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The Gamer Chapter 1604 – Raid and Adventures 1 – Lulu and Ehtra
🕑 Added 2024-01-19 17:47:28 +0000 UTC
‘Oh yeah, it’s all coming together,’ John thought with a smirk. 5 to 6 wasn’t the biggest increase he had gotten, but it was still a base increase of 20% and that was huge. He now had a comfortable lead on his Sustain Costs.
‘I could probably take in another Artificial Spirit – no, bad John!’ the Gamer cussed himself out before he could take that thought to whatever the logical conclusion was. ‘You have enough on your hands as is.’
“I hate these creatures, I hate these creatures, I hate these creatures,” Ehtra kept mumbling to herself. Her fingers were dancing on the keyboard at a rapid speed. After some initial struggles at utilizing technology, the First of Hatred had taken half a day to figure out all the basics. Apparently, the basics included mastering 10-finger typing.
Since then, Ehtra had been engaged in her trial run as his secretary. The results, after just one day of testing, were… inconclusive. John definitely felt the effect of her filtering things on his diminished workload, but it would take more time to say for certain if her effect was overall positive. If she was just turning people away without telling them where they actually had to turn to with their issue, then that was its own problem.
Not that John had noticed something like that. So far, Ehtra had repeatedly asked questions. Being disagreeable like she was, she had no qualms about constantly pestering him when it was about figuring things out.
John did not mind. For one, he had the Wisdom to realize that he had to answer these questions if he wanted a worthwhile assistant. More importantly, it was very difficult to be mad at the world when one got sucked off under the table – and the one asking was a gorgeous woman in a maid outfit.
Ehtra’s head snapped to the side. She stared over the rim of the rectangular glasses on her nose. The artificial light of screens bothered her and the orange tinted utensils helped her with that. “Can you tell your comfort hole to be less sloppy?!”
“No, I like it this way,” John answered, feeling Eliana’s agreeing hum around his cock. The pretty little psycho redoubled her efforts to be loud while she worked his manhood. John was entranced by the sight of her bobbing head for a few moments.
When he raised his gaze again, he could have sworn he caught Ehtra biting her lower lip. If she had done that, she stopped doing it so fast the Gamer couldn’t be completely certain. Considering other patterns of her behaviour, especially the current tensing and releasing of her crossed legs, he was certain that he was right, though. His new secretary was getting less and less guarded about her suppressed desires around him. If he just kept pushing, he was certain that she would come to him with it eventually.
Which was what John aimed for. He didn’t want to add Ehtra to his harem too quickly and he wanted this to be her choice as well. Both goals went against him making any direct moves.
“You’ll have to decide whether you want to tag along for the grinding session soon,” John pointed out.
Ehtra did not respond, instead concentrating on her typing. Her furrowed eyebrows betrayed distaste for whoever had written the message she was currently going through. Her expression rarely changed during work hours, John found.
There were two things Ehtra could do in the coming days. One was to come with them to the grind and the other to get more closely engaged with Nightfall and its anti-Lorylim activities. Of those there weren’t many. They still had no inkling where the Lorylim were hiding out, and where they thought they probably would be, Fusion’s borders did not yet expand to.
On that front, the issue was distance. Expanding from the east to the west coast came with a progressively bigger time cost. Annexing Amacat had been quite easy, driving to Boston was a simple affair, making it all the way to Salt Lake City to strike a deal with the Gobbo Nation was slightly more difficult. Six out of the seven immediate expansion targets, being the Upwest Corner, the Passamalar, Stadantoro, the Gobbo Nation, the Dust Walkers, and the Catto Nation, Fusion had amicable relations with.
In the case of the Upwest Corner, the Passamalar, Stadantoro and the Dust Walkers, this was due to the Hidden Tradition and its influence on Fusion internally and externally. All four of those guilds were the result of natives managing to deal with settlers and achieving a shared way of life that was neither European nor tribal.
The Gobbo and Catto Nations were… to put it bluntly, they were sex-fiends. Apparently, both had a much higher female birthrate and the goblins further boasted quite the fertility. Through diplomacy and being just very attractive, both nations had established themselves despite the numbers disadvantage that non-human races in the Abyss always had. They continuously managed to convince powerful men to marry into the nation.
