Chapter 1026 – An Impressive Victory
Getting home was a complicated affair. To start with, there was the issue of clothing. Metra was in her armour, Thana naked, and Rave in her bodysuit. None of the three could have walked through the mundane world in those outfits. Further, John’s girlfriend had a cat ear problem. Sure, they were adorable, but she also hadn’t figured out yet how to make them, the tail and the slit pupils disappear.
Because of this, John had to go shopping on his own. His face was dirty with ash and dust after all the events of the day, which earned him a lot of odd looks. At the best of times, people with dirty faces in an inner city were a bit weird. People in extremely fashionable suits and dirty faces, buying women’s clothes, that was a whole set of questions to be asked. John turned them into jokes when someone, like the cashier, asked them and was on his way back as quickly as possible.
At least the weather played along. For December, John found it quite warm, but for the southern coast, it was comparatively cold, at roughly 10 degrees Celsius. Cold enough to justify a large coat that hid Rave from her collar to her knees. That hid her tail. An old-school hunter cap, as grey as the coat, allowed her to tuck away her cat ears and aviator shades hid her eyes.
“I look like a detective from a noir comic,” Rave said, inspecting herself through Copernicus’ eyes.
“I don’t think that works with the pink hair,” the Gamer suggested.
“Won’t matter once they apply the washed-out grey filter,” his girlfriend retorted and put on her best mysterious voice. “It was a cold night, a rainy night, a cold, rainy night. I was standing by my office window, looking down at the grimy street. The black coffee I had poured myself was cold and rainy...”
“How can coffee be rainy?” the Gamer asked.
“Script is a work in progress,” Rave waved off. They both shot a glance at Metra, who was keeping quiet at the moment – for obvious reasons. Then they looked over to Thana, who had put on her clothes just as quietly – for mysterious reasons. “Anyway, shouldn’t ya be covered in Achievements?”
“They won’t pop up until I am relaxed, and I don’t think I can relax until I’ve had a shower,” the Gamer responded. “At home. A long, thorough shower at home. Speaking of which, we have to think about how we get there. Normally I would suggest taking a plane, but there is no way we get through the security. I’ll see if I can have Scarlett arrange something.”
He did and she could. The Technomancer pulled some strings to get them on a private plane. Whatever organization she got in touch with to that end didn’t ask questions. They were mundanes, though, otherwise they couldn’t have been pre-positioned.
‘I really need my own private plane,’ John thought, before sleeping through the flight. When he awoke next, they were already landing in NYC. The reason he did wake up was Metra shaking him.
“Get up, we’re home,” she told him in her casual tone. “The shower is close.” John stretched and yawned, while Metra went over to wake up Rave.
“You seem to feel better?” John asked, noting that Metra had returned to her usual behaviour.
“Not a lot of use to keep dwelling on it,” the First of Wrath stated. “I didn’t expect all of these figures from my past to have such influence in the present. Not like it’s the first time I clashed with the other Metracanas though.” She looked over to him with a grin on her face and determination in her eyes. “If they’re your enemies, I’ll crush them. If we can save them, I know you will.”
“A good feeling, to be trusted,” he hummed.
“I do more than trust you,” Metra purred and gave him a quick kiss, before the plane came to a halt.
There was a teleporter just east of the airport, so they managed to get home the instant they left that maze of a modern building. Once there, they were immediately greeted by Lee and Scarlett. The former threw herself at John, hugging him tightly, only to depart from him with a heavy blush on her face. “You reek!” she stated.
“Out of my way,” Thana growled before John could answer, shoving Lee to the side without a second thought.
“Thana,” John tried to sound reprimanding, but the goddess of genocide just growled at him. He tried a nicer tone, “Where are you going?”
“To the parasite’s room. I’ll wait until the end of this cursed wake state.”
“If ya get bored, ya know where ya can find us,” Rave offered. Thana opened the door and was out without another word. “She’s going totes soft.”
“Good for us,” the Gamer said, knowing full well that Thana was still able to hear them. “I want her to fit in with us. Eventually she and Eliza will be the same person. It’s unavoidable at this point.” He looked back to Lee. “Anyway, we were talking about my smell?”
“Yeah, you smell like rotting tang and smoke.”
“That’s to be expected, given the last two days,” John answered and looked at Scarlett, who was smoking indoors. “No welcome back from you?”
Slowly puffing out a stream of white smoke, the redhead kept quiet for several seconds. “...I really want to hug and kiss you, but you really are too dirty,” she told him. “Let’s get you in the jacuzzi and then I’ll show you just how happy I am to see you.”
“Sounds perfect.” John nodded and they went to their apartment in the Palace. Before they got into the shower, they made a stop in the living room. Two boxes of scrap metal had already been prepared for him. He pulled the cores of Aclysia and Beatrice out of his inventory and placed each in one of those boxes. Their consciousnesses were dormant and John had to kickstart the process of recovery by using Create to combine some of the metal with each of the cores. After he did that, Aclysia and Beatrice were back inside his mind. A familiar and deeply welcome touch to his soul.
‘Master!’ they thought in unison, while they started to munch away at the metal surrounding them. It was all mundane material, shipped here from the Mine, comparatively soft and allowing the two to recover their bodies quickly.
Aclysia took initiative to ask, ‘What happened?’
‘Too much to put it into words,’ the Gamer responded, while making his way to the shower room. While it was somewhat interesting to watch the crystals assimilate more and more metal, slowly growing tiny versions of the two maids, he really needed to get clean. Sharing his memories with the two, he brought them up to speed while rinsing himself off. When the water streaming off him, Rave, and Metra was no longer black, they switched to the jacuzzi.
