Chapter 13: The Swashbuckling Gambit
The air in Neptune’s apartment was a solid thing, thick with the cloying sweetness of cheap candle wax battling the grease of last week’s pizza. The Jolly Roger on the wall hung limply. Theron’s character sheet was damp under Jaune’s palm.
“—so the Kraken’s tentacle isn’t just smashing the deck, it’s tearing it open!” Neptune’s voice was a manic conductor’s, hands flying. “Splinters the size of spears are flying. The main cargo hatch is gone. You’re looking down into a black maw of hold, seawater geysering up. What do you do?”
Penny, vibrating on the sofa, declared she would attempt to bless the seawater into holy wine. Emerald, lying on her stomach, her bare midriff exposed to the frayed carpet, mumbled about looting the captain’s quarters before they sank. Cinder, draped over her armchair like a lazy predator, watched Jaune. Her eyes were twin pools of reflective amber in the lamplight.
Jaune felt the stare. It was the same as the previous week: an evaluation, a challenge. Do something interesting. The unspoken words hissed in his mind. His skin prickled. He was a passenger. A guy on a boat. But Theron was a marine. Marines acted.
“The rigging,” Jaune said, his voice firmer than he felt. He pointed at the crude map Neptune had drawn. “The snapped line from last week. It’s still swinging from the foremast, right? The loose end is near the starboard rail.”
Neptune blinked, glancing at his notes.“Uh. Yeah.Okay. It’s whipping around like a pissed-off snake. So?”
“Theron grabs it,” Jaune said. The decision crystallized as he spoke it. “He’s not just bracing. He’s going to use the swing. To get across the broken deck, over the hole.” It was a simple, physical solution. The kind of move Neptune’s game rewarded. The kind of move a hero would make.
A faint, approving glint surfaced in Neptune’s eyes.“Alright! Athletics check. DC fifteen. Don’t fuck it up.”
Jaune picked up the d20. The plastic was warm. He rolled. The die clattered, bounced off a miniatures base, and came to rest.
Seventeen.
A jolt, something almost like electricity, went through him. A success. In this room. Under these eyes.
“Hell yeah!” Neptune crowed. “You snag the rope, take a running start, and launch yourself over the gaping hold! Describe it!”
Jaune took a breath. “Theron wraps the coarse rope around his forearm, feels the fibers bite. He doesn’t think. He runs three steps and jumps into open air. The ship lurches. The swing is wider, wilder than he calculated. He’s arcing right toward the foremast, toward the—”
“—toward me,” Cinder finished, her voice a low purr. She hadn’t moved, but her posture had subtly shifted, coiling. “Because I,” she said, picking up her own die with deliberate slowness, “am not just sitting pretty. While the idiot marine was planning his little Tarzan act, I was already moving. I’m climbing the foremast rigging to get a vantage point. I’m fifteen feet up when I see him flying at me, a human cannonball with poor aim.”
She rolled her die without looking. It was a fifteen. She smiled, a catlike stretch of her lips. “I try to dodge. But the rigging is tight. There’s nowhere to go.”
The room held its breath. Penny’s hands were clasped under her chin. Emerald had propped herself up on her elbows, a genuine spark of interest in her eyes. Neptune looked back and forth between them, his grin widening. “Oh, this is beautiful. Collision course. Roll… hell, just give me a straight d20 each for impact.”
Jaune rolled. A twelve.
Cinder rolled.A three.
“She twists,” Neptune narrated, his voice dropping into a theatrical rasp. “But her foot tangles in the netting. You, Theron, are a wrecking ball of muscle and salt-soaked leather. You slam into her mid-air, a tangle of limbs and momentum.”
The description unlocked something in Jaune’s mind, vivid and immediate. He wasn’t in Neptune’s cluttered apartment anymore. He was in the screaming wind and stinging salt spray. He felt the bruising impact, not of bodies, but of two opposing forces—unyielding determination and graceful evasion—meeting in catastrophic concert.
“The air is punched from her lungs,” Neptune continued, his eyes on Cinder. “You hear the whuff sound, close to your ear. Her body is surprisingly solid, a core of wiry strength wrapped in silk and leather. The corset’s laces dig into your chest. Your forearm, still wrapped in the rope, snakes around her back instinctively to stop her falling. You spin together in a brutal pirouette. Her knee jams into your thigh. Your chin scrapes against the delicate bones of her shoulder.”
