Traditional Festival Revival: Evading the Ghosts
Just as Camille had said, the gate submerged in the lake opened with almost insulting ease.
Once we pushed it open and swam through the U-shaped passage beyond, the dungeon lay waiting on the other side. I was a terrible swimmer, so it was a bit of a struggle, but with Elesa and Camille helping me along I somehow managed to make it inside.
"...So maybe flooding the whole place and turning it into a lake counted as the seal itself?"
I floated the theory, but Elesa shut it down at once.
"I don't think so. We got here without any special equipment, didn't we? If they'd actually been serious about hiding this dungeon, they would have layered on more magical and mechanical countermeasures."
"Yes. And from what I could see, there were traces of an additional seal that had been laid over it. Someone definitely forced it open."
I'd been trying to talk myself into a brighter interpretation, but that wasn't working out either. If we went in only to find everything already wrecked and nothing left to salvage, that would make for a pretty depressing ending.
"We'll just have to go in and see for ourselves."
Elesa drew her long katana. She cut such a reliably imposing figure that I found myself drawing courage from the sight of her.
"I'll take point. If you see anything suspicious, do not touch it. If you spot an enemy, find somewhere that looks safe and get out of the way."
"I-I can use a little lightning magic, so... I-I'll do my best."
"I'll... I'll do everything I can not to hold you back!"
If I'd known it would come to this, maybe I should have kept at least one combat spell...
...No. A situation like this was the exception, not the rule. Wasting magic that was meant to be used on men just to cover some outlier scenario would have been sloppy of me.
"Watch your footsteps. Don't let them get too loud. All right... let's move."
Elesa led the way, placing each foot with care, and Camille and I followed behind her.
It might have been a tactless thing to admit, but honestly? I was a little excited.
Why do people play RPGs in the first place? For the thrill of adventure and exploration, right? It hit me all over again that I was standing in the middle of a game world.
Sure, it was dangerous — that much was true. But I trusted Elesa's skill. Whatever anyone else might say, she was a veteran of dungeon exploration.
We had been advancing in silence for a while when Elesa suddenly raised a fist. Wait — they had the halt signal in this world too?
"Sounds coming from further in. Doesn't sound like just air moving around."
I found myself clutching the staff tucked against my chest. It probably wouldn't help much, but it was better than bare fists, right?
"I'll check it out first. You two get ready to take cover."
Elesa scouted ahead at a distance, then called us forward a moment later. Paying that much attention to every single footstep had sharpened our hearing to the point that even the faintest sounds rang crystal-clear.
It didn't take us long to realize those sounds were the moans of a man and a woman tangled together. And just like that, Camille and I both relaxed.
"Take a look over there."
I followed Elesa's pointing finger, and there they were: a pair of translucent figures, a man and a woman, tangled up and going at it like animals.
"Looks like your typical spirit-type monster — ghosts. Normally they'd be wandering around looking for living people, chasing the one thing every spirit wants most: resurrection. I've never seen ghosts this dedicated to fucking."
"That's... kind of romantic..."
Camille was right. It really was romantic.
They were setting aside even a ghost's greatest instinct just to service the cock in front of them, just to keep thrusting into a pussy. That was their priority. These ghosts were probably sacrificial victims, persecuted for no reason by the Light Church. They had died in unimaginable agony, and yet they had held onto a conviction that transcended instinct even after death, and they were still acting on it. How beautiful was that?
But no matter how beautiful it was, I couldn't deny they were still dangerous.
"They might look like that right now, but they're still ghosts at the core. The moment they notice us, they'll try to suck out our life force. ...Maybe with those cocks, even."
"T-then what do we do? It's not like we can resist a cock."
Even if they were dead, if the other party was a man, we were Female Slaves. The instant one of them so much as touched us, our cunts would go into heat and we'd be helpless, getting broken in without being able to do a thing. The female ghosts were one thing, but a single touch from a male ghost would drain our life energy for sure. We'd die.
Even in a game that would feel like cheap, broken design. And this was reality?
"No need to worry. I've been at dungeon exploration long enough to know what I'm doing. I've already got a plan for ghost-type monsters."
Elesa slid her blade back into its sheath. Because physical force wouldn't work on them, I supposed?
"To actually destroy a spirit-type monster, you need a priest, or a mage of a certain caliber. But even a warrior like me can at least drive them back."
And with that, Elesa hooked a finger into the crotch of her bodysuit and tugged it aside. I had absolutely no idea what she was planning, but she was striding forward with that much confidence, so I figured she had something in mind and followed after her.
Ghhhhhhh...?
Perhaps they had sensed the life force of the living. The ghosts turned toward us with a creaking, broken motion. Their bodies were so translucent you could see right through them, which made it easy to miss at first — but even without that telltale transparency, you would have known they were the dead at a glance. They were grotesque. A missing eyeball was on the milder end. Some had their guts spilling out. There was even a woman with no head at all.
