Collide Gamer

[Author’s Note: As a quick announcement, you will see AI pictures pop up more frequently now. This is because I have struck an experimental deal with Monori, the artist whose style I am generating in here, where I pay him a small sum for each picture I put into my works. This clears ethical concerns, as far as I am concerned, and I am thusly more than happy to make greater use of it. I will, however, continue to use links only for AI pictures, so those of you that don’t enjoy this don’t have to click on them.

Also because of NovelFire rules I will not put the lewd ones in the chapter at all on that site.]

'Well, there goes that money.’ John opened up the Harem Comms to drop a message to the Kingdom Question task force, telling them what had happened and that he would have a new Creator Puppet ready for them in a moment. ‘It was disposable, so it’s not too bad.’

John studied the screen in front of him. It was a simple text file, a log of what the Creator Puppet had seen and experienced that he had written using his technomancy while working on various documents. The gap between the portal closing and the connection severing was interesting. There should have been no delay between the two. Though the range of the Skill was advertised as ‘infinite’, the connection would break when there was no conceivable way for the signals to take.

‘Was there a second portal?’ he considered.

“Knock, knock, sug’r.” The alluring drawl of his favourite country gal pulled him out his thoughts. Hailey pushed the door open before he had the chance to respond, then stopped in the doorframe. The hips of her hourglass figure were alluringly tilted, ready to take the step that would deliver her from the break room to his office.

She wore her typical clothes. A leather bra covered her huge breasts; the shiny cups joined at the middle with a metal ring. Deep blue jeans gave an alluring look at her fairly defined stomach. The upper edge of the deep blue womb tattoo peeked over the waistband, beautifully framed by the lines of Venus that demarcated the border between torso and legs. There were oil stains all over her. Wrist, waist, cleavage, even on her face.

[Hailey Entrance (AI): https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/d6f36a11b484.png]

“You know you can clean yourself before coming in,” John told her.

“Sure, I could, but I know ya. The grease is half the fun.” Hailey emphasized her accent for his pleasure. It worked wonders. Every drawled syllable of her southern twang was like honey pouring down his ear canals. “Gonna call me inside, lemme get to piston cleanin’?”

“Would love that…” John looked down at himself, sitting in his office chair, actually wearing pants. It was a horrid state of affairs, but no one had been available for the under-the-desk work until now. Well, some had been available, but even Eliana had said she wanted to do her things at the moment. John had supported her in prioritizing her urge to paint over sucking him off. Anything else would have been too horny even by his standards. “…but I have to take a trip to Delicia. My Creator Puppet got cut off in some Kingdom.”

“Just the Creator Puppet, I hope?” Hailey asked, with a slight bit of concern to her voice.

“Of course,” he assured her. Though there was basically no chance that he would send one of their shared loves into a one-way trip to uncertainty, he understood the need to make sure. This was a high-risk situation even for them. “Just have to get the replacement ready for when Lee takes them back.”

“So, in the next minute?”

“Nia wants to investigate the lingering mana first, so we have five minutes.” John pushed against the edge of the table. His chair rolled back, then rolled a bit further without him when he got on his feet. “We’ll do that and then… I actually have to head to a meeting.” He let out a heavy sigh.

“That’s the sound of havin’ to appease Emrik.”

“It’s not Emrik, for once, it’s the capitalists.” John walked past Hailey, smoothly putting his arm around her as he did. A pleased purr was his first reward, the squish of her hot tits against his chest the second, and her great jeans under his fingers the third. Obviously, he wasn’t actually appreciative of the jeans.

“We talkin’ capitalists or corpos?” Hailey asked.

“Lil’ bit of both?” He mimicked her accent a bit on instinct. It was all too easy to absorb the talking habits of loved ones. “It’s a gradient, right? When you play the game of the free market, eventually someone wins. Then those winners try to make it a less free market so they keep the top position. Then the corporatist monopoly entrenches itself until it either becomes so incompetent that something new breaks its kneecaps or the government has to come in and break it up.”

