Authorial Note: It turns out it's weirdly hard to come up with a decent sounding video game name that hasn't already been taken. It probably goes without saying, but the Wages of War described here has nothing to do with the 1996 computer game. I just can't be bothered to keep shopping around until I find one that isn't already in use over what amounts to a throwaway name.
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A figure slowly crept through the corridor. If they had any identifiable features, they were concealed by a black full body riot suit . Not even his eyes could be seen beneath the tactical faceplate. The figure kept the assault rifle in his arms trained in front of him, his every sense on high alert for anything that could potentially signal danger as he made his way towards his destination.
The location was now in sight as he rounded the corner. A final few meters of hallway opened up into a small warehouse filled with boxes taller than he was haphazardly cluttering the floor.
“They ambushed me from behind the row of boxes on the north side,” a voice in his earpiece warned.
“Bomb should be back there too,” chimed in a voice noticeably younger than the first.
“Understood,” he muttered back while continuing onward. Pressing forward into the warehouse, he couldn’t help but curse to himself on how the place was a veritable deathtrap. There was barely enough room for him to squeeze in between the boxes, let alone see more than a couple meters in front of him. Slipping around one last row brought the row of boxes he’d been told about into sight.
It was at that moment that the sound of boots crunching on gravel off to his side caused him to whirl around to face the source. He completed his turn just in time to see a small cylindrical object roll around the corner of a nearby overburdened shelf. “Crap!” he exclaimed, recognizing the flashbang on sight, and brought up his arm to shield his eyes.
While his arm did block out a lot of the flash of blinding light, it did nothing to prevent the spray of buckshot that followed immediately after from shredding through his helmet on its way towards his head.
“Match over. Blue Team wins 13 to 9!” announced a voice over the loudspeakers.
“Oh yeah!” shouted the woman responsible for the killing shot with an accompanying fits pump. She allowed herself a moment to pat herself on the back for a job well done watching the corpse of the man she’d just shot grow fuzzy before blinking out of existence. Managing to put together a win as the last surviving member of her team like this always felt good.
“Pretty good, for a girl.”
“Hey babe, wanna chat after this? You’re too cute to waste on these kids.”
What pride the woman, Sophia Mayers, took in her victory was almost instantly dashed by a chorus of voices nattering in her ear. Evidently none of the people who were on her team this time had ever heard of the concept of a simple “Good job”. Not even seeing the results screen pop up in front of her congratulating her for winning with a hefty payout of reward money helped much. Sophia quietly reached up to switch off her earpiece before selecting the prominent “Return to Lobby” button on the results screen.
“Assholes,” she sourly muttered to herself as the world began to shift around her. The terrain bucked and rolled from the warehouse she’d been in reshaping itself into the shape of a large indoor bazaar. Except instead of containing food, souvenirs, and various household items, this one was staffed by merchants hawking their wares of firearms, drones, explosives, and other military technology. People in varying states of combat loadout ranging from realistically accurate bordering on a fetishistic attention to detail to what would qualify as military-themed cosplay if the onlooker was drunk, squinted, and being generous for the sake of the other person’s feelings were all milling around together browsing their options.
Wages of War Online was one of the new entries in the field of video games taking advantage of recent technological breakthroughs that allowed players to connect all of their senses to the game. At this point, being inside the game was almost indistinguishable from reality. From the sound of the computer controlled merchants hawking their wares to the bright colors of the banners and lights down to the feeling of the dry air on her skin, every sense was telling the young woman that the bazaar stretching out in front of her was real in spite of her knowledge that it was all just a video game.
Under normal circumstances, Sophia would’ve taken the opportunity to sift through the stands herself. The economic aspect of Wages of War was one of the reasons she kept playing the game. It was a simple gameplay loop: Get into online matches against other players under the conceit of being a mercenary for hire then use the earnings you got to purchase new equipment for the next round. Merchants’ wares changed by the day so players never knew what they would find. But at the moment, she wasn’t really in the mood. Even restocking the shells and grenades she’d expended on that last match wasn’t on her mind. Instead she stowed her favorite pump action shotgun in the sling on her back before aimlessly wandering around fuming at her teammates’ words.
Not for the first time, she was wondering if she should change up her avatar to cover up a little more. In normal everyday life she was Sophia Mayers, a 21-year-old college student attending the University of Minnesota as a mechanical engineering major. On weekends she was better known as the mercenary Magnolia in Wages of War Online. There was actually very little difference between how she appeared in real life and in game. Magnolia had been automatically generated based on her appearance, and her 5’2” stature, face that was commonly described as stern looking by her peers, sharp brown eyes, small mouth, and slim figure had pretty much all been left untouched. The only real change she’d made was taking the opportunity to grow out her hair until it almost reached the small of her back and giving it a gradient that transitioned it from its natural auburn color near the roots to white at the tips.
What she felt was the problem here was that her outfit was fairly girly for the game’s setting. While it was long sleeved, her black long sleeved top was the female variant that exposed enough skin to reveal her C-cup breasts and the jeans she had on underneath hugged her legs around her thighs and calves. Throwing on a purple scarf she’d picked up for a splash of color and black calf-high boots completed the ensemble. Sophia had stuck with it because she liked the look, but she was well aware that it made it readily apparent that she was a girl and that there was a certain brand of creep who took that as license to make sexist remarks or hit on her. Even if any individual instance wasn’t that big a deal, it happened often enough to start to bug her after a while.
Shaking off thoughts of changing her look for the moment, Sophia made her way over to the Dispatch Counter to find another game. Her hand reached for the Quick Play button that would automatically sort her into a newly formed lobby, but she found herself hesitating. The remarks she’d gotten at the end of the last one were still fresh in her memory. The more she thought about it the less certain she became that she was in the mood for putting up with that again.
‘I need a change of pace. Something fun to lighten the mood,” she thought to herself. “Show me the custom lobbies,” she said to the AI controlled receptionist manning the counter.
“Certainly,” he automatically replied. A screen obliging popped into existence in front of the college student.
One of Wages of War’s touted features was that the developers had leveraged their physics engine to add in a level editor with a surprisingly large number of options. “Endless ways to play!” as their advertisements loved to proclaim. None of it was too crazy, it wasn’t like players were able to change the basic structure of the game itself, but there were a good number of options to take the game’s aesthetic from a serious tactical shooter to something far wackier. Sophia had come across lobbies where players’ guns shot whoopie cushions instead of bullets or grenades that forced everyone to evacuate the area by playing songs about infant sharks loudly enough to make your ears ring.
Sophia scrolled through the listed options looking for something that looked crazy enough to take her mind off things. A listing titled “Looking For Tickling Fetishists” caught her eye from the weird title alone. “One versus one, bondage bullets, loser gets tickled, women preferred” read the lobby’s rather perfunctory description box. Additional filters had also been put in place so that only players who had verified that they were legal adults with the game’s parent company were capable of viewing the match. ‘Well it certainly fits the “crazy” part of the requirements,’ the college student thought to herself.
Curiosity won over writing the listing off as some pervert’s weird fetish. Wages of War fully simulated all sensations except for pain and more than mild levels of discomfort, she highly doubted anyone would play if they had to put up with the sensation of getting shot for real, but it had never occurred to her before that tickling was also replicated here. And if it turned out to just be some guy looking for an excuse to get handsy then she could leave before anything came of it. The college student-turned-pretend-mercenary’s hand reached over to hit the “Accept” button more out of a desire to see what was going on than because it sounded like a good time.
The world once again began to roll and buck around her as she transitioned into the game arena. The young college student had fully expected to be greeted with the sight of a guy by the time it stopped and was caught off guard to instead see a girl about her age come into view. Sophia guessed that the girl was 4-5 centimeters taller than her at most and had her shoulder length blonde hair done in a half up. Her outfit didn’t even count as military cosplay as far as these things went, being a black and white mini-dress with gold highlights and nylons that came up to just above her knees. Most egregiously, she had a pair of high heels on that even someone as handwavy on the entire conceit as Sophia found ridiculous. The closest thing the woman had on her outfit to being vaguely militaristic was an ammo pouch strapped around one of her thighs, which was presumably there because they served the in-game function of allowing players something more physical to access their inventory with than a floating menu. A system notification must’ve let her know that someone had joined in, because she turned around to look at her a couple seconds later, giving the gradient-haired mercenary a look at her golden eyes and apathetic expression.
“Oh, hey. Did you read the description before joining?” she asked without much preamble.
“Yep. ‘Bondage bullets and loser gets tickled’. What’s that about anyways?”