The atrocities of the Light Church!
Uoooooooogh....
The male wraiths abandoned the ghost Organic Masturbation Sleeve sluts they'd been railing just a moment ago and drifted toward us. Of course they did. We were a target that could satisfy both their instincts as ghosts and their urge to violate females, all at once.
We looked at Elesa with uneasy eyes. She didn't so much as flinch. Completely unfazed, she simply went—
"Hmph!"
—and blasted out a spray of squirt.
"Huh...?"
Impressive. If nothing else, it was impressive. A hands-free squirt without even touching her own pussy. As someone who hadn't reached that level yet, I felt a genuine pang of admiration.
But... but was this really the play, right here, right now?
Uoooooooogh......
It worked?!
The ghosts had been drifting toward us, only to stop dead at the line where Elesa's squirt had landed, glaring at us with something like resentment.
"Does Elesa's squirt have some kind of special power? How is this even..."
"Nothing to do with special powers. It's just a shift in thinking. The holy water people use to deal with ghosts is basically salt water, right?"
Salt water had purifying properties. That was a belief that cropped up independently across a surprising number of cultures. Squirting was chemically the same as urine. To put it bluntly, it was salt water mixed with waste. Which meant squirting had purifying power too — not all that different from holy water, when you got down to it.
If you stripped away the uniquely unpleasant implication that something coming out of a lowly female's body was the same as holy water, it was actually a pretty solid idea.
"I'll hold the ghosts back with my squirt for now. But even mine isn't unlimited."
"Yes! We'll step in when the time comes!"
Filling our canteens to the brim just in case had been the right call. We pressed forward, following the squirt-line Elesa laid down ahead of us.
An ordinary woman wouldn't have been able to keep spraying like that for this long. But we weren't Female Slaves for nothing. The urethral strength we'd trained relentlessly so we could be men's toys — this was exactly where it needed to shine.
The dungeon was crawling with ghosts, no question about it, and among them were a few unusual specimens that fired beams designed to send women into heat. But those beams meant nothing to us. Constant arousal was basically a baseline qualification for Female Slaves.
"I won't lie, my pussy does feel a little itchier than usual."
"Mm. Could just be in our heads, though. Even catching a man's eye is enough to get us this wet."
Going from ten to twenty would be a dramatic change. Going from a thousand to a thousand and ten? Not so much. Same principle.
The dungeon interior was literally swarming with ghosts, but even so, there were definite safe zones.
"The ghosts don't seem to come anywhere near this area, do they?"
I raised the question, and Camille offered an explanation.
"This room was probably something of a taboo for them in life — or a sacred place. This used to be a temple, after all. It wouldn't be strange at all for a spot like that to exist."
I wondered whether the ghosts still had that much reason left in them, but these were people whose convictions had been so thorough they'd kept their teachings even after death. It wasn't strange to think they'd observe certain boundaries even unconsciously.
"Good timing. Let's catch our breath here. Anyone thirsty?"
A little squirting wasn't enough to wear us out that easily. But staying in condition mattered, so we passed around the water and topped up our stamina.
"That aside... it looks like the thing we were worried about when we first came in didn't happen."
When we'd found the seal already broken, I'd been afraid someone had already torn this underground temple completely apart. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. But that left a different question hanging.
Had some random person just happened to be swimming in the lake and undone the seal? Hard to believe a seal the Light Church had poured their heart and soul into crafting would come undone by accident. Had some clueless adventurer broken the seal for glory, gone in, and ended up a pile of bones? Possible, sure — but if you were going to dive into a dungeon you knew nothing about, the rational move was to report it and put together a survey team.
I could spin out possibility after possibility, but nothing that felt like a clean, satisfying answer. After chewing on it for a while, I came to a conclusion.
"Well, a stupid female brain has its limits. Let's drop it. Right now we just do what we can."
Camille and Elesa both agreed.
"Exactly. A pussy putting on airs like it can actually figure something out would just be a waste of time."
"If thinking harder only makes the maze deeper, it's better to focus on what we can actually find."
Having settled that, we quickly agreed to search the room. If this was a special chamber the ghosts wouldn't even approach, there had to be at least one meaningful thing waiting to be found.
"The room's big. Let's split up and look."
Following Elesa's suggestion, we spread out for a bit to examine the room — if you could even call it a room. It was more of a hall. We weren't scattering that far, so what could possibly happen in such a short time? That was the kind of complacency we let ourselves slip into.
And complacency like that always extracted a painful price.
"Aaaaaah!!"
I whipped my head around at Camille's panicked scream. There, a figure with their face hidden by a hood had a blade pressed to Camille's throat.