Oath of Civility (Passive, Mandatory) has been triggered. You have witnessed an assault on an ally that you cannot tolerate. You must seek recompense from the aggressors. Your ability scores and affinities are increased by 20% against those aggressors. Recompense for this assault: Death. Failure to seek recompense will break this Oath and inflict severe backlash on you.

  He saw with disgust that two gnolls had gotten the drop on Ella. Between her handicap and their physical builds they had easily overwhelmed her. One spear had been lodged in the external oblique muscles of her stomach, and another had been driven through the meat of her good bicep and into the ground below. Rather than just kill her though, the hyena-men were pinning her down and ripping at her clothes with wheezing cackles while she struggled and cursed beneath them. Their intentions were as clear as they were repulsive.

  The enchantress had come to hunt him, but that was just a misunderstanding and not her fault. If anything, it proved how much of a good person she was by coming out here to protect the village. And while Xander wasn’t the one being attacked, his nascent feelings for Ella and his growing hatred of sexual assault were apparently enough to trigger the Oath even though it hadn’t mentioned allies before.

  “Oh don’t you worry,” he growled at the System, dismissing the disk and feeling the power of his passive flood into him, “There’s not a snowcone’s chance in hell that I would ever let this slide.” Wrenching mana from his core, he dumped it into the plants and skeletal corpse at his feet. Vines began moving towards the filthy bastards even before they had fully formed and grown, dragging the bones and spear behind them. The new minion assembled itself on the go, and Xander wasn’t far behind.

  Gripping the bloody shortsword he had held onto in one hand, he began to jog towards Ella as fast as his damaged body could manage. He barely felt alive, let alone conscious, but he would be damned before he would let the wretched beasts have their way.

   the magically nurtured tree warned him. Xander didn’t have the mental capacity to come up with a sufficient curse. That made six on the bridge, and six more in these woods outside the village, but he didn’t have the time to consider what that meant right now. With some effort, he regathered the scraps of his attention to focus on the task at hand. First things first, save Ella. Then he could worry about surviving both her and the next two gnolls afterward. He could only face one potentially fatal circumstance at a time.

  Glancing at his new minion while jogging, he observed that it was hardly a work of art. Between his distraction and haste, the vines had pulled the bones into more or less random positions. The skull and pelvis had swapped positions, and all the leg and arm bones were jumbled along three ‘legs’ with random fingers and toes scattered about haphazardly. The spear had just been attached on top of the pelvis in a fixed position. The whole minion was bizarre and somewhat disturbing, which suited Xander just fine as they charged closer.

  He desperately wanted to scream at the gnolls as he ran, both to distract them from tormenting Ella and to release his own volcanic fury. Instead, he clenched his jaw until his teeth creaked. Giving the assholes any warning would lower his chance of survival, and hers by extension. Even then, he knew that the gnolls had superior senses and would sense him and his screwed up minion before they got all the way into range. Scowling, he pushed himself and his increased stats to their limits, accelerating across the forest floor.

  As if to mock Xander’s expectations, Ella’s pained and frantic cursing hid the soft pounding of his feet on the forest floor until it was far too late for the beast straddling her now bare hips. The gnoll began looking up just in time for a pissed off dryad to slam into its chest, short sword first. He may not have weighed much, but surprise, fury, momentum, and buffed stats were enough to knock the much larger hyena-man off of its intended victim.

  This particular gnoll was either lucky or had good resilience, because even though the shortsword was sunk to the hilt in its chest, it wasn’t dead yet. A gasping wheeze brought a trickle of blood to its muzzle, but shocked eyes still stared up at Xander with hatred that mirrored his own. His vision was getting fuzzy and grey again, but he instinctively knew that trying to pull the short sword out to use it again would be all but impossible at his current level of exhaustion. So instead, Xander pushed himself up enough to use the partially regrown stump of his left arm.

  Violet eyes burning, he slammed the nub into the dazed gnoll’s throat, but he was weak despite the bonuses and the flesh was dull. The impact to a vital area stunned the gnoll briefly anyway, but it wouldn’t be enough. He needed more, he needed his useless arm to be a weapon. Screaming in frustration, Xander reached inside to his frigid core and ripped at the flowing green mana of Nurture Plants that swirled there. He could see the structure that allowed the spell to heal creatures with high Nature Affinity, and his will smashed it sloppily together with the shaping portion. The repurposed spell didn’t only heal him, but also grew his flesh into the shape he needed.

  Modifying a spell on the fly proved enough distraction for the gnoll to recover. It ripped a spiked gauntlet across his bare chest, leaving several bleeding furrows on his breasts. The bastard then shoved him to the ground and climbed on top of him using its greater strength and grappling technique. It growled wheezily and grabbed his shoulders, lifting him up and slamming him back down against the ground several times.

