As the battlefield roared around with the fury of the fire that was spreading everywhere, Salome could only limp around in search for an unlikely escape. The conflagration wasn't her doing, so perhaps it was an accident or maybe some desperate defense against the threat, but it had turned the fields into a living hell. Not that it was any better before, as the pompous bastard who hired all the mercenaries he could get his paws on didn't tell the truth about the enemy they were going to face. That bunch of soldiers of fortune were supposed to stop a bandit raid, something that wasn't supposed to pose a challenge to those ruthless warriors of ill repute that Salome counted herself among. The truth was far from that, since not only the foe weren't bandits, but they weren't there to stop anything, just to offer a distraction and buy time for the noble who hired them to run with his riches.
Salome had faced many foes in her short life as a mercenary, she was a mountain of a woman, her well-sculpted body a testimony to her devotion to be the best, to stand tall above any judgment others could make of the clanswoman. But no amount of fighting talent, experience or skill would help her against the foe they were presented with. As soon as they saw the Necrophage swarm appear behind the hill, they knew that it wasn't a fight they could win, and now it was just a matter of delaying them long enough to save their own skin.
Amidst the chaos that ensued, a sudden fire gave the swarm some pause, even if it was just with the smoke hampering the visibility of the necrodrones chittering and buzzing above, festering the fields with their caustic poison. Salome had managed to kill a few foragers that marched ahead of the main swarm, but not without paying the price, as her body now exhibited half a dozen cuts and a couple of acid burns. Nothing lethal, not yet, but that was only if she didn't catch the plague and was already marked for death. Her force of will kept her moving, her mighty body walking despite the injuries, at least until she fell into one of the irrigation trenches that nourished the now burning fields.
Crawling along the trench to keep herself safe from being spotted by the swarm, away from the deadly fire, Salome dragged herself through dirt and mud, her prodigious strength slowly fading as she felt more and more feverish. Were they the injuries or perhaps the plague, she didn't know, but she wasn't going to die there, not like that, not that day. The trench guided her to the river it fed from, her only way to escape that inferno. Holding onto a broken board that were part of the leaking dam that controlled the flow of water into the trench, Salome threw herself into the river, allowing it to take her downstream away from that madness.
The will to live, the desire to get revenge upon the lord that had made a fool, a sacrificial pawn of her was the only thing keeping her awake as she drifted down the current, but she couldn't keep herself conscious forever. When the smoke column was gone from the view, and the buzzing swarm was nothing more than a memory that would plague her nightmares, Salome ended up aground in a river bend when the board got stuck in some water lilies. The wounded, feverish, barely conscious woman managed to drag herself into land, her clothes in tatters and completely unarmed. Maybe if she rested just a bit she could walk again, maybe if she rested a bit she would be just fine...
Salome's dark purplish eyes closed, her red mane of hair stuck to her by mud and water, as her body had finally given up and spent every little bit of energy it could muster.<|im_end|>
A lone figure strode through the rolling hills into the mouth of a great valley as day broke, her silhouette obscured by a hood and long cape draped over wide pauldrons. A cold wind pulled at the leather cloak to reveal modest brown robes, rattling the hidden chainmail and bringing with it the stench of soot and cinders. She turned to its source, spotting the pillars of smoke reaching to the skies in the distance and the body that lay on the shore of the river that flowed down from the burning fields. Heeding the call to action, she moved to bring the mercy her sect was so known for, praying that it would be bringing healing instead of digging a grave.
A sigh of relief came as she checked the strained woman's pulse, however weak it was. With heavy exertion, she pulled the woman onto drier soil and began removing her drenched clothing to examine her wounds. An examination that revealed quite the surprise and distraction between the woman's thick, muscular legs; a shockingly large penis. A blush formed beneath her bandana mask as she pondered how it dwarfed the secretive member hiding beneath her own robes. With a gulp, she pushed aside her curiosity in order to save her. The first step was cleaning her off. A cooking pot filled with river water and a rag from her backpack did the job well enough, but this led to the discovery of something even more peculiar, something the cleric did not share with the injured woman; a vagina hiding beneath her heavy testicles. She bit her lip, steeling herself to focus on the task at hand instead of lewd ponderings. The wounds were strange, they were the marks of claws and insectoid mandibles, not of steel, with burns born not of fire but of caustic venom. The sure signs of Necrophage bites she had only read about in the Abbey. This woman was not long for this world. She dug deeper into her bag, taking out a decorative bottle filled with a golden powder and a bundle of yams. With one hand on the bottle and the other on the woman's chest, she prayed and gave the vegetables as an offering. The bottle glowed, releasing tendrils of golden light that stitched the wounds closed and purged her body of infection and disease.
There was only so much her prayers could do for the woman. Even with the plague purged, her skin was too cold and she would die of exposure soon enough without proper care. She needed something to keep the woman warm, but a fire was too risky. If the necrophages spotted them, it would spell death for both of them. Instead, she laid the woman out onto her sleeping bag and removed the plate pauldrons her cloak was attached to. Using her cloak as a blanket, she lay on top of the woman to keep her warm and hoped the chainmail layer in her robes wouldn't be too discomforting for either of them. She had woken up only an hour ago, but prayed that sleep would find her, or that the woman would wake up shortly, as she tried to keep her mind off the hefty member and soft, bountiful breasts she was lying on.<|im_end|>