‘Health regeneration is still pretty bad,’ John thought after allocating the latest level he had gotten. Experience gain was pretty good right now: he got at least a level per day, making for a total of four over a three-day period. ‘Well, I guess it’s balanced because I decided to go into magic instead? If I had allocated all my resources into melee and physical defences, I would probably have insane HP but shite mana. I should just be happy about how quickly things are progressing right now.’

By typical pattern recognition, once he hit level 150, the level requirement would jump. Meanwhile, Assault followed a largely stagnant pattern, so, in typical game design fashion, the grind would become increasingly steep.

‘If I went for three rather than two Assaults a day I could probably get way more done,’ John thought, tiredly rubbing his eyes as he was done for the day. ‘But fuck doing that.’ Spending twelve hours a day in life or death situations was just the recipe for John to hate his life. He was willing to do it every now and again, but generally he treated grinding of this intensity like a job.

So while working extra hours was expected sometimes, especially if he wanted to see more results, he would rather spend free time with his loved ones. Was that wise? Yes and no. Mostly no. The absolutely wise decision would be to get as strong as possible as quick as possible so he wouldn’t have to be afraid of running even into Primarch-level enemies.

“Tiger, there you are!” However, when he thought about not hearing that voice for another four hours in his day, his life seemed bleak. Surely preventing burnout was a wisdom in itself. He had barely left the gate of light when his girlfriend ran over. Feathering steps caused her pink hair to rise and fall, her cat ears peeked up attentively in the mana-filled wind.

While John caught himself wondering why there was wind inside an Illusion Barrier, Rave’s hair turned into a shining gold. Her loving approach stopped on the spot, her body folding together like a spring – to then unload in a devastating charge. Body turning into a streak of flashing lights, a bright display of red, white, blue and green, she was right upon him.

John barely managed to raise his arms and shield himself from the kick that came his way. He took damage twice: once when her shin clashed with his arm guards and a second, more dangerous amount afterwards as her martial art travelled through the protective layers and applied a mixture of blunt force and ruptures to the tissue underneath.

The kick shoved him to the floor, while she made an elegant landing. Still completely buffed up, both Purgatory at max and the Third Eye active, John rolled to the side when she followed that up with a Focus Stomp where his head was. The basic technique caused her to to sink into the dirt down to the ankle.

He extended his hand in an attempt to catch her and succeeded. The gold flowed out of her hair from the base to the tips just as he pulled her down to the floor with him. A playful fight ensued where they rolled over the ground together. Rave aimed her martial arts and magic only at his limbs while John used Purgatory’s sharp claws only to skilfully cut out parts of her clothes.

“Ya jerk!” Rave laughed when her breast was exposed to the air and John greedily sucked on it. “Not where they could see us!” she was of course referring to the Magus family.

“This is my revenge!” her boyfriend declared, giving it another lick. The sensitive crown of her petite breast was hard against his tongue and she let out a small moan.

Not one to be dominated just quite like that, the Lightbearer began her counterattack in John’s unconcentrated state. They turned into a spinning mess as each of them insisted on being on top. It wasn’t until both of them were out of breath after what must have been minutes of play fighting, laughing and groping of sexual areas that the outcome was decided with Rave on top. From a pure Stats standpoint, John was slightly superior at that very moment.

Or maybe not, seems like he was working on outdated information. “Yo-,” he was interrupted in his words by Rave’s soft lips meeting his. Although her bodysuit had already patched itself back together, he immensely enjoyed the feeling of her body against his. The sweetness of her tongue fulfilled him as it wrestled with his in a less exhausting echo of their finished tumble.

John refused to let her go when she attempted to pull back, his neck following her movements. While she was obliging him, leaning back into the kiss for another minute of making out, his left hand reached into her hair and kept her there. Purgatory had reverted into its boring arm-guard shape, hidden underneath the sleeve of his damaged suit.

Her breath on his face was oddly pleasant, as was the love that warmed up his insides with every second he felt her. A strand of saliva connected their extended tongues for a couple more seconds after they had parted. Smiling like sunlight, she asked, “You were saying something, tiger?”

“Uhm,” John raised an eyebrow as he thought back the few minutes. What had he been looking at again? Right, her stat screen. “You have been making pretty big leaps lately. Also, did your cat form get better?”

“Surprisingly,” Copernicus stated, walking his way over, “yes. I don’t know how she does it, but she increased the amount of my power she can overlap with her own.”

“Like a very nice cocktail,” Rave joked.

