Into the Grind

Fianna stood opposite of John at the long coffee table, a hand raised in salute. “Following her display of power and her crude mannerisms, even more people came to like her. The men, who so far had largely considered her to be overbearingly sweet, respected her ability to be both sincere and powerful and the women were twice as respectful of her for her reaction to having her child threatened.” The Cardinal Chosen’s tail moved lazily left to right. “The sultan was further legitimized by having her defer to his judgement. He immediately moved to install one of the referred heads of the twenty families as the custodian of the mountaintop. Momentum is now firmly with the sultan. He ought to be able to remove the anti-reformist elements and assure stability come to the island. That concludes my report.”

“At ease,” John told his militaristic maid.

“Yes, Sir!” With a sharp movement, Fianna lowered her arm. A stride and a turn later, she lowered herself to join everyone else on the Couch. Lydia and Lu Zhi were still predisposed. Beyond them, the entire Imperial Choir was present.

“You seem in utter despair about your success,” John pointed out.

Eliana did not even look at him. Her face rested on her hands, reducing her to a small heap of misery. The sound she made matched the view. Before John’s intrusive thoughts could win, Jane’s did. The feline Lightbearer poked the pretty little psycho in the sides.

Eliana jumped. Her butt rose a hand width from the seat, then landed back down on the Couch. “The fudge is your problem, seizure hands?!” she exclaimed.

“Just one of the ways to restart ya,” Jane answered. “Ya know, like you have to kiss Aclysia a bunch when she gets herself into a feedback loop.”

“Perhaps I should let that happen to myself more frequently,” the first maid thought aloud. “I rather enjoy the prolonged kisses.”

“Ask and you shall receive!” Sylph zapped on over to Aclysia’s lap, straddling the considerably taller woman. “And I will suppress my wish to babble because MWAH! And MWAH!” The two overplayed kisses were followed by the hungry, genuine mashing of lips and tongues. That shut both up for the moment.

“You seriously don’t need to put yourself down,” John talked to his third wife. “Actually, let me rephrase that: you seriously shouldn’t put yourself down. You’ve got talent for diplomacy.”

“No, I do NOT!” Eliana vehemently disagreed. “All I do is try not to curse and then fail at that when it counts.”

“We call that maintaining composure and being sincere when the moment calls for it,” John responded plainly. “Remaining entirely disciplined when someone throws a punch in the direction of your stomach is unnatural in most situations. For a pregnant woman to retaliate with the most violence she is capable of is entirely just.”

John had felt his veins freeze when he had heard of the incident. Had the matter not been dealt with adequately already, he would have been tempted to test how quickly he could turn a volcano into a crater.

“Stop trying to build me up!”

Both John and Jane gave her a flabbergasted look. “”No,”” they responded in unison.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” The internal screaming found an external outlet. Eliana curled up into a fetal position and toppled over. Her head landed right on Jane’s lap, where she was made the immediate subject of many head pats.

“You’ll beat that imposter syndrome one day,” the feline Lightbearer purred.

John wasn’t so sure about that one. In his experience, imposter syndrome was a consistent gnawing on the brainstem that was suffered to some innate degree. People like Jane and Scarlett did not appear to be subject to it at all. Well, Jane had voiced uncertainty if she deserved her position on some occasions, but that seemed to be more basic doubts brought by sudden elevation rather than a creeping sense of inadequacy. There was a difference that John was deeply familiar with.

“I’ll give you the same advice I gave Moira,” John said. “Even though I’m an emperor, I, too, feel like an imposter at times. When that happens, I just ask myself if anyone else could have done what I have done.”

“Anyone!” Eliana responded instantly. “Literally anyone else could have solved that situation!”

“Then why didn’t anyone else?”

“Because they don’t have the help I do!”

“The people that help you are part of your competence,” John stated. “Not everyone can muster this kind of support, you know? It takes a very special, very cute kind of person to do that.”

“Shut the fuck up, you ass-loving-hole-collector!”

‘Well, that’s as far as I’ll get to nudge her today,’ the Gamer thought, giving Eliana one more supportive squeeze. Her attempts at reining in her potty mouth had the convenient side effect that it was easier than ever to know when the reasonable part of her brain was being shut out by her layers of mental problems.

Best to save it for another day.

_____________________________________________________________________________

While his real body was giving the returned Harmonia the attention they deserved, his other two bodies were out and about enacting the minutiae of imperial administration. Ten days had now passed since the relocation to Eureka and things were beginning to settle into a familiar but slightly different rhythm.

