Hypnosis, I Haven't Fallen for It Yet? (Ch. 29 - "Suck Me")
Leaving the visibly dejected elf behind, Nemea and the rest of us pressed on with the search, and it went smoother than I expected.
Clang!
"Holy Power, now!"
"Coming right up! Sis, go in!"
The moment the padlock hanging off the door shattered under my hammer and we flung it open, Nemea timed it perfectly, flooding the darkened ward with a burst of Holy Power. Leo and I, who'd been pressed against the wall beside the door waiting for that exact cue, charged straight in.
"...Think there's one this time."
"Then I'll take the shot!"
It had been awkward at first. Not every room we tore through actually had a Walker in it, so we'd been cycling through sighs of disappointment and relief in equal measure. But this was the kind of place where you couldn't afford to let your guard down, and by the second or third time we'd run the same play, we'd started to look like a team that actually knew what it was doing.
Clang!!
Keeeeeeek!!
"We've got one! Go!"
This time we'd picked right. The instant the Holy Power washed over the room, a Walker of miasma let out a filthy, nauseating wail — whether it was pain or a roar, I couldn't tell — and Leo vaulted onto its head, stomping its skull and spine into the floor in one motion.
"...Got it."
"I'll start with the head!"
I'd more or less gotten the hang of these Walkers by now. I brought the hammer — still glowing bright from the Holy Power coating it — down on the thing's skull with everything I had.
WHAM!
The hammer Dyna of the Female Knight Tribe had given me smashed through the Walker's head like it was made for the job. Caught between a Saint's Holy Power and a hammer steeped in the same, the Walker crumbled into ash and scattered.
"That's another one down! There really can't be many left now!"
"The miasma's thinned out a lot, too. You can actually see it."
Had they been spreading the miasma through this place like the source of some plague? Compared to when we'd first stepped inside, the fog of it had grown noticeably thinner. Each one of them had been pumping out miasma so vicious you barely wanted to touch them, so thinning their numbers had finally let Nemea's Holy Power overpower what was left. She was starting to purify the whole building.
"It's faded enough now that I don't even need to stay in the sanctuary, mph—"
"Absolutely not! It's still dangerous, so you stay glued right to my side. Heehee."
Even the darkness the miasma had been casting was starting to lift. Nemea, looking thoroughly relieved by the sight, reached for my ass again like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"Just so you know, this is a medical procedure! Mm, nothing weird about it whatsoever!"
"..."
I could feel Leo's gaze from the side going distinctly unfriendly, so I manufactured a plausible excuse and extracted myself from the pervert Saint. I headed over to the elf, who was still slumped in a funk over not having done a damn thing.
"I didn't land a single shot..."
"This isn't exactly a new development. What's with the tragic act? It's unsightly."
"...You damn monkey. Isn't this the part where you're supposed to comfort me?"
The elf puffed up in indignation, her enormous breasts bouncing with the motion. Still, having someone to talk to — even if that someone was mostly a verbal punching bag — seemed to lift her mood a little. She huffed through her nose, then suddenly started tugging on my sleeve like she'd spotted something.
"What?"
"What's that over there?"
"That? The lettering's worn off, so I can't read it, but looking at the shape... a radiation facility, maybe?"
"Radiation?"
Faint, but it had a yellow background, and sitting on top of that was a red trefoil — the mark you only ever saw on radiation warnings. The elf's interest was piqued enough that she dragged me straight toward what looked like an X-ray imaging room. Nemea and Leo, equally curious after what I'd said, glanced around and followed us in.
And right then—
THUD!
"The door?!"
"It just shut!"
"...We're trapped."
The entrance slammed shut as if it had been waiting for us to walk in, and nobody had even touched it. We spun around in a hurry to force it back open, but in that same instant—
WHIIIIIIRRR!!
"The sanctuary...?!"
Somewhere, machinery whirred to life, and a wave of vicious miasma poured out with it. Except for the light of Nemea's Holy Power still wrapped around us, the imaging room plunged into total darkness. Then, from every direction at once, came the sound of something grinding, colliding, scraping away — and Nemea shouted.
"We're under attack! The sanctuary is being hit from every side!"
"The dungeon lured us in!"
"...Not enough to break through, though."
We put our backs together, bracing for Walkers that might come flooding in, but the miasma only grew thicker with every passing second. Before long we were right back where we'd started — unable to see so much as an inch in front of our faces.
