Curse of Scales

Author's note: Story may contain non-human transformation and monster sex! So if you don't like that... well, get out!

This story starts a bit slower, but don't worry, it'll ramp up in the later chapters =)

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Curse of Scales: Chapter 1 (of 3)

Day 1: -2,000,000 credits (in Debt)

"Goddamn it," I cursed after peeling the crate's top off. The internals of another food-crate were melted into a soupy mess.

All of the containers appeared fine on the outside. However once I opened them, only about half of the supplies survived untouched. The rest were turned into mush.

I hadn't realized that direct magical translocation was so much harder on materials than using the standard gateway. I figured for about 500k per trip it'd be a lot more delicate!

I tossed the crate aside, and looked over my guild stone to cheer myself me up. It was disconnected to the nexus, but I had per-loaded it with massive database containing everything related to Caldem.

"Hot damn." So many monster bounties! Hundreds, thousands? There were literally too many listed on Caldem to even count.

Caldem was a feral world, it had been roughly surveyed, but had no direct connection to the Guild's gateways. Direct (and expensive) translocation was the only way here for now.

That left me, the lone huntress on Caldem, to monopolize every bounty!

Day 2: -2,000,000 credits (in Debt)

"Whew," I sighed in relief as I gated back to my hub. I was worried about the mini-gateway, but it finally worked.

Given its astronomic price tag, I didn't realize the gate required so much calibration first. I had to spend all day setting it up. I'm learning a lot of this frontier style gear is a lot more finicky than I thought.

Day 3: -1,920,000 credits (in Debt)

I vowed to port back before dark each day even though I'm overpowered compared to nearly every monster on Caldem. Weaker monster can often become stronger at night and grow more aggressive. Even a monster hunter with my gear and at my rank, I was still susceptible to getting fatigued and making stupid mistakes in the dark.

Maybe it was just a silly hunter superstition but it had served me well in the past. A solo huntress couldn't take risks with night hunts.

However, here on Caldem it meant I often had nothing to do at night. I was safe in my hub... but dreadfully bored.

This gave me hours to scan through my guild stone. I did see something of note I had missed on my contract, about how rough translocation would be here to Caldem (of course it was written in the tiniest of text). It seems that when I eventually ordered a port back, the bounty materials should teleport into a more stable landing area.

I didn't even have time to survey how many supplies were wrecked, but thankfully my profits would be safe.

Day 5 -1,890,000 credits (in Debt)

I collected a good amount of Caldem red wolf tails. Food shouldn't be an issue because of all the meat. I should easily be able to stay on Caldem for at least 2 months.

Day 7 -1,820,000 credits (in Debt)

I've been making progress, but my hunts are taking me longer than I wanted. There is only so much daylight and maps are a lot less reliable than in better surveyed realms.

Slow was bad, because this expedition wasn't just to break even. No, the goal was make real money. I was shooting for 20 million at a minimum.

I've noticed there are some bounties to bring back live specimen. Keeping the monster alive often comes with quite the payout multiplier but I do have to play it safe. I can't grab anything that's going to break out and eat me at night!

Day 9 -1,595,000 credits (in Debt)

"Get in there... mister... uh, Scales," I said as I pushed the lizardman into the cage.

I sighed. Grabbing him had once again taken me much longer than I had wanted. I had to fight through an encampment of lizardmen and a primitive ziggurat to grab an alpha, but that was the easy part. With my heavy magic armor the only true enemy between me and my 'Scales' was trudging though the damn swamp.

Worse yet, the gateway couldn't get a lock to port me out until I had hiked all the way back out. I nabbed him with a magic suppression collar so he couldn't put up much of a fight, but even so pulling an angry 7 foot tall lizardman who didn't want to cooperate out of a murky swamp in full armor left me beyond exhausted.

"I'm never going back to that swamp," I vowed. What a disgusting place. The smell alone. Never, never, never. None of the bounties in there were worth trekking in there!

Not for 100 million credits!

I left 'Scales' chained to a corner of a cage. I could tell by the way he snarled at me that he didn't enjoy being tethered. Was it was overboard chaining him and caging him? Maybe, but I didn't want him to be able to reach the door to the cage. I couldn't take a risk when the creature had functioning hand-claws with opposable thumb-talons.

Day 10 -1,535,000 credits (in Debt)

"Ah fuck," I moaned as I opened the medicine crate. The syrup and bottles were a congealed mess, another ruined effect of direct translocation.

I scratched my wrist at a green rash, and it felt hard like stone under my nails. I had hoped it was nothing but the guild stone said otherwise.

A curse!

It appeared after my excursion into the lizardman swamp. I wasn't even sure how exactly I got infected.

"Damn, what now?" I asked myself as I tried not scratch the green patch again.

