Collide Gamer

John was atop a tree.

The tree was not made of wood – it was made of a plant fibre that was yet to be paper. Ink rained from an opening sky. Swirls of magical energy, a noxiously bright green trimmed by prismatic auroras, were pushed aside. They formed a corona around the gate, a circle of flames, flickering and ever-burning.

John could not see past the gate that opened.

He could not see past it, yet he did not see black either. There was no void. There was something that refused to be seen and his mind, against the attempts of his curiosity, agreed. Whatever it was, it was disinterred, peering through him like one did through a glass of water.

The insides of John’s mind knotted up. His desire for knowledge turned away from the gate over and over again. He was missing the key. The refusal of his own mind to engage with the question fuelled his paranoia. He could not ask himself what this was, only why he could not ask himself what this was.

Through clenched teeth and strained muscles, he inhaled slowly. His mouth filled with the taste of the ink of books unwritten and lost to time. The air was thick with the smell of salt and old parchment. Concepts were imbued into those sensations, a mind outside himself communicating ideas through the buds of his tongue and the receptors of his nose.

Confusion.

There was no pain, no madness attempting to rise up through his throat through laughter, no spore that tried to hijack his spinal column, he was just… confused. The confusion mounted and mounted, his mind still refusing to even entertain what was beyond the gate in the sky, now wide open, his paranoia still asking why.

No answer.

Confusion turned into panic. What was happening to him? Where even was he? His eyes snapped downwards. He stood in a chamber of knotted wood and shattered dreams. Fragments of fear tumbled in the air, screaming in a male voice as they turned. Like wooden shavings, they tumbled away from the growing cocoon in the middle of the chamber.

John took a step towards the cocoon.

A woman’s scream ripped him out of his dream. The Gamer shot upwards, his vision suddenly extinguished. In the waking world, he was blind. Rapidly, he cycled through his mental connections, until he found an overlap of point of view that let him make sense of the situation. ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ novel⁂fire.net

“Rel! Talk to me, Rel!” Rave was by the seer’s side. The blonde woman was no longer screaming, but her body was drenched in sweat, her chest heaving, struggling to draw air through a constricted throat.

John crawled over, the crowd of worried women making room for him and Undine. The healer of the harem applied her magic immediately, spreading healing slime over Lorelei’s back. It wasn’t absorbed. “There is no injury,” the abysstide elemental stated, only growing more worried because of it.

Lorelei suddenly slumped to the side. On instinct, John and Rave held her up, then gently lowered her to the mattress. The entire room was in a controlled panic, the haremettes standing or climbing on the elaborate side-constructs of the enormous bed, all to keep an eye on what was going on.

After a few seconds of unconsciousness, Lorelei snapped back. Finally, a proper breath flooded her lungs. John felt a wave of relief, followed by a different kind of concern when Lorelei turned onto her side. She put a hand on her mouth, barely holding back the contents of her stomach. Audible breaths through her nose were the only sound in the otherwise silent room.

John gently caressed the back of the seer. He bit back useless recommendations on how to calm. Lorelei was no stranger to dangerous situations, none of them were. Over the course of several minutes, her panicked breathing turned from erratic to controlled and finally slowed to a regular pace.

While he watched her, John realized that he was almost as slick with sweat as she was. He had fallen asleep clean, after a proper shower having followed all of their entanglements. This was not the pleasant kind of sweaty anyhow. He felt… cold.

“Lorelei?” he quietly talked to the seer.

She gulped once more, a hand still on her mouth. She only put a little distance between her palm and mouth at first, not trusting her stomach yet. A second later, she lowered the limb fully. “I am… fine,” she said, voice still shaken. “No, not… I mean to say that I am physically unharmed.”

“What the fuck happened?” Rave wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Lorelei croaked, rising to sit and lean against John’s chest for support. “I looked down upon a tree draped in retreating tendrils. Spheres were born from branches that were not of wood but…”

“…not yet paper,” John finished the description.

Lorelei nodded.

A shared vision changed everything about this. Lorelei getting dream visions was one thing. They usually didn’t cause her to shoot up in a panic, but they happened. Assassinations of figures of importance, unintended consequences of actions of officials, even an unexpected threat to ongoing missions of the Order or Fusion’s military all had happened before. The response then was to contact the parties affected, tell them, and most of the time it prevented the worst from happening.

John, however, had only received a vivid dream vision like that once before.

“Last time this happened, it turned out to be Enki at the end, right?” Momo asked.

“Correct,” John said. “I was on top of the tree. There was a gate above that I… refused to even try to comprehend. It wasn’t like the blank creatures of Nirvana, just… unknowable. I took a step towards some kind of cocoon shaving screams before I woke up.”

