Chapter 548: Chapter 545: On the Wing

Jadis stretched her arms high above her heads, letting out a groan of satisfaction as she loosened her muscles. She was feeling good. More than good, really. The cool breeze ruffling her white hair was refreshing, and the sun’s warm light just barely peaking over the horizon was already providing a soothing warmth to her bare skin. Overall, she felt happy with where she was, even if she had a long journey yet to travel ahead of her.

“Hey, look,” Syd called out. “Looks like Bridget is getting a head start on her daily basking.”

“I am in no way surprised that you spotted a naked woman,” Severina commented as she stretched her wings. “However, I am mildly curious as to why you felt the need to join Bridget in disrobing.”

Syd turned to grin at the Seraphim as she brazenly stood in the open air with her chest uncovered. There were a few guards on the other side of the Leviathan, but they couldn’t see her from where they were stationed. Exhibitionism still wasn’t her thing, but she had to admit that she was getting a good kick out of the risk, as well as the look on Severina’s face.

“We don’t know what’ll happen when I summon my wings. What if they tear my clothes?”

Severina didn’t look particularly convinced by the explanation, but she didn’t argue either. Instead, she resumed giving her advice on what Jadis should expect while flying under her own power, as well as what she should and shouldn’t do to remain as safe as possible.

Jadis’ Jay and Dys selves paid close attention to the paladin’s instructions. She couldn’t deny that the prospect of taking off into the sky with magically summoned wings was making her insides tingle with nervous anticipation. However, her Syd self was still focused on Bridget’s nude form basking on the roof of Aelius’ home. She was fully visible, which meant she hadn’t asked Sorcha to cast the partial obfuscation spell on her. Possibly because none of them were certain if the spell would interfere with Bridget’s passive or not, but the reason could also be that the orc knew that Jadis would soon be flying overhead and wanted to give her a show.

Bridget could be a little freaky when she wanted to be.

“Didn’t you get enough last night?”

Syd looked up towards the angelic blonde and gave her a wicked grin.

“I’m pretty sure you know the answer to that question.”

There had been almost no ritual sex during their final night together before the party split up. Instead, the group of lovers had focused on simply enjoying each other’s company in both carnal and emotional ways. They weren’t going to be separated for long; only a week at most. It was still going to be the longest they had been apart from one another since… ever. From that perspective, they were all happy to just relax and be with each other, rather than worrying about whether or not they were doing a ritual the right way.

The one ritual Jadis did perform was her Debauched Duplication spell. While having five bodies had been useful for the one day, she had no intention of keeping that many selves going for a longer duration. Things could be confusing enough with just three of her. Five bodies was pushing it.

Taking the opportunity to try out something that had been previously discussed among the group, Jadis had not reapplied Debauched Duplication to her Lesser Fractional Spread. Instead, she used the ritual to double the multiplier to her Eldritch stat that Paladin of Jadis’ Boldness gave her. The result was an overall decrease to most of her physical stats, but a massive boost to her Eldritch and Agility attributes.

Jadis had naturally been forced to take a minute to compare her status sheet from before to after by Aila.

The difference between having Lesser Fractional Spread duplicated versus Alex’s borrowed passive was, frankly, substantial.

While Jadis wasn’t thrilled about losing over one hundred points in her Strength attribute, she was quite enjoying the insane increase to her Agility. Besides which, the real reason she had wanted to change out which passive she was duplicating was the effect it had on her lovers, not herself. While Jadis had taken something of a hit, everyone else had benefitted massively. Lewd Lover’s Bond had gone from two hundred and ninety-four points all the way to four hundred and forty-one. The increase was absolutely colossal, and Jadis had no problem sacrificing a little of her strength for the benefit of her lovers. Especially since several of them were going off on their own for a short while.

Jadis wanted to make sure they were all as protected as they could possibly be.

Thoughts of stats and rituals were soon pushed out of even the partial attention one partition of her mind had spared when Severina announced that it was time to begin their first practice flight. Jadis could feel a tingle running up her spine at the thought of summoning wings and leaping into the air under her own power. While she had experienced a similar sensation when she had taken the air balloon into the sky for the first time, this was different. Wings were a whole separate scenario from a vehicle.

“When you are ready,” Severina told Jadis with a teacher’s formality. “Just remember to keep your thoughts on staying grounded. Do not even think of pushing upwards until I say you are ready.”

All three of Jadis’ selves nodded in understanding. She didn’t want to float off into the clouds before she had full control over the new mode of locomotion. Taking a deep breath first, Jadis exhaled slowly before concentrating on her magic and casting Wings of the Succubi.

A strangely cool sensation ran through Jadis’ bodies. On a second thought, she realized that the chill wasn’t coming from the whole of her bodies, but from… parts of her selves that she couldn’t immediately identify. She tried to concentrate on the strangely foreign sensation to better understand where it was coming from, but she had no frame of reference at all. The alien feeling was utterly novel to her.

She was so focused on trying to puzzle out what exactly she was experiencing that Jadis almost didn’t notice the wide-eyed look of astonishment on Severina’s face. When the Seraphim muttered a few words, though, she paid better attention.

“Valtar’s blessing… I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this was not it.”

Finally taking a look at her own selves, Jadis’ eyes grew just as wide as Severina’s had become.

She had grown tentacles.

Well, maybe not tentacles exactly. Jadis wasn’t entirely sure what else to call the appendages that were suddenly growing out of her backs, but tentacles was about the closest word she could figure without quite nailing the concept to complete satisfaction. Using her Jay and Dys selves to study her Syd self closely from behind, she took careful note of her new “wings” and their decidedly odd appearance.

