“What smells like sugar and more sugar and fuck me that is a lot of sugar?!” Eliza wanted to know, her nose raised and sniffing. Following whatever it was she was smelling, her steps carried her by one of the many, many cheese stores that were around, and everyone went after her. It didn’t take too long for John to also smell what she was talking about and just a few more seconds for them to reach the store.

They had waffles and other sweet pastries stacked up like shoe stores had boxes. Well, it was not quite that bad, it wasn’t like they were even rowing the walls or anything, but it was still a rather impressive amount of waffles, covered in different kinds of chocolate.

“Buy me one!” Eliza demanded, pointing at the sugary goods. John sighed and grabbed the wallet he solely possessed for the real world to carry some Euros (or whatever local currency equivalent he would need in the future) with him. “Some” being about one thousand bucks in solid cash. He liked living large, and it gave him the air of an overly accomplished young person, which he actually was at this point. It felt nice to grow into his shoes.

He bought one for Eliza, Nia and then looked at Gnome. “You want one as well?” he asked her, taking Nia’s waffle for himself until they could hand it to her somewhere people wouldn’t get a heart attack because of a vanishing waffle. Presumably that was what would be happening. The alternative was either a hovering one or people just ignoring it subconsciously like they ignored everything Nia did.

“I, uhm, it’s too much, you don’t need to do that,” the stone elemental said, but her eyes were darting from John’s face over to the clerk that covered the waffle in another layer of fresh chocolate sauce and sweet cream on top of the waffle. “Like… I want to, b-but I don’t know if I can eat all of that.”

“We can share,” said the emotionless voice of Nia.

“Y-you really mean that? Yay,” Gnome exclaimed and hopped on the spot out of happiness. Then she turned crimson as the realization of not only her gestures but the weirded-out blinking by the clerk, to whom it looked like the brunette had just exchanged words with a fairly close lamppost, hit her. “…y-yay…” she repeated much more silently as John paid and handed her Nia’s waffle. They retreated to a nearby bank where John created an Illusion Barrier for them to eat in.

“Not sure how long we can stay here,” he warned everyone; this barrier was on top of abyssal Amsterdam, so they would sooner or later be spat out into that city. “We probably got half an hour though, if I had to take an uneducated guess.”

“Who the fuck needs half an hour to eat a waffle?” Eliza giggled, opened her mouth as far as she could and then chomped down on the thing like a hungry, hungry hippo. Making an entirely pleased sound as the sugary sensation slushed through her taste buds, she was the indirect cause for Aclysia making one that was very much displeased, because John took his arm off her waist and walked over.

“Jesus, can you remember these things called table manners?” John asked, grabbing a packet of handkerchiefs from inside his inventory and wiping some cream off Eliza’s nose with one of them.

“Fhck yuh,” she answered with a full mouth, “nothn got ohn the scrf.”

“At least you got priorities,” John said in a resigned tone. “Now eat properly, or do I need to spank you?”

Eliza rolled her eyes. Evidently, she wasn’t that susceptible to that sort of command when she was eating and not in the right mood. “Go stick it up your ass, nerd-brain,” she told him and grabbed the handkerchief to take care of herself as she greedily devoured the rest without any care.

Meanwhile Nia and Gnome were going about this in a whole different way, which was one of a totally cute display of social awkwardness. The two were sitting on a bench of their own, with the blank looking mindlessly forward as she was nibbling on the waffle, holding it in a ladylike manner. Gnome, at her side, was sitting with her eyes downcast and her hands folded in her lap, twintails dangling expectantly. Every now and again she would turn her head and open her mouth to ask when she could get a bite, but then stop herself thinking it would be rude, look back down and blush a little.

After letting this pass for a minute, it was just so adorable to behold, John fixed the situation by cutting the end opposite to Nia’s mouth of the waffle with a small Mana Blade. The pariah didn’t even mind, just continuing her slow and quiet nibbling. Meanwhile, Gnome was ecstatic at the small piece of waffle she got.

John left it small on purpose; as an elemental Gnome wasn’t able to eat a lot of substance that wasn’t natural to her. Nevertheless, she had a happy expression on her face when she bit into the cream covered goodness. After patting her on the head a bit, John made his way back to Aclysia and went back to cuddling her and keeping a sticky faced Eliza at arm’s length. “You really should have taken my advice rather than getting chocolate sauce all over your face,” he told her, “table manners don’t just exist for show.”

“I am sorry, jackass,” she didn’t sound that sorry, “but I am not me when I am hungry because fuck being hungry now that I know what being sated feels like.”

“Only got myself to blame for that, I suppose,” John said and patted his lap. With a huge smile on her face, Eliza sat down there. When she turned her neck to plant a kiss on his face, with her sugar covered lips, the blood mage was met with a wet handkerchief. “I am not getting sticky because of you,” he told her as he dumped the bottle of water back in his inventory and simultaneously wiped off her face. The fact that that was a bit of a problem, motorically, told him that he should consider raising his Agility skill to increase his ambidexterity. ‘It would be nice to have perfect reaction time with both hands,’ John thought.

