Collide Gamer

The air in the living room was heavy.

The gathered harem plus Daiyu, minus Ehtra, Metra and Lydia, waited for John to break the silence. He had a hard time doing so. He hated losing. It took the growl of Stirwin in his mind to remind him of his obligations. ‘Your rankled pride does not entitle you to waste everyone’s time,’ the Celestial Devourer spoke to his thoughts.

‘I know…’ John yielded, then groaned and tilted his head back. “Let’s start with what we learned,” he said. “Which isn’t much. The masked things I believe are tied to the Tzitzimimeh, shock troops of some type perhaps. Do they match any legends you are aware of, Nahoa?”

“I can’t say they do, no,” Nahoa denied. “White masks, yes, the rest of their bodies, no. White masks aren’t exactly a distinctive feature in our legends though.”

If the Mexica had an archive or something where they could look deeper into the matter, that would have been incredibly helpful. If there was a single mention of lightning tongues or goat hooves, then they could further narrow in on this being the correct interpretation.

Alas, the Aztec Empire had acted primarily on oral traditions and what was written down in glyphs had been destroyed along with the Eternal Sanctum. There was no way to check.

“What else could they be?” Aclysia inquired.

“Anything, really,” the Gamer responded. “Though the most likely explanation would be some side effect of Yoshua’s power. Reality phantoms born from his anxiety, whenever he opens portals. With his Spellpower, that is entirely possible. The only real pointer I have towards this being tied to the Tzitzimimeh is that I saw the sky darken on the other side of the portal, which could have a myriad of other explanations.” Arms crossed, John tapped his elbow repeatedly. “It’s all a big mystery.”

“What about the Martyr Morph?” Aclysia continued to prompt him. “What have you learned about it?”

John looked to Nathalia, who shrugged. “Intense physical power, adhesive and acidic spit, a lesser intellect. Altogether, a mere roadblock to entities such as me.”

She was boasting. Had it not been for the intervention of the others, the dragoness would have sustained several injuries. Even with that aid, she had required Undine to patch her up so no unseemly cracks appeared on her humanoid form.

“Devos’ abilities apparently fall into the biomancy school of magic,” John continued from there. “Immense physical strength, self-adaptation, and the ability to create soldiers from the eggs with him in an emergency. A formidable foe… one whose intentions we still have no idea about.”

Scarlett swung one leg over the other, her heel bouncing in agitation all the while. “Gotta call it: wasn’t the best call to let him tag along.”

“There was no good call to be made,” John pushed back. “Had I told him to stay, he would have bided his time another way. We could have attacked and killed him immediately, but I don’t think you would advertise that we should greet all that is unknown that way.”

“…No, we should not,” Scarlett agreed, voice flat from annoyance.

“This could all have been avoided if I wasn’t so weak,” Lee mumbled.

“Do not poison your mind!” Nia declared. The forceful and immediate response of the blank had people turn their heads. Where the blonde had originally sat was vacant. She was instead straddling Lee’s lap, a hand on the side of her friend’s face. “What you are capable of is miraculous.”

“Wasn’t enough though.”

“For all of our power, we do not dictate the laws of reality,” John said, loud and clear. “This isn’t a case where you can blame yourself for being too weak. You can grow stronger still, we all can, but there was nothing there that could have been done.”

“If I may, blame could also be placed on me for not spying his duplicitous intentions,” Lorelei added.

Upset continued to linger on Lee’s face, but she gave a light, understanding nod. Nia put a rewarding kiss on the harem’s youngest lips.

“When do you think he started to contemplate betraying us?” John asked everyone.

“Impossible to say,” Scarlett responded first.

Rave put a foot on the edge of the table, then put it back down when the entire maid cadre gave her a warning glance. “He was behaving notably differently the last two days,” the feline Lightbearer said.

“Indeed, he was… though that was likely due to the things he learned about this world,” John said. Devos had never been entirely unobserved. He had even slept in the library. There were always two to three people with him. The only outsiders with him were Daiyu and Qingmei and it was never those two on their own.

John would sooner believe that the cure for cancer could be found in a fortune cookie than assume Daiyu had anything to do with this. As for the other…

“Where is Qingmei at the moment?” the Gamer asked.

“Answering inquiries for me,” Lu Zhi responded. “I know where you are going with this. I personally observed her whenever she and Devos were in the same room, since she was the only outsider. From all I could tell, they only spoke once. There’s no good reason to suspect her.”

John held onto a degree of scepticism. The worst thing about people out there having matching counterintelligence capabilities to his Observe was that he could never be really sure about anyone’s loyalties. That only meant he was in the same boat as all of humanity though. At least he could trust everyone with the Lover’s Will mark on them, which was a privilege he did not take lightly. Having consistent certainty that all of his loves did love him in return was an ease upon his paranoid mind.

“For now, we’ll stick with the most likely explanation then: he came to the conclusion he needed to pry Yoshua away from us for whatever he wants to do next.” John was back to drumming on his elbow. “Which categorically has to be something he thinks we would want to stop from happening, otherwise he could have just worked with us on building Yoshua up.”

“We will see him again,” Nahoa reiterated what she had said to the Mite King.

“Virtually guaranteed,” John agreed.

Moira chose that moment to ask a single question, “Are we giving chase?”

