“Those are all very bad and or boring,” John mumbled, simply going ahead and picking Weapon Specialization followed by picking spears, since that was Beatrice’s expressed choice of equipment.

Beatrice blinked slowly at the unfamiliar sensation of sudden knowledge about how to improve her combat efficiency with exactly one type of weapon. “An odd process,” she commented. “Not unlike gaining Stats. I find it pleasant. Please continue.”

“Just tell me whenever you prefer something,” John said. Even though she nodded, he expected very little to come from the passive maid.

Oh god, those choices were dull. John didn’t like Focused at all, repeated attacks against the same enemy usually meant one was winning already so the extra damage was negligible. Between whether he wanted Beatrice to be 1% faster or 1% stronger, he had to go with the former, simply because she would gain more from it.

‘Such interesting decisions!’ John mentally complained as he hit Nimble.

“I am about to die from boredom,” he groaned as he hit Nimble again. At least the next thing should be interesting.

Yeah, that was at least something to think about for a bit. Refined Body would obviously take him down the same or at least a very similar route as Aclysia had been taken down. It was chartered territory, yet John didn’t feel like it was what he wanted to do in this situation, due to two reasons.

One was that one of the main attractions of Ascended Body was the part where Aclysia created Baelementium passively. While a second girl that continuously provided the valuable material wouldn’t hurt his wallet, quite the contrary, there was also very little reason to. Soon his main revenue would come from taxes and the loans he was handing out. Currently, he had more money than he knew how to spend, it was as simple as that. It would be a drop in a very large barrel that was already overflowing.

The other upside of the refining part of the skill was that Aclysia could nurture his other Artificial Spirits with the high-quality materials, but that was a moot point if they both had it. Only the metadermis (the perfect faux-skin blended from metal and silicon) was what Beatrice was missing out there. When the passive maid ate that stuff, it broke into its components. Normal (read: magical) rubber and silicon fixed that just fine though.

What also averted him from going down the path previously travelled was that he knew that between him and the choice for a proper class for Beatrice stood five special choices: Refined Body, Refined Body II, Ultimate Body, Ascended Body and only then would he get the Cultivation choices.

He only had three, not including the reset choice, so rather than waiting until he hit fifty the next time around, shouldn’t he try to see if he got something else if he took a new route? Worst case scenario was that Beatrice had a unique powerset, which wasn’t bad in any way.

Between Internal Flow and Continuum Code, John favoured the latter. For a start, the alliteration made it sound cooler, then Beatrice also had nothing to do with her mana; John liked unique resources more than yet another mana-reliant build, and someone fighting with a spear could use the extra reaction speed. Plus, 20% Agility was a lot.

Continuum Code was selected and the normal choices went on in all their boredom.

“Eh, interesting enough,” John admitted to himself, getting poked in the ribs by his minorly bored girlfriend.

“Wanna make out to pass the time, Lyly?” she asked, her boyfriend ignoring her like a needy cat and kept concentrating on the task at hand.

“No,” came the clear rejection; the queen was more interested in her tea.

John picked Spear Specialization II. That usually lead to some more interesting choices.

‘Fuck that’s potent,’ he thought as he looked at Spear of Severity. Anti-regeneration effects were hard to come by. However, so was a teleport, and John really didn’t like getting caught with his pants down. Generally talking, he’d rather have a rebranded defensive teleportation than a niche, if powerful, effect. So, Spear of Devotion it was.

It dawned on John that it was highly likely that he had to get rid of most of these choices anyway once the reset came around. Well, that was a problem for him in a few minutes.

‘Why must you taunt me, Gaia?’ John thought-cried looking at Sex Servant while his finger tapped on Continuum Engine. If he learned anything by now, then it was that going down one path with the Artificial Spirits usually led to better results.

If those were his choices, John decided he wanted Nimble. He already had Metra for 1vs1 fights, he didn’t feel like building Beatrice up for the same niche just because, at the face of it, Duelist looked better.

Alright, there it was. The choice of class, or Focus as Gaia seemed to have branded it since Aclysia got hers. ‘Better formatting this time around,’ John nodded approvingly; the blocks of text last time around had been unsightly.

Speardancer was clearly recycled top to bottom. While it sounded potent at the face of it, John found that mere Stat-blocks stood no chance in the level of Abyssal warfare he was getting to. Even Sigmund hadn’t been just running around ramming his stupidly large sword into people’s throats.

