Chapter 568 – Separation 6 – Site

Chapter 568 – Separation 6 – Site

“Here you go.” John’s tone wasn’t just good, it was downright ecstatic, as he flicked something at Ahanu. Catching it barely, the Chieftain-Elect looked at the dime. The heads side of it had a long scratch running over it. John beamed with satisfaction, glasses on his eyes, accompanied by an Eliza that would have had dishevelled hair were it not gone for short, currently black, stubbles. The buzzcut was just about the only thing depressing his mood.

He just felt like fate was finally swinging his way again. Granted, only the events over the course of the day would show this, but he had a plan and, potential consequences aside, it was a pretty tight knit one. The beauty was in its simplicity and the fact that, if it failed, John won anyway. There was one particular unknown that still annoyed him, well, potentially two, but neither of them were necessary for this thing to work out.

Once he lowered his arms again, the Gamer continued, “Keep it in a pocket you don’t mind losing. It might stretch out the fabric and all that.”

“Alright,” Ahanu seemingly got infected by John’s good mood. “Slept well?”

“You have no FUCKING idea,” Eliza giggled erratically as she grabbed John’s arm and clung to him like a very needy sack of bricks. “I got absolutely HAMMERED, it was the greatest shit. If I was some disgusting normal bitch, I wouldn’t be able to walk. My womb got completely bloated with cum and I fucking love it.”

“She still isn’t pregnant,” John jokingly added, an insider joke that flew over Ahanu’s head, but he got the gist of it.

“Bit more than I needed to know,” the leader of the Hidden Tradition giggled and then made an inviting gesture towards the car he had come in, another large van of the mobile home variety. More of a bus, as John decided while they entered.

It had two floors, barely high enough that John wasn’t afraid to bump his head every step, with a small kitchen and relatively spacious sitting area, as well as a bathroom containing a single toilet and a sink, on the lower floor. The upper floor had a bedroom and a proper sitting area.

‘So far the two things that seem to dominate the Hidden Tradition are smoking and a love for mobile homes,’ John thought as they got comfortable on the lower floor. ‘Don’t like the former, but the latter I can get behind.’ After looking around some more, John asked, “Did an Abyssal make this?”

“I get the feeling you’re asking something else – tea, water, anything else?” Ahanu extended the question while standing in the kitchen. Aside from John and Eliza, Elu was also there. This mildly stimulated John’s paranoid side. Being together with the two strongest members of the guild while on the way to the place where Ahanu would have his maximum power. The mix of his good mood and the laughable niceness of the Hidden Tradition made him disregard that feeling.

Not completely, John wasn’t even sure if he was able to not have second thoughts about everything at this point, but as much as he could.

“Well, I have a follow-up question, but I would like to know that first,” John retorted. “Also, just some water is fine with me... also, did you get the message I wrote you yesterday?” In a pause of his, very thorough, ‘love-making’ session with Eliza yesterday, he had updated the Native on his plans via a text message.

Elu responded before Ahanu had the opportunity, “Yes, he did, next time alert us about such things in advance, please. I need my beauty sleep,” the elderly woman was only partly joking. “I’m very old and don’t want even more wrinkles... also coffee.”

“Can I just drink semen straight from the cock?” Eliza asked, ready to slide under the table. John grabbed her by the collar of his appropriated shirt. “We got caught before, don’t be such a sensitive, sissy dick!”

“There is a difference between being caught in the office and just doing it in front of people,” the Gamer very clearly stated. “And you have been insatiable lately, Jesus Christ almighty!”

“I am on my fertile period!”

“You’re always on your fertile period!” John retorted. “And you can’t get pregnant through the mouth anyway!”

“I think we just haven’t tried it hard enough,” the blood mage crossed her arms and nodded to herself as if she had just said something sagely. “Just REALLY fuck me up and maybe my womb will smell all that cum in my stomach and slide up my body to suck it out?”

“That sounds absolutely disgusting,” the Gamer pointed out.

“Motherfucker, we had our first face to face conversation while you ripped nails out of my flesh, I think we’re beyond ‘disgusting’,” Eliza giggled. “How about ‘kinky’?”

‘I should set Scarlett on that... then again, she might get offended if I keep using her as my personal search engine,’ the Gamer was a bit amused at his own thoughts. The bus came to a soft halt soon after that. “Are we there?” John wondered, looking out of the window to find them on a pretty nondescript area somewhere in the Appalachians.

The mountains surrounded them on all sides and continued as far as he could see in every direction, if they didn’t simply block his vision. In a distant valley there was a town, from where they had come. Aside from that, it was all green trees and light stones.