John had gotten his fair share of offers since his appearance on the CPDI and SSSN channels, both of which were incredibly popular in these sexed-up nations. He had refused all of them, not for a lack of attractiveness, but because his principle of wanting to actually love his haremettes held true. On a more pragmatic basis, despite being impressively large for nations of Abyssal races, neither the Gobbo nor Catto Nation were powerful. Their exports were attractive female diplomats, which was valuable enough for a small nation trying to remain independent, but not of exceptional worth to Fusion. Still of worth, yes, but not enough for John to get hitched twice over.
In any case, John couldn’t just march into these nations, and even if he could, he currently lacked the time for it. The last of the seven direct expansion targets, the Fleshcleansers, were moving through too large a land area to take care of in one afternoon either. Technically, there was also the Wanderer, but that didn’t even have a centralized power that could be replaced. If Fusion ever expanded up north, that would be more colonization than conquest. A little bit of that had already happened, but not enough to grab the attention of this Wanderer.
As for Ehtra’s decision in all of this, if she decided to concentrate on Nightfall, she would be sent out to the Caribbean alongside other scouts and spies. The Middle American islands were one of the places that John found reasonably likely to be home to the primary Lorylim infestation. There was much room to hide and fester on individual islands and the Abyss in the area was thin. Until the advent of the Mobile Barrier, Abyssals had largely avoided being reliant on ships.
If she did take the assignment, she would be away for several weeks, scouting out islands. It could get her closer to Tiamat or it could be a gargantuan waste of time. Alternatively, she could stay boxed in with a bunch of highly hormonal (physical) twenty and thirty somethings. That only cost her two days in real time, but it was a declaration of intent. What did she care most about?
Of course, there was also option three, which was for her to sit around for those two days and continue getting her life in order. Considering everything else that was going on and who she was, John didn’t think that one even entered consideration.
After a long while of clacking keys being the only sound to accompany the slurping of Eliana’s enthusiastic mouth-work, the First of Hatred said a few words, “I’ll go with you.”
“Any particular reason?” John dared to probe.
Ehtra sent him an annoyed glare, but if those had been a reason not to pester her, then he would have never spoken to her at all. Leaning back in the office chair, large breasts propped up by crossed arms, she swivelled towards him. “I want to see what you are truly capable of. I want to check if you truly treat your harem as well as you claim. I don’t want to miss out on any upgrades you might unlock for me.” A sharp pause was taken. “Any of those good enough for you, Master?!”
She tried to make it sound mocking, but John just noted that she was using his title in that particular way again. “These are all good enough for me, Maid,” he returned with a broad smile.
Ehtra blushed. She didn’t blush a little bit, she blushed so intensely that he could see it through her dark tint, spreading from her cheeks to her cleavage. “Fucking idiot!” she suddenly cussed him out and turned back to her work. Clicking her tongue and snapping her teeth at nothing in particular, the grey angel pushed up her glasses. “Buy me more clothes!”
That seemed like a distraction. John let her have it. “I believe I have given you access to plenty of money already.”
“You – buy – me – more – clothes,” Ehtra spelled out word for word. “You have given me the choice to join your retinue, now treat me like a member of it! Do I have to spell everything out for you?”
‘No, but it’s more fun when you do,’ John thought and smirked. “Any kind of clothes you would like?”
“Things appropriate for the occasions,” Ehtra stated and waved off, as if she did not care.
Again, John let her get away with that one.
_______________________________________________________________________
“I wanted to see how you live,” Lulu complained.
The Heavenly Jade Empress was covered by the night, as were all of them. Was anyone watching and wondering why he put such a thick cover over his group? A question John had no answer to. ‘Even if someone does, they wouldn’t guess that I am here with her.’ “If you have the time later, we can do that after the grinding,” he promised her. “For now, let’s get inside.”
They stepped into the I.D. Gate. Lee lost no time filling the darkness with a vast, green plane. John couldn’t help but immediately identify some differences. Unlike Magoi, who had always created his planes as just that, flat planes, Lee’s greenery was interspersed with cliffs, concrete building shells, and hills.
“Is this… a deliberate difference?” John asked carefully.
