the slimes in back grew bows and arrows. Though made of solidified goo, they’d be excellent stand-ins for the real thing, if past experience with Nilith’s shapeshifting ability was prologue. The archer Niliths disappeared behind the forward trio’s shield wall, their organic-looking spears pointing outward.

“WE GO PLACES WE’RE NOT WANTED.”

“AND CLAIM WE DISCOVERED IT!”

“ANYTHING WE FIND IS OURS.”

“ESPECIALLY IF WE HAVE TO KILL YOU FOR IT!”

“You think she might be mad at adventurers? It’s subtle, but I detect some resentment.” Skari mumbled, shaking her head derisively.

“For once,” Rakna replied with a hint of genuine mirth, “I agree with you. And I certainly can’t blame her; as a fellow cave dweller, the adventurer’s propensity for diving into any hole they see is quite vexing.”

“Come to think of it…she lived the last 100 years in what is essentially a self-contained dungeon. The door wasn’t that hard to clear. I’m surprised we didn’t find any broken swords or 10 foot extendable poles on our way down here.”

“IF I TOLD YOU,” all six Niliths said at once, “THERE WAS A PIT WHERE YOU COULD FIND A CENTURY’S WORTH OF CORPSES PILED HIGH WITH ALL THEIR RUSTED, ROTTING GEAR, WOULD YOU STOP TALKING AND START FIGHTING? I HAVE A FULL SCHEDULE.”

Skari folded her arms over her (increasingly exposed) chest. “No you don’t.”

“THROW A PUNCH, YOU SOLIDSHAPE RUBES.”

Skari sighed. “Okay, ready up. And remember everyone. This is a training exercise. So no actual injuries, just-”

Rakna cut Skari off, motioning to her two handmaidens. “Enough talk! Let’s show our “overlord” our true power!”

The head of the Driders, flanked by Mikra on the left and Lyra on the right, charged. With their mass and a chance to build up speed, they had all the momentum build of a cavalry charge. But the spears made the last three metres away from them a hostile prospect. At the last moment they halted, lower halves reeling up just long enough for several Niliths to shove a spear forward. Instead of pierce the carapace of its victims, it just left an obvious black stain behind. Like an overly large and goopy paintball hit.

“ARGH! DEATH TO SLIME!” Mikra cursed, recoiling after getting run through by the rightmost Nilith.

“HIT MIKRA. GLANCING HIT RAKNA. MIKRA IS SUFFERING FROM TRANSTHORACIC WOUNDS AND IS BLEEDING OUT. RAKNA IS WOUNDED BUT STILL IN THE FIGHT.”

Fucking hell. That was 33% of her force gone just as quick as it had charged! Mikra scowled, looking to Rakna for what to do now that she’d been ‘killed’. Only after a nod did she amble over to the side of the arena, practically pouting.

“Pull back, Rakna! Let’s strategize about this!” Skari said, rushing closer to try and exert some measure of control.

The Drider’s leader thrashed her legs toward the front line of spearslimes, trying to get above their guard. The shields came up just in time. Her blows hit like dumbells shot from a cannon, causing the amorphous warriors to wobble and struggle to maintain their forms, let alone their tiny line. But every hammerblow fatigued her reserves, while the slimes in the back were fresh and ready to fight.

“SLIME ATTACK!” was the refrain, as globs of simulated “arrows” came splashing into Rakna. She took several to the thorax and torso, with a final ignominious splatter hitting her upside the face. With a flustered scoff, she peeled away as the slimes pronounced her very clear simulated death.

The only Drider left was Lyra, and Skari tried to wave her over. She was the least hostile of Rakna’s entourage, and though she looked ready to listen, she also got a stern glare from Rakna. While her head snapped between her two apparent masters, a trio of arrows-blobs smacked into her.

“LYRA HAS BEEN HIT BY A HAIL OF ARROWS,” the Niliths recited, then turned to Skari. The Evil Overlord, bravely, made the “time-out” hand gesture.

