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The Order of the Black Foot

Arc 1, Chapter 3

Sponsored by GlynWolf

by Draconicon

As soon as they transitioned from outside the cave to inside, Draconicon was aware of movement. Lots of it. He saw a silhouette coming his way, and rather than trying to dodge, he forced himself to stay still and take it.

The sound of a fist cracking against his chest, followed by the scraping, then snapping sounds of claws trying to do damage, was all that he needed to hear to know that he was still damn near invincible. Nobody else in the group could have stood up to that, not without some serious help from him. He looked over his shoulder at the kobolds. Harendra smiled at him, his eyes wide, the AI within the kobold shell obviously surprised enough to show it instead of the less emotional expressions that the creature had shown up until this point.

Creature. He shook his head. Not the right word for it.

Draconicon turned his attention back to his attacker, reaching up and grabbing for the clawed hand coming down for a second attack. He managed to snag it, feeling the tick-tack sounds of things rolling in the background, and felt the gnoll trying to pull back.

"So...this is a gnoll," the black dragon said. "Hmm..."

She was a powerful creature, or at least, powerful as it was considered powerful for this world. Her muscles bunched up in anger and frustration as she tried and failed to pull her hand free of his grip, and she growled as she pulled her lips back to show her teeth.

With the '18+' mode that he had kept activated from the start, he found himself staring at a nearly-naked female, too. She was quite shameless about her body being on display and everything out in the open. Her breasts, fulsome and surprisingly perky for the sort of life she was leading, were thrust forward, and he could just make out dark nipples through her fur going down along her stomach and the lower part of her chest. Further down, puffy dark pussy lips stood out from her body, showing that there was more to be found here than just -

Another blur, another crack of impact as he was attacked from the side. Yes, the kobolds had said 'gnolls' rather than 'gnoll,' hadn't they?

He looked to his left to see a smaller male with a similar brown coat with black spots streaked through it attacking him, biting and clawing at his side. There was little being done to his scales, and a glance down at his health showed that it wasn't dropping in the slightest.

Well, this is inconvenient...

He had been hoping to just deal with this, to uplift them the way that he had done with Harendra and Jaya, but it seemed that he'd need a little more time for that. Shaking his head, he pushed the female back, then flicked his hand out with a Wall of Force spell.

As the magic drained from the bar in the corner of his vision, a transparent wall thrust out from his fingers. The female and her two male cohorts were caught on the other side, shoved backward until they slammed against the far wall of the cavern. They gasped, groaning as they struggled against it.

Draconicon shook his head. So much for coming in with peaceful intent.

"Harendra."

"Yes, Master?"

"Do they all act like...that?"

"Gnolls, Master?"

"Yes."

"They are aggressive, and they don't like sharing space..."

"But?"

"But they will trade. They just need the right thing to trade for."

So there was some intelligence. They just registered him as something else, someone not worth trading with.

Probably something to do with all the other problems in this world. Morphus doesn't make any sense...

But at least for now, they were pinned, and that meant that they wouldn't be hurting his kobolds. He walked down the tunnel to the far wall, leaning forward and resting his hand on the transparent barrier between him and the gnolls. The males whimpered, lowering their heads and looking away from him, while the female glared at him, her head forced sideways to the point of having to look out of the corner of her eye to meet his stare.

"Can you understand me?" Draconicon asked.

"Rrrrrrr...Mmmph...Understand..."

"Good." Good. Very good. "Then listen to me. I don't want to hurt you."

"Hmmph. You want something."

"Yes. And I'm willing to trade."

"Not carrying any smells that we want."

Shaking his head, he held up his hand. As the wall kept them pinned, he devoted a little bit more of his magic to another spell. From the palm of his hand, he called forth a swirling tendril of water, one that rose taller and taller until it was nearly four feet long. He twisted it with nothing but a thought, spinning it around his head, and then down along his ankles. He made it dance, swirling it with the water control spell that he'd summoned, at times stretching it out to a full ten feet long by making it skinnier, and then condensing it into a ball.

