The Mall

“Okay, so, what exactly is it that we’re gonna be doing?” John asked.

The group had returned to the Order’s manor, specifically the small training courtyard, after leaving Asta’s workshop. At which point, Moira had split off from them because of her Warden-ly duties, or some such. John had been listening, but had been more than a little distracted by Velvet, ever since they’d left the workshop.

She was… sulking? Or maybe angry? John couldn’t say for certain, he simply lacked the experience with… well, any social context, actually, not just girls. She’d not spoken to John since leaving, and seemed almost distracted, or preoccupied with something. He could tell she wasn’t happy, by any definition of the word, but he also had absolutely no clue on how the hell he could fix this with her.

It was also entirely true that he was somewhat enjoying the distracted and mildly angry pout that filled her cute face. He felt guilty for it, but… come on, she was adorable when she pouted. What was he meant to do?

“Right, so,” Erica began, drawing John away from his contemplation of Velvet’s pout, “I had figured we’d start with some basic fighting skills to gauge where you are. But then I realised that we should be in a dupe barrier for that, so we don’t break anything. Guessing you’ve not made a barrier before, right? I mean, you probably have some idea about barriers, since you got in here.”

John nodded. “Oh yeah. I know some of it, I think? There are three types, one happens naturally, one’s maintained, and then the others just, like, copy wherever you are.”

“Yeah, exactly. The manor is one of the maintained ones. Usually, you can’t open another whilst inside another barrier, but this courtyard is one of the cleared spots for barrier practice. Some kinda special fateweaver stuff. For now, I just want you to open a normal one for us, so we can practise against some fakes in there without messing with any of the manor’s stuff.”

“Uh, okay. What do I do then? I know that to enter into here, I did this whole hand thingy?” John lifted his hand and clenched then opened his fist.

“…Okay, you realise you have to do it with the intent of opening a dupe barrier, right?” Erica asked him, one eyebrow raised.

“Oh, uh… okay. My bad,” John replied, very self-consciously.

He replicated the hand gesture, feeling slightly foolish in the chamber of his own mind as he intently focused on the idea of opening an alternate reality barrier.

A notification window appeared in front of him.

Open Barrier Dungeon?

That sounded about right. He tapped ‘Yes’.

Immediately after, another window appeared.

Nearby Allies auto-joined to Party: Velvet, Erica.

Velvet startled slightly, while Erica simply looked at the air in front of her, grinned slightly, and said, “Cool.”

Opening Barrier Dungeon

“Wait, what’s that mean?” Erica asked, a look of confusion entering her eyes as she looked to John in the moment that the world stopped, shattered, and then drained away to darkness.

He wasn’t actually waking up, but that’s kind of what it felt like to John. Absolute darkness, followed by a slow building lighting that showed his surroundings. A good thing, too, because those surroundings had changed entirely from the manor’s courtyard.

A vast expanse of white tiled flooring stretched into the distance with stainless steel railings holding glass panels along the balconies up above. Unless he was wrong, John was pretty sure he was in… a mall? The sudden flickering of neon signs as they illuminated confirmed it for him, though it failed to reduce his confusion in the slightest. Why was he in a mall, randomly? Come to think of it, where were the girls?

He looked around himself to check, but he was definitely alone. With curious yet cautious steps, he slowly began to walk around the eerily empty mall.

All of ten steps later, several floor tiles rose a few inches off the ground, and out trundled several… roombas? The hell? John’s confusion then dissipated as a message popped into the air before him.

Defeat all enemies to proceed. Enemies remaining: 3

John looked for a moment at the slowly trundling robot cleaners as they slowly advanced on him. They didn’t seem to have any kind of weapon and- Yep. Not only was their only attack to bump into something, but they also bumped into each other, and apparently dealt friendly fire damage. John slowly moved his eyes from the sedately moving vacuums to his hand, and the twin-blade axe that popped into existence, shining with a wicked gleam. Then he looked back at the roombas with a raised eyebrow and a slightly guilty smile. He probably shouldn’t be so enticed by the thought of doing ****, but… try though he might, he couldn’t get rid of the smile. He felt like a kid on Christmas. He stepped slightly closer to the nearest roomba, the other two having bumped away and gotten lost somehow, and raised the axe slightly.