Jaune’s face was burning. He could feel it. The description was too intimate, too physical. He saw the details Neptune omitted: the shock of her hair against his face, likely smelling of smoke and jasmine; the jarring intimacy of her weight against him; the split-second shared vulnerability of falling.
“You hit the deck,” Neptune said, slapping the table for effect. The miniatures jumped. “Not the hold, thankfully. You land in a heap on the forecastle, a pile of groaning, entangled adventurers. Theron, you’re on the bottom. Cinder… is mostly on top of you. Everyone’s breathless.Literally. Take… four bludgeoning damage each.”
A heavy, charged silence filled the room, thick as the candle-scented air. Jaune couldn’t meet anyone’s gaze. He stared at the painted miniature of Theron, lying flat on the map. He felt a phantom pressure on his chest, a ghost of the impact. His heart hammered against his ribs, a trapped, frantic thing.
Across the table, Cinder shifted in her chair. She brought a finger to her lips, slowly, thoughtfully. Her cheeks held a faint, high flush that hadn’t been there moments before. Not embarrassment. Something hotter, more focused. Her eyes, when they found Jaune’s, were narrowed, sharp. The predatory amusement was gone, replaced by a sheer, unadulterated intensity. She looked like she’d been challenged in a way she hadn’t anticipated.
“Well,” she breathed, the word barely audible. “That was… direct.”
Emerald snickered, a low, knowing sound. Penny blinked, looking back and forth. “Is this a team-up? A bonding moment? Should I sing a shanty?”
Neptune leaned back, stretching his arms behind his head, the perfect picture of a satisfied gamesmaster. “So,” he said, his voice ripe with implication. “You’re both prone. Grappled, essentially. The Kraken’s tentacle is rising again. What do you do?”
Jaune’s mind was white static. The rules, the tactics, the game—they had evaporated. All that existed was the lingering, visceral echo of the collision and the searing eye contact from the woman across the table. He was no longer just a passenger. He had become an active, physical variable in someone else’s equation, and the result had left them both stunned.
Cinder recovered first. That calculating coolness seeped back into her expression, sealing over the raw surprise. But it was a thin veneer. The flush remained. She looked down at her character sheet, then back at Jaune, a new, unreadable tension in the set of her jaw.
“I get off him,” she said, her voice regaining its controlled flatness. “And I cut the tangled rigging from my ankle.”
Simple. Practical. A retreat.
Jaune swallowed, his throat dry. The phantom weight lifted from his chest. “Theron… rolls to his feet. He keeps hold of the rope.” His own voice sounded strange to him.
“Fine,” Neptune said, a flicker of disappointment crossing his face that the moment hadn’t spiraled further. “The tentacle comes down…”
The game stumbled forward, but the axis of the room had tilted. Every roll of Jaune’s dice, every decision Theron made, now felt like it was being measured against that single, electrifying moment of impact. Cinder’s comments were fewer, her critiques sharper, her gaze lingering on him longer than necessary.
When the session ended two hours later—with the Kraken temporarily repelled and the Crimson Tide limping toward a smugglers’ cay—the usual chaos of departure was muted. Penny and Emerald left together, chatting about the tactical merits of holy wine. Neptune was already on his phone, ordering more food.
Jaune stood, gathering his single sheet of paper, his dice. He needed to leave, to process the seismic shift in the stagnant atmosphere of his existence.
“Jaune.”
Cinder’s voice stopped him at the door again. He turned. She hadn’t risen from her throne-like chair. She was looking at him, one leg crossed over the other, her chin resting on her knuckles.
“You surprised me tonight,” she said.No smirk. No purr. It was a statement of fact, delivered with clinical precision. “Don’t make a habit of it.”
Before he could form a response, a thought, she looked away, dismissing him. The conversation was over.
He walked home through the cool night, but the city felt different. The lights were brighter, the sounds more distinct. The memory of the impact wasn’t just a description in a game. It was a sensory imprint: the imagined give of her body, the shock of connection, the blatant, undeniable reality of it all. It was the opposite of the basement’s sterile control. It was chaotic, messy, and vividly, terrifyingly alive.
He didn’t feel like a passenger anymore. He felt like someone who had, for one reckless moment, grabbed the wheel and veered into oncoming traffic. The crash had been spectacular. And as he let himself into his silent, empty apartment, the echo of it reverberated in the hollow spaces, a promise and a threat tangled together as tightly as two bodies falling through storm-wracked air.