“Hold up, hold up, alright, you got us that time. Let’s reset and try to work on a strategy, rather than just running in and getting slaughtered.”

Rakna’s words came with a generous spray of saliva. “You DARE blame us? You didn’t even enter the fray! Are you too meek? Too cowardly to be our supposed leader? Speak truly, because I will not hesitate to end our temporary partnership.”

“You charged in like lemmings! I can help you if you’re dead set on tossing yourself into a meat grinder. If those were real spears, real arrows, you’d all be shish kebabs.”

Bitter feelings threatened to spill out of control, and Skari knew that she had to take Rakna by the proverbial scruff. She was the Overlord, she was the leader! But what did she need to do?

“Okay…okay, we’ll try again. This time, though, we talk beforehand. Unless you want to get humiliated again.”

Rakna snarled, baring her fangs like an angered beast. But Lyra, blessedly, took a more diplomatic tack.

“Very well. How would you suggest we strike?” she asked.

Skari chewed her lip. Jane had played plenty of strategy games before, and had lots of experience playing RPGs and Planet of Perils in particular. To fight an enemy like a boss, you had to slowly wear it down over time, keeping its attention.

But she had to think about who she was now! She was the raid boss, or the main big bad enemy with all the health. Her Driders were her adds: her loyal henchwomen who needed to be dealt with by the players, while maintaining their primary focus on the boss. So, to be the Overlord she wanted to be, the focus had to be on her.

“Okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to wail on the Shield Niliths with my tentacles. Lyra, you and Mikra harass the sides to keep the shield wall engaged. Rakna, you’re the punch dagger. You roll up the back and charge dead hard into the undefended Archer Niliths. Voila! Steamrolled enemy. Got it?”

Skari made sure to look into all three Drider’s faces and getting a nod before proceeding. This could work. No, this would work! She was determined, she was pumped up!

“Round 2…fight!” Skari called. Nilith had already reformed her troops, and it was time to put them to the test. Skari rushed forward and launched wild tentacle haymakers, sacrificing her practiced dexterity for the same force that had shattered the glass bottles earlier. Slime impacted slime in a glorious splashing effect, causing the Niliths hit by the tentacles to rock back. Thus extended, she used the returning motion on her right tendril to rip at the shield of the centre slime. It had to switch from shielding against hammerblows to holding on for dear life.

The next stage was obvious, and she looked to the sides for her forces. But the effort Lyra and Mikra were putting up was laughable. A few lazy lunges at the side Niliths was all they wanted to muster, rather than their previous ferocious battery. Rakna was by far the worst offender, strolling a wide circle around the defensive slimes while casually dodging the arrows shot her way.

“What are you guys doing?” Skari asked, recalling her left tendril and exploding it outward into a fan shape to protect her from the arrows shot in her own direction. Having to attack and defend at the same time quickly drained, or rather filled, her lust metre. She watched helplessly as for all her efforts, her ability to fight was draining away. Just as her armour shrunk further still.

Now standing in a bikini and bra and little else, she made frustrated noises to try to get her troops attention. But the questing tendrils of the slimesuit were becoming too concentrated, too intent in their desire to ignore. Her tentacle thrusts lost their energy, and soon all her energy was turned to not blowing her load right then, right there.

Arrows popped into her chest, rendering her dead to the simulation. But what she hadn’t accounted for was that slime constructs that Nilith had made would, naturally, be full of corrupting energy themselves. And though she was a conduit for such power, it was nevertheless transferred its taint into her body.

She fell to her knees, breath hot and heavy as the true power of the diving suit transferred every little twitch and rub of her slime armour to Jane/Skari, making it impossible to ignore as simply simulation. This was as real as it could be.

“N-no…I can’t…not now!” she croaked, the writhing in her slime bottoms visible to even the most casual observer.

And it was at that moment when the driders decided to pause their ‘attacks’ and decided to just…watch.