Lee was already bashful about the scene, playing with one of the longer strands of her dark brown bangs. “No, it’s just… subconscious stuff coming through… Dad has better control of that…” As she spoke, she focused on the various buildings in the distance and made them disappear one by one.
“I do like it. Has more character than the empty plains.”
“The buildings are super out of place though!”
“I do also agree with that,” John told her.
While Lee cleaned up, the Gamer checked on his group of gorgeous companions. In total, there were 23 women and 1 man in here. Of those 23, 21 were haremettes proper, 1 was a trial haremette, and one was… whatever Ehtra was right now.
They were all happily chatting away. Well, not all, some preferred to stand by the sidelines by themselves, but by and large the group was happily chatting with each other. John’s second and third body were minorly involved here and there.
“Say, Ehtra, something on my mind… you know about IBMAs?” Momo started a particularly interesting exchange with the First of Hatred.
“The concrete pyramids the Illusion Barrier experts of this age use to enhance and anchor their powers?” Ehtra asked. “What about them?”
“I found a tiny version of something like it in Akkad when I was doing archaeology. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?” Momo did not sound particularly hopeful. Metra had been pretty useless when it came to these things, so her expectations were low.
“Ah,” Ehtra let out a disappointed noise. “You found one of Malakurst’s workshops.”
Momo hovered right up into Ehtra’s face. “Tell me everything you know, right now!” the knowledge-starved servant demanded.
Ehtra tilted back to regain some distance, but stood her ground and kept a plain expression. “It’s a short and sordid tale. Malakurst was a genius on the forefront of Illusion Barrier enchantments. He was taken into the court as Sargon the Fourth’s personal expert on the matter. He fashioned a great number of these small IBMAs, as you would call them. The other men of his craft did not take kindly to getting put out of business. They burned him in his workshop. All details of the craft were lost.”
“Fuck!” Momo cussed, causing everyone to turn to her. “What?”
Undine spoke for everyone when she said, “…I don’t remember the last time you cursed.”
“I, oh, uhm…” It seemed to dawn on the poncho-wearing fairy what had slipped past her pretty pink lips. She turned a pleasing shade of red and cleared her throat. “The destruction of knowledge annoys me, okay?”
“Better wash that fucking mouth out, you potty-holed whore,” Eliana laughed.
“I don’t want to hear that from you ever!”
“You just did, the fuck you gonna do about it, stutter-fly?”
“I do not stutter, you womb! Don’t you have some cum to beg for?”
“Rich coming from a woman so white she looks like she fucking paints her skin with it.”
“Are you this purple then because all of the choking stuck?”
“That sucks…” Lee mumbled, while Momo and Eliana engaged in one of the many verbal fencing duels that happened daily around the harem. Banter was just a fact of life around here and John loved it. “We’ll just have to keep trying to replicate it, I guess.”
“I hope you get that figured out,” John agreed. “How about we start with a house for us, though?”
“Right… alright, just got to visualize and…” Lee closed her eyes. A few moments later, a house popped into existence in a valley below.
John could immediately tell that it was cobbled together from various games. The architecture of the building was just too stylized to be based on anything real. The corners were a little too decorated, the windows a little too opulent, the colours a little too intense for any of it to exist in this shape in normal architecture.
That wasn’t necessarily to its detriment, though. The black-gold walls certainly fit with John’s preferred colour scheme and the estate was enormous enough to house the whole lot of them. ‘Amazing to think that I need mansions these days, we’d be beyond cramped in a normal house.’
They went inside and checked out the rooms. There were some oddities about the inside. Some of them were from Lee not fully understanding proper room layouts, others were her mind slipping on a structure this enormous and thus creating things like unevenly spaced lighting or a suddenly changing pattern in the wallpaper. Those little kinks were ironed out with time though.
There were three bedrooms. One with the harem bed, a perfect replica of the real thing, taking up a two-stories-tall hall, one for Ehtra and one for Lulu, should she want it. There was plenty of workspace inside, with functioning internet, baths with running water, recreation space, all of the commodities and luxuries they had grown accustomed to.
“Alrighty,” Lulu threw herself on the cushions of an enormous couch, “now show me the harem life! I was getting all giddy thinking about how you people do your day by day stuff, when you should be so distracted by being around each other.”
John grinned. “We’ll start with the boring part.”
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