Kraken Killjoy (Son of Fire Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Summary

  Black Forge Books Mailing List

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  Patreon

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Books by Black Forge

  Books by Shadow Alley Press

  GameLit, Harem, and Cultivation on Facebook

  LitRPG on Facebook

  Even More LitRPG on Facebook

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Summary

  A NEW WAVE OF TENTACLED terror is heading for Foulwater

  Axel is homesick. Yes, exploring a strange new world, discovering new powers, and slaying monsters is all awesomely fun. However, he misses his family, nachos, and whiskey that doesn’t taste like tree fungus.

  Then the kraken attack, led by an army of monstrous mermen who are out for vengeance. Or are they? There are secrets in Foulwater Bay that the merfolk will kill for. Axel must bring in new spells, new weapons, and new allies to stop the fin lickers and to take another important step in getting home.

  All in the normal day of an isekai hero.

  Only, there’s an angelic woman that might ruin everything. Damn, but it seems trouble has wings.

  Disclaimer: Kraken Killjoy is a steamy isekai harem adventure like no other. Our hero isn’t shy, and neither are the women of Caranja. There is sex on the page, swearing, smoking, drug use, and goat-milk beer. Enter a spicy new world from Aaron Crash, the bestselling author of American Dragons and the Princesses of the Ironbound.

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  If you’d like to support Aaron Crash (and get early access to cover art and chapters from new books), visit Patreon at www.patreon.com/aaroncrashbooks.

  Chapter One

  WHEN I BURNED MY WAY through the universe and landed in Foulwater—which is a three-syllable word meaning broken public toilet—I had no idea who I was. I didn’t have a name. I didn’t have history. I didn’t have any context. Context is everything when it comes to deciding how to live your life. And no one thought I was a hero.

  There was at least one nice thing about having amnesia—I could choose who I wanted to be.

  Then I worked to save the town, which had some nice people and some cute girls and some good food. I was on the continent of Xid, on the planet of Caranja, and Foulwater didn’t have to worry about demonic deer men coming to kill them. I’d solved that particular problem, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t my first time killing assholes.

  The big raider war had been about six weeks ago.

  Some of my memories returned. This was a problem because now I had context. I had a family at home, friends, a good life, and here I was on the planet of Caranja, maybe several universes away. I missed them.

  It’s hard to be homesick when you have amnesia. But with the memories comes the pain, the kind that leaves you breathless, heart aching when you remember some little detail.

  I’d woken up early on my elven girlfriend’s boat, the Twilight Gem. Did I say elf? I meant slutty pirate elf—a certain Rheesee Helleen, the Dawn Coast Hellion. She was blonde, and perfect, and a little clingier than I would’ve thought.

  That was why I’d snuck out of our bed for the sunrise. I wanted some alone time. It was the nicest part of the day, still cool, without the wretched humidity that would only get worse as the day wore on. Get up early enough, and you could avoid the mosquitoes. They were bad. The biting flies were worse. They loved me in the morning like I love powdered-sugar Donettes. Those were a universe away, too.

  Get up wicked early, and you could watch the fisherfolk take off from the New Pier to try and catch fish in the first of the light. They mostly looked Mediterranean, women with black hair, brown eyes, and olive-colored skin.

  I sat on the bow of the Gem, watching a whole mess of people, mostly women, work their oars until they were out far enough to raise their sails. I recognized names and faces.

  Two of the rajani, Syren and Serene, waved at me. Their black hair was pulled back in ponytails. The rajani were the five women who ran the town. Now that we had good walls, including arrow slits and defensive spikes, the five women had more time to make a living. Heaven knows their worthless husband, Uncle Dog, wasn’t going to do anything to put bread on the table.

  I also waved to Nameless’s mom. Nameless was my favorite little girl in town, and I’d found out her name, but I couldn’t pronounce it. So I called her Nameless. Her mom was Sarawigga, and her teenage sister was Fransigga. That town loved their double Gs. I preferred double Ds.

  When I first made that joke, my other girlfriend, Finniwigg Nightshine, hit me. I didn’t blame her. My sense of humor was an acquired taste. As in bad taste. Let’s be clear.

  The fisherwomen sailed away. The morning winds, coming in from the west, pushed them out further into Foulwater Bay.

  More people waved at me. That’s right. I was kind of a big deal, around here, and maybe elsewhere, too. Or dumb as a sack of rocks for risking my life for strangers, but there you have it. The perks were nice. There were mostly women in town because of the Great Disease, some kind of fertility thing that happened a long time ago. My Xiddian history was improving but not by much.

  The fisherwomen also smiled at me because I happened to be a Dragonsoul, and women were drawn to me. Again, I had no context on how to handle that. I thought I was just some guy from Wyoming. Nope, I could shift into three different forms: no dragon, half-dragon, and full dragon, thirty feet long, with black and yellowish-orange scales. Wings sprang from my back, independent of my arms. I hadn’t been able to figure out the whole breathing fire thing yet. That was coming.

  Rhee said I smelled like burned sugar and sweet fire. It was my dragon scent.

