Sadly, no

John had just caught the pouncing Thorn when next to him a doorway opened and Kim stepped through, raising an eyebrow at John who was surrounded by his pets.

“Uuuuh… Good morning?” John said unsurely.

“Good morning, John. I hope the two of you had a… nice evening?” Kim responded, looking away at the mention of what they were doing.

“Oh, yeah. It was a nice evening. Oh, and I want to thank you again for helping me out with that, I’m sure if the two of you didn’t help me I would be dead now. Did the Order already pick them up?”

Kim nodded at that, “Yes, I picked the two bullies up last night after I got home. A knight of the Order picked them up soon after, he said that they were stable but in a weak condition. I assume they will want to talk with you at some point since you and the Valkyrie were the only ones that saw the condition they were in.”

That probably made sense, but couldn’t they ask Brun as well? “Okay, if they ask me for anything, then I’ll answer their questions. By the way, where did you open that door?”

“I opened it on my way to the school; it’s hidden in an empty alleyway behind a grocery store.”

“Excellent! Then I’ll leave the Nexus with the two of you quickly; I need to buy some groceries.”

“Are you planning on living here permanently?” asked Kim.

“Kinda, I’m pretty sure I will spend most of my time in here, so I might as well stock up on stuff here. I’ll still live with my mom until I move out at some point… But for now this will be something like my secret base,” answered John, thinking about his future plans. He was pretty sure that all the girls that he had invited so far would also spend some time in here, so it would probably be best to both stock up on food and snacks and to build up the furniture a bit more so that it was properly usable.

Nodding in thought, Kim agreed, “It sounds reasonable to live here from what I’ve seen of it so far, this looks like a beautiful place. I will need to look at this place a bit later.”

At that moment, Kaen exited the bathroom, once again dressed in her school uniform. Her hair was still slightly damp, and her face was relaxed. As she saw Kim, she ran up to the martial artist and glomped her happily.

“Goooooood morning! Hope you had a good night? I did! John was such a gentleman, he was so good to me! You’ll totally be happy with him as well!”

Kaen just kept on blabbering and blabbering, turning Kim’s face a darker shade of red with each sentence.

“Wh-what do you mean “happy with him”? I don’t want him! He’s a friend, an ally!”

That didn’t sound convincing to John, and neither did it to the dragon. “Suuuuure, whatever you say, sis. So, should we go to school? Shouldn’t you change, John?”

Chuckling, John replied, “Actually, I’m not going to school anymore, with the job I got from the Fateweavers, I told them I’d do this somewhat full-time.”

Pouting, the small dragon girl said, “Whaat, that’s totally unfair! I want to skip school to work somewhere as well!”

Kim flicked her on the forehead, “You will stay in school. You need a cover to do the work we do, and nothing is better than the cover of school.”

That brought a thought to John’s head, “Wait, what kind of work do you actually do? Do you also help people like the Gjoskenholms?”

“Not entirely. While we do help people once in a while, we are more akin to the Order in that we patrol the nearby area as best as we can, but we specialize in different things than they do. Where they are better equipped to deal with malevolent people and bigger groups, we are better equipped to deal with ethereal opponents, spirits and the like, and dealing with corrupted individuals,” Kim answered with a business-like tone.

“Corrupted? Like the… people we fought yesterday?” John doubted that they were actual people since they had the same Observe interface as other creatures he had fought.

Kim vehemently shook her head at that question, “No, nothing like those creatures yesterday. When I talk about corrupted, I mean corrupted by the Outside.”

Now John’s head was starting to hurt again, “Okay, and what is the Outside?”

“The Outside is the void outside of any reality; our physics and our logic do not hold there. The beings in there defy any reason and are extremely dangerous. They can’t survive without some kind of host until they are powerful enough, corrupting living beings, possessing them. If there ever was a fully-fledged outsider to spawn in our world, it would be close to the end… Which is why we keep a watch on energies that defy our reasoning…”

Something in that explanation made John worry, “Hold up a second. Magoi told me that I have something called ‘Void Magic’… Is that related to this Outside?”

“We are not sure about that. Potentially it could be related, or entirely unrelated… Void Magic is something rare that some people just have, and these people can learn a lot of different kinds of magic. A void mage in the right mindset could probably tap into the Outside, but the effect would still be the same in the end, they would be consumed by a spawn of the Outside and would be their vessel.”

That relieved John a bit. So he would probably have to actively dabble with them to be in any greater danger… “Okay, that’s enough Abyssal lore for now again... You two need to get to school, and I need to get food.”

The three of them left the Nexus through Kim’s door, making sure Gary and Thorn were not following them.

Leaving the alley, John said goodbye to both Kim and Kaen, and wishing them both a good day, he went into the grocery store with a shopping cart.

Half an hour later, John was loading various items into the shelves of the storage room in the basement. He had spent roughly a hundred dollars just to buy basic food and drinks. He had found out that Sarai had installed basic electronic appliances in the kitchen (for a big part of his remaining mana), so he was able to store perishable food in a fridge upstairs and some canned foods down here. Judging by the amount of stuff he had bought, he alone could probably live about a month with these.

Once he was done, he went back up to the kitchen, took some eggs out of the fridge, and cracked them into a preheated pan.

And John realized at that moment, that he had no idea how to cook. In a matter of minutes, the eggs were burned to a crisp, more akin to charcoal than to anything edible… All the abilities he had received in the last couple of days, and he still had no idea how to cook.

Crafting expanded! Crafting now contains cooking. Cooking yields skill experience dependent on the quality and rarity of the items used to cook. Quality of the cooked food depends on used time, quality of materials and Crafting level.

Neat! Now he wasn’t incompetent at cooking anymore! Now there was actual knowledge in his head on how he would have to prepare certain common things and not to fuck everything up.

Now that he knew how to cook, he went back out of the Nexus and bought some more things he would need.