Modern technology made the moving of a capital a much smaller deal than it would have been just a century ago. No worries about delivery lines or post offices, no requirements for power plants capable enough to support the amount of phone calls that were being made, not even considerations about whether or not there was enough paper to print it all.

Between satellites and optic fibre, data transfer was so rapid that distances basically ceased to matter. For everything else, there were technomancers. Magic could boost signals even through outdated infrastructure. Scarlett had half-realized plans that let her use constructed relays to create her own continent spanning intranet.

Still, there were SOME hiccups. Most of them were caused by the Guild Hall materials now needing to be shipped the opposite way. Since they were utterly revamping the transportation network anyway, that wasn’t the biggest of problems.

In fact, there still weren’t any big problems. Treating this like a strategy game, John was currently in the lull between major events where he was allowed to just take it easy and watch his numbers go up. It was nice, especially since, unlike most strategy games, he wasn’t being assaulted by a bunch of tasks that were engaging on a small scale but became tedious when they were a constant assault on his senses.

Reality was not strictly bound by game mechanics. Things were delegated to the degree John wanted them to be, leaving him with the kind of workload that had him satisfied while leaving him plenty of time to pursue his own projects. Life had been pretty good these past days.

Life would be even greater over the next 14.

“Might even be 16,” Lee informed John.

“…Did you just pull a Jane?” he asked.

“I’ve been with you for over a year, I can read your smirks.” Lee enacted an overplayed, lecherous grin. “This one says, ‘Mwehehe, time to be a sex pest with a bunch of women that can’t escape!’”

“Almost every single word you just said is wrong.”

“Urgh, did you have to answer like that? I still have Last Jedi trauma.”

“You shouldn’t devalue the word trauma by using it to refer to a bad movie. Especially since you weren’t even a big Star Wars fan to begin with. You just have meme-related brainrot.”

“And yet!” Lee threw her hands up. “The Last Jedi’s attempt on my life has left me scarred and deformed!”

John rolled his eyes and gave Lee’s ass a smack. “Nothing deformed about that!” he declared, immediately spanking the other cheek, then grabbing the whole of the bottom of her pear-shaped figure as best he could. A single hand stood no chance against the magnificent plush.

Lee pushed her ass back against his hand as best she could while they continued walking. Without a shred of hesitation, John’s fingers trailed upwards, pressed beneath the flexible waistband of Lee’s yoga pants, and then ventured on to her pussy. “Little nympho,” he cooed a loving mockery. Lee simply moaned in response.

Two fingers penetrated her wet snatch. Jittery legs carried her the last couple of steps, then she fell against the frame of the I.D. Gate. Tight spandex clung to John’s dancing knuckles. The most delicious of all squelching sounds filled the air as his fingers accelerated. “S-stooooooop,” she whined. “I’ll… I’ll ruin my pants…!

“I’ll buy you new ones, sweet cheeks,” John said with the most chauvinistic tone he could manage. It made Lee laugh, only for her to immediately moan again. His drenched digits were now focusing on her clit. “Cum for me,” he ordered her, no magic in his voice. The raw authority was enough. Lee threw her head back, shouting her lust into the sky. “Harder, cum for me!” The command hit the already orgasming submissive with the demands of dominance and magic. Pussy juice gushed between her legs, soaking the crotch of her yoga pants. Excess liquid dripped down the ground, marking the grass between her sneakers. “Good girl,” John complimented and pulled his hand back.

“Bad dom, not stopping when someone says stop,” Lee grumbled.

“First off, you are a brat, so if I listened to you, we’d both die of thirst,” John retorted. “Second, I am a good dom, that’s why I can separate a normal stop from a playful stop.” ‘Unless it comes from Nia,’ he added mentally. Good as he had gotten at reading her, whenever Nia decided to emulate hentai dialogue, it turned out to be a big mood killer. Thankfully, she did not do it often.

Lee continued to grumble but nothing of what she said was an actual retort. Ignoring her, John sucked her juices off his fingers and walked into the open I.D. Gate. The rest of the Imperial Choir had already headed inside.

“Alright… I can do this!” Lee pumped herself up, then exerted her will over the unfilled potential of the space that contained everything and nothing.

The conceptual realm collapsed into the certainty of shapes that Lee demanded of it. After having fought an incarnation of Tiamat in a truly unshaped place, John knew better than ever that Lee’s ability to focus all of this into being was a herculean feat of mental discipline. Green plains disrupted by various derelict buildings, like a half-baked post-apocalypse setting, spread out in every direction. The only break from it all was the three story mansion they, like usual, would use as their stay.