The week between sessions passed in a fog of distracted silence, the memory of the collision a persistent ghost in his muscles. He caught himself staring at blank walls, reconstructing the sensation of impact—not the painful bruise, but the shocking solidity of another person meeting his momentum. His own quiet apartment felt more suffocating than ever.
When next Tuesday loomed, a new, unfamiliar energy buzzed beneath his skin. It wasn’t anxiety. It was a sharp, anticipatory focus. He arrived at Neptune’s door exactly on time, his Theron sheet folded once, sharply, in his pocket.
The game commenced with the Crimson Tide anchored at the smuggler’s cay, a lawless spit of sand and rotten pilings. Neptune described a tavern called The Guttering Wick, where the air swam with smoke and the promise of treachery.
“We need information on the Kraken’s master,” Neptune said, leaning over the map. “The usual scum and villainy are present. How do you proceed?”
Last week, Jaune would have waited. Now, he spoke before Cinder could draw breath. “Theron walks straight to the biggest table in the place,” he said, his voice leaving no room for interrogation. “He slams his coin purse down. He says he’s buying a round for every patron who can tell him about deep-water summonings. And he stares right at the guy in charge.”
Neptune’s eyebrows climbed. “That’s… aggressively straightforward. Persuasion check. With disadvantage, because you just interrupted three very tense card games.”
Jaune rolled. The dice skittered. A natural twenty. The second die clattered to a stop: a nineteen.
Silence, thick and stunned, swallowed the room’s usual background chatter.
“Well,” Neptune breathed, a slow grin spreading. “The entire tavern goes dead quiet. Then the boss, a woman with a scar where her eye should be, starts to laugh. A low, grinding sound. She says she likes your spine. She tells her thugs to put their knives away.”
Cinder, from her armchair, watched Jaune with a detached, analytical intensity. She had not attempted to steer the scene. Her character, for now, was a shadow in the corner, observing Theron’s blunt theater. Her silence felt more loaded than any critique.
Jaune rode the momentum. He had Theron ask direct questions, refuse side plots, and cut through Neptune’s attempted embellishments with a sailor’s practicality. He wasn’t playing a hero; he was playing a man with a job, wasting no time. Each decision was a clean, deliberate cut. Neptune, adapting, seemed almost delighted by the resistance, the narrative forced into a leaner, harder shape.
The session barreled forward, a ship on a straight course. They secured a lead, a chart to a tidal cave, and fought off ambushing sahuagin on the moonlit docks. Jaune’s combat turns were efficient, brutal. He didn’t narrate flourishes. He described broken jaws and disarming shoves, the grim work of survival. The fictional Theron was becoming solid, undeniable, in a way Jaune’s previous elaborate characters never had.
When Neptune finally called the session, the usual lethargy didn’t descend. The air remained charged, a live wire strung between the five of them. Jaune felt alert, vibrantly present in the cluttered, smoky room.
“Good shit tonight,” Neptune said, stretching his arms until his joints popped. “You’re learning, Arc. Straight to the throat. I can respect that.”
As if summoned by the closing ritual, Emerald uncoiled herself from the floor. She moved with a languid, sinuous grace that was entirely her own, not her thief character’s. She walked over to Neptune’s chair, where he still sat, and without a word, simply settled onto his lap, facing him.
Her arms looped around his neck. She kissed him, not a peck, but a deep, unhurried communication. Neptune’s hands came up, gripping her hips through the thin fabric of her sash, then kneading the flesh of her ass beneath it, pulling her closer into him. The sound was wet, intimate, utterly unconcealed.
Jaune froze, the afterglow of his in-game boldness evaporating. This was a different script.
Penny, seeing Emerald’s move, blinked her wide eyes. A look of decisive comprehension clicked into place on her face. She turned from the sofa and marched directly to where Jaune stood rooted by the table.
“My turn!” she announced, her voice bright with synthetic cheer.
Before he could process the words, she pushed him back a step until his calves hit the low sofa. He sat, plummeting down onto the cushions. Penny promptly climbed onto his lap, mirroring Emerald’s position, her frilled blouse brushing his chin. Her perfume, a cloying burst of synthetic berries, filled his nostrils.
“You were very structurally sound tonight,” she informed him, as if giving a performance review. Then she pressed her mouth to his.
Her lips were soft but motionless, a static, experimental pressure. One of her hands came up to pat his cheek clumsily. The other braced on his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her through their clothes, the unsettling reality of her weight. His own hands hung uselessly at his sides, fingers splayed against the cheap fabric of the sofa. His mind fragmented into a thousand shards of sensory input: the taste of her lip gloss, the dig of her knee into his thigh, the continuing, wet sounds from Neptune and Emerald a few feet away.
