I walked until the light through the canopy started going amber.

  The goblin had disappeared sometime during my extended research session, which I chose to interpret as a good sign about my judgment rather than a bad sign about the goblin's. One minute it had been following me at a respectful distance and the next time I looked back it was gone. I didn't examine the feeling that came with that too closely. It had been a weird day and I had bigger things to think about.

  Like the fact that my pants were essentially decorative.

  I looked down at myself while I walked. The leather scraps I'd ced together were holding, technically, but the front situation was an ongoing negotiation between the twine and the dimensions it was being asked to manage. The outline of everything was completely apparent to any observer. The ring sat warm and snug at my base and my cock hung heavy against the leather in a way that the leather was clearly not designed for. Six inches soft and thick and shaped in a way that the goblin's original owner had not anticipated needing to accommodate.

  I had bigger things to think about, I reminded myself.

  I'd been walking for a while with nothing but my own thoughts and the forest and the warm amber light when I started actually examining what the ring had done to me beyond the obvious physical stuff. Not the horse cock, I'd processed that as well as anyone could be expected to in a single afternoon. I meant the other stuff.

  I'd sucked my own dick.

  Multiple times, across the course of the afternoon's research, and I had no clear memory of deciding to stop the first time or the second. I'd done it because the situation presented itself as a logical option. I had agreed immediately and enthusiastically, gotten my mouth around my own wide fred tip and licked Morning Dew off it in long slow passes. I swallowed it and felt the systemic healing work through me, and the most honest thing I could say about the entire experience was that I would absolutely do it again without hesitation.

  I'd also fucked my own ass with a goblin club. Multiple times. With increasing skill and genuine enthusiasm. And then I'd had actual sex with an actual goblin, which remained a sentence I needed a little more time before I could look at directly at full brightness.

  The thing was, I didn't regret any of it.

  That was the part worth examining. Not the acts themselves, which I had committed to fully and without reservation, but the complete and total absence of any subsequent regret. I was nineteen years old and I'd arrived in a fantasy world this morning with a perfectly normal if above average dick and by the afternoon I had a horse cock and had used a goblin club on myself in ways that would have been unthinkable twelve hours ago. I fucked an actual goblin and sucked myself off multiple times. The sum total of my emotional response to all of that was something I could only describe as thoroughly satisfied.

  The ring was doing something to me beyond the physical transformation. I was fairly sure of it. Lowering thresholds. Expanding the category of what registered as normal. Making options avaible that my previously nineteen year old brain was then selecting enthusiastically without any of the usual internal friction.

  I thought about this for about thirty seconds.

  Then the ring pulsed warmly and I stopped thinking about it and started thinking about finding shelter before dark instead.

  I found it maybe twenty minutes ter.

  Two rge boulders had fallen against each other at an angle, creating a triangur space underneath that was dry and protected on three sides with a clear sightline to the approach. The ground inside was soft dirt, slightly raised, nothing living in it. Big enough to lie down. Small enough to feel defensible.

  I crouched and checked the inside thoroughly with the goblin club because I had learned things today about what lived in this forest and caution was now part of my operating system.

  Empty. Clean. Mine.

  I crawled in and sat with my back against the cooler stone and let the relief of having walls on three sides settle through me like a drug. The amber light was fading outside. The forest was shifting into its evening register, different birds, a low repeating call from somewhere distant, the creak of trees cooling in the darkening air.

  I checked the status screen. Ring evolution had ticked from twelve to seventeen percent. Charge sat around sixty, lower than after this afternoon's extended session, the walk having cost me something even if I hadn't felt it. All stats ten. Level one. Sex Mage. The full skill table sitting there with its descriptions in complete institutional sincerity.

  I closed it and looked at the darkening tree line.

  I needed food. I had none. Water wasn't immediately critical but food was going to become a real problem tomorrow. I noted it and filed it under tomorrow's problems because today's list was already full.

  The ring pulsed.

  I looked down at myself.

  "I know," I said.

  The charge wasn't going to top itself off and the ring had been making that point with gentle architectural inevitability since approximately the moment I put it on. I was alone, I had shelter, the forest was going quiet, and sixty percent charge with a ring that wanted to be full was a situation with an obvious solution.

  I untied the front cing of my goblin pants and let them fall open.

  My cock was already half hard, Morning Dew beginning to bead at my wide fred tip, catching the st of the amber light filtering through the trees. I wrapped my hand around myself and stroked slowly and the ring did its thing immediately, amplifying everything, warmth spreading outward from its position through my hips and stomach and up into my chest.

  I had a thought while I was working.

  Before all this — before this morning, before the ring, before everything — I'd had a perfectly normal above average dick and a perfectly normal nineteen year old's retionship with it. Modest distance on a good day. Average trajectory. Nothing remarkable.

  I looked at the tree line maybe fifteen feet away.

  I wondered how far I could shoot now.

  It was a reasonable scientific question. The ring had changed my anatomy significantly. The charge it stored released differently from normal biology in ways I was still mapping. I'd watched it absorb everything this morning without a drop escaping. But I'd also felt during the afternoon's research that there was a ceiling on the ring's absorption speed, a throughput limit, and when I'd been deep into an extended edge session there had been moments where the pressure felt like it was building against something solid.

  I wondered what happened if I really pushed that limit.