Plus, it was boring, tremendously so. That wasn’t always a bad thing, a lot of times the most basic of designs had the strongest tools, but John liked his stuff at least somewhat complicated.

Predictor was then the choice that made him think of Beatrice’s love for combos the most. It was clearly focused around a very nimble style of fighting, continuously on the move and never slowing down in the battle. For a being that had no stamina to run out of, that was pretty good, although Twist Position sounded like a copy of the martial arts technique Reality Slide, the one that allowed its users to reposition without lifting a toe.

Not that copying martial arts was a bad thing. As far as John was concerned, the discipline of studied movements was a potent one. Even if he was still failing like a total novice to get as much as the basic punch down. Him hating that there was something he sucked at aside, he moved on.

Maid of the Spear was a rebrand of Maid Knight. Same resource, very similar attack reinforcement skill and a Captain America shield. Interesting, but not what John envisioned. The temptation to pick that was simply for thematic consistency.

The middle choice was, however, what John thought to fit Beatrice’s little personality the most. He stopped only for a second to questioningly gaze at the passive maid, but with no gesture or thought did she indicated that she cared either way. Her mind was, as almost always, a grey surface with very little in the way of desires. A speck of dust on the table seemed to be the only thing bothering her, at that moment.

Thus, she gained the Predictor Focus.

“What a choice!” he sarcastically threw his hands into the air, causing both women at his side to look at him like a crazy person. Particularly Rave, who had been robbed of the shoulder she leaned on, was annoyed. He quickly appeased her by putting his right arm back around her waist and resting it on the swing of her hip.

He then picked Nimble IV with his left.

The final choice was quickly done with thanks to an Extra Consumption Slot showing up for the remaining AP. Then it was reset time.

Well, it had to be a A new beginning by simple process of elimination. Sure, he could go with A real girl, but that seemed counterproductive.

“Okay, I have done all I can for you right now,” John said to the passive maid after picking a new material for her Consumption Slot. It wasn’t a great one, but maybe it would work out.

“We are going in a dungeon later to see if you are strong enough to keep up now,” John said and then moved onto the next thing he could upgrade.

Namely, the Guild Perks, he had three points to take perks for that. Luckily, that was a pretty easy decision to make, as he only had to pick a category. Between Conquest, Diplomacy, Patronage and Administration, he could quickly eliminate what he didn’t need.

Patronage was still useless without any patron gods. It was that simple.

Administration was pretty good but not necessary as of that moment. Neither did he need the extra Core Members nor an announcement feature. Only the buildings that category unlocked would have been good. Therefore, it was out for the moment.

Diplomacy with its Federation mechanic would be worthwhile at this point. However, the Federation would only be completely operational once everything else had been taken. That aside, the building that category unlocked was pretty useless.

Conquest seemed like the way to go for the moment. The War-Quests would be some extra value sprinkled on top of the territorial expansion and the Guild Hall relocation sounded busted (even with the immense cooldown). Sadly, the Training Room was less great than John had originally thought; he knew that already because it had an outside limiting factor.

The Gamer had originally planned to simply sell short-term Guild memberships to Collide to people and then let them go to level 50. However, he had found three limiting factors in that plan. People that had the kind of money he wanted were extremely likely to be above level 50 already, the Training Room worked with the group-level mechanics (meaning it couldn’t drag them much beyond their potential without significant time investments) and John couldn’t remove people from his guild for a year after inviting them.

These were the things that had either dawned on him or he had learnt about through some minor experimentation.

Anyway, even if the Training Room wasn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread, the last Perk out of the Conquest path turned off friendly fire for people in his guild. That was pretty much incalculable in terms of value, especially if that worked in some part with the Federation mechanic.

‘Yeah, let’s go Conquest,’ John thought and tapped down the first three of that.

Afterwards, he reluctantly peeled himself out of Rave’s embrace, “I need to go put down a building,” he told her.

“Ya go do that, but we are going to fuck Lydia between that and you leaving for the dungeon,” Rave decided.

John nodded and headed out. It wasn’t a long walk, and on the way, he realized that none of the girls were following him. Felt a bit odd to be alone but also nice. Even Siena was out of his shadow for once.

