Chương 961: Day Nine Hundred And Fifty-Nine

Dear Diary, Y'know, maybe I've been thinking about this all wrong. It's pretty clear that the longer this chase goes on, the more my friends and companions are put in danger and hurt, the tenser and angrier I get, and the more brutal I'm likely to be with the Spartans when we eventually catch them. If we'd caught one right after Panther got impaled, I'd be wearing him as a tentacle sleeve, the entire 'Mortals can't technically die in M-Space' being a feature, not a bug. I have a temper.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure a lot of people, The Morrigan being first in line of all those who are still alive to talk about it, would agree. Thing is, while I'm a Goddess of Justified Homicide and Vengeance, which sounds like a Righteous Retribution one two combo to me, I gotta be careful with that shit.

I'm sure nuking a city because they'd lost the plot of basic hospitality seemed like Righteous Retribution at the time to he who did that shit, but from my perspective here and now it seems, I dunno, a little bit overkill. Maybe send some strongly worded letters before you send weapons of mass destruction. Thing is, here and now there's a need for Righteous Retribution.

Fuck, I'm not sure if there was more of a need for it back in the day or not, but I'm sure that plenty of shit in both places wound up, winds up, being labeled 'Righteous' when it's 'Barely Excusable' at best.

If I were just some dumb bitch on the street, or hiding in my house not interacting with anybody except on Call of Duty, not that I know anybody who fit that description, because can any of us really know ourselves, but in that case I could just bitch about shit and maybe go vote or run for office or start a movement or something. A political movement, I did plenty of the other kind back in the day, because anything not added to the junk had to leave the trunk, unlike here and now. But I'm not.

I'm the CEO of dealing with the stink, Inc. I'm the Boss Bitch in charge of scratching the itch. Which, in this case, I'm talking about the itch that is assholes doing asshole shit and needing consequences, not nice people having needs and getting them fulfilled, which I am also apparently the Boss Bitch of. But back to Righteous Retribution, I gotta be on point when it comes to making sure that shit is, in fact, Righteous rather than just Cathartic. Catharsis is nice. It feels good.

It lets all the stress go, burns up the cortisol, lets you think that all will be well from now on. Unfortunately, more often than not it is a lying sack of liar shit.

So if I'm gonna be the Goddess I want to be, the Goddess my Wives deserve to be married to and Worship and holy shit that sounds sketchy when I think it with my own brain, but at least I'm tryna be a bitch worthy of that shit, so if I'm tryna be that, not to mention a Goddess worthy of all the Worship I'm pulling on Fridays, not to mention the other days, which I think might actually be powering the rest of Mimic, because that bitch doesn't seem to be starving in any meaningful way despite having an ass the size of Ceres, and also not eating anything physical on a regular basis.

Okay, yeah, I nosh on the regular, but not with the kind of regularity that would keep my here and now body fed, forget about feeding my Pluto sized M-Space ass. But back to the plot, I gotta make sure that when I dish out Righteous Retribution, it is in fact Righteous. Which the more stress I'm under, the more tension that gets wound up inside me, the more my Retribution tends to slide toward torture, desecration, and general atrocity. I wonder what 'atro' means.

Because now I kinda wanna found a City and name it 'Atro' and see if anybody notices. Yeah, I also get less coherent when I'm under stress. Thankfully, my ladies are doing their best to keep me topped off with Worship and support, because that really does help me keep my cool. Okay, it helps me have the power and presence to undo the bullshit the Spartans' traps are doing to my boys and girls. Once again we pushed on past dark, although I worried about more incidents with traps the trackers couldn't see.

Oddly, while that did in fact happen, with them springing as many traps between dusk and midnight as they had all day long, between me being absolutely on edge and my wireframe vision catching motion, even motion under the snow, way better than I realized, I managed to catch each and every one of them before they hit home. Okay, two of them I grabbed Marie and yoinked her out of the way, because I was far less worried about some kind of acceleration trauma with her, what with the whole Sparagmos reset button.

I mean, I don't wanna do that, but she's the one who has done it for fuckin' hangnails and shit. If I didn't know any better, I'd say she gets off on it. Shit, I don't know better, and there is in fact plenty of evidence to show that Maenads do, in fact, achieve Sen'i Sōshitsu when they do the Sparagmos thing. That's what that means, right? Bitch sure as fuck looked pretty satisfied to me then, with the steam blowing out and everything.

Not sure if it happens when they're dying or when they're reviving or both, but it still seems like it. Shit, Dionysus custom crafted them. It's both. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. Yeah, after we got home, pumped the trackers full of beef soup so thick it was practically mashed potatoes and gravy with beef and veggie chunks just small enough to swallow, soaked them all in the Bath until they fell asleep, and I delivered each of them straight to bed.

Felt a little weird doing that with Panther, because I wound up tucking a dude who had done the most respectful ogling of my tits and O face that I can recall into bed like he was one of my kids. But then I guess now and then we do for our partners and other intimate friends like we do for our kids, because by the time we're old enough to have intimate partners, our parents aren't doing that any more. When we all got up to the Bedroom for our now nightly refueling, Marie wound up cranky as fuck.

