Chương 890: Day Eight Hundred And Eighty-Eight

Dear Diary, I think sometimes I forget, or don't realize, or otherwise do not give my ladies enough credit for their own badassery. I mean, I even watched Kaiju Saffron take on two kaiju and absolutely dominate them. In a fight. Definitely gotta remember that part, because my little Kitten would definitely do that kind of thing just to watch my eyes glaze over. The fact that she took them on one at a time really doesn't enter into that calculation either.

But when I stepped away to go hunting the cause of kaiju, I still felt some kinda way, like I'd left them right when they needed me most. I'm really not sure how to feel now that I've got clear evidence that wasn't really the case. I mean, on one hand I feel a lot less guilty about doing my part rather than theirs and mine both. I also feel a lot safer, since I'm not the only one who can deal with mindless rampaging beasties. I'm still needed for mindful awful beasties, but I think that's really my core competency.

Also, I know I shouldn't feel like them needing me less is a bad thing. Yeah, it's nice to be needed, but it's better to be wanted. I think that's the way it's supposed to be, anyhow. Not like my bargain basement Moral Compass is gonna be of any help with that. Fuck, maybe that's one of the things they want me for, because oddly enough it does point to happy fun times for anybody I have a positive enough opinion of.

Some part of me really hopes that someday I can stop looking so desperately for some sign that the ones I love actually love me. Seriously, Saffron fuckin' fed herself to me. Okay, to my dark fatass alter ego, but still, how much do I really need. Sometimes it seems like I'm the one destined to consume everything, what with my insatiable appetite for everything, up to and including validation.

So at the end of the day yesterday I came home to another night of our kids taking care of all my ladies, Orla now included. Not only had they made us dinner, which I think was intended to be fried rice but wound up more of a rice pilaf, they also made cake. By the little wooden post I got in my piece, they'd intended it to be the fancy kind of layer cake with separate tiers, but for whatever reason the upper tiers had driven the little supports directly down into the lower tiers.

I'm not sure if it was a question of 'too light to support the tiers above', 'too dense to be supported by the tiers below', 'too little surface integrity', or some combination thereof. They'd also used way too much sugar in the cake, not to mention a half inch layer of frosting over everything. I'm not gonna complain, though, because not only was it tasty in a super sweet kind of way, the girls were also adorable in an equally sweet kind of way.

I did not get to feed Saffron my cake, as Menace teamed up with Anise to hold me down and feed me mine, Saffron snickering all the while. Adding to the overall diabetes overload, Hailee very carefully fed Siobhan everything, one tiny bite at a time. I'm not sure if she realized we could see her taste testing everything before feeding it to Siobhan or not, but after dinner I managed to hold her back from the general rush to the Bore.

"What's with the taste testing?" She looked a little shy about it, so I hugged both of them and said, "I'm not mad, Hailee. I was just curious if you were hungry or something?" She shook her head.

"Pregnancy diets. Very important."

"And you can taste whether something is right for our Darling?" She nodded, super serious kid face on, although much to my shock she wasn't super little any more. Like, she'd been born less than six months ago, and while she'd been the size of a big teddy bear relative to Siobhan back then, now she came up to mid-chest on Ice Pop.

I stepped the five of us up to the Bath, just to make things easier on Siobhan, and our adorable attendants pushed us into shower stalls next to one another and started scrubbing us and each other off. I watched as the rest of the kits came in; Anise was the littlest, but even she'd hit chest height on Saffron. Where three months ago they'd barely been able to walk, now they were, on average, bigger than their older sisters.

Okay, then there was fuckin' Isadora, who was bigger than two out of the five adult women in the nuclear family already, and showed no signs of slowing down until she was as tall as the tigress who'd birthed her. Another oddity, the bigger the kit, the less furry she was. Like, Anise was still upright tiger kit, but Isadora could, when she got wet and the white parts of her fur mostly disappeared, pass for a much closer to human tweenager.

The only things that stood out were the cat ears atop her head, and if you looked close her slit pupils and claws. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Yeah, the family is maybe a weird isotope and somewhere down in that little blown out section of the Relationship Periodic Table, but it's our family, and if anybody hurts any of them I will go nuclear. So it's our nuclear family, fuck anybody who says it isn't.