“…What’re ya talkin’ about ‘shaving screams’?” Hailey asked.

“Weird dream stuff. There were shattered things floating about that were screams.” John gave her a frustrated shrug. “That’s the best I got. Momo, Lydia, you got any idea what this could be about? Lulu? Anyone?” There were naught but uncertain glances, haremettes that knew nothing looking at other haremettes that knew nothing.

“Wild guess: big tree could be Yggdrassil?” Lee threw in.

“The Worldtree, while famous, is hardly the sole example of a massive tree in the Abyss,” Lydia said. “Nothing else about the description given matches either.”

“Then we just have a vague warning that something will happen eventually,” John groaned.

“Is this a vision or some entity reaching out?” Scarlett wondered.

“Probably a vision, although I can’t say that for certain.” The Gamer looked at the black marks on his arm. “The Lorylim, Izha most likely, put me into contact with Enki, probably to delay the Lorylim invasion until he had set up all of his pieces and to weaken Tiamat… there’s no such connection remaining.”

“That is your assumption, Master,” Aclysia cautioned. “You ought to ask Layla on the matter.”

“If she can look at me without her eyes rolling up in her head,” John drawled. The mild joke was met with equally mild chuckles. Adrenaline was fading. Nothing was left to be discussed. They could lose themselves in unproductive theories or they could continue to live.

Going back to sleep after that was not exactly an option for John. Between the long time the orgy had taken and this early rise, they had only gotten four hours in. ‘We’ll have to repay that sleep debt tonight,’ he thought.

“Imma go take a shower to wake up,” Rave said. “Anyone with me?”

“Yup, yup, yup!” Sylph chatted, which spoke for the general attitude. Lorelei specifically wanted to wash off the sweat.

“I’ll be right with you, I just want to drink something first,” John said.

“Ya can drink shower water?” Rave suggested jokingly.

“One, no, even if that is the same water as what comes out of the tap, two, I want orange juice.”

“Guess we’re gonna get wet without ya then,” his first fiancée teased.

They parted ways at the bedroom door, them turning towards the large main bathroom and him seeking out the kitchen. ‘Still haven’t put in my contacts,’ he thought. ‘I’ll put them on in the kitchen.’

Following his mental map of the mansion was easy enough. In the first place, the most commonly used rooms were close together in the centre and front of the large building. All of the extra rooms around were just extras for comfort and the diminishing number of guests. They had gone from 4 non-haremettes to 2.

‘I hope we’re not waking up Moira or Daiyu,’ John thought. The sex room had been isolated, he was confident of that, but twenty women moving through the hallways could potentially stir sleeping women. Then again, he was currently in one of those hallways and he barely heard a muffle once the door was closed. This really was top-class noise isolation.

The Gamer found the handle to the living room/kitchen combo in one try. He pushed it down, stepped on through, and immediately picked up the sound of the fridge working. It was a steady hum, familiar from years around the electric device. It was the kind of noise the fridge made when it was open. His elemental senses told him the same thing. Light and cold air were radiating from the fridge, casting the shadow of a person standing before it, her body heat creating her outline.

“Morning, Moira,” John said, his voice raspy from the stresses of the sudden awakening. He enunciated each word carefully, to not cough when he was this close to a glass of OJ. “Hope you had a restful night.” Just as he finished that sentence, he finished putting his contact lenses in place.

Moira stood in front of the open fridge, one hand hovering in front of the stored foodstuff, the other holding the upper edge of the door. She was bent forwards, likely having looked for something specific amongst the manifold things a household of this size had on offer. Now, she was looking over her shoulder, her eyes widened in shock, her reddish pink lips parted around a piece of honey-spread toast between her lips.

The redhead was frazzled. Her eyes had bags under them, betraying little or no sleep had been had at all. Her gold-trimmed, red nightgown clung to her curves. The already thin fabric had turned see-through and clingy, soaked in the sweat of a night spent orgasming. She was leaning forwards, all but presenting the round backside of her athletic figure. The short skirt failed to cover anything, being both too sheer and too short to hide the amethyst-studded plug in her ass and the purple dildo in her pussy, kept in place by a black harness. The artificial phallus buzzed in unison with the frequency of the fridge.

John took in the sight, a quarter as shocked as she appeared to be. A blush covered her face that made her face almost as red as her dishevelled hair.

Something in John flipped in that moment. Why, he could not say. It was not the first time he had walked in on her masturbating. Was it because this was a display of her own perversion, rather than a Blessing-enforced Libido boost? Was it because he was tired, his mental fortitude weakened? Was it because he had spent the past two weeks wondering if Moira wanted him? Was it because her sweat drenched the room in enough pheromones to soak his brain? Was it just because this was so… wonderfully casual? Perhaps any one, perhaps all, perhaps none.

