Chapter 128: Bath Time
Chapter 128: Bath Time
Reina proudly showed them around her new domain.
She led the Alpha over to the automated fresh-water fountain in the center of the yard.
The massive wolf sniffed the clean clear spring water, then began to lap it up hungrily with his tail wagging.
The females investigated the individual, ironwood-reinforced stalls lined with fresh dry stalk while the three pups immediately started wrestling with each other in the corner of the warm paddock, completely oblivious to the trauma of the afternoon.
"It’s perfect, Lord Silas," Reina beamed, watching the pack settle in with an ease that usually took months to achieve. "The passive healing buff is already working... The Alpha’s breathing is completely steady so they feel safe here."
"Good," Silas nodded, resting his hands on his hips. "Start working with the females tomorrow. Let’s see how long it takes to get some saddles on them."
"You really think a saddle is going to fit over all that swamp grime, Captain?" a voice called out from behind them.
Silas turned around.
Walking across the eastern tiles toward the Pavilion were Morwenna and Eluned.
The two SSS-rank women had clearly finished cooking.
They had shed their kitchen aprons and were back in their usual gear... Morwenna in her tight dark canvas pants and cropped leather top, and Eluned in her pristine spider-silk robes.
They didn’t look impressed by the majestic golden wolves. They both had their noses wrinkled in a bit of disgust.
Morwenna stopped a few feet away from the heavy iron gates, crossing her thick arms over her chest and glaring into the paddock.
"They might look like glowing gold," Morwenna sneered, waving a hand in front of her face to clear the air. "But they smell like a rotting swamp carcass that’s been sitting in the sun for a week... They reek of wet mud, dried blood, and dirty dog..."
Eluned nodded in agreement, delicately pinching her nose closed with her thumb and forefinger.
"The trench-rat is entirely correct for once," the Goddess complained. "The scent is completely unrefined. It is polluting the clean air of the courtyard. If you plan to house these beasts within our walls, My Lord, they require a severe sanitation protocol..."
Eluned didn’t want to be this rude, but lowering her voice right now would only make Morwenna taunt her even more.
She dropped her hand and glared accusingly at Silas.
"And so do you, my Lord," Eluned added, pointing an accusing finger at his chest. "You pressed your body against that animal for quite a while. You smell just as bad as they do. I will not have you stinking up the Keep during dinner."
Silas raised an arm, discreetly sniffing his own canvas sleeve.
He had to admit, she wasn’t wrong.
He had just been riding a wild animal through a swamp and now he smelled like a biohazard.
"Fair enough," Silas sighed, dropping his arm. "Reina, grab some buckets and brushes from the supply closet. We’ll give the pack a scrub before we head in."
"Buckets?" Eluned scoffed with her glowing green eyes flashing with divine light. "Please, My Lord... We are not peasants washing pigs in a river. We have state-of-the-art territorial infrastructure."
The Goddess of Nature floated gracefully forward, passing Silas and Reina, and stopped right in front of the heavy obsidian wall of the Beast Pavilion.
She raised her slender hand, tapping her fingertips against a cluster of glowing blue runes etched directly into the stone masonry near the gate.
"From what I can see, there are not only drinking fountains here," Eluned said smugly, channeling a tiny pulse of her mana into the stone. "There’s also an integrated high-pressure sanitation array directly into the roof supports."
’There is?’ Silas blinked.
Click.
HISSSSSS!
Overhead, a series of concealed brass nozzles built into the ironwood roof overhang violently flared to life.
A massive torrential downpour of steaming hot crystal-clear water erupted from the ceiling, completely flooding the center of the training paddock like a localized monsoon.
The sudden deluge caught the wolves completely off guard.
The females yelped, scattering toward the dry edges of the stalls, shaking the hot water off their golden coats.
The pups thought it was a game, immediately diving into the massive puddle forming on the thermal tiles and splashing each other wildly.