There was a brief pause as he considered moderation in his attack, since these were very clearly not powerful foes. Then, unable to resist the allure, he raised the axe up high above his head using both hands and, with an air of slightly manic excitement, slammed it down into the robot. It glimmered in the sharp white lights of the mall as it arced downwards, then it crashed into the metal top of the robot. There was a resounding noise as it made contact, cleaving the top in two and continuing down to crush the circuitry within. It was only after it had crunched all the way through the little robot cleaner that it slowed, skidding slightly across the smooth white tile beneath.

28 Damage

Immediately after finishing his act of immensely satisfying yet senseless ****, John felt a little bad for murdering the tiny little robot so very severely, and looked guiltily at the other two. ‘Maybe I could just tap them instead…’ he thought to himself.

’I’ll give you a special reward if you make it past 40 damage.’

He stared a long moment at the floating message. Another one popped up.

’A special reward which I guarantee Velvet will love.’

He looked from the message to the little robots, then lifted the axe up again and walked towards the next one.

Critical Hit! 42 Damage

Two brutal robot murders later, John lifted his axe back up and willed it into his inventory, then looked at the pop-up that’d appeared.

’Hehe. I knew that the promise of Velvet’s approval would get you to do it. Well, a deal’s a deal, here you go.’

Without any special fanfare or the usual achievement or quest reward screen, something popped into John’s inventory. He quickly opened the item description.

…John hated how adorable he found that, considering how much he had just been destroying the actual enemies so savagely. Closing the windows open in front of him, he looked around for any changes to the scenery, and when it was clear that he was still in the same clinically white, empty corridor space, he sighed a little, and continued walking, making sure to walk away from the direction he’d come from.

Eventually, the corridor opened up into a large atrium with a glass dome roof. Not that anything was beyond the glass. Just a plain, cloudless blue sky.

His attention was drawn away by a stringent chime that sounded throughout the corridors of the mall. The shutters that were covering all of the storefronts rose in response to the chime, and John paused a moment to look at the stores suddenly available.

There were over a dozen in this atrium alone, and they seemed to lack any kind of concurrent theme to them. There was a flower store, a shoe store, a bookstore, something that was either a gym or an exercise equipment store. They all looked rather inviting, but John had other things on his mind after a familiar soft feminine-sounding yelp sounded from one of the storefronts.

Velvet.

With an unexpected sense of urgency and laser focus, he made a beeline for the entrance, taking in the front as he did so with a sense of immature discomfort. Mora’s Secret. Of course, it just had to be a lingerie store, didn’t it?

He tore into the store, disregarding the assorted displays of various types of feminine underwear, materialising his axe into his hand as he ran. Almost immediately on entry, a pop-up appeared in the air in front of him.

Defeat all enemies to proceed. Enemies remaining: 7

That was over twice as many as he’d fought before. Maybe each encounter scaled according to the amount of people nearby? A thought for another time, as he weaved his way through the racks towards the sounds of fighting he could hear. He drew closer, and began to register individual sounds within the clamour. There was Velvet’s voice raising in the occasional cry of anger, as well as soft noises of exertion from her that shouldn’t have made him feel so horny right now. But there was also some kind of cracking noise that tended to follow her cries, and most bizarrely… some kind of watery squishing noise? Not quite squelching, though. He couldn’t quite pin those down until he rounded a false wall and finally found the fight.

Velvet was stunning. John felt a little guilty for thinking it, but goddamn was she hot right in that moment. Her jacket was completely gone, her jeans were almost more hole than fabric, the fabric of her t-shirt beneath was dotted with holes melted through it. Beautifully pale legs were set in a confident fighting stance, disregarding the damage to her clothing. In one hand, she wielded one of the strangest weapons John had ever seen, some kind of whip made of segments of wood, whilst the other hand was drawn back with the palm facing her foes. Her magical gaze was fixed in front of her, and John saw a hyperfocus in those eyes which simultaneously frightened him, impressed him, and made him unreasonably aroused.