Normally I would pop back to a hub using gateway and get myself de-cursed by a cleric for a nominal fee. But that wasn't really an option here!

I looked over my guild stone, trying to decide what to do. This 'Curse of the Lizardman' was a fairly weaker curse, fitting a lower ranked monster and 'normally' easy to cure.

I was still in the hole over a million and a half credits!

I may have tried to order a relocation back, debt and all, except for the one glaring note in the guild stone record. It was explicitly noted the curse as: NOT FATAL.

Day 11 -1,505,000 credits (in Debt)

My guild stone beeped at me, informing me that Scales needed to be fed.

Turned out that Lizardmen looked like lizards, but they were biologically closer to dragons than reptiles.

Draconids of a sort, but that meant they were warm blooded. And that meant I had to feed it nearly every day.

I wasn't happy to learn that he'd be an extra drain on my time and supplies, even if it was only throwing a wolf leg into his cage.

It was napping when I got to the cage. I gave it a kick and spat with disgust.

"You may have cost me a lot of money!" I doubted he understood me, but the growing rash on my wrist put me in a foul mood.

He snarled as I tossed him the meat.

"You're welcome," I snapped. It was lucky to be alive. I honestly wanted to end him, but no. I had to feed the bastard if I wanted to collect that bounty multiplier.

Day 12 -1,485,500 credits (in Debt)

I spent my pre-sleep night time delving a bit deeper into the records of this lizardman curse.

"Geez," I groaned looking over the pre-loaded library in my stone.

It never ceased to awe me just how much damn information the guild recorded and kept on different monsters. For a creature like the lizardman, which appeared as different varieties in an assortment of realms as a fairly common creature, it meant the amount of data was completely overwhelming.

I was never one to go this deep to research a monster. Normally I just stuck to essentials to help me complete a hunt. But my current predicament spurred me on.

A lot of their queer nature as monsters was prescribed to their original role as tools of ancient dragon masters. Lizardmen of Caldem, like my captive Scales, were used eons ago as a dragon's weapon to invade a realm. This is why they appeared in multiple realms while being too weak and primitive to transport themselves.

This was eons before the Guild Administrators domination of the realms. Generally, the ability to use this curse had diminished greatly since then.

"Lucky me," I noted sarcastically, as now a lizardmen capable of casting this curse was extremely rare. One in a million.

Maybe it was Scale's last ditch effort as I collared him? A thin red mist, one I never even noticed must have worked it's way between my bracers and gauntlets.

The curse worked on nearly any type of humanoid race.

And it was true, the curse was never fatal. Victims never died, but instead were transformed.

The scales spread all over the victim's body, encasing them in a new green skin. In a way that at distance it almost look like hybrids were wearing an ornate costume.

Navigating through the records, it was clear that the transformed never really became true lizardmen themselves. Instead they became a sort of lizardman-hybrid that depended on their original race.

Human Hybrids had dark green scales along the back, with more 'normal' and lighter green skin face and abdomen, almost simulating an underbelly. The pupils of the eyes were more narrow and snake like. The tongue was thinner and longer than a normal tongue. Their ears were pointed almost like an elf's. The teeth were sharper and longer, with a pair of small underfangs protruded between the lips even when the mouth was closed (almost like an orc's does, but not nearly to that extent). The biggest change was the growth of a thick tail that descended down the floor.

Yet there was no doubt, even with this massive change that the essence of their prior form was never really lost. The curse didn't make them grow, or shrink. They weren't hairless on the head like normal lizardmen and the overall bone structure of the victim stayed the same. And even with the discoloration and modifications to the face it was mostly recognizable. If you knew someone before the curse, you would no doubt recognize them afterward.

The victim was still 'there' in a way, just clearly 'tainted' by the lizardmen.

I read that the curse acted as a form of assimilation, incorporating the hybrids into the tribe. Hybrid men were often used as laborers and soldiers.

"Gross," I mumbled as I noted that for women like me, the hybrids were often used as mates!

I had to stop reading there. The idea of mating with a lizardman made me want to puke!

Day 13 -1,465,500 credits (in Debt)

As a hunter you really only ever have two real choices.

Go back or push forward.

Knowing the curse, and how it was changing me, a similar suited person may well have turned back. But I needed to push forward, to push as long as I possibly could.

Call me stupid, or irrational, sure, but normal and sane people don't become monster hunters in the first place!

And I needed to AT LEAST break even!

Hunter gear was made to work with a countless number of civilized races, so modifying it wasn't hard. If I was going to push it, push this curse as long as I could, I had to be prepared...

"For my tail," I noted. Yet it felt so strange, knowing that soon the bump on my backside would grow out into an entire goddamn tail!

It was like welcoming a new limb. But if it was coming, I had to at least make sure my clothes and armor fit.

