Chapter 179 – In the evening.

Chapter 179 – In the evening.

“What am I doing with my life,” John lamented, closed the window and spread his arms out on the cool, ravaged, stone floor. They had just beaten the second version of a boss they thought would be no problem, and were all completely exhausted. The boss had been a hand. Literally, a giant hand, the nails alone had been bigger than John’s whole body, and it had shot laser beams, tried to swat them away, fired random explosions, poked at them, and all the other good stuff hands could do.

Well, normal hands couldn’t do a fourth of what that hand did. Where the first version of that hand had only showed a fraction of its mechanics, due to being killed in a relatively small frame of time, this one had truly put into them the fear of facing things while underlevelled.

“To think I’d need two Mithril ingestions in a day,” Lydia gasped, leaning against a smashed marble pillar. The whole setting, a forest of glorious white marble pillars with silver inlays, had been thoroughly destroyed by the God-Hand’s endless waving. The princess had dark rings under her eyes, only seeming to worsen by the second, as she looked around.

“It flicked me into a wall,” Rave, lying on her back, lamented, “repeatedly. Super rude...”

“He squashed me...” Undine, sitting in foetal position, slowly rocked back and forth; her voice had lost all of its melody to the shellshock and was now just a grave monotone, “I got splattered on the floor. It was horrible...s quish... squish...”

The hand had indeed focused on Undine a lot, not from the start, only after it had found out that Undine was their healer. “Bosses with healer aggro are the worst,” John agreed. At least he had gotten a level out of it.

“He...he threw me like a skipping stone,” Gnome, who had shown incredible fortitude up until now, broke down on her knees and started crying. She was less damaged than Salamander and Sylph, though, both of whom sat in front of a pillar, just emptily staring holes into the air. Literally, in Sylph’s case. Occasionally, the tiny vacuums collapsed with an equally tiny sound. The hand had used Salamander to light a giant cigarette and Sylph to get the smoke blown away. The first time it had happened, it had just angered both of them; by the fifth, they had been reduced to this state.

It was a miracle they had been able to defeat that boss. On Tier 14, the boss had been manageable, because they were quick enough to dodge and all of that. Not so on the 15th. If it hadn’t played with them so much, John would have had to use his new Escape Rope. In the end, they did beat it, but only thanks to making a couple of sabotaged pillars fall on and nail the hand to the ground, where Aclysia then proceeded to cut it apart.

Speaking of the Artificial Spirit, she and her ‘sister’ were completely unfazed. Aclysia, although she had taken quite a bit of damage, tended to John, giving his head a soft rest on her lap. Those thighs were for more than viewing pleasure. “Master, I should remind you to visit a barber soon,“ she said, running her hand through his still fairly short hair with a slight smile.

“You may do that,” John groaned, thinking about getting up but ultimately deciding against it. The mana charged silicone Aclysia made her day to day body from (opposed to the metal composition she used in battle) was incredibly soft and comfortable and thanks to Inner Fire it was also nice and cosy. The only thing missing was a blanket, and he could have fallen asleep then and there. ‘I should do this more often,’ John decided and just kept lying there. It seemed to be just as much a reward for the maid as it was for him.

Momo smacked his face with the wad of cash the boss had dropped. “There you go, lazy perv,” she said and repeatedly poked him in the cheek. “Get up, sleeping here is bad for your posture.”

“Maybe I want a bad posture?” John suggested.

“You better don’t, because I don’t think you’d look good with a hunchback.” Momo kept poking him for a little bit longer. “Also I want to lay in Aclysia’s lap sometime!”

“Nope, my space,” the Gamer declared.

Grumbling, Momo backed off and gathered up the rest of the Loot. All of it turned out to be edible trash, so she got right on that, while tending to Gnome. “You did good,” the support assured the stone elemental, thus starting the process of building Gnome back up.

In the meanwhile, Sylph rebooted. “Beep, beep,” she commented her noisy start-up, launching on her feet and then marching forward. “I am Sylph-bot, the best bot, look at my booty!” she stated in a mechanical voice and pushed her ass out.

“It is a rather nice ass,” Salamander, begrudgingly, admitted. “Now get it the fuck out of my face before I burn it!”