While that did leave him somewhat vulnerable, as far as that was possible with all of the teleports off cooldown, he was within the boundaries of his own Guild Hall, so he felt safe enough. Although the barrier was now connected to the city at large, it was still an island. Whoever wanted to approach the island would need to either fly or swim, and as long as he didn’t see any stingrays made from shadows taking to the sky, John didn’t assume he had to worry about anything.

‘That does look pretty odd,’ John thought as he emerged on the sun deck of his yacht, with eyes on the border between the Guild Hall’s territory and the larger Hudson Barrier, the name given to the structure to prevent any New York vs New Jersey talks. Where the two met, there was a visual stutter in the sky and the water. It was as if the game engine of reality was calculating the waves and clouds for both of these areas separately. While the sky aimed to look the same by emulation on both ends, the edge showed a distorted circle around them. The water was even weirder, as waves clashed against the border, vanished for a second, only to then be spat out on the other side.

Luckily, like with all barriers containing large bodies of water, waves were scarce. Most of them were caused by a certain higher dragon using the vast amount of space he suddenly had to move around with large curiosity. There were vessel and water-dwelling races that also shared the Hudson’s brackish waters.

The reason for that border phenomenon was that John’s Guild Hall was something like the colosseum had been in Rome, a barrier that was within the larger type three barrier but removed enough to be manipulated on its lonesome. Magoi had grumbled that that was entirely stupid, since it had taken the Supreme and a High Fateweaver to control the colosseum and the Guild Hall had much more going on inside it than occasional landscape changes.

Indeed, the Guild Hall seemed to be a very stupid and overpowered part even of John’s powers, if the Mine and Farm, both technically endless resource generators, weren’t evidence enough.

John reached the highest point of the yacht and opened the map used for construction. There was no reason he had to be out there to build it, but he preferred to be able to see what he was doing outside of the menu. ‘I guess the Training Room goes into the guild district,’ John thought and looked at the model of the building.

The building had two simple parts: a white wall around a courtyard and a small, one story house in the middle of it. It reminded him of a mixture of a dojo and a school, having that oriental way of roof tiling to it while the doors, windows and brick walls of the house were really making John think back to elementary school.

He placed the thing somewhat awkwardly at the base of the star fort, behind Lady Liberty’s back. Then he grabbed the design tool and drew a simple walkway up to its entrance. There was nobody in his guild who could even make use of the thing, as they were all above level 50, but it was good to have it placed already. There was also no reason not to, since buildings granted by the Guild Perks never cost maintenance or Room Slots.

John was about to head back inside when he heard Aclysia’s voice in his head. ‘I have returned to the Guild Hall, Master,’ she informed him. Having teleports on the east and west coast was pretty nice. John just imagined Aclysia storming through the streets, skirt waving and revealing scandalous amounts of leg to lucky onlookers.

Although Aclysia wasn’t that fast, especially not compared to Beatrice now that she profited from all those bonuses. While wondering how the Transport Station and its outposts would work if John decided to relocate the Guild Hall, he jumped over the railing and dropped to the deck below, aiming to meet the weaponized maid halfway.

Perhaps sensing his excitement or simply sharing his feelings naturally, Aclysia was just as hurried in her approach. In the end, they met where the pier was connected to the land. From the Transport Station to the Harbour, it wasn’t far after all.

The flow of Aclysia’s hair in the modest cold of mid-April reminded John of silvery-white snow. His arms found her hips the moment she was close enough, wrapping around them and lifting her up as he whirled around his own axis. It’s just great that metadermis was a surprisingly light material, otherwise John would have either failed in the movement or broken his spine.

This way, the romantic get together was a complete success, down to the part where they stopped spinning and, with the sound of laughter like pure little bells, Aclysia leaned down from her position in his arms to kiss him. Her metallic taste and lightly plastic smell didn’t bother John in the slightest. After putting her down, the almost equally tall lovers stood forehead to forehead for a few moments, swinging to an invisible melody.

“John,” it was rare for her to address him with his actual name, “we departed just a few hours ago. There is no reason to greet me this enthusiastically.”

“I would have enough of a reason if you were gone from my sight for five minutes,” John whispered back. “I love you.”

“I love you too, John,” she returned, but then departed. “I must, however, insist that we keep schedule. Our schedule with Queen Lydia is quite clear, and I must clean up as much crime as I can before we depart from the Hudson Barrier, Master.”

“Yeah…” John could only agree, but he sighed nevertheless. He wasn’t feeling particularly productive today, more like cuddles and flirtations, not even sex necessarily, perhaps he needed that vacation more than he thought?