He offered it to her lips, and after a moment, the gnoll sipped at it. Her eyes widened.

"That..."

"Magic water, yes," the dragon said. Not quite, not really. It was more of a buffing spell that he had found, but it was one that would taste good and make the drinker that much stronger, quicker, and more insightful for the time that the spell lasted. "I can offer that and much more, if you will meet me for trade."

"...We'll talk. Let me go, and I'll take you to Akan."

"Your leader, I presume?"

The gnoll female nodded, and he waved his hand. The Wall of Force disappeared, and as soon as it did, the male gnolls dropped down into a squat, their heads lowered to the ground. They looked like whipped dogs rather than the proud fighters that they had been just a moment ago. Then again, they hadn't done anything worthwhile to him, and he imagined that they were rather embarrassed.

If they were capable of feeling things like that, at least. He reached down, holding his hands out for them to sniff, which they did. They nodded, moving to stand closer to their female as she led the way down the tunnel.

"Come...but leave the scaly ones here."

"They're part of my group," Draconicon said.

"Then tell them to stay here. They're safe here. My promise."

"..."

"Trust me. Gnolls don't lie."

"Ever?"

"...Well, not about food."

"They're not food."

"They are to us, but I'm saying not now. Not while we talk."

That was better than nothing, he supposed. He glanced at Jaya and Harendra. The latter had been listening and nodded his understanding, and turned to the other. Jaya was still coming up to speed, so to speak, and needed the extra explanation, but not much. They were soon nodding in understanding and explaining the situation to the rest of the kobolds.

Draconicon, on the other hand, fell in step behind the gnoll. She was shorter than him, about up to chest height, but that didn't mean that she wasn't built. She had thick muscles that rolled along her shoulders and down her back, and he had to admit that the view of her ass as he walked behind her was rather...nice. He smiled as he watched it swaying from side to side, and he would be lying if he said that he didn't have a few thoughts of putting her to work in a very different sort of way.

That said, he was able to hold those thoughts back, and they did nothing to his cock. Not yet, at least.

She led him through a series of tunnel-dens, past holes in the wall that led to different sleeping caverns, past half-empty store-rooms that looked like they had seen better days. Broken crates rested inside, but they looked...off, for lack of a better word. Almost like they had been stuck like that, like the times that he had seen people and weapons frozen in stasis, unable to change while the world around them continued to move on. It made it look disturbing, like two things completely out of sync with one another.

But the further they walked, the more that the other gnolls of the cavern started coming out. They popped their heads around the corners, moving with a different sort of will than the kobolds had. They weren't entirely there, but they were more...free-willed, he supposed, than the kobolds had been. More intelligence guiding them from the start, he imagined, rather than just being locked to certain routines.

They were all quite exposed, however, without any coverings. The males were surprisingly small in the crotch, with most of them just barely having enough to fill out their sheath. The few that had been interrupted in mid-intimacy looked like they were barely more than four inches. On the females, however...

Some of them were fairly standard, as he was familiar with them, down there. They had the same puffy black slit that he had seen on his guide. Others, however, had a throbbing thing that pushed out from just over their sex, pushing forward and down. Not quite the same as a penis, but definitely as thick and long as most of them. They outmatched their male mates by nearly twice their size, and more than three times the thickness.

They also gaped, and he wondered if they had been rutting the males by thrusting their 'shafts' against the male ones, and taking it inside, and -

Well, that was a thought. An interesting, vaguely enticing one, but not one that he would take further just yet.

His guide brought him to a greater cavern, one that surrounded a dip in the ground. Down at the very bottom of the cavern, there was a massive fire burning, one that stretched from its place twenty feet below the tunnel exit to ten feet above it. Plumes of smoke rose through a hole in the ceiling, and he cocked his head to the side as he watched the light through it.

That doesn't make sense...I don't remember there being a hole in the mountain...

