Making an elemental evolution anywhere inside would have been asking for destroyed furniture. Instead, they headed to the lawn on top of the fortress that lay at the base of the Palace. Doing it down by the six lakes he placed around the star fort would perhaps have been more topically sound, but that wasn’t worth the extra stairs they had to descend to get there.

“Alright, Undine, you ready?” John asked, while everyone formed a big circle around her.

“No,” the ocean elemental responded honestly. Waiting for a follow-up, John took one last look at her current form.

The clothes were discarded, leaving Undine in her usual shape. She was a slime girl of an intense blue colour. Although she hid her sensitive bits, or simply hadn’t formed them, her hourglass curves were on open display. Drops, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, steadily formed on the smooth surface of her skin and slowly ran down to her melded legs. Her hair was of a similar texture, unequally parted, fused and only splitting into a few separate tendrils in the lower half. Like most of her, her hair was translucent, barely obscuring the right eye, which it covered.

Four things interrupted her translucency: the dark blue, stubby horns that grew from her head, the Lover’s Will mark under her navel, the Lorylim scars that wound over the right side of her body in a contrasting, bright red colour, and finally, her eyes, a bright gold and staring ahead. Although blind, they still indicated where Undine’s attention was currently directed towards. A learned behaviour, initially meant to hide the fact that she only saw through others and kept to make communication a bit easier.

She was beautiful, primordial in some way; the melancholy written on her face a sign of steady thought, not sadness. Solemnly, she nodded. “Now. Conjure the choices, John.” An announcement that John followed by pressing that golden plus.

‘Pure water or two variants of water-shadow,’ John analysed the choices before him. ‘Guess that fits with Undine.’ For himself, the choice between the three was clear. Deathwave elemental sounded like it would make her a mixture of Siena and Gnome, fighting style wise. While having someone with good damage and high tankiness was always useful, it wasn’t worth giving up their main healer for.

Between truewater and abysstide, the latter just sounded more useful. Although John would have been a liar if he said his dick didn’t enter the equation. Having Undine be physically immense, even if her curves stayed in the current distribution, didn’t sound like it would please him. He had neither a fetish for giantesses nor vore, which was about all that could enable.

Shapeshifting though? Lots of applications for that in the bedroom. That aside, the liquid shadows sounded interesting. Healing at a distance had always been a utility John wished they had. They could somewhat mimic it by having Undine spawn another version of herself and have it go to where healing was needed to be done, but that was very limited in range, speed and the clone used itself up in the process.

It didn’t specify how her range would be improved, but John just trusted Gaia that it would be substantial. Aside from that, it didn’t seem like there would be any defining increase in power. The build in all three cases was the same as before, Undine switching between a supportive and an aggressive mode. The only real mix-up was that deathwave elemental switched the priorities around.

John was fine with this, Undine was a reliable part of the team and he didn’t need her combat style shift in some way. An improvement was welcome, that was all he was looking for in this evolution, and it seemed like he was getting it.

As much as he wanted to pick abysstide, though, this wasn’t his choice. He looked up from the windows and to Undine, who stood there. Only the drops on her glistening skin moved, slowly going down, to be absorbed back into her by the time they reached her knees. She was taking her time thinking about it.

“I choose abysstide,” she finally announced.

“You sure?” John asked, playing devil’s advocate. “This is the last choice you can make. If you are uncertain about this one, like you were going to Tier 2, and you find yourself tormented by this choice, there is no way – not even a reckless one – to fix it.”

“I am certain,” Undine answered swiftly. It must have been exactly this question that she had gone through during the last minute or so. “My problems then were because I was only useful in one way and it bothered me. It was exacerbated because I refused to talk about it, to solve it with all of you. Now I can be more than the one to heal you. My body can be a shield. If necessary, my Unleash allows me to take an offensive role.” It was a pleasure to listen to her explanation, the beautiful melody of her words intertwining with the calmness of her thoughts and her admission of past faults. “I will happily continue to be your healer. That aside, I don’t want to be as big as a lake.”

“Then we are in agreement.” John smiled and raised his hand. There was a tingle in his spine and a fidgeting in his entire body. Finalizing the evolutionary path of one of his elementals pleased his inner completionism and he couldn’t wait to see how it would pan out. A press of the button and the evolution was decided.

John looked up, just to see Undine dissolve into numerous drops, drifting upwards, which then proceeded to fade completely. “That’s not how that usually looks,” he remarked with a slightly worried tone. Something being different about the last evolution was expected, he just wished it didn’t start with her getting Thanos-snapped out of existence.

After several seconds passed with nothing happening, John walked up to where she had been. Testing, he waved his arm around, hoping to hit something invisible. Nothing was there. He looked at the floor, hoping to find something else there. The grass seemed to darken.