“It means I modified the bullets to tie up the person they hit. Well, more like gluing them down. This game doesn’t have assets for bondage.” The girl motioned to the training dummies she’d been shooting at. Sophia glanced over and saw that almost all of them had an almost translucent glue spidering off of them to the nearby terrain. “The ‘loser gets tickled’ is a bit more self-explanatory. We’ll play 3 rounds. Rounds end 5 minutes after someone gets shot. The winner gets that time to tickle the loser. And before you ask: Yes, this is a sexual thing for me. I’ll try not to make it too weird. Does that all sound good to you?”
“Yep.” The more she thought about it the more it occurred to her that the tickling portion of all this was downright crazy. But then again, crazy was just what she’d been looking for. It wouldn’t do to start complaining after she got what she’d wanted.
“Alright. Goodbye then.” An awkward silence hung in the air between them. The blonde girl was halfway into a turn with a dismissive wave over her shoulder before Sophia’s words seemed to fully percolate into her brain. She froze in place before her head snapped back around to stare at the college student in surprise. “Wait… what did you just say?”
“I said I’m good to play. Do you want to start now or are there some warmups you’d need to do first?”
“Wait… Wait, hold on. Do over. I wasn’t ready. You actually want to go along with this!?” the minidress and high heels wearing mercenary asked incredulously.
Sophia wanted to ask why this lady was bothering to create a game mode as out there as this one if she was going to be surprised when other people were going to agree to play, but she had the sneaking suspicion that nobody wanting to join in was the exact reason she was acting like this. “I take it most girls nope out the moment they understand what they’re getting into?”
“Nobody has stuck around past the explanation since I opened the lobby hours ago. I’m lucky if they don’t call me a pervert on their way out. Are you certain you wanna do this?”
“Every time you ask raises the chances of annoying me into making that a ‘No’.”
“Alright, alright.” The girl held up her hands placatingly. “I gotta ask first. Tickling is really touchy-feely. Is there anywhere you’re not comfortable with being touched? I personally don’t like it when someone reaches for my chest or face, for instance.”
There was something about the question that took away the last bit of unease even Sophia herself hadn’t been aware she’d been holding onto. The fact that the girl seemed to care enough to even ask was comforting. “Just don’t go for my privates,” she said. She held out her hand for a shake. “My callsign’s Magnolia by the way. Maggie for short. Let’s have a fun match.”
“I’m Lily. Right back at you!” Sophia found the way Lily’s face brightened up rather endearing. Seeing her face light up with a smile made her fox-like face quite beautiful in stark contrast to her unapproachable apathetic expression from before.
Both players separated in preparations for the match. Sophia took the time to give the arena a quick once over. The map seemed to have been designed with the idea that there would only be two players on it in mind. Their marked starting locations were on opposite sides of a small two story cottage. The map as a whole was sparse enough that there weren’t any places to go outside of the building itself, naturally forcing both of them to come closer to each other or risk getting caught without any cover to hide behind.
The auburn-to-white-gradient-haired mercenary broke into a sprint the moment a buzzer signaled the start of the round. She dashed towards the building to take cover underneath one of the windowsills by the front door. Peering cautiously inside, she managed to catch a hint of movement in a window on the opposite end of the building. It looked like Lily had the exact same idea as her.
A noise came from the opposite side of the house the moment the young woman knelt down to plan out her next move. Poking her head back up revealed that Lily had opted to push forward into the room via the back door. The young college student couldn’t let the opportunity pass up. She leapt with her pump action shotgun at the ready and fired off a shot before her opponent could realize she was there.
“Eek!” Lily shouted with surprise. The buckshot had caught her square in the chest and exploded into a wad of glue. Lily was left standing pinned to the wall with the glue wrapping around her chest to bind her arms to her side.
“Score one for me!” Sophia crowed.
“Nice one, Maggie!”
Sophia opened the front door and jogged across the room.
Looking over Lily one last time while trying to figure out where she should start tickling, it was starting to occur to her that her opponent was quite the catch. The fact that she’d been pretty before had always been obvious, but the way she looked tied up now was stirring feelings in Sophia she wasn’t certain how to process. Having the translucent glue press around her chest made the college student extra aware that the other girl’s chest was maybe a size or two larger than her own C-cups and her slim waist was being accentuated by the fabric being pressed around it.
“The timer to end the round starts the moment one of us gets shot. If you wanna do the tickling portion, you better start fast,” warned Lily.
The other girl’s words broke Sophia out of her reverie. Shaking her head, she settled on reaching her hands towards her captive’s stomach. “Tickle tickle!” she taunted aloud. Her fingers lightly wiggled against the fabric on opposite sides of the girl’s bellybutton.
“Like that’s good enough,” said Lilly. Despite her words though, her face was going stiff with effort from keeping herself from giggling. The expression brought a smile to Sophia’s face. A sadistic urge was welling up within her wanting to see that expression break apart with laughter. She pushed her nails against the fabric a little harder and picked up the pace. Her fingers moved all around the bound blonde’s stomach in random patterns.
Lily bucking her stomach in an instinctual attempt to dislodge the fingers told her she was on the right track. Part of her wanted to go even harder in an attempt to make Lily laugh immediately. Another part was savoring how adorable the other girl looked squirming in a visible effort to hold it in.
Impatience won in the end. The mercenary spread her fingers out and pressed the pads of all 10 fingers into her captive’s stomach right below her breasts. Shaking her fingers back and forth as fast as she could, her hands zigzagged their way all across the width of the vulnerable girl’s tight stomach on a trip down to her hips.
“EEEKHEHEHAHAHA! Not therehAHAHAHA! StohOP THATHAHAhahahaha!” Her efforts were rewarded with the bound busty blonde breaking out laughing. One of Lilly’s arms proved to still be free from the elbow down, because her hand suddenly whipped around to grab one of Sophia’s arms in an attempt to pull her hands away. The college girl wasn’t about to let herself be stopped by that though. Her hand stubbornly kept tickling the section of stomach in front of it while the other moved around to attack as much skin as possible..
“Is it still not good enough? Do I need to tickle even harder?” she taunted. She was loving watching the other girl buck and shape her hips in an attempt to escape. The way it made the hem of her minidress dance around her thighs was downright tantalizing.
“Enougheheheh! It tihickles SO BAHAHAHDHEHEHEAHAHA!” Lilly cried. Despite her cries for mercy and struggles to escape the tickling, Sophia couldn’t help but notice that the helpless girl was still doing her best to hold still. Both of Lily’s nylon-clad legs were still free, but rather than trying to kick at her tormentor in retaliation she was pressing her legs back against the wall in an effort to keep them still.
Sophia wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. She continued to work over Lily’s stomach for the next several minutes. Her assault only ended after a system notification usually used to signal the end of the round played, which she assumed was the signal that her 5 minutes of play time was up.
“I think I could get used to this,” she happily stated. Tickling a girl who was helpless to resist had been a lot more fun than she’d been expecting. Even watching Lily trying to catch her breath after she was done was giving her tingles. That’s when she noticed that her opponent’s struggling had rendered her hair a mess. The formerly neat blonde hair now had loose strands hanging all over in front of her face. Sophia’s hand reached up to help brush the offending hairs back, but stopped her hand short. Lily had mentioned earlier that she didn’t like people reaching towards her face and Sophia didn’t mean to intrude on her boundaries like that. “Hey, you have some hairs in front of your face. Do you mind if I brush them back for you?” she asked.
Lily stared at her blankly before seeming to realize what she was getting at. “Please and thank you,” she replied with a small smile.
“So when does this gunk wear off anyways?” Sophia asked as she tucked the stray strands back behind Lily’s ear. It was starting to worry her that the glue tying Lily down was still there even after the round was supposed to have ended.
“Give it a bit. I set it to last for 6 or 7 minutes to make certain the winner had enough time to get their tickles in.” True to Lily’s words, the glue started to fade soon after. The pair separated back to their starting positions to start the next round once she was free.
Once again, Sophia launched into a sprint towards the cottage the moment the starting buzzer rang. So far she had no reason to believe it was a bad strategy to take shelter under one of the windows again. This time she crept along to the edge of the house as silently as she could, thinking this time around she would try attacking by flanking Lily from the side.
The problem with her strategy came to light when she heard a clattering sound above her. Her head spun around to catch the sight of a gun nozzle pointed down at her from the lip of the roof.
“Gotcha!” she heard Lily shout. The burst of fire from Lily’s SMG caught her on the shoulder before she had time to scramble out of the way. The force knocked off balance into lying flat on her back in the grass.
“Damn. How did you even get up there?” Sophia asked, watching Lily hop off the roof to join her on the ground.