“ALRIGHT!” Layla screamed and ripped her top off. It would have been a literal case, had her wardrobe not been carefully chosen. The metal buttons popped open one after another, first down her front and then along the side of her skirt. Both articles of clothing were mindlessly tossed into the grass, leaving the brunette immediately naked.

Of course she didn’t wear underwear.

“Let’s get started,” she hissed, licking her lips predatorily.

John had negative reasons to refuse and the little foreplay with Lee had left him understandably horny. A press of his buttons left him equally naked. Layla sprinted, then leapt at him with her legs spread. John caught her by her shapely butt. It was just tad smaller than Lee’s, matching with their height difference. Hungry lips and moderately sized breasts pressed against him. Arms and legs closed around his neck and waist as he carefully lowered her onto his twitching cock. Aclysia had grabbed his shaft to angle it perfectly.

Layla broke the kiss to clack her teeth next to John’s ear. “For our entire stay, you’ll be inside me!” she whispered sharply. It was a demand and a plea in equal measure. Goosebumps traversed up and down John’s form.

“You really are a unique one, Layla Viorica,” he whispered back.

Before she could answer, John took his first step. Superhuman strength brought with it the possibility of effortless walk-fucks – a school of sex that he was every bit as intimately familiar with as the rest. A spring in his step added a nice amount of bounce. The gyrations of her hips did the rest.

They relocated into the mansion. It was an odd building on the inside. Courtesy of having a single purpose, to house them for short periods, the imagined structure was specialized to the needs of the grinding harem. The foyer was tiny, existing only as a space to allow the changing of shoes (if any were even worn) and led directly into a massive living room. The rest of the base floor effectively consisted only of the master bedroom and the spa the entire harem could use at once. The two floors above existed for the occasional guest (of which they had none this time around), for Harmonia to find a quiet spot to enjoy some isolation, and to make sure they weren’t competing for a too limited amount of bathrooms in the morning.

As was tradition, the kitchen was integrated into the living room. The maids immediately walked on over there, beginning to unload what food they had prepared into the fridge. “Are the electronics running?” Lee asked.

“I hope not, we need them in place,” John joked.

“…So it begins,” Jane whispered, as if she had just witnessed the first verse in a foreboding prophecy becoming real.

“Like that is the first dad joke I ever made.”

John sat down with all of the care a man had to employ when a lovey-dovey crazy was gripping his cock with all the tightness of a vice and all the heat of a lava cake. She would have started bouncing wildly immediately, had he not kept his hands firmly on her hips. “What?!” she growled, impatiently.

“Traditionally, we start with having our talk on the plans for the grinding session,” he told her. “You can wait for that long, yes?”

“...If I have to…” Layla stopped trying to raise her hips and remained put, for the moment.

“This won’t take long,” John promised. His left hand combed through the brunette’s wavy strands as he addressed the room. Everyone besides the maids had taken their seat and the maids were close enough to listen. “First off, Lee, how is the time dilation?”

“1 to 8,” she informed everyone, while peeling off her soaked pants. “Feels a bit unsteady, but since the electronics are operational, it looks like I managed. I’ll tell you if I need to adjust downwards.”

“Alright. First things first… Ehtra, please adjust the due dates in the calendar for everyone.”

“Affirmative,” the grey angel said, already tapping around on her phone to adjust the shared calendar file.

“Delicia, I will entrust you with the health check-ups.”

“Everything as usual, then,” the bratty alchemist responded, while stocking the kitchen with pots and pants. According to Lee, manifesting connected things was just that much easier than creating loose items, so they typically brought utensils and such with them. Same went for most electronics. The fridge, specifically, Lee actually hadn’t made, she had just pulled it from her own pocket dimension and placed it down.

“As for our aims during this grinding session, there are two. First off…” he gave Layla’s ass a nice squeeze, “I am going to fuck Layla up to current Level. I can’t gain experience, but you all still can – though that doesn’t matter for anyone besides Layla since you are tied to my current Level. I can do this in parallel with the second goal, which is to progress the Raid as far as we can comfortably go. If we have time left over after, we are switching to Floors. The goal is to get as much Loot as possible, specifically in an attempt to get Beatrice a spear, Aclysia some extra swords, and then whatever upgrades we may otherwise come across. Everyone onboard with this?”

Nods all around.

“Then… let’s get started!”

He thrust up into Layla.