“Hey, did you schedule fuck-off rain for today?” Eliza asked.

Rather than waste his time looking at her, John just looked up to the sky. “No,” he answered, following the rapid development of a cloud above. He also took a step backwards, filling the hole in the circle he had left.

The cloud started as a small thing above them, but it only took twenty seconds for it to sprawl out to the edges of the Guild Hall barrier. It had the deep grey colour of a thunderstorm. Not a single bolt of lightning descended, however, nor were there any flashes within the cloud itself. It just roiled above, the surface first calming, then beginning to wave like an upside-down ocean.

It started to rain.

The first drop landed on John’s face, as these things tended to do when they got noticed. With the usual curiosity of man, he raised his hand and waited. Another drop landed on his hand. While it ran down like normal water, its colour was of a strong blue, with grey undertones. A second drop soon joined the first, then a third, fourth, fifth, and so on.

A steadily swelling sound echoed through the Guild Hall as the greyish blue rain grew from single drops to a steady fall to a thick curtain that consumed everything. John was drenched to the bone within seconds and was only able to see Rave and Aclysia at either side of him. Everyone else was a silhouette in the rain at best. The fact that it was day was almost completely hidden by the density of the clouds.

It continued to rain for five whole minutes. When John started to consider heading inside, he noticed another oddity. Where Undine had vanished, the water didn’t sink into the ground. Instead, it pooled into an invisible shape. Only now that a pair of feet had formed up to the ankles, did he notice that ongoing gathering. The beginnings of her mark helped in that endeavour.

Red, it started at her right ankle, and wound up her smooth leg as it formed. The colour seemed to have intensified, although that could have been an illusion thanks to the darker shade of her main body. As translucent as ever, the greyish blue water condensed into a more viscous fluid.

The shape of her body was much the same. Wide hips, narrow waist, large breasts, a wonderfully curvy body, as tall as she wanted it to be. The Lover’s Will mark was now pitch black, mainly rising from the background due to its lack of translucency. Right of it, the old scars wound on in their red. The lines were finer than before, branched out more and covered her right arm and leg completely where they had previously stopped at hips and shoulder. Despite that, they seemed less intrusive. John realized that they were as see-through as the rest of her, unlike before.

Her head formed last. Full lips, a tad darker than the surrounding area (and sharing their colour with her exposed nipples and pussy), a fine nose, elf-like ears, and eyes of a brilliant gold, surrounded by a normal, white sclera. All sat in a fair face, resting in the usual, melancholic expression.

A noticeable change wasn’t her eyes themselves, but the area around them. The darker, hardened slime that had mimicked lashes and brows looked like proper hairs now, their colour more focused on grey than blue, with a shade running around her eyes like professionally applied mascara. It gave her melancholy a slightly more sinister feeling, emphasizing the gothic image he had found so fitting earlier.

The clouds tore open, the rain going with them. As sunlight touched Undine, horns and hair explosively shaped from her head. The stubby, dark blue things had become completely black and appeared like antlers of a medium size.

While her hairstyle hadn’t changed much, its body-uniform colour had changed to the darker tones of her brows and lashes. Its melded texture had been softened up, making it somewhat more like regular hair, but still staying close to its liquid origin. The unequal parting and the covering of her right eye had been kept. Where, before, it had split in the lower half, it now fell down her back in a fashion similar to long, straight human hair, ending in slowly narrowing tips.

Undine blinked, narrowed her eyes and looked around. They gave her a few moments to orient herself, moments John used to feast his eyes on her nakedness. While she was no less shiny than before, her skin looking like she spent the whole day oiled up, it seemed the unsteadiness of her surface was now gone. It was all smooth and glistening, even her antlers had a dull reflection.

She answered her summoner’s gaze with her own. Her mind reached out to his, to see herself through his eyes. At the same time, he saw himself through hers. “I-I can see?” Undine sounded unsure, but as she moved her head and eyes more, the truth of that became undeniable.

John grinned, that piece of news made him happier than her new appearance. It had never hindered her (or him, for that matter), but the fact that she had been blind had never set well with him. “Seems so,” he announced and ran a hand through his hair to get some of the water out. “I might have to issue a public explanation because of this.”

“I am fucking SOAKED,” Eliza complained, marching over to Salamander and standing next to the endflame elemental’s heat. All of the oddly coloured raindrops, hanging around on the grass, went on to become the usual clear colour of water. “Did you have to do your ‘look at me, I am now a SUPER FUCKING HOT GOTH CHICK!’ transformation with that much of a giant scene?! Are you some sort of attention craving edgelord? Are you Siena?” The indirectly insulted shadow spirit just hissed at that.

