“Master,” Aclysia’s urgent voice reached him together with a gentle nudge on his shoulder. “Master, you need to wake up!”

“But why though?” John wanted to know, his voice still drunk on sleep. He rolled around, a minor mistake as he was subjected to the unpleasant feeling of his bedsheets, sticking to his dick thanks to dried up sexual fluids, suddenly ripping off his semi-erect member. It wasn’t as bad as a bandage, but that still didn’t make it pleasant.

As for why he was still semi-erect, he didn’t need a reason. A better question would have been how he could have been flaccid, with the androgynous beauty that was Scarlett in the bed with him.

He was somewhat awake now, so he opened his eyes. “What is it, Acly-“ he blinked at the phone display, set on a low light-level to not affront his eyes too much, and saw the text message.

Lydia: Landing at 23:52 at the John F. Kennedy Airport, according to schedule. I request you be there.

John’s eyes darted over to the upper part of the display to check the time. 23:30, this was going to be tight. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” he wanted to know as he flew out of the bed and into the bathroom. He was most likely going to be late already, but if he was late and smelled and looked like he had been late because he just had sex with another woman, that was just asking for Lydia to give him one of her long-winded tirades.

Scarlett just rolled over and continued to sleep. For her, this must have been the first time she could sleep completely stress free for years. After all, as long as she had been the leader of Thorne, there were plans to find out who she was or how to get into her position every few minutes. Sleeping a whole night in an environment out to ‘replace’ her would have been a giant risk.

As the water ran over him, blocking outside noise, Aclysia continued the conversation mentally. ‘Like you, I had my phone in my inventory, I am sorry, Master,” she explained the delay. Inside the inventory, phones didn’t have a signal, so even if there was a magical way to hear them from the dimensional pocket, the messages wouldn’t get to them in the first place.

‘Gah!’ he mentally screamed out as he began the process of soaping himself up as fast as humanly possible. ‘It’s not your fault, I am just in a real hurry right now.’ There was a way how he may have been able to get there in time, albeit it would be a bit difficult and ask of him a minor sacrifice.

Undine and Salamander came to his aid. By rinsing him completely clean with her body, the ocean elemental spared him some time spent in the shower. When he stepped out, the fire spirit in turn dried him up as fast as she could. For once she did so without bashful comments. Nobody wanted or looked forward to an annoyed Lydia.

He and Aclysia hastily applied the currently best body oil they had to him, something that had a mixture of a pleasantly smoky and sage musk, and then he threw on his, thankfully self-cleaning, clothes.

Now he was stuck with the next problem to solve within 17 minutes, how to get to the airport. The obvious answer was not by foot, way too long a distance, and not by cab, he needed to get to land, wait for it and get through NYC traffic, so the only real option he had was the sea route. That meant he needed to maintain a mobile barrier somehow.

He couldn’t go to Magoi, the High Fateweaver was out for the victory dinner with his family, and calling a ferry service to ship him off the island would have taken way too long. Thankfully, he had a solution for all of this.

Hammering the Class Level he had kept to put into Elementalist into Fateweaver, John got a pop-up.

He hadn’t gotten a real license, neither had he gone to a real class yet, but Magoi had shown him the ropes well enough for it to count towards the quest. He would have done this anyway once he had hit level 140, so it was really the smallest of sacrifices. That was just a two-level stretch where he couldn’t level Elementalist if he miraculously got it.

He ran down to the lower deck. Taking the entire yacht wouldn’t have worked. He needed a smaller, more mobile vessel. Luckily, there was just the thing amongst the ships resting inside the enormous yacht.

“What are we doing?” a new voice suddenly caught up to him; Rave was chasing after him. She must have seen him run by and thought that it was very peculiar behaviour her boyfriend exhibited. “Does her vagina have teeth or why are ya running like the devil is after ya?”

“Lydia is landing in the next 15 minutes,” he told her, jumping down a flight of stairs.

“Oh! Oh crap!” Rave immediately got on the program, storming after and then through her boyfriend, picking him up in the process. To the feeling of being carried princess style, John could only say that he much preferred being the one who had his hands close to her breasts.

They approached a sharp corner at a speed that had John, for a moment, wondering if he would die in a double suicide by something approaching a car crash. However, a moment before they hit the wall, their entire momentum suddenly shifted and they just continued to run forwards.

“That’s a way to use martial arts,” John joked, having recognized the technique. It was called Drift and allowed for immensely sharp turns. Normally something like that would have been used to correct the direction of a kick or something; it was a pretty basic skill (some would say THE basic skill of ankle techniques) with broad but not particularly impressive usages. Because it used up a load of ki, as most ankle techniques did, it wasn’t used a lot.

“I guess ya bullshitted your way towards the ability to use mobile barriers already?” Rave asked.

“Yeah, did it just now,” John answered as they reached the inner dockyard. The seaside gate was already opening; Aclysia was taking care off that from the bridge.

