“Stop eating them you fucktard…” Eliza presented her complaint in the usual bloomy language, but her tone was one of misery. “Pleeeeeasssse?” She swatted towards his hand. Her immense powers suppressed, as to not stir the monster inside her unnecessarily, the movement was dull and John easily dodged.

A simply step to the side and he took a cookie out of a plastic box he was holding and an overemphasized bite out of said cookie. The light-coloured bakeware, spotted with dark brown, was probably supposed to resemble a circle, but the bloated outline more closely had the shape of a mistake. “Why would I?” John asked, munching and causing crumbs to scatter everywhere on the floor. “They taste good.”

The cookies were sweet and the chocolate chips inside, while having been even better when the batch was fresh and warm, added an extra note. “They look like shit!” Eliza stated, starting another attempt at stealing the plastic box from John. The Gamer threw them in his inventory. No matter what she would try, that was a place she couldn’t reach. “GAH!” she cried out, the crimson aura of martial arts flaring up around her. The resulting stomp of her heel on his foot was delivered with rather brutal force. He was pretty sure he felt something break.

The fact that he didn’t even flinch at that and chopped her on the forehead while eating the rest of the cookie made him a bit concerned. ‘I may be getting a bit too used to being physically abused,’ he thought, then decided that was just the price he had to pay for deciding to love a girl that was absolutely crazy. He put his heart with her and the incidents were few and far in between. To put it easily, it was worth the minor pain.

“Don’t practice martial arts on me,” he nevertheless scolded her, as her retreating sole allowed his bones to jump back into the correct position between two frames of reality. Gamer’s Body in combination with a near total pain tolerance was pretty unfair. ‘Although I also need to keep a closer eye on my numbers now that my perception is a bit warped,’ John reminded himself.

The crimson around her disappeared again. At least the one that was apparent with the naked eye. Looking at her through the aura sight that allowed people in the Abyss to identify each other revealed the thick, blood coloured aura to hang around her as strong as ever.

John had found that his own had changed dramatically over time. Originally it had just been a plain blue around him. By now it was a golden centre having all kinds of different colours swirl around it, doubtlessly from all the contracts, familiars and godly influences. The more powerful a being got, the more it seemed to individualize its aura. Rave, after all, had also gone from a relatively normal light-blue to an almost seizure inducing spectacle.

“Sorry,” Eliza apologized, making a sour face. “This aura shit is fucky. First I couldn’t get that dumbass mana-sweat to appear at all because fuck me that’s why, but now it just does whenever I get annoyed with some shit.” She looked at her hands, moving her fingers as if to ensure herself that they were still hers. “Not as bad as back when I destroyed anything I touched on accident, but I still feel like a bag of damaged condoms in a whorehouse.”

“You can destroy whatever you want as long as it’s not part of anybody,” John told her, turning his chop into a pat and then bowing down to kiss her. “Anyway, I am keeping the cookies. They are good.”

“NO!” Eliza shouted, turning his kiss into a headbutt. “Give them back, you zombie-beaver fucking asshole! I should never have made those!”

Rave, who was watching the whole situation from her position on the couch, threw in a question, “Is the zombie-beaver you in that situation?”

“Yes,” the blood mage answered, continuing to drum her fists on John’s body, this time without unneeded brutality. All in all, John was amused with how this situation was continuing on.

“Didn’t ya say you don’t like beavers?” Rave continued on.

“Yes, I don’t like myself, fuck o-oooooff – HEY!” Getting suddenly lifted over John’s shoulder, Eliza could only flail, her black robes sounding like a flag in the middle of a storm.

“We don’t do self-deprecation around here!” the Gamer decreed, running towards a mattress that was randomly lying in the living room. In a move that was half improvised wrestling and half cuddling, John slammed Eliza on that oversized cushion and covered her complaining shape in hugs and kisses. He did this until he had subjugated her with love and she was reduced to a gleefully pouting little bundle of curses and messy hair. “That’s better,” he said, holding her close to his chest to refill his energy while he looked around.

The living room had a slight crack-house atmosphere to it by the sheer amount of chaos that was going on. It was still bursting with people and the fact that more objects were added to the room every day didn’t help. Then again, it was all incredibly clean thanks to the tireless maid duo’s work. Maybe a more suitable metaphor would have been an elderly folks place when they had their grandchildren over.

