Here we are at last, with the third and final Goblin Girls Do It Better!
First chapter is below.
Second chapter is on my Patreon for 1$/month Patrons.
Third chapter and on through to the end will be posting for 3$/month Patrons in this collection.
I hope you enjoy!
Something awaited them in the logging mill’s attic.
Lucas looked to Nysa. She had heard it as well.
He made quick motions to her. She nodded tightly and slipped off. It was still impressive, how silently she could move, given her build. Whatever it was, it shifted again. There were two ways up into the attic of the old mill, and as Nysa got into position at the ladder, he began ascending the stairs. She moved with him, carefully hauling herself up the old rungs.
Both ladder and stairwell creaked.
Lucas prepared himself for the worst, though he had the impression that whatever it was up there wasn’t particularly large. That didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t dangerous. He flashed back to that damned Larsis creature from a few months ago and how close he’d come then.
He was going to be first up, as the stairwell was exposed. He crept up it, crossbow at the ready, and studied what there was to see. It looked about as he’d expected it to: a dusty room, half-filled with an uneven mishmash of supplies and furniture. Gray sunlight filtered in through a poorly maintained roof and a single window across the way, slanting shafts of pale light across the chaos.
There were no obvious signs of recent passage, but even as he came to the top of the stairs, he heard something shift near the center of the room. He saw Nysa’s dark-haired head rise into view from behind a low bookshelf across the way.
He made a few more quick hand motions to her and she nodded once more.
He loved working with Nysa. Each of the women now in his life offered him something unique, some special thing that they shared, mostly by dint of who they were. Ella offered a comforting, social ease, a sense of relaxation. Talia offered him a seriousness that most of the others lacked. She was the one he went to when he was craving longer or more philosophical conversations that the others simply lacked the patience for or interest in.
Nysa, however, offered him something he’d forgotten he enjoyed: a fierce, brutal competence in the field. She acted like the old hand adventurers he ran into, like the veterans of war who could never really go back, even after the war was over, and instead opted to roam the land.
Her seriousness still made her stick out back at the village, and it was clear that even now, she was still struggling somewhat. Out here though? She seemed in her element as nowhere else, and something in him responded very strongly to that.
Sometimes they spent entire trips out in the forest without exchanging a single word, both of them not even just comfortable operating this way, but comforted by it in some ill-defined, tacit manner that probably wasn’t very healthy.
Well, he supposed that was all right. The world was often not a healthy place.
They crept forward, the attic a potential battlefield.
They’d hit this abandoned mill for the same reason they’d been hitting derelict locations for a few weeks now: resources. Either stuff they could make practical use of immediately or stuff they could sell. Although he was finding it a little ridiculous, just how much ‘stuff to sell’ they had. It now occupied a pile at the back of their main cave and it was beginning to resemble a dragon’s hoard, simply because they had nowhere to offload it.
But that was a problem for the rapidly approaching future.
Whatever it was, it shifted suddenly. It was low to the floor, had to be hiding beneath a huge dresser that sat near the center of a cluster of random objects. Lucas had a strengthening suspicion of what it was, especially as he caught a whiff of strong animal scent, but he had to be sure. Once he saw Nysa was in place, he pulled out his sword and then poked the dresser with it.
It tilted back just a little, an inch and a half maybe, and then he released it. It banged to the floor and something let out a chittering yell and scurried out of the cluster of furniture in a frantic motion. Lucas sighed heavily in relief as he saw that it was indeed just a raccoon. Nysa frowned in disappointment as she watched it race off to a hole in the roof and vanish.
“Disappointing,” she muttered.
He chuckled. “You were hoping for a fight?”
“Maybe.” She considered it. “I suppose not.” She looked down, frowning. “And I suppose we must now search this place over.”
“From the top down is often a good policy,” Lucas replied.
Nysa sighed and sheathed her blade. “I guess we should get to work then.”
He nodded and they did.
It had been a month since they’d celebrated finding the Heart of Peace.
