Chapter 565 – Separation 3 – Socialized

Chapter 565 – Separation 3 – Socialized

“You sure have some convenient powers,” Elu laughed as the car carried them over the highway. It was a large camper van, with high quality furniture, slightly worn down from repeated usage over several years. He, Eliza, Elu and someone she had introduced as her great, great, great grandchild (give or take a few greats) were sitting in the back on a quiet table. Like everything else about the Hidden Tradition, it had genuine charm about it, the smell of fresh coffee mixing with dried grass to create a welcoming atmosphere.

Which still had John glance around for traps. The advantage of moving focus in an untraceable layer on top of his eyes was that he didn’t have to wait for people to look away from him. Everything he wanted to ogle at, he could without appearing paranoid to his hosts. As long as he kept his actual eyes still.

He maintained that he was secure enough with the blood mage sitting next to him, as well as the several elementals invisibly inside and around him, but that didn’t fix his paranoia. ‘I wonder if I would have these problems if Elu was a genuinely hot chick,’ the Gamer thought, more than aware of his own shortcomings. If there was a fateful encounter where he could bang some sexy indigenous lady, add her to the harem and expand Fusion in the process, for the low price of overcoming that nagging part of his mind, he would certainly act on it. As it stood, John had found the girl currently driving cute, but generally treated the people of the Hidden Tradition with very well veiled distrust.

They were just such moral actors that it disturbed him greatly. For no other reason than it being the right thing, they wanted to help Eliza? Maybe even want to join Fusion? Well, John had an easier time understanding the latter thanks to the reasoning Elu had given him, that was a pragmatic argument rooted in a mutual understanding of necessity to be protected against the forces beyond their corner of the world.

‘I will have the opportunity to ask the other leaders soon enough,’ John thought, wondering what he should ask to, carefully, extract any hidden agendas they might have.

“You sure have some convenient powers!” Elu repeated louder and reminded John that he wasn’t supposed to just sit there broodingly.

“Sorry, was lost in thought,” he quickly apologized, stretching a bit on the couch and absent-mindedly put a hand on Eliza head, combing her long hair with his fingers. ‘Lydia was right, this is very nice hair,’ the Gamer thought, despite the lack of care (outside of taking regular baths) and the recent growth spurts, the strands were flowing like liquid sapphire through his caress. “What exactly do you mean?”

“Being able to teleport to DC like that,” Elu specified. Originally, the native woman had wanted to take a plane over to the capital. Not one to waste time or money (although he admittedly valued the latter way less than the former), the Gamer had explained that he had a quicker way and so they had taken the Transport Station.

“Seasoned RTS players know where to put their teleport targets,” John just shrugged off with a charismatic smile. Perhaps because of how nervous the approach of their target made him, an emotion that he hadn’t had in the foreground of his mind for a long time, he was feeling the need for affection more than usual. He pulled Eliza into his lap, whose only complaint about that was her increased distance to the cookie jar, and cuddled her fiercely.

There was a lot related to this trip that was immediately important for their future, and so John was planning out the effects of everything that could go wrong and the immediate contingencies for it. Over and over again, to make sure he had the best answer for any given situation. One outcome in particular made him feel at unease. Perhaps the unlikeliest one of them all, it was the only one where John genuinely had trouble choosing between the two options presented.

“I love you,” he whispered into Eliza’s ear, who swallowed and turned to look at him. Before she could ask him, in her bloomy language, what the fuck his pussy breaking ass was suddenly on about, he planted a quick kiss on her sticky lips. The sugar from all the bakeware she had been consuming made it all the sweeter. “Don’t you forget that, my dear broken angel.”

“Don’t... don’t fucking use that one,” Eliza physically cringed in his arms, which only served to get her deeper into his embrace. Completely by design, John was quite sure as he lovingly played with her hair.

“Hey, you called me daddy recently, this is my revenge.”

“You don’t like being called that?” Elu asked with a raised eyebrow, then giving it a dirty, old lady laugh. “Okay? And here I thought the men hadn’t changed since I grew up. One of my granddaughters recently slipped up over the dinner table. Was a very funny moment when both her boyfriend and father reached for the salt.”

“...I refuse to believe that meme actually happened in any capacity anywhere,” John mumbled, but the hesitant nod of Elu’s present relative only confirmed the tale. “Maybe there is some sort of gene that makes people wrong?”

“Don’t you mean ‘gives people different tastes’?” Elu wanted to know, pouring herself a cup of coffee. A bump in the road threatened to make her spill some of the drink. She caught the wayward drops of the steaming hot liquid in her palm and then licked them off without a single care in the world.

John wondered if them sitting in this back area without any security belts was against some sort of law. In case of a crash, they would probably have to fake injuries though. “No, I mean wrong. Wanting to be called daddy is creepy.”

“Whatever you fucking say, ‘Master’,” Eliza mocked him.

“...You just broke our sacred bond,” John sniffed artificially while he groped all the parts of Eliza he could get away with in this setting. “Of all the people to call me that mockingly, I thought you knew the second best. I am thoroughly disappointed.”

Number one was obviously Aclysia, something that the blood mage also knew and didn’t move to refute in any way. “Well, our daughters will call whoever they get with daddy eventually,” Eliza decided, notably not swearing a single time in that sentence.

“I am just going to state that I hope that sadism is the dominant and ‘daddy’ the recessive gene.”