“It turns out you can get enough height to grab one of the pipes leading up to the roof if you climb up the windowsills,” LIly explained. “It’s a good way to get an angle on someone who’s trying to stay outside. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment.” To Sophia’s surprise, Lily leveled her gun at her again. Another quick burst of fire pinned the bound college student’s other arm to the ground with a second coating of glue. The blonde mercenary completed her bondage by sitting herself down to straddle Sophia’s hips.
“I’m guessing it’s a little too late to suggest we call a truce and put aside all of this senseless violence to go get ice cream?”
“After the tickling you just gave me? You wish.” Lily was intent on getting revenge for the earlier stomach tickling, but Sophia’s top was too thick for her to effectively tickle through. The bound college student obligingly arched her back a little to allow her soon-to-be tormentor to roll up her shirt enough to expose her flat tummy.
“What thehehe hEHELLHEHEHEAHAHAHA!” A shriek immediately ripped its way through Sophia’s lungs the moment Lily’s fingers made contact. The blonde sitting on top of her wasn’t playing around. She’d dove in with fingers wiggling to immediately send her fingernails spidering all over Sophia’s quivering tummy just like Sophia had done to her. The helpless college student had never been tickled with anywhere approaching this level of intensity in her life and was caught off guard by just how overwhelming the sensations proved to be. She arched her back as far as she could with a scream before immediately breaking down in a cacophony of deep belly laughs.
“StOHOHOP! Stop it! ThaHAT’S TOOhoho mucheheHAHAHAHAH!” Sophia cried in desperation.
“What, done already? Too bad. There’s 5 minutes left and I’m not letting you off for a single second!” Lily jeered. A wide smile had formed across the sadistic blonde’s lips the moment she realized just how ticklish her new plaything really was. Her fingers continued to dance all over Sophia’s shaking belly for the next minute. To spice things up after that, she began changing things up to slip a finger into the college student’s belly button and reached around to goose her sides and hips.
Sophia was quickly overwhelmed by the ticklish assault. Never in her life had she ever felt so helpless. Her bondage not giving her any room to escape was compounding with the harsh tickling to make it far worse than she could’ve expected. On top of that, as unused to BDSM as she was, Lily’s taunt that she wasn’t going to let up was causing her to panic. The howls of laughter pouring out of her mouth took on a desperate edge as she thrashed against her bondage in an attempt to escape.
The tickling stopped as quickly as it’d started. “Hey, are you okay, Maggie?” Lily asked. The minidress wearing blonde had noticed her playmate’s distress and immediately stopped her assault. She was now watching Sophia with more than a hint of worry.
“That was… That was… Fuck…” was all the college student managed to get out in between her gasps for breath. She squeezed her eyes shut and realized that she was on the verge of crying.
“Okay, okay. Time out. Let’s take a break.” Lily stood up off of her foe. Reaching into her ammo pouch, she pulled out a cellphone. After a few moments of fiddling with it the world around them went gray and the air filled with static, the game’s visuals for when a match had been paused. The glue around Sophia’s arms disappeared a few button presses after. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
Sophia took Lily’s offered hand to help her stand up. Lily led her by the hand inside the cottage to take a seat on the couch before grabbing a nearby padded chair for herself. They sat in silence together while Sophia took a few deep breaths in an attempt to calm herself down. “That was way more intense than I thought it’d be,” the gradient-haired mercenary eventually managed to say.
“Sorry about that. You did such a good job working me over earlier that I forgot that you were new to all this. The only thing I was thinking about was how to get back at you, not whether or not you’d be able to take it” Lily admitted sheepishly. “Are you fine now? We can stop the game completely if you’re not feeling up to it anymore.”
“Give me a bit…”
“Sure.”
Silence once again descended upon the room. Sophia leaned back into the couch while trying to get her thoughts back in order. Now that she had a little room to breathe, her mood soured a little thinking about how close she’d come to breaking down crying over a little bit of tickling. It felt extra uncool in comparison with how Lily hadn’t seemed distressed in the slightest after her own session. The college student glanced at the tickling fetishist with curiosity. Now that they were taking a break, it struck her as a good opportunity to ask a question she’d had ever since first laying eyes on the lobby.
“Lily? Mind if I ask you something?”
“Go for it.”
“Why’d you add in the rule for a tickling punishment round into this?”
“Ah. That.” The curvaceous young woman leaned her back to stare at the ceiling like she was trying to find the words. “LIke I said, it’s a sexual thing for me. I always knew I was into other girls. But unlike most girls who like girls, I realized pretty fast that I wasn’t interested in sleeping with them. Watching women get tickled out of their minds was the only thing I’ve ever found that really turns me on. Problem is, I’ve never met another girl who’s into that sort of thing. Since Wages of War Online replicates feelings outside of pain, I ended up hoping that if I made a custom match with tickling as a major component then maybe another tickling fetishist like me would show up eventually.” She let out a self-deprecating laugh. “Though now that I think about it, trying to get random strangers wrapped up in helping me get off is pretty messed up. Guess I really am just a pervert after all.”
Something about the way Lily had said that really bothered Sophia. She let the words turn over in her head until she realized what it was. “You know, my dad has a saying he’s pretty fond of. ‘Don’t do to yourself what you wouldn’t do to others.’ He calls it the Reverse Golden Rule. I thought it sounded pretty messed up that girls were coming into an adult-only lobby titled ‘Looking for Tickling Fetishists’ only to call you a pervert after you warned them that you’re into tickling, so I don’t think you should say that to yourself either.”
Lily stared at her in surprise. “You’re surprisingly kind.”
“You can drop the ‘surprisingly’ part next time.”
“Haaaa… We took this break to help you feel better, but I ended up being the one who needed a pep talk in the end,” Lily grumbled to herself while standing up out of her chair. “Right, so are we going to continue playing or call it quits here? I’m good with either.”
“I’m good to keep going. Let’s play.” Sophia watched Lily pull her phone back out of her ammo pouch to restart the match. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Huh? What am I forgetting?” Lily asked in confusion.
“The loser of each round gets tickled for 5 minutes. You haven’t tickled me enough yet.”
Lily stared at her in bafflement. “Yeah, but I thought you hated it. You barely lasted 2 minutes before we had to stop.”
“I was just caught off guard. Now that I know what I’m getting into, I bet I’d be able to last through it all without breaking a sweat,” Sophia claimed with a huff. Her pride refused to allow her to move on with the game until she redeemed herself over cracking so easily under Lily’s fingers. Lily’s baffled stare changed to one of exasperation.
“There’s such a thing as being pointlessly competitive.” The tickling fetishist mercenary paused briefly. It was obvious to Sophia from the look on her face that she was struggling with something internally. “Fine,” she said finally. “But we’re gonna set some ground rules first. I’m not gonna tickle you again in bondage again just yet. Maybe you can lie down across the couch or whatever you find comfortable.”
“That works for me,” said Sophia. She obligingly laid herself off across the couch with her still-booted feet on the armrest. Lily dragged her chair over so she was sitting roughly next to where her stomach was.
“I’m not gonna tickle too hard, okay? Let me know if you want me to stop or slow down.” Sophia tensed up watching Lily once again roll up her shirt to expose her stomach. Despite her earlier bravado, seeing those fingers come close to her vulnerable skin again struck as perfectly good cause to worry.
True to her words, Lily’s fingers started off slow. Sophia couldn’t stop herself from bucking a little feeling the nails of each index finger lightly scratch right above and below her bellybutton. Each wiggle sent tiny jolts of that unpleasant ticklish sensation radiating out wherever they made contact.
“I’m gonna ramp it up now,” Lily warned. Sophia almost wished she wouldn’t. Being told that it was about to get worse struck her as being another form of torture unto itself. A gasp escaped her lips when the second set of fingers, the middle finger on each hand, joined in. It did more than double the ticklish sensations. She found herself aware of each questing finger individually. Their light scratching was compounding on the earlier ticklish sensations to make things far worse than the sum of their parts.
Sophia lightly bucked and squirmed, trying her best to hold still against her swelling urge to get away. Her hips nearly bounced off the couch when the rest of Lily’s fingers all came in to play a little less than a minute later. A part of her had expected her tickler to warn her ahead of time again, leading to the sudden increase in intensity catching her off guard.
“Oh fuhuuckheheheh!” she cried. Her giggling filled the small cottage as she did her best to keep from squirming her way off the couch. She had to grab onto the armrest above her head with both hands and press both feet into the other to keep herself from curling into a ball to protect herself from the fingers.
“Is it too much?” asked Lily. Sophia wasn’t entirely certain if it was an honest question, a taunt, or a mixture of both.
“Keehep gohoinghehehahahaha.”