The whip-thing that Velvet wielded explained the cracking noise, and the enemies she faced explained the strange moist noises. They were… well, they were mannequins. Made of slime. Wearing lingerie. John had seen some really fucked up shit, and some really weird shit, since falling into the Abyss, and magic, but… these were somehow extra weird to him. Even more so was the fact that he didn’t find them attractive. They had all the right curves and such, but… maybe it was the fact they were trying to kill Velvet. Or… maybe it was because Velvet was so much more alluring to him right now than they could ever manage.

He threw that thought aside as he charged into the nearest slime, his axe cleaving straight through its gelatinous neck and slamming into the torso of the next with a sticky squelch.

Critical! 28 Damage
18 Damage

He tugged the axe back to him, or tried to, but it was stuck in the slime. His other hand moved to grab the handle of the weapon, and yanked it out with another disturbingly wet noise.

“John?!” The Gamer turned to face her, only to have a pair of arms slide across the skin of his neck, wrapping him in an embrace from behind. There was a moment that John panicked, trying to think of how to get out of the hold. He had just decided to try to use the axe to strike underneath his arms. Then Velvet acted instead, her eyes narrowed in anger. Her whip snapped out, once, twice, and a third time, all almost faster than John could track. Then, the arms that had been around him fell to the floor, severed just above where the elbow would be, and John moved to the side as the slime collapsed to its knees with the whip encircling its head. As it struck the ground, Velvet flicked her wrist, and the noose snapped shut, slicing through the creature’s neck and returning to the blind badass.

She looked up at him and then shouted, “Look out!” as she looked past him. Feeling infinitely less graceful than the display of precision and dexterity she’d just shown, he spun around and ducked, blocking the slime arm-bludgeon that was descending on where his head had been with the flat of the axe’s blade. There was a moment of panic, as he felt his muscles giving out under the unexpected strain added to the existing burning that had been growing as he fought. Then… a snake flew past his head, wrapped around the slime’s neck, latched its teeth in, and remained there, tightening the coil until the slime dissolved.

Despite how distracting the sight of the scantily-clad blind girl was, not to mention the unexplained snake, the Gamer part of John’s mind was still running as usual. That was four enemies down, maybe five if he killed the one that got his axe stuck, and as long as Velvet killed the one she had been fighting when he charged in. That meant there were only two or three left. He turned to her again, and the enemies that were between them. Only two of them were in sight, so he must have managed to kill that other one. He pulled the axe up, then swung wildly as he stepped in close to the nearest slime. John could feel the swing go astray before it hit the slime, just because his arms felt really fatigued, his muscles beginning to scream from the sudden usage as the adrenaline rush started to fade. It struck low, cleaving in a downwards diagonal, through the chest and into the abdomen of the slime instead of a clean kill, and got stuck again. He planted a foot into the uncomfortably squishy surface of the now-dissolving slime and yanked the axe out. Before he could raise the axe again, a slender sword blade stabbed forwards, taking the creature neatly in the neck and twisting, severing the head.

He looked up at Velvet, who had disposed of the other slime and then had come closer to help him finish off his. “Are you alright, John?” she asked, still unaware and shameless of her own state of dress.

“Uhm… I-I’m fine, but… V-velvet, your clothes…”

She tilted her head, “My… clothes?” Her hands reached up and her fingertips gently traced across the surface of the fabrics, speeding up as she found more and more holes, then reaching down to find her jeans in tatters, and ending with a small gasp. “P-p-please tell m-me that y-you c-c-can’t see anything!”

“N-nothing inappropriate!” John hastily replied, a blush coming to his face now that he was paying close attention to each and every spot of pale skin he could see. The large holes that showed porcelain skin on her stomach, leading up to the gentle swell of her breasts that her t-shirt revealed, then the few patches in her jeans that flashed her legs to him whenever she moved- “I’ll go find you some clothes!” John blurted, and quickly fled the scene,