“Now, now,” Tilgun placed the little boat on the ocean with some care before doing something more than unusual in pulling himself out of the water and resting on the surface. Even going as far as picking some of it up and reshaping it to be a better rest for his head, as if the water was just clay. For a higher dragon, the difference may have been miniscule.

The Maw of Souls’ body must have been at least a hundred metres long, although that was purely length. There was something like a pair of legs, halfway transformed into clawed fins, down his body, but aside from that he looked mostly like a giant serpent. “Your story must be interesting, so start at the beginning and skip only the unimportant details.”

“Wow, that is going to take a bit,” John said and began recounting his adventures. “It all started about seven months ago…”

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I used to be a typical nerd. Well, maybe not typical in some respects, but typical enough. No muscles, no confidence, no social experience, the whole package. Then, when I turned 18, I awoke to some weird status messages telling me I had gotten a quest. It took me a moment, but eventually I realized that I had been given some sort of power.

I began experimenting that morning, in secret. It didn’t take long for a genuine member of the Abyss to notice me, a Moira Brighton. The Observe spell I used on you earlier, she had felt it and was then naturally wary. At the time I thought she could trace it back to me, and although I was wrong with the assumption that she could, someone else did. Someone by the codename SecretBlonde.

After having been given the rundown what the Abyss was from Moira and her recommendation to decide soon whether or not I wanted to stay or leave while my aura was still indistinguishable from a normal person’s, her recommendation was the latter, I pretty quickly concluded that I wanted to stay. My reason was pretty shallow, I just wanted to live in a world where polygamy was a possibility. Looking back at it, I also did it because continuing on in the world where I was bullied and powerless would have been just… depressing. The rewards for this risk would have been worth any amount of danger, I thought.

If I had known what would await me, I still would have made that choice, but I would have been less happy-go-lucky about it.

Just a day later, I was still only at the beginning of my powers, I was pulled into a barrier by a Bunch of Rockers. Apparently, that was their guild name. An informant, the earlier mentioned SecretBlonde, had noticed my presence and tipped them off about my existence. He had also armed them with a Wall Shadow, the first genuine monster I would ever see.

My untimely capture and confinement in a mana factory was stopped by a very unstable alliance between Moira and a small guild of something less than vigilantes but more than criminals called Collide. They were very small, consisting of just three people: Travolta, the guild founder and leader, my eventual girlfriend Jane over here, who I fell in lust for at that moment after seeing her for the first time, and Jimmie, a starting off Fateweaver and arcano-mechanic. Last of which wasn’t present at the time.

Together, we managed to first free the Wall Shadow from the grasp of the Rockers, which murdered them in turn, and then lured the monster onto the roof where we forced it from the shadows and then killed it. Afterwards I had to make a choice between Moira and her guild and Collide. Being a lover of my freedom, and having been more attracted to the pink-haired light mage, I picked the smaller, less stern organization.

From there, a week passed relatively uneventfully. Jane and I got to know each other better. She made some sexual advances towards my unconfident self, exclusively oral, mostly in response to giving her a good time punching some ghosts. I quickly stopped just wanting her and started to want to be with her. A feeling she returned, as we confessed to each other after a life-threatening fight… and the popping of my cherry. We became a couple and…

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“Hold on there,” Tilgun said, “last I checked your species doesn’t exactly go into relationships quite that quickly. It doesn’t hold a candle to the length of time us higher dragons wait to mate, but this still strikes me as rather quick.”

“Oh, it definitely was super quick,” Rave answered, “We still wonder ourselves how it worked out, but it did.”

A fine mist of water exited the dragon’s nostrils when he snorted in dissatisfaction. “No magical slave collars were used? No relationship enhancing spells? No cheating? You can tell Tilgun, I will just delete her memories afterwards. She is just weak enough to do so.”

That was a scary implication. “No, although I did use Observe and some raised Charisma. Both of which I thought were to blame for her feelings.”

“And I told him that was bullshit, so we did what I wanted anyway,” Rave decisively added.

“I see, I see,” Tilgun gestured for John to continue.

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Shortly thereafter a guild called the Bloodfallen pulled Collide under its protection. I created my first Artificial Spirit, a girl named Aclysia. Travolta drank from something called the Blood of Thana. A girl called Victoria also showed up and asked to join our guild. She did, and we killed a boss together. It was around that time that my girlfriend and I had the talk about whether or not I was allowed to have a harem around her. As you can probably guess by the assembly of people you saw on the ship, the answer to that was yes, condition being that she still was to be treated as my girlfriend, so above everyone else. I also began my counter-investigation into SecretBlonde, who had begun selling information about me online.

Still, we had a good time. Until Jimmie’s workshop exploded due to a malfunction in his current arcano-tech project, putting him into a short-time coma. Things unravelled pretty quickly from there. Travolta and I wanted to investigate Victoria, Rave thought we should go confront Moira about it. We did the latter first, Rave and Moira duelling in a barrier. Moira won, but she still told us what she knew about the situation, pointing us at the Bloodfallen as potential culprits. Annoyed by this loss, Rave got herself a contract with a light elemental called Copernicus.