“Would feel really fucking weird if they are my daughters and somehow not want to get piledriven into the ever-fucking cock-biscuits of whatever surface they get their pussy pounded on.”

“I put it aside while I serve all tribes,” the chieftain-elect explained readily. “Is that all this scrying spell told you about me? All questions needed?”

“No, I have one more, if that is alright with you?” John asked; a gracious handwave was the indication he needed. “Are you the strongest in your guild?”

From a level standpoint, that seemed impossible, but John had been through enough to know that levels themselves weren’t everything. Elu may have double the base numbers, but it seemed Ahanu had access to something very finely tuned to the specific magic of his people. In other words, he had access to a bullshit ability. Not nearly as brutal as John’s, Romulus’ or Sigmund’s, but definitely potent in its niche.

“Yes,” the answer came pretty quickly and, after John nodded to himself to signal that he believed it, the Gamer relaxed. If their strongest person came all the way out of the nexus of his power, to a place he was quite vulnerable at, then this showed a degree of trust. Trust that John had answered by showing up here without his usual entourage. “Anyway, this is the famous Eliza then?” Ahanu moved on.

“Is there even a need to ask?” John wondered, putting an arm around the smaller woman to keep her from hiding behind him. As usual Eliza met new people with a mixture of immense disdain and a dash of fear. Although that fear was less for what they could do to her than the reverse. “Not like information about her is much harder to find.”

“You’d be surprised,” Ahanu told him. “Aside from knowing that Thana exists, it’s actually quite difficult nowadays to get any definitive information. Best we have is very shaky live footage that goes for hundreds of thousands.”

“That tall-haired piece of shit is still selling those recordings?!” Eliza growled, keenly aware of Jeff, the announcer, having all rights to that video material. “I should have pulled his lungs out through his mouth and let him choke on his fucking blood.”

John furrowed his eyebrows. “Sorry, but can you elaborate on that a little bit? Like, walk me through how you found what you did.”

“Well, basically everyone can find out you exist, that’s pretty easy with all the buzz you are making,” Ahanu said. “That’s where we got to the first hurdle, articles on the Abyss Auction very rarely have cross references to other people and the information package about you only shows photos of you with, mostly blurred out, companions.” John nodded, he followed so far. “When looking for your name, we pretty quickly stumbled over the tournament in Germany though, so that’s where we got the names Jane Hollmey, Nia Fae and Thana Newman from.” The blood mage squeaked happily when she was addressed with that last name, even if her first name was wrong in that instance. “Your girlfriend, I assume, has very little reliable information about her available, most of it is forum discussions elsewhere, I guess that’s her mother’s influence.”

“Can’t say for sure, but probably,” John agreed. This he had already noted before, although he wasn’t sure if Nariko was keeping Rave’s name off the site to protect her eldest daughter or to keep her own reputation clean. “I assume there is nothing about Nia?”

“On the contrary, we found the most about Nia Fae – well, the queen herself aside,” Ahanu chuckled and explained. “Apparently there is a network of pet owners that started tracking an odd blonde that would appear on their front lawns and pat their animals.”

“That makes... way too much sense...” John had to concede, interested how those sightings would look like if projected on a map.

“She is such a stalking bimbo,” Eliza cackled. “Really, how retarded can one blonde be?”

“Which brings us to you,” Ahanu took a gracious little bow and offered to kiss Eliza’s hand, something that the blood mage reacted with a teeth revealing growl towards. “Point taken,” the Hidden Tradition’s leader backed off. “The entirety of info about you is quite scattered. The only clear footage that exists is your announcement in Cologne. Then there is a report about a run-in with reporters, the one-sided fight against that swordsman, the immediately concluded fight against... Alex?”

“Alexej,” John corrected.

“Yes, that guy. Anyway, that, the pretty chaotic footage of the group fight and then the clash with Romulus. That’s what we, as an organization, could do. Finding all that video material wasn’t actually that easy, neither can we make any real estimates of Thana’s strength from it, other than she is terrifyingly strong. But you seemed to be even before the change, though.”

“Because I fucking am,” Eliza puffed out her chest, causing the overly large shirt to slouch away to one side.

“I see...” John mumbled and realized that he had made a mistake in his assumptions so far. In Europe everyone knew more or less about Thana because people had taken way more interest in the press conference that had started the Five Day War. It helped that a bunch of people had been in the colosseum to tell their friends and family.

One ocean across, word of mouth was harder to come by, and since the damage Thana had done had been pretty contained, knowledge of her was limited. Helped, without a doubt, by the fact that she was eliminated as a threat the moment she appeared. By word of mouth, Thana would travel as a supremely strong entity that was defeated by Romulus. Just another god or member of the upper power echelons of the Abyss, in the perception of most people.

John’s mistake hadn’t been too impactful, what the average joe didn’t know, large organizations would keep an eye out on, and John primarily dealt with those nowadays. His assumption that nobody would dare attack him as long as he ran around with Eliza was also still true. Not because of Thana but because of what the blood mage had done before realizing that wasn’t her own name. Normal people didn’t really have to bother knowing whether it was a boulder about to squash them or an entire mountain. They just had to be aware of what they were getting into.

Inconsequential, but interesting.

“Anyway, enough of all of that,” Ahanu waved off and gestured towards the smoky room. “Why not have some fun? You arrived so much earlier already, certainly you brought the time?”

Eliza looked unwilling, but John pushed her along as he followed the invitation.