Collide Gamer

“Okay, we are going to have an orgy in a minute,” John promised, “but I need to get these other things out of the way first, okay?”

Everyone agreed, so he got to work. First question: What to do with that SEP? He had gotten a pop-up allowing Undine to ascend to Tier 5, but the plus sign was still silver, meaning that corruption might occur. John did not want that, so that needed to be pushed up to the future.

With the elementals out, his choices were limited to Arcane Echo, Blink, and Arcana Strike. Arcane Echo, while not exactly his most used skill, fulfilled what he had gotten it for perfectly. While he would have liked a more versatile version of it, Arcana Strike was fine as it was right now. Blink, however, saw barely any usage. Time to see if he couldn’t get something a little bit more useful out of the deal.

Relocate would allow for some pretty nice shenanigans involving items, and Portal Point was pretty bonkers in any situation where he got to manipulate his environment. However, Relocate also required him to have useful items with him to drop at all times, and when he had the luxury to manipulate his environment to that degree, Portal Point was just a win-more type of spell.

Shifting Momentum on the other hand gave him Blink as a passively charging spell. Sure, he had to pay another 500 on the current mana cost, but because that mana was spend on other things, the spell was free in effectively all situations where he didn’t need a clutch teleport. That aside, there would be a point where 1500 mana was pocket change.

So, he went with Shifting Momentum and moved onto the next item on the list: the Artificial Spirits. A quick Observe on Metra revealed that she was levelling automatically, granting further credibility to him holding her down right now.

Aclysia and Momo both were seven levels underneath him right now, as he had jumped from 102 to 109 thanks to defeating both the Supreme Fateweaver and the Grey Golem. The conundrum now was how to get them those levels. Nathalia wasn’t around, and he didn’t have any of her scales on hand.

“Do I need to buy some expensive stuff from the auction, or how do we fix this?” John mumbled out loud in hopes of getting some meaningful contributions. In the background the sound of scissors cutting through Eliza’s hair, Lydia reducing it back down to the more sensible size of down to the middle of her back.

“How about this?” the blood mage in question raised a strand of her hair, “or these alternatively,” she tapped against her teeth. “I have enough of both of these things: I don’t have any fucking use for the hair, and the teeth just regrow all the damn time.”

“That… could work…” John said hesitatingly, “but I don’t know how I feel with putting parts of you inside Aclysia and Momo since… you know the whole Thana thing.” He knew what the blood of Thana had done to weak people, and he didn’t really feel like experimenting what her hair would do to Artificial Spirits, especially if the goddess of genocide took control of the whole thing.

“Yeah, probably as smart as cutting someone with leukaemia and stopping the time until they bleed the fuck out only to then tell the police that it was for science,” Eliza agreed.

“I have a solution,” Metra said and reached into his inventory. She pulled out a strangely beautiful, elongated drop of metal, gold and scarlet red having mixed together.

With a raised eyebrow John checked his inventory. He had like 40 of these. “When did you do that?”

“While you were busy chatting it up with that Rodaclam guy,” Metra explained, “who I cannot believe is still alive.”

John handed the molten metal over to Aclysia and Momo; they needed two each to get to the new max level. The drops didn’t have anything on them he wanted, but hey, they were a good source of Consumption.

“You knew the man already?” John asked Metra while they were still feeding.

“Yeah, was under his contract for a bit about 4000 years ago. Was supposed to find a god named the Horned Rat and ‘invite’ him to court,” the weaponized artefact said.

“Tell me about that,” the Gamer didn’t even try to hide his blatant interest. As far as he knew, the Horned Rat was 4331 years old (although that number could have been fake), so what Metra had done must have happened in the Rat’s relative youth.

“Sorry, my oath to Enki prohibits me to give away the exact details on my past contracts,” Metra shattered his expectations. “Unless I am explicitly allowed to talk about it, like in this girl’s case.” She pointed at Eliza who got the finishing touches put onto her hair. “All I can tell you is that it ended with a very angry Romulus and a confused Rat.”

‘Man, I would love to hear that story,’ John lamented while also wondering a certain thing. Did the Horned Rat simply keep quiet about the fact that he encountered Metra before or did he simply not know? When they had struck a bargain over the Rat telling John everything he knew about Metracanas, he hadn’t mentioned anything like this.

Then again, since transforming into this form, the berserker babe’s aura had gotten a major transformation. Instead of the unsubtle power that the old item radiated, it now was an ever shifting, unstable torrent of power directly over her skin that looked like the edge of torn paper, so it was safe to say that her true identity couldn’t be found using the aura sight method. Since she also shape-shifted every time, maybe, just this once, the Horned Rat hadn’t known better. Although, knowing that particular god, the keeping quiet seemed more likely.