“Or a shitty ass couple that makes me jealous as fuck,” Eliza complained, throwing herself in the mix. Further curses were sealed by John and Rave both wrapping an arm around the girl in the beginnings of a group cuddle.

“Yes… cocktails…” Copernicus mumbled. While John imagined to hear an annoyed mixture of disgust and thoughtfulness in those two words, the suncat’s behaviour was as usual as he trotted away. Passing and hissing at a certain queen on the way.

Lydia did only as much as raising an eyebrow at the ever-unfriendly elemental. “My mixed nature annoys him continuously, it appears,” she stated upon reaching the bundle of people on the floor. Bowing over them, her hair’s red undertone came out at the side of her head the sun’s low position shone upon.

As they were at the end of the third day of the ten parts of the stretched Saturday, it was about seven in the morning real time. John heavily disliked the 24-hour segments around noon, it was hard to get a proper sleep schedule when it was bright when he left and bright when he came back.

“You should not take rest at this position,” the queen advised. “Either move inside to take proper rest or do something productive.”

“Lyly, don’t be so constipated,” Rave told the new arrival.

“I am not being… Haaaah,” Lydia spared her breathe the waste on a worthless argument. “All I am letting you know is that the current situation is suboptimal for a work environment.”

“The way I see it, I am on break,” John stated. “Why don’t you join us? The grass is nice.” Magoi liked to keep his barriers at a nice 24 degrees Celsius. While it didn’t feel exactly like summer, it was still nice and cozy.

“I don’t see the value in that when Aclysia is finally getting me a fresh pot of tea,” the brunette said.

John, through eyes blinking quickly and squinting to protect them from the sunlight, opened his mouth first in retort, then to yawn. Once the prolonged exhale had left him, he did get around to speak, “When was the last time you just laid in the grass and didn’t think of anything?”

To that her answer was silence. After a few moments, she finally did join them on the ground, albeit not in the group hug. Closing her eyes, she just lay there. “I cannot seem to think of nothing,” the queen stated, eyebrows curving towards the centre. “My mind will go to one place or another.”

“Yeah, I know that problem,” John said, reaching out with his unoccupied hand. Soon, his fingers interlocked with hers. “Does that help?”

“Certainly,” Lydia admitted with a more peaceful look on her face. After admiring the elegant swing of her nose for what felt like an eternity, John closed his own eyes to just relax for a minute.

_____________________________________________________________________

When he opened his eyes again, he was in his bed back in the house. He was on his lonesome, the best company he had were two pieces of buttered bread and a small bottle of orange juice. The silent room irked him as he hastily devoured the food. As someone who had always been surrounded by noise even before he suddenly got magical powers, John didn’t like this lack of any sound. At the very least the whirling of the cooling from his computer was supposed to accompany him. Especially since he was looking at a copy of his old room.

‘I must have nodded off,’ John thought after putting the now empty bottle down next to the also vacant plate. It wasn’t that surprising, given that he had spent a lot of time with Kickboxing practice. His Endurance helped with numerous things, especially if he needed to push himself, but after a long day of hard exercise, any amount of good relaxation could easily lead to deep slumber. ‘I wonder who carried me inside though. Not that it really matters.’

All he knew was that he had been left naked. His clothes were orderly folded at the side, indicating the involvement of at least one of the maids. For a moment, John looked at the suit and formal-looking ensemble that went along with it. He decided to instead walk to the nearby closet and check the inside. Unsurprised to find some spare clothes for him inside, he put them on.

It was an assembly of loose, dark clothes, the kind that looked a size too big and were absolutely not fashionable but super comfortable. ‘Nice to wear something like this again,’ John thought. Sure, his suit was enchanted to be a good fit, but the natural comfort of these clothes, not to mention the nostalgia, were a nice change of pace.

Laughter from downstairs finally broke the silence the moment John opened the door. Barefoot, he made his way towards the source in the living room. What he found there had him smile.

All of his girls were scattered throughout the barely large enough room. The furniture had been rearranged in a fashion that was clearly not meant for a prolonged stay, some chairs standing uncomfortably close to door frames. There was a frisky mood in the air, exuding from all corners.

In a triangle consisting of the V-shaped couch and the television sat Beatrice, Salamander, Sylph and Rave, each of them with a controller in their hands and staring at the splitscreen. Non-serious insults were thrown around as the minigame went on; John recognized a game of Mario Party. The situation got a bit heated when it was only Salamander and Beatrice remaining, the passive maid winning in the end by doing the analytical thing and playing the clock. “Cheap bitch!” the endflame elemental, wearing only cold fires around her sensitive bits, complained, her buzzcut transforming into a candle flame.