Well, just one more (or ten more depending on Magoi’s willingness to aid him tomorrow) days.

“Alright, let’s do this quickly then,” John decided and opened her skill tree.

Aclysia had retained a lot of the good stuff from her last run through, namely the two immense stat boosts that were the Consumptions Slots. Sword Specialization II was simply mandatory for her to keep her fighting. It was nice that he could simply keep the best version of a skill on a rerun. Of the 19 points he had before to the purchase earlier, he had spent 5 on regaining Adaptive Bladery.

It was somewhat alarming to see that, while Gaia had gotten somewhat more creative by giving Artificial Spirits access to these new Focus things and the skills that came with them, the supreme deity had also added the boring ‘Increase X by 1%’ stat bonus to Aclysia.

Anyhow, he picked Defensive Teleportation, that was always needed in her arsenal. Plus, Aclysia let him know in no uncertain terms that she insisted on it.

Well, those were somewhat boring. John always loved his versatility, so he picked the Twilight Body. Even if the conversion rate was slower, having access to both materials should prove more valuable.

‘Cool, new skills,’ John thought and gave them the quick once over. He dismissed Carve on the basis of being a ranged skill, which wasn’t the area where Aclysia operated, and even when she did, she had Eclys and Marath. Intercept and Cutting Flurry both had tremendously higher acquisition costs, but they also seemed more useful. The only reason why John didn’t immediately take Intercept was its horrendously high cooldown.

‘I would prefer Intercept,’ Aclysia reinforced his thought.

‘Yeah, but Cutting Flurry would be better for resource generation,’ John took the opposite stance despite his gut feeling agreeing. ‘Plus, it looks like it would be a pretty useful skill to surprise enemies. You need a second to change weapons normally, right?’

Adaptive Bladery allowed for very quick changes, but in the insane pace of an ongoing melee clash of their current level, it created a miniscule opening. The word ‘immediately’ in the skill thus stood out quite a bit.

‘The surprise would be lost after the second time at the latest, Master,’ Aclysia argued back. ‘However, I can concede that having more Devotion available is going to be more favourable if I get access to more spender skills. I will leave the decision to you.’

After a moment more of hesitation, John picked Cutting Flurry, putting Aclysia down to 25 available points. He really wanted her to be able to use Fortification more often, the defensive bonus was too potent not to.

Now he could make two Special Choices in a row.

That choice came down to whether he wanted Aclysia to use her generators or her spenders more often. Aggression to Devotion he found lacklustre in either case. Imagining that Servant’s Vigour would scale better into the late game, he picked that one.

What hellish choices. Devoted Housemaid was clearly the most useful of the three. Not only was Aclysia’s cooking half the reason he successfully left the bed each morning (without it he and his harem would probably just be fucking until noon) but the inventory space was something always useful.

His dick desperately wanted to pick the left or right choice though. Even there he was torn. Did he want to have the ability to make her squirm in bliss on command or her pussy feel even greater than currently? He did note though that he was apparently off the tree that allowed Aclysia’s pussy to feel amazing.

He looked to Aclysia for help, but the weaponized maid was as lost as he was. For her, the idea to cum at the sound of her beloved master’s voice was pure bliss, so was cooking even better meals for him, so was blowing his mind when fucking him.

“I do not suggest this lightly,” she finally spoke up, “but perhaps we have to randomize the choice?”

“…Yeah,” John agreed, as he couldn’t find within him what he wanted the most to happen. He pulled out his smartphone and then googled a simple randomizer site. After changing the settings to 1 to 3, he pushed the button and looked at the number that immediately came out.

It was the 2.

John felt disappointed, but he knew he would feel like he was wasting the perk if he picked something else. There really was no winning here. “Curse you, Gaia!” he shook his fist at the sky, the prospect of great food angering him. A proper unthankful heresy.

At least that one was easy enough. Focus Service was great, but Aclysia needed way more Devotion than she currently had to make it useful. As he didn’t feel like investing into Wisdom or Intellect for her anytime soon, Master’s Shield seemed to yield more immediate results. That aside, it was an effective taunt and he had wanted one of those since he got Aclysia.

Also easy, A new beginning and he was done. “I will go back to patrolling for the rest of the day,” Aclysia told him once he had closed all windows. “I will return in time to make dinner. I ask that we test my and Beatrice’s new capabilities tomorrow.”