“It was outside my control,” Undine assured, looking down on her hands and the marks on them. “The scars spread,” she remarked, only for those same marks to vanish up to her shoulder. Her eyebrows raised slightly, as she eliminated them completely. A moment later, they reappeared. Sliding over the affected areas, she added, “They became part of me. They no longer feel numb.”

‘Doesn’t exactly help the case against the edgelord image,’ John couldn’t help but joke to himself, even if he found this to be another good point overall. “You don’t have to display them anymore, if you don’t want to,” he told her, as Undine lowered her hand, indicating she was done testing.

She shook her head in denial. “They are part of my history and they don’t bother me anymore. I will keep them, be it only as a reminder.” She looked good with or without them, so John didn’t mind any of that.

All of a sudden, her surface changed entirely. The hairs went from blueish grey to plain black and her skin to a normal Caucasian skin colour, on the pale, northern side of things. While the red lines and the horns vanished completely in the moment, the brand above her cunt stayed in place. The colour of her eyes also shifted from gold to plain brown.

John went from looking at a very attractive slime girl to a very attractive goth girl, both naked, both with delicious bodies. The faking of the human appearance was complete, from the round ears, to the erect, pink nipples, the individual strands of her hair and the horny blush that took hold of all of her. His dick was entirely fine with this development.

Not that she stopped experimenting there.

First, Undine went through various adjustments of her body as it was. Bigger tits, smaller tits, tighter ass, rounder ass, jigglier ass, her height changing through all of it as well. When she was smaller than Sylph and equipped with her usual curves, her other features shifted as well. Hair became red and differed in the path of the individual strands, skin became green and ears extended back to the elvish form.

Rather than Undine in any of her forms, he was now looking at a copy of the goblin Worlina. Although the features were all the same, at least according to John’s memory, her expression and the way she stood were still clearly those of the abysstide elemental. “What a peculiar ability,” she said, her voice also the same, which caused a bit of an uncanny valley moment. “A peculiar ability,” she repeated but now she had the same voice, albeit not the tone, of the goblin as well.

While Undine continued to transform into several girls present and not present, Gaia, Eliza, Rave, Chemilia, to name only a few, John thought about the applications for this ability. In the bedroom, they were incredibly vast. Absolutely no question about it. In the real world, however, there was a hard limitation.

That being Undine’s acting ability.

Although she had a number of great attributes, Undine was neither used to acting nor did she have the Charisma to really pull that task off. At 20, she was above the normal human, but basically all of that was represented in her attractiveness and, probably, her natural ability as a songstress. When it came to her character, she had a hard time striking a conversation with anyone she didn’t know – and barely any interest in doing that either.

In other words, her ability to perfectly mimic the looks and voice of any female didn’t mean much if she couldn’t copy a person’s behaviour. There was also the issue of details. Birthmarks under the clothes, for example, couldn’t be accurately copied if Undine didn’t know about them. Using her in stealth missions was not the smartest of calls, therefore. Because most things in the Abyss were locked with magical signatures or just general seals, copying thumbprints or retina wouldn’t do much good either.

There could still be fringe applications. She just wasn’t the perfect infiltrator. That was fine, Siena was doing more than well enough on that front.

Undine morphed back into her regular slime girl shape. “It costs some energy to maintain transformation,” she explained. “Only a very small amount though, I could probably hold it for days. Although I am not sure I could maintain it while sleeping.”

“We’ll test that later,” John said. “First off I want to-“

“Can I suck your dick?” Undine interrupted him with a very sudden and very clear proposal. The question came along with her flowing in his direction. While her legs stayed where they were, melding together in the movements, her upper body went up to him. “I feel desperate for something inside me,” she confessed. No wonder, her Libido had more than doubled. A Stat increase fuelled by the fact that her overall scaling had gone from 6 to 7 per level.

The equally calm and desperate way in which she presented this request, the lust shimmering in her golden eyes, made it nigh impossible to refuse. “I would like to run a few practical tests first,” John somehow still managed.

“I can do both,” Undine assured and leaned up to kiss him. Two of her hands cupped his face while a translucent tongue parted his lips. Not that he put up any resistance to that, meeting the motion once it was inevitable.

The salty taste had dulled, but was still present behind a tempting, rich sweetness. At the same time, her body temperature was now normally that of a human, evident by her not thinking any of it and just kissing him as he was. A change to help in the copying endeavour, no doubt.

While her hands stayed on his face, a second pair started working on his trousers. While her lips were still pressed against his, a second pair pressed against the half-erect cock she pulled out of its confines. While her tongue still wrestled with his, a second one whirled around his head, quickly making sure he was fully erect.