“Do you want to test that claim?” Beatrice asked in her typically robotic tone. “A full analysis of my components would take time. Following assembly of market data too. Going by my heart-crystal alone does place me in the hundreds of millions, however. Cheap bitch thus does not apply.”

“Know-it-all cunt then,” Salamander growled, the fire on her head only swelling. Sylph trying to blow it out like she was birthday cake didn’t help.

“Yo, watch it!” Rave, sitting in the direction of the breeze, cried out. She was sitting there in basic panties and a sports bra. They were all friends and members of the same harem there and the atmosphere had something of a sleepover anyway.

John looked over to the table where Lydia was having a discussion with Siena, Undine and Nia. That particular set of girls in combination was basically just the queen and sadist having a bit of a fight. From the sound of it and the fact that both of them remained seated, it was evident that there was nothing too serious being disagreed over though. Even if they did threaten to go volatile, Undine’s calming and Nia’s odd presence prevented the discussion to ever completely spill over.

Gnome was also sitting on the table with them, but her attention was focused on the floor instead. Having wrapped some yarn around a rod of stone, with a ball of rubber attached to the end of it, the stone elemental was instead playing with Copernicus and Stirwin, the two animal-shaped light elementals going at it. The suncat was even nice enough to help the golden hatchling out of a bit of a situation it had gotten itself in. Doing what creatures of its ilk liked to do, Stirwin had gone into a so called death-roll.

In nature that move was, as the name indicated, a sure way to murder whatever was in its jaws. Here, the tiny little crocodile had only succeeded in wrapping enough string around its snout that it now couldn’t open it anymore. “Roll the other way,” Copernicus advised, even going as far as demonstrating. Gnome watched with a sunny smile on her cute face.

John could see motions inside the kitchen. A maid outfit and a sickly pale girl in nothing but an apron working on something. From the sweet smell in the air, he guessed something in the sugary department, probably some sort of cookies.

His entrance into the room was noticed, but only Sylph got up to start enthusiastically dancing around him and fill his ears with chatter. The rest simply acknowledged that he had woken up and immediately returned to their activities. Except for a certain Mario Party arrangement that was now missing a player.

This state of affairs was welcomed by John. If his girls didn’t drop everything the moment he came into the room, that was a good thing in his book. Sure, it would have been sexually amazing if they began worshipping at his feet, but it would also have been more than a bit creepy. The greatness of it would have lasted as long as the orgy, and then he would have been left with a swathe of women that were all the same in how devoted they were to him.

Much more importantly, however, was the fact that they were all engaged with each other. Fluidly too, as Nia suddenly rising out of her seat and answering the call to the missing player on the couch, and being immediately accepted, demonstrated. It showed John that there weren’t any awkward silences or that they were engaged in catfights when he wasn’t around.

“I have no interest being informed about that!” Lydia slammed her hand on the table. “Stop evading the topic at hand!”

“Peeling fingernails off victims and your idea about how tax evasion should be handled are pretty much the same,” Siena’s teasing voice quietly contrasted the queen’s mild annoyance. “You shouldn’t rub the pennies out of them but force them to cum and do something useful.”

John wasn’t sure he wanted to get into that discussion, he didn’t even know why Siena was interested in a discussion about taxes in the first place. Something told him the answer was a mixture of wanting to sneak innuendos into everywhere and just annoying Lydia.

‘Well, some fights, but nothing they can’t resolve without me,’ John thought and sighed as he moved towards the kitchen. He was a bit hungrier than a few buttered slices of bread could solve. Passing the table without saying anything, he just left Lydia to get a bit worked up and Siena to her amusement. Not only was he sure that his involvement would only get him a poisonous stare from the queen, but the nightmare elemental’s involvement in topics usually caused him to think three times about them. Couldn’t hurt for Lydia to do the same.

He found the kitchen in a state between massacre and clean, a clear distinction between where Aclysia had been with a wet towel and Eliza had worked with flour. “Did she bake something edible?” John wanted to know.

“Cocksucker comes in here and that’s his first utterance, what a granola-dick,” Eliza mumbled, clearly having expected some comment about her get-up. Instead, she got a slap on her ass and a glance to be quiet. That also had her smile.

“It will be edible, but it won’t look pretty,” Aclysia answered.