???????Chapter 1: Salvation.
Chris leaned against the trunk of the huge tree, breathing heavily.
He could feel his body about to collapse, cell by cell, due to his physical and spiritual energies rejecting each other. He was also fully aware of the poison coursing through his veins, accelerating the process, as well as his multiple injuries, which while individually insignificant, collectively posed a serious threat to his body, especially with the curse on him. allowing multiple infections to occur, as individually harmless as each of his wounds, but dangerous as a whole, that magic curse was a serious thing.
UEG had finally found him. Despite his multiple hiding places and all the red herrings he left in his wake, the underground elimination group (UEG) had tracked him down and ambushed him. This was the result. It seemed like too much effort just to get rid of a mere human, but he knew better.
Not only was he a loose end in the investigation of his parents and stepmother, he was a possible threat as his son because he would seek revenge, and also his birth was an attempt against the sacred laws of the empire.
A new wave of shivers ran through him, accompanied by the excruciating but already familiar pain, and Chris felt dizziness overtake him. His vision blurred, his balance unstable, and he would have fallen to the ground had it not been for the tree supporting his weight. The last thing he saw and heard before his conscious completely left him were two female figures demanding their identities from each other.
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"Hey, identify yourself right now, I'm serious! I won't hesitate to use... Oh shit!" The threat was interrupted when the owner of the voice and the target of her threat reached the tree on which Chris was leaning, finding him unconscious and deathly pale, bleeding from his multiple wounds, convulsing slightly from time to time.
"Damn, he's dying." The other girl muttered under her breath as she approached.
"Hey, don't come any closer if you don't want..."
"Shut up and help me, damn it! If we don't act now, he will die!" The other girl yelled, apparently having lost her patience.
Both girls held Chris's body laying him gently on the forest ground, kneeling on either side of him as they began to examine him.
"I detect magic on him, it seems some kind of curse to cause accidents and minor injuries, as well as promote infections in that wounds."
"I don't know anything about any magic, what I do know is that he has been poisoned and all of his organs seem to be collapsing for some reason. It's not the poison, though it's certainly not helping either."
"Energy imbalance. His yin and yang are fighting, and since positive yin is weaker than negative yang, it's winning. The problem is that without his yin, his cells are going into necrosis. The cell collapse is due to the opposite reaction. Loss of yan. Possibly aided by that poison you mentioned, it may even be precisely the cause of it."
"Shit, I can't do anything on my own, there's too much damage, removing the poison now won't do anything, his organs are too affected. Damn, even poisoned his blood smells delicious..."
The other girl looked at her in disbelief at her last comment, but her expression didn't indicate that she had any idea how to save Chris either.
"My magic can't help either," the witch commented with a sigh. "I could remove the curse over time and heal his wounds, but time is precisely something he doesn't have right now."
They both seemed contemplative for a moment, and suddenly they acted at the same time.
With a flash of magic, vines sprouted from the witch, some kind of plant growing out of her as if it would have stayed inside her body until now. The plant wrapped the battered human, forming a giant vegetable cocoon around him, filling itself with a strange green liquid and closing instantly around his body.
At the same time, a techno-organic incubator formed around the plant and the human, with various tubes and wires connecting it to the other girl, the device taking the form of an artificial womb and filling itself with a red liquid resembling blood. Coating the inside of the womb was a slime substance very much like mold.
The two girls looked at each other, silent understanding on their faces, before nodding, seeming to make up their minds.
"Succubus, huh?" The witch commented with a smile.
"Some problem with that?"
"No, not at all, actually that will make things easier for the three of us."
"You are aware of what will happen if we complete that particular process, right?"
"We don't have mutch of a choice. Even if we can cure him, those bastards will continue to hunt him down, and eventually they'll find out a way to eliminate him permanently. I don't know about you, but I certainly can't be constantly in guard. At some point we will miss something important and then..."
The other girl sighed and nodded.
"Do you think it will work?" She asked her partner.
"Well, if it doesn't work, all three of us will die, so it won't matter."
Looking back at each other, they both nodded again, reaffirming their decision, and then closed their eyes with a look of concentration on their faces.
The witch began to transform slowly, her skin taking on a greenish hue, as if she was turning into a humanoid plant, her hair turning the same greenish hue and resembling grass or leaves. Strange fiery red tattoos began to appear all over her body, patches of black skin surrounding them, as if they had been literally burned into her. Her breasts increased in size as her body took on a more hypersexualized shape. a pair of horns sprouted from her forehead and a demonic looking tail came out of her back completing her look. The last change came to his face, a pair of fangs forming in her mouth as her tongue split like a forked tongue and her eyes became slanted like a reptile's, its irises taking on a strange color pattern that alternated green grass with blood red as her pupils seemed to turn completely black.
The other girl seemed to lose some of her curves, her body becoming somewhat more modest, though still beautiful. She grew a bit slimmer and more agile, her black pupils turning red, her skin paler considerably as did her hair, and strange electronic circuit-like patterns appeared imprinted on her skin, glowing with some type of energy.
The biggest change was produced inside the strange artificial womb. The fungus fused with the plant and the technology, while the green liquid came out of the plant and the red one entered, both fluids intermingling. Despite the strange liquids moving around, Chris's body was still visible, so it was easy to see his transformation as it happened.
His body seemed to absorb the strange liquids through skin, while all his wounds were closing faster and faster. some kind of biosuit covered him, face mask included, apparently taking care of his life support, while a strange magic entered his body, permeating every part of him. His body grew stronger with each passing moment, until suddenly the whole process stopped.
The strange artificial womb, now empty of liquid, degraded itself at a rapid rate along with the strange biosuit, disappearing in seconds as if it had never existed. At the same time, all the magic seemed to finish being absorbed by Chris's body and the plant begins to rapidly wither and dry up, disintegrating without a trace. Chris was completely free again, standing in front of his two saviors.
"auto-diagnostick started, systems checked at 0%," he speaked with a strange monotonous voice. His face was expressionless, but his eyes flickered and swiveled, glowing with binary code and complex biological and technological schemes from within, as if his retina were a screen. At the same time, a magical aura surrounded him, circles filled with magic symbols spinning in it, hundreds of different diagnostick spells being cast on him at once as if his own magic was intelligent and was assessing the status of his host.
As before, the entire process ended abruptly, the magic disappeared without a trace, and Chris's eyes returned to normal. He blinked as if coming out of a deep trance state, looking in surprise at the two girls in front of him, who had been looking at him for a long time with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension in their expressions.
"Are you okay?" They asked in unison, then looked at each other in surprise before smiling cautiously.
"I guess so," Chris answered, looking at them confused.
"Oh! Where are my manners?" The green-haired girl scolded herself. "My name is Lilith, you can call me Lily, and this is Aileen..." She stoped abruptly realizing that she shouldn't know it, because during their confrontation neither of them had introduced themselves. "How the hell do I know your name?"
"Probably due to the demon essence you took from me," Aileen replied with a smile directed at both of them. "And after this, I think you can both call me Ai."
"Lily," the other girl confirmed , looking at her again to give her a wary smile, extending a hand in each direction to shake those of her companions.
"Don't be a strange," Ai replied, slapping her hand away, before walking over to her and wrapping her in a hug. "Now you know everything about me and I know everything about you, so drop the formalities."