Chapter 2154 – Friends and Loggings

“Took you long enough!” Delicia shouted as the ferry settled against the Pier. “We were starting to think we should just leave.”

“She was thinking that,” Nightingale disagreed. “I have patience.”

“Urgh, Gale, you are so whipped! What happened to the girl that would sneer at nobles with me? Just because you’re screwing this emperor doesn’t mean we can’t mock him!”

“It does not fit a loyal haremette to mock her patriarch.”

“Says who? As a maid, I think it’s my right to tease and mock the guy that can’t even take a shower without me.”

“Why am I friends with you?”

“Because I am short and adorable?”

Nightingale let out a long sigh while bumping elbows with the shortstack. That particular duo went back well before they had joined the harem. It had even been a minor point of initial awkwardness for them to go from friends to lovers. They both had the latent bisexuality that ran rampant in harem aspirants, but they still hadn’t really seen each other in a sexual light.

Well, that had changed thoroughly over the months. Now, Delicia cupped a feel of the harpy’s pale cheeks without a second thought. The goddess of the night wore her deep purple unitard while Delicia sported the typical maid uniform. In other words, they were in their standard outfits, as had been the women that had appeared on the date before and likely those that would come after.

“You were only here for the ferry ride?” John asked Beatrice as they disembarked.

“Affirmative,” the passive maid confirmed.

There was a slight sense of loss at having missed his chance to plough her on the date. That base feeling of lacking completionism was not enough to disrupt the planned schedule. He left it at another kiss and a whispered promise that he would make it up to the passive maid another day.

“Statement: there is nothing you need to make up for,” Beatrice whispered back, sensuality filling her quiet voice. “I will see you later. I love you, John.”

The softness of her lips sealed the promise. After they separated, Beatrice stepped up the pier. She exchanged a quick remark with Delicia and Nightingale in passing, before turning towards the Warehouse in the distance. It seemed like she would take the chance to do an audit with the local overseers.

Layla watched it all with content silence, waiting until John put his arm back around her and then walking towards the waiting duo. Pressed against him every step along the way, the reformed stalker suddenly detached herself once she got there. It took her visible effort, like removing a strong magnet from a metal surface, but she did it all the same.

“You probably want to put your hands all over your other women.” The words were a bit harsh, annoyed even. It went against her nature to give up the position at his side. That she consciously made that sacrifice for her fellow haremettes made her every bit as capable of fitting in as a woman who would have done the same without even thinking about it. If trends were anything to go by, she would achieve that seamless giving and taking over the months, as it seeped into her subconscious that there really was no need to be jealous.

“I always want to put my hands all over all my women. Too bad I’m not some hundred-handed entity.” John lifted his arms a bit, allowing Delicia and Nightingale to attach themselves to his left and right side respectively. They were two very differently shaped women, one a compact manifestation of overabundance and the other a tall, slender lady. Both were deeply to his liking.

“I can turn you into one,” Delicia offered. “Just let me experiment on you for a while.”

“I doubt you can get past Gamer’s Body,” John responded. They had run scans to that end before in an effort to see if alchemy could do what other fields of magic could not and repair his eyes. “Plus, I am not sure I want to be turned into a hug-monster of only bratty comprehension.”

“I’d still love you!” Layla blurted out. “No matter what form you take, no matter what world you are in, I will always love you!”

“Drastic changes would cause me distress,” Nightingale confessed.

Delicia snorted amusedly, taking large strides to keep pace with John as he guided them forward. “Ironic that the harpy with her feather arms is the one most against becoming a monster fucker.”

“Is this where we talk about the female propensity to fantasize about the wildest creatures?” John asked. As part of harem book clubs and because he liked knowing what women were into, he had read his fair share of female-oriented erotica novels. “Vampires, okay, that’s just a pale human. You go a bit under the surface and it's straight to werewolves, then it gets more absurd from there. For men, at a minimum, face and torso have to remain human to be appealing to most.”

“That’s just simple evolutionary biology at work,” Delicia responded plainly. “Fertile looking female is sexy because child grows healthily in fertile looking female. Strong looking male will protect children. What form he takes to deliver the cum doesn’t really matter as much.”

“That’s fair,” John agreed readily. He could be puritanical about some things, but women fantasizing about getting loved by tentacle monsters wasn’t among them. For one, he had seen and read his fair share of porn with those elements. More importantly, he was of the strong opinion that even attempting to control widespread kinks like that would lead to more harm than benefit. Better to draw a line on the genuinely heinous stuff that everyone could agree on being too much.

They walked across the street and into the Logging Camp. Nightingale breathed a little lighter once they were out of the sun and under the manifold coverings of the supernatural forest.

They came across stumps that were just a few days old, yet were decaying rapidly back into the soil. Before their eyes, new saplings broke through the soil and grew into small stalks, to become full trees in a matter of days, to then be cut down by those that frequented these areas.

Woodsmen’s axes echoed in this forest. From the simplest birch to the black trees with leaves of glowing crystal, the Logging Camp existed in an eternal cycle of growing and being cut down. The produce fed into the Warehouse and then further into the internal and global economy. Though the Mine was the Guild Hall’s foremost value creator, the Logging Camp more than justified its occupation of several square kilometres.

