“ARTICLE 35. RIGHTS OF MONSTERS. Nonhuman and unaligned girls, vermin, sentient plants, magical beasts, and other monsters shall be entitled to protection in law. Sanctuary zones shall be established where it is strictly forbidden to harm monsters, even in self-defense. In addition, a dryad, a nymph, a butterfly girl, a fairy, an ember-girl, a swamp spirit, and a shimmergeist shall be invited to all future Planetary Councils and meetings of similar import.” — excerpt from the Treaty on Friendly War
Ciel found for us a small closet, barely wide enough to hold our bodies. We locked ourselves inside, to regain our strength and think of an escape plan. The closet was pitch black, but I must have been blushing furiously. Our chests were touching, and I felt Ciel’s hot breath on my cheeks.
“Are you okay, Astra?” said Ciel.
“Y-yeah,” I stuttered and accidentally brushed against Ciel’s tummy. I reflexively tried to withdraw but only managed to hit my head against a shelf. “Ouch!” A couple of open cans fell from the shelf on our heads and spilled some kind of sticky substance on our hair. Even as covered as I was, I still winced as the liquid flowed over my face. “Stay calm,” said Ciel, “I don’t mind it if you touch me.”
At this point I was happy Ciel couldn’t see my face, but I was pretty sure she could hear my heart.
“It actually feels very good,” she continued, “we should go take a massage together when this is over, Astra.”
Was that… an invitation? I almost managed to smile.
“I’m picturing it now,” Ciel went on, “a lazy day of relaxation, in a luxurious kissborn resort, lying naked on a sandy beach. Then you come, sit on top of me and start massaging my back. I let out a satisfied moan and close my eyes…” I almost didn’t notice my breathing getting more regular, my heart rate slower.
“You cover your finger in water, or maybe the seaside mud, and slowly trace lines across my back, inching slowly closer and closer to my butt, until you reach it and then you hesitate and decide to turn me over. My eyes are still closed, which calms you. Still, you observe me for a while, not sure about what to do but you see my happy smile and cover your finger with mud again and start tracing lines, starting under my belly button and moving towards my breasts…”
I was almost calm. The sounds of battle in the rooms and corridors outside didn’t bother anymore, nor did the contact of our bodies. I was lost in Ciel’s story, in which somehow I was the heroine, a heroine for Ciel who for some reason admired me, liked me.
Then there was a soft knock on the closet door.
“Hey, guys?” the voice on the other side of door was quiet and shy. “Do you maybe have… an extra spot in there? The battle is getting closer…”
We both recognized the voice. It was Xeelee, the weaker of our opponents in the competition. And now, a true enemy. If tensions were high before the competition, it was now an all-out war, and here, we had an opportunity. There were two of us, and Xeelee was a weak and exhausted inexperienced girl. We could have her captured or incapacitated in no time at all.
I whispered this to Ciel but she resolutely shook her head, “the only way to win the war is through friendship, not force,” she said, “our goal didn’t change with the betrayal; it only got more difficult.” I still wonder sometimes how things could have turned out differently if Ciel didn’t say that right there — both for the world but also personally — but she did and I was immediately ashamed.
We opened the door and let Xeelee in.
Like us, she was naked but fully covered in all manner of mess that I and Ciel had dumped upon her. Unlike us, she barely walked. She was indeed weaker, smaller and more hurt. Her eyes were still wet from crying.
We locked the closed door just in time to avoid a patrol of slimeborn fighters. There were now three of us in the tiny closet, our naked bodies pushing at each other. A couple more cans fell from the shelves and spilled their messy contents but none of us made a sound.
“T-thank you,” whispered the girl, “I swear I didn’t know this would happen.”
“It’s fine, Xeelee,” I said. Somehow the presence of a weaker girl gave me courage. “We’ll get through this together.” And then there was a huge explosion and we all shouted in surprise.
(“What?” asked Daina.
“Yeah,” I said, “I later learned it was a slimeborn fighter, camouflaged, her entire body covered in mess so her skin color wouldn’t give her away. She smuggled the bomb in the middle of a large group of kissborn fighters. A suicide attack. All of them dropped unconscious from the blast wave.”)
We collapsed in a heap of bodies on each other, but something gave. The floor under our feet broke and collapsed and we fell into a hole, a slide, of jutting clay. The explosion had created a new entrance into an underground cavern!