“W-what are you doing?! Keep up the…ahh!~” The moment those eyes fell upon her, and the manifested embarrassment of being locked in such a compromising state became clear, Skari came hard. Her eyes crossed and she pumped jet after jet of thick corrupt cum into her teasing slime panties. They gobbled the release up as readily as any needy slut, but it didn’t change the fact that she was creaming herself in full view of her ‘troops.’

“Look girls, the powerful Evil Overlord Skari Suneater, soaking herself like a bride on her wedding night. Would you like to be left alone to shame yourself further?”

“It’s not…it’s my powers…I’m…ngh…” Skari struggled to find the words, weakly humping against her outfit to complete her climax. As powerful as those tentacles had made her feel, their cost ended up leaving her looking like an embarrassing loser. A quickshot cutie, rather than a terrible tyrant.

Rakna continued to press the attack, approaching until she loomed over Skari, her enormous spidery bulk making the Overlord feel small, useless.

“Perhaps we should put Briggy in charge? She’s at least able to last longer before spewing her pathetic load on herself. Suneater indeed. We should call you Skari Skirtsoaker. Skari Slicksheets. Skari of the White Sea.”

Fury tinged the embarrassment. She balled up her fists, first in impotent fury, then in white hot rage . No, no! This was not how her empire would end! If she would not have their respect, then she would have their fear.

Allowing her orgasm to drain away into the slime, she stared daggers at Rakna until she felt the creep of corrupt gel across her skin. The skimpy and shameless slimekini deformed once more, expanding out until it formed back into the intimidating black scale armour it had once been. At the same time, she crystalized her thoughts into a single image. Tentacles shot out from her back. First two, then four, then eight. They stabbed into the stone like harpoons, bloating out and thickening as sheer, callous fury tamed the amorphous form into solid shape.

“I am your Overlord,” Skari said, her voice low and cold. With effort, she forced herself off the ground. The tendrils quivered, but they held her weight. Bolstered, she continued their growth. Twelve limbs. Twenty. She marched toward the trio. Her armour writhed over her body, but she didn’t feel it. She was incandescent. It was time these specks learned who they spoke to.

“You’re a pretender. A flicker in a great woman’s shadow,” Rakna spit, but her confidence was ebbing. Her handmaids had already taken steps backward, but their Mistress held.

Skari manifested her full focus into this performance. A primeval and atavistic dominance display, she made herself into the mother of all spiders. No. Something more. Chaotic limbs lashed the air for each two that held her aloft. She towered over Rakna. Not a spider. Not even close. She was a cephalopod from the aphotic depths. An ebon hand reaching out from a nightmare. The thing in the corner of your eye at night, just when you thought you were no longer afraid of the dark.

“I am the Shadow that Hides the Dawn. I am the Drowning Night. I am Skari fucking Suneater. You will choose to obey me, or I will turn you into something that doesn’t get the choice. Am I clear?”

Rakna held up under a stare that could wilt the tree of life. But in the end, it was the Drider who turned away.

“I will do as I have promised,” she said, each word a bitter concession.

Skari shook her head. The original agreement had been six months of in-game time. But that was no longer good enough. She would not do this shit again down the line. These were Her soldiers.

“No. You will obey. I have been patient with you, Rakna. Through your jibes and disobedient sniping. But I will have your loyalty in perpetuity. And you will give it to me freely.”

All this tentacular effort from Skari meant an equally impressive writhing beneath her armour. It wouldn’t be long now before her armour began to attrit away, just like it had the first time. Her opportunity was slipping away.

“I swear…” she said, grinding her teeth. Skari grabbed the disobedient Drider’s chin, forcing her to look up into her eyes.

“Swear what?”

“I swear loyalty to you.” Her voice was flat, defeated.

The black tendrils surrounded Rakna on all sides, darkening the light from above like black ink poured into water. There was no escape.

“Louder.”

“I swear my loyalty to you!” A little desperation was leaking into her voice. Good.

Skari let go. “Look into your bondwomen’s eyes and tell them.”