“Can we even make it?” his girlfriend asked, jumping down another flight of stairs and to where the jet skis were anchoring. They were black and blue pieces of sleek design, truly motorcycles of the water. There were two different models, one with only two and the other with three seats. They jumped on the latter, seeing how they had to get back with an extra person.

“Depends on how much mana the engine of this thing can take!” John told her and omitted the part where he had no idea how to drive the thing. He had done all of his practice on boats, the effective cars of the water, he was factually a noob in regards to riding a jet ski.

The ramp the jet ski was resting on slowly tilted as the automation began the process of ejecting it. They started sliding towards the end of the dock, where seawater flooded in high enough to allow the thing to rest. Carefully he revved the engine, and they dashed off with immense speed.

“YOU’VE NO IDEA HOW TO DRIVE THIS THING!” The jig was up as they drove in overcompensating curves.

“I am a quick learner though!” John shouted back as he quickly figured out how this whole thing was supposed to be controlled. Normal people drove these things, and with his all around good Stats, especially Agility, Wisdom and Intellect, he was able to get it right by the time they darted through the barely opened gate of the Guild Hall’s shipyard.

Rave laughed now that she was in no more danger of falling into the pretty cold water; this whole thing was pretty thrilling. In order to protect herself from the cold winds, she activated her body suit. The moronic Artificial Spirit inside instinctually ate her clothes, mistaking them for offered material as well as an obstruction to its programming – to cover Rave’s body in a protective layer up to her neckline.

Speaking of Rave’s entire body, John very quickly realized why so many guys were into motorcycles. Arms wrapped around her boyfriend’s waist as her literal only way of getting any hold on anything, she pressed her boobs and indeed her entire warm and sexy body against his back.

When he leaned into the curve, she followed, as if they were one unit. They were about as close as two humans physically could be without him literally sticking his dick into her. “This is awesome!” Rave shared his enthusiasm. He allowed himself one quick glance over his shoulder seeing her smile broadly back at him, her hair fluttering in the wind.

Never had he been so thankful that she wore it long now. Seeing that chaotic piece of art fly freely behind her just looked awesome. “Happy you like it!” John shouted as he course-corrected towards the open ocean, then he looked back ahead.

It wasn’t like he expected any obstructions to suddenly pop-up in front of him, they were in their own barrier after all. The cautious part of John wondered, if another vessel’s barrier was to cross their barrier, if he would manage to dodge in time. However, he trusted that the engineers of the mobile barrier technology had found some trick that allowed high speed vehicles such as this one to avoid that sort of overlap.

Nevertheless, he had more than forty kilometres left to go in just over ten minutes. The jet ski reached 100 km/h by design and John was already figuratively flooring the pedal into the red zone, causing it to go 130. If he wanted to reach the airport in the nick of time, he needed to reach about 210.

Luckily, he was his own nitro injection. The handles of the jet sky were directly connected to the mana generator that was meant to refill its fuel battery. Of course, one could change out the battery itself, so this thing was viable to be used even by people without absurd mana, but for people like John it increased the fuel the thing had loaded by however much they could bring to the table themselves.

Even greater, theoretically the engine would go into overdrive if it was fed more power. The risk was that it was going to fail, much like overclocking computers, the parts wore down faster under such strain, but that was a risk John had to take if he wanted to be punctual.

And, even more than avoiding Lydia’s annoyance, he wanted to see her again as soon as possible. “Here we go!” he warned Rave and slowly began pouring his mana into the engine. Carefully, as to not cause an explosion or anything of the sort, he raised the speed that way. With less sturdier bodies, both of them would have needed a helmet to even look straight ahead as they stormed underneath the bridge that connected Staten Island and Brooklyn.

“NYEEEEEH!” Rave suddenly made a really annoying sound and laughed.

“WHAT?!” he shouted over the whipping wind.

“Brooklyn raaaaaaage,” she added as if that explained everything. “Yu-gi-oh abridged?”

“We haven’t watched that yet!”

“YOU haven’t watched that yet!” she corrected. Their speed finally topped out at 250 kilometres per hour; they would make it at that rate.

“Want to flip that beach off?” John tried his hand at another joke between them as they made a turn around a small peninsula towards the Jamaica Bay.

“Why would I want to flip a beach off?” Rave asked just as confused as he had been about her earlier sound.

“’Cause it’s called Brighton Beach,” he laughed and then laughed some more when she indeed took a hand off his waist to do what he suggested. The unfortunate beach shared the name with Moira Brighton, Warden of the Golden Rose and a pain in Rave’s side from back in Springfield.

“Can’t wait to see Moira again,” Rave said. “Gonna duel her again to reclaim my right to call her by her nickname!”

John shook his head, he would have turned around to kiss her. That was just so like her. This silly, carefree and fun attitude, it was the very reason why they had fallen in love as quickly as they had, because she had been willing to make the jump and pull him with her.