“You are such a dick,” Eliza complained once he took the handkerchief down. About to answer, John was shook when Nia, having finished her waffle, pressed herself against him. Without any shame, she pressed his arm between her breasts. This fun was, as always when she wasn’t naked, partially flawed by the fact that her dress didn’t transfer any body heat. However, it did pose a silent challenge.

At least in Aclysia’s view, who quickly mimicked the motion. Her body was burning with her Inner Fire, which thankfully only kept her at normal body temperature. “I… I also want to cuddle with John!” Gnome suddenly cried out and jumped on his back, as his lap was already taken.

John was in a momentary panic, expecting his spine to break or at the very least hurt a lot under the weight of over a hundred kilogram of adorable rock. Instead he found her to be not much heavier than he expected a girl of her size to be. She also was wonderfully squishy. In a moment of instinctive perversion, he reached up and squeezed his hand right into her pants to enact the same action upon her butt. ‘No panties,’ he soberly thought before he looked up in Gnome’s eyes.

They were wide open and sat in the middle of crimson coloured face. “Wha-wha-what are you doing!” she half asked and half screamed, closing the arms she had lovingly put around his until she had him in a choke hold. In a now genuinely panicked moment, he tapped her butt and screamed out to her mentally. The hold only intensified. Turned out that tapping a flustered stone elemental’s behind did not help her embarrassment situation.

Her brown eyes were darting all over the place, just not John’s purple face, while his own field of view became hazy. Hearing Eliza’s agonizing laughter, he at least knew that he wouldn’t die, but that reasonable thought was a bit hard to appreciate while being asphyxiated. There was relief a moment later, as Aclysia tapped Gnome on the arm and helped her realize what she was doing. John gathered his breath.

“You really need to work on your violent tendencies when you are too flustered,” he told Gnome about a minute later, still rubbing his throat. The stone elemental looked like a little pile of miserable pebbles, so John gestured her to lower her face and then gave her an ‘it’s okay’-kiss. She turned a bit red, but her shamed eyes switched to embarrassed twitching. The goal had been achieved.

“I have a question. Does it take a lot of effort to keep your density that low and your body that squishy?” he had to ask. Especially the latter part was important for… screw it with the euphemisms, it was important for sex. Normally only her boobs were really soft, the rest of her was either like kneading clay or strictly inflexible. The clay feeling on her butt was actually pretty nice, so he didn’t want her to get rid of that. However, there was something to be said about the advantages of squishy thighs during missionary and a lighter body during cowgirl.

“W-well, I wouldn’t fight like this, so yes,” she answered. “It’s hard to keep up when I am not…comfortable.”

‘So, that’s out for the moment,’ John thought. “But you weren’t really able to do this before, right?”

“Right, it’s like Sall-,” Gnome stopped herself as she had almost used that nickname her sister really didn’t like, “Salamander and her better control over fire, it gets better as our level and your skill level increases.”

“I see,” John nodded to himself, it was indeed true that Salamander’s fire attacks were less broad in their nature nowadays. Where she used to be significantly better at area damage, she now also was helpful in targeting certain enemies. Sylph still was better than her in both aspects, despite being more geared towards single target in general, simply on the back of being Tier 3. The same was true for Siena, who specialized in hit and run. Undine was, when unleashed, the best damage dealer in all aspects (ripping people apart from the inside did tend to be highly effective), but she was also Tier 4.

Meanwhile both Gnome and Salamander were still Tier 2. They weren’t weak, just mediocre. ‘I guess I should buy some skill level points to hurry them along to the next Tier,’ John thought, ‘Although I would really like to save for that extra class level, that is going to take an eternity, and promoting these two is an easy power grab… plus I really want to.’ Nothing was more pleasing than seeing his girls happy, and he was pretty sure that being that much weaker than their sisters, especially since they were the first two John had contracted, was bothering both of them, particularly Salamander. The blaze elemental was nothing if not a hothead and had taken passion over logic at several occasions, a person like that didn’t like being last.

“What do you think, should I concentrate on getting you the Tier upgrade?” he asked Gnome directly.

“I…” she began but then thought about it for a moment. “Yes, but I can wait,” she answered, nodding to herself. When it was about her sisters, the stone elemental was able to muster more courage than usual. “Please, give Salamander the favour here,” it seemed she had come to the same, or at least similar, conclusions as he had. He nodded and that was that.

“Okay, we have been lazing it up inside for too fucking long already,” Eliza declared, “and now I want to eat something else. Chinese or some shit like that.”

“What a splendid idea!” Aclysia jumped in. “I have never cooked Chinese food before; I will have to acquire some knowledge about this.”

“I will probably have to bribe someone so you can sit on the table with us… Oh well,” John sighed, “Chinese food, then some more walking and then I am going to get a blowjob in the jacuzzi from one of you!”