This wasn’t desire. It was a transaction, a mimicry, a game he hadn’t known they were playing. A profound, paralyzing awkwardness locked his joints. He was a statue being used as furniture.
He managed to turn his head a fraction, breaking the kiss. “Penny, I—”
“Shhh,” she whispered, her face still inches from his, her eyes sparkling with a confusing mix of innocence and intent. “It’s post-game protocol. It means you did well.” She went in for another kiss, missing his mouth and landing on the corner of his jaw.
Over Penny’s shoulder, Jaune’s wide, bewildered eyes found Cinder. She had not moved from her armchair. She was watching it all—Neptune and Emerald’s practiced entanglement, Penny’s clumsy assault on Jaune—with a look of pure, undiluted delight. Her amber eyes gleamed in the low light, capturing the scene like a collector admiring a particularly interesting set of specimens. Her full lips were curved into a smile that was neither kind nor cruel, but simply, deeply satisfied.
She held Jaune’s trapped gaze and slowly, deliberately, took a sip from her drink, her smile widening just for him. It was a toast. A recognition. He was inside the chaos now, not as its architect, but as a component being rearranged. The promise and the threat from the previous week had crystallized into this unbearable, confusing moment, and Cinder was savoring every second of his silent, frantic dissolution.
The promise and the threat from the previous week had crystallized into this unbearable, confusing moment, and Cinder was savoring every second of his silent, frantic dissolution. Penny’s lips were a persistent, unskilled pressure against his own, her patting hand now stroking his hair with a bizarre, rhythmic cadence. Over her shoulder, Cinder’s smile was a scythe.
Jaune’s mind was a riot of static. This was protocol. This was a reward.
A hot, shameful spike of anger lanced through the paralysis. He was not a prop in Neptune’s fucked-up side game. He was not a specimen under Cinder’s glass. The fictional Theron’s decisive courage, earned with a roll of the dice, flared somewhere deep in his gut, cutting through the fog of awkwardness. He would not just be acted upon.
He moved.
Jaune embraced Penny’s lips, stopping her aimless pecking by finally kissing her back. It wasn’t gentle. It was a claim, an assertion of presence. His hands, which had been dead weights at his sides, came up and slid under the loose fabric of her frilled blouse. His palms found the bare skin of her hips, warm and surprisingly soft. He gripped her, his fingers pressing into the flesh, anchoring her—and himself—to the moment.
Penny gasped into his mouth, a short, sharp intake of surprise. Then she approved. “Oh! Optimal!” she murmured against his lips, her own hands becoming more purposeful, one tangling in his hair, the other sliding down to grip his shoulder. She ground herself down onto his lap, and he felt the hard ridge of his own erection, trapped in his jeans, press against the denim of her shorts. The sensation was a lightning bolt of pure, undiluted sensation, obliterating thought.
“See?” Neptune’s voice cut through, slightly breathless from his own activities. “He’s a quick study.”
Cinder said nothing. Her drink was forgotten in her hand. Her predatory delight had sharpened into something more focused, more intense. She watched Jaune’s hands on Penny’s skin, the way his fingers were digging in, with the concentration of a strategist assessing a new variable.
Jaune broke the kiss, his breathing ragged. Penny’s eyes were wide, her pupils dilated. “Protocol,” she whispered, as if reminding herself, and began fumbling with the button of his jeans.
“Not here,” Jaune heard himself say, the voice rough, foreign. He looked past Penny, directly at Cinder. The challenge was clear, stupid, and inevitable.
Cinder’s smile returned, different now. It was no longer amused observation. It was an invitation to a knife fight. She uncoiled from her chair in one fluid motion. “The bedroom has a lock,” she said, her tone conversational, as if discussing the weather. “Neptune won’t mind.”
“Use protection, you savages,” Neptune mumbled, his face buried in Emerald’s neck. Emerald watched them go, a cryptic smile on her lips.
Cinder led, a sway in her step that hadn’t been there before. Jaune followed, Penny’s hand clutched in his, her other hand still working at his belt. The bedroom was a disaster of laundry and more pirate junk. Cinder closed the door, the click of the lock definitive. She leaned back against it, crossing her arms under her breasts, pushing them up against the corset’s confines. “Well?” she said. “You wanted an audience. You’ve got one.”
