John: Man, Bearings is an asshole.

Rave: Do tell?

John: His deal was that we trick every one of his current allies, then start serving him (with him conveniently failing to mention that he would drug us) after everything is said and done.

John: AND we were supposed to help him get Scarlett.

Scarlett: Sounds about right for the luxurious prick.

Rave: Could ya not invade our private chatroom?

John: Could you not invade out private chatroom?

Rave: Hah! Jinxed!

John: One letter less, and you got me.

Rave: I always got’cha. (But you also misspelled *our)

Scarlett: It’s either me listening in or whoever else oversees this Discord. I heavily recommend you change to another program. Discord does not have end-to-end encryption.

Scarlett: Seriously, even Bearings technomancers can listen in on this, I am scrubbing the records here for you!

John: Oh… any recommendations?

Scarlett: Get your own communication program.

Rave: How about ya set it up for us after this is done? We need a proper war software like Rex Germaniae has anyway.

Scarlett: If you pay me enough.

John: You are paid in non-exposure.

Scarlett: Haha, fair enough.

John: Anyway, aside from that everything is going exactly as planned.

John: I think I successfully taunted him into attacking. Didn’t need to pull the trigger on Phase 3 yet.

Rave: So, what now?

John: Now I need to get to the boat, and then we wait.

_______________________________________________________________________

“But waiting is so boooriiiiing,” Rave complained, lying with her back on the sofa and kicking the air. She was breathing heavily from some kind of meditation she had been in. Her training clothes were a thoroughly soaked through, white (now see-through) crop-top and a pair of bright green yoga shorts. “Ya listening, tiger?” she asked, looking at him through her outstretched, parted legs.

He was busy following a drop of sweat running down her thighs. “Nope,” he blatantly stated and threw himself onto her.

“What’chadoing!” she slurred and giggled as John kissed her midriff, tasting the salt of her exhaustion. “John, stahp! I am too tired to fuck ya right now.”

“Don’t you worry and relax, we will make this all about you,” John assured her as he hooked his fingers under her pants and pulled them up. Because they were a bit damp, that was more of an endeavour than he liked, but by the end Rave’s naked crotch was in front of him. “My girl deserves some reward, even if I don’t get how she is exhausted from sitting on the floor for three hours.”

“I was channelling mana through my centre,” Rave told him, her heavy breaths assuming a different origin when John gently let his lips travel over the inside of her legs. “Distributes it through my body, keeps my muscles strong and expands my magical ability. It’s a technique daddy taught me.”

John felt her heels coming to a rest on his back as he teased her pussy lips with two of his fingers. In response to that little stimulation, they started to swell inside. The pink landing strip above her clit nicely harmonized with her healthily toned but generally pale skin, especially against the backdrop of the black leather couch. “So, you just sit there and become stronger?”

“It’s more of a preparation to become stronger,” Rave answered and then moaned when John’s thumb circled her clit. “Ahh, ya know, cause the muscles are filled up with more mana than usual, mhm, they get stronger during the next work-out in the attempt to handle it all.”

“Last time I saw you training this hard was before you were facing your mother,” John pointed out. “How come you are trying this hard?”

“Cause ya keep pulling ahead,” his girlfriend stated earnestly. The look in her eyes caused him to stop in their current engagement to hear what she had to say. “We both know ya are going to stay away from me in power forever now. Ya grow faster, ya have more potential, you’re just stronger. That’s how that works in the Abyss, but I don’t want to fall behind anymore than I need to. If ya become a god amongst men, I will at least be an angel!”

“You are already my angel,” John whispered as he leaned in to kiss her.

“I know,” she answered as she raised her upper back to meet him, “but I refuse to be just a trophy wife. I am going to kick ass and take names!”

Their tongues intertwined in a loving kiss that had John forget to think entirely for the few seconds it lasted. It was just her that filled his mind in these moments. When he pulled back the two of them just quietly enjoyed each other’s presence for a moment before Rave asked, “What did ya say my potential level was again?”

“225,” John answered.

“You are about halfway there.”

“Lots of room upwards, then,” she grinned and then yawned. “Gotta go do my best.”

“I will see how I can help you,” John told her. “There have to be some tricks we can discover together; I am quite crafty.”

“That you are,” Rave agreed with a wide smile. “And good with your tongue, so how about ya gimme a reason to nap and then we see about that?”

That was entirely reasonable and so he gave her some orgasms that sent her to the land of dreams.

______________________________________________________

About two hours later, they were inside a basic, green plain instant dungeon without any enemies around. Just him, her, Aclysia and Copernicus. John had to admit that he hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to his girlfriend’s power progress. Sure, they had talked about it, but that wasn’t quite the same as stopping to look. “So, go ahead, show me what you trained while I was busy grinding away my levels.”

