Empire Builder 1: Breed, Populate, Conquer by Dante King (free e books to read online txt) 📕

of logs. Within moments, they had a small blaze going, a campfire in the center of the village.

Melody gasped when she saw them. “Mountain ogres,” she said.

The two figures by the fire were big. Ben assumed they were male, but he wouldn’t have said they were men. They must have been seven feet tall, and they were hairy and muscular.

“Mountain ogres?” Ben asked, keeping his voice low. Until he knew if they were friendly or not, it wouldn’t do to give their position away.

Melody shook her head, a frown forming on her face. “Yes. They are also bandits, as that is their chief occupation.”

“Oh, I see.” He nodded. That didn’t sound so good. He badly wanted to enter the ruins and find whatever magical site he was meant to find here. But getting killed before they even got there by savage bandits would have put a dampener on ever recovering his former powers.

As Melody and Ben watched, he spotted several more mountain ogres moving about between the huts in the clearing. He counted at least five of them, but he couldn’t be sure there weren’t more. They looked formidable.

In stark contrast to the hulking forms of the mountain ogres, three figures by the campfire caught Ben’s eye. They were far smaller, petite even, and seemed to have more feminine forms. From the way they were sitting, they appeared to be bound, hand and foot. They also appeared to be very lightly clad, wearing only small bits of clothing. Their skin gleamed in the flickering firelight.

“Who are those creatures?” he asked, pointing at the three figures.

Melody looked a little startled as she spotted them. “Those are nymphs. The nymph on the right with green hair and dark skin is a dryad. In the middle is an undine, with blue hair and skin, a water nymph. And on the left is an oread, a mountain nymph, with hair and skin the color of granite.”

He could see that all the details Melody had observed were accurate, though the dying light made it difficult to identify the exact colors of the nymphs’ skin and hair.

“Why are you so surprised to see these nymphs here?” Ben asked. From what he’d seen of this world so far, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see a hippopotamus crossed with a giraffe sitting in the clearing.

“These women are of the monstrous races.”

Ben stared blankly at Melody and she went on, apparently taking his dead stare as a sign he needed a little more information.

“I am a Beastkin—a catgirl to be precise. In the more civilized regions of the Xurian Realm, they may call me a monster girl as an insult, but that is not technically true. Beastkin are different from monsterkin. These women,” she waved her hand in the direction of the village. “They are monster women. They are not hybrid humanoid races like me, they are truly a different kind of creature. They are incredibly rare. For reasons that don’t bear speaking about...the Realm is not kind to such folk.”

And here they were, seeing monster girls in the place where Ben was said to have once ruled. He wondered if that was merely a coincidence.

“What do we do?” Ben asked. “You said we needed to enter this village so I could get back some of my lost power. These ogres don’t exactly strike me as being the hospitable type.”

“We must wait for the ogres to leave,” Melody said, with a nod and a note of finality in her voice. “We have to search these ruins for any remnant artifacts left by the Forgotten Ruler. But it is too dangerous while these ogres are still present.”

“What will happen to the monster girls?” Hiseyes stayed on the strange women. Something about them was almost hypnotic.

“Nothing good,” Melody replied.

Ben didn’t like this sound of this.

He assumed they would either be sold into slavery, or abused and then sold into slavery. His blood grew hot as he considered the idea.

“We have to do something,” he said, shrugging the rucksack off his back.

Melody turned sharply to look at him. “Are you mad? We cannot take on so many adversaries alone.”

He rose to his feet and hooked the rucksack on a high branch of a large tree on the hill. He didn’t want the egg he had been carrying to be damaged, and if he had to head into a fight with these ogres, he couldn’t afford to be slowed down.

“But we are only two people,” Melody protested softly, not raising her voice too loud.

Ben narrowed his eyes and spoke. “I know the odds are against us, but we both have spells we can cast—right? With the advantage of surprise, I’m sure we can kick their asses.”

Melody opened her mouth to speak, her brow knitted with worry.

Ben held up a hand. “If I’m going to be ruler of this region, I’m not going to start my reign by allowing these shitheads to do whatever they’ve got in mind with these women.”

“Monster girls,” added Melody.

“Right—monster girls. If I’m going to rule, I’m going to do it right, and starting now with showing these pricks what happens when they try to take advantage of the innocent.”

Melody smiled with pride and wonder in her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You will be a great ruler, I am sure of it.”

“Then let’s plan how we’re going to win this fight.”

They turned to face the village and make their plan of attack.

It was time to mete out the justice of the Forgotten Ruler.

Chapter Four

Ben paced back and forth, trying to gather his thoughts.

Was he really about to do this? Was he really about to lead an attack on a village against a non-human band of slavers?

He must have been out of his mind.

The closest he’d ever come to a real fight before coming to this world, let alone something as potentially deadly as this, was a fistfight he had had back in high school with some asshole named Josh Barnes, this prick