Chapter 145

--- 23rd Night ---

Something brushed along my shin as I lay under the covers on my bed. At first, Zoe’s tail crossed my mind, but her presence was missing at my side, along with Amber and Azura.

As I snapped my eyes open, I found myself in the dream world. It was Gemma sitting by my legs, brushing her soft fingers along my skin with a mischievous smirk, watching me closely. She leaned slightly forward, showing a generous view of her enormous cleavage, squeezed by her purple dress - one she hadn’t worn during our last few meetings.

“You know it’s creepy when you watch me while I sleep,” I murmured, relaxing. My gaze flicked to her gorgeous face for a moment before being drawn down to her tits again. “Wait, what?!” I gasped, sitting up suddenly before she could answer, as I realized what she was actually doing.

I reached out, trying to brush her arm, but my fingers passed through her body as if she were a ghost.

Gemma giggled, then pressed her hand down. The fingers that had just been brushing my leg passed straight through it.

“I swear I could feel you touching me,” I said.

“I can’t touch you,” the blonde replied. “But this can,” she added, summoning a bit of mana and pushing it into my shoulder - something I could actually feel.

“Hey, we can have some fun this way,” I said. With the two achievements I had completed before - one requiring me to bring a woman to orgasm using my mana, and the other doing the same to myself - we could still affect each other, even if we couldn’t physically touch.

“As if you don’t have enough fun during the day,” Gemma replied with a smirk.

“I can’t have it with you.”

Gemma snorted, leaning back. The tops of her breasts were still clearly visible, though not pushed together quite as much. “How did the talk with Whitney go?” she asked.

“She didn’t tell me anything. I need to bring her something to write with. And she wants to take off the mana-blocking collar so she can spend time with her dragon - apparently she misses it.”

“Would you do it?” Gemma asked.

“What?”

“I’m asking for your opinion. You’re the one talking with her. You had sex with her, and you’ve seen that dragon. If it were your choice, would you let her take it off?”

“Probably not,” I replied, frowning. “She might want to send a message with it. That would explain why she wants something to write with so badly.”

“If that’s her big escape plan, I’d be disappointed,” Gemma said.

“So what do you think she wants to do?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Gemma shrugged. “I don’t know much about her class. I don’t even know if she has just one or more. But I’d guess she’ll try to contact someone in another way.”

“It might be hard to get anything out of her if I refuse to take off that collar.”

“That’s why we’ll let her do it.”

“You actually want her to contact someone?” I asked.

“I’ll let her try.”

“And intercept it?”

“Or track down who she contacted,” Gemma replied.

“How are you going to do it without knowing how she plans to do it?”

“Magic,” Gemma replied, chuckling.

I groaned at her lame joke.

“I can explain the details, but they’re quite boring,” she added. “In short, Sage will seal the area with a special enchantment, and nothing should pass through it.”

“Okay,” I replied. “We need to be careful not to make her suspicious when we agree.”

“You need to be careful,” Gemma corrected me. “Don’t agree immediately. Try to get as much as you can from her. But in the end, she probably expects we’ll try to intercept it or stop her, so it’s a test of who’s stronger and smarter.”

“And are you sure that’s you?”

“I’m definitely better prepared, with her locked in a basement without anything,” Gemma replied. “And even if she manages to contact someone, we’ll know. Then we’ll just need to move her to a different place.”

“And if someone comes to try and save her, you’ll be waiting, ready to capture them?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Gemma replied.

“Okay… Is there something I should ask her about? In return for taking her collar off?”

“Let her show some initiative. And don’t agree the next time you talk to her. She’s the one locked in a dark basement, let’s keep the pressure on her and be patient. If she doesn’t come up with anything useful, I have a few questions I might want to ask her.”

“Like?”

“If there’s someone working for me she was paying for information.”

“Now that you mention it,” I replied, “do you know if Sage hired someone to keep an eye on me?”

“Probably,” Gemma said. “You caught her interest.”

“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.”

“Sage can be problematic, but having her as a friend is better than not.”

“Do you think she would hire Marcy to spy on me?”

“Hmm… no,” Gemma shook her head. “Like I said, you caught her interest. And she knows we’re hiding things from her. She’ll want to uncover them herself, not pay someone else to do it. It’s a matter of ego.”

“She tried to pay me to find your secrets,” I replied.

“She was testing you, to see if you’d betray me.”

“Does she play games like that with everyone in her life?” I asked.

“Her life is a game to her. With unlimited lives,” Gemma snorted.

“What?”

“You’d better start playing too, or you’re going to lose,” the blonde replied, not explaining what she meant by the comment about unlimited lives.

“Playing with Sage sounds like playing with fire,” I murmured.

“Sometimes it might be worth getting burned,” Gemma replied with a smirk.

“Are you trying to set me up with Sage?” I asked, frowning.

“Who said anything about setting you up?” the blonde snorted. “You think about sex all the time.”

“It’s hard not to, when you wake up with amazing tits in your face,” I replied, letting my gaze drop to her cleavage.

“You’d want to see more, wouldn’t you?” Gemma asked, wiggling her shoulder just a tiny bit, causing her boobs to move.

“Not only see,” I replied, raising my gaze to her face. “Someone’s in a flirtatious mood today.” For the last few meetings, she hadn’t been flirting as much as at the start, but apparently something had changed, or maybe she was just in the mood that day.

