It's always just work by this point

Michel left shortly after that. Despite the fact that both Grace and Michel had their own work and jobs to attend to, they both left before finishing their shift and didn't come back for the rest of the day. John continued on with his workout; he didn't really have anything else to do other than farm his stats and keep his hands wrapped up whenever he was grinding his Infused Strike. Now that he knew that they could inexplicably start glowing whenever he used the ability, he had to start making sure that he was being careful with how he used it. That little surprise came with a lesson that he tried to apply to all of his abilities. If some abilities could leave little physical clues to the way he was casting magic, then at the very least he could have figured out how Cassandra found out about his powers and prevented it from happening again.

Once again, though, he didn't get very far with his practice. He spent some time with the punching bag again and did manage to do some work with the weights, but all he really got to show for it, other than a sudden doubling of the amount of weight he could lift, was a single point shoved into just one of his stats.

+1 Agility

It was almost excruciatingly slow by this point, but at least he was making progress. He wasn't sure how long that would last since leveling methods in video games had a tendency to vary. The one common thing they all seemed to hold for the most part was that the easy stuff that a player could do to level up would eventually just stop working. He was already starting to dread the part where he would inevitably stop making progress. It was like he could feel it happening, though that could have just been imagined. Every little thing, like working out or studying, could have very easily just stopped helping him along, and he would have been stuck and left to find some other way to continue on farming his stats and leveling up.

Thankfully, after the events at his school, the barriers seemed like the right answer for that.

Now it seemed like he could go out and fight someone or something other than Michel in the ring and gain some actual experience whenever he truly won a battle. That last fight he had won against Urga earlier that day had granted him nearly eighty experience, and that was just against one opponent! Some of his very first quests hadn't even granted that much! Even that seemed to be quickly changing, though. His quests were certainly getting harder and were granting better rewards for the completion of them, so not all hope was lost, thankfully.

He just had to make sure that he didn't die whenever he went raiding from now on.

Dina chewed him out briefly before he left, and he took it reluctantly. In a way, he did feel like he was the one who had chased Michel and Grace off from work that day, so he was fine with letting her yell at him. It also meant that he got to listen to her ridiculous accent and try to make sense of her curt and nearly incomprehensible sentences. He wasn't about to say it, but listening to Dina talk brought on a kind of nostalgia for him. She reminded him of a character from a game he used to play where he got to kill hordes of Nazi zombies for fun. There were multiple moments where he had to physically stop himself from getting up to give Dina a great big hug or hold his tongue whenever he went to mimic her heavy accent.

Thankfully, Dina didn't seem to catch on, and John went on to live another day.

John didn't bother walking home after work. The second he was done, he just called for a cab. He had the money to shell out for it, and made a note to thank Vanessa for that later on, so he just took the option that seemed like it would be safest for him. He wasn't going to risk being followed again or running into Cassandra on the street, certainly not while he still had the Soul Torn status effect. It hadn't gotten bad yet, but he wasn't going to take any chances with something that had no timer on it.

Eventually, night fell, and his taxi driver dropped John off at home with a grunt and a groan after a long day of driving around. There were no lights on when he arrived, at least none that he could see, and for a second he felt worry begin to bubble up in his chest at the thought of Cassandra's lackeys visiting his house too. There were no noises or signs of movement. His mother wasn't stumbling around drunk after another long day without him, the television in the living room was black and empty, and the house even smelled like it might have been slightly cleaned. There were no longer any thick, wafting aromas of sex and sweat in the air. Instead, the house had a slight tinge of lemon and chemicals in the air that gently eased John's senses into adjusting to his familiar, homely environment once again as he began searching around for his mother. Thankfully, he didn't have to go very far; once the front door closed behind him, he heard her speaking up from the kitchen.

"John, baby, is that you?" her soft, velvety voice called out to him before he even began walking over to her. He didn't give her much of an answer in the form of words; he was too busy letting his heart settle back down from the things his imagination had begun to cook up. She sounded fine, and when he finally found her, it quickly became apparent that the house wasn't the only thing that had cleaned up a little bit. His mother was still maintaining the habits she had picked up since they started their new relationship and remained mostly naked for him even when he wasn't there.

What little bits of clothing Brenda had put on over her hourglass figure proved to just be the simple remnants of an outfit that she outgrew a long time ago. The first thing John noticed when he walked into the kitchen was a short, silken, pink robe, and somehow, it did nothing to cover up the most intimate parts of her body. If anything, all the robe actually did do was to simply wrap around the width of her waist and stomach, even while tied shut. It barely hung from her shoulders, and it most certainly did not hang over her large, pale, heavy breasts that were just left out in the open for him to ogle. That didn't even get to everything on her lower half that the robe failed to cover when it ended at her hips. If anything, her 'top' was short enough that the robe could have been more accurately referred to as a tiny shirt than what it was actually supposed to be, and John considered the idea that she had altered it or bought it that way just for that revealing purpose. Below the bundle of soft, pink cloth a pair of jet black, skintight stockings dug into to the thickness of her womanly thighs and called attention to how her supple skin genuinely bulged out around the hem of the translucent cloth. Her long, matching, black heels clacked on the linoleum floor as she rose up from the kitchen table on legs so long that they seemed endless to him and strutted over to John in the kitchen entrance. Her large, motherly hips swung side to side as she moved, tearing his attention down to the way her garter belt dug into her waist, thighs, and plump, round ass with its thin strings and framed the way her bare, eager mound started to glisten and drip when she stepped too close to her son.