"Alright, that’s quite nice..." Silas admitted, highly impressed by his own base upgrades.
He walked over to a supply crate near the gate, pulling out a massive, heavy-bristled scrubbing brush and a huge block of harsh un-scented lye soap.
He wasn’t going to make Reina wash seven giant direwolves by herself. He was the Lord after all so he led by example.
Silas rolled his dark sleeves up past his biceps and marched directly into the center of the downpour.
The steaming hot water felt incredible against his sore muscles, immediately washing a thick layer of forge soot and swamp mud right off his skin and clothes.
"What a nice day for a wash..."
He looked around the flooded paddock and locked his eyes on the Alpha male.
The massive pack leader was standing near the edge of the water, looking highly suspicious of the magical rain.
His golden fur was still matted with dried blood from the bear fight, and his healed eye was blinking rapidly against the steam.
"Come here, big guy," Silas commanded, patting his thigh.
The Alpha hesitated, his pride warring with his new Master-Slave tether but the command of the Lord was absolute.
The massive wolf let out a low grumbling sigh, lowered his head, and trotted reluctantly into the center of the downpour.
Silas didn’t waste time.
He grabbed a wooden bucket, scooped up a gallon of steaming hot water from the fountain, and dumped it directly over the Alpha’s massive head.
YELP!
The Alpha let out an undignified high-pitched squeak of pure shock as the hot water cascaded over his ears and down his snout.
The terrifying predator violently shook his head, spraying water everywhere, and glared up at Silas with a look of miserable betrayal.
Silas burst out laughing.
"Hm?" Silas smirked, scrubbing the block of soap vigorously against the wolf’s thick neck until a massive mound of thick white lather formed. "What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever had a bath before? You’re a Lord’s mount now so you have to look the part."
The Alpha whined miserably, clearly deciding that fighting a twenty-foot bear was significantly less traumatic than taking a hot shower.
Before the wolf could even try to shake the soap off, two more shadows stepped into the downpour.
Morwenna and Eluned hadn’t stayed dry.
The pirate and the goddess had both grabbed massive wooden buckets from the supply crate and waded right into the middle of the flooded paddock with their clothes instantly soaking through in the magical rain.
They didn’t come to help Silas scrub... They marched right up to the miserable soapy Alpha male.
"Hold still, dog," Morwenna grinned wickedly, hauling her heavy bucket back.
"Prepare for purification," Eluned declared, raising her own bucket high.
Before the Alpha could even twitch a muscle to escape, both SSS-rank women violently hurled their buckets forward in a perfectly synchronized splash.
The ten gallons of hot, sudsy water hit the massive Alpha male directly in the face.
SPLASH!
The terrifying majestic pack leader... the same predator that had fought a twenty-foot bone-plated bear to a bloody standstill just an hour ago instantly deflated.
The thick, proud golden fur around his neck and face was plastered flat against his skull as the intimidating bulk of his massive frame shrank by half.
He didn’t look like a monster anymore. He looked like a giant and miserable angry wet rat.
The Alpha squeezed his amber eyes shut against the stinging soap, let out a pathetic high-pitched whine, and aggressively tried to bury his wet snout between his front paws to escape the humiliation.
Silas burst out laughing, dropping his wooden bucket into the puddle forming on the thermal tiles.
"Don’t hide your face, big guy..." Silas grinned, grabbing his massive block of harsh lye soap and going back to work on the wolf’s thick neck. "This is the price of living indoors... You want premium roasted boar and warm floors? You have to smell like lavender so deal with it."
Morwenna didn’t show an ounce of pity.
The pirate queen waded deeper into the flooded paddock, her dark canvas trousers completely soaked.
She had a rough, heavy-duty sea-sponge gripped in her hand, and she immediately started aggressively scrubbing the dried mud off the Alpha’s left flank.
