Chapter 528: Strip Off Your Armor
The moment Heila’s witchcraft washed over him, carrying away the pain that tormented his mind and body, Ollie found himself falling into a deep darkness as the seed within his chest drew his mind into a world filled with power that felt young, vibrant, and full of potential.
At the same time, the place left him feeling anything but relaxed, as though the energy rippling through the darkness had yet to decide if it should yield and submit to Ollie’s desires or turn on him and use him as soil in which to grow and strengthen itself.
"Hello, Ollie," a familiar, feminine voice called from the darkness.
Suddenly, a jade-green light blossomed in the darkness, shimmering from thousands of cypress needles in a strange, flooded forest. Ollie found himself standing barefoot and knee deep in the warm, still water with soft, silty soil squishing between his toes as he turned to face the woman who had spoken.
There, he found Lady Ashlynn, dressed in a scandalously short skirt and sleeveless tunic, wearing a witch’s hat that seemed to hold half a garden’s worth of twigs, flowers, leaves, and stalks of grass in neatly tied bundles. It looked strangely fitting for the odd place he found himself, and at the very least, it wouldn’t become as heavy and sodden with water as his own heavy breaches and the padded gambeson that he found himself wearing in the oppressive heat of the flooded forest. But still, did she have to sit so... provocatively as she looked down on him from her perch above?
"So, these are cypress trees?" Ollie asked, turning his gaze away from Lady Ashlynn before his eyes could linger further on her soft, creamy thighs or slender calves and instead focusing on the strange trees and the labyrinth of gnarled wooden structures that grew around them. "They’re... different from what I expected."
"Many things seem to be different from what you expected," Ashlynn said. "You’ve come here dressed for war, but where is the enemy you need your armor to fight? There are no beasts in the water here," she added, tossing a stone playfully into the water nearby and splashing the startled Ollie in the process. "Strip out of all that, you’ll be more comfortable then."
"My, my lady," Ollie said with a pained expression on his face as he faced her, struggling to keep his eyes where they should be, particularly as he looked up at her from below. "It, it wouldn’t be proper," he said lamely. "Not when you’re dressed like that."
"Ollie," Ashlynn said, summoning a lightweight scarf and draping it across her legs as she regarded him from her seat on the cypress knee. "What is it that you think I’m asking you to do?"