The ticklish college student really wished she’d had the forethought to look at the living room clock before they’d started. Every second was dragging on thanks to the ticklish jolts her stomach was producing. Lily’s hands were wandering all over her tummy gently poking, prodding, stroking, and scratching away at the entire expanse of quivering flesh. Forget 5 minutes, Sophia was starting to become convinced that her tickler had been toying with her for at least 10 by this point.
An alarm going off from Lily’s phone signaled it was time to stop. Sophia relaxed when Lily pulled her hands away. She hadn’t even been aware how tense her entire body had become until the tickles stopped.
“How’re you feeling?” Lily asked.
“Not a problem. That was easy!” Sophia proclaimed. She realized playing it off hadn’t been the best decision when Lily broke into a big smile.
“Oh, good. That means I can give it to you harder next time.” Her face apparently hadn’t done a good job of hiding her worry at the sound of that, because the video-game-mercenary let out a laugh at her expense. “I’m kidding. I promise I’ll keep it gentle from here on out. Though just so we’re clear, don’t worry about paying the same courtesy to me. I actually prefer it when somebody lets me have it.”
The pair once again separated. Sophia clapped her hands against her cheeks to hype herself up. This would be the final round. Whoever won this took it all home on top of getting the final opportunity to tickle the loser. She did one last check on her equipment to make certain it was still in working order before taking position to break into a run the moment the chime for the start of the round played.
This time she didn’t bother waiting around outside the house. She made a beeline for the front door the moment the buzzer went off. Pushing her way inside, the college student dove behind the kitchen counter for cover. Her precaution hadn’t come a moment too soon. Lily had evidently had the exact same idea, because the backdoor burst open to be followed by a spray of glue-bullets passing through the air where Sophia had just been.
Sophia fished a flash grenade out of her ammo pouch. The sound of footsteps approaching let her know that Lily was taking advantage of her keeping her head down to approach. Pulling the pin from the grenade, she rolled it out around the corner of the kitchen counter. A blinding flash filled the room followed immediately by the gradient-haired mercenary springing up to level her shotgun at her stunned opponent’s head.
A horrible thought occurred to Sophia in the half-second between fully readying her weapon and pulling the trigger. Her aim instinctively yanked to the side as she pulled the trigger, causing the shot to fly wide into the wall rather than risk hitting Lily in the face.
A mistake like that was costly. Her gun was a pump-action shotgun and the time it took her to ready another shot was long enough for Lily to recover. Squinting through her still-recovering eyes, the mini-dress wearing blonde fired off another burst from her SMG before Sophia could get down behind cover again. The spray caught Sophia all over her stomach and chest. Strands of glue spidered off of them to bind her upper body and arms to the kitchen counter in front of her.
“You’re gonna have to explain to me what happened there. You had me dead to rights,” commented Lily as she rubbed the dancing motes of light out of her eyes.
“I panicked when I realized I was about to hit you in the face. Covering your mouth and nose in glue strikes me as a really unpleasant experience.”
“You really are way too kind. That was one of the first things I realized when testing this out. Headshots are coded to instead bind all of your limbs. And even if they weren’t, the game would’ve forcibly logged me out the moment it registered that I couldn’t breathe.” Lily chastised her by lightly rapping a knuckle against her forehead. The reproach was softened up a little by the grin on her face. “Thanks though. I appreciate that you care to not put me through that. How about we call this one a draw?”
Sophia stuck out her tongue at the blonde. Her pride wouldn’t let her take a pity-draw just like that. “I’m up for tickling you after this if you want, but a loss is a loss. Get tickling before the timer runs out already.”
“I’m not one to turn down a lady asking me to tickle her,” said Lily with a shrug. Standing behind the bound college student, her slim hands began to roll up Sophia’s top again.
Feeling fingers sink into the side made the helpless mercenary flinch to the side. Clenching her teeth to keep herself from tittering, Sophia was left squirming back and forth feeling the fingers work their way up her sides starting from just above her hips. Not being able to see her tickler’s hands was an odd combination with how the fingers were methodically making their way up towards her ribcage. Every squeeze and teasing scratch made her fight down the need to break down giggling at the same time it filled her with anticipation for the next ticklish touch.
“Fuhuck! NooohohoheheHAHAHAHA!” Sophia squealed with surprise after roughly 30 seconds of side teasing. Lily had made her way halfway up her sides before suddenly slipping her hands inside her shirt to jump straight to the bottom of her rib cage. Getting caught by surprise by the sudden change in targets was enough to break what concentration she had keeping her laughter in check. Throaty giggles and pleas for her tormentor to stop poured from between her lips.
“Got your spot! Is this still easy enough for you?” Lily teased.
“I’m finheheheh. Keehephehe it uphahaha!” A few spots on Sophia’s ribs proved to be more ticklish than her stomach and sides. The tips of her nails on one hand teased in between a pair of ribs near the bottom while using the pads of the other to rub the corresponding spot on the other side. Having two competing sensations target a weak spot made Sophia’s giggling rise in intensity into brief bursts of laughter intermixed with gasps.
A paradoxical feeling was welling up inside Sophia. With the tickling this time not being nearly as intense as the first time around, she was discovering that she was actually enjoying herself. Being in bondage was somehow making being tickled more enjoyable than when she’d been lying on the couch earlier. The feeling of helplessness that came from not being able to make the tickles stop was oddly liberating in its own way. She found there was something almost arousing about being forced to accept that she couldn’t do anything more than react with laughter and squirming to whatever Lily wanted to do to her.
Trying to parse those feelings would have to wait until she wasn’t being distracted with ticklish sensations. Lily’s hands had continued up her body after reaching her ribs. Sophia spent the next minute getting wound up with anticipation, fully expecting the hands to leap up into her armpits just like before. Every time they only moved up to tease the next set of ribs made her all the more certain that the next time would certainly be when it would happen.
In spite of everything she could do to brace herself, Sophia was once again caught off guard. Lily’s hands had crossed over her bra strap before suddenly plunging back down to her sides. The helpless college student’s waist bucked with surprise as a yelp punctuated her ebbing laughter. Her attempts to escape grew to the point of throwing her hips to the side.
“Oh no you don’t,” she heard Lily breath into her ear. Her tormentor nestled her body right against her back. One leg tangled around hers to keep her still. Sophia was hyper-aware of feeling the other girl’s body press into her back. The unexpected eroticism of the entire situation was driving her crazy.
Lily spent the final couple minutes of their session focusing on Sophia’s sides and ribs. It was a struggle for her to keep the tickling relatively light. Pressed together as they were, she could feel Sophia’s every last flinch. The laughter ringing in her ear was turning her on to a point that was getting hard to ignore. What she wanted most of all right now was to dig in fingers wiggling to extract every last shriek of laughter she could with her remaining time. Her promise to take it easy took priority though. She kept up the teasing all the way up until the buzzer rang again to let them know the punishment round was over.
“Match over. Red team wins 2 to 1!” an announcement informed them.
Lily took a step away while taking her hands off the girl’s sides. “Is everything okay? Didn’t go too hard that time?” the blonde asked.
“I’m fine,” Sophia gasped. If anything, how she was feeling was hard for her to quantify at the moment. There was an unresolved tension bubbling away in her that was making it hard to look the other girl in the eye. The glue dissolved off of her body a minute later. Sophia extricated herself from the table and grabbed her gun. “So, I remember you intimating wanting me to tickle you back…”
“Maybe next time.” Lily grinned at the girl’s disappointed expression. “Come on, I have to give you some reason to want to come play with me again. Now we both have something to look forward to if you find my lobby again,” the mini-dress wearing mercenary explained. A blush broke across the college student’s face when the busty blonde leaned in to whisper into her ear. “Just so you know, my feet are my worst spot and these nylons are modded to make them twice as ticklish!”
Sophia coughed and looked away to hide her embarrassment. It took a few moments to compose herself, during which she noticed Lily was giving her a devilish smirk. “Alright. Don’t expect me to go easy on you though. I’m gonna get you back extra hard for making me wait to play with them.” The mercenary held out her hand for a parting handshake.
“I’m looking forward to it!” The smile on Lily’s face was just as bright as when Sophia had agreed to the match. There was something amusing to the college student about seeing a woman smile so widely over another girl announcing she planned to tickle torture her the next time they met.
Both women said their goodbyes, then left the game lobby soon after. The difference in Sophia’s expression as she loaded into the bazaar was a far cry from her earlier mood. It wasn’t lost on the young woman that Lily hadn’t been the only odd one here. There was something strange even to her about leaving one match upset over a win only to come out of the next one happy after being tickle tortured as punishment for losing.
The college student glanced at the in game clock. It was later in the day than she’d expected. As her hand reached to log out of the game, she paused briefly to open up another menu first. She and Lily had made certain to add each other to their friend’s list before parting ways. A smile graced her lips seeing her new fetishistic acquaintance’s status sitting on the top of the list. With any luck, she would need to be prepared for more than a few laughs the next time she decided to play.
