Chapter 601 – One thing done, rewards a-plenty
Chapter 601 – One thing done, rewards a-plenty
‘This is… actually an acceptable hangover,’ John thought when he awoke on the couch the next morning. He was missing some details here and there of how things had gone, but he remembered the vast majority of it. Which was rather pleasant. ‘I can deal with alcoholic experiences like that.’
His body felt a bit sluggish, like the ‘I don’t want to get out of bed’ laziness one could feel on winter mornings had seeped from his liver into his brain. Just raising his head with half open eyes was a bit of a challenge, but the Gamer had the advantage of not needing to do that. His mental eye just switched from the contact lenses to the replacement sphere and then got the flying piece of metal to hover around.
The room was sticky and gross and didn’t smell particularly great. Unsurprising, given the amount of dried up body fluids and booze everywhere. John was just happy he had the floorboards treated to be resilient to all kinds of seeping. Aside from bottles, people and ripped maid uniforms were also left all across the room.
Sometime during the night, John had decided to get a bit rougher with those that displayed some submissive or masochistic tendencies. Those people had the ruined remains of their uniforms used as impromptu bondage. Giving a quick once-over, the Gamer counted how many people were still around.
It seemed everyone was still right where they had been when he had laid down. Most people had passed out shortly after John had engaged with them. The maids, naked or not, were still lying in poses approximating the position they had last been fucked in. John could see his semen between the legs of all of them. ‘Thank god for Abyssal birth protection,’ he thought; he would have quite the situation on his hands if there was just one amongst those girls here who disliked being on the pill or something like that.
John shifted his attention from the room at large to his immediate surroundings, finally opening his eyes. Covered by a nice sheet of Rave and Aclysia (Sylph and Salamander having retreated to their safe haven inside his soul) and an actual blanket, he was quite comfortable. More importantly, there was the visual treat of seeing Aclysia with dishevelled hair.
Rave’s unique properties always gave her a pretty wild look, so seeing her have even messier hair after a night of rough sex was nice but not all that different. By comparison, seeing the always orderly and clean Aclysia and her silky white hair in utter disarray, with some of it clumped together through matting and perverted actions, was incredible. She really rocked that ‘absolutely wrecked by cock’ look. Although John was, of course, biased on that front.
Slowly opening, unfolding all of their emerald beauty, Aclysia’s eyes met his. She hadn’t been sleeping, since she physically lacked the ability to, but instead just rested her mind while cuddling up to her loved ones. It was a pretty close replacement and visually indifferent. Her advantage was being able to wake up whenever, perfectly rested.
‘Hey, could you start on breakfast?’ he asked, mentally to not disturb the slumber of everyone else around. Especially his girlfriend, since Rave tended to get cranky or non-functional if she didn’t get to sleep all the way through. ‘Something with a lot of bacon and eggs, for everyone if possible?’
‘Certainly,’ Aclysia gave him a tiny nod. ‘Shall I also prepare fresh clothes for our guests?’
‘That would be smart, yes…’ John answered, wondering how they could clean up everyone. Well, there were a couple of bathrooms, so as long as people woke up one by one, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem.
‘It is medically inadvisable to keep a pair of contact lenses in for prolonged periods,’ Aclysia reminded her master, probably just to keep the conversation going for as long as she could before she had to break off physical contact to get working.
John chuckled quietly, ‘What is going to happen, I am going to go blind?’ Regardless of that joke, he agreed with her. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take them out when I go get a shower.’ As they were bog-standard contact lenses, John tended to throw them away mindlessly. Buying them was basically spare change for him.
This mindset would change whenever he managed to get some unique ones tailored to his current needs. A thing he was still working on but hadn’t given urgency to for as long as he was still working on keeping his balance. Which, given yesterday’s largely flawless performance, seemed to be a process nearing completion. It was good to have the complete replacement of his sight in graspable range.
Aclysia gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and then gently slid out from under the blanket. Although she was completely naked for a few moments, something that she must have done over the night to have smoother skin contact, she strutted away comfortably, growing out her usual uniform as she manoeuvred her way through the sexy ladies scattered about.
Once her ass was out of staring range, John turned towards a stack of windows. Ever since he had beat Jeremiah in the tournament, he had let the Achievements and other things build up to go through as a present to his own success when he got done with this entire thing. Luckily, windows got completely transparent whenever he didn’t want to see them, otherwise this plan would have been impossible to execute without blocking part of his vision.
‘I wonder if that is true anymore, what with the windows being the only things I can still see with my own eyes…’ John thought as he pulled the stack in front of himself and read them one after the other. To people not in his party, it must have looked like he was browsing on an invisible phone.
‘Horrible pun attempt,’ John thought and saw another window queue into the end of the stack. Just another corner, peeking out from behind all of those layers. It reminded him of a buggy Windows encounter, when dragging around a task caused all of those afterimages to appear and stick. ‘Feels good to level again though.’