Lucas had been expecting things to happen, but while he would not say it hadn’t been a busy month, it had sure been an uneventful one. Which he was fine with. Very fine with, actually, given everything he’d been running around getting done, but it was making him paranoid. Like something was coming for them, it was just taking its time getting there.
For the most part, they’d just been building and gathering.
Making a village from scratch was a lot of work. Doing so with mostly the help of goblins was even more work, given how prone they were to...giving into disruptive thoughts. Thankfully, most of those thoughts were along the line of ‘I want to tickle my friend’ and not ‘I want to set this hut on fire’. Or, at least, if it was like that second one, they didn’t give into it.
Although Lucas had been learning that goblins needed ways of releasing pressure. It was actually a kind of fascinating learning experience, but at some point he’d become aware of the fact that there was indeed some kind of ebb and flow to their more psychotic tendencies. There was this kind of internal pressure that built in them, naturally and eternally.
Some things could make the pressure build faster, some things could slow the pressure’s growth, but you couldn’t stop it. And, Lucas had deduced finally, even if he could, he wouldn’t. Because it was somehow integral to who they were, some crucial, core component of their own internal goblin essence. He knew it partially because he had something similar in himself.
And so, in order to keep them from doing big insane things, he had been learning that they could do little wild things and that would be fine, provided it was done often enough. It was so interesting because, except for perhaps Talia, none of them seemed aware of this. He had been slowly introducing the concept to them over the past few weeks and it seemed to be going...all right.
“So I was meaning to ask,” Nysa said, breaking the silence that had begun to fill the attic, “how are you holding up? I know most everyone has been more difficult lately.”
Lucas chuckled. “Yeah. I’m all right. Finding myself a little run down, and I’d like to get more sleep, but it hasn’t gotten serious quite yet.”
It had occurred to him at some point over the last two weeks that the abrupt uptick in arguing, crying, or yelling goblin girls was a direct result of so many of them being pregnant. He’d been around pregnant women before, (for a while there, he’d sought them out, for obvious reasons), so he at least knew that pregnancy could screw up emotions. Izzy had become a holy terror at times, getting into arguments with everyone over just about everything.
Every day that passed, Lucas found himself even more grateful for Nysa, Kiara, Clover, Syl, and Jacinda. Although in truth, it was Syl who was doing a lot of heavy lifting, emotionally speaking. He had often heard her described as the mother of the village, and it seemed truer than ever. She seemed to spend most of her time counseling the others, breaking up fights, or whatever other emotional oddjobs cropped up.
And while Lucas was more or less living a dream of sleeping with seven very noticeably pregnant women, he had promised himself after a particularly brutal day last week that he was never, ever, ever again impregnating more than three of them at a time. And he was certain that this conviction was only going to strengthen after they actually gave birth.
He was also absolutely certain that if they really wanted to get pregnant, the goblin women he shared his life with could pretty easily talk him into it.
Lucas glanced at Nysa. He thought the conversation would keep going, and from what little he could see of her expression, he thought she was struggling to think of something else to say. He hid a smile and kept searching through the mess for the moment.
Their relationship was...still being sorted out.
He had honestly expected something to have happened between them by now, as Nysa was clearly interested in him. She’d avoided him for a little while, but then seemed to go in the opposite direction this last month, hardly leaving his side. He kept thinking something would happen, because she was giving him all the correct signals.
He thought she might come to him abruptly and confess her feelings, or kiss him randomly, or perhaps wake him in the middle of the night. In fact, a few times, he’d been sure that she was about to actually talk to him regarding her feelings, but she didn’t follow through.
For a time, he’d simply settled on the idea that she had decided she wasn’t interested. Which was fine. If you weren’t into someone, then you just weren’t into them. But she had been hitting on him, and all four of his wives had, at one point or another, let slip that she’d had discussions with them about the possibility off sleeping with him.