“Not exactly, but this is the last point the car can turn without problems,” Ahanu explained. “So we are going the rest of the way on foot.”

Wanting to complain that having a hardly accessible centre of power seemed impractical, John bit the inside of his cheek. Not only did that gravesite predate modern roads, he knew that the remote location was part of the point. The mere existence of the gravesite lent people of the Hidden Tradition power when they were nearby, they didn’t even need to be in the barrier itself.

Ahanu stepped off the road and Elu followed him with a grace that no sane person would have expected from such an old, thin lady. Due to their remote location and the lack of mundane people around, none of them felt particularly inclined to hide their supernatural physiology. Neither were they about to start throwing fireballs, they simply jumped past or climbed over obstacles in ways above the normal.

Not that this was needed too often. Although John couldn’t see it, Ahanu was clearly guiding them along a path up the mountain. The summerly warmth was greatly reduced between the height and the canopies of the trees. With disdain, John watched his suit get stuck on a splintered piece of wood and rip. With this normal piece of cloth, he definitely wasn’t dressed for the occasion. Honestly, he was more bothered by the torture his Overwatch shirt went through.

“Mind changing into your robe?” John asked when they stopped for a moment so that Ahanu could orient himself. Didn’t seem like he was lost and Elu also hadn’t said anything, but better safe than sorry. “I really like that shirt.”

“Because of the logo or because I wore it? Say the right thing!” Eliza asked as she was already peeling herself out of it. “This is actually easier without any hair,” she commented, the Gamer hoping that she wouldn’t start thinking about keeping this hairstyle.

“Well, it’s going to smell better than before,” John fully admitted, quickly changing topic, as he inspected the partly torn piece of his gaming wardrobe. Sap stuck to some of the fabric. It exuded sweetly the natural musk of Eliza, her sweat and whatever shampoo she had used in the hotel. He tossed it into his inventory and then pulled out her robe. While she was on it, Eliza also got out of her leather pants. Underneath, she wore the usual black pieces, held together by metal rings.

“Now, if we get caught, people will think I am a massive fucking freak,” Eliza pointed out with an adoringly insane grin on her cute face.

“I can guarantee that nobody is behind us,” John promised, leaning against a stone that overlooked the path they had come from and the phenomenal mountainside. This bit further up, and with a clear look between the trees, the sight only got more beautiful. If he had nowhere to be, he could have sat there for a little while and studied all the details and the patterns that continental drift had caused the mountains to rise in. He got to rest in that position for long enough before they continued making their way.

The barrier was much larger than John had thought. They entered while still enveloped by trees, and it took them a solid ten minutes of walking straightforward, a well-trodden path suddenly appearing under their feet, before they arrived at the actual gravesite.

The ridge of the mountain had been modified. Where the rise should have curved back into a fall, it instead formed a roughly circular cliff that rose out of the forest floor. Atop of the plateau stands a massive construction of trees, clay and stone. The interconnected branches reminded John, in arrangement and form, of an arena, the colosseum in Rome even. Where the arches of that building had been orderly and led into a structure, however, these were archaic in position and size and led only into a hollow center.

Stone covered many of the trees or supported branches too thin to bear their load by forming mighty pillars of grayish white or red. Clay covered large cocoons, for a lack of a better word, that were hung into the arch-like windows between the trunks through an assortment of taut strings that seemed like oversized dreamcatchers.

The size and shape of those pieces of impressive, if simple, pottery gave John the hunch that he was looking at the caskets holding the mortal remains of the past leaders. The floor was simple, even stone. Numerous members of the Hidden Tradition stepped out from behind the trees and took a clearly pre-coordinated position.

“We should not disturb the ancestors for longer than necessary,” Ahanu said. Although John sort of wanted to see the ritual happen unobstructed, he had been told before that he was to clear the direct premise, so he nodded and left the circle of trees after kissing Eliza one more time.

“If the ritual stops, stay right here until I come and get you, okay?” he whispered to her.

“Alright,” the pretty little psycho pulled him back into another meeting of their lips, only then was he allowed to go.

John looked over his shoulder once he was outside of the grave-circle again, to see incorporeal forms of humans, surprisingly clearly defined, settled on the floor. A ritualistic song in the native tongue began and the Gamer felt a tightening in his chest, hoping that none of the choices he had made on the way here were wrong.

He sat down under a tree and watched as best he could from his position. The spirits soon transformed into a vortex of energy that spun around the girl, his girl, in the center of it all. Minutes passed, then an entire hour. 'If what they were doing wasn't working, they would have stopped the ritual by now,' John thought, more and more realizing that the horror of Thana may soon be removed from his life.

He turned inwards, to watch things elsewhere and noticed a certain pair.