So, we started investigating Victoria. It was rather easy to point to her as the culprit because Jimmy woke up from his coma and told us how she had sabotaged his suit to send us all into a short-term coma while she searched our headquarters. At that point we had already found out that she was with the Bloodfallen, so the dots connected. We confronted her, found out that Travolta was messing with the Blood of Thana in some ways the Bloodfallen didn’t approve of and that that was the whole reason why that was happening. So, we wanted to confront Travolta.

When we arrived he was already gone, mentally I mean. The blood was driving him insane, pain flooded his mind through a mental gate he had pried open unknowingly. We tried to save him in a desperate fight, his body regenerating and covering in scars, but at the end we had to kill him. His last wish was to ‘save her’.

Hit by that loss, Jimmy left the Abyss. I haven’t seen him since. I became guild master over our little club of two.

Some time passed, we just lived on. Not like we had any other choice aside from wallowing in sadness, which just isn’t our style. At that point I had basically dropped out of school. Thankfully my mom left the state to live with my dad in Washington D.C., so she was unaware.

We just trained and got stronger, wanting to prevent anything bad from happening to our lives again. We didn’t have a lot more than the two of us at that point. Although I was expanding my harem through a bit of a cheat, growing Aclysia to sapience and contracting the four basic elements. The latter weren’t fuckable or legal at Tier 1 though.

It was then that I met Nathalia. It was a random encounter, to be honest, she just laid in a chest in a dungeon I created. I had no clue, and I then had to convince her to not eat us by…

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“I can imagine,” Tilgun interrupted, making an understandably urgent gesture to move on, “I need not hear the details, just continue after that.”

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Victoria reappeared before us to invite us to the base of the Bloodfallen in a nearby town called Franklin. Their leader greeted us with a friendly attitude, acted like a charming fellow. He wasn’t a fighter, he was the leader of a cult. A cult centred around the murder of a war experiment they stole from the Soviets, who they hated with unhealthy passion.

It was a girl, looking 18 of age, sedated inside a tank. Her name was Thana, and they couldn’t kill her, so they just waited for her heart to stop while harvesting her blood and selling it to keep up a tributary structure. We decided that that was unacceptable, that she was the one Travolta wanted to us to save. We acted neutral, only when we left did we decide we had to hatch a plan.

We asked an Apothecary, Herman, who had looked after Jimmy in the hospital to help us. He agreed, enthusiastically. For a few days, we trained some more, told the Bloodfallen that they were giant dickbags and that we would harm them in whatever way possible. It had the intended effect and they sent a group to attack us. A group we managed to dispatch.

It was then or never: with a large amount of their fighting force gone, we struck at the base itself to get Thana out. Aided by some mercenaries, we managed to get inside; we were halfway out again when Aclysia slamming into the tank caused it to crack and burst. In her indoctrinated hatred, Victoria shot at the still sedated Thana. She went rampant and killed most people in that room in a brutal fashion. Jane and I tried to run, but at the exit, she caught up to us. My girlfriend sacrificed herself to allow me to escape, Aclysia had to drag me away.

I was shattered when I thought she was dead. I told her father, I saw a recording of her. I cried. Then the phone rang, and the formerly wordless, only ever laughing, Thana spoke to me. She opened to me that Jane was still alive and that she would spare her if I would present a challenge to her within 5 days. Why did Thana want that? She was dying, slowly, with her regeneration and general power fading. Only fighting or killing things, a general sense of danger, was keeping the Metracana in her brain from sedating her again.

She wanted to go out with a bang, her words.

I swore I would kill her and then made a pact with the princess of Prussia, Lydia. She would pay someone to give me more time to train and in return I would repay her with whatever she wanted. I did not ask what that was, neither did I care.

A High Fateweaver arrived to stretch the 5 days I had into a month. One month I spent with each day grinding enemies. My powers transforms each kill into experience points, allowing me to grow more rapidly than most everyone, so a month was a massive boost. I received several lectures during that time, not to destroy myself for the sake of others, to be patient, to be passionate, to be flexible and to take aim at what is important. My elementals rose in strength and so did I. By the end I also created my second artificial spirit, Momo.

We went to confront Thana. The hatred I had for her had been calmed as I asked myself what her entire story was. To keep it short, it was horrible, years filled with nothing but pain and torture, cluelessness as to who or even what she truly was. It was no wonder that she did what she did. That didn’t make it less dangerous for me, though.

We faced off and I was thoroughly outclassed. Furthermore, Herman had contacted me again, with a plan to maybe save not just Jane but Thana as well. We just needed to calm her down or weaken her until we could drag her out. Thana just wanted to die, however, so nothing of the sort happened and it was only her intention to not kill me that prevented it from happening. When I almost managed to paralyze her, one last attempt at saving her as well, she bombarded me with pale blue fire. I almost died two times during that fight, but at the end she collapsed and turned into red dust.

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John needed a moment after remembering all of that in vivid detail.

“And then?” Tilgun didn’t have the same level of patience.