Chirp asked me to walk to the center of the room, and Crash handed me a silver metal wand to hold in my left hand. The engravings in the wand meant nothing to me. Several wands lay on the little wooden table they had set up.

Chirp handed me an identical wand to hold in my right hand.

“Are these magical?” I asked.

“No. They are copies, so they can’t be enchanted. However, they do conduct magic. When I reach out with this third wand, here,” Crash said, lifting yet a third, identical wand. “I’ll send magic coursing into the wand you hold in your left hand that will push the evil spirit inside you to the wand in your right, and from there it will dissipate into the air.”

Chirp grinned. “I can use this wand to push magic into the air that will swirl it up. That will cause the spirit to become fractured and dissipate faster.”

“The spirit can’t do anything?”

Crash shook his head. “No, it won’t have time for that. And once it’s all stirred up, it will be even more powerless and fragmented.”

“We’re not just creating a hundred tiny Enash spirits?” I asked, just to be sure.

“Shouldn’t be. A spirit that fragmented loses its identity. It is said that we all, in some sense, partake of the spirit of the great President Kapow when it left his body two thousand years ago, but that’s just an example. We all partake of all the spirits that were around back then.”

Enash didn’t say anything. Of course, he’d told me he wasn’t speaking to me. Something about his silence bothered me, but I couldn’t put a finger on it.

“Alright. Let’s do it.”

“Shouldn’t we get naked?” Lysandra asked.

“Huh? Why?” Chirp asked her.

“I don’t know,” Lysandra said, “at Elvish rituals everyone gets naked. So the clothes don’t interfere with magic, or something.”

“Elves just like excuses to get everyone to be naked, Lysandra,” Aurea said. “There’s no magical reason for it.”

“So no need to take your clothes off,” Crash said quickly. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

He touched the wand to me, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then I felt something tingle. Was that the magic?

Bwahahaha.

Uh-oh. But I felt Enash being ripped away. Maybe he was tired of living like this, and welcomed oblivion. Maybe that’s why he’d been so quiet, rather than begging me to keep him around. Maybe.

It was as if everything about him was being pulled into my right arm, toward the wand in my right hand. And all the while, Enash was laughing maniacally. Of course, that, too, could just be a last desperate attempt to get me to do something to mess up the ritual, or maybe the magic tickled. I stayed still.

Chirp touched his wand to the wand in my right hand. That wasn’t in the script as I remembered it. He was supposed to use it to swirl the air once Enash was driven out.

“Abby!” Valeria shouted suddenly. “Chirp is evil!”

Now she told me. I jerked away, but not before I felt Enash leave completely.

Chirp took a step back, and laughed, just like Enash. “Bwahahaha! Now I have the power!” the green haired gnome cackled. “And you! Bing! You will be the first to die!”

He dropped the wand, and pointed at the gnome President. A black ray shot out, and hit the gnome in the face. At once, his avuncular features turned purple and splotchy, and then he clutched his heart and keeled over.

“The president is dead! As Vice President, I now assume the presidency!” Chirp yelled, and then pointed. “Attack them!”

Them meant my friends. But they were already leaping into action. Valeria drew her sword, and charged. Gren charged too, apparently deciding the quarters were too close for her bow but well-suited to her knife. Betsy, Inka, and Lysandra were right in there with the others. And Lesseth was popping out of my bag. Aurea waved her hands in the air.

I, meanwhile, felt kind of dizzy and helpless. I had no doubt that Enash was inside Chirp. If Enash was twelfth level, my death magic wouldn’t work. But then again, Enash was inside me, and that didn’t make me twelfth level. I jumped toward Chirp and cast Death Touch.

I made contact, but nothing happened. He was higher level than me.

“Hahaha! It is I, Enash, that is in control here! Prepare to watch your friends die to my Death Fog!”

He teleported, putting distance between him and the others. They charged to where he was, but he wasn’t there anymore.

He began the spell, and I knew he’d get it off before Valeria and crew managed to get to him. He could just teleport again if he wanted to, anyway. I reached into my bag for my katana, figuring I’d teleport and hope, but I didn’t think I could take him out in time.

Unless…

I teleported on top of the ritual table. From there, everyone could see me. “Enash!” I yelled.

He looked.

I unzipped my dress. My boobs popped out. I didn’t expect it to do more than slow him down a little, but his little gnomish eyes bugged out and stared.

Stunning Beauty.

I shrugged the dress off my shoulders, and he kept staring.

Enash had made my body. I was his ideal, the sexiest person he could possibly imagine. That was before I’d been magically enhanced with the power of Special Attraction. For all his levels, he couldn’t resist staring at his own wet dream.

I pushed at the dress, slowly making it fall from my hips. My friends were already charging toward Enash, their backs to me, leaving them unaffected.

“You can’t defeat me,” Enash said. “You’re only slowing me down. But wow, nice legs!”

“That’s right Enash,” I said. “Perfect legs. Perfect breasts. And you know what else?”

I pulled my panties off, and my cock flopped out. It wasn’t hard, or even close. But still, he stared at me.

And then my friends were on him. Aurea pointed her hand and an ice bolt shot forth and hit him in the head. Lysandra stabbed him with a dagger. Inka hit him with a big curved knife. Gren stabbed him. Valeria chopped at his face with her sword.