“Well, ya know I am pretty martial arts-y,” Rave, covered in her pink battle suit, answered. “I have been focusing a lot on my melee, because I just feel more comfortable there than throwing spells out. My toolset of punching and throwing light attacks around hasn’t really changed.” The moment she finished that sentence, she sprouted a pair of pink cat ears. “I can maintain this state pretty much 24/7, but that isn’t a meaningful difference.”

“We have been working mostly on two things,” Copernicus chimed in, his tail flopping over the floor. “Which are to perfect her different fighting styles…” by that he meant the difference between Rave fighting normally and in a way that scattered a wasteful amount of mana into the air. The reason for the second one was Copernicus unleashing requirement, to devour a lot of his summoner’s free-floating mana. “…and how long we can keep up the unleashed stage.”

“It’s really hard to hold onto that much mana,” Rave spoke up again, “hence why I do the meditation stuff.”

“Mhm, I can’t help with that,” John hummed. The only idea he had was to give Rave an enchanted item that regenerated her mana passively, but previous experiments had shown that’s not how that worked. The way Rave regenerated mana was just too different from his to be affected the same way. Only thing he could do was give her items that increased her natural mana regeneration, but with her body suit she was already fully covered on that front.

In other words, he couldn’t bullshit her powers.

“Nah, that would be weird anyway,” Rave told him. “If ya had a skill that allowed ya to meddle with the powers exchanged between a summoner and his elemental, that would be super busted. Best ya can do is throw me some levels every now and again.”

“Yeah… but I can at least give you a sparring partner for the base training,” John declared and Aclysia stepped forwards.

“It has been a while since we fought,” she stated bowing with a wooden sword in hand. Of course, the weaponized maid couldn’t fight using Eclys or Marath, those weapons could make a little incident into a severed limb. To compensate, John had grabbed some high-quality wood off the auction while Rave had been sleeping and used Create to make it into a copy of Eclys in shape, as sturdy as his skills possibly allowed him.

“Ja, I usually grab Nia when I can find her,” Rave rolled her wrists. The black gloves, the only part of her outfit that wasn’t pink, covering her hands were thicker than any other part of her battle suit. Most of it was there to allow Rave to dodge and move, rather than block, but those gloves had to withstand and protect her hands from a lot of heavy impacts. “Variety is nice.”

With that, the two of them went straight at each other.

They were roughly equal in speed, now that Rave had all of her buffs active, with the Lightbearer trumping Aclysia by about 20 points. However, the weaponized maid had almost twice Rave’s Strength and it showed in that first clash.

Rave attempted to block the sideway swing of Aclysia but quickly had to find out that only sent herself flying. The techno-lover made a perfectly graceful landing on her legs a few metres to the side, shaking the impact out of her arm while the white-haired servant came for her again.

“Between you and me,” Copernicus spoke up from the floor, “Jane is stronger already than I thought she would ever be when we made the contract.”

“Is that so?” John asked; he wasn’t really surprised. His cat-eared girlfriend dodged the next strike, her pink hair whirling after her as she executed a spinning kick right into Aclysia’s side. To her master’s surprise that dealt quite a bit of damage. “Where is the aftershock?” John wondered. For a second, he thought she didn’t have the buff on. Then Rave back-flipped away from the engagement to flee retaliation, and every time her feet skipped over the ground the golden ripples of Copernicus’ blessing spread out, slowing Aclysia in her chase.

It was like the weaponized maid was running against ankle-high waves, it took a lot of energy out of the steps she dragged through them and could have seen her stumble and fall if she wasn’t careful. Manoeuvring to have her stride carry her over the ripples wasn’t difficult, but it still caused her pace to change.

“Ah, right, that’s a new trick we have been working on,” Copernicus told him with a proud purr. “Jane always had a few problems with armoured or regenerating enemies, so she learned a ki-strike that travels a few centimetres under the impact site, the Penetrative Blast. In turn, I learned how to modify the blessing so that it works with that.”

John raised an eyebrow, “Are you telling me the aftershock is now happening inside Aclysia’s body when she is kicked?”

“Indeed. If she wasn’t made from metal, you could actually see the light flaring up under her skin,” Copernicus stated. “Also, we are no longer limited to just kicks.” That was backed up by Rave missing a flying punch and the impact of her fist on the ground sending a ripple outward. Aclysia distanced herself quickly, afraid of losing her footing. “As you can see, we have made quite the advancements.”