“I swear my loyalty to Skari. You will follow her instructions.” No longer angry, this was a defeated pronouncement. The other two Driders nodded solemnly.

“Tell them who I am.”

“Skari. Skari Suneater!”

“Your what?”

“My Overlord!” she shouted, reflexively searching for the right answer before Skari even asked the question.

That would do for now. Skari let her go, and called back the consuming extent of her slimy appendages. The tentacles let her drift to the round, slorping back into her body and leaving her with black armour just spicy enough to raise an eyebrow should she be on the ad thumbnail.

“Alright. Let’s try this again. From the top. And this time, I expect my orders to be obeyed to the letter.”

***

They practiced fighting the Niliths for the rest of the in-game day. There was no pushback from Rakna. It looked like she’d finally gotten her authority through to the stubborn spiderwoman. The risk of a flare up was not impossible, but for now, they had settled the matter. There was only one leader in their group: Skari.

Practice was frustrating, arduous, but fruitful. Nilith worked overtime to wring every dangerous trick, sneaky tactic, or outright scheme out of the six adventurer forms. She was a formidable opponent even when she couldn’t shapeshift at will, but in the second hour, Team Skari got its first win. The splitting focus tactics worked, now that Rakna and the others were on board, and the slimes dispatched. Nilith mimmicked a dramatic death scene of her copies as good as any Shakespeare in the Dome local actor troupe could manage, coughing and giving their last, ragged breath before they slorped into oblivion. Celebration, brief but heartfelt, brought the four women together. They had done it!

After that first win, it was as if they’d gotten over the hump. For each win Nilith got, Skari and the Driders got one of their own. The practice sharpened everyone, as one trick that Skari came up with would lead to Nilith coming up with a counter. At the end of the experience, everyone was drained in more ways than one. Skari had shot several more orgasms into her armour, but thankfully, nobody paid much attention. The tentacles were working was the thing that mattered. And they were becoming a team.

During the last practice, she had worked on edging herself. Keeping herself strung on the very cusp of orgasm before pulling her tentacles back. And it was working! Though her armour remained its skimpy, slutty bikini form, she was able to retain combat effectiveness for short bursts indefinitely, as far as she could tell. One errant look, however, and it would be over. Not for the first time, she was grateful for the diving suit’s new ‘attachment’. If it wasn’t draining her dick like Virtue said it would be in the real world, Jane would have to deal with an impressive mess at the end of this.

Skari caught movement up near one of the stands. Fearing some scheme by Nilith to put an archer among the risers, she rushed over to strike out quickly. But as her head turned to lock onto the target, she realized it was Carri!

“Oh, fuck!” she said, recalling the tentacle before it made contact, whipping it back so hard it made a cracking noise. “Sorry! Didn’t see you come in!”

The Elf waved it off. “I’ve had worse reactions to me walking in on someone going at it with three Driders and a slime, don’t sweat it!”

Skari blinked, not knowing how to proceed from that statement. Instead, she flashed a ‘thumbs up’ and went back to the fight. But the appearance of the Life Mage had given her mind a new set of ideas to focus on. Carri was doing great as a gardener, but it wasn’t her calling. Well, her “calling” as it were was to get piped by as many weird monsters as she could. A respectable goal, of course. But if Skari didn’t mix it up for the other player, she might just take her impressive power set and walk.

“Alright folks, let’s call it here for today. Driders hit the showers, if there are showers to hit. Nilith, do whatever slimes need to relax,” Skari said, then hustled to where Carri sat. Without thinking, she stabbed the tentacles into the ground and had them propel her over the sidewall of the old arena to the stands. Only as she touched down again did she realize she just created a new method of clearing obstacles for herself. Who needed high agility when you could just just ride a tentacle?

…

So to speak.

The Elf looked a little sheepish, though she did occasionally steal glances around the side to peek at what the Niliths were doing. “I hope I didn’t disturb you all. I just heard there was a monstergirl fight going on in the underdark and decided to check it out! Or would that be a monster girlfight?”