"...That's the boss."
"A Miasma Type has a boss? I've never heard of that!"
The X-ray machines that had once been used on patients rumbled in a slow orbit around us. Looking at our lineup, we could punch through this if we really committed — but whether the thing would just let us walk out was another question entirely. And with those machines circling, we couldn't even tell where the door we'd come through was anymore.
They weren't just spinning. They were scrambling our sense of direction on purpose. The plan was to lock us in here and keep us isolated until Nemea's stamina ran out and she couldn't hold the sanctuary anymore.
I turned it over in my head, then looked at the elf, who was very obviously starting to panic.
"Try shooting."
"What?"
"Spray it! Do what you always do — just fire everywhere and waste some ammo!"
"The mouth on you! ...You've got some kind of idea, though, right?!"
BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM!!
The elf's Peacekeeper roared, spitting fire.
"Keep going! Don't stop!"
"If you put me up to this just because you've given up and wanted one last look at my chest, I am not going to forgive you!"
Her left hand kept fanning the hammer, and every time she did, her breasts heaved up and down in a frankly spectacular display — but that was not the priority right now.
The gunshots are making my ears ring a little, and I can't be completely sure, but...
If this was an imaging room — and I hadn't gotten a good look in the dark — then this dungeon had been built by eating a hospital. That meant this was not a perfectly sealed chamber. Somewhere in here, there had to be glass.
A control booth. A place for the radiologic tech to watch the scan, give directions, and run the machines without standing in the radiation. It had to be here.
I kept listening in every direction, and then—
CRASH!
"There! Shoot that way! Shoot and go in!"
"Nngh!"
She didn't even bother reloading. She just flung the revolver aside, yanked a gun out of her Magic Poncho, and opened fire in the direction I was pointing. More glass shattered in a cascading crash. I hurled the hammer I was carrying as hard as I could toward the same spot, and Leo launched herself after it.
"...What do I do?"
"Smash everything in there! Whatever it is, just wreck it!"
I had no idea how to actually operate the machines, but if you just started hitting buttons by instinct, you'd find the stop switch eventually. I left that side to Leo and grabbed the Garand I'd brought along with the hammer, then opened fire on the imaging unit that had been circling us like it was trying to make us dizzy.
CLANG!
"Got it!"
"On the first shot?! How do you just hit things like that?!"
The machine froze with a hole punched clean through it. I gave it a couple of extra cracks with the rifle butt for good measure, then turned toward the commotion and found Leo already tearing apart the Walker that had apparently been running the trap from inside the control booth.
"You've already finished it off."
"...Trap-makers are usually weak. Can't fight themselves."
"Ah."
CRUNCH!
She put the last blow through the skull of a Walker still dressed in a radiologic tech's uniform. Fortunately, we didn't even need to figure out the controls — the mechanical racket that had been screaming through the imaging room wound down and fell completely silent.
That must have been the last of them. The last thin haze of miasma vanished entirely. The elf and Nemea, who'd felt it end the same way I had, both let out long breaths of relief.
"That scared me..."
"I really didn't think we'd walk into a trap. This is genuinely not a place you can afford to get careless."
"..."
Leo, on the other hand, still seemed to have unfinished business. She glanced around with a strange look, then crooked a finger at me where I was sitting on the floor, beckoning me over.
"I, uh — I'll just do a final sweep with Leo, just in case..."
"Yeees, go on ahead. Ugh, I'm wiped..."
The elf and Nemea were completely spent — the elf hadn't even bothered to pick up the revolvers she'd thrown. We left them there and stepped out of the X-ray room together.
And then.
"...It's medical treatment, so it's not anything dirty. This is medical treatment."
"Huh?"
Leo was muttering to herself. I started toward her, wondering if she'd gotten hurt in the fight just now —
Thud.
"Urgh...?!"
"..."
"Leo?"
The door clicked shut behind us, and Leo spun around and pinned me to the wall.
"...Medical treatment. Gonna do it. Holy Water Treatment."
"...What?"
Suddenly? And she needed to slam me against a wall for that? Also — Holy Water Treatment?
I tilted my head, completely lost. Leo looked down at me in silence, took one long, deep breath, then hooked a finger into the scrap of cloth covering her crotch and tugged it aside.
"...Holy Water Treatment. I'm doing it... S-so..."
Suck.
A glimpse of golden hair between her legs, and a thick, filthy scent rolling up from below.