John was in a great mood.

John was in a sour mood.

John was feeling victorious.

John was feeling cheated.

Sitting in the relative safety of the bunker, the Gamer dwelled on the duality of feelings. It was a precarious balance. Just dismissing the negative emotions because they were displeasing was dangerous. His mood was great because he had made progress on the Quest, but he hated that three of his elementals were currently out of his reach because of it.

On the matter of feeling cheated, it was plainly obvious that Malady had held back. Not just in terms of where her potential truly peaked out but how far she could push that body of hers. Of course, John also could have brought greater might to bear, that was what made all of this so half-satisfying. No one was fully committing. They always stopped just shy of getting truly serious.

There was every reason to behave that way, John shared it, but it still made it annoying. The reason why John held onto that annoyance was that he otherwise would have potentially plunged down the ‘I could have crushed them so easily’ line of thinking. Pride was a dangerous thing and his was gnawing at the edge of his mind constantly.

Distracting himself was one way to push this away. He could fill his thoughts with lust or video games instead, but that wouldn’t address the root issue. It would come back to him in the quiet moments. He needed to think this to its conclusion.

‘Why do you feel upset?’ Stirwin nudged helpfully in his mind.

John looked at his hands. ‘Because I feel like I was robbed of a great battle,’ he admitted. ‘God, I miss them. That fight at the Blood Fountain only made it clear. I haven’t really fought anything since Arkeidos. The stronger I get, the less satisfying most fights become. I’m vain enough to get pleasure out of stomping my enemies, but this? This was neither a full fight nor a stomp. I could have lost that. How much further could she have gone?’

‘Will talking about this make you feel better?’ Stirwin asked, already knowing the answer.

John tried to come to the opposite conclusion, but he just could not. ‘No,’ he answered and groaned. ‘Maybe I don’t have to think this to its conclusion, maybe I just need to wait for the adrenaline to fully flush out of my system…’

‘There are states of mind that time will heal,’ Stirwin advised. ‘Not all is solved by overthinking it. Matter of fact, very little is solved that way. You are a man. Work with your hands.’

John snorted at the simple advice. Not because it was ridiculous but because he was. ‘Everyone needs to hear the most basic advice sometimes,’ he thought and stood up. He moved from the isolated room to the main chamber, where Rave was currently living her best life. The first of the harem was reclined on a grown couch, Ehtra and Momo on top of her. Both were in that glassy-eyed state that proved the pink-haired bombshell of a woman had pushed them past the submissive switch and well into the subservience trance.

Dragging their tongues over Rave’s peaks and valleys, the two white-haired maids were occasionally treated to a make out session by the feline Lightbearer. For the most part, they were dedicated to worshipping Rave’s curves with kisses and the caress of their hands.

The sight immediately lifted John’s mood. “Done brooding?” the feline Lightbearer asked.

“I was advised to work with my hands.”

“Sounds like Stirwin is smart like always,” Rave purred and gestured for him to come hither. “I get, ya think it wasn’t a real enough fight,” she said, her voice getting lower as he got closer, until she was whispering. “The rush, everything is balancing on a knife’s edge – and then it just ends. Not ‘cause either of you went to the extreme, but ‘cause it's smart to end there. The brain agrees, but the blood is pumping and there’s that one punch never thrown that’s itching in your bones.”

“You really know what you’re talking about,” John whispered back.

“I’m a fight junkie, ‘course I do.” Rave’s lips parted, not to speak more on the matter, but to receive him with a kiss. She tasted of peppermint, of the forest, and of cinnamon – an interplay of herself, Momo and Ehtra.

Usually, John preferred breaking his brats himself. This once, it was nice to have Momo start worshipping his midriff as soon as he was settled next to Rave. “Next time, I won’t let them die,” he mumbled his regret.

“You’ll do your best,” Rave encouraged him. “Then you’ll do better than that. I believe in you. We all do.”

John inhaled deeply and felt himself slide back into confidence. “Apparently that was all I needed to hear.”

“Nah, ya just needed to hear my voice. I could’ve said anything.”

“Well, I am a bit of a whipped ---- fool,” John agreed, his voice hitching when Momo wrapped her lips around the head of his cock. Next to him, Ehtra was gliding between Rave’s tanned legs. The considerably darker woman began to lick the honeypot before her, causing the feline Lightbearer to coo.