Morphus made less and less sense the more time he spent in it. Shaking his head, he looked around. A total of thirty males lounged around the walls, most of them clustered around one or two females. The gnoll females were thicker, stronger, taller than their male counterparts, and most of them seemed to own at least two or three. Some owned as much as six, if ownership was the right term. They were partnered with them, at least, as most of them seemed to be engaged in some form of debauchery when he walked in.

Yet, as he met their eyes, they seemed to grow more confused, their faces going as blank as the kobolds had been. Something had gone wrong for them, something that had broken their ability to think and process things.

For the first time since entering the cave, Draconicon brought up the 'character sheets'.

They were not particularly different to the kobolds, not compared to him. While the kobolds had strength down in the single digits, the gnolls topped out between 16 and 18, and were all closer to what the adventurers had. Their dexterity was a little smaller, though not by much. Their constitution, slightly higher than their strength in most cases. Particularly in the case of the female at the far side of the fire, leaning on a throne of skulls, but also in the case of one of the males lounging near her. He actually had a constitution of 20, which was rather high compared to most of the males, which topped out at 12.

As for intelligence and wisdom, however, they were not doing so well. Again, save for the one on the far side. She had 11 in each, which should be enough, considering that Harendra had been able to speak at 6, and had been able to start handling philosophy at 13. That would be enough.

Draconicon looked across the fire, then around the pit, and then to the fire again. His guide had said nothing, so he assumed that it was now up to him to take this further. Shrugging, he gestured forward.

Another Wall of Force drained his magic meter, but it provided a bridge for him to cross the room and show off a little bit. The various gnolls finally reacted, getting to their feet, but still looked confused after that. They were arranged in squads from three to seven all around the room, looking at him, starting to reach for him, then pulling back. They seemed lost, unsure of what to do.

On their 'character sheets', he could see that there was another code, another routine, just as the kobolds had had. They were bound to some form of behavior, some form of control.

Was this the same for all creatures in this world that weren't like Amarantha, or the other ones trying to kill him? Were they all bound and controlled, left to be helpless things for those that would hunt them?

Someone has a very cruel sense of how things should be...

He reached the far end of the fire, where the floor swooped upwards in a curling stone staircase towards a throne of yellowed bones. The gnoll that sat upon it, another female, was the strongest one that he had seen yet. The muscular woman leaned forward, her eyes fixed on him, and she snarled with her lips pulled back over her teeth. Her eyes flicked up and down his robed form, trying to make something of him.

Draconicon let his hands rest at his sides rather than crossing them. He planted his feet on the stone and nodded at her.

"May I assume that you are Akan, leader of the gnolls?"

"...I am den-mother of this tribe."

"Then let me ask you a favor. Let the kobolds live here."

"HA! The scalies, live here? We would eat them in days."

"That is what I heard...but I would trade for their space here."

"What do you have, hmm? What are you?" she asked, narrowing her eyes. The shaft between her legs, wet from having been somewhere moments ago, bobbed up and down as she looked him over again. "Huh? What are you?"

"I...am a dragon."

The room went quiet. Once more, the confusion look spread, and this time, Draconicon pushed rather than let it just settle and stay.

"And a mage. And someone that can make life better for all of you, if you'll let me."

At any normal village or gathering, he would have expected to hear someone shouting that he lied at that point. Not here, not among the gnolls...or was it not among those that were unable to think for themselves? They were conflicted, some of them twitching, one or two of them going from standing to sitting to standing again with no apparent reason. Something had gone wrong for them, though he didn't understand what. All he knew was that it could not be making them comfortable or happy.

He looked around the room. Not one of them seemed willing to attack, but what he offered them seemed beyond their abilities to comprehend. The control over them kept them from being able to hear him, or at least, unable to respond. He turned back to Akan.

"I apologize...but this is the best way I can explain."

Draconicon opened the list of her details again. He went past all of that, down to the 'Behavior Routine' bar. And then, he deleted the string of letters and numbers beside it.

The reaction was to be expected. She stiffened up, her eyes went wide, and she stared straight ahead. Her mouth worked soundlessly, her head twitching slightly. Something inside stilled her, and she slowly closed her eyes. Something shifted, and she breathed. She stopped, then breathed again, almost like she had to remind herself to do it.