  I’d grown up in Wyoming, which should’ve prepared me for Foulwater because Wyoming is also a nowhere place that smells bad—lots of cattle in that state. I never minded it. I also remembered that my father called his many wives his Escort. You have the Dragonlord, and you have the Escort, and in my family’s case, it was loving, and cool, and fun.

  So, yes, I was homesick.

  These were the things I missed the most and in this order:

  1) Nachos

  2) Martinis

  3) The Internet, which included video games, Netflix, and porn—though I had two women, so didn’t much need the porn. I did miss my VR headset and the new VR shows on Netflix. The whole entertainment industry changed in 2035, but I digress.

  4) My Colt Defender
, which fired magical rounds—fire, acid, lightning, and arctic amounts of cold. Didn’t have my gun. Didn’t have my powers.

  5) Flushable wipes. I won’t go into detail, but you’d think when your whole town was a sewer, you’d figure out toilet stuff.

  One thing I didn’t add to my list was coffee. But yes, I missed coffee. On Caranja, they called it quaffa. The first time I smelled the bitter beans brewing, I had my first ever panic attack. Those are fun. Over the weeks I’d been in Foulwater, I’d gotten better, but I still couldn’t drink the stuff, and I had trouble smelling it. I’d switched to a potent seaweed tea called chay, and I’d started smoking a bidi in the morning—a single little cigarette made from Xiddian tobacco called tebbeck.

  Hanging around smokers definitely had its drawbacks. Don’t judge me.

  The tea had caffeine, and I liked that first bidi, but I knew if I didn’t limit myself, I’d have to smoke all the time, and I didn’t want that. One of my mothers was very anti-tobacco. Hard to remember which one. I had like twelve moms, or was it fifteen? After a while, they all kinda merged into one big mother figure that was all love, all pride, and all disappointment, all the time.

  I cast a spell to light my bidi. “Agnaat injit.” And then I inhaled the smoke and sighed it out through my nose. I suffered through the chay, which was like drinking a liquified mackerel mixed with lawn clippings. The bidi helped with the taste of the nasty green tea. Sometimes a guy had to go to unreasonable lengths to get caffeine.

  I sat on a bench on the bow. On a grill attached to the deck, I cooked a lamb sausage over a small fire. The kettle was boiling, and I was contemplating a third cup of the chay tea. I had a little wire ball infuser packed with herbs, leaves, and seaweed. The only words less appetizing than seaweed tea are ball infuser.

  I heard angry footsteps on the dock, and I knew who was approaching.

  My other girlfriend, Finniwigg Nightshine, stomped up, moving quickly, smoking and sweating. She bounded off the dock and onto Rhee’s ship. “Dammit, Axel! Damn it all to the seven hells! May the seven devils stuff hellfire straight up both their asses!”

  It was too early for so much yelling. I had a bit of a headache from the night before. Rhee and I had spent the evening at Mumi’s Tavern and Fish Fry drinking goat-milk beer and tree-fungus whisky, bilk and samarandha respectively.

  I’d known when to call it a night. Rhee, though, was still trying to figure out how not to get blind drunk. She seemed to have a permanent grudge against her liver. Or did elves even have livers? I thought so.

  I tried to contain Figg’s rage fire. “Tell me what’s going on, but with less yelling and more explaining.”

  She flung her bidi into the fire. “Uncle Dog. It’s always Uncle Dog and his mother. Do you know what they did? Do you fucking know what they did?”

  “Please!” Rhee wailed from her bed. “Keep it down. You’re killing me and my head.”

  Figg waved that action away. “Behind our backs, Uncle Dog and Granny Heehee bought a huge boat with a good portion of that treasure that we won. We won it! They spent it!”

  I winced. “We’ll figure it out. Just take it down a notch.”

  Figg’s eyes widened. She looked like Cleopatra with bigger boobs and anger issues. She was like a cross between a goddess of vengeance and a porn star from the twentieth century, like Annette Haven having a bad day. Figg was a brunette with bangs and golden-brown eyes. She wore a tunic, cinched with a belt heavy with pouches, and old-timey knee-high sandals. She liked carrying around an overgrown shrimp fork—that was her bident—its worn wooden shaft wrapped in leather strips.

  “The rajani don’t know, do they?” I asked.

  Figg stood clenching her bident in both fists. I could hear the wood whine. “I don’t know. Does it matter? They can’t stop him. I think we should kill him. It’s not like he could stop us from murdering him.”

  “Keep yelling and you’ll murder me.” That was Rhee from her cabin.

  “We probably shouldn’t murder him,” I said. “How did he become the rajan of Foulwater anyway?”

  Figg wasn’t in the mood to give me the colorful local history. “It’s too late. He already made the deal with a shipwright out of Trident. A good portion is gone. I know the rajani are going to be upset. They had big plans to improve our town. Get rid of the Hintala Village, dig out the silt, and expand the New Pier. We could buy more goats, more sheep, and we could actually start exporting goods. This all could’ve really helped Foulwater.”