"You call this a bath, Captain?" Morwenna scoffed, putting her heavy shoulder into the scrubbing motion. "This is barely a rinse! If my quartermaster caught a sailor smelling like this swamp dog, he’d throw them overboard and make them scrub the barnacles off the hull with their teeth. Dirt is a weakness! Scrub harder!"
Eluned was positioned on the wolf’s right flank. The Goddess of Nature had summoned a thick spongy cluster of enchanted forest moss into her delicate hands.
She wasn’t scrubbing with brute force like the pirate; she was meticulously massaging the hot water deep into the roots of the golden fur.
"For once, the trench-rat and I are aligned," Eluned agreed, flicking a clump of bloody mud off her pristine fingers with a shudder. "This animal is a disaster. I can feel the swamp rot buried in his undercoat. Hold still... I can’t comb this out properly if you don’t!"
The Alpha let out another miserable whimper, looking up at Silas with a desperate pleading gaze.
He was trapped.
His Lord was rubbing soap into his ears, an insanely strong pirate was trying to scrub his skin off, and a glowing elf was threatening him with magical gardening tools.
Standing near the heavy alloy gates of the Beast Pavilion, Reina watched the entire scene play out in complete paralyzed disbelief.
The Beast Tamer held a dry towel in her hands, her jaw slightly unhinged.
’I spent three years studying beast mastery...’ Reina thought with a sigh. ’I read ancient, dusty tomes on pack hierarchy. I memorized complex dominance rituals, intimidation tactics, and feeding schedules designed to slowly break a monster’s wild will.’
She watched Silas casually flick a clump of soap suds right onto the Alpha’s wet nose, making the massive beast sneeze violently.
’However right now...’ Reina thought. ’I can see that the secret to taming a pack of apex predators wasn’t a complex ritual at all... It was just hitting them with a hot shower and bullying them with soap. My entire class is a lie.’
Before Reina could process the absurdity of her new reality, splashing footsteps echoed from the eastern courtyard.
"You started a wet t-shirt contest and didn’t even bother to invite me?" a loud abrasive voice yelled over the sound of the falling water. "I am deeply offended by the lack of communication in this chain of command!"
Thora stomped into the Pavilion.
The dwarven blacksmith had clearly heard the commotion from the forge.
She had her heavy welding goggles pushed up onto her forehead, her leather apron discarded, and her thick bare arms covered in grease.
She didn’t hesitate for a single second. She marched right through the heavy downpour of the sanitation array, her boots kicking up massive splashes of hot water.
In her right hand, Thora wasn’t holding a sponge or a bucket. She was wielding a massive custom-forged ironwood comb with thick, rounded deep-earth alloy teeth.
"What is that?" Silas asked, eyeing the terrifying grooming tool as Thora waded up to the Alpha.
"This, Boss, is a heavy-duty slag-rake!" Thora bragged, proudly holding the metal comb up in the steam. "I usually use it to scrape hardened flux off the bottom of the smelting furnaces! But looking at the state of this swamp dog’s matted undercoat, it’s exactly what we need!"
The Alpha male saw the giant metal comb and let out a terrified, guttural bark, trying to scramble backward on the slippery tiles.
"Oh no you don’t!" Thora laughed.
The dwarf didn’t care about the wolf’s size or his fangs.
She reached out with her left hand, grabbed a massive handful of the wet, soapy fur on the back of the Alpha’s neck, and hauled herself up onto her tiptoes then she aggressively dragged the heavy alloy comb straight down the wolf’s spine.
Schllrrk.
A massive clump of dead swamp grass, dried mud, and tangled undercoat came loose in the metal teeth.
To everyone’s surprise, the Alpha didn’t bite her.
The massive wolf instantly froze as the terrifying heavy-duty scratching motion of the metal comb hitting the itchy mud-caked skin on his lower back felt so incredibly good that his back right leg actually started kicking the air in a rapid thumping motion.
"Yeah, you like that, don’t you?" Thora purred with her grin widening as she aggressively raked the comb down his flank. "Who’s a good armored siege mount? You are... Yes you are..."