  The seven and a half foot tall hyena-man loomed over Xander with an evil grin on its muzzle, using its superior size, weight, and muscles to pin him to the soil just like it had done to Ella. Blood dripped from its chest wound and drool from its black muzzle as it cackled and spoke in the common tongue with poor proficiency. “You… weak… you… lose” it smirked “I’m… gonna…”

  Xander didn’t wait for the asshole to finish its sentence. Turning his head, he bit down on the hand holding his left shoulder as hard as he could. Warm blood sprayed across his face and dribbled from his lips as several knuckles came away in his teeth. The gnoll reflexively yanked its hand away, face twisting in a snarl of pain, but the expression quickly turned confused. It looked down between them with growing fear that Xander could literally taste with his upgraded aura ability.

  A green limb ending in a sickle-like curve and lined with vicious fangs had just finished ripping across the gnoll’s lower abdomen. Steaming innards slid out of the jagged tear with hideous sounds. Only then did Xander spit out the digits and growl “Fuck… you…” through bloody teeth. The gnoll toppled sideways, leaving him covered in its foul intestines.

  Another wave of exhaustion threatened to knock him unconscious, but he forced himself to look up and over at the sound of flesh striking flesh. It took him a moment to comprehend what he was seeing, but after it clicked he smirked to himself tiredly. His minion had impaled the other gnoll through the lower back and pinned it to the ground face down. However, because the spear was attached in a fixed position the vine had gotten stuck. it whined at him.

  Ella, on the other hand, was totally free from her attackers and was now beating the back of that gnoll’s head to a pulp with a snarl on her scarred features. More notification disks signified the deaths of the two scumbags, but Xander’s eidetic memory reminded him that there was another threat on the way. “Ella…” he called, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

  “ELLA!!” he shouted, dragging himself with one hand out from under the pile of offal. This time her head snapped around, and her eyes landed on him with a disgusted glare. The fire in her eyes, and the blood splattering her half exposed body in the bright moonlight only made her even more beautiful. It was suddenly hard not to stare, but he wouldn’t let himself abuse her vulnerability, and looked carefully into her eyes and not anywhere else.

  “We’ve got two more coming and I’m just about useless. I refuse to die here to these sadistic monsters though. So what do you say, are you willing to fight them together?”

  —----------------------------

  Visceral horror and rage roiled inside Ella as she turned and watched Autumn crawl her way out of entrails. It took her several moments to realize that the dryad was not only talking to her, but also offering her aid. On closer inspection of both the words and the woman, Ella sincerely doubted they had enough strength between them to take on another fight. The dryad was having trouble standing, slipping in the blood and guts, her whole body shaking with the effort and her eyes half lidded with exhaustion.

  The enchantress was actually in far better shape, even with the new wounds in her stomach and arm. The spear must have missed anything vital, slicing mostly through muscle and fat, though blood loss could still be fatal eventually. Her arm still worked, even if it felt like a fire mage roasted her shoulder every time she moved it. There was no doubt in her mind that she could kill the necromancer right now, and part of her insisted that Autumn was trying to use the threat of more gnolls as a ruse. No, not Autumn… there was no doubt about it anymore; this was Dungeon Lord Xander.

  What confused her though was why the dryad had come back and saved her at all. She could have made her escape and let the gnolls have their way with Ella, but instead Xander had picked a fight with them. The twisted skeletal minion thing was still stuck in the ground, apparently not strong enough or smart enough to get free. She didn’t know what the dungeon lord was playing at, but her danger sense began sending her warnings again and forced her hand.

  “Fine. But I can still kick your ass if I have to, so don’t try anything stupid,” she said with frustration, leaning down carefully to retrieve a shortsword for herself, and nearly throwing up in the process. She was still queasy from draining her mana pool for that last Frostfire lance and shield. Ironically, the spear through her midriff actually kind of helped, but she couldn’t let either problem stop her right now. Standing up she hobbled gingerly over to the gore soaked being that had saved her from a terrible fate but might still try to kill her later.

  Chuckling weakly, the dryad nodded “Yeah… I bet you could.”

  “Are you going to do anything about… all that?” Ella asked, covering her disgust with an irritated tone and motioning towards the guts hanging from Xander’s body.

  “Nope. I’ve got one trick I hope will work… and these might help.” The necromancer shrugged slightly, but even that small motion nearly caused her to topple over. The enchantress looked at her askance for a moment, but before she could question what kind of horrifying ritual the dryad was planning, the last two gnolls prowled into view.

  —-----------------------

  Two hyena-men froze in place as they saw two women standing and waiting for them with weapons ready. The females stood shoulder to shoulder and were soaked in blood, one barely clad in shredded rags, and the other wearing only the entrails of a dead gnoll that lay just behind her. The stink of charred flesh and death filled the forest, not just from the two dead gnolls at the women’s feet, but also in several other places nearby. New wounds and old scars marked their bodies, but their expressions were filled with only anger and violence.

  The two scouts looked at each other hesitantly, until the green skinned dryad called out coldly, “Hurry up, I don’t have all night. Come and let me send your worthless souls back to the Cycle.” Dark power washed out from her, and fear gnawed on their bellies as they realized they were in the presence of a superior predator. The woods grew darker, and the raw power of the blood drenched dryad hungered to add their corpses to her tally. Without consulting each other, both scouts turned and ran away as fast as they could manage. Some prey required a larger pack after all, right?