Rave was smiling at him with lovestruck eyes. It was certainly out of the ordinary that she would have such an expression after seeing her boyfriend tumble around with another girl for a couple of minutes, but such was their (incredibly well-working and healthy) relationship. A quick tap on the ass informed the techno lover that they were about to start another round of Smash, so she turned around to partake in that.

Lydia, flipping a page of Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, raised her voice, “You are quite lively today.” Her tone was the usual stern, but the fact that she didn’t even look up from her page to deliver a mildly reprimanding glance meant she was just commenting and had no stakes in the answer.

“I have a bit of a post-danger high,” John agreed. About ten minutes ago he had gotten out of an Assault, so his system was still worked up. It was also why everyone was gathered in the living room, as the days were pretty consistently structured around the two Assaults. John headed out at eight, was gone until noon, then returned for lunch. Aclysia would be cooking something she had already prepared in advance, but it would still take her a bit and so it was that they all came together at that time for about two hours.

Then, from about 14 to 18 o’clock, John would run the second Assault, then spend the rest of the day relaxing, helping the girls or continuing his attempts at finishing the martial arts quest. This was day five of that ongoing process, and he was perfectly happy with the results. Although he was about to switch up his strategy a bit.

“So why are you suddenly embarrassed of your cookies, hmm?” John wanted to know of the small girl in his arms. “You looked so happy when you got them done.”

“…I ate some of Aclysia’s and compared them to mine,” she grumbled. “Happy, joystick wanker?”

“Well, if you compare yourself to perfection, you are bound to fall short,” John stated and dwelled in the scent of her hair for a moment. “I was just really happy you made them for me. Just because they aren’t the absolute best doesn’t mean I won’t appreciate them.”

“Ja,” Rave agreed. “Just don’t let me near the oven!”

“The only fucking person here that I wouldn’t let close to the oven is Lydia,” Eliza spoke up. “Because she is German and they have an awful track record with those.”

The queen slammed her book close. “Hilarious,” she hissed, “a generalized insult, a true masterpiece. Want to insult me for being brunette next?”

“Relax, anal queen,” Eliza shouted back.

“Once you learn to be less infuriating, I might get the chance to,” the queen returned. “Until then, your shrill voice rings in my ears.”

“Fuck off, you overly serious…” Eliza hesitated for a second as she desperately searched for something that wasn’t another insult based on anal sex, “tyrant!”

That, for the sheer weight of the word, John knew, was what transformed this exchange into a genuine fight. Wood scratched over wood as Lydia shot out of her seat. “If you took things more seriously, perhaps you would stop being a safety risk for everyone around you.”

For a moment, Eliza was speechless. “Listen here, Lylyti-“

John was about to interrupt this, because there had already been too many sore spots being handled with too much blunt force, when a light like flashbang illuminated the space between the mattress and the dinner table. “Can ya two knock it off already?” Rave asked as all looking parties had to blink rapidly to even see something again, leaving them with no choice but to listen. “Don’t you two already know to not butt heads like that? Can we skip the part where you are mad at each other for a day before John convinces you to shake hands again?”

Lydia was the first to back off. “Right,” she sighed and fell back into her chair. “I do apologize. Particularly with my current choice of literature, the word tyrant does not ring well with me. I am in an irritable mood today,” she rubbed her temples. “I don’t get along with complete relaxation like this, especially for prolonged periods. Again, I do offer my apology.”

“Yeah… it’s fine… shouldn’t have said that,” Eliza grumbled, ashamedly pulling her hood over her eyes. The fight ended as quickly as it had begun, and a few minutes later they were all gathering around the table like usual. No bad blood had a proper way to continue existing in this harem household of wholesomeness.

Still, John had to poke some fun at all of this. “Seriously, you two are like… I want to say cats and dogs, but I don’t know who of you would be which,” he said as Aclysia placed today’s meal, burritos, on the table. They were separated as per their contents by plate and properly labelled.

As there wasn’t nearly enough room on the table itself, many of the group had to simply grab something and then retreat somewhere else to eat. Not that the elementals would even be able to finish more than one of the rolled pieces of deliciousness. John sunk his teeth into a combination of onions, crispy-roasted duck, a hot sauce, red beans and bell peppers when he got his answer.

“Yes,” Lydia’s answer was simple and precise. “Take that we converse at this level of civility, as it is all you will get.”

Eliza was too occupied with chomping through her burrito in four bites to answer.

_________________________________________________________________________

“Alright then,” a rested John rolled his shoulders as he stood in the darkness that lay behind the gates of light that separated the grass from the spaces he could use to create his own Instant Dungeons within the intermediary barrier. “How do we do this?”