“I realized something,” Gemma said, pausing briefly before continuing, “It’s not worth denying the inevitable.” She stared at me with her big blue eyes expectantly, not with a smile, but something closer to worry or hesitation, which was unusual for her.

“Inevitable?” I asked, surprised. “I didn’t know you thought like that about me.”

“Isn’t that what you want?” Gemma asked.

“I’ve made it quite clear from the start. You’re the one building walls between us. Magical ones,” I added.

“Maybe it’s time to tear them down.”

“It’s quite simple, you know where to find me,” I replied.

“Nothing is ever simple,” Gemma said. “I can’t meet with you.”

“We don’t have to meet in Ortas,” I replied. “We can find a place where no one would see us together,” I added, leaning slightly toward her, closing the distance.

“Maybe you should avoid Sage,” Gemma chuckled. “She’s going to eat you alive.”

“What does she have to do with it?” I asked, confused.

“That’s the whole point. You don’t understand so many things. And you don’t know so much…”

“You could just tell me,” I said.

Gemma looked at me thoughtfully before shaking her head slightly, waves of blonde hair shifting around her perfect features.

“You want to play games like Sage?” I asked.

“Birds of a feather flock together.”

“What if you lose?” I pressed.

“In some games, everyone can win,” Gemma replied, almost purring.

“Even if there are more than two players?”

Gemma sighed, a brief grimace crossing her face, mentioning that clearly hadn’t been the best idea.

“I’m quite aware of your lifestyle,” she said, the flirtation gone from her voice.

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Apparently not,” she replied, then immediately added, “Your mana increased again?”

“Yeah, I completed The Main Goal Two.”

“Which one was it?”

“Can’t you check it yourself?”

“Didn’t I mention I can’t access your achievements?” Gemma asked. “I can only see that you have the skill, not the list.”

“It was one to reach a hundred orgasms through sex,” I said. “Now I have to do it fifty more times, and I bet I’ll get the same reward again.”

Gemma snorted, shaking her head. “That’s starting to get absurd. Explains why the Greatest Mage was so strong.”

“A lot of mana isn’t everything,” I replied.

“Of course. But it’s something no one else can change. You can improve how you use it, your control, or your martial arts.”

“To be as good as Sage?”

“No,” Gemma replied with a frown. “In her case, she… No one can catch up to her in that regard.”

“Because of her classes?”

“Mostly her past,” Gemma replied. “But her martial skills are useless if you can keep slamming your abilities into her without letting her get close.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“Given your hesitation about Sage, you seem very curious to get to know her better,” Gemma replied, raising an eyebrow.

“I’d like to know who I’m dealing with,” I shrugged.

“Sage had it even worse than Mari,” Gemma said.

“But Mari was a-”

“No,” Gemma cut me off with a smirk. “I’ve already told you too much. No more questions about Sage.”

The kitsune had been a slave, and I wondered if the same had happened to Sage. But maybe something even worse had happened. Still, remembering Mari in that cage - naked, malnourished, and beaten - it was hard to imagine what could be worse.

“Why did you choose Mari when you were secretly buying me a slave?” I asked, changing the subject, as it reminded me of the argument with the kitsune earlier.

Gemma frowned, confused. “She’s a strong ice mage, perfect for keeping you safe. Why?”

“Maybe she is strong, but her personality is awful, and dealing with her is exhausting.”

“Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“What if that horse is trying to bite me?”

“I’d guess you like things like that,” Gemma snarked, a proud smirk on her face.

“Very funny,” I rolled my eyes exaggeratedly at her lame, vampiric joke.

“What is she doing?” Gemma asked. “Zelda should finish healing her soon, right?”

“Yeah. She’s an ungrateful bitch, and besides constantly thinking I just want to have sex with her, she apparently hates me because I freed her.”

“Huh… Maybe she’s having a hard time finding herself as a free person for the first time in her life.”

“First time?”

“She was born a slave,” Gemma replied.

“How does that even work?”

“If your slave gives birth, the child is yours, and you can enslave it.”

“That’s fucked.”

“That’s why I banned the enslavement of people under sixteen in Tenebre, but it’s still legal in other guilds.”

“Didn’t you say you can’t remove slavery just by changing the law?”

“I can’t remove it completely, but I can make changes. One after another, pushing things further. But I doubt I’ll ever be able to remove it entirely.”

I wondered if that could be something that connected Sage and Gemma. If Sage had been a slave, and Gemma was trying to fight against it, that could be a shared goal, and a good foundation for their relationship.

“Are there any more women causing trouble in your life?” Gemma asked, giggling.

“There’s a certain blonde who teases me all the time.”

“Teases how?” Gemma purred.

“She haunts me in my dreams every night.”

Gemma laughed. “She’s the woman of your dreams?”

“Something like that. But she doesn’t want to meet me in real life.”

“Maybe she wants to, but can’t,” Gemma replied.

“For someone as powerful as you, there shouldn’t be anything stopping you.”

“There are things that are even out of my control.”

What could be stopping her from meeting me? Hiding from other people was just an excuse, and there was something more to it, but what? If only she would explain instead of staying secretive and avoiding the question.

I stared at her, wondering how to break through the walls she kept building between us and make her open up. Maybe then we could deal with whatever was stopping her. But that was hard when we couldn’t even really meet.

Gemma sighed deeply, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“You need to go to sleep?” I guessed.

“That’s enough haunting your dreams for tonight.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” I replied.

“Good night, Tobias,” Gemma said with a smile.

And just like that, the talk was over because she decided so, and sleep consumed me again.