Walking arm in arm with his loves came to a stop when they wandered past one of the many sheds. John and Layla both grabbed an axe, an instrument that looked like the concept of the utensil had been boiled down to its simplest form. Though the trees could still be destroyed utilizing other means, only felling them with the Building-supplied axes would allow them to be harvested.

“Ever been deep into the Logging Camp?” John asked all three of them. Nightingale and Layla both shook their heads, while Delicia nodded.

“Duh, I need specific materials all the time,” the alchemist said.

“Can’t you transmute them?” Layla asked.

“Yeah, sure, let me just use my limited throughput to replicate entire trees,” Delicia responded, bratty as ever. “Plus, no, I actually can’t. Well, yes, I actually can but it’d be a horrific amount of work. Creating a 100% pure material, like a square of Mithril, is way easier than the complicated mixture of organic fibres and materials that makes up just a small piece of wood.”

“Makes sense, makes sense,” Layla answered with repeated nods.

“You could have explained all of that without the snark,” Nightingale chimed in.

“But how will I let people know that I am soooooo much smarter than them if I don’t do that?”

“You don’t, it’s rude.”

“I think accosting me with stupid questions is rude.”

“I will remember that when next you ask me if you have overstepped in conversation.”

“Psssh, that never happens.”

“What about yesterday?”

“Nothing happened yesterday!” Delicia’s tone was too insistent to be taken for anything besides panic.

“Did you not almost get blacklisted from a supplier because of undue comments you made on his inability to hold a relationship?”

“All I said was that he would be able to get with a girl if he stopped trying to make every conversation about how important he is! It was friendly advice!”

Nightingale looked to Layla and John for support. “Would you listen to advice that was delivered with the words,” she suddenly switched her tone to a bratty mimicry of Delicia’s voice that only a longtime friend could produce, “’Loser, listen up, you’re making me snooze over here. I didn’t sign up for a talk about barnacles. No wonder every date you go on leaves through the bathroom window.’”

John and Layla simply laughed, while Delicia threw her hands into the air. “What self-respecting Abyssal makes crabs his hobby anyway!”

“A biomancer researching evolutionary developments to manipulate.”

“Get out of here with your facts, Gale!”

“No.”

“I hate you!”

“No, you do not.”

“Yuh-uh!”

“Nuh-uh!”

John laughed even louder. It was always something special to see Delicia coax the immature side out of the usually so dignified goddess of the night. He and Layla continued to just watch the duo go back and forth like this. There was no need for them to disrupt such perfectly good entertainment.

The Logging Camp did that eventually.

A living knot of roots and branches leapt out of the canopy of a nearby tree. It shared the flickering glow of the heated leaves, covering the upper side of its ovate body like a tuft of hair. Effortlessly, John stepped into the trajectory of the creature and cleaved it apart mid-air. Its halves dropped onto the compacted dirt with audible thuds.

“Explosive Seedlings,” John explained. “Despite the name, they’re fairly harmless. They latch onto you, then explode in a wave of energy that leaves little more than unpleasant surface marks. Well, to me they’d do nothing.” Bending down, John pulled an almost perfect sphere of amber out of the corpse. The rest of the two halves disintegrated moments later. “Killing them is worthwhile because of their sap cores.”

He extended his hand to show the little thing to Layla, who swept it out of his hands immediately, holding it up against the little light that fell through the canopies. “Fire amber for me? I love it!” she squeaked.

John had not meant that to be a gift, but the adorable brunette was now bouncing on the spot so… a bit of revisionist history could be excused, certainly? “It’s yours to keep,” he said with a broad smile.

Like the Mine, the Logging Camp got more dangerous as one penetrated into its deeper levels. The Explosive Saplings were challenges for people from levels 10 to 20. After that, one encountered Elemental Treants, then Woodworms. John dispatched of them all easily, leaving the new woman to swoon at his abilities and the two established women to roll their eyes at him showing off.

They reached the Hallowed Centre of the Logging Camp, where the soil was gold and the branches of the massive tree offered deep twilight to the tranquil clearing. The Hallowed Tree, as it was called, was a treasure trove in and of itself. Its wood was Mithril-grade in rarity and it had been left to expand for many months and would be left to expand for many more. If felled, it would take 5 years for the next one to start growing.

“We considered cutting it down during the Lorylim War,” John explained as they walked.

“Why didn’t you?” Layla wondered.

“Lack of industrial capacity, mostly,” John responded. “Our craftsmen were better used making more things out of the metal stockpiles we had.” They reached the middle of the clearing, where John put a hand on the trunk. “We might be selling it to the Mandate of Heaven soon though. Lu Zhi insists it’ll help with stabilizing the north of the country if she gives the old masters something this rare to work with.”

The gamer turned away from the girthy trunk of the tree and dropped down next to a picnic basket that he had placed there the previous day. “Let’s have a little brunch,” he said, pulling out dishes from the basket and sandwiches from his inventory.

“I don’t need to eat, so…”

“I crave other sustenance…”

Delicia and Nightingale crawled towards him. His pants were off and his dick soon shifted between the ministrations of their tongues.

Layla was sipping plenty of water as she ate.