“Well, if you can’t, you can’t,” John sighed and then went to increase Aclysia’s Stats first, since that was just his decision and his favourite maid was fine with whatever he was going to do. He just raised her Strength and Agility this time around.

Then it was time to move onto the AP questions. He hadn’t touched these things since the skill had been level 35, so there should have been at least something to grab.

It was going to be Sword Specialization 2 without a doubt. The other two didn’t have any practical applications. Aclysia did use her swords a lot. Like a lot, lot. The choice was pretty clear. Moving on.

John just blinked at the choices. How was Anti-Magic Barrier not stupendously broken? The only reason why Anti-Magic Shell, her current skill that he more often than not forgot about, wasn’t completely broken was because it blocked 78 damage at most. Sure, with Aggression to Mana, a skill that gave her mana whenever she blocked an attack, Aclysia could regenerate her little mana pool very quickly but the shield was negligible anyway.

In comes Anti-Magic Barrier, which passively added the extra regeneration to a shield even when she wasn’t using the skill. The value probably got split between all group members, and in effect, it was a rather boring skill, but it still increased everyone’s survivability passively. It was insane value. He picked it immediately, wondering how exactly that shield actually worked. He was pretty sure that wasn’t the same thing as Nia’s powers, since Aclysia was unlikely to suddenly materialize a blank soul. Was anti-magic in this context just a fancy shortening for a shield that didn’t react to physical attacks?

He moved on to Momo while those questions joined the others that were steadily flying around in his head.

“So, first things first, do you want Libido 25, yes or no?” John wanted to know. “With you going out there on your own and probably trying to get it on with some girls, having a dick sounds pretty useful.”

“Don’t lie, you perv, you just want to fuck me up the ass,” Momo said, glancing up from her page with a berating smile, “but I will take it anyway, because you are right, I will try to get it on with some cuties, like that Ria girl.”

“She is a princess, but knock yourself out,” John shrugged and put 15 of the 35 points into Libido. “I would put 10 more into Intellect to get you the next efficiency upgrade and then 10 into Charisma, you can use it,” he suggested further.

Momo nodded, shifting her legs as the new sensitivity between them together with the new hole that had just appeared there made her very much aware of her sex. “Sounds good.”

‘Fucking hell, that mana,’ John thought. It wasn’t even funny how much of it she had. Sure, her regeneration sucked (comparatively, one mana per second was still nothing to scoff at), but every time he looked at that, he understood why Magoi had warned him that people would want to use her core for mana factory purposes. If he put more points into her Wisdom, how much would her mana regeneration increase? It had performed rather poorly up until now, but maybe it was going to break through some ceiling at 250? Well, he wouldn’t find out today.

That was easy: he didn’t want Copperskin, and Momo REALLY didn’t need the mana, so the hive it was. ‘Gaia really needs to stop recycling stuff,’ John thought; it made the decisions pretty clear.

“So, what do you want?” John asked and got the expected answer.

“That Folded Mana thing sounds pretty useful,” Momo said and thus got it. Out of the three, it was the only thing that sounded even remotely useful. She created a little ball box in her hand that then unfolded. “…I don’t think this is particularly strong aggressively, huh, wait a second.”

She created another construct, this time a wound up ball of string that slowly uncurled throughout the room. Out of interest, John touched it when it passed him. It felt like it was made out of cotton.

Following the path of the piece of energy-woven yarn, he watched as it unrolled to the end and then spawned a firefly. “I can put spells into the construct, it costs a hell of a lot more, but I can do it,” Momo said as the magical insect made its way over to its creator.

“That’s actually pretty strong… if you get your hands on a few more spells,” John mumbled, feeling slightly jealous. If he could create a folded piece of Shardbound and then use it as a sort of splinter grenade, that’d be pretty damn solid. Well, he could achieve a similar effect with a stone and Possession, but it would still be pretty nice.

“Time to raise my own Stats,” John said. He had already allocated the four levels that the defeat of the supreme Fateweaver had gotten him, pushing his Intellect to 130, but he still had 18 points left from defeating the Grey Golem, and now he was kind of split. Intellect was one good investment for sure, but after being read that easily earlier (and with being uncertain how Metra would play into the whole harem situation), he felt that it was time to raise Charisma to 50, and with his current points, he would be almost there already.

He did that, and thus his character sheet now looked like this:

His Stats were looking pretty good, to say the least.

“Okay, I think that was about everything I needed to do,” John announced. “Anyone got anything else to say?”

“I am already naked, and I haven’t had sex with a vagina in over a hundred years,” Metra told him. Indeed she was; she had parted from her clothes with such readiness that John had the suspicion that he finally found an exhibitionist in his harem. “Let’s do this already.”