In truth, he had the idea that he was looking at a very long, very extended case of a woman trying to make up her mind. What was truly confusing him, though, was why it was taking so long. Things had more or less settled. Sure, there was more to be done, but life in the village felt comfortable now. It had something of a routine to it.
No, something was bugging her still, but he was beginning to suspect that it didn’t actually have anything to do with him.
So, while she sorted it out, he was glad to keep spending time with her and occasionally flirting.
Speaking of which…
“Hey, can you move this for me?” Lucas asked after he’d finished searching a dresser.
“Yeah,” Nysa replied, striding over and picking it up.
“You’re so strong,” he marveled as she set it down elsewhere.
Nysa paused and although she was facing away from him, he could almost hear her blushing with a small smile on her face. He’d taken to saying that to her. At first she had mistook it for mocking, given she’d informed him multiple times she was stronger than he was before he’d essentially dominated her with speed and skill. But he had convinced her that it was a genuine compliment, and at some point she’d realized he was flirting with her whenever he brought it up.
“You know,” she said, still facing away from him, walking to a desk and beginning to look through it, “most men do not value physical strength in their women.”
“You should by now that I’m not like most other men, at least in this regard,” Lucas replied.
She snorted. “Yeah, I was going to say, you’re exactly like most men in how easy it is for one of your wives or mistresses to get to you to do things. All they have to do is lift their dress.”
“Is that so unreasonable? I’m literally surrounded by attractive women all day every day, most of whom I’ve impregnated, almost all of whom I’ve slept with.”
He and Kiara still pretty regularly went at it. He didn’t say it outright, but at this point, she was the only one who he hadn’t been intimate with.
“Not unreasonable, I suppose,” she murmured.
He paused, noticing a change in her tone. He looked at her. She was no longer searching the desk, instead just staring down at it.
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Nysa,” he said.
“I know you didn’t,” she replied, finally turning around and fixing him with a firm stare. “I’m not angry. I just wanted to say that...I know we’ve danced around sex since the beginning. And I know that I’ve said I want to, and that I will. And that you’ve been extremely patient with me. And none of that has changed.”
“I don’t want you to feel like you’re obligated to do it,” he replied. “If how we’re going along now is more comfortable for you, I won’t resent you for it. I won’t ask you to change it.”
She smiled an awkward smile. “I really appreciate that. And I believe you, truly. I don’t feel like you’re trying to guilt me into it. And I wanted to say that I’m going to be ready to do it soon. I’m still...examining my emotions, about certain things. Something’s bothering me, something we haven’t really dealt with yet.”
“I’m willing to talk about it, whatever it is,” he replied.
“I know, and I’m thankful, and I will. Just...not quite yet. That being said...I would like a kiss.”
“Right now?” he asked. She nodded. “Gladly.”
Lucas felt his heart flutter briefly in his chest as he stepped up to her and placed his hands on her hips. He’d been hoping for this since he first saw her. He waited, seeing if she wanted him to take the lead or not, and she didn’t. She leaned in, a surprisingly shy half-smile on her flushed face, and pressed her lips to his own.
She had very nice lips. After a brief pause as she kissed him, Nysa tilted her head and slipped a hand over the back of his neck. She pulled him deeper into the kiss, and he had to duck to get it properly, (something he was very used to by now), and then she parted his lips with her own and pushed her tongue into his mouth.
It had a different feel than the others, a different shape as well, and a different taste. Her natural taste was stronger, more intense. She kissed him with a fierce passion for about five more seconds, their tongues twisting and tasting, and then she pulled back, a little abruptly.
“Oh wow,” she said softly, breathing more heavily.
“Good, I take it?” he replied.
“Yes. Good.” She blinked. “I had...forgotten.”
“Just how satisfying and intense physical intimacy can be?”
“Yes.”
“Once you’re feeling ready, I will be more than happy to reacquaint you with it.”
“I appreciate that.” She cleared her throat. “We should probably get back to work.”
“We should,” he agreed.