----------
A figure slowly crept through the corridor. If they had any identifiable features, they were concealed by a black full body riot suit . Not even his eyes could be seen beneath the tactical faceplate. The figure kept the assault rifle in his arms trained in front of him, his every sense on high alert for anything that could potentially signal danger as he made his way towards his destination.
The location was now in sight as he rounded the corner. A final few meters of hallway opened up into a small warehouse filled with boxes taller than he was haphazardly cluttering the floor.
“They ambushed me from behind the row of boxes on the north side,” a voice in his earpiece warned.
“Bomb should be back there too,” chimed in a voice noticeably younger than the first.
“Understood,” he muttered back while continuing onward. Pressing forward into the warehouse, he couldn’t help but curse to himself on how the place was a veritable deathtrap. There was barely enough room for him to squeeze in between the boxes, let alone see more than a couple meters in front of him. Slipping around one last row brought the row of boxes he’d been told about into sight.
It was at that moment that the sound of boots crunching on gravel off to his side caused him to whirl around to face the source. He completed his turn just in time to see a small cylindrical object roll around the corner of a nearby overburdened shelf. “Crap!” he exclaimed, recognizing the flashbang on sight, and brought up his arm to shield his eyes.
While his arm did block out a lot of the flash of blinding light, it did nothing to prevent the spray of buckshot that followed immediately after from shredding through his helmet on its way towards his head.
“Match over. Blue Team wins 13 to 9!” announced a voice over the loudspeakers.
“Oh yeah!” shouted the woman responsible for the killing shot with an accompanying fits pump. She allowed herself a moment to pat herself on the back for a job well done watching the corpse of the man she’d just shot grow fuzzy before blinking out of existence. Managing to put together a win as the last surviving member of her team like this always felt good.
“Pretty good, for a girl.”
“Hey babe, wanna chat after this? You’re too cute to waste on these kids.”
What pride the woman, Sophia Mayers, took in her victory was almost instantly dashed by a chorus of voices nattering in her ear. Evidently none of the people who were on her team this time had ever heard of the concept of a simple “Good job”. Not even seeing the results screen pop up in front of her congratulating her for winning with a hefty payout of reward money helped much. Sophia quietly reached up to switch off her earpiece before selecting the prominent “Return to Lobby” button on the results screen.
“Assholes,” she sourly muttered to herself as the world began to shift around her. The terrain bucked and rolled from the warehouse she’d been in reshaping itself into the shape of a large indoor bazaar. Except instead of containing food, souvenirs, and various household items, this one was staffed by merchants hawking their wares of firearms, drones, explosives, and other military technology. People in varying states of combat loadout ranging from realistically accurate bordering on a fetishistic attention to detail to what would qualify as military-themed cosplay if the onlooker was drunk, squinted, and being generous for the sake of the other person’s feelings were all milling around together browsing their options.
Wages of War Online was one of the new entries in the field of video games taking advantage of recent technological breakthroughs that allowed players to connect all of their senses to the game. At this point, being inside the game was almost indistinguishable from reality. From the sound of the computer controlled merchants hawking their wares to the bright colors of the banners and lights down to the feeling of the dry air on her skin, every sense was telling the young woman that the bazaar stretching out in front of her was real in spite of her knowledge that it was all just a video game.
Under normal circumstances, Sophia would’ve taken the opportunity to sift through the stands herself. The economic aspect of Wages of War was one of the reasons she kept playing the game. It was a simple gameplay loop: Get into online matches against other players under the conceit of being a mercenary for hire then use the earnings you got to purchase new equipment for the next round. Merchants’ wares changed by the day so players never knew what they would find. But at the moment, she wasn’t really in the mood. Even restocking the shells and grenades she’d expended on that last match wasn’t on her mind. Instead she stowed her favorite pump action shotgun in the sling on her back before aimlessly wandering around fuming at her teammates’ words.
Not for the first time, she was wondering if she should change up her avatar to cover up a little more. In normal everyday life she was Sophia Mayers, a 21-year-old college student attending the University of Minnesota as a mechanical engineering major. On weekends she was better known as the mercenary Magnolia in Wages of War Online. There was actually very little difference between how she appeared in real life and in game. Magnolia had been automatically generated based on her appearance, and her 5’2” stature, face that was commonly described as stern looking by her peers, sharp brown eyes, small mouth, and slim figure had pretty much all been left untouched. The only real change she’d made was taking the opportunity to grow out her hair until it almost reached the small of her back and giving it a gradient that transitioned it from its natural auburn color near the roots to white at the tips.
What she felt was the problem here was that her outfit was fairly girly for the game’s setting. While it was long sleeved, her black long sleeved top was the female variant that exposed enough skin to reveal her C-cup breasts and the jeans she had on underneath hugged her legs around her thighs and calves. Throwing on a purple scarf she’d picked up for a splash of color and black calf-high boots completed the ensemble. Sophia had stuck with it because she liked the look, but she was well aware that it made it readily apparent that she was a girl and that there was a certain brand of creep who took that as license to make sexist remarks or hit on her. Even if any individual instance wasn’t that big a deal, it happened often enough to start to bug her after a while.
Shaking off thoughts of changing her look for the moment, Sophia made her way over to the Dispatch Counter to find another game. Her hand reached for the Quick Play button that would automatically sort her into a newly formed lobby, but she found herself hesitating. The remarks she’d gotten at the end of the last one were still fresh in her memory. The more she thought about it the less certain she became that she was in the mood for putting up with that again.
‘I need a change of pace. Something fun to lighten the mood,” she thought to herself. “Show me the custom lobbies,” she said to the AI controlled receptionist manning the counter.
“Certainly,” he automatically replied. A screen obliging popped into existence in front of the college student.
One of Wages of War’s touted features was that the developers had leveraged their physics engine to add in a level editor with a surprisingly large number of options. “Endless ways to play!” as their advertisements loved to proclaim. None of it was too crazy, it wasn’t like players were able to change the basic structure of the game itself, but there were a good number of options to take the game’s aesthetic from a serious tactical shooter to something far wackier. Sophia had come across lobbies where players’ guns shot whoopie cushions instead of bullets or grenades that forced everyone to evacuate the area by playing songs about infant sharks loudly enough to make your ears ring.
Sophia scrolled through the listed options looking for something that looked crazy enough to take her mind off things. A listing titled “Looking For Tickling Fetishists” caught her eye from the weird title alone. “One versus one, bondage bullets, loser gets tickled, women preferred” read the lobby’s rather perfunctory description box. Additional filters had also been put in place so that only players who had verified that they were legal adults with the game’s parent company were capable of viewing the match. ‘Well it certainly fits the “crazy” part of the requirements,’ the college student thought to herself.
Curiosity won over writing the listing off as some pervert’s weird fetish. Wages of War fully simulated all sensations except for pain and more than mild levels of discomfort, she highly doubted anyone would play if they had to put up with the sensation of getting shot for real, but it had never occurred to her before that tickling was also replicated here. And if it turned out to just be some guy looking for an excuse to get handsy then she could leave before anything came of it. The college student-turned-pretend-mercenary’s hand reached over to hit the “Accept” button more out of a desire to see what was going on than because it sounded like a good time.
The world once again began to roll and buck around her as she transitioned into the game arena. The young college student had fully expected to be greeted with the sight of a guy by the time it stopped and was caught off guard to instead see a girl about her age come into view. Sophia guessed that the girl was 4-5 centimeters taller than her at most and had her shoulder length blonde hair done in a half up. Her outfit didn’t even count as military cosplay as far as these things went, being a black and white mini-dress with gold highlights and nylons that came up to just above her knees. Most egregiously, she had a pair of high heels on that even someone as handwavy on the entire conceit as Sophia found ridiculous. The closest thing the woman had on her outfit to being vaguely militaristic was an ammo pouch strapped around one of her thighs, which was presumably there because they served the in-game function of allowing players something more physical to access their inventory with than a floating menu. A system notification must’ve let her know that someone had joined in, because she turned around to look at her a couple seconds later, giving the gradient-haired mercenary a look at her golden eyes and apathetic expression.
“Oh, hey. Did you read the description before joining?” she asked without much preamble.
“Yep. ‘Bondage bullets and loser gets tickled’. What’s that about anyways?”
“It means I modified the bullets to tie up the person they hit. Well, more like gluing them down. This game doesn’t have assets for bondage.” The girl motioned to the training dummies she’d been shooting at. Sophia glanced over and saw that almost all of them had an almost translucent glue spidering off of them to the nearby terrain. “The ‘loser gets tickled’ is a bit more self-explanatory. We’ll play 3 rounds. Rounds end 5 minutes after someone gets shot. The winner gets that time to tickle the loser. And before you ask: Yes, this is a sexual thing for me. I’ll try not to make it too weird. Does that all sound good to you?”