The question was about which way was the best to acquire a Skill Evolution Point. John hadn’t just been running Assaults these past few days, he had been banking up on an item called Symbiotic Riddle that dropped from the bosses in the Maggot Ursa Assault. As an epic item, its drop chances were fairly low, but with the new Loot Focus and the finagling that the Advanced I.D. Settings allowed him, he had set it to just low. Over the last five days, he had gotten a total of five copies of the object.

Obviously, it was a good old key to Secret Rooms. A mechanic John seldomly took advantage of since he got a way to just disable loot to extract the more reliable EXP bonus. John checked his level, currently he was at 144, this was a bit of a problem since the Revealers of Secrets he had farmed would stop working at his current Tier in just 2 levels. It was high time he moved onto phase 2 of the farming.

He flipped the Secret Rooms on and then went to pick his poison for which dungeon he would crawl through in search of that room. The Assaults were a bad choice, way too frantic, and even the downgraded waves were not advisable. Sieges, Captures and Arena, John hadn’t even managed to find any Special Rooms in. Random came with a whole different load of baggage.

So back to Floors it was. After five days of Assaults, John wasn’t against a change of pace whatsoever. ‘Let’s go with…’ he looked over the options of the Monster Table. ‘Slimes, why the hell not.’

The darkness around them was eliminated immediately. The outline of a new reality quickly sharpened to John’s eyes. He was standing in a cylindrical room, the floor and ceiling made of a sort of polyester cloth, finely woven, slippery and a bit damp. Not unsurprising with what the glass walls revealed to be outside.

They were in a submerged labyrinth, a three-dimensional maze of tunnels cutting through the liquid world surrounding them. Room and tubes all structured with the same combination of glass and polyester as this room spanned through dozen of kilometres, ultimately vanishing as John’s eyes failed to pierce through the fogginess of the flowing world.

‘I would call it water, but…’ John thought, looking at the fluid all-around. For the most part, it was a clear, translucent blue, like the ocean on flyers for a Caribbean vacation, but around large rooms there were segments of green, dark azure or red. ‘Also water would drip in here by pressure alone,’ he continued on to think, looking back up to the layer of cloth that was separating them from the outside.

The truth was, they were surrounded entirely by slime. A very peculiar situation, one that John found to be pretty dangerous. There was no telling when they would be attacked, neither what would happen if they tore open that cloth by accident.

Eyes wandering over to the edge of the room, where the cloth was hooked into a metal frame, John came to the realization that each segment of this labyrinth had its own sheets that served as the separations above and below. This was an important detail, as it allowed him to experiment relatively safely.

Stepping out into that first corridor, ever watchful to not slip on the floor that was like a wet bouncing castle, John mentally turned to Siena. ‘Could you slice that floor open?’ he asked.

‘I can slice a whole lot of things,’ the nightmare elemental’s sensual voice whispered back as she climbed out of his shadow. The fact that her stiletto-esque heels didn’t stab right through the floor was good to know already.

In a display clearly meant for John’s eyes, she bowed down at the hips. Keeping her legs straight, the downward motion pushed her juicy ass out and her summoner was left fighting the blood rushing to the place where it could have more fun. This immediately changed once she actually lunged at the floor with knife-like fingers and bladed tendrils of purple.

It took her several cuts to break through what turned out to be a bunch of layers. A geyser of goo came her way when she finally did, and she snapped back. In the ocean illuminated by an unknown light source, covering everything in the pleasant brightness of daylight, she had very little room to retreat.

John grabbed her by the arm and pulled her against his chest and into the relative safety of the corridor. Keeping Emergency Rope at the ready, to teleport out if this experiment went south, he watched as the slime geyser slowly filled up the room. A magical barrier was preventing the rising fluid from spilling into the corridor the Gamer was inhabiting.

“You look almost heroic,” Siena teased, her body pressed against his with full intent, an index finger reaching under his suit and trailing the rim of his nipple with scary accuracy.

“Not like you are a damsel in distress,” John answered. A bunch of tentacles slung out of the slime wall and towards the duo. Arcane sparks flew everywhere as Mana Protection did what it did best. Quickly retreating down the corridor to preserve his pre-charged shield and his mana by extension, he noticed pillars of slime growing like connecting dripstones. “Seems like we left the safe zone,” he said.

“Like there is a safe zone around me,” Siena laughed quietly, brandishing her claws at the new enemy.