Chapter 354 – Back to Rome

Chapter 354 – Back to Rome

“Okay, everyone, I know this isn’t the strictly quickest way to go about things,” John told everyone once they were ready to make their way back to Rome, “but I am going to take the plane.”

“You are going to lose time,” Lydia reprimanded him.

“No, I am going to lose REAL time; I will spend way less on travelling in experienced time. I do not want to ride a raptor for a whole day. Instead, I will be comfortable in my seat in first class,” he crossed his arms, as he had made his mind up on the matter.

“You have flying machines in reality nowadays?” Metra asked. “I want to see that, let’s go!”

“Yeah, gonna stick with my boyfriend here,” Rave added.

“I am not going to leave smelling range again,” Eliza, now actually being carried by John, announced and pressed her face into his back. “You need to put that body oil on again! You still smell good, but you don’t smell amazing, and I want you to smell FUCKING amazing.”

“I left it back at the mansion,” John said in an apologetic tone.

“Then what the shit are we waiting for you cum hose and or dumpsters?!” the blood mage wanted to know; “Get the fuck on with your life! Anal queen can run if she wants to.”

Aclysia and Momo also were in agreement while the elementals basically where left without a choice.

“Hmph, fine, you all are welcome to waste your time then. I will meet you in Rome,” Lydia announced and went over to the procession on her own.

“I too feel like flying, but I should talk to her,” Maximillian fell into the conversation, scratching the back of his head while leaning on his walking stick. “The question of succession is more urgent than ever now that the throne is actually vacant.”

“We won’t continue this stupid tournament, right?” John wanted to know. After all that had happened, getting back into the colosseum and fighting that last round sounded needlessly exhausting.

“We will see,” Maximillian gave him an enigmatic smile; “I like to keep you in suspense. Also, I will ask Nariko out for dinner; she is going with Romulus’ group as well.”

“Ya will not do that!” Rave demanded.

“Try and stop me,” the king said and waved goodbye as he turned around.

“Prick,” the lightbearer stuck her tongue out and pulled one of her eyelids down as Maximillian made his way over to Romulus, leaving John and his direct procession behind.

Momo cleared her throat. “I have to voice a safety concern about Eliza coming with us and Romulus being somewhere else entirely. Because being the devil’s advocate is basically my job with you chaotic bunch,” she informed them.

“I doubt Thana would be dumb enough to come out in public,” John told her, “and even if, it seems that we can keep Eliza at the top just by naming her.”

“Also, it’s not like I change out of fucking nowhere now that I actually know what I am wrestling with,” Eliza added; “As long as I am not getting close to mass murder or get overly excited by fighting, we should be fine.”

“So we shouldn’t be involved in a plane crash or get ambushed by some stragglers still running around the place, okay,” the support shrugged; “If you are sure it works, hey, I will only die if you are wrong.”

“Come now, Momo,” John chuckled a bit to himself; “If you actually thought things were likely to be wrong, you would be way more earnest about your complaints.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Can we get a move on already?” Metra urged them, jumping from one foot on another in excitement, “I haven’t seen whatever this plane thing is in my life. So, let’s go!” She gave everyone a wide grin, the playful tomboy type that made everyone just a bit overexcited.

“That was unnecessarily complicated,” John complained when they finally sat down in their seats in first class. Getting the artificial spirits through the security measures had been rather annoying.

John went back to his menus; he now had a class level to spend. Luckily, he had already grinded up Elementalist to the threshold because that had been a thing he had the time for.



John went right for Combination 2. How couldn’t he? It was literally an increase on his already game breaking abilities.



The utilities of combining 3 elementals was just incredibly likely to be pure amaze-balls. It made him versatile to the point where he was basically unpredictable. The addition of another 5 minutes to the existence of the two-type combination was also stupendously good. As a matter of fact, it was the thing that dragged a few combinations out of purely niche usage. Like Darkness, who didn’t exactly get a lot of stalking done in the old time limit, or Cumdump, a pure sex-bomb of a combination that he barely got to shag thanks to the temporal constraint put upon her.

Although the new ceiling wasn’t exactly enough for proper sex as John liked to have it as well. It would have easily been enough when he still had been largely normal and lasted for like 5 minutes of actual sex tops. Nowadays, he could cum as many times as he wanted in a row and abused that shamelessly.

But the implication here was that there was going to be an increase of time with each upcoming level, though, and there were going to be another 3 of these if his math wasn’t off as it had to reach all the way to the six-type combination.

Which also meant he had to take the light elemental along the way.

John looked at the food that was placed in front of him and thanked the stewardess. “You want to know something interesting?” he asked Rave.

“I just want to hear ya talk about anything; this program is pretty dull,” she answered, “so I am going to do the creepy woman thing and listen to your voice but not what you say.”

“Pretty sure that’s just a creepy lover thing,” John pointed out, “but fine, if you are amused by my voice and I get to talk about stuff while doing it, that’s fine by me. See, Lydia explained soul types to us a while back, right?”

“Right,” Rave stretched cattishly before flopping down back against her chair and lazily transported food into her mouth. “Whaddaboutit?”

“Well, I can only have one elemental of each type for balance reasons,” John said; “Guess Gaia has some sense in not allowing me a giant hoard of elementals.”

“Nice to hear that your bullshit has some limits,” his girlfriend commented.

“Right, here is the kicker thought. Lydia said there were 8 kinds of souls: Fire, water, air, earth, light, dark, life and blank. I obviously can’t contract a blank elemental, since those don’t exist or don’t not exist or something; however it works, they aren’t compatible with any normal magic. I got five of the remaining elementals down and light is something I have the choice to take basically every time I reach a level in Elementalist. Here is the kicker though: Life elementals don’t exist.”

Rave looked at him for teasingly long as he waited for her to ask to explain. Eventually she grinned; she knew exactly that she had him by the ropes in this conversation and could tease all she wanted. Thankfully, she handed him the opportunity to say what he wanted today without derailing the conversation. “Okay, Brainiac, I’m gonna give ya this satisfaction: can ya please elaborate?”

“There are skillbooks for ‘life’ elementals out there, like blood elementals for example,” John said, “and I bought some of them for research. Whenever I tried to learn them, I got a pop-up telling me that this elemental slot was already taken. This leads me to believe that the life soul type actually doesn’t exist and that it’s just representing an omni-colour soul, the actual counterpart to life.”

“And how do ya explain that it’s so much harder for people with a life-type soul to learn stuffs outside of other life-type magics?” Rave asked just to let him talk some more, for which he was grateful. After all, his girlfriend may have been giving him attention, but that attention lay with him first and what he was actually saying second. He was fine with that, as long as they kept being interesting to each other, their relationship was still pretty healthy; it was when one talked and the other would have rather listened to silence that they would have been a problem couple.

“I think that has something to do with all the different elements layered on top of each other causing disruptions. Anyway, it’s just a theory I have,” John shrugged; “It could also be that life elementals don’t come as only life. Maybe it’s an element that only exists in a pair with another one, and the same is true for the soul types. I don’t know.”

“So, when ya getting that light elemental?” Rave steered the conversation towards another topic; “Maybe it’s going to be that moon chick that wanted to have a contract with me?”

“Right, that would be nice, although I think now that you said it, it’s going to be that weirdly muscular dude.”

“He was mean to Copernicus. If it’s him, I am going to kick him in the shins everyday,” his girlfriend threatened.

“I don’t think beings of pure light have shins,” John proposed a revolutionary idea that made Rave roll her pretty blue eyes at his semantics.

They continued to banter for the rest of the flight.