Seriously, if they're polite about it we'll all take turns until they acknowledge that we're obviously correct, and if they're not we'll, I dunno, hand them over to Mister Slither for re-education or something. Thinking about him, especially with him coiling around the outside of the Bath, watching over everybody until we got out to go to bed, reminded me that I still needed to get Dad and Sigyn out of that cave, not to mention springing Fenris and giving Hel some vacation time.

When I snuggled into bed, I reached out for Saffron, but she gently but firmly placed my arms around Siobhan, who'd already fallen asleep.

"Not tonight, love."

"Uh..."

"Trust, love."

"Always." A short while later, I drifted off to sleep surrounded by my kids and ladies. My ladies floated in my Maw, watching the big screen. For an endless moment I wondered who was in the Bedroom, what with all the ladies in the Maw, until the image of Saffron standing on the rear upper deck of the Seeking. The water around her hull lay still, wind lashing the Ward around her ship with rain. One of the humanoid kaiju slammed both fists down onto the Ward, and glowing cracks ran though it.

I giggled as I watched her crouch, hands behind her, as she gathered Mana, pulled it from my tentacles in M-Space, pulled it from the storm itself. The kaiju brought its fists down again, the Ward shattering, but before it could take advantage, my Kitten released a long, thin Mana Lance, punching right through the thing's head. Waves rocked the Seeking, and the Mana Lance wobbled around, turning the kaiju's head into some modern art. Next came Marie.

One of the glowing snakes wended its way toward the Worshipping, but long before it reached her, two dozen Maries dropped along its length, tearing into it. Half of them practically burrowed, and without limbs, it had no way to stop them. As it approached the Worshipping, its movements got more and more erratic, until right before it reached the ship, it convulsed once, then rolled over, still.

the wave nearly capsized the Worshipping, but the crew managed to not only keep her afloat, but get lines tied to the massive snake, pulling it alongside, at which point each Marie started carving big hunks of meat out of the thing and dropping them into the hold. Karen leapt away from the Questing to meet another of the humanoid kaiju strength for strength, grown to kaiju size herself, with a huge hunk of dull metal in one hand.

She screamed out something I couldn't understand, because dreams are like that, grabbed it by the back of the neck, and went to town stabbing it in the guts. It beat her head and shoulders, eventually slumping over and slamming its fists into her back in repeated kirkoffs, until, after she'd stabbed it even more than she stabbed me back during our escort mission, it slumped back into the waves. Another of the snakes chased the Training south, never far from the shore, as she ran before the wind.

Every time it got close, Tallulah dropped something in front of it. Big rocks. Icebergs. At one point I'm pretty sure she dropped a giant sheep on it. Then, disaster seemed to strike as another kaiju reared up out of the waves in front of her. She turned starboard, toward the shore, then back hard to port to run through the shallows. She slid to a stop on a sandbar, at which point Tallulah threw up a scintillating Ward too bright to see through. The kaiju kept coming.

Then the humanoid one stopped, frozen in its tracks. A few moments later the big fucker's head just toppled off. The snake, almost too big to get to the shallows where the Training waited, slowed down. Then I realized it wasn't slowing down; the water around it had frozen. Right about then a familiar glowing mounted figure rode across the not yet frozen ocean waves, a flaming Mana Blade held at her side.

Adrienne slouched in the saddle, leaned over, extended her Blade, and just fuckin' unzipped the big snakey fucker. Finally another of the humanoid kaiju fought against the Norfolk fleet anchored by the Plundering. Madeline stood in the forecastle, arms out, holding up a Ward. The kaiju hammered at it again and again. Each time she slumped a little further, the Ward got a little closer to the mast. Then a different kind of thunder filled the air, and the kaiju's legs went out from under it.

It landed on hands and knees, thighs bleeding from multiple puncture wounds. It turned its head to see another Tentacle behind it, this one without the Tentacles' normal fore and aft vehicle mounted Crossbows. I wasn't sure what it was armed with, but then the Plundering turned, and three of the firing ports along her side slid open, barrels made stubby and small by the scale poking out. Three cannon and the Plundering's Crossbows fired, all of them hitting the kaiju right in the side of the head.

It turned back, reaching for the Tentacle that had shot it in the head. Right about then the Penetrating brought her other broadside to bear, and punched half a dozen holes into the big berserk giant. It froze, then slumped into the water. Yeah, apparently kitten had finally figured out how to produce gunpowder weaponry, just in time to arm the latest Tentacle and rearm the Plundering while it was in dry dock getting repaired.