“No trouble at all. How’s the garden growing?”

“Wonderful! Though, I have to admit, it’s getting to the point where I can’t aid it anymore. I’m outta Life Juice.”

Skari’s gave an awkward shrug. “Well…there’s plenty of sources for that around. I’m sure the Driders would be happy to cooperate.”

“Yeah, I know. But, not to be rude to our spider-y friends down there, but I’ve had my fill of Dridercock. It was fun! But my eye doth wander, and so much my feet.”

“Right, I was afraid of that. Well, there’s always Nilith?” Skari turned to look down at the slimesgirl, who was in the process of congealing herself into a single form. All at once she became a ten foot tall giantess, before slowly expelling excess ooze to return to her normal height.

“Yeah, true, but I ain’t getting Life Magic from her. If anything, she’s draining it outta me.”

“Right,” Skari said, nodding. “Well…” She struggled to find a solution. She was planning an expedition, but not for a while. Not until the Driders were up to snuff at the very least. They needed more soldiers, more workers, more everything, and capturing them was the only way to go about it. After all, it wasn’t as if she could-

An idea. She grabbed Carri’s shoulders, her words a mile a minute.

“Okay, I got a plan. Meet me in the garden in like fifteen minutes, I gotta go spend a point and ask someone something.” Before the last word was through, she was running out of the arena. Leaving Carri totally perplexed…but intrigued.

***

After so long in the gloomy confines of the Danger Hole, the cozy spread of greenery around the Lair felt calming. Practically cheery, in a ‘garden gone wild outside a haunted mansion’ kind of way.

Examining the flowers closer, however, yielded something unexpected. Rather than the normal varieties she expected to see from her time in the Herbalist profession on her old character, these flowers were much brighter in hue, the colours sharper and leaning toward the purple and pink end of the spectrum. One variety was growing cups that were particularly yonic, reminding Skari of an artist’s rendition of a Dryad’s pussy that Jane had looked at, quite intently, one lonely Saturday night. Could her corruptive aura be affecting the plants as they grew in? Was she developing her own Garden of Unearthly Delights?

“Skari!” Carri said, waving her over. She sat among a dense cluster of her handwork, butt resting on a tree warped into the shape of a chair but nevertheless flourishing. Around her, a kind of intrusive vine twisted around the bark of the tree. As Skari approached, it seemed to move of its own will.

“I have a proposal.”

Carri nodded. “So you’ve said. Well, I’m all ears…so to speak.” She pointed at the side of her head, then giggled.

Here goes nothing, Skari thought. Though communicating with Virtue in-game had proved more difficult that just shouting at the top of her lungs at the sky, she figured that the AI was monitoring her at all times. And, theoretically, if she described what she wanted out loud…

“I recently levelled up and gained a perk that lets me give another player a new class, sort of like an evil version of their current one. And…according to the interface, if you take it, you’ll become something called a Gene Twister. A kind of, I don’t know, fucked up magic biologist.” She paused, looking up at the sky before settling her eyes back down. Was she expecting Virtue to just appear there and give her a thumbs up?

The Elf lit up. “I’ve never heard of that one! What can it do?”

The Overlord tried to play off like she wasn’t just feeding the information to the computer running the game. “Apparently, it’ll make you able to build monsters out of Life Magic, and command them to do your bidding.”

“I didn’t know that was an option! Make my own monsters? Holy…” Her voice trailed off and she rubbed the back of her neck. “I doubt the Druid Coven’ll be too happy about me turning my back on the natural order. Plus, I’ve reclassed before. I’d be starting at Level 1 again! I’d be throwing away a lot of rep and XP, not to mention a whole parcel of spells.”

“I get that. But as far as I know, you’d be the only one to have this class! Think about that.” Skari started to worry that she was setting Carri up for disappointment. What if the AI was busy? What if she thought that was overpowered?

The Elf stroked one of the vines next to her seat absently, letting it curl around her hand like an affectionate serpent. “That does sound appealing. But I don’t really think I’m cut out to be a Bad Girl. I like being nice!”