Rave, despite being thirty levels lower, was now pressing the attack against Aclysia. In terms of balance, the fact that a human had better abilities than a golem was only fair. With this new armour penetrating strike, John’s girlfriend was squarely the favourite in this fight. Eclys or Marath would mean that Rave would need to fight more cautiously than she was right now, but even then, she had now taken care of one of her bigger weaknesses.

The biggest weakness Rave still had was the fact that she was someone who didn’t fight with a real plan. Pure fighting instinct guided her every step along the way, together with a beat only she heard. That made her fighting style simultaneously chaotic but well timed, entirely confusing for the enemy; the problem was that was all there was to it. It was a fighting style that was very much in the now and that often turned out to her detriment.

Copernicus guessed what he was thinking. “We have tried to get her to fight more patiently, and she did try,” the suncat informed him, “but it just seems that, once she in the momentum, she gets carried away. She just goes along the rhythm in her heart.”

“Mhm,” John thought about that for a second, then he had a stupid idea. “I’ll be back in a second.”

_____________________________________________________________________

Rave looked at John presenting her with a pair of headphones, simple black things with an odd cursive-w shape at the bridge, and her mp3-player at the next break. “Why are ya giving that to me now?” she wanted to know. “And I still have the headphones ya gave me for Christmas, there was no reason to buy me new ones.”

“I have a theory,” the Gamer told her. “If what you need is a plan, but all you ever fight by are those constant beats you hear from years of exposing yourself to techno...”

“Don’t music-shame me!” Rave interrupted with a light laugh.

“…how about you just fight by actual techno?” John finished his explanation. Copernicus and Aclysia looked reasonably doubtful, it was a stupid theory.

Rave didn’t seem to think it was that stupid, putting the mp3-player into a pocket that formed conveniently from the body suit and then looking at the wireless headphones. They were a nice sky blue, the same colour she had painted her nails today. “Ya know, I won’t be able to hear anything if I listen to music mid-battle,” she pointed out. “Kinda puts me at a disadvantage.”

“Really?” John reached out and pressed his hands against the sides of her head. “Last I checked you had four functioning ears,” the cat ears formed from her long hair perked up, “and two of them are actually way better.”

Copernicus tapped in a circle around them, “This is entirely stupid.”

“Oy, music is my first love, Cappy!” Rave declared, putting on the headphones. The odd shape came into play as it curved near perfectly around her cat ears. They were, after all, made for actual catgirls. “I mean, sure it sounds stupid, but if it works, it works, right?”

When the next engagement ended with Rave beating Aclysia in three minutes fifty-two seconds, Copernicus had no more justification to complain. It had been an entirely one-sided fight from start to finish, every step Rave had taken had been with purpose.

As the song flowed, so did she, exerting herself where it was erratic and concentrating on dodging and gathering her resources where it was building up. It granted to the otherwise completely spontaneous fighting style an overarching structure.

A second fight had Rave win again, this time she needed three songs. She made it from one to the next without confusion; if anything, the change in tempo threw Aclysia off. Just because the Lightbearer was following the incomprehensible, unintended instructions of the dubstep fighting manual didn’t mean she had suddenly lost her adaptability.

John made a mental note of Gaia’s comment there. It sounded like it would be highly important later on in his life.

“But how?” the suncat wanted to know. “How can you move that smoothly just because you have some sounds in your ear?”

“Pssssh, I dunno,” Rave waved off. “Music is magic and if it works, it works.” She winked at John. “Thanks for pointing out the obvious, tiger. Should have thought of this myself.”

“Hey, sometimes you just need a second opinion on things,” her boyfriend smirked and slung his arms around her lower waist. They playfully danced a few steps together. “Just keep pointing out the obvious things I don’t see about myself and I will keep doing the same for you.”

“Well, I have one thing in mind,” she said with a flirting tone. “You’re really cute today.” They kissed again, but it was still as great as the first time they had ever done it. “Ya can’t go train again yet, right?”

“Not without risking being trapped inside a dungeon when Bearings finally mounts his offensive,” John said; Escape Rope still had two more days cooldown.

“Okay, then ya and me are gonna have some more sparring matches,” she decided. “Throw some more stuff at me. I need to check which songs work the best for what situations, gotta make some playlists.”

“I never heard you this excited about preparing for battle before,” John whispered to her, raising her from the floor and spinning around his own axis before putting her down again. When he was with her, he just felt free to do useless and fun things.

“Hey, I get to listen to music and kick your ass, what’s not to love,” Rave laughed then stopped their little dance. “I can’t imagine not loving ya, you know? Super weird, when I met you this wasn’t where I thought we would end up.”

“Neither did I, but this is the best timeline,” John stated.