John also closely monitored the systems of the Guild Hall. The water they used would eventually disappear into the aether, which made this doubly the best place to shower because there was no guarantee there weren’t some spores that somehow survived being exposed to Stirwin’s radiation. When nothing out of the ordinary popped up, when the last memory had been transferred to the maids, when Scarlett and Lee hugged him from either side, the Gamer leaned back in the tub and let out the longest sigh of his life.
That was when the flood of windows came in.
John turned his head when he heard the door open quietly. When the white-blue haired woman hesitantly looked back, he thought for one moment Eliza was back already. When he made eye contact, he knew he was still dealing with Thana. The failed goddess had torn off the clothes John had given her to move through reality. They stared at each other for a moment, then she entered and, as if she had every right to, sat down at the dinner table.
“If you want to eat with us, you need to shower first,” John softly scolded her and pointed her to the appropriate door. “Get that grime off you.”
Thana pulled her lips back and growled like a cornered wolf. So focused on trying to intimidate him, she didn’t notice Rave approaching her. Watching the goddess of genocide jump in her seat was almost surreal, even with how confused she currently was. “Come on, ya must prefer being clean too. Bet ya can smell yourself.”
“My smell doesn’t matter, human,” she said contemptuously, even while Rave pulled her out of the chair and then shoved her towards the shower room. That the smaller of those two naked women could wear the entrails of the other as a hat within three seconds was just ignored.
‘Well, I guess with how Jane is nowadays, it could take up to a minute,’ the Gamer thought with a smile. ‘Having Eliza back would be a lot better, but this is progress in its own right.’ Rave managed to get Thana into the shower and came back after some shouting by the goddess. “Does she want her privacy?”
“Doesn’t even make sense, she’s already naked!” Rave complained. “And it’s not like I don’t know every nook and cranny of... their body.”
“I don’t think logic is involved with anything she does at the moment, it’s all a scrambled mess of conflicting intuitions,” John told her, and was then distracted by the sound of one of the many phones buzzing. Like the tablets, the phones of the harem had a dedicated gathering spot. Being always naked at home meant that most of them didn’t have them on them. Because many of them also had obligations for which they needed to always be reachable, the phones were almost always in the room.
On vacation days, there usually was only one phone switched on (the one John used for emergencies), but this was less a vacation and more of a recuperation. The one currently ringing was John’s business phone. Sighing, personally ready for some lewd activities to work up an appetite, he went over and picked up the phone.
“Hello there,” a deep voice, underlined with squeaks, reached him through the speaker.
“Horned Rat,” John greeted him, not the slightest bit surprised who he was speaking to. “Interested in talking to me about what happened?”
“In a lot of ways. I must commend you on your intel policies. All I know for certain is that you are back from the Death Zone – victoriously.”
‘That could be an admission his spies are only in the ranks of common soldiers or an outright lie,’ the Gamer thought. “So, you want to ask me about what happened?”
“Essentially.”
John considered a couple of seconds, then decided to ask, “Did you know Enki would be there?”
The answer was silence. “...So that’s where he went?” The Horned Rat’s question caused John to groan into the phone.
“Just answer me,” he demanded. “Give me an answer I’ll believe or you can wait for the press releases, like everyone else.”
“No, I did not know, for certain, that Enki was there,” the Horned Rat obliged him. “After the prophecy I made on your birthday, I knew for certain that the Lorylim had their teeth in him. Not where-”
“That Tiamat had her teeth in him,” John interrupted and tapped on the table.
“Indeed,” the Horned Rat responded.
John pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why did you keep these things from me? What benefit do you get from me not being certain? You’re not like Tilgun, keeping things from me solely for your entertainment, so what goal do you have?”
“My goals, regarding you, remain twofold: to see you grow and to have you act in accordance with my endgame.” The god of future calamity said those things plainly. There was no use for secrecy in this regard, they both were clear about their relationship. “I will not reveal the latter to you, obviously, but you deducing and evaluating the intel you gain yourself is certainly helping you grow.”
The Gamer would have liked it if his growth was limited to dungeons, but the Horned Rat was broadly correct in that assessment. “It won’t be of use to me when I’m dead.”
“I trust that you’re stubborn enough to escape that fate,” the voice from the other side reported. “You killed the Starforger, after all.”
“...How do you know that but not what else happened?” the Gamer asked.
“I didn’t know it for certain, and I still don’t know how, but the fact that we are talking right now made it the most likely outcome of your expedition,” the Horned Rat mused. “You killed a god... the god of stars at that. I will need all the details.”
John was willing to give them to him. None of what he said next were things he wanted to keep for himself. Because it came right from his mouth, the Horned Rat was getting more of the gritty details, but everything else was in accordance to what the press would learn soon. The god was amused by many parts of the tale, proud about the accomplishments of Nia, taken aback by Rave’s transformation, and finally impressed with the way the Gamer had won.
“A splendid scheme,” the Horned Rat said.
“Thank you,” John responded in earnest. If there was one thing on which he acknowledged the Horned Rat’s expertise, it was long-term planning. “Now, as a loyal ally, I have informed you about Fusion’s latest developments. I would appreciate advice on what you will think will happen next.”
“You will have your advice – in person,” the Horned Rat stated.
John raised an eyebrow. “I’m just wondering about the international repercussions this might have, I don’t think that necessitates you crossing the Atlantic.”
“You are right about that, but there is more to talk about than just the aftereffects of this,” the Horned Rat said. “We have much to talk about. More importantly, to kill a god and stamp out such a massive infestation of Lorylim with primarily your own power – contracted or not – I would deem that as an accomplishment of divine proportions.”
John’s heart jumped in his chest. “Are you saying...?”
“I’m willing to bet Nathalia would agree.”
End of Season 3 Arc 6.