Something in her was thinking. Actually thinking.

Bit by bit, she opened her eyes, looking down, then up, then down again. She glanced slightly off to the side, as if she was looking at something, and he imagined that she was looking at the sheet with all that information. It was like she was looking at the world for the first time, and the gnoll didn't entirely know what to make of it. Her mouth worked soundlessly, reading something, absorbing it, and every so often, her chest rose and fell as she reminded herself to breathe.

Draconicon smiled. She was not just learning, but thinking. That was something. That was everything.

"Akan."

She looked up, almost as if she had forgotten that he was there. He held up his hands to keep her attention on him.

"I want to talk to you. I want to make a deal."

"What...happened? What...am I?" she asked.

"...Let's talk about that first."

It was a long talk, made longer by the frequent questions and the occasional angry interruptions. He never stopped her from interrupting or asking questions, nor did he come down on her - at least, not hard - for being angry. Being emotional, being able to react that way, meant that there was more to her already than Harendra had started out with. He didn't know what that was, but he would find out soon enough, he imagined.

Maybe it's something to do with the death stat, he thought. She's died less often...

Even Jaya, as the head of the cavern of kobolds, had died no less than three hundred times. Akan, by contrast, had only died eighty times. She must have survived long enough to start understanding things better, to have more of an understanding of what was around her...perhaps even to feel a bit.

Yet, Akan still struggled, though not as much as before. They talked as the only two able to converse freely in the cavern, the other gnolls staring blankly at them. She would occasionally look at them, grumble, and then look back at him. The distance between them had grown, he knew, and that would need correcting. He was willing to do that, and made sure that she understood that would be part of the deal.

"I will not leave you alone."

"That's not my problem," she grunted. "Why...how?"

"I don't know how. I just know that I can do this. And it seems to help."

"It does something," she muttered, shaking her head. "Fuck..."

"You think better than some of the others."

"The kobolds...you did this to the kobolds?"

"...Yes?"

"And you did it to them first?!"

Akan grabbed him by the shoulders, yanking him close. Her teeth were bared again, and she snapped at him. That, he did push back against.

Quite literally, actually. He shoved her back against her throne, pinning her there. She yelped, blinking as she was pinned with her legs spread over the arms of her chair, her ass hanging over the edge.

"Let's not do that," Draconicon said, shaking his head. "Are you annoyed that I've done this, or are you annoyed that I didn't come to you first?"

"...The second," she admitted.

"That's fair enough. But don't start trying to bite my face off just because you're jealous."

"...Jealous. That...Hmmph."

She didn't deny it, which meant that she had probably found the information somewhere and begrudgingly agreed with it. She looked away from him, growling under her breath.

"Kobolds are less than gnolls. We could have earned that."

"You would have tried to eat me."

"Heh. Eat you? Probably...but we wouldn't have succeeded, would we?"

"No. Probably not."

"Of course...we could always eat something else."

He blinked, about to ask her what she meant before she reached down, sliding her hand into his robe and finding his cock. He blinked again as she wrapped her hand fully around his hidden shaft, and he realized that he had been rather hard. Hard for a while, apparently, considering how wet her hand felt against his cock.

"Dragons are big...and have much 'meat'."

"..."

"Heh. Gnolls like to fight, feast, and fuck...and you just showed me that you can fight. I think...I want to fuck."

Draconicon was rather surprised, but not surprised enough to just bend to that possibility. He leaned back, dragging his cock out of her hand, though the movement left his robe spread open. His shaft, slightly over a foot long and definitely rather excited, hung down in the open, and Akan sat up with a smile on her face, leaning in to take a sniff of his crotch. Her nostrils flared, and she growled in a deeper, louder tone.

"Mmmm...that's a good scent...virile scent."

"Stop."

"..."

"I said, stop," the dragon said.

"Make me."

