CHAPTER 51: GOLEMS AND GROWTH

I awoke to find myself sandwiched between both ladies, seemed that this is becoming a regular occurrence, not that I exactly minded that fact as I found it quite enjoyable. Although it does make it a touch hard to get up stealthily. But for now anyways I just enjoyed the soft embrace of both ladies and waited for either one of them to wake up first.

Turns out however that it was a certain dragon that woke up first. And with something new to show me! Overnight it seemed little Dawn had grown the start of a pair of wings, right now they were just bony nubs that jutted out of her back but I could see the beginnings of a membrane growing in. In all honesty it looked quite painful and wasn’t the prettiest thing to look at.

But I could feel that Dawn was both delighted and exited about the sudden growth but that she also found it quite uncomfortable. To try and ease that I enveloped her in my aura and her discomfort fell off quite quickly. But that’s not all that it did, to both my and Dawn’s surprise the wings that wear barely half grown suddenly extended.

The bones of the wing grew rapidly with 3 bone ridges that were soon connected by a light green membrane that had a pattern similar to leaves on it. The growth took around a minute with my aura focused on her but the effect was wonderous.

Dawn was currently around 2 and a half feet long around and inch wide for most of her body with a more pronounced head, her legs rested around 2/3rds of the way up her body and her new wings sat just above the claws at around the 3 quarters mark, they were honestly quite big compared to her small body but as she experimentally opened and closed them when folded away they blended into her body quite well.

I could feel Dawns delight through the body and it mixed with my own amazement at the sudden growth. And then before anything else Dawn leapt off my chest where she had slithered up to and attempted to fly around. It didn’t work too well. She managed to glide for a solid second, and then she tried to flap and it all went down hill from there. She must have lost her ballence with that movement as she suddenly careened to the side and disappeared below my sight line only to crash into the floor with a thud and squeek of pain.

I bolted up out of bed and dashed over to her to find her sprawled out on the floor looking quite sorry for herself. I gently scooped her up and healed up her bruises and whispered sweet nothings to her whilst gently stroking her head and back. My sudden movement had also awoken the other two as I saw Amanda poke her head around me to look down at Dawn.

"Oh she has wings now! That’s new, when did she get them?" Her normally dry tone was replaced with one of affection and curiosity. After all both girls had grown to love the little scarf impersonator just as much as I do and would pamper her at any opportunity.

"She just grew them this morning and tried to fly just now, it didn’t go too well and she fell." This of course resulted in little Dawn reviving the pampering of 3 women for quite some time as she slowly got past the embarrassment of failing her first attempt at flight.

Once she had revived sufficient encouragement Dawn gave flying another go this time just starting with short glides between myself Kana and Amanda. We made a little game of it and Dawn seemed to love it. Although she did tire out quite quickly and when she landed back in my arms she promptly folded her wings and made her way back to her rightful spot around my neck causing all 3 of us to chuckle.

"Glad that she seems back to normal. Wonder how long till she can properly fly?" Kana wondered aloud.

"Hmm I’m not sure but I don’t want her to rush and get hurt!" I replied, still very protective of my baby.

"Well we shall just have to be with her when she tries so that she doesn’t get hurt." Amanda said whilst walking up to me and wrapping me in a tight up and gently kissing me. Any more complaints I may have had were silenced by that action and I melted into her arms.

"Alright enough outa you two or we will be in here all day." Chided Kana, but we could both tell that she only half meant that and really wouldn’t mind a full day in bed with us all. Although personally I’m not quite sure I could survive that. Whilst I had grown considerably stronger thanks to my rank up the same was true for both girls so it was quite the challenge to keep up with them both in the bed when they wanted to ’put me through my paces’ so to speak.

I shivered at that thought only to revive a sharp slap to the butt causing me to yell in surprise. I glared at Kana in offence to which she just rolled her eyes. "We both knew where your mind was going there don’t even try to deny it." Not able to deny that I only glared at her, she simply snorted and moved to get dressed properly.