“Yep.” The more she thought about it the more it occurred to her that the tickling portion of all this was downright crazy. But then again, crazy was just what she’d been looking for. It wouldn’t do to start complaining after she got what she’d wanted.
“Alright. Goodbye then.” An awkward silence hung in the air between them. The blonde girl was halfway into a turn with a dismissive wave over her shoulder before Sophia’s words seemed to fully percolate into her brain. She froze in place before her head snapped back around to stare at the college student in surprise. “Wait… what did you just say?”
“I said I’m good to play. Do you want to start now or are there some warmups you’d need to do first?”
“Wait… Wait, hold on. Do over. I wasn’t ready. You actually want to go along with this!?” the minidress and high heels wearing mercenary asked incredulously.
Sophia wanted to ask why this lady was bothering to create a game mode as out there as this one if she was going to be surprised when other people were going to agree to play, but she had the sneaking suspicion that nobody wanting to join in was the exact reason she was acting like this. “I take it most girls nope out the moment they understand what they’re getting into?”
“Nobody has stuck around past the explanation since I opened the lobby hours ago. I’m lucky if they don’t call me a pervert on their way out. Are you certain you wanna do this?”
“Every time you ask raises the chances of annoying me into making that a ‘No’.”
“Alright, alright.” The girl held up her hands placatingly. “I gotta ask first. Tickling is really touchy-feely. Is there anywhere you’re not comfortable with being touched? I personally don’t like it when someone reaches for my chest or face, for instance.”
There was something about the question that took away the last bit of unease even Sophia herself hadn’t been aware she’d been holding onto. The fact that the girl seemed to care enough to even ask was comforting. “Just don’t go for my privates,” she said. She held out her hand for a shake. “My callsign’s Magnolia by the way. Maggie for short. Let’s have a fun match.”
“I’m Lily. Right back at you!” Sophia found the way Lily’s face brightened up rather endearing. Seeing her face light up with a smile made her fox-like face quite beautiful in stark contrast to her unapproachable apathetic expression from before.
Both players separated in preparations for the match. Sophia took the time to give the arena a quick once over. The map seemed to have been designed with the idea that there would only be two players on it in mind. Their marked starting locations were on opposite sides of a small two story cottage. The map as a whole was sparse enough that there weren’t any places to go outside of the building itself, naturally forcing both of them to come closer to each other or risk getting caught without any cover to hide behind.
The auburn-to-white-gradient-haired mercenary broke into a sprint the moment a buzzer signaled the start of the round. She dashed towards the building to take cover underneath one of the windowsills by the front door. Peering cautiously inside, she managed to catch a hint of movement in a window on the opposite end of the building. It looked like Lily had the exact same idea as her.
A noise came from the opposite side of the house the moment the young woman knelt down to plan out her next move. Poking her head back up revealed that Lily had opted to push forward into the room via the back door. The young college student couldn’t let the opportunity pass up. She leapt with her pump action shotgun at the ready and fired off a shot before her opponent could realize she was there.
“Eek!” Lily shouted with surprise. The buckshot had caught her square in the chest and exploded into a wad of glue. Lily was left standing pinned to the wall with the glue wrapping around her chest to bind her arms to her side.
“Score one for me!” Sophia crowed.
“Nice one, Maggie!”
Sophia opened the front door and jogged across the room.
Looking over Lily one last time while trying to figure out where she should start tickling, it was starting to occur to her that her opponent was quite the catch. The fact that she’d been pretty before had always been obvious, but the way she looked tied up now was stirring feelings in Sophia she wasn’t certain how to process. Having the translucent glue press around her chest made the college student extra aware that the other girl’s chest was maybe a size or two larger than her own C-cups and her slim waist was being accentuated by the fabric being pressed around it.
“The timer to end the round starts the moment one of us gets shot. If you wanna do the tickling portion, you better start fast,” warned Lily.
The other girl’s words broke Sophia out of her reverie. Shaking her head, she settled on reaching her hands towards her captive’s stomach. “Tickle tickle!” she taunted aloud. Her fingers lightly wiggled against the fabric on opposite sides of the girl’s bellybutton.
“Like that’s good enough,” said Lilly. Despite her words though, her face was going stiff with effort from keeping herself from giggling. The expression brought a smile to Sophia’s face. A sadistic urge was welling up within her wanting to see that expression break apart with laughter. She pushed her nails against the fabric a little harder and picked up the pace. Her fingers moved all around the bound blonde’s stomach in random patterns.
Lily bucking her stomach in an instinctual attempt to dislodge the fingers told her she was on the right track. Part of her wanted to go even harder in an attempt to make Lily laugh immediately. Another part was savoring how adorable the other girl looked squirming in a visible effort to hold it in.
Impatience won in the end. The mercenary spread her fingers out and pressed the pads of all 10 fingers into her captive’s stomach right below her breasts. Shaking her fingers back and forth as fast as she could, her hands zigzagged their way all across the width of the vulnerable girl’s tight stomach on a trip down to her hips.
“EEEKHEHEHAHAHA! Not therehAHAHAHA! StohOP THATHAHAhahahaha!” Her efforts were rewarded with the bound busty blonde breaking out laughing. One of Lilly’s arms proved to still be free from the elbow down, because her hand suddenly whipped around to grab one of Sophia’s arms in an attempt to pull her hands away. The college girl wasn’t about to let herself be stopped by that though. Her hand stubbornly kept tickling the section of stomach in front of it while the other moved around to attack as much skin as possible..
“Is it still not good enough? Do I need to tickle even harder?” she taunted. She was loving watching the other girl buck and shape her hips in an attempt to escape. The way it made the hem of her minidress dance around her thighs was downright tantalizing.
“Enougheheheh! It tihickles SO BAHAHAHDHEHEHEAHAHA!” Lilly cried. Despite her cries for mercy and struggles to escape the tickling, Sophia couldn’t help but notice that the helpless girl was still doing her best to hold still. Both of Lily’s nylon-clad legs were still free, but rather than trying to kick at her tormentor in retaliation she was pressing her legs back against the wall in an effort to keep them still.
Sophia wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. She continued to work over Lily’s stomach for the next several minutes. Her assault only ended after a system notification usually used to signal the end of the round played, which she assumed was the signal that her 5 minutes of play time was up.
“I think I could get used to this,” she happily stated. Tickling a girl who was helpless to resist had been a lot more fun than she’d been expecting. Even watching Lily trying to catch her breath after she was done was giving her tingles. That’s when she noticed that her opponent’s struggling had rendered her hair a mess. The formerly neat blonde hair now had loose strands hanging all over in front of her face. Sophia’s hand reached up to help brush the offending hairs back, but stopped her hand short. Lily had mentioned earlier that she didn’t like people reaching towards her face and Sophia didn’t mean to intrude on her boundaries like that. “Hey, you have some hairs in front of your face. Do you mind if I brush them back for you?” she asked.
Lily stared at her blankly before seeming to realize what she was getting at. “Please and thank you,” she replied with a small smile.
“So when does this gunk wear off anyways?” Sophia asked as she tucked the stray strands back behind Lily’s ear. It was starting to worry her that the glue tying Lily down was still there even after the round was supposed to have ended.
“Give it a bit. I set it to last for 6 or 7 minutes to make certain the winner had enough time to get their tickles in.” True to Lily’s words, the glue started to fade soon after. The pair separated back to their starting positions to start the next round once she was free.
Once again, Sophia launched into a sprint towards the cottage the moment the starting buzzer rang. So far she had no reason to believe it was a bad strategy to take shelter under one of the windows again. This time she crept along to the edge of the house as silently as she could, thinking this time around she would try attacking by flanking Lily from the side.
The problem with her strategy came to light when she heard a clattering sound above her. Her head spun around to catch the sight of a gun nozzle pointed down at her from the lip of the roof.
“Gotcha!” she heard Lily shout. The burst of fire from Lily’s SMG caught her on the shoulder before she had time to scramble out of the way. The force knocked off balance into lying flat on her back in the grass.
“Damn. How did you even get up there?” Sophia asked, watching Lily hop off the roof to join her on the ground.
“It turns out you can get enough height to grab one of the pipes leading up to the roof if you climb up the windowsills,” LIly explained. “It’s a good way to get an angle on someone who’s trying to stay outside. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment.” To Sophia’s surprise, Lily leveled her gun at her again. Another quick burst of fire pinned the bound college student’s other arm to the ground with a second coating of glue. The blonde mercenary completed her bondage by sitting herself down to straddle Sophia’s hips.
