Tomboy Island

“You take this,” Alex said and pushed both the Storage Gauntlet and the light crystals in Niara’s direction. “Sofia will need her balance to fence properly and Valeria is our climber, so I think you make the most sense here.”

“As you say,” the track-and-field Olympian answered with a curt nod.

“The necklace… I will keep on me,” Alex decided after a short moment of hesitation. It felt wrong to hoard things for himself, but it did make the most sense. “I’ll be moving ahead most of the time and I don’t want sudden changes in the environment to distract me in combat.”

“Makes sense,” Valeria agreed.

“We’ll stick close to you, Master,” Sofia spoke, a warm smile on her face. “T-to tend to your huge sword when you aren’t… swinging your huge sword… that sounded better in my head.”

“Suck cock and combat support,” the cat-eared climber put it succinctly.

“Yeah, that.”

“Plenty of chances for that,” Alex assured them. “First, though, let’s get the day moving.”

They stepped out of the room and then the entire tree. Several dozen metres from the entrance door, down a wooden staircase, waited the rest of the harem. The party of the day joined the rest of them, then turned around to behold their magnificent home. Red-leaved branches reached high into the sky.

A sky that had become worryingly darkened with clouds. Alex could practically taste the electricity in the air. It would not be long before a storm drenched the world in rain. “Think it got protection from lightning strikes?” Alex asked with a small degree of worry.

“It will heal, even if struck,” Janette assured.

“Which it probably won’t, because fae shenanigans,” Astrid added.

That was good enough for Alex.

“Better question is if you want to head out when it's going to be a rainy day.” Jane tilted her head back further. They were at the edge of the cover of branches. Only a few, early drops of water fell on them. It would get worse in no time.

“I think it is best we do,” Alex answered. “We still know so little, losing a day to sitting inside would be a waste. Plus, once in the jungle, we will be covered.”

Kiara gave her own tits a squeeze. “Not like we have clothes that could get soaked.”

“Some of us got fur though,” Charlotte added, swishing and swooshing her fox tail for emphasis.

Alex looked up at the tree. They had all gathered outside of it so he could make one more decision: should it stay where it was, or should it move elsewhere?

“There was a cluster of fruit trees that we found two days ago,” Alex thought out loud, as he marched over to a root of his home. “It’s further inland and will make for a better base of operations.”

“Easier to keep our pantry stocked as well,” Tess drawled.

A hand on the root, Alex closed his eyes and reached for the essence of the tree. The bond he had with it had only grown over the last couple of days. It was quite happy with its existence, mighty as it now was. There was a strong sensation of loyalty from the tree, dense and heavy as oak. Simultaneously, the entity was different, if it could even be called an entity at all. It was more of a… collection of reactive instructions, emerging and intertwining after receiving his order.

The root beneath Alex’s hand moved with the smoothness of a python. All over, the ground rose and fell in accordance with the wooden network of the mighty maple moving upwards. Eight massive ‘feet’ formed from intertwining fibres. Each of them was big enough to squash a car beneath it, the large, flat soles pressing into the ground as the entirety of the massive tree rose upwards.

The tree walked with a fae grace. Slow as it was, the rhythm of its legs kept the actual trunk and canopy steady. It barely rustled, barely creaked, making its advance almost eerily silent. The staircase that led up to the entrance was, as before, extended by vines that dangled down to ground level. Anyone at a walking pace could have caught up, grabbed one, and then climbed their way up. Only the last part was any challenge of physical prowess.

“Alright, we are ready to go the-”

“Woof!”

Alex turned around, as did everyone else. The sudden sound surprised them, but not in the manner that other animal sounds would have. All of them could very easily tell the difference between a hostile and a friendly bark and it had definitely been the latter.

Everyone’s eyes fell on a big canine. She had a dark grey, almost black coat of fur. A much lighter, almost white shade marked her belly, paws, snout, and the tip of the bushy tail. In its colouration and the distribution of it, the canine reminded Alex of a husky. The canine was much too large for that, the pointy ears and yellow eyes too intelligent. They were looking at a wolf - a female one, as Alex simply… knew.

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The canine tapped up to Niara, who received her with a raised hand. Finger booped a snout. Both wolf and tomboy belonged to each other, it was an evident truth of just seeing them. Like Sofia and her sword, so too did the wolf belong to Niara.

There was a logical part in the back of Alex’s brain that urged him to question this a bit more. Intuition had it that this was right and intuition had not failed him yet.

“What do we call her?” Alex asked. “Besides a good girl.”

By this point, Niara was giving the spirit wolf ear scratches. The animal melted into the treatment so much it almost felt like it was too good. This was the very image of a well-behaved dog, just big enough to reach Alex’s knees when standing - which made it equivalent to the thighs or even hips of a more reasonably sized male specimen.

Rather than answer, Niara directed her dark eyes to him. Wordlessly, she bounced the question back to him.

“How about Cania?” Alex suggested.

Far from the most creative name, but it fit well enough. Niara nodded and that was all there was to it.