They ripped under another bridge and into Jamaica Bay. From there they had to dodge a couple of small islands. To their luck, it was only shortly after high tide, otherwise parts of the bay would have been too shallow to navigate even with a jet ski.

A last bridge and then they pulled into a waterway that led a little further inland. Much to his pleasant surprise, John found that there was a small pier that was part of a large parking lot. They got off the jet ski and jumped on the pier. “Ah shit!” Rave declared, looking down on herself. In her battle suit she could hardly run around without attracting unwanted attention.

John quickly reached into his inventory and threw his jacket at her. “Put it on, they will just think you like weird pants!” he told her. In his suit, people would only wonder if he was cold, which was a perfectly normal question to have and thus no problem. The battle suit itself probably wouldn’t have triggered Gaia, but the airport security was another question.

Gnome and the elementals (except Siena) were staying behind to look after the jetski in the meantime.

They only had one and a half minutes left, so they ran at breakneck speeds, creating one barrier after the other in the process to allow them to use their superhuman attributes. They were going to be late, the thing they were banking on now was the delays Lydia would be facing during the landing and check-out.

Once they had reached the actual airport, it took them another ten minutes to run around and find the correct place. John had no one to blame but himself for this situation: he had gotten the message at noon, during the fight against Izha’s Inconvenience, and just forgotten his phone until now.

In the end, they reached their position and stopped, out of breath. They gathered themselves just in time for a certain auburn-haired woman to come walking down the check-out. Lydia noticed them immediately.

She was wearing a grey wool coat that reached to below her hips. A dark green skirt grew out from underneath, stopping at her kneecaps in turn. Her legs were covered in black stockings, normal ones as opposed to her making them out of the malleable metal of her rapier. Probably to avoid the metal detectors. As always, she was wearing heavy boots, more fit for marching than looking good, and her hair was put into a perfect braid.

Her red lips curved into a smile for a moment, then she remembered who she was and regained her composure, walking towards John with a diplomatic expression. Her black gloved hand dragged a trolley behind her. “Greetings, John Newman,” she extended the other towards him.

John looked at it like someone was offering him to stick his hand into a bowl full of boiling water. He did it anyway, just to pull her towards himself and kiss her quite forcefully. The queen tensed in the initial moment but immediately after went with the flow. Her skin was radiating heat, a clear indication that she was blushing heavily.

“This is not the proper procedure to greet a foreign diplomat,” she scolded him when their lips parted a breath’s width.

“In my America, we don’t care about your European properness,” John returned in the same scolding tone. The vibration of her quiet chuckle reverberated in his arms as he held her.

“I have missed you, John,” the way she said his name this time was a wonderful fulfilment of their longing for each other, and they kissed again. He had forgotten how she tasted. Citrusy, with a light note of iron, not at all unpleasant. The queen of steel eventually ended the kiss. “Alas, we shall continue this in privacy,” she declared and turned to Rave. “You do look good with longer hair, Rave.”

“Oh, just call me Jane, ya old stick in the bum,” the Lightbearer laughed and then threw herself at Lydia, kissing her herself. Now the queen turned beet red, as a couple of eyebrows were raised by passing people at the very public display of polyamory going on.

After clearly giving tongue for more than a few seconds, Lydia snapped out of it. “I demand you cease your affectionate activities at once!” She was absolutely embarrassed about all of this happening out in the open, and both of her sadistic lovers enjoyed watching that. Lydia being Lydia didn’t drop her composure at any point, standing upright and with dignity, but this whole scene had probably played out more like a royal visit in her head.

“Yeah, yeah, ya old tsundere,” Rave laughed. “Welcome to America, land of the free, home of the spontaneous.”

“And this is why you remain with the imperial measurement system,” the queen began and sighed quite heavily as she felt herself getting pulled back into the banter-sphere. She sighed and then allowed herself to smile again. “I really missed all of you, even Eliza.”

“Why don’t we get you to her then?” John asked. “It’s awfully cold out here.”

“To that, I can agree,” the queen said. “I take it you are in control of this area by now?”

“Just wrapped up business in New York today, I will be a regional power soon,” John smirked.

“I know, isn’t that great?” a new voice chimed into the conversation. The man that everyone looked at had the elegant looks of a corporate suit. With short hair the same colour of his black vest and a sharp jawline, the suit wore his suit as if he had been tailored into it and not the other way around. Despite that, the devilish smile and teasing tone of the person made him pretty easy to identify.

“Your presence is thoroughly unwelcome, Rat,” Lydia narrowed her blue eyes.

“Don’t be like that, our guilds are on good footing right now,” Richard waved off. “I am just here to congratulate my bestest of future allies on his victory against a bunch of Lorylim.”

How did he already know that? John developed a bit of a headache despite the happy occasion this should have been. Not only was asking that useless, Lydia was now looking at him with a glare that said ‘Explain – NOW!’