“No fool would’ve gotten us here, tiger.” Her fingers brushed over the side of his neck, sending pleasant shivers down his spine. They met halfway down with the intense waves of pleasure accompanying each bob of Momo’s head. “This started with me sucking ya off in a forest.”

“Weren’t you quite the slut back then?” John teased her.

Rave rolled her eyes. They had this exchange so many times – yet she still chose to have it again. “I just knew you were worth being a little loose for.”

“Isn’t it lucky for you that it worked out?”

“Yu-p,” Rave suddenly swung herself over, straddling him. A snap of her finger was all the order Momo needed to align his cock with her slit for them. She slowly impaled herself, running her hands through her hair all the while. “Because you’re just that great, tiger!” she shouted out in lust and love.

His first love rode him with all the grace of a belly dancer and all the care of a longtime lover. Over two years they had been in each other’s life now, constantly elevating each other to new heights. Their power dynamic had changed considerably since those early days. At first she had been so much stronger than him, but that had swiftly changed. For a considerable stretch, she had struggled just to keep up with his shadow. Then the mark that now decorated all of their wombs had changed everything.

Its importance could never be understated. The Lover’s Will mark was every reason why they could be as cocky as they were. John’s familiars would have continued to scale. They would not have provided the kind of oomph he needed to be as confident about this whole situation as he was.

Rave kept on riding him until the last of his worries had been replaced with post-coital bliss. At that point, they just lay there. His thoughts were calm. Nothing was gnawing on him. ‘How rare, I was wrong and I love it,’ he thought.

His good mood was rather intensely interrupted by the chant echoing down the corridor. “Hate… hate… hate…. Hate… HATE! HATE! HATE!”

“Scarlett, get your machine under control!” he yelled. A tinge of worry filled his tone. The shouting stopped a moment later. The lack of response, however, put a sensation of dread in his stomach. Quietly, he freed himself from the cuddle pile. Momo blinked herself out of her sex drunk state and followed him when he left the room. Rave and Ehtra remained where they were, not sharing his concerns. ‘I swear, if she actually managed to make it sapient…’

The Gamer did not even get to finish the sentence. He turned the corner and found Scarlett and Hailey hands deep in cables and machine guts. Both of them were wearing coveralls, one blue the other red, both of them were covered in oil. The reason why Scarlett hadn’t responded was the screwdriver she held with her teeth.

“Perfect timing,” she growled past it. “Lend us a hand.”

John scratched the back of his head, but approached. “What do you need me to do?”

“Get me a fresh bottle of the Promethian oil from the Guild Bank. I also need more Thalia crystals and the Voidmarrow.”

“Are… you sure about that one?” John asked. The Voidmarrow had been a drop from Ohmior – a Legendary one at that. It had dropped from Ruhrszatch, which had been a Raid boss best described as a ‘void elemental’. John had encountered nothing like it in real space and he hoped he wouldn’t. There were enough corruptive influences in the current Abyss.

The problem was that he knew there was something out there, courtesy of Arkeidos’ kraken pet that had crashed into the planet from outer space.

Then again, he had killed that and John, by now, was stronger than Arkeidos had been.

While the Voidmarrow was from a boss that John would, at best, describe as eldritch, it was still an item created by game mechanics. It had no warning labels by Observe and was, therefore, only aesthetically shady. Its purpose was to create Stable Voids, which in turn were the energy source that, in the lore of the fictional place, had brought about Ohmior’s ruin. Tapping into the endless darkness as a battery was usually not a good idea.

Scarlett had been using Stable Voids for months now. Harnessing their power was difficult, but she had worked it out by reverse engineering the blueprints for the Ohmior Tower Knight. The arrival of Hailey had only advanced that endeavour. As far as either of them could see, the crystallized nothing had no corruptive influence.

They were both fallible.

“Did I fucking stutter?” Scarlett bit back.

“I am not entirely comfortable combining the AI technology that might go rogue with the Voidmarrow that we do not understand.”

“You’re not comfortable with combining the code that cannot go rogue with the item spawned by your system to give you bullshit value,” Scarlett answered and ripped her oil-drenched hands out of the guts of the machine. “I’m combining one thing that hasn’t gone out of control with another thing that hasn’t gone out of control. You gave it to me, I’ve been using it, now I have a purpose for it, hand it over, you paranoid bastard.”