“Second one rar’ly goes well,” Hailey pointed out.

“I think that says more about the incompetence and corruption of people using the tool than the tool itself.” Then shook his head. “To the point: there was pressure on Scarlett from her colleagues to call this meeting. They want to have a conversation about imperial economic policy.”

“And that annoys ya, why?”

“Because it’s not like I changed my stance on it.” A flash of arcane light delivered the two of them from the office teleporter to the teleporter room inside the Palace. “I’m still a free market person, I don’t have any adjustments to the economic policy planned. In fact, now that I have more control over the laws, they can expect less changes than before. I think that meeting will just be a lot of the wealthy people of Fusion shouting ‘advice’ over each other. Not like they are a unified political entity.”

“Mhm, yeah, that is soundin’ like a hassle,” Hailey agreed.

The inexplicable corridors of the Great Harem Palace took them straight to the Crafting Crew centre of operation. When he stepped inside, it was remarkably quiet. Lorelei was out, Lee was out, Scarlett was out, Hailey was with him and, considering he didn’t hear any active operations from her corner either, Delicia must have been out as well. That left the hums and light clicks of the various automatic processes. Brews bubbled in complicated pipe networks. Metal was smelted and turned into ingots by a massive machine. A laser cutter did its work on a plate of magical metal one centimetre per minute.

John had a room in the Palace where he kept his menagerie of golem bodies. Those, however, were of high quality or outdated versions that had emotional value. What he needed was another throwaway.

He found one in Delicia’s corner of the complex. It was a partially mangled, failed experiment. Truthfully, it looked quite crude. Whatever manner of fuck-up had occurred when making it had caused one arm to be thin, borderline skeletal, while the other was covered in jagged bumps. It looked like the rock and metal suffered from a skin disease.

It was aesthetically unpleasing and objectively sub-optimal. The only reason it and its like had been kept in storage was that separating the materials back out would have been a lot of effort Delicia hadn’t found the time for. For right now, they would serve as effective and disposable bodies.

John put his hand on the shoulder of the golem and activated the Skill. A new fragment of his will came to inhabit the inorganic vessel. New hands, new feet, the new, separate capacity to move. He rolled his new shoulders, testing them like he always tested them. Though the feeling of expanding himself across physical locations was familiar now, there remained certain rituals he had to observe. His humanity urged him to.

The Creator Puppet shifted from Ascendant to Socialite mode. The ugly interior was hidden by a naked facsimile of himself. Though the false body could mimic his clothing, it was best to put it in an actual suit if he was going to interact with the mundane a lot. Unlike the Ambassador Double, this one was a cheap mimicry.

“How do you feel when I do this, by the way?” John asked and moved his second body to Hailey’s free side. Mirroring the position of the original, the Creator Puppet put an arm around the country gal, groping the free cheek.

Hailey immediately put her own free arm around the second body. “It’s incredibly hot.” Her voice was a husky coo.

John had already known that would be her reaction. When he was treated to two Momos or two Undines, that was a highlight of the day. Who wouldn’t want to have just more of a beloved partner around them? There was no difference between men and women in this regard.

“I would love to treat you to this more frequently.” John only used his real body to speak as they walked back the way they had come. “Alas, mathematics. Three of me is one of me for each 9-ish of you.”

“Ya might need a fourth one,” Hailey suggested.

“I might. I had hoped the Companion Cube would go that direction.” He eyed the ever-present block of silver that trailed behind him. “It still might. It also might not. There must be some limit to even my bullshit.”

“Only a fifth of the way left,” Hailey said.

John nodded slowly. “Very weird to think about that. Just 200 levels left before I max out. That’ll be one whole chapter of my life done.”

“Just gives ya time to focus on other things, right?”