“Well, we don’t have to be reduced into silly moralistic boxes-”

She squinted. “Your class is literally Evil Overlord.”

“Okay, fair, good point. But I myself, the player, am not evil. I just work a boring job and have been given, by fate or by luck, a chance to experience something different. I don’t wanna actually hurt anyone, or cause anyone distress. I’m just playing the villain role that the game has given me. I have an empire, as small as it is, but I know that I can’t do anything if I don’t start having players join me. You can be my right hand! My henchwoman!”

Carri made a face. “I’m nobody’s hench anything.”

“Fine, fine, you can be my…Chief Monster Coordinator. Plus, well, gaining power over monsters means you can design and modify them to your heart’s content.”

Though the effort to keep her face impassive was clear, there was the hint of a smile on her face. Her gentle stroking of the tentacle in her hand became a more…suggestive motion. To her surprise, however, the tendril responded in kind. The tip of the tentacle peeled back to reveal a flagrantly phallic appendage. It seemed that she was right: her plants were not immune to Corruption magic.

“Well…I do like monsters.”

“And you could make your own. You could customize them to have, well, the right assets you’d want to see in this game.” Skari closed her eyes and focused on her tentacles. If there was Corruption there, she could control them. Telling the plants that there was something *very* interesting below, Skari opened her eyes to see the result. More vines slid down the chair-tree, clustering in around the Elf. They stretched out toward her, wrapping around her arms and legs with slow, methodical motion. She could break away at any moment, use her own Life Magic to tell them to cease and desist.

But she didn’t.

The vines tightened, pulling her legs apart while supporting the rest of her body. She moaned as her slit was exposed. Skari’s heart pounded in her ears. Her slime suit peeled away from her waist, exposing her still throbbing hard cock. She’d been edging herself for a while, after all.

“B-but my levels…” Carri mumbled pathetically, though with enough dramatic flair to let Skari know she was playing it up.

“I need to hear a yes,” she said nevertheless. The tentacle vines continued to explore Carri’s body, wrapping and squeezing around her helpless body. One tugged on a stiffened nipple with surprising dexterity, while another pushed at her lips and “made” her lick its length. The vines only grew more phallic, with a mix of her Life Magic and Skari’s Corruption Magic altering them until she sat upon a throne of motile green erections of infinite length and equal desire.

“Yesss…” she hissed. Her pussy drooled, but the vines didn’t push inside it. They yielded for their Mistress. For the Overlord. Skari pressed her erection between Carri’s folds, making the Elf shudder. Whatever feedback system she had on her end, it was giving her plenty of pleasure from this as well.

“Forsake goodness and virtue,” Skari said, enjoying her role as corrupter in chief.

“Yes.”

“Give up your old allegiances. They matter not.”

“Yes!”

“Succumb to corruption…and become my Mistress of Monsters!”

“Yee-ahh!~” Carri cried as Skari slid her length deep within the Elf. It was her first time fucking another player, and the combined thrill of corrupting someone mingled with the incredible sensations fed into her cock. If this is what sex in VR was like, why the fuck would she ever leave?

Skari bent over the Elf, pinning her to the helpful vines, and pounded her. There was little foreplay or build, no love bites or sweet nothings. They both knew what they needed. Carri seemed always half-close to orgasm herself, and Skari had been edging herself for an hour. They were avatars of lust, pure and visceral. The climax was inevitable, anything else was formality.

“Are you ready…ahh…to transform?” Skari asked, her breathing heavy.

“Y-yeah,” Carri gasped through the heavy impacts to her jiggling flesh, “Only I wanna…ngh…make sure I get every drop.”

A prodding sensation against Skari’s backside. She halted her thrusts as she felt a tentacle press against her ass. She’d never been on the receiving end of something like that before. In the heat of the moment, she dithered.