There was a strange bright side to all of this. My monster bounties were filtered under the condition I had de-curse medicine available. There were plenty of monsters on Caldem with fatal curse attacks that I now filtered out. In that way, this screwed up experience may have saved my life!

Day 14 -1,375,250 credits (in Debt)

Being so bored at night, and anxious about my fate, curiosity got the better of me.

You could get some horrid content in Guild recordings. Information on monsters often became a grotesque library of gruesome deaths, often devourings. To the almighty guild administrators- data was data.

What I found wasn't really on the same level of watching an adventurer being eaten alive as you listened to their screams.

Yet for me what I did find felt personally unnerving: countless hours of recording of these cursed and transformed hybrid women silently submitting to their pureblood lizardman mates. Yuck.

I swore however long I pushed the transformation, how much I changed, this would never be me. I was never going to let a gross and pathetic monster use me that way!

Day 17 -1,045,000 credits (in Debt)

I think deciding to stay was a good choice. Bounties have been going well. My left arm, green and scaled, actually feels stronger than it did before.

Although I know deep down inside I shouldn't, I can't help watch recordings each night of lizardmen and their hybrid-women mating.

I watch in part terror and in part fascination. The way the women seem to roboticly submit to sex with these monsters still disgusts me.

I could only wonder, what was going through their heads? Did they think they were lizardmen themselves? Or were they just overcome by some new instincts to mate?

I guess my apprehension is a good sign that I'm still thinking clearly.

I'm confident I can handle this.

The power level between me and a lizardman was a joke. I could kill Scales in a single hit, and that was without the suppression collar!

The victims in the recordings were all all 'normal' woman, often ignorant peasants. As a huntress I had strength and willpower beyond that of those other women. I doubt this would impede my goals on Caldem.

I have no doubt, where they failed, I can resist.

Day 23 -520,00 credits (in Debt)

Ugh, I feel sick.

The curse has been spreading fast over my body.

Scales all all down my backside and my 'bump' is now a growing tail... but I haven't really minded too much.

In fact, until today its.. well... been good, a boon even! I felt stronger and its been helping me hunt.

But not today.

The spreading green scales have worked their way up to the side of my head. It's my scaled ear, I think.

I've heard we use our inner ears to calibrate balance and stability. Having one human and one transformed has created a tension I think. It's made me dizzy and disoriented.

I'm alright if I lay down, but I can't even sit up without the world spinning.

Yet nothing made me as sick as when I navigated to one of those dastardly mating recordings. There was something nauseating and strange about them in a way I never felt before.

I can't watch, it makes my head pound in pain.

Day 24 -520,00 credits (in Debt)

I felt much better today. So much better!

I decided not to go out, just in case I had another episode. I can't pass out in the middle of a monster den!

The bad news is, there is no doubt changes are altering my perception.

I watched a hybrid mating record and it was like a different world. They had been silent before, there was no doubt, I had made a note of it. But not anymore.

The male was making a strange drumming sound between a croak and a click, and the woman was making a high pitched purr.

The sound wasn't there before, but now? It was so loud!

How could I not hear it before? Could human ears not pick up on this sound? It must be my transformed ears. Yes my new pointed and scaled ears do feel much more sensitive.

The sound, its not random. I feel like it has meaning. Like words I just can't yet decipher it. But I feel like I can almost make it out... almost apprehend it.

The sound is confusing, but if I listen to more maybe I can understand.

Day 25 -490,00 credits (in Debt)

The sound in the recordings is affecting me more than I want to admit. It's intoxicating.

When I watch it muted, its gross. I think, why the hell are the women acting that way? But with sound, and notably if I close my eyes, I just feel it.

I finally get it. The women are drawn to a sort of 'mating call.'

I laid back, closed my eyes and just let the sound wash over me.

But its more. The exact meaning is there, I know it. I listen desperately trying to understand more, and I feel so close. But in doing so I cannot help but be stirred myself.

It felt like someone distilled the essence of being horny and injected it into my veins. Arousal coursed into my blood and my hands shot between my legs.

I listen with my eyes closed, and I see myself working as an assimilated slave for their tribe. Then I see a Alpha stop me with his mating call.

I bend down submissively, letting him mate with me right there in the open.

I want my sexual fantasy to be a man, a human man. Or hell, any 'normal' race, but it's not. Anything would be better than this. But no, it's a big lizardman alpha, pushing me down and taking me just like in the recordings.

The feeling faded after I orgasmed.

I wondered with these strange feelings, was it time to turn back, to order my relocation? I wasn't thinking like I should, I knew that.

No. It was just a silly fantasy. I was still in debt. Turning back would be weak.

If anything I felt more capable. The hybrid changes complemented my huntress powers. I felt physically stronger. I could hear and smell better. I was tracking and killing faster.

And I needed more credits.

I couldn't stop now.

TO BE CONTINUED...