Penny, emboldened, pushed Jaune onto the unmade bed. He fell back, and she climbed atop him, finally popping the button on his jeans and yanking the zipper down. The cool air hit his skin, followed immediately by the warmth of her small hand sliding into his boxers. She wrapped her fingers around his cock, and Jaune’s head slammed back into a pillow, a guttural sound tearing from his throat. Her grip was tight, inquisitive, mechanical.
“He’s very structurally efficient,” Penny reported, pumping him slowly.
“I can see that,” Cinder replied from her post by the door. Her voice was a dry, tantalizing scrape. “Don’t just jack him off, you useless toy. Put it in your mouth.”
Penny blinked, then nodded with earnest determination. She shuffled down the bed, yanking Jaune’s jeans and boxers to his thighs. Her orange hair fell around her face as she lowered her head. Her tongue, flat and awkward, licked a stripe from the base to the tip. Jaune jerked, his hips coming off the mattress. Then she took him into her mouth.
The heat was shocking, wet and sudden. She had no rhythm, just an eager, sucking pressure, her teeth occasionally grazing his shaft. It was clumsy, amateurish, and overwhelmingly, brutally real. Jaune’s hands fisted in the sheets. His vision swam, focusing on the water-stained ceiling tile above him. He could hear the wet, sloppy sounds, could feel the tremors in his own thighs.
Cinder pushed off the door. She walked to the side of the bed, looking down at the scene. “You’re thinking too much,” she told Jaune, her eyes tracing the line of his body. “Stop being a passenger. Or is that all you know how to be?”
Her taunt was the spark. With a grunt, he sat up, dislodging Penny with a soft pop. He flipped her onto her back beside him, her skirt riding up to her waist. Her small, pink panties were already damp. He hooked his fingers in the fabric and pulled them down, revealing her. She was neatly trimmed, pink, and glistening.
“Yes,” Penny said, spreading her legs without hesitation. “This is a more effective configuration.”
Jaune looked at Cinder. She gave a slight, imperious nod. He positioned himself between Penny’s thighs, the head of his cock pressing against her entrance. He was shaking. He pushed inside.
Penny gasped, a short, digital sound. She was tight, impossibly so, a slick, hot vise around him. He sank deeper, the sensation so profound it bordered on pain. He buried his face in her neck, breathing in the synthetic berry scent, now mixed with the musky, salty smell of sex. He began to move, a slow, desperate rhythm.
“Faster,” Cinder commanded softly. She had perched on the edge of a cluttered desk, one hand resting in her own lap, watching. “She can take it. She’s not fragile.”
Jaune obeyed, his hips snapping forward, driving himself into Penny with a force that made the bedframe knock against the wall. The slapping sound of skin on skin filled the room, punctuated by Penny’s sharp, rhythmic exhalations. “Oh! Oh! System override!” she chanted, her fingers clawing at his back.
He was losing himself, the coiled tension of weeks—of loneliness, of failure, of watching—unraveling in a violent, physical rush. He fucked her with a single-minded intensity, chasing the feeling, chasing the silence it brought to his roaring mind. Cinder’s gaze was a physical weight on him, hotter than the sweat-slick skin beneath his hands.
“Look at her,” Cinder said. Her own breath was slightly shallow. “Look at what you’re doing.”
Jaune forced his head up, looking down at Penny. Her green eyes were unfocused, her mouth open. A thin line of drool trailed from her lip. She was wrecked, used, and utterly compliant. The sight sent a final, seismic jolt through him. His rhythm fractured, becoming frantic, brutal.
“I’m… I’m gonna…” he choked out.
“Where?” Cinder’s question was a blade.
He didn’t have an answer. His body decided. With a raw, animal sound, he pulled out and came, hot streaks painting Penny’s stomach and the frills of her blouse. He collapsed beside her, spent, gasping, the world reduced to the hammering of his heart.
Penny lay still, blinking at the ceiling. “Protocol… completed,” she panted.
Cinder slid off the desk. She walked over and looked down at the mess of them, at Jaune’s exposed, softening cock, at the cum cooling on Penny’s skin. Her expression was one of deep, analytical satisfaction. She reached out a single, sharp-nailed finger and collected a bead of Jaune’s release from Penny’s navel.
She brought it to her lips, her eyes locked on Jaune’s. She tasted it.
“Hmm,” she said, the sound vibrating with dark promise. “Next time, you won’t pull out.”