In the evening.

“What am I doing with my life,” John lamented, closed the window and spread his arms out on the cool, ravaged, stone floor. They had just beaten the second version of a boss, they thought would be no problem, and were all completely exhausted. The boss had been a hand. Like, literally, a giant hand, the nails alone were bigger than John’s whole body, and it had shot laser beams, tried to wave them away, fired random explosions, poked at them, and all the other good stuff hands could do. Well, normal hands couldn’t do a fourth of what that hand did. Where the first version of that hand had only showed a fraction of its mechanics, due to being killed in a relatively small frame of time, this one had truly showed them the terror of under-levelling content.

“To think I’d need two mithril ingestions in a day,” Lydia gasped, leaning against a smashed marble pillar. The whole setting, a forest of glorious white marble pillars with silver in-lays, had been thoroughly destroyed by the God-hand’s (which was the name of the boss) endless waving. The princess had dark rings under her eyes, only seeming to worsen by the second, as she looked around.

“It flicked me into a wall,” Rave, lying on her back, lamented, “repeatedly. Super rude…” “He squashed me…” Undine, sitting in foetal position, slowly rocked back and forth; her voice had lost all of its melody to the shellshock was now just a grave monotone, “I got splattered on the floor. It was horrible…squish…squish…”

The hand had indeed focused on Undine a lot, not from the start, only after it had found out that Undine was their healer. “Bosses with healer aggro are the worst,” John agreed. At least, he had gotten a level out of it. “He…he threw me like a skipping stone,” Gnome, who had shown incredible fortitude up until now, broke down on her knees and started crying. She was less damaged than Salamander and Sylph, though, both of which sat in front of a pillar, just emptily staring holes into the air, literally in Sylph’s case. The hand had used Salamander to light a giant cigarette and Sylph to get the smoke blown away. The first time it had had happened, it had just angered both of them; by the fifth, they had been reduced to this state.

It was a miracle they had been able to defeat that boss. On the Tier 14 floor, the boss had been manageable, because they were quick enough to dodge and all of that. Not so on the 15th. If it hadn’t played with them so much, John would have had to use his new Escape Rope. In the end, they did beat it, but only thanks to making a couple of sabotaged pillars falling on and nailing the hand to the ground, where Aclysia then proceeded to cut it apart.

Speaking of the artificial spirit, both of them were completely unfazed by all of this. Aclysia, although she had taken quite a bit of damage, tended to John, giving his head a soft rest in her lap. “Master, I should remind you to visit a barber soon,“ she said, running her hand through his, still fairly short, hair with a slight smile. “You may do that,” John groaned, thinking about getting up but ultimately deciding against it. The mana charged silicone Aclysia made her day to day body from (opposed to the metal composition she used in battle) was incredibly soft and comfortable and thanks to Inner Fire it was also nice and cosy. The only thing missing was a blanket, and he could have fallen asleep then and there. ‘I should do this more often,’ John decided and just kept laying there.

Momo threw the money the boss had dropped in his face. “There you go, lazy pervert,” she said in a voice made from poison, glancing jealously at John’s position. She didn’t keep standing and angrily watching over them, though, instead getting the rest of the loot, all of which was feedable trash, and then tending to Gnome. “You did good,” she assured the stone elemental, thus starting the process of pepping Gnome up to levels where she would calm down.

In the meanwhile, Sylph rebooted. “Beep, beep,” she commented her noisy start-up, launching on her feet and then marching forward. “I am Sylph-bot, the best bot, look at my booty!” she stated in a mechanical voice and pushed her ass out. “It is a rather nice ass,” Salamander, begrudgingly, admitted. “Now get it the fuck out of my face before I burn yours.”

Undine fixed herself by attaching to John. Halfway enveloped by the slime, he hugged her upper body until she stopped quivering. “It’s all good, no one can squash you now,” John whispered. Lydia and Rave stepped next to him, both looking thoroughly done with grinding for the day. “Okay, so punching above our weight is a lot harder now…but hey, I got a level, that’s nice!” “As did I,” Lydia stated. “I even got a second one,” Rave said, she managed to sound remotely happy about that, even as beaten as she was.

“However,” the princess spoke up again, “I do not wish to continue this. I need sleep. I have paperwork tomorrow.” “Yeah, kinda spent, let’s go home and just…knock ourselves out,” Rave agreed. “Mhm,” John, Undine in arm and all around him, functioning as the blanket he had desired, with Aclysia as his pillow, didn’t want to move. But he also didn’t want to remain where they were. “Okay,” he agreed and destroyed the Illusion Barrier.

They landed right back in the living room. “Convenient,” Lydia said after looking around, “If you’ll excuse me for the night, I don’t have any energy left for perversions.” “That the day comes that I can’t perform in the sex bed, which is different from the sleeping bed mind you,” Sylph, barely hanging in the air, added. “Such a sad, sad, saaaaaaaaaad state of affairs. By my honour as your concubine, you may thoroughly punish me, John-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” the tempest elemental yawned, “tomorrow.” With that she dematerialized.