“C’mon, cutie, give it a try,” the Elf said, smiling. Skari untensed, letting her muscles relax as the vine found her rosebud and pushed. “That’s it…good girl…almost~”

Her hole opened, and Skari felt it slither inside her. Her cock was still lodged inside Carri, and the combination of fucking and being fucked nearly made her pop right that instant. A low, guttural moan left her lips. The alien sensation at once mingling pain, pleasure, and other feelings she couldn’t identify.

With some practice, they found a rhythm again. Skari caught between pussy and vine in such a way that when one withdrew, the other slid in deep. The tentacle was expertly maneuvered as well, likely by Carri. It found Skari’s prostate like an expert markswoman, homing in and stroking it to cause spurts of precum to drizzle out and into the Elf’s squeezing hole.

With this buffet of sensations going on, Skari’s orgasm was quick in coming. Carri must have figured that out too. Before she could make a grand pronouncement about what was taking place, the tentacles struck. Thickening out as they pushed, the Overlord squealed as the vine stretched her virgin hole to its limit.

“Give it to me!” Carri demanded, her legs wrapping around Skari so tight it was unclear which one was corrupting who. “Give me all of it! Flood me full of your evil power!~”

Skari came harder than she ever had in her life. Corrupting jizz poured out of her, milked as much by Carri’s pussy as the tentacle draining her prostate. The Overlord saw stars as shot after shot of her defiling essence poured into the Elf. As she fell from the sharp peaks of ecstasy, Skari allowed herself the quiet satisfaction of watching the transformation take hold.

Her skin lightened to a purpley grey, her eyes glowing bright with violet light. Her ears lengthened out from tiny points to long, luxurious knife blades. And though her body’s proportions didn’t change that much, she was already pretty stacked, the glow of corruptive energy beneath her skin made it clear there were plenty of changes going on behind the scenes. As the last of the magic changes faded, she came. Her pussy squeezing hard around Skari’s already drained prick, making sure to milk the last of the defiling seed into her body.

*Class Change*

Carri’aran Lethrendir has changed from High Elf Life Mage Level 4 to Tainted Elf Gene Twister Level 1. She has unlocked the following traits.

*Taint Sense*

Tainted Elves can see the corrupt energies within other beings as a natural feat. This can benefit some classes who rely on Corruption magic, while for others this can serve as an important warning sign of a potential threat!

*Corrupt By Nature*

Exposed as they are to the transformative powers of Corruption magic, Tainted Elves are less likely to suffer permanent effects and can withstand greater amounts without detriment. They do, however, start with a baseline Corruption that cannot be removed. Certain multiclass options like Purifier and Monk are disabled.

*Former Life Mage*

Though Carri’aran has forsaken her old vows, her experience has allowed her to retain some aspects of her former life. All Level 1 Spells are retained, as well as her ability to drain and retain Life Magic. However, Life Magic when stored within for long periods of time breaks down into Corruption Magic.

Skari had to resist the urge to pump her fist. It had worked! Having a source of in-game power was incredible like this. She had an honest to god…god, on her side.

The tentacles settled Carri down onto the grass like it was a feather bed, letting her stretch out and feel the tainted cum flow from her pussy. She looked up with bleary eyes at Skari, who couldn’t help but feel a twisted sense of pride. It was her first ‘convert’, so to speak. She bent down, pushing some wayward hair from the Elf’s face.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Strange. I’ve lost some powers…but, judging from this menu…” She fell silent as she poked at an interface that Skari couldn’t see. The dreamy grin on her mouth spread as her eyes went wide. “There’s a whole new interface here. It’s like the character creator, but with dozens of body parts and forms that I can just snap together…I think I’m a monstermancer!”

It was all coming together, Skari decided, and all through the power of being incredibly, insatiably horny. And the favour of a godlike machine intelligence with a fetish for power and control. That too. Skari helped the Elf to her feet, gave her a quick, eagerly returned kiss, and said words she’d been aching to say since she’d thought of this madcap scheme in the first place.

“Build me an army worthy of the name ‘Suneater.’”