He watched as her full, pillowy lips parted and exhaled with the start of an impatient and needy moan, cresting over the brink of calling out his name for the first time that night... and then she stopped short. Her expression hardened and furrowed as she leaned over her son with her added height, and stopped just short of planting the 'welcome home' kiss she had been planning on seducing him with. They didn't reunite as physically as either one of them had been hoping as his mother just stared at him with a sudden flush of worry.

"Are you feeling okay, baby? You really don't look well," she said, and John frowned as her seductive mood completely disappeared. That was disappointing. Her motherly tendencies slowly slipped back out as she began brushing little locks of his hair out of the way and taking his temperature with the back of her hand. She even let little 'coos' of worry slip out about how cold he felt or how ill he looked. In an instant, she just started taking care of him, going as far as to push him down to sit in one of the kitchen chairs before she really went off.

"No, mom. I'm fine," he said and caught her by the arm before she could run to make tea or get him a blanket. It was a slow process to ease her worries into the background once more, but he was all too happy to start it by groping as much of her ass as he could reach with just one of his hands. With a simple squeeze, he was left groaning from his own desire as her butt filled up his grasp and then some. His fingers sunk almost completely into her rear, while each digit aggressively caressed and mauled her behind like all he could do was just watch as his hands struggled to grasp again and again at perfection before it just slipped and spilled from his fingers. It didn't matter how many times he tried... there was always just more for him to enjoy. "It's just the side effects of some spell..."

"A spell did this to you?" Well, that wasn't what he was aiming for, yet his mother couldn't seem to bring herself to pull away from him. Even as she spoke and the mood seemed to get further and further away, her body just kept sinking to the rightful place he wanted her to be in on his lap. She moved right to where he wanted her, where he could just reach her with ease. "Maybe you shouldn't be messing around with all of this magic stuff-"

"No, mom. It was a part of a spell cast by someone else," he said, and his mother all but shrieked at that.

"SOMEBODY ELSE DID THIS TO YOU?!" So much for easing her worries. "WHY?!"

It took a little after that to explain to her about the book and all of the things he found in it. He tried avoiding mentioning any of the times where Cassandra nearly killed him with it, but his mother wasn't having it. In time, she got every last piece of information out of him, and the idea of actually getting to have sex that night seemed to eventually vanish before his very eyes.

"If she's actually trying to kill you over a book, then maybe you really ought to stop with all of this magic stuff, John," his mother said when John had finally finished explaining why he had the Soul Torn status effect.

"Even if I thought that would help, by this point, I can't bring myself to stop!" John shook his head as he spoke. "I want to keep doing this! This is different! This is me now!" He gestured down at his body with both hands, and his mother, as if realizing how scarcely dressed she was, tried to pull the robe tighter over her form. It didn't work, if anything, it just squeezed her breasts together right in front of him. "Besides, I've only survived all of her attacks because of magic! It's keeping me alive!"

The look his mother gave him told him she wasn't convinced. She clearly didn't like his new abilities, especially if he was constantly on the verge of dying because of it.

"Look, it's fine. Even if I get in trouble, from now on, I have a new ability that will allow me to escape," he said and watched as something in his mother's expression changed. He might have found something. "I can create these things now. They're like... making a portal to another world that I can escape to at any point. That's what I did the last time, and now I can just do it whenever I want!"

"A portal... really, John?" her voice practically bled skepticism as he talked. He clarified after that that it was less of a portal and more that he just appeared in it, but it didn't help at all with his argument. By that point, he wasn't sure if anything would have.

Unless...

"I could show you..." It made sense. After all, his plan had been to go back there, not only to continue with his newest quest but also to try and work on leveling up. This way, he could have just shown her the area that he could retreat to, and hopefully, that would erase her worries. There was a long pause as the two of them stared at each other with his mother sitting mostly naked in his lap. They sat there silently for what felt like a whole minute before, eventually, she nodded. "Okay... but it may be difficult... The last time I went there, I had to challenge one of the tribe member's to take her place just so they wouldn't kill me." He didn't give her a chance to freak out about that one. "I'm one of them now, so it should be fine for me to go... It's you I'm worried about." Again, they fell silent. Brenda's brow dipped and furrowed as they sat there. He could practically see the way her mind threatened to exaggerat-

No. There probably wasn't any way she could have exaggerated the danger that he faced earlier that day. The problem was just showing her that he didn't face it now.

"You fought one of them... so that they wouldn't kill you? Did you kill... you said it was a her? Did you kill her?" Brenda asked, and John slowly shook his head. It took a couple more minutes, but he eventually explained the whole enslaving process that he had put Urga through after beating her. His mother seemed to slowly catch on and understand, and after a couple moments, she even managed to get up and walk away saying, "I think I have an idea," before she eventually came back with a twist of her own.

John could feel his pants tightening as his mother slowly walked back over to him and sat down in his lap again. Her eyes blinked a couple times in rapid succession as her mound slowly squeezed and spread around the width of the rapidly hardening bulge in his pants, and she grinned lustily down at him. He could see that it was already starting to become a trend among the women around John, and it could have been used to tease him, but... he wasn't about to put an end to it. Why would he?

"I love you, mom." A little giggle escaped the MILF as John wrapped his arms around her back and held her close for a couple of seconds before she spoke up too.

"I love you, too... sir." The last word was emphasized by a sudden click as she leaned in to kiss the side of John's neck and clasped her own black, leather collar shut around her neck.