Esoterica 2: Liam's Mission: A dark Lovecraftian harem lit fantasy adventure (Esoterica Chronicles)

  Esoterica 2:

  Liam’s Mission

  By Virgil Knightley

  Copyright © 2021 Virgil Knightley All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  To my team of beta readers who made this sequel better than the original.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Farewell!

  Chapter 1

  The Void Dragon

  M y eyes burned with white, necrotic light as I rode bareback atop the giant vulpine monstrosity that was my familiar, Uther. Dahlia’s soft hands wrapped themselves tightly around my waist as she sat behind me, and I struggled to ignore the softness of her chest pressing up against my back as we charged into a ruined black city whose skyscrapers seemed to grasp longingly at the red aurora teeming in the twin-mooned sky overhead.

  Gargantuan Shamblers, Void zombies the size of a colossus whose skin writhed with inky black Void energy, lumbered to intercept us. I scoffed at their feebleness, uttering a profane incantation, holding up my wand, igniting it with pale green luminosity. Extending my wand in the direction of the Shambler, I watched as the monstrosity melted and crumbled, sinking to its knees, quaking the shadowy earth underfoot as I absorbed its power, refilling my own stores of magic ever so slightly.

  Dahlia, at my back, wasn’t going to suffer any weakling titans, either. She raised her crystal orb up, and it hovered over her hand as she channeled a radiant, golden beam that seared the head off another Shambler, effectively clearing the immediate path ahead of us as it toppled over with a thunderous sound. Together we were an all-consuming storm of domination.

  Still, a few lumbering monstrosities followed behind us, but they were no threat, not even worth the time to dispatch—we’d soon outpace them, and the mindless hulks would eventually forget they were even pursuing us.

  I could have made them my own, of course—they were undead, or at least undead-adjacent, after all, and I am a necromancer. However, our mission in the city was one that required a bit more tact than marching the streets with an army of corpselike juggernauts. No, today we were headed to the nesting hoard of something called a Void Dragon. It was a high-risk, high-reward mission for only two people—unless the duet party was made up of Dahlia and me. Then it was low risk, extremely high reward.

  See, the mission itself had two features that made us uniquely suited to tackle it—the presence of undead, which was my bread and butter, and the density of lower-level Void Things that had taken over the city, which Dahlia could very easily manipulate and neutralize—she was the daughter of a Void Star and a human woman after all. The proof of it was in her gorgeous eyes, pools of midnight blue, devoid of whites, wherein swam glimmering constellations that made her orbs look like a planetarium projection. When she was pissed, though, her daddy’s bloodline really shone through, and her eyes went slick and pitch-black like so many of the Void Things we’d faced. Even I feared her a little in those moments.

  As for why this reward was particularly attractive to us, it involved a necromancer-specific magic item known as the Mask of the Master. That unholy mask had apparently been secreted away within the hoard of this beast for centuries, along with dozens if not hundreds of other eldritch artifacts and weapons. The bulk of those items we would absorb to boost our powers even further, but that mask was for me.

  This mission was specifically assigned to Dahlia and me through the special request of the Headmistress, Eliza Waite. She was obsessed with helping me to grow in power, but only because she planned to one day claim my body and all its abilities for herself. She was a several-time body-hopping hag, possibly centuries old by now, and with each generation, she merged her soul and all her existing powers with the capabilities and strength of a new host. I was next on the list, and it wasn’t even a secret anymore.

  Still, I relished the opportunity to grow stronger. As I saw it, the headmistress was vastly underestimating me, and her desire to nurture my growth as a sorcerer was her folly, sowing the seeds of her own ultimate defeat. Over the last three months, since I discovered her true intentions, I had been strengthening my powers vastly, far outpacing even what she expected—and I showed her almost none of my true capabilities and watched with sadistic glee as she still fawned over what little I let her know.

  Now we trudged on fox-back through dark, ruined city streets. Tall buildings loomed over us like unholy monoliths dreamed up through alien geometry. Atop the tallest of the skyscrapers was the nest of the Void Dragon, and within the upper floors of that same building would be its hoard, which it guarded jealously.

  I was warned by the Headmistress that Void Dragons don’t really have much in common with dragons of myth when it came to appearance—they were nicknamed dragons because of their hoarding behavior, collecting magical items, and attempting to keep them hidden away. Void Creatures seemed to hate sorcerers for whatever reason. It was their natural instinct to inconvenience us at every turn, and the so-called dragon did it by blocking our access to equipment we could use to empower ourselves, while entities like Graspers and the corrupted Nightgaunts that had been stolen away from the Elder God Nodens acted as our hunters, able to slip more easily through the narrow cracks between worlds.

  We reached the building at last, but the inside was filled with damage and rubble, and no stairways or other way up was plainly available to us. Even if they were, the idea of walking up a hundred flights of stairs did not appeal to me. I looked to Dahlia, my gorgeous companion, and asked the obvious question. “Now what?”