“Nooooo!” Enash yelled.

“I don’t have to defeat you,” I told him. “I have my friends for that.”

But before I finished talking, Betsy had chopped his head off, and the green topped gnome head was rolling across the floor. I was talking to his corpse.

And then Lesseth, always a little slower to move than the others, turned into an amorphous blob and covered the body. The flesh hissed as acid dissolved it.

Crash ran forward, swirling his wand in the air. “Begone! Begone foul spirit!”

I heard Enash’s voice in my head.

Abby. Save me. Let me back.

As if. With each word the voice got weaker, until it simply faded away completely. I looked around.

A lot of the gnomes were stunned, too. I wasn’t sure whether that was about the death of their President or at the sight of my naked body. Could be both. I reached down to get my clothes on.

“Did she just pants herself?” asked a gnome.

All in a good cause.

“She did!” exclaimed another.

“Heh.”

“Bing would have found that pretty funny,” one said.

“Yeah, the least we could do is laugh.”

One chuckled. Then another. And then they all started laughing and pointing, even Crash.

I didn’t think it was that funny, but I wasn’t a gnome. I did feel kind of embarrassed, so I pulled my dress back on and zipped it partly up. I’d deal with the panties later.

It probably was a bad time to press them about the need for an artificer. I walked over to Bing, and put my hands on his black and blue corpse.

Raise Dead.

Somewhere in there the gnomes stopped laughing, although no one moved to stop me. They all just stared.

Valeria caught on, and she was there by my side. Then all my friends were there, surrounding me.

Bing’s eyes fluttered open. Valeria immediately healed him.

“Welcome back to the living, Mr. President.”

“What happened? I – I was riding the eternal wheel, far up into the sky.”

“You died. I brought you back,” I said, as if it was a thing I did every day. “Enash is gone from me, although you might want to have someone check.”

“How did you defeat him?”

“I pantsed myself.”

Bing started laughing.

“Hey! He’s alive!”

“The Uber Archfiend of Tartarus pantsed herself!” Bing yelled, and started laughing again. Then all the gnomes erupted in more gales of laughter.

So he’d known about that all along.

Crash came over. “Enash is truly gone,” he said. “This woman now has no Enash in her.”

For defeating a legendary twelfth level necromancer,you have earned 20000 experience points. You now are now seventh level! You need 61340 experience points to reach eighth level.

“Oh my goddess!” Lysandra said suddenly. “Did everyone else just get a whole lot of experience?”

“Yep,” Gren said.

“Yee-haw!” exclaimed Betsy.

Good. They deserved it. All I did was take my clothes off.

I stood up. I didn’t feel any different, really. Sometimes Enash was quiet, and this was like that time. But apparently, he was really gone. I had wondered if that would change me somehow, if I would maybe even lose the necromancer class. But I’d used both seductress and necromancer abilities. Apparently, I hadn’t lost a thing. Heck, I was even seventh level now, which I had thought was pretty much unattainable.

I wanted to find out what new abilities I had. Probably something annoying and borderline unusable. Well, that would have to wait for a moment of calm and quiet, when I could be alone. This wasn’t it. I still had a mission here, and it hadn’t gotten any less important.

Suddenly, I felt my skirt being lifted.

“You’re not even wearing pants!” Bing yelled.

I turned to find him there with the hem of my dress in his hand. “Mr. President!” I scolded.

“What! You’re like one of us now! I just wanted to make you feel welcome.”

“You folks already doused me with water and tried to short-sheet our beds,” I pointed out. “That’s enough welcoming, really.”

“Tried? Someone messed that up? How could someone fail to short-sheet a bed?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday,” I said. “I checked before any of us got in.”

For some reason, that too was funny, and he started laughing again.

A few of the gnomes started playing some kind of game that consisted of kicking a ball around, except they were using Chirp’s bloody head for the ball. Great fun.

“Not evil?” I asked Valeria.

Val shook her head. “Not evil. Just very impertinent.”

Impertinent. I chuckled at her choice of words.

“Not you, too,” Val said, looking at me.

“It was just a chuckle,” I said. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to go kicking heads around.”

Aurea walked over to me. “Abby? I think we should try to fit in more.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“If you unchain the chain around my back, the metal will fall off and I’ll be suddenly topless.”

“You’re just trying to show off,” Valeria said.

“Well, I could take it off myself if that was all I wanted to do. C’mon, Abby, show them you’re a fun-loving person. I’ll pretend to walk away now.”

Alright. It might make it that much harder to explain to anyone who came with us about consent and asking first, but it wasn’t a horrible idea. I waited until her back was turned, and then undid the clasp.

The gnomes loved it. To be fair, a lot of people appreciated Aurea’s areolas.

President Bing just shook his head, though. “That was totally staged,” he said.

I shrugged. “Sure. She’s an exhibitionist.”

“Too bad she’s so tall.” Bing shrugged. “If you don’t mind finding your way outside, the death of our vice-president means that we have serious matters to attend to.”

“Gooooooal!” shouted one of the gnomes, as he kicked the vice president’s head past another gnome and it flew between two chairs that had been set up.