Undine fixed herself by attaching to John. Halfway enveloped by the slime, he hugged her upper body until she stopped quivering. “It’s all good, no one can squash you now,” John whispered. The slime girl opened her mouth to say something. Ultimately, she did not.

Lydia and Rave stepped next to him, both looking thoroughly done with grinding for the day. “Okay, so punching above our weight is a lot harder now... but hey, I got a level, that’s nice!” The Gamer’s girlfriend worked to reclaim her enthusiasm.

“As did I,” Lydia stated.

“I even got a second one,” Rave added, after another inspection of her Character Sheet.

Blowing air out of her nose, “And whose fault is that?”

“That gets more complicated the more I think about it. I mean, do you feel like you owe any of what you are to me?”

There was no immediate answer to that question, because she treated it with the proper level of seriousness. In the end, she could only let out a long, frustrated sigh. “I don’t think so?” she said. “You didn’t make me in a way that makes me... you know... just a golem.”

John just nodded. They wouldn’t really find a fully satisfying answer to this maybe ever. What was important to John was only that any and all feelings in the room were genuine. Everything beyond that was a complicated mess of questions that he would like to resolve, but he could live with if they weren’t.

“Momo, can you open the Abyss Auction for me?” John asked, using his free hand to comb through Aclysia’s long, silky hair. In the light of the bulb above, the silvery white glowed wonderfully, having a lustre otherwise only seen in heavily edited commercials. It was wonderfully soft as well. Momo, whose hair was duller looking, obeyed and opened the laptop with an annoyed sigh. What that annoyance was aimed at, only she knew.

This was a trick John had picked up during his training preceding the fight with Thana. His artificial spirits could both order for him. John wasn’t sure if this was because the technomancy network identified them as his familiars or if they couldn’t differentiate them from him. Personally, he believed the former, after all their auras were linked to his, but still different in structure. It would be worth looking into this. If they were truly unable to sense the difference, he could use that for information wars in the future, shrouding his actual position and shenanigans like that. He should ask Lydia about this; the princess was the best source of reliable information he had to date.

“So, what do you want to buy?” Momo asked and John cited the list of objects he knew he bought, way back when, for Aclysia.

“And a dildo plus strap-on,” he added at the end. Since the lesbian side-events were getting more frequent in his bedroom, he might as well add some toys to the mix.

Momo put the cursor above the order button and turned to John. “You want to raise my Libido, don’t you?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“I was going to bring it up after you ordered everything,” the Gamer confessed. “One way or another, you will need the more human texture, if you want to go around on your own.”

“What if I say no? To the Libido offer?” Momo asked.

John froze, his youth and own lust competing with his raised Wisdom for what he should answer. The former would just have stared in confusion. Who would not want to feel pleasure. The latter knew that all of this must have been a bit odd to someone that had, so far, been incapable of understanding the sensation. “I want you to experience all things a human can, just like Aclysia,” he finally told her.

“Personally, I am happy just cuddling her,” Momo said.

“But I am not happy with just that,” the naked maid declared. Her thinning patience was evident in every squirm that went through her alluring curves, every little way she grinded against John, and every audible breath she took. “I wish for us to find pleasure together, as Master’s women. Masturbating on my own is thoroughly unsatisfying.”

“Ah... well, I was in blissful ignorance about what that shifting around last night was,” Momo responded drily. Aclysia’s eyebrows pulled together, but she barely kept her composure.

John could feel the craving radiating from his artificial guardian. She needed his cock almost more than he craved her. “Let me assure you that lust is a great gift,” Aclysia stated in the calmest tone she could muster. “You have nothing to lose and pleasure to gain.”

Momo’s sceptical expression softened. From the lips of a woman that had been in the same situation once, it must have all sounded a little more reasonable. John decided to play the card that he knew would win the argument. “You could help Gnome and Aclysia whenever they are horny.”

Audibly, Momo sucked on her lower lip. She understood that her love for Gnome and Aclysia was partly implanted, much as she liked them on her own terms now. “You’re thinking with your dick,” she called him out.

John felt just the slightest bit guilty about it. “Yeah... yeah...” he sighed. “It is your decision.”

“...Raise my Libido score,” Momo caved just a moment later and tapped on the order button.

It wasn’t the entirely appropriate reaction, but John smirked anyway. “I will after you have eaten up.”