  She smirked. “Dismiss Uther,” she said, visibly unconcerned. We dismounted, and I watched Uther vanish into the air with a pop. I looked back at the celestial girl and waited for further instructions. Instead of offering any, she turned me around at the shoulders and hopped on my back. Her arms and legs wrapped tightly around me, and I was surprised to suddenly be giving Dahlia a piggyback ride for all intents and purposes. She held onto my body tightly as I readjusted my standing posture to accommodate her weight.

  “I am not sure what you think is about to happen, but—”

  “Shush,” she interrupted me with a peck on the cheek, and a dozen or so gloomy tentacles shot out of her back and grasped at the side of the tower. Before I knew it, we were climbing the tower with the aid of Dahlia’s Void Thing appendages.

  “This is pretty rad,” I admitted, my body suspended in the air. The only thing st
opping me from falling to a terrible death was the impressive grip that the Starchild woman’s legs and arms had on me. We climbed and climbed with surprising speed and ease. It was pretty cool at first—until I looked down.

  “Don’t do that,” Dahlia giggled at me, her voice seductively musical.

  “Do what?” I said, my stomach turning.

  “Look at the ground. Don’t do that. I’ve got you, don’t worry.”

  I decided to believe her. As it turned out, I was right to do so because, within ten minutes, we had ascended to the summit of the skyscraper, finding ourselves abruptly face to face with a horror the likes of which I’d never seen before.

  The monster that stood in front of us made the titanic Shamblers we’d encountered earlier look tiny in comparison. Its entire body was thick and massive, and indeed, its appearance didn’t live up to the title ‘dragon’ but was instead something altogether much, much worse.

  The Void Dragon’s shape was somewhat gorilla-like, if gorillas had four arms, four enormous bat-like wings, two legs, and an octopoid head with long, seeking tentacles surrounding a sphincter-like mouth. Its skin was a swimming oily blackness, slick and unnatural, vaguely translucent. On its head was one large eye but several other eyes and growling, drooling mouths were placed and scattered randomly across the thing’s misshapen body. It was a nightmare incarnate.

  “Oh, damn,” I groaned. “That’s an ugly son of a bitch.”

  “That ugly son of a bitch is our ticket to a ton of mana-bearing magical items, honey,” Dahlia tutted, her hands already teeming with golden and silvery energy. My eyes fell to a pile of rubble that surrounded the nesting spot of the creature, giving me an idea.

  Time was short as the blasphemous thing had just taken notice of us, its many eyes now fixated on me in particular. A mouth-tentacle extended and stretched like a rubber band, whipping at me, but Dahlia blasted it with beams of light, knocking the probing appendage off its path, buying me just enough time to activate the first part of my combo.

  “Ig’nara K’thun!” I shouted, and piles of rubble and stone twisted into bone. “Yg’nau F’htag Ya’kyl!” I yelled next, pointing at the new bony assemblages surrounding the Void Dragon. The twisting bones came to life, though they were malformed and contorted unnaturally. Still, they crawled toward the creature with surprising speed, grasping and clawing at it, forcing the thing to take flight and move away.

  “Try to weaken it!” Dahlia said. “Do as much damage as you can, then let me absorb it!”

  “What are you going to do in the meantime?” I asked as I hurled a bony spear projectile at the creature as it soared above us, narrowly missing.

  “Oh, you’ll see,” she said mischievously. She started chanting something, and from her crystal orb emerged a long, serpentine Void Thing with a glowing light dangling from a stalk affixed to its head. The thing was just as hideous as the Void Dragon, maybe worse, but it was on our side. It was the Void Worm that Dahlia had captured a few months ago on our first mission with Memento Morikawa.

  “Damn, girl!” I shouted as I vaulted another bone spear and a cluster of Exploding Skull spells at the Void Dragon as it sought a safe place to land. One of the skulls successfully made contact, detonating and scorching a wing. I grinned with satisfaction.

  We were practically playing ‘Keep Away’ now—I was hurling attack after attack at the thing, and no matter where it tried to park itself on this rooftop, it was likely to be caught by either my spells or Dahlia’s new pet. I summoned Uther back into the fray for good measure, using him as an additional focus from which I launched more spears at the Void Dragon.

  It made a desperate, terrible sound as one spear caught it in the arm. I grinned at first but then saw it decide to take a dive right on top of me, throwing caution to the wind as it plummeted its assault. I dodged out of the way, and Dahlia’s Void Worm exploited the fresh opening, catching the other monster’s leg in its jaws and beginning a wrestling match between the two of them. I watched, trying to aim spells carefully, as the drama unfolded between the two titans, but I couldn’t get a clear shot in without risking hitting the Void Worm, so I held off until something changed. The two monstrosities ripped and rent each other, tearing away chunks of tar-like flesh, and the vapors of their dark energy seeped into the atmosphere with each new injury they endured.

  “This really could go either way, babe,” I noted to Dahlia. “You sure you want to let this play out?”