Ten long, thick appendages streamed out of her back like living pythons made of pure plasma. There were five on each side, all coming out of her skin just to either side of her upper spine, but there was no visible change or deformity to her flesh. The tentacles did not look like they were attached to her, so much as they looked like they were coming out of her, like intangible illusions that had no physical interaction with her body. The appearance of ephemeralness was further enhanced by the fact that the tentacles were constantly shifting and moving, like kelp dancing in the underwater currents of the sea. Which tentacle was on top or on bottom seemed to change at any given moment, almost like it didn’t matter, as they passed through not only Syd’s skin, but themselves as well.

The description of plasma energy was looking more and more like a better title than tentacle by the second. Each one of the ten limbs was like a branching force of magic energy that stretched out from each of Jadis’ bodies by what had to be thirty feet. Their coloration was white, just as all of Jadis’ Eldritch magic tended to present itself, but these strange wings were glowing with a brilliance that was almost hard to look at, even in the morning sunlight.

“They’re beautiful,” Jay murmured as she tried to touch one of the wings tentacles of her other self.

Jay’s finger went through the plasma tentacle without resistance, though her finger did tingle like she had just stuck it into a mild electrical current. Oddly, Jadis found that her Syd self had felt the finger passing through that part of her wing, though it wasn’t the same as what her normal flesh would have felt via touch. After a moment, she realized that the strange cool sensation she was feeling was coming from all her wing tentacles registering the cold of the morning air on top of the tower, but not in the same way that she was used to.

“Can you control them?”

Severina’s question caused Jadis to jolt in place. She had been standing there for almost a minute, staring at her own beautiful wings, which wasn’t exactly productive. In order to answer her lover’s query, she tried to control what her wings were doing by folding them close to her bodies.

The result was a mixed success. All of her many plasma tentacles pulled in close, even going so far as to bend halfway in the middle of their lengths so that they looked like actual wings folding against her back. However, the individual strands of magic energy continued to waver and twist about despite her best efforts, almost like they were incapable of remaining completely still.

“Sort of,” Jay frowned in concentration. “This feels… weird. Not bad, but definitely weird.”

“Try opening them again,” Sev encouraged her. “Get used to the sensation of their movement.”

Jadis followed her lover’s instructions, carefully folding and opening her eldritch wings in ways that mimicked the Seraphim’s own movements. As she did so, she began to get a better understanding of what exactly she was working with. Then Dys turned to the side slightly to get a better view of Jay’s wings and inadvertently brushed her own wings against Syd.

“Oh, fuck,” Syd said in surprise as the plasma tentacles brushed through her body like she wasn’t there. Or they weren’t. Whichever.

“Unexpected,” Severina said from her place of observation a few feet away. “Your wings are… incorporeal. I am not sure if that is a product of them being a spell, or if that is the nature of Succubi wings.”

“Won’t know until the baby is born,” Jay commented as she purposefully flapped her wings through Dys. “Oh, hey, just had a thought.”

Picking up her shirt, she tossed it to Syd, who caught it and quickly put it on. The wings proved no obstacle to the task as the fabric slid over her frame without issue. Jadis could see the ephemeral tentacles poking out of her back still, completely ignoring the existence of her shirt. Strangely, she could also feel the material passing through her intangible tentacle wings, but the sensation was minor and easily pushed out of mind.

“Good news,” Jay laughed. “Looks like Sabina won’t have to make any adjustments to my armor.”

“Thank Valtar for that,” Severina murmured. “A spell you can only cast while you are without armor equipped would be of greatly reduced utility.”

Jadis continued playing around with her strange wings for a while before Severina had her focus on a few control exercises. They weren’t hard to follow, but getting used to moving her wings in specific ways was just strange enough that she couldn’t call it one hundred percent natural. She had something of an innate sense of what she needed to do to direct them, but it was all still a bit wobbly, almost like trying to ride a bike after not doing so for years.

After a full fifteen minutes had passed, Jadis' wings winked out of existence as easily as they had appeared. There was no fanfare to the moment. One second, they were there, the next they were gone. Not having the wings wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, but suddenly losing a bunch of limbs that she had possessed an instant before was more than a little bizarre.

Resummoning the wings, Jadis practiced for another fourteen minutes before Severina had her cast the spell again to test how it would react to an early recast. The tentacles didn’t wink out and then back into existence; they simply continued to float in the air as though nothing had changed. However, once another minute had passed, they did not disappear, proving that she didn’t have to worry about not being able to refresh the spell mid-use. After a little more experimentation, they confirmed that she couldn’t cast the spell multiple times in order to gain extra time. As soon as Wings of the Succubi was cast a second time, the timer started over, which meant she would need to keep close track of how long it had been after each casting, just to make sure she wasn’t wasting her magic reserves.

“So, do you feel ready to fly?”

“Yes,” Syd said as she looked over the edge of the tower again. “Though now that the time has come, I’m really questioning whose idea it was to do this on top of the tallest tower within a thousand miles.”

“Calm yourself,” Severina said in a soothing tone. “You cannot fall. Your wings will keep you hovering in the air. You will only dive if you make the decision to do so.”

“Right, right,” Dys said as she took in a few extra deep breaths. “It’s magic, not mechanical flight. It’s all about just doing it.”

“Yes, that is correct,” Severina agreed with her. “Your will makes you fly. You can do this.”

As she spoke, Severina spread her black and white wings and floated off the ground. In moments her feet were suspended in the sky as she held herself out over the edge of the tower.

“Come, Jadis. Fly with me.”

With a grin, Jadis spread her eldritch wings wide.

“Fortune Favors the bold!”

Jadis jumped.

And she flew.

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