Apparently one of those emergency yoinks wound up wrenching some joints in a bad way.

"Sparagmos!" I pulled her over to me when she nearly snapped at Siobhan.

"Oi! Mittens! No bitey!" She whined a bit, which modulated itself into a whined out, "Sparagmos?" I sighed, then got a bit of a shock when Siobhan said, "if you wake me before dawn, I will, Mistress Marie." Everybody turned to her, our mouths dropping open. She actually giggled a little bit, then said, "it's a medical procedure. Unconventional, but still a medical procedure."

"Okay, so I get why you'd want to, but can you?" Siobhan just looked at me, bit her lip, then nodded.

"I believe so, yes." We all gathered around her, hugged her, and she dropped back to the bedroom. Tallulah and Saffron's Worship wound up less adults-only tonight, but no less intimate, no less potent for all that. Also, y'know, 'less', not 'not'. I remain eternally surprised at how much I like slow, languid intimacy as much, maybe even more than athletic energetic stuff.

Marie was still cranky in the morning, and my waffle skills aren't really on the same level as hers, so we wound up with eggs, pancakes, and juice. Okay, I'm sure it has some other name when you take dried fruit and reconstitute it and then puree it and water it down until it drinks like pulpy juice, but I don't know it, and that's what I did, so it's juice. If the Pope can say alligator is fish during Lent, I can say reconstituted fruit mush is juice during cold pursuit.

Shortly before sunrise, because we'd taken to eating before and leaving at sunrise, Siobhan laid a hand on Marie's arm.

"Shall we retire to the Bedroom, Mistress?" Marie looked around at the trackers, then at the kids, then to me.

"How Long?"

"Uh, about sixty seconds." She looked at the kids.

"Eyes Closed." Amazingly, none of them, not even Isnomi, disobeyed her. Then she turned back to Siobhan.

"Do It." Siobhan nodded, said, "please don't move or resist," then Shaped something complicated. Like, some Shapes are more complicated than others, and the non-Global Healing Spells are among the most complicated ones, but this was... Okay, I think it was as complicated as that 'recreate living flesh' Spell she'd used on Panther the other day, the one they'd used on me a time or two. Then she released the Shape and Marie fell apart. Just...

One moment Murder Mittens standing there, the next her legs and arms fell away, her head bouncing away when her torso hit the floor.

"Holy fuck, Siobhan."

"Perhaps later, Goddess?"

"What the..." I realized the kids were listening and cut myself off, then decided that this was in fact a teachable moment about when cussing was appropriate.

"What the fuck was that?"

"I've been studying by proxy with Doctor Zeccardi. Karen has facilitated for me."

"Uh..."

"Mass Amputate." I blinked.

"Uh. Okay then. I guess I'm slightly less concerned about you getting caught by muggers in a back alley." She looked like I'd just slapped her in the face with a boy dick.

"I wouldn't!" Before I could argue that, darkness flared, Marie roared, and we had our Murder Mittens back in full fighting trim. Her first action upon return was to inspect Siobhan's upper digestive tract with her tongue, so I guess that Spell wasn't particularly painful. Then again, medical procedure, so I guess it was supposed to not be. I distributed hugs to everybody staying behind, let the kids all hug Marie as well to reassure them Mawa was fine, then stepped us all back to the trail.

Right into a mix of sleet and freezing rain.

"Fuck." I stepped us back.

"Goddess, we mustn't." I did not expect Panther to be the one to argue with me, but I wasn't gonna overrule him without hearing why.

"Okay, enhance my cluefulness?"

"We have been steadily falling behind our quarry. A day like today they cannot move without harm."

"Yeah, but we..." I stopped. Sighed. Looked around.

"Everybody else willing to risk it?" After everybody agreed, albeit Silk did so after yelping at someone Panther shaped stepped on his foot, I tagged everybody with the wireframe vision boon and the Jotnar anti-cold whammy.

"Okay. We stay in sight of one another. Which might not be much more than arms' length if it gets bad, but I don't want to fuckin' lose anybody. Got it?" After that we forged forward. We started finding traps set off by the wind and rain. Silk stepped in two more ankle pinning mantraps, the second of which everyone else had seen and stepped over.

Even Lemmy mocked him for that, and I couldn't find it in myself to stop them, because between him being dumb and getting away with temporary agony, I didn't think the temporary agony would be enough to force him to turn his brain on. By mid-morning the rain and sleet had turned to snow. We bunched up more and kept forging on.

I'm pretty sure between slowing down to keep to the Spartans' trail and trudging through snow coming from every direction including gusted up from the ground, we didn't make much forward progress, but we still made some, and to the best of my knowledge the Spartans didn't have any Jotnar anti-cold magic, so if they were marching in the shit we forged through they'd suffer for it. So hopefully we gained ground today. Right at sunset, we came across another little clearing, with another little shack.

I wasn't sure whether to be relieved or not at the lack of bodies.