John reached down and instinctively grabbed a horn of Undine’s double. His hand fit nicely between two splits of her antlers. ‘Alright, you can do both,’ he mentally conceded, and the abysstide elemental broke the kiss with a slight, victorious smile. John pressed his teeth together as the clone sunk down into a fantastically tight deepthroat. ‘The new shadow parts definitely had their effect,’ he thought to himself.

“What was it you wanted to test first, Master?” Undine asked, while her main body flowed back into its original position. The connection between herself and the clone separated entirely, leaving John with a completely formed slime girl that was sucking him off relentlessly. The telling difference was that only the true Undine had the Lover’s Will mark on her. Something they had to consider in combat.

“I want that…” Aclysia mumbled at the side. “So many ways to please Master.”

“IT’S NOT FUCKING FAIR!” Eliza shouted in agreement. “Fucking slime girl biology being able to split and all that bullshit!”

“Okay, before the first test I wanted to do,” John kept as calm as he could, “can you assume the goth girl form with only the clone – and keep the horns?” She could, which meant that John was now balls deep inside a big titty goth harem member. One that, it was important to mention, still let the original body standing two steps away feel all the pleasure.

Undine’s melancholic expression was broken by a steady panting, a clear liquid dripping from her crotch. Simply letting loose, John came deep into her throat. While Goth-Undine’s eyes rolled back and her moans vibrated in the slime around his cock, Real-Undine tried her best to keep her bearings while the seed-fuelled orgasm rolled through her.

It didn’t work all that well, her entire body trembled and the dripping of her cunt intensified.

“Next test,” John continued, almost to get a minor revenge on her. “Does your healing work like before?” It did, the green-tinged slime she created for healing hadn’t changed. She created it with some difficulty, given the nerve-wrecking situation she was in. “Alright, then let’s see the liquid shadow.” The last spurt of John’s semen vanished inside the Goth-Undine, allowing her to concentrate properly.

The abysstide elemental took a moment to gather her concentration, then raised her hand. From her palm rose a black mist. Some of it drifted out between her fingers and faded on its way to the ground, the rest condensed into a black sphere. Undine looked at it with as much interest as everyone else. Simply following her instincts, she grabbed the sphere. It connected to her body like any liquid. Then, she turned her hand.

It dropped very slowly, like liquid rubber, and didn’t disconnect from Undine’s hand at any point. When it touched the ground, it melded with the water spirit’s own shadow and stayed taut the way it was. In John’s stead, Aclysia walked over and tried to touch the liquid shadow. There was some initial resistance, like putting one’s hand into water, but Aclysia’s hand went through without a problem otherwise. When her hand exited on the other side, a small cloud of black mist followed after the motion. The connection seemed thinned out by this. After a couple more tests, the strand broke and dispersed completely into black mist.

John scratched his head with the hand not busy handling the pace at which the clone bobbed back and forth. “How would you heal at range with that?” he asked.

“I am not sure yet,” Undine answered truthfully. She seemed to have a rough idea though. Her gaze concentrated on Rave’s shadow. After a few moments, following a few conjuring movements by the abysstide elemental, parts of it began to rise. The liquid shadow stretched up by itself and changed. After a little bit, a third fully-formed Undine stood next to Rave. Given that she could form normal slime out of liquid shadow, she would also be able to produce healing slime.

It wasn’t quite the RPG-esque targeted person heal John would have wanted, but this had its own sets of advantages. Particularly after they did some more testing with this. Undine didn’t need to be the one seeing the shadow herself, she just needed to be able to pinpoint its location in relation to herself. Since she was already used to relying on others for her senses, she could use the eyes of all the other familiars to extend her reach by quite a bit.

What she could always do was spawn a clone of herself in the shadow of one of her fellow elementals. Their interconnection made this quite easy. When it came to the Artificial Spirits, there were some range complications after over a hundred metres. That was also her effective range when it came to relying on others. Which was quite massive, all things considered.

She didn’t need to create a full clone to heal either. After some experimenting, she got quite adept at creating regular slime tendrils from the liquid shadow in a short amount of time. Those could be used to defend someone or heal them. Like all of Undine’s abilities, the tentacles weren’t that great offensively, the best they could do was lash or strangle, but when it came to supporting, she had definitely stepped up her presence on the battlefield.

The one disappointment John found in the ability was that she couldn’t switch which one her original body was. It would have been pretty advantageous if she had been able to relocate her true self whenever it was harmed. However, that required body contact between herself and a clone – at least a split second of parts of them being melded.

Regardless, she had much higher Stats, had become basically every hot girl John could imagine (her shapeshifting was not limited to copying real people) and a much broader toolkit. Also, she was sucking his cock with more enthusiasm than ever, while having retained the ability to place her sensitive areas wherever she wanted.