  I picked up the pace and the ring picked up with me, the hum deepening, Morning Dew running freely down my shaft and dripping warm and luminescent into the dirt. I edged myself through one full cycle, the ring absorbing it and demanding the next immediately, and kept pushing instead of easing back, kept building, the charge climbing higher than it had been since this afternoon. The ring got darker and heavier and the hum became something I could feel in the stone against my back.

  The pressure built differently at high charge. I could feel it clearly now, something backing up behind the ring's absorption capacity, the ring pulling everything in as fast as it could and still not quite keeping pace with what I was producing. A heat building at my tip that was different from the Morning Dew warmth. More focused. More pressurized. Like a concentrated force looking for a direction.

  I kept going.

  The charge hit somewhere above ninety percent and the pressure at my tip became urgent and directional and I aimed at the tree line fifteen feet away with the instinctive targeting of someone who had no idea what was about to happen but had a strong feeling it was going to be informative.

  I let go.

  The sound it made leaving me had no reference point in my previous experience. Not the normal conclusion of normal activities. This was pressurized and concentrated and fast, a single dense projectile that left my cock with enough force that I felt the recoil, an actual physical kickback that rocked my hips back against the stone, and crossed fifteen feet of forest air before I'd fully processed that it had left.

  It hit the tree. The impact was not soft.

  Bark exploded off the trunk in a spray of fragments, a crater the size of my fist punched clean into the wood beneath, and the sound echoed off the rocks around me. The tree shuddered. A branch above the impact point shed several leaves simultaneously. The hit site glowed faintly where it had nded, luminescent against the pale exposed wood of the crater, slowly fading.

  I sat with my pants open and stared at what I had just done to a tree.

  The forest went very quiet.

  Then the smell hit. Dense and immediate and completely unmistakable, rolling through the space under the outcropping and drifting out into the still evening air. The concentrated warm magical smell of exactly what had just happened, filling the area with a thoroughness that suggested any living creature within a significant radius with a functioning nose was now aware of the general nature of my evening.

  I looked at the crater. The glow fading slowly. The ring sitting around seventy percent, the discharge having cost me something meaningful, the warmth dialing back a degree.

  I tried it deliberately.

  I stroked back to full hardness, which took about forty seconds, and focused on what I'd felt right before the discharge — that pressure building behind the ring's absorption, that focused heat at my tip. I pushed the charge back up and felt the pressure build again and this time leaned into it instead of letting the ring take everything, held it, felt it concentrate into something dense and directional, aimed at the same tree, and released it with conscious intent.

  The second hit nded six inches above the first. More bark gone. The tree shuddered again and a small branch came down entirely.

  I sat looking at the two craters for a long moment.

  "Okay," I said to the empty forest. "Okay."

  The status screen flickered at the edge of my vision.

  New Skill Registered — Cum Shot Active — Charge Cost: High Concentrated charge discharge. Force scales with charge level. Depletes reserves significantly. Aim carefully.

  I closed it.

  The forest smelled aggressively like sex. The tree had two craters in it. The ring was at fifty percent and already climbing back up with the patient unstoppable appetite of something that had no concept of enough.

  I looked down at myself. Still hard, Morning Dew running freely from my wide fred tip in a warm glowing thread, dripping into the dirt between my legs.

  My stomach growled.

  I looked at the Morning Dew dripping from my tip. Looked at my stomach. Thought about what I'd discovered this afternoon about the systemic healing effect, how eating it worked better than topical application, how it spread through me warm and complete and left me feeling restored and full in a way that had nothing to do with normal nutrition but had absolutely addressed every physical compint I'd had at the time.

  I was alone. I was hungry. I was already hard and already producing in quantity. My cock was right there and I had already sucked my own dick multiple times today. I regretted none of it.

  I leaned forward.

  The flexibility was already there, and I got my mouth around my wide fred head with the practiced ease of someone for whom this was apparently becoming routine. The Morning Dew hit my tongue immediately, warm and faintly sweet and alive with that indefinable something underneath, and I worked my tongue slowly around the fred ridge and licked everything clean in long thorough passes.

  I swallowed it and felt the systemic warmth move through me from my stomach outward.

  It wasn't food. It wasn't nutrition in any conventional sense. But the hunger that had been sitting in my gut since I woke up this morning eased back in a way that was real and immediate, the Morning Dew's healing and restorative properties working through me and addressing whatever my body was actually asking for underneath the hunger signal. Not full exactly. But not empty either. Something in between that was functional and warm and sufficient.

  I kept going, licking my tip clean each time it accumuted, swallowing it, the systemic warmth yering deeper with each pass. The ring appreciated the stimution and the charge climbed steadily while I worked, the hum deepening, the two craters in the tree across from me the most recent evidence of what a full charge produced.

  I eventually sat back up with a popped spine and looked out at the darkening forest with the equanimity of a man who had made his peace with his circumstances.

  I was a Sex Mage. Level one. Unique css. Horse cock and magical ring. Morning Dew and Cumbalm. Dick Sp and Cum Shot. Alone in a forest on a world that wasn't Earth with goblin pants and a goblin club and a ring sitting at seventy-five percent charge. A tree with two craters in it and the evening air smelling like the inside of a brothel that had caught fire, and my immediate hunger addressed by my own biology in a way that I was apparently completely at peace with.

  I retied my goblin pants. Lay down with my back against the cooler stone and the club within reach and the ring warm and steady at my base.

  The ring pulsed once. Warm. Satisfied.

  "Yeah," I said. "I know."

  I closed my eyes and went to sleep.