John was still reluctant, but ultimately relented. The Voidmarrow went through the hands of his double back at home to his and then to Scarlett’s. It was a purple bone, of sorts, stripped of the hard outside and left with the flexible core.

The redhead grabbed it and jammed it somewhere into the chest cavity of the humanoid robot. The voice box activated again, screeching like a maddened flock of parrots, before Hailey bonked the head with a wrench.

If John had been worried before, he became extra worried when Hailey deployed the Rose of Artifice. “Can you stop stacking red flags?” Momo wheezed for him, while he was made to retrieve an ever-growing list of other items. “What are you doing with the hyper-enigmatic artifice?”

“Fusing the Voidmarrow to the spinal core,” Hailey answered, adjusting the petals of the opened Rose. John only now realized that the protrusions of the black base had been connected, via cables, to the Arcane Star that he had provided to them the previous day. The White Star contained around 700’000 MP.

It collapsed into nothing in an instant.

The Rose of Artifice flashed, pumping prismatic light into the body of the Autonomous Machine. It jumped like a body under the defibrillator. Once, twice, thrice, until the red gem at the core of the Rose had turned nearly black. Hailey pulled her enigmatic masterpiece away, then went right back to tinkering. John worriedly looked at the twitching claws of the machine. ‘If this thing becomes sapient, its given way of interacting with the world will be knives,’ he thought.

The list of items he was expected to provide finally came to an end. It meant he still had to stand there and hand them over, while the two mechanics finished the assembly of their improved model. Their last act was to slot a second Arcane Star into the chest and then seal it up by slamming the equivalent of the ribcage shut.

The final result was something out of a sci-fi horror story. The head retained that beak-like shape of elongated triangles. There were only two sides on this iteration, a left and a right. The only visible ocular was on the left side. The right had a seven-pointed star engraved in the metallic surface, giving John Chaos Cultist vibes – which was yet another red flag stacked on top.

The body was similarly still slender. Additional plates covered the thin arms and legs, but they only added sharpness to the design, not bulk. Arms ended in sharp claves, feet in a grotesque mixture between the dexterous feet of monkeys and the sharp talons of birds of prey. Every part of the machine was made by hand in this makeshift workshop, some of them were repurposed from the previous deployment, giving the entire thing a cobbled together, scratched look. The curtain of cables that hung from its hunched back like the cape of a dark lord was the final touch.

“Stand,” Scarlett commanded.

AM moved with unnerving fluidity. John hated it. There was nothing mechanical about it, no clunkiness – worse, there were none of the biological restrictions either. Sub-joints allowed it to swing its feet off the platform and get on its feet like it was a splash of water that decided it was taking a turn. Internal mechanisms whirled. It turned and bopped its head, like a crow checking out its environment. That was decently normal in its patterns of movements. That only made it more unnerving though.

Scarlett and Hailey exchanged a high-five, clearly happy with what they had made. “So, what does fusing the Voidmarrow to the spinal core mean?” he had to ask.

“Ye ‘member how your Creat’r Puppets have a core with Fusionals?” Hailey asked.

“I do,” the Gamer asked, wearily. He needed those to be in his Creator Puppets so certain Perks were active and the core, specifically, was a solution so they wouldn’t get lost too easily when he used them in Raids. “Did you use any?”

“Not in this,” Scarlett answered. “It’d be a waste for a Mark 2. We just appropriated Delicia and Lee’s design to try and make a central power source.”

“The Voidmarrow always makes Stable Voids, so what if we just diffuse the energy from those straight into the circuitry?” Hailey drawled excitedly. “It ain’t just peak energy efficiency, its self-sustainin’!”

“To a degree,” Scarlett curbed the enthusiasm. “It still needs the Arcane Star to function properly. Once it’s tapped out, it’d be like a car that occasionally finds a bit of gasoline in the tank again. A few metres at a time, steadily shutting down in-between.”

AM just stood there throughout the entirety of the explanation, a machine scanning its environment. “I do not trust it,” John confessed. “Infusing it with void stuff puts me straight back to my pre-trial concerns.”

“Just Observe it,” Scarlett challenged him.

All of the assurance in the world did little to ease his paranoia.