Chapter 311 - Internal Conflict And A Deadly Mistake
Like any other day, Serena was gracefully making her way to the infirmary to heal Azalea and her company's wounds, however, walking through a barrage of grimm, shaken looks from the guards, she could feel a sense of bizarre tension lingering in the air.
Without a word of questioning, she made her way to the wounded girl's room, but to her surprise, Azalea was nowhere to be found. Confused by the sight of the empty bed, she made her way outside to finally question the guards about what was happening.
"Where is the girl?" She asked, trying her best to make herself look composed.
The guards remained silent with their heads hanging down. Breezing her sight past the elvens, Serena turned to her acolyte, and with but a gaze she passed her thoughts onto them. Moving around the makeshift infirmary, the acolytes quickly surrounded the place and had a chasm of dark magic floating around their fingers.
"Again, I ask," resting a nail under the chin of a male elven guard, Serena raised his face so she could look him in the eye. "And trust me, I am being nice since I might have a strain of elven blood in me. Answer, where is the girl?"
The very first thing the guard noticed upon gazing up; were the sharp edges on Serena's ears appearing once she undid masking magic. Her acolytes knew of her troubled origins, born to an elven woman with a deficiency of skin pigments, which in turn made their priestess's skin as pale as the wax of a candle.
"Now that you know, I'm giving you one last chance to answer before I gouge your eyes out and nobody believes what you saw after," Serena whispered with the gentlest smile.
Fearing for his life the guard began to pant and inevitably wheeze out a name.
"The q-queen, the goblin queen!" He stuttered, struggling to speak out any further.
"The queen?" Tilting her head, Serena squinted, focusing her gaze on the shaken guard's face. "What did she do exactly?"
"She took the girl away and some of the other wounded servants of Master Deus's!" Spat the female elf guard standing beside him.
Shifting her gaze to the girl, Serena let go of the man and questioned further.
"Where and who gave her that authority? My patients are mine to move around, not hers," hearing Serena's question, the other guards defending the place raised their heads as well.
The infirmary was a makeshift building with a handful of people guarding it, and even fewer were allowed in. And despite the fact that the goblin queen was one of those people, her authority was limited to checkups since she wasn't exactly known for the delicate handling of other people.
"W-we don't know Mistress Serena, she didn't say anything, just took the girl away with her!" Yet another useless response left the lips of one of the guards.
'What in the world is she plotting?' Curling her fist tight and clenching her teeth, Serena was barely hanging on the facade of acting the part of a priestess.
"Hawthorn! Where is the goblin queen!" Serena yelled, calling out to the omnipresent dragonkin.
'I…I didn't teleport her from this village today, she should be around here but I can't feel her presence anywhere.' The mental reply from the dragon left Serena aghast. She shook her head from side to side trying to make sure her mind didn't process the news wrong. 𝑏𝑒𝘥𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝑙.𝘰𝑟𝑔
"You don't know?" She muttered, and the dragon hummed in response.
'Where the fuck is this bitch?!' Having no clue about where the goblin queen was and what she was doing, Serena only had one possible thing she could do. 'Relay the news to Margarette and Master! We need to find her and the people she took along with her!'
'Wait…' Hawthorn relayed to her through his mind, sensing something to have changed. 'She, the queen…She's in the dungeon lab working with Medusa and a demon lord.'
The more things escalated, the more confusion it brought. Despite now knowing where the queen was, the very fact that Hawthorn couldn't sense her before was more than enough to raise suspicion.
"What about the others? The ones she took with her?" As she talked to herself, everyone around Serena looked at her as though she'd gone insane. However, given the situation, she didn't care what others thought at the moment at all.
'No, none of them are with her.' As Hawthorn threw yet another curve ball of confusion, Serena decided to go ahead with her plan to inform everyone and see where things go from there.
"Teleport me to her now!" She demanded, and this time Hawthorn didn't refuse her demand.
***
Far away from the ordeal, Merciella and Klaus were just done sealing the stolen bodies into giant glass containers that they'd gotten with the queen's help.
"You sure she won't remember anything?" Merciella asked Klaus, growing a bit suspicious over the extent of his hold on her mind.
"Not a second, she won't remember anything, besides, if you don't trust me, just see through your clone, shouldn't it be working with her right now?" Klaus responded while moving towards the working station.
"Yeah, she's as bitchy as always," quickly looking through the clone, Merciella joined Klaus to finish the last few steps of their plan.
"Just like someone else I know," Klaus said, glancing at Merciella for a second before shifting her gaze back to work.
Rolling her eyes, Merciella let the matter go and helped Klaus lift and set up the apparatus before they could finally begin their experiment. The first batch of potions was already forced down the lips of the stolen females from Deus' army. Thankfully, not being lust demons their chances of pregnancy weren't as abysmal.
"Let's hope this works," Merciella muttered, forcing the girls inside the tubes to wake up with her manipulative magic.
As the girls began waking up inside the glass, still not completely having recovered from their injuries they all seemed a little delirious. Even those who were more aware than the rest tried bashing out through the glass vessel, but their hands were quickly tied back by Merciella's dark magic.
With the sound of them squirming and screaming, the two demon lords kept working on the finishing touches. Until it was finally time to test a few things.
"First their blood samples, second, testing out their pain tolerance, and last, speeding their bodily time with a hint of time magic," checking all the things on their list, Merciella moved closer to the glass and had her arm phase in through the vessel and stab the girls with an extraction syringe.
Seeing them sequel and flail around like fish, she couldn't help beaming as the struggles of those around her have always managed to please her the most. When it came time to extract Azalea's blood, her excitement grew even further. Feeling herself up between the thighs, she bit her lower lips as she stabbed the girl near the very same place.
Showing no shame despite Klaus being in the same room, she began poking her insides with the needles while at the same time, she let her fingers slip into her pussy folds. Drooling like a hungry dog, she subconsciously pressed her head against the glass and kept torturing the semi-conscious girl until her body forced her back into a coma-like state.
"Are you done?" Klaus growled, disgusted by the display by Merciella.
He'd never seen this side of her, but at the back of his mind, even he knew she'd always been a little twisted in the head.
"Almost…" Drawing the needle out, Merciella couldn't help but lick the blood clean off of it. Letting the taste mingle inside her mouth, her eyes widened by the taste of something strange. "Wait!"
Frozen in place, she blinked her eyes a few times, trying to figure out if her taste buds had failed her at that moment. She could taste not one but two different types of blood in the cocktail of blood she had gripped between her fingers.
"She…" Glancing up at Azalea's face, the mistress couldn't believe what she'd just found. "She had a baby in her womb just now, I think I killed it."
Following her words, the room was silent without a peep from her or Klaus. It was only when a potion vial slipped through Klaus's fingers and shattered that the two were brought back to their senses.
"The potion couldn't have worked so soon, that means!" Turning to look at Klaus, Merciella knew she'd messed up something major.
"You killed Deus's child…" Klaus finished her thought and the two stood there in silence for a moment, not knowing what to make of the situation.
'No wonder that priestess bitch was so stingy about keeping everyone out!' Connecting the dots about Serena's overprotective behavior towards Azalea, Merciella wondered if she'd even told Deus about the baby she'd just murdered inside the womb. Either way, the duo couldn't continue on working, at least not until they figured out how to prepare Azalea's body for the experiment after the mess-up.