“I’m guessing it’s a little too late to suggest we call a truce and put aside all of this senseless violence to go get ice cream?”
“After the tickling you just gave me? You wish.” Lily was intent on getting revenge for the earlier stomach tickling, but Sophia’s top was too thick for her to effectively tickle through. The bound college student obligingly arched her back a little to allow her soon-to-be tormentor to roll up her shirt enough to expose her flat tummy.
“What thehehe hEHELLHEHEHEAHAHAHA!” A shriek immediately ripped its way through Sophia’s lungs the moment Lily’s fingers made contact. The blonde sitting on top of her wasn’t playing around. She’d dove in with fingers wiggling to immediately send her fingernails spidering all over Sophia’s quivering tummy just like Sophia had done to her. The helpless college student had never been tickled with anywhere approaching this level of intensity in her life and was caught off guard by just how overwhelming the sensations proved to be. She arched her back as far as she could with a scream before immediately breaking down in a cacophony of deep belly laughs.
“StOHOHOP! Stop it! ThaHAT’S TOOhoho mucheheHAHAHAHAH!” Sophia cried in desperation.
“What, done already? Too bad. There’s 5 minutes left and I’m not letting you off for a single second!” Lily jeered. A wide smile had formed across the sadistic blonde’s lips the moment she realized just how ticklish her new plaything really was. Her fingers continued to dance all over Sophia’s shaking belly for the next minute. To spice things up after that, she began changing things up to slip a finger into the college student’s belly button and reached around to goose her sides and hips.
Sophia was quickly overwhelmed by the ticklish assault. Never in her life had she ever felt so helpless. Her bondage not giving her any room to escape was compounding with the harsh tickling to make it far worse than she could’ve expected. On top of that, as unused to BDSM as she was, Lily’s taunt that she wasn’t going to let up was causing her to panic. The howls of laughter pouring out of her mouth took on a desperate edge as she thrashed against her bondage in an attempt to escape.
The tickling stopped as quickly as it’d started. “Hey, are you okay, Maggie?” Lily asked. The minidress wearing blonde had noticed her playmate’s distress and immediately stopped her assault. She was now watching Sophia with more than a hint of worry.
“That was… That was… Fuck…” was all the college student managed to get out in between her gasps for breath. She squeezed her eyes shut and realized that she was on the verge of crying.
“Okay, okay. Time out. Let’s take a break.” Lily stood up off of her foe. Reaching into her ammo pouch, she pulled out a cellphone. After a few moments of fiddling with it the world around them went gray and the air filled with static, the game’s visuals for when a match had been paused. The glue around Sophia’s arms disappeared a few button presses after. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
Sophia took Lily’s offered hand to help her stand up. Lily led her by the hand inside the cottage to take a seat on the couch before grabbing a nearby padded chair for herself. They sat in silence together while Sophia took a few deep breaths in an attempt to calm herself down. “That was way more intense than I thought it’d be,” the gradient-haired mercenary eventually managed to say.
“Sorry about that. You did such a good job working me over earlier that I forgot that you were new to all this. The only thing I was thinking about was how to get back at you, not whether or not you’d be able to take it” Lily admitted sheepishly. “Are you fine now? We can stop the game completely if you’re not feeling up to it anymore.”
“Give me a bit…”
“Sure.”
Silence once again descended upon the room. Sophia leaned back into the couch while trying to get her thoughts back in order. Now that she had a little room to breathe, her mood soured a little thinking about how close she’d come to breaking down crying over a little bit of tickling. It felt extra uncool in comparison with how Lily hadn’t seemed distressed in the slightest after her own session. The college student glanced at the tickling fetishist with curiosity. Now that they were taking a break, it struck her as a good opportunity to ask a question she’d had ever since first laying eyes on the lobby.
“Lily? Mind if I ask you something?”
“Go for it.”
“Why’d you add in the rule for a tickling punishment round into this?”
“Ah. That.” The curvaceous young woman leaned her back to stare at the ceiling like she was trying to find the words. “LIke I said, it’s a sexual thing for me. I always knew I was into other girls. But unlike most girls who like girls, I realized pretty fast that I wasn’t interested in sleeping with them. Watching women get tickled out of their minds was the only thing I’ve ever found that really turns me on. Problem is, I’ve never met another girl who’s into that sort of thing. Since Wages of War Online replicates feelings outside of pain, I ended up hoping that if I made a custom match with tickling as a major component then maybe another tickling fetishist like me would show up eventually.” She let out a self-deprecating laugh. “Though now that I think about it, trying to get random strangers wrapped up in helping me get off is pretty messed up. Guess I really am just a pervert after all.”
Something about the way Lily had said that really bothered Sophia. She let the words turn over in her head until she realized what it was. “You know, my dad has a saying he’s pretty fond of. ‘Don’t do to yourself what you wouldn’t do to others.’ He calls it the Reverse Golden Rule. I thought it sounded pretty messed up that girls were coming into an adult-only lobby titled ‘Looking for Tickling Fetishists’ only to call you a pervert after you warned them that you’re into tickling, so I don’t think you should say that to yourself either.”
Lily stared at her in surprise. “You’re surprisingly kind.”
“You can drop the ‘surprisingly’ part next time.”
“Haaaa… We took this break to help you feel better, but I ended up being the one who needed a pep talk in the end,” Lily grumbled to herself while standing up out of her chair. “Right, so are we going to continue playing or call it quits here? I’m good with either.”
“I’m good to keep going. Let’s play.” Sophia watched Lily pull her phone back out of her ammo pouch to restart the match. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Huh? What am I forgetting?” Lily asked in confusion.
“The loser of each round gets tickled for 5 minutes. You haven’t tickled me enough yet.”
Lily stared at her in bafflement. “Yeah, but I thought you hated it. You barely lasted 2 minutes before we had to stop.”
“I was just caught off guard. Now that I know what I’m getting into, I bet I’d be able to last through it all without breaking a sweat,” Sophia claimed with a huff. Her pride refused to allow her to move on with the game until she redeemed herself over cracking so easily under Lily’s fingers. Lily’s baffled stare changed to one of exasperation.
“There’s such a thing as being pointlessly competitive.” The tickling fetishist mercenary paused briefly. It was obvious to Sophia from the look on her face that she was struggling with something internally. “Fine,” she said finally. “But we’re gonna set some ground rules first. I’m not gonna tickle you again in bondage again just yet. Maybe you can lie down across the couch or whatever you find comfortable.”
“That works for me,” said Sophia. She obligingly laid herself off across the couch with her still-booted feet on the armrest. Lily dragged her chair over so she was sitting roughly next to where her stomach was.
“I’m not gonna tickle too hard, okay? Let me know if you want me to stop or slow down.” Sophia tensed up watching Lily once again roll up her shirt to expose her stomach. Despite her earlier bravado, seeing those fingers come close to her vulnerable skin again struck as perfectly good cause to worry.
True to her words, Lily’s fingers started off slow. Sophia couldn’t stop herself from bucking a little feeling the nails of each index finger lightly scratch right above and below her bellybutton. Each wiggle sent tiny jolts of that unpleasant ticklish sensation radiating out wherever they made contact.
“I’m gonna ramp it up now,” Lily warned. Sophia almost wished she wouldn’t. Being told that it was about to get worse struck her as being another form of torture unto itself. A gasp escaped her lips when the second set of fingers, the middle finger on each hand, joined in. It did more than double the ticklish sensations. She found herself aware of each questing finger individually. Their light scratching was compounding on the earlier ticklish sensations to make things far worse than the sum of their parts.
Sophia lightly bucked and squirmed, trying her best to hold still against her swelling urge to get away. Her hips nearly bounced off the couch when the rest of Lily’s fingers all came in to play a little less than a minute later. A part of her had expected her tickler to warn her ahead of time again, leading to the sudden increase in intensity catching her off guard.
“Oh fuhuuckheheheh!” she cried. Her giggling filled the small cottage as she did her best to keep from squirming her way off the couch. She had to grab onto the armrest above her head with both hands and press both feet into the other to keep herself from curling into a ball to protect herself from the fingers.
“Is it too much?” asked Lily. Sophia wasn’t entirely certain if it was an honest question, a taunt, or a mixture of both.
“Keehep gohoinghehehahahaha.”
The ticklish college student really wished she’d had the forethought to look at the living room clock before they’d started. Every second was dragging on thanks to the ticklish jolts her stomach was producing. Lily’s hands were wandering all over her tummy gently poking, prodding, stroking, and scratching away at the entire expanse of quivering flesh. Forget 5 minutes, Sophia was starting to become convinced that her tickler had been toying with her for at least 10 by this point.