The Gamer scoffed at the notion, mimicking the tone of genuine offense as closely as he could get away with. “Hardly. We are going from mid to late game. My powers operate on MMO logic, so that’s when the grinding really kicks off. I’ll have to spend ten-thousand hours running the same dungeon over and over again, just to get a +2% bonus to my Strength, but only on my left arm and only on days that start with S.”

“Games are so weird,” Hailey drawled. “When ya describe it like that, it sounds like a terribly dull thaing, yet it ain’t that bad when ya do it.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” Squeezing her butt with both hands, he used his double to double-hug Hailey one more time. Then, the Creator Puppet stepped away, entering the teleportation pad before them on its own. It went to where it would link up with Lee; they stayed in the room for a moment. “Unless you want to join that business meeting, I recommend you detach from me now.”

Hailey was weighing her options. “How long’s that gonna take?”

“Approximately?” Numbers were crunched in John’s head. Human intuition could be surprisingly accurate when it came to many things and he could couple that up with actual math. Knowing the people that would attend, the average amount of time they needed to hear their own voice, and the level of patience he had to display for the sake of appearing respectful. “…About 3 hours?”

“Nah, hon’.” Hailey decoupled from him with almost insulting swiftness. “I’m sufferin’ a lot for ya, but I ain’t doin’ that. Wanted to give ya a quick oil change, then get back to workin’.”

“What are you working on anyhow?” John wondered.

“Upradin’ Moi-moi’s motorcycle.”

“Sweet, merciful God, can you not give her something even faster? I fear for my citizenry!” John shuddered at the memory of the few times he had seen the Warden – his Warden, actually – on a bike. He loved that woman to bits, but her driving habits were likely to turn someone to bits eventually. It was either a miracle or a sign of skill that it hadn’t yet.

“Ya know she’s a pretty good driver, yeah?”

“I am not convinced of that.”

Hailey rolled her eyes at his tone, then playfully punched his shoulder. “Imma see ya lat’r, sug’r.”

John watched her ass wiggle as she made her way out of the teleportation room. His dick was at half mast just listening to her drawl and the view of her bubble butt stretching the denim of her pants almost got him to the full erection.

‘I don’t need to deal with it. I do not.’ John told himself and stepped onto the teleporting platform.

Another flash of light later, he was in Scarlett’s temporary headquarters. As before, the technomancer had preferred to have a basis of operations outside of the Palace. When he had asked her why, she had given him a very clear answer: “I work with people that would love to crush me. Why the fuck would I invite them into my home?”

A crass point, but a point nonetheless. With business leaders and politicians, the same advice went: most were decent people, but there was always a snake in the grass.

The temporary HQ didn’t look temporary at all. It was luxurious, a testament to the absurd level of wealth Scarlett possessed. Had it not been for the Guild Hall, John would have been sure that Scarlett’s net worth would have surpassed his own, despite her being a subject inside his empire. ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ novelꞁire.net

John strutted down the long corridor, gazing out of the window as he went along.

The ruins of Goblin Capital had been largely cleaned up. The oddity of the architecture struck him once more. Seeing those hyper-efficiently designed alchemy plants tower over parks and rows of gorgeous statues of shortstacks was just… weird to his sense of aesthetics. It was like someone had mashed together brutalism and the renaissance into one time period.

“Finally here?”

John directed his gaze forwards. The question had come from Momo, who he had not expected to be there. “I thought you had better things to do?” the Gamer wondered.

“I do and yet here I am;” Momo groaned. “Strings have been pulled to make the ministers insist to me I take this meeting.”

“Were your strings pulled?” John asked the present and most attractive of said ministers.

“Statement: attempts were made,” Beatrice answered. The head of Fusion’s finances was obviously going to be present during a conversation about them. “I remain incorruptible.”

“Of course you do,” John boasted in the tone only a lover could have. He put his arms out to the side. One rolling her eyes, the other swiftly, the two maids stepped into his embrace. There really was no better way to walk than with two loves attached to his sides. “Let’s go deal with boring finances, then,” he declared.