He made her, though not without some effort. After pinning her back to her throne, including using various shackles of force to ensure that she didn't follow him around, he went about the process of breaking the 'Behavior Routines' of the other gnolls. They had similar reactions to their chief, shaking and then blasting awake again, their eyes wide and their understanding mostly dulled of the world around them. They were slightly more aware than the kobolds had been, which he chalked up to their higher starting intelligence and wisdom, and he made note of that.

As they were made self-aware, Akan called them over. He heard her start moaning shortly after the males and females came to her, and he could tell by the tone of the moaning that it was meant to entice him, to make him interested and come back to her. He put it out of his mind, doing his job.

It didn't take long to break the control of the routines over the gnolls. As an orgy began at the back of the cave, he kept his eyes firmly on the tunnel leading back to his kobolds.

"I want to live here, with the kobolds.'

"Mmmph...we can make a deal, dragon," Akan called to him.

"I am sure. But -"

"You can live here, but you put that thing to work. You keep us safe, keep us happy, and I'll let you stay here."

Draconicon groaned, slapping a hand over his face. That was not the sort of thing that he wanted to start up, but when it came down to it, he wasn't going to say no. There was pleasure to be had there, and he supposed it wasn't the worst deal that he could make.

Just ensure that she doesn't start laying eggs...that I have some of the males, too...that I can keep any diseases that might be in this world from affecting me...

Shaking his head, he left the main cavern, heading back down the tunnel. The sound of the gnollish orgy faded into the background, and he was happy enough to leave it there.

He had yet to pull his robe back together when he rounded the corner to find the kobolds still waiting for him. Harendra looked down, only for the kobold to blink and look back up.

"That...Did something happen, Master?" Harendra asked.

Jaya slapped his fellow kobold along the back of the head.

"Of course it did. Look at him. The Master's hard," Jaya said, shaking his head.

"But why?"

"Gnolls. They're always breeding."

"Oh. Oh!"

"And Master must have liked it."

The two kobolds, as well as all the others that had followed him from the cave, turned to look at him as one. It was a reminder that they were all guided by something that went beyond individual minds, even though they had all separated from the 'Behavior Routine' that had bound them together. Despite being individuals, there was something beneath that, something that seemed to bind all their minds together. And that thing...was curious, he could tell, but there was something else. Something that -

Harendra stepped forward, the tiny kobold stopping right in front of his bobbing hard-on. The kobold looked up at it, then wrapped one hand around the base. It was surprisingly forward and hesitant at the same time, the smaller scaly looking past the head. The size difference between them was startlingly stark at that moment, and Draconicon...

Well, he didn't blush, but he had to admit that there was a part of him that was rather embarrassed at how turned on he was right at that moment. As Harendra slowly stroked from the base to the tip, something that took far longer than it should due to the small kobold hand that didn't come close to wrapping around his shaft, Jaya stepped forward as well. The kobold leader leaned in, half-demanding, half-possessive of the shaft already, but reaching for the dragon's balls instead.

"You came to us first. You owe us."

"...Owe you what?"

"..."

"You don't know, do you?" Draconicon asked.

"...We...are learning," Jaya admitted.

"But you don't actually know. You just know that the others might have gotten it, and - mmmph!"

It did not help his thought process to have the tip of his cock licked right at that moment. Harendra had leaped right in, and whether there was some underlying guidance for the kobold or not, he was learning quickly. The waist-high kobold was at the perfect spot to take the dragon's dick into his throat, and he did just that, pulling it past his lips and then further in. The sensation was...

Good. Not great, but good, and Draconicon blinked as he realized that there was something different to getting a blowjob from the little one.

No, that wasn't quite right. It wasn't that it was different because he was getting it from the kobold. It was different because he could feel that, despite the pleasure that he was receiving, his orgasm was a very, very long way off. Almost too far off, now that he thought of it. The disconcerting feeling of having such strong pleasure but without that impending feeling of relief left him rather off-kilter, and it took him a second to understand what it was.

In his 'character sheet,' he had bumped up his Constitution to a rather high level. It had done a great deal to allow him to move around without exhausting himself, yes, and had done a lot to make sure that he felt comfortable with his exertions through the day, but -

Constitution...may be tied to stamina...and if my stamina is that high in bed...