“Any other last minute surprises?” The question was more directed at the world as a whole, than anyone around him. By now, Alex was entirely convinced that nature itself either had a consciousness or consisted of several overminds that could pull some very large strings. There was no way it was a coincidence that this spirit wolf appeared randomly on the morning of the day that Niara accompanied him.

The world responded to the question with a thundercrack. The mighty rumble echoed in the world, closely followed by an intensifying of the rain.

“Well, I’ll be indoors!” Kiara declared and hurried over to the entrance of the walking tree. The rest of the tomboys followed after her, some getting a quick kiss in, others not. Only Alex, Niara, Valeria, Sofia and their new pet wolf were left outside.

“Time to get moving then,” Alex spoke, voice raised to overpower the intensifying rain.

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“WOOF!”

Cania stopped atop one of the jungle roots, waiting for the group to catch up to her. The wolf had been keeping steadily ahead of them, testing the ground and showing them routes that were quicker to walk. It was nice to have a guide that only needed to be pointed in a direction every now and again.

The wolf had been downright instrumental during the first bit of travel of the day. The intensifying downpour had turned the grassland into a horrifically muddy area. Cania had managed to find the driest route, which was quite helpful because Alex did not want to experience getting his bulk stuck in wet ground.

Although the concern from the mud was greatly lessened once they had entered the jungle, the storm itself continued to slow them. Dangerously strong gusts kept the canopy in motion and transformed ferns on ground level into whips. Occasionally, a bending leaf sent dozens of litres of water falling tens of metres to the ground. Water was the least dangerous item that fell. They had to be constantly vigilant not to be randomly struck by a falling piece of debris.

Getting through the jungle was a slog at the best of times. The weather added multiple hours to it all. They had been heading straight east since departing from the tree. By the time they were past the fruit tree cluster and into a new area of the island, morning had become noon.

‘We won’t make a lot of progress today,’ Alex thought. ‘Any progress is better than no progress though.’ “Let’s take a break over there!” he shouted and pointed at an outcropping of the earth that would give them shelter from the wind, at least as long as it kept blowing from the north.

The women with him sat down on the bare dirt with various degrees of quiet sight. That Sofia was the loudest among them spoke volumes about the character of their little group. Similarly, the fact that none even attempted to get frisky spoke to how much of a slog that journey had been.

Not that there was anything to get frisky with. Alex himself was too exhausted from the journey to get his dick up. What usually sprung to attention the second he was still was currently kept low by his body's need to retain heat. Wetness clung to his skin. The tropical weather prevented him from feeling actually cold, as did the magical necklace around his neck, but the difference was still notable.

Carnia shook out her fur. The wolf had enough wherewithal to do so enough steps away that no one was showered in the scattering droplets. Once sufficiently dried out, the wolf tapped on over to Niara and nuzzled up against her. The African woman responded in kind.

Alex felt a bit of warmth return to him at the sight.

“At this rate, we won’t get terribly far,” he breached the obvious subject. “Not the most exciting day to come along.”

“I don’t mind… uhm… stable?” Sofia smiled at him. “I’m happy to follow you around, Master. I like… looking at your back muscles… that sounded less pervy in my head.”

“How?” Valeria asked.

“D-dunno… but it’s fine to be pervy when it comes to Alex, right?”

“That’s what we are all about.” Valeria looked up when thunder cracked above. “Damn that’s loud. I really hope the tree does not get hit.”

“By now, it should be among the other trees,” the man of the island says.

“It is magic.” Niara weighed into the conversation with some choice words. “Fae. It will be fine.”

“Fairies confuse me,” Valeria said.

“Sort of the point, isn’t it?” Alex recalled the encounters he had with such creatures so far.

“I would like to fence with one,” Sofia confessed. “I wonder what that would be like.”

“Always thinking about your craft,” Valeria teased.

“I s-saw you climb around in the tree!”

“Climbing is fun.”

“So is stabbing things!”

“Did that sound better in your head as well?”

“...A little less psychotic, definitely.”

Alex really felt the warmth rise up through his feet seeing his haremettes engage like that. A little bit of an odd place to get the warmth rising from. Usually it was his stomach.

Peering outwards, he saw the curtain of rain between the trees. “Seems like there is a clearing south of here,” he said. “Might be worthwhile checking out ne-”

There was a sudden spike in the heat from the ground. Alex shot up. Everyone else shot up as well. Ready instincts of athletic women mixed with the healthy dose of caution these islands had drilled into them. This made the difference between surprise and disaster.

The ground they had just crowded on erupted. Nearby trees fell as the ground unfurled, unleashing a pyroclastic wave of heat. The shield of moderate temperature visibly distorted the air, keeping the sharp increase in temperature from washing over Alex and his women.

The canopy above split open. Rain fell, turning into steam upon meeting a pool of lava, two paces across, that had suddenly appeared. The geyser of molten rock rubberbanded back together, refusing to fall according to gravity. Instead, it shaped up into a humanoid shape. Two legs, two arms, ending in stubby claws of half-liquid rock. Cracked skin, incandescent, with patches of cooled rock. A head like a reptile, a maw split into a gargling scream, and glowing eyes streaming tears of heat.

“FREEEEEEEEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

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The entity of magma charged straight at Alex.