“Yeah, going to rekindle,” Salamander agreed and was the second one to disappear. “I’ll be sleeping like a rock…uhhh, bad pun, I am sorry,” Gnome stated, blushed and then hastily vanished into thin air. “I will be calming…” Undine, a faint melody in her tone, returned to her incorporeal state as well.

“Yeah, no, I am out too…how about you, John, we sleeping together or are you staying awake?” Rave asked, after Lydia had left the room. “Mhm, Gamer’s Body keeps me awake for the most part, I think I’ll stay awake for a bit longer,” John stated. His girlfriend nodded, glancing at Momo. She could easily guess what John wanted to do, “You sleep in another room tonight then,” she winked and left John alone with his artificial spirits.

John gave them the trash loot to eat while he put all of the jackets in his inventory back on the wardrobe in the entrance. By the time he returned, they had eaten up; it wasn’t even close to getting them up to level 76, but it was a start. “Well, you heard Jane,” John commented, “let’s go to your room.”

As they were heading up the stairs, John had a private conversation with Aclysia. ‘I am sorry,’ he started, ‘I know that you wanted to spent a night alone with me.’ ‘It is fine, master,’ Aclysia answered, ‘I am slightly disappointed, but I will manage.’ ‘I will make it up to you, tomorrow,’ he promised, ‘we’ll go on a date, just you and me, okay?’ A feeling of happiness so strong that even Momo noticed it, watching her sister with a confounded expression, filled John’s mind. “Yes,” Aclysia answered out loud, betraying the excitement that her tone failed to convey. Her social understanding may have reached acceptable levels months ago, but the execution of tone and mimic was still lacking at times.

“Now I know how Rave felt earlier,” Momo mumbled, opening the door to their room. John didn’t even need to look at anything closely; it was the same old design that every room had. Only noteworthy thing about this room was that it lay across the hall from John’s. That, once again, put them far away from Lydia’s room, but Rave was just next over, so they should try not to make too much noise.

John sat down on the bed. Aclysia took her seat right next to him, cuddling up against him like the very happy tank, maid, girlfriend mixture she was, even wrapping her arms around his shoulder and resting her head there. A moment later her dress had vanished and she was naked, John’s hand firmly placed on her bare leg. Smooth, unnaturally so, the plastic material felt like a superior, albeit artificial, version of human softness under his hands. Momo sat down at the table with the laptop, which was good because that meant that he didn’t have to get up.

“Momo, can you open the Abyss Auction for me?” John asked, using his free hand to comb through Aclysia’s long, silky hair. In the light of the bulb above, the silvery white glanced wonderfully, having a lustre otherwise only seen in heavily edited commercials. It was wonderfully soft as well. Momo, whose hair was duller looking, obeyed and opened the laptop with an annoyed sigh.

This was a trick John had picked up during his training preceding the fight with Thana. His artificial spirits could both order for him. John wasn’t sure if this was because the technomancy network identified them as his familiars or if they couldn’t differentiate them from him. Personally, he believed the former, after all their auras were linked to his, but largely different in structure. It would be worth looking into this, however. If they were truly unable to sense the difference, he could use that for information wars in the future, shrouding his actual position and nonsense like that. He should ask Lydia about this; the princess was the best source of reliable information he had to date.

“So, what do you want to buy?” Momo asked and John cited the list of objects he knew he bought, way back when, for Aclysia. With every item Momo looked less pleased. At the end she stared John down, who, following a spontaneous idea added, “and a dildo.” With that list done, the support let the cursor hover over the order-button. After a moment, she left it there and turned around. “You are going to raise my Libido, aren’t you?” Momo asked with crossed arms.

“Yup,” John admitted directly. “What if I don’t want that?” Momo challenged him. John froze, he hadn’t even considered that. He was quick to find and argument for it however. “I want you to experience all things a human can, just like Aclysia,” he explained. “Aha, but I am very happy just cuddling with her,” the artificial support stated.

“But I am not happy with that!” Aclysia burst out, evidently having no more patience for waiting. “I had to masturbate on my own, because you didn’t know what to do, Momo; I am the pervert master made me, and I do not regret it for a moment.” The words just flew from the artificial guardian’s mouth. “Oooh, so that’s what you shifting around under the blanket was, good to know,” Momo stated. Her older sister furrowed her eyebrows, but kept her patience. She was so close to getting what she wanted, John’s dick into her, that she would not get cunt-blocked by her sister. “Let me assure you that you will not regret accepting master’s gift of Libido,” Aclysia calmly stated. “You have nothing to lose and pleasure to gain.”

Momo did not look convinced entirely, but her sister's words had softened her resistance, so John moved in to deliver the one argument that he knew would work. “You could sleep with Gnome and Aclysia whenever they are horny,” he said, “so that they don’t have to run to me.” It was a bit unfair to play that card, after all he had created Momo with a love for both Gnome and Aclysia, but he was of the honest conviction that the support accepting sex as part of her life would be best for everyone involved.

“Raise that Libido score,” Momo caved a moment later, turned around, and clicked on that order-button. John smirked, “Sure, once you have eaten up.”