  “Money comes and goes, Figg,” Rhee said from her cabin. “We’ll just steal more from someone. There are big merchant ships passing Foulwater Bay all the time. We could help ourselves. Or, I know, steal shit from the merfolk. I hate the merfolk. Why am I talking? Fuck, I’m killing myself. But I miss my Axel!”

  I knew what was coming. In seconds, Rhee had staggered out from her cabin, in a long shirt that draped down to her knees. She ran and curled up in my lap, which took come curling, since she was so tall and slender. She had dirty blonde hair—unapologetically dirty. Beads and braids and little onyx skulls were woven into the hair. Some were for decoration. Others might have been weapons. Rhee had a tattoo on her left arm, a shooting star surrounded by five other stars. That was from her old life. She’d had her own family of slutty pirate elves, known as the Myrran, but they were all dead. It was your basic tragic backstory and the reason Rhee was so clingy.

  She had her blue eyes closed.

  Figg went to talk.

  The sea elf raised a hand full of rings. “Before you say another word, you need to whisper. Please.”

  The sorceress raised her left fist to her mouth. Her concentration ink, a magical tattoo, covered her left arm in an intricate pattern. There had been five diamond-shaped blank spots, each about two inches long. Now there were only four since one of the slots had a brand there, a swirl of pink skin like a wave about to crash. That was the Vanka Jalana, and it had amped up Figg’s water powers.

  “I’ll deal with Uncle Dog,” I said. “We’ll get that money back.”

  Figg didn’t stop scowling. That girl, my summoner, could scowl like it was an Olympic sport. “That’s just one thing I’m mad at. I’m also pissed at you!”

  “Lower, Figg, please,” Rhee pleaded.

  The sorceress did lower her voice a bit. “You two sneak out, leaving me alone with our winged friend. I didn’t agree to watch over her at night. She’s crying less, but glaring more, and still not talking. I’ve caught her eating little seeds. I don’t know what they are, but I find her and her whole manner troubling.”

  I couldn’t disagree.

  My slutty elf sighed. “It’s that whole not talking thing. I can’t bang her if I can’t talk to her. I’m old-fashioned like that. As for the seeds? I’ve seen her eating them as well.”

  I quirked an eyebrow. “Are you saying our winged friend is eating birdseed? Where does she get it from?”

  Figg increased her scowl to a perfect score of ten. “I don’t know. I think her old dress might have had hidden pockets. She wouldn’t let us throw it away.”

  Our winged friend hadn’t come with a name, and so we’d tried calling her Angelina. She wouldn’t answer to it, though, and she’d get miffed.

  “Bird seed? No, Axel, that girl wants your human seed.” Rhee was hungover, yes, but she wasn’t too fucked to make an unfortunate joke that didn’t land well. I could relate.

  Figg’s face softened into an amused frown. “Rhee isn’t wrong, Axel. I’ve seen how our winged friend looks at you. I think that’s why she will only roost in your room.” That brought in a fresh wave of pissed-offed-ness. “And this brings us back to this shit. You can’t just leave me to watch over her.”

  Rhee raised a hand. “It’s my fault. I was a bad influence on Axel. I insisted we go to Mumi’s and get drunk.”

  “I went for the fried jimps,” I protested.

  The elf appraised Figg. “You’re not jealous, are you? Of me and Axel alone?”

 
; That made the sorceress laugh. “Jealous? No. I’m assuming that Axel and Angelina will eventually be together. She looks at him with such hunger in her eyes. As for you and Axel? I trust and love you both.”

  Rhee grinned. “Angelina is pretty. Have you had any naughty thoughts about her? I have. I wonder what those feathery wings would feel like on my yoni. I’ve had fantasies of bending her over, and then I get on top of her and ride her.”

  That left me blinking as the blood rushed down to my nether parts. That would be my “pinga,” in Xiddian.

  A shadow swept over the wooden buildings of the New Pier, and then across the worn gray wood of the dock itself, and I realized it was heading straight for the Twilight Gem. It was the winged woman we were talking about. She didn’t slow. Held aloft on her white feather wings, she came down, her hands reaching for me. She hit me going a million miles an hour, grabbed me, and plucked me off the boat. Rhee was sent sprawling.

  Figg leapt to her feet. She raised her bident, and the concentration ink on her left arm flashed. Tentacles of water twisted out of the bay to reach for me and the woman, but Angelina, or whatever her name was, deftly dodged them.

  I thought about shifting into a dragon, or into my partial form. In the end, I let myself be taken. I didn’t mind a woman who knew what she wanted, especially when she wanted me, but where was she taking us?

  Chapter Two

  THE WINGED WOMAN TOOK me up to the southern hill overlooking the town. She dumped me at the top, where a few low walls rose from the dust and weeds. It would’ve been a guard tower back when Foulwater had been a far nicer place. Now? Merchants basically sailed past Foulwater Bay, choosing to unload their cargo in Trident to the north or Clearwater in the south. Then you had South City at the bottom of the Xiddian continent.

  We wanted to change that. Uncle Dog, though, was far more self-involved than I would’ve thought. His mother, Granny Heehee, was just as bad. In fact, she might have been worse. The old woman was creepy in a horror-story, soul-stealing grandma kind of way.