“I don’t know where we would start,” John responded. “It took us almost two weeks to find him when we had portals as our leads. Lorelei, could you locate him?”

“The future fractures when I scry his fate. It is a parchment yet to be paper that I see, a page in a book unwritten.” Lorelei put the fountain pen, one of the personal items they had appropriated from Yoshua’s house, on the table. “In blunt terms, I have no awareness of his location. I believe I could find a trail if I dug deep.”

John inhaled deeply. He would have preferred it if her answer had been a clear no. “If we attempt to find him, then we have to either reschedule the wedding or accept that not all of us will be there.”

It was what everyone had been thinking about, finally said aloud. Siena raised her voice before any silence could settle. “I’m speaking for a lot of us when I say that this is not an option.” Her moonlight silver eyes wandered around the room, waiting for anyone to contradict her.

Moira picked up that mantle. “A week is a long time for a creature of Devos’ capabilities. What narrow gap Lorelei has will be closed, our chance to give chase snuffed out.”

“I don’t think this is my decision to make,” John said and looked at his first fiancée.

Pupils narrowing into slits, Rave tilted forwards. “It’s your wedding too, Johnny.”

“If you want me to, I can make that decision,” he clarified. “If you want me to, I can tell you what I would prefer. All I want to say is that the ultimate choice on this is yours. I submit myself to your authority on this.”

Rave leaned back a little bit, still tense. He could guess what was going through her mind. She loved him for giving her that control and loathed him for putting her on the spot. It was not a nice decision to put on someone, but he believed wholeheartedly that everything to do with this wedding was completely in her domain. All the decisions he got to make on it he had either made already or were given to him by her.

“…No,” Rave uttered that single word, then shook her head. “No, I’m not having it. I’m not letting another crisis push us back. This is our week. The world will have to survive for a bit on its own.”

Most of the harem let out a sigh of relief at that. Even the selfless women were unwilling to postpone the marriage and all associated with it. Moira pulled her shoulders back, before groaning and rubbing her forehead. “Lady, forgive me for this dereliction of my duty. Lady, forgive this Warden for being just a woman.”

“Lorelei… on the off chance that you manage to find a definitive location by Sunday, I want you to try,” John put the final words in the matter. “Otherwise, we admit defeat in the battle and prepare ourselves for the war.”

That had the agreement of the room.

_________________________________________________________________________

“And that was the last time you’ll have sex for the next week,” Rave told him.

John had been entirely mesmerized by his first woman’s post-orgasmic trembles. Distracted by such a potent force, it took a few seconds for the words to hit him. “What?” he asked.

“Ya heard me.” Rave stretched and gave him a smug smile. “I’ve pulled some strings and got everyone to agree that ya don’t get to cum until we do the whole wedding night.”

Annoyance rose and died within John over the course of a single second. “I suppose it will make the night more special,” he slowly agreed, “but I would prefer it if you didn’t spring it on me like that.”

“Ya sprung it on us before,” Rave pointed out.

“Once was because of a Quest,” he defended himself. “The other time… admittedly was not. I just wanted to make sure I could do it.”

“So now ya gotta live with the consequences.”

“Touche…” John groaned and moved out of the bed. If he was now cockblocked, he would need to get pants on. Otherwise, his brain would recognize the patterns and keep his boner up. “I hope I don’t get too irritable.”

“If ya do, we agreed that handjobs are fine,” Rave informed him.

“Small mercies.” He opened the closet by their harem-sized bed and looked for the seldomly used stack of his casual pants. By demand of the maids, he wore shirts around the house with some regularity, but pants were almost banned.

He did not bother with underwear, just stepping into the loose legwear and letting the elastic waistband fall into place. A black, plain shirt followed after, covering him in a gamer’s traditional garb.

“I’ll try not to need that,” he promised. He could go a week without orgasms. The first three days would suck immensely, but he could get there. “Are we also sleeping in separate beds?”

“Was gonna leave that one to you,” Rave said. “I like cuddling ya, but I understand that might be a bit too much.”

“Is this a harem-wide sex ban or just me?”

“Harem wide… probably should’ve led with that.”

John agreed, but telling her that she sucked at explaining things would just have been retreading old ground. “Fascinating that you managed to rope everyone into that. Just you and me would be enough for the point.”

“Eh, ya know, I’m cute… so separate bed or no?”

John contemplated for a little bit, weighing the benefits against the drawbacks. “Yeah, I’ll sleep in a separate bed,” he decided. “I could muster the willpower to ignore my morning wood for a week, but it would be…”

“Fucking hard?” Eliana shouted from the neighbouring room.

“Thank you for the brilliant input!”

“You are fucking welcome!” Eliana shouted. “Or unfucking? Non-sexual? Some prude shit!”

John rolled his eyes in amusement at her comments. “In any case, I think that way works best.”

“Fair’s fair.” Rave crawled out of bed after him and put a quick kiss on his cheek. “It’ll be hard but we can do it.”

“If it was easy, it’d be an empty gesture.” John returned the kiss with a peck on her cheek, then scratched her behind the ears. “I was thinking about suggesting the same break tomorrow.” He bowed down and whispered into her ear. “Next time we share a bed, it’ll be as husband and wife.”

Rave shuddered, then hugged him intensely.