That would mean that he had effectively given himself an unwanted chastity effect. Not quite what he had imagined when he had been messing with the numbers. Nor what he wanted, if he was honest with himself. As much fun as that could be to play with, perpetual edging was not his idea of a good time in the long term.

Particularly as the gentle sucking motions along the head of his cock - all that Harendra could fit past his lips - was very, very nice and he would have liked the chance to enjoy it properly. He allowed the sucking to continue for a few more seconds before gently pushing the little kobold back, tucking his shaft back into his robes and pulling Jaya's hands from his shaft. The kobolds continued to stare at him, with Jaya's face more than slightly possessive, Harendra more curious and eager to learn, and the rest of them just...watching.

Draconicon didn't know how much they understood about sex, and he didn't know how much was coming from this underlying intelligence that he was seeing more and more of with each 'day' that he spent in this world. They seemed to have some sort of basic understanding that there was something that they could get from him, that he could give them something...good, but there was no real clear knowledge there.

Contrasted with the gnolls, who had been more than eager to offer him some pleasure, it was quite the strange thing. Given that Akan had woken with intelligence and curiosity, and that he had needed to push the kobolds to feel the same thing, it offered a number of possibilities. Possibilities, he supposed, that he would have to examine at a future date.

"The gnolls will let you stay here," he said, trying to bring the topic back to the important stuff. "I've ensured that they won't eat you."

"That's good...but what happens next?" Jaya asked.

"We're figuring that out, but at least you'll be safer here than you were at the old cave."

"Will we?"

"You're working together now -"

"Mmmm..."

The dragon turned slowly, looking over his shoulder at a male gnoll that had come wandering around the corner. He was all but drooling as he looked at the kobolds, licking his lips. However, as soon as he looked up and saw that the taller dragon was looking down at him, he swallowed hard, clearing his lips of any sign of his hunger. He wiped his mouth repeatedly, shaking his head as if denying that there had ever been such damning evidence on his face, despite the silence.

Draconicon sighed. Perhaps it wouldn't be quite so simple as that. Admittedly, everyone seemed to come back to life as soon as they died, so there was that, but it was not something that he particularly wanted to see happen. He had no idea if Harendra and Jaya would retain their intelligence and their self-awareness if they had to come back like that, and he didn't want them to suffer, either.

"Go back to your mistress," Draconicon said.

"You sure? Thought I could show them their dens..."

And something else, too, likely enough, Draconicon thought, looking down at the gnoll's sheath, which was already quite full and pushing forward that little bit more. The male clearly had something in mind, and the way that he kept looking down at the dragon's low-hanging balls, he had a pretty good idea of what it was.

He hadn't pegged the males for being that kind of submissive, but perhaps it was something of an offer from Akan. Something to entice him, to keep him interested. The gnolls had made it a condition that he had to keep them satisfied, and Akan had said that he'd need to work the males and females. He'd been unclear just how much the males would have been interested in him, but with that stare...

Well, maybe there was something else to enjoy there.

"Show them...and I'll be watching."

The gnoll nodded, waving for the kobolds to follow. After an encouraging nod from the dragon, they did, and he followed at the back.

All the while, he was contemplating how he was going to keep the gnolls from eating the kobolds, how to keep the kobolds from being too naive around the gnolls, and how he was going to expand this further. With the cavern here, they had a fairly defensive home, and with the numbers, he was pretty sure that they could hold their own until he showed up to fight adventurers that came to the front door.

But he had to make sure that they would work together, and that...that might take some doing.

The End

Summary: Draconicon goes to the gnoll cave with the kobolds, and sees if he can bring them around to his side.

Tags: M/F, M/M, Hyena, Gnoll, Kobold, Fantasy, Virtual World, Series, Order of the Black Foot, Character Editing, Mind Control, Handjob, Sex, Sounding, Failed Femdom, Exhibitionism, Oral, AI,