  Dahlia gritted her teeth, calling off her Void Worm, trying to help it make an exit from the fight, but the retreat left it wide open, and the Void Dragon tore into it even more fiercely, decapitating it. Dahlia shrieked in horror as her pet became a puddle of black misting miasma.

  “No!” she cried, and it stirred my guts with rage to see her unhappy.

  I vaulted forward, commanding the writhing mass of bone to attack the Void Dragon. They pinned it down, and at last, I had the opening I needed. Uther charged, shredding into its shadowy hide, and before the thing could attempt to brush him off, I focused a charged bone spear directly at its head, impaling it through its eye. I shuddered with delight as the spear pushed all the way through and emerged from the other side of its head, but the thing didn’t stop moving. Its movements were jerkier and more frantic now but still possessed some degree of life.

  Dahlia, recovering from her dismay, launched a fresh new assault of beams of light at its body, causing its flesh to teem and burn. The combined force of all three of our attacks was enough to weaken it, and I smirked, thinking this thing wouldn’t get a single hit on us.

  But in my cocksure hubris, a flurry of mouth tentacles launched at me, wrapping themselves around my torso. I felt my shirt burn away from the toxicity of its touch, and skin began to sizzle and sear, flesh melting.

  With that, Uther appeared, leaping upward, biting down on the tentacles, severing them from the face of the Void Dragon, and they fell from my body, limp, slumping to the ground and misting away.

  Dahlia started incanting again, this time something new. She held out her tome of Void Magic and her crystal ball, and I watched as the weakened Void Dragon failed to resist the force of her summons. It withered and flew into her focus, every drop of it, until nothing was left. She panted heavily at the completion of her task.

  “Are you alright?” I asked. She rushed over to me, throwing her arms around me and kissing me once on the lips. I gnashed my teeth in pain as her breasts heaved against the fresh burns on my chest. Dahlia's eyes showed that she sensed my discomfort and quickly backed off with mounting concern. “You’re the only sorceress I know who can play Pokémon with the Void Things,” I chuckled.

  “I have no idea what that is,” she said, frowning at my wound. “Let me try to fix that.” She lifted up her crystal orb once more, pushing it against the painful marks on my body. I felt my wounds healing, but dark scars were left behind in the shape of the tentacles that had twisted around my torso. Frustrated, I ripped off the remaining tatters of my shirt, displaying my awesome physique. It was cold, though, and a pang of regret made its way into my mind as I already missed being fully covered.

  “Are you trying to get me excited?” she whimpered naughtily as her finger seductively traced the new scars in my chest. She put her focus away on the pouch on her hip and fixed her starry eyes on me.

  “Sorry,” I grunted. “Let’s stay on task for now. We’re almost done here.”

  She looked a bit disappointed but nodded her agreement. “Of course,” she sighed, looking away, but flashing me a bit of a resentful pout at the last second.

  There wasn’t much in the way of treasure on the rooftop. There was, though, a broken hexagonal skylight that led to the floor below. I peered in, and my mouth hung open as I processed what I saw. “Babe, you’re going to want to check this out.”

  Easily hundreds of treasures lined the floor of the room—amulets, rings, swords, axes, tokens, and more. I jumped down through the skylight and landed gracefully as a comic boo
k superhero—a three-point landing.

  I spared a thought for my leg, remembering how weak it had been just a few months ago. Now, though, I’d absorbed so much mana so many times that my body was stronger and more resilient than that of a normal person, even that of an Olympic athlete. A gunshot to the head at point-blank range would probably kill me, sure—I was still mortal. But I was a hell of a lot more durable than your average Tom, Dick, or Harry, and my regenerative powers kept me alive in situations that should have easily killed me.

  Dahlia leaped down just behind me, but she fell like a feather, some spell or another slowing her descent. You could barely hear her white boots hit the ground.

  “Okay,” I said, surveying the loot. “We hit the jackpot, but—”

  “How do we get all this out of here?” Dahlia asked. “Once we waypoint back, that’s it. We lose our tether to this location. It’ll probably sit here for another hundred years before anyone can find it again.”

  I groaned. She was right. The waypoint spell to get us home was indeed a handy spell, but once we left here, this place was locked away for good, and it would take the professors a ton of effort to reopen the location for us again—enough that it basically wasn’t worth asking.

  “Well, there is another possibility,” I said. She looked at me questioningly, waiting for me to speak. “You’re not going to like it because it cuts the rest of the team out of the equation,” I said, my face souring in preparation for her reaction.

  She furrowed her brow at me. “You mean we absorb it all here and now? For ourselves?”

  I shrugged. “We take back what we can for the others, but yeah, we absorb the bulk of it. I know it’s not—”

  She cocked her head sideways and interrupted me. “No, it’s a good idea,” she said. “The majority of it should go to you, and I’ll take a small share, and then we bring back a similarly sized armful for the rest of the harem.”

  I blinked. “You want to give the bulk of it to me?” I asked in surprise. “This is going to be a huge power gain for one person, especially me.”