Fact was that John felt the all too familiar sensation of his heart expanding to make room for another. With it came the involuntary switch of Source of Satisfaction. A debuff of 100 Libido turned into a buff of 100 Libido, as John’s monkey brain went straight to the thought: ‘I want to cuddle and tap that red-white creature so badly.’

John’s dick rose up rapidly, each heartbeat surging more blood into the member. Moira’s mouth parted a little further, the toast falling out, accompanied by a deep moan. Her eyelids fluttered. The buzzing of the vibrator did exactly what it was supposed to do. Pussy juices dripped off the purple toy while her hips quaked in bliss.

“I… hnggh…” Moira bit her lower lip, staring half-lidded at John’s cock. They did not linger there for long, drinking in the entirety of his naked form. Her orgasm was drawn out, second by beautiful second.

John couldn’t help but notice the specific selection she had made in the sex toys. They were obviously of his collection, removed after her prior request. Of all the things that she could have chosen, a butt plug and a vibrating dildo notably below the size of his cock was… interesting. There was so much more to help a lonely girl get off in there than goods that every common sex shop offered.

Their eyes met. That feeling in his heart redoubled. The orgasm faded, the buzzing remained, Moira continued to stare and so did he. There was nothing said. Nothing locked them into place. Time ticked away. He loved every second seeing her before him. The cold light of the open fridge did not paint her in the light she deserved.

‘Do I want her?’ John asked himself earnestly. He weighed the question up not just against his desire, but against his situation as a whole. Their past, his present conditions, her limitations, their differences in values, what this would mean for the future, his resolution to no longer expand the harem. ‘She is different from just another addition,’ he thought. ‘This is Moira Brighton…’ “Hey.”

The single word snapped Moira out of her dreamy stare. “Ah!” she gasped, lustfully, shyly, confusedly, then she straightened up like her back was a string attached to a heavy weight that had just been pushed over the edge. A second later, she turned around. Her moderately sized chest jiggled slightly, the hard nipples tenting the soaked fabric. “H-hey?” she stuttered.

“I would like to… get to the fridge?” the Gamer said, not sure what else to say. His mind was still reeling, various instincts and opinions pulling him in several directions. The one thing he knew was that he did not mind seeing her walk around with a vibrator pinned in her cunt. That was the kind of lewdness that he casually accepted from women in his life, be they haremettes or friends.

Just the average debauchery of his lifestyle, really.

Moira shuffled to the side with a muttered, “Sorry.”

The meekness on display made the butterflies in John’s stomach flutter. She had the defined shoulders of a knight and the femininity of a princess. He tried to put that to the side. He was too thirsty for all of this.

He grabbed the orange juice, then a glass. Moira picked up the toast. It had fallen on the meticulously clean counter. The frazzled redhead decided to eat it, despite the loss of honey. The toast crunched. With her off-hand, she cleaned the sticky substance off the counter. The way she motioned to clean the counter resembled stroking a bit too much. John stared at her hand. His erection twitched. He stared at her ass. Precum dripped from the tip. Moira bit her lower lip and watched it fall.

“Do you like the colour purple?” John asked, trying to fill the silence with something besides sexual tension.

“I… might be growing more fond of it la-ah-tely.” Moira’s words were whispers on sighed exhales, a voice that could command an army of the faithful in the middle of a battle reduced to a whisper. “I’ve always liked gold too… if you can believe that.”

John chuckled weakly, swallowed, then took another huge gulp of orange juice. ‘Ravished by the gold and purple man,’ he remembered the prophecy Lorelei had gotten regarding her lover – the prophecy about him. ‘Coincidence?’ he thought.

Moira refused to look at him again. She washed out the rag. The fridge was closed now. The heat exchange turned off, leaving only the vibrations of the sex toy. Did she know she could turn it off with a thought?

“I’ll go back to my room now,” the redhead said and turned away.

John stayed silent. His eyes were focused on her back. Even her median furrow was gorgeous, highlighted by the fabric that stuck to it and the shoulderblades to its sides. Once more, his eyes were drawn to her butt. It was a little rounder than Metra’s and a little larger than Nightingale’s. Muscles marked her thighs as she tensed to step, softness marked them when she relaxed to stand.

John tried to take another sip of orange juice, but the glass was empty. Without looking, he placed it on the counter. He ignored the desires raging in his loins and said what he wanted to say beyond lust, “I’m going to join the girls in the shower, then we’ll hold the morning meeting. Want to join us?”

Moira stopped, hand on the handle. Objectively, she stood there for barely any time at all. To John, it still felt like an eternity. The room was dark, no light had been switched on, little starlight made it through the windows on this late December night.

“Yes,” Moira answered in a whisper.