An alarm going off from Lily’s phone signaled it was time to stop. Sophia relaxed when Lily pulled her hands away. She hadn’t even been aware how tense her entire body had become until the tickles stopped.
“How’re you feeling?” Lily asked.
“Not a problem. That was easy!” Sophia proclaimed. She realized playing it off hadn’t been the best decision when Lily broke into a big smile.
“Oh, good. That means I can give it to you harder next time.” Her face apparently hadn’t done a good job of hiding her worry at the sound of that, because the video-game-mercenary let out a laugh at her expense. “I’m kidding. I promise I’ll keep it gentle from here on out. Though just so we’re clear, don’t worry about paying the same courtesy to me. I actually prefer it when somebody lets me have it.”
The pair once again separated. Sophia clapped her hands against her cheeks to hype herself up. This would be the final round. Whoever won this took it all home on top of getting the final opportunity to tickle the loser. She did one last check on her equipment to make certain it was still in working order before taking position to break into a run the moment the chime for the start of the round played.
This time she didn’t bother waiting around outside the house. She made a beeline for the front door the moment the buzzer went off. Pushing her way inside, the college student dove behind the kitchen counter for cover. Her precaution hadn’t come a moment too soon. Lily had evidently had the exact same idea, because the backdoor burst open to be followed by a spray of glue-bullets passing through the air where Sophia had just been.
Sophia fished a flash grenade out of her ammo pouch. The sound of footsteps approaching let her know that Lily was taking advantage of her keeping her head down to approach. Pulling the pin from the grenade, she rolled it out around the corner of the kitchen counter. A blinding flash filled the room followed immediately by the gradient-haired mercenary springing up to level her shotgun at her stunned opponent’s head.
A horrible thought occurred to Sophia in the half-second between fully readying her weapon and pulling the trigger. Her aim instinctively yanked to the side as she pulled the trigger, causing the shot to fly wide into the wall rather than risk hitting Lily in the face.
A mistake like that was costly. Her gun was a pump-action shotgun and the time it took her to ready another shot was long enough for Lily to recover. Squinting through her still-recovering eyes, the mini-dress wearing blonde fired off another burst from her SMG before Sophia could get down behind cover again. The spray caught Sophia all over her stomach and chest. Strands of glue spidered off of them to bind her upper body and arms to the kitchen counter in front of her.
“You’re gonna have to explain to me what happened there. You had me dead to rights,” commented Lily as she rubbed the dancing motes of light out of her eyes.
“I panicked when I realized I was about to hit you in the face. Covering your mouth and nose in glue strikes me as a really unpleasant experience.”
“You really are way too kind. That was one of the first things I realized when testing this out. Headshots are coded to instead bind all of your limbs. And even if they weren’t, the game would’ve forcibly logged me out the moment it registered that I couldn’t breathe.” Lily chastised her by lightly rapping a knuckle against her forehead. The reproach was softened up a little by the grin on her face. “Thanks though. I appreciate that you care to not put me through that. How about we call this one a draw?”
Sophia stuck out her tongue at the blonde. Her pride wouldn’t let her take a pity-draw just like that. “I’m up for tickling you after this if you want, but a loss is a loss. Get tickling before the timer runs out already.”
“I’m not one to turn down a lady asking me to tickle her,” said Lily with a shrug. Standing behind the bound college student, her slim hands began to roll up Sophia’s top again.
Feeling fingers sink into the side made the helpless mercenary flinch to the side. Clenching her teeth to keep herself from tittering, Sophia was left squirming back and forth feeling the fingers work their way up her sides starting from just above her hips. Not being able to see her tickler’s hands was an odd combination with how the fingers were methodically making their way up towards her ribcage. Every squeeze and teasing scratch made her fight down the need to break down giggling at the same time it filled her with anticipation for the next ticklish touch.
“Fuhuck! NooohohoheheHAHAHAHA!” Sophia squealed with surprise after roughly 30 seconds of side teasing. Lily had made her way halfway up her sides before suddenly slipping her hands inside her shirt to jump straight to the bottom of her rib cage. Getting caught by surprise by the sudden change in targets was enough to break what concentration she had keeping her laughter in check. Throaty giggles and pleas for her tormentor to stop poured from between her lips.
“Got your spot! Is this still easy enough for you?” Lily teased.
“I’m finheheheh. Keehephehe it uphahaha!” A few spots on Sophia’s ribs proved to be more ticklish than her stomach and sides. The tips of her nails on one hand teased in between a pair of ribs near the bottom while using the pads of the other to rub the corresponding spot on the other side. Having two competing sensations target a weak spot made Sophia’s giggling rise in intensity into brief bursts of laughter intermixed with gasps.
A paradoxical feeling was welling up inside Sophia. With the tickling this time not being nearly as intense as the first time around, she was discovering that she was actually enjoying herself. Being in bondage was somehow making being tickled more enjoyable than when she’d been lying on the couch earlier. The feeling of helplessness that came from not being able to make the tickles stop was oddly liberating in its own way. She found there was something almost arousing about being forced to accept that she couldn’t do anything more than react with laughter and squirming to whatever Lily wanted to do to her.
Trying to parse those feelings would have to wait until she wasn’t being distracted with ticklish sensations. Lily’s hands had continued up her body after reaching her ribs. Sophia spent the next minute getting wound up with anticipation, fully expecting the hands to leap up into her armpits just like before. Every time they only moved up to tease the next set of ribs made her all the more certain that the next time would certainly be when it would happen.
In spite of everything she could do to brace herself, Sophia was once again caught off guard. Lily’s hands had crossed over her bra strap before suddenly plunging back down to her sides. The helpless college student’s waist bucked with surprise as a yelp punctuated her ebbing laughter. Her attempts to escape grew to the point of throwing her hips to the side.
“Oh no you don’t,” she heard Lily breath into her ear. Her tormentor nestled her body right against her back. One leg tangled around hers to keep her still. Sophia was hyper-aware of feeling the other girl’s body press into her back. The unexpected eroticism of the entire situation was driving her crazy.
Lily spent the final couple minutes of their session focusing on Sophia’s sides and ribs. It was a struggle for her to keep the tickling relatively light. Pressed together as they were, she could feel Sophia’s every last flinch. The laughter ringing in her ear was turning her on to a point that was getting hard to ignore. What she wanted most of all right now was to dig in fingers wiggling to extract every last shriek of laughter she could with her remaining time. Her promise to take it easy took priority though. She kept up the teasing all the way up until the buzzer rang again to let them know the punishment round was over.
“Match over. Red team wins 2 to 1!” an announcement informed them.
Lily took a step away while taking her hands off the girl’s sides. “Is everything okay? Didn’t go too hard that time?” the blonde asked.
“I’m fine,” Sophia gasped. If anything, how she was feeling was hard for her to quantify at the moment. There was an unresolved tension bubbling away in her that was making it hard to look the other girl in the eye. The glue dissolved off of her body a minute later. Sophia extricated herself from the table and grabbed her gun. “So, I remember you intimating wanting me to tickle you back…”
“Maybe next time.” Lily grinned at the girl’s disappointed expression. “Come on, I have to give you some reason to want to come play with me again. Now we both have something to look forward to if you find my lobby again,” the mini-dress wearing mercenary explained. A blush broke across the college student’s face when the busty blonde leaned in to whisper into her ear. “Just so you know, my feet are my worst spot and these nylons are modded to make them twice as ticklish!”
Sophia coughed and looked away to hide her embarrassment. It took a few moments to compose herself, during which she noticed Lily was giving her a devilish smirk. “Alright. Don’t expect me to go easy on you though. I’m gonna get you back extra hard for making me wait to play with them.” The mercenary held out her hand for a parting handshake.
“I’m looking forward to it!” The smile on Lily’s face was just as bright as when Sophia had agreed to the match. There was something amusing to the college student about seeing a woman smile so widely over another girl announcing she planned to tickle torture her the next time they met.
Both women said their goodbyes, then left the game lobby soon after. The difference in Sophia’s expression as she loaded into the bazaar was a far cry from her earlier mood. It wasn’t lost on the young woman that Lily hadn’t been the only odd one here. There was something strange even to her about leaving one match upset over a win only to come out of the next one happy after being tickle tortured as punishment for losing.
The college student glanced at the in game clock. It was later in the day than she’d expected. As her hand reached to log out of the game, she paused briefly to open up another menu first. She and Lily had made certain to add each other to their friend’s list before parting ways. A smile graced her lips seeing her new fetishistic acquaintance’s status sitting on the top of the list. With any luck, she would need to be prepared for more than a few laughs the next time she decided to play.
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