We all did eventually make it downstairs where the ever present Fuarder who greeted me as boisterously as usual and again before I could even finish asking for breakfast and a drink 3 mugs were in front of me. I had been paying attention that time and even then I couldn’t sense any magic like what happened when I or Amanda use our storage artifacts so I can only assume that it was raw speed.

I narrowed my eyes at the dwarf and muttered. "One day I will find out how you do that."

He just smiled even wider before replying. "Ha! No you won’t lassy! Greater folk have tried and all have failed to witness my magesty!" I only snorted at this boast and swore that one day I would catch him out.

After a quick but filling breakfast of sausage eggs and a bowl of porridge, with extra sausage and eggs for Dawn who happily scarfed down her fill. We made our way out of the inn and decided to make good on our promise to stop by the adventures guild and get a training room to try out my new staff and see how powerful it really is!

It was a quick walk through the city as we were now mostly familiar with the route to the guild. And upon entering Amanda opted to head to a receptionist for us and organise a room for us to train in. Unlike the guild back in Tenebre village which only had the one training yard as this was a considerably larger guild it had both open and private training rooms.

Since we wanted some privacy with testing out this staff we opted to pay a bit extra to secure that.

A few minutes later Amanda returned to us and directed us to the private room she had booked out for the hour. Once more we wandered through the long hallways until we eventually came to a similar mini reception as last time and were directed to a room by another member of staff there. We entered into a room almost identical as to the room we were in yesterday for that test.

It was large, square shaped and with a sand pit in the middle. Perfect to test out some new magics!

Recalling the staff from my inventory I poured some of my mana into the staff however as soon as I did that I felt a sudden wave of weakness pas over me and it felt like I lost a chunk of my mana capacity. I staggered at the sudden feeling of loss, almost falling to my knees but managing to catch myself using the staff as a crutch. As I wondered what caused that a notification suddenly flashed into view.

[Expositional aid - when equipping 3 or less items gain:

- 20% boost to Health. Mana, Stamina

- boost to Health, Mana, Stamina regen depending on amount of exposed skin]

As this happened both girls rushed to my side and helped me back to my feet. "What’s was that? Was the item cursed after all?" Was Kana’sfirst words.

I shook my head and reminded them about my boon. "It seems like if I try to use this staff it counts as equipping a 4th item, so looks like I’ll have to retire one of my other items if I want to use this." And I already knew which one would be getting dropped. I took off my ring which only provided a slight mana regen and handed it over to Kana seeing as she lacked an item like that. As soon as I relinquished the ring the feeling of loss suddenly revered and I was once again feeling back to normal.

We did quickly test out its limits just to be on the safe side and it turns out then even when in my storage item it will still count as ’equipped’ if it is imbued with my mana so looks like their is no cheating this unfortunately.

Still with that hickup out of the way I returned to testing out the staff. Pouring my mana into it I began to understand how I could go about summoning my golem. Within the staff their was a ’reservoir’ of sorts with dozens of separate containers. To summon a golem I would need to completly fill at least one of them.

So I began to fill one of them, and was slightly worried at what I found. It would seem that this wasn’t a gold ranked item for nothing as it took nearly my entire mana pool to just fill a single one of their containers. However when it was full it only required a fraction of the mana to keep it full. I then willed a golem to be summoned.

A wave of nature mana washed out from the staff into the ground and a couple meters in front of me it began to form. Vines sprouted out of the sandy ground in front of us, they wrapped themselves around each other. Their numbers and thickness growing at a constant and rapid pace. After only a handful of seconds it was fully formed, and it was a beauty.

In front of me stood a 8ft tall woman made of vines. It strongly resembled the woman that I saw from the Living Vines memories. However its form was rough. Almost unfinished, its face lacked any clear features and their was no defonition to its body or limbs.

As I considered this Amanda gasped. "It summons a dryad?!" And yeah I had to agree, I was quite expecting it to summon a classic golem not anything this.. bespoke?

Then something even more shocking happened. The dryad looked at me for a moment then down at Dawn wrapped around my neck who was also staring at it along with me. Then the dryad went down to a single knee and spoke. "I greet my new master."