Our bodies slid down the opening, getting coated in the slippery clay. The slide led above a pool of watery mud and we all fell in and crashed through the water level, still tangled together. I thought this was our chance. An escape path. We just needed to find an exit from the underground somewhere. Maybe it would lead to the some unguarded forest on the surface.
I disentangled from our bundle and stood up. Mud went up to my waist and water up to my chest. And I was all covered in weeds and rotting twigs. The others didn’t fare better.
“Do you smell it?” said Xeelee.
“Of course. We stink.”
“No, not the mud. There’s something alive.”
“In the mud?” I said, shivering. “Maggots? Leeches? Worms?” I looked around to try to see if there’s a way to get of the mud pool but it was pitch black. I made a few steps at random, but I only reached an even deeper part and submerged up to my chest in mud.
(“You are afraid of maggots?” chuckled Alrae.
“Not anymore. Are you?” I replied and manifested a small colony of slimy maggots inside each of the girls’ panties. The spell bounced harmlessly off of Luna’s shield as usual, but Alrae’s face contracted in horror and she fell silent.)
“Not in the mud,” said Xeelee, “or, well, that too, but I meant something bigger, scarier.”
We all locked hands, for courage. Joined together, we started wading through the chest-high mud forwards, through one of the tunnels. Ciel summoned a faint light to guide our way and in its light, despite our situation of being in the darkness underground, watched by a scary monster, we all felt safer because we were together. I worried about the war, but when I was around Ciel and Xeelee, it felt like we could take it on.
We exited one of the tunnels into a larger cavernous space where the mud was only knee-deep and there was only a thin film of water.
“The smell is worse here,” said Xeelee. “I think…”
I felt her grasp of my hand tighten. She was terrified.
“I see a light,” said Ciel, “the second tunnel from the left. It’s tiny and weak and but it is moonlight. If we take the second tunnel, we’ll return to the surface.” Hopefully the tunnel is unguarded or controlled by our people. But even then, who knows how they would react to a party that includes a slimeborn.
I felt Xeelee’s hand in mine shake. “It’s coming… now…” she whispered.
And a thick white web fell onto us from above.
“Gah!” My knees dropped and I fell face first into the mud. I felt my two friends collapsing as well. I tried to stand up but I just got tangled into the web which stuck to my skin. I gasped as a thread slipped between my legs and attached itself there. Then another web fell and another and then we saw the monster.
Xeelee saw it first and let out a piercing shriek. I had never seen such a large spider. It walked nimbly on top of the mud and cautiously approached us. Strings of web shot from its mouth onto our bodies, binding and linking us. A spider’s web, but it felt like thick, living, unbreakable cords. They bound my arms and legs quickly together and I saw the same happen to Xeelee and Ciel.
The spider grabbed us out of the mud and threw us into its giant web on the walls where we got stuck, meters above ground. But the spider didn’t stop firing its threads. Webbing covered my mouth so I could not speak and my eyes so I could not see and then the rest of my body until I was but a cocoon, immobile and helpless. I commanded my muscles to move my arms and legs but I couldn’t beat the pressure of the web.
And I was still breathing and sweating. And when the sweat on my skin touched the web, it was as if it caught on fire and I felt a prick on my skin as if bit by a mosquito and I couldn’t scratch it, my arms being totally bound.
(“Wow, Astra, that must have been a terrible eight hours,” remarked Daina.
“Eight hours?”
“Well, until your Recall Beacon activated and you were teleported back home.”
“There was no Recall Beacon at the time. We were all stuck in the spider’s web for weeks.” I saw the look of horror on the girls’ faces. And I summoned forth thick spidersilk ropes and had them bind each girl in turn — over and under breasts, arms to waists, hands together, and twice on legs. Even Luna understood and put forth her arms out of her Barrier so I at least bound her wrists together.
Then I had the ropes contract and constrict the girls, just a little. By the noises they made, they weren’t used to it.)
And so we waited, hurt, naked and exhausted, not knowing whether we’d wait for hours, months or years, but rescue was our only chance at future life.
Author’s note: Each chapter of this story contains wam, but the story branches out into many other kinks. BDSM is the most common. One aspect I regret not having very much here is monster girls. If anyone wants to create a story about an ember-girl, a fairy, a dryad and a shimmergeist, I’d very much like to read that ^^.