That was his first gained level in almost a month, the longest levelling break he had since that initial patch he had gotten. The Gamer could only hope that he would get back to doing what actually gave him his title soon enough. At this point, he really missed the simple pleasure of grinding and the clear reward of numbers. He was a bit overloaded on complicated, political scheming. All should be taken in equal measure.
‘Adequate reward,’ John thought, reaching down to his girlfriend and caressing her impossibly soft hair. Letting out a cute little gasp, she stretched but remained asleep, relaxing again after resting her head in the little depression between his shoulder and chest.
‘Oh, free Wisdom,’ John’s enthusiasm about that was mediocre, the same way somebody would appreciate finding a penny after checking their full bank account. A single point of Wisdom was not much, but nevertheless something he liked.
Well, Zone-Tan must have been really impressed with his performance there to be the first non-Gaia god to give him an Achievement (albeit not the first to give him a reward). To be fair, he had seriously messed up a lot of girls last night. They were probably going to remember this part of their young adulthood for the rest of their lives. Which put a giant smile on John’s face.
Since he had gotten that Max Class Level on Lover Boy, there was no reason to not spend it immediately. He still had free levels for that Class, after all. ‘Maybe it should tell me something that I keep getting free Max Levels and Level Ups for Lover Boy and Lover Boy alone… but I think I already know all the things that says about me.’
‘Hooooo, boy,’ John thought as he read through all of that. This was an actually hard choice. As much as it pained him, Sadist’s Will was out. The only truly masochistic members of his harem were Eliza, Scarlett and, to a much lesser degree, Gnome. Although the rest of them liked the frequent spanking, the occasional light bondage and the rare choking, none of them were so deep into it that John thought Sadist’s Will would often come to use. Better to pick something generally applicable.
Which was exactly what Dominator’s Will was. It raised the cap of people he could keep view over and gave him the new tool of putting their sensitivity into overdrive. Didn’t quite have the functionality of making them orgasm on command yet, which was something John desperately wanted, but it seemed to lead in that direction.
Lover’s Will offered a specialist as opposed to a generalist approach and actually piqued John’s interest a whole lot more. For a start, it was a new skill, so taking it wouldn’t alter Domination Pact, whose two current upgrades were likely to show up again on future level ups. Then there was its wording: ‘increases all pleasure of all kinds for each other by 5%’.
5% wasn’t a lot, considering all of the other bonuses John already had. As a matter of fact, the level in Lover Boy alone added another 5% to all of his sexual output. The thing was just that this specifically specified ALL pleasure of ALL kinds. It sounded like, for example, if John was to bake a cake and give it to Rave (the target his mind immediately went to), it would taste 5% better to her. That this was the first case of such a skill being mutual only furthered John’s curiosity.
So, he took Lover’s Will. He wanted to see where it could lead and, more than that, he wanted to have his girlfriend love life with him even outside of the bedroom. It was nice to have something that furthered that particular front. ‘I am going to put it on her later,’ he decided, as he could not do it without her consent.
Not like he didn’t have another thing to look into anyway. He finally had some more Stat Points to distribute, 28 of them in total. ‘Hmmm…’ John scratched his temple as he looked at his Character Screen. He always went with Wisdom, usually, but he did determine to raise his Charisma recently and 28 points was a hefty increase there. Especially since he was about to go have a diplomatic engagement with the Amacat guild, it was worth the thought.
His main goal, Wisdom 500, wasn’t that far off either, just another 75 points. Pretty hard decision all around.
‘Well, if I am aiming for peace negotiations soon, being more convincing is going to help me more than some more mana regeneration,’ he ultimately concluded and put his finger on the plus next to Charisma, keeping it there as the points drained from ‘Available Stat Points’ into the Stat. Then he looked at his Character Screen again, clicking a little button so display his Stats as if he had all of the equipment he had set on short-cut on.
‘Maxed out Fucking and Nimble Hands now,’ John noted, quite happily. Also interesting that Source of Satisfaction was currently in its stage where it gave him bonus Libido. Normally, when he wasn’t having sex, it was supposed to decrease his lust instead. Then again, he was lying with a pretty clear level of morning wood under his girlfriend, so maybe the skill already knew more than he did.
Well, that was a bunch of expected and useless pay-out. Nevertheless, he would still take those rewards, particularly that last bit. Rave still called him ‘good-looking, but plain’, so maybe that would finally fix it.
There was also that last window Gaia had sent him when he had commented on the pun.
Well, that was short, sweet and anticlimactic.
He was immediately distracted by the soft whisper of his girlfriend slowly rising into consciousness. “Morning, John,” she said, “…do I smell bacon?”
“Aclysia is in the kitchen.”
“Is it done?”
“I would say a bit longer until it’s nice and crunchy.”
“…Long enough for a morning quickie?”
John grinned, the passive had indeed known more than him.