“I can report a string of victories. We, aided by Rex Germaniae, have retaken the territories of the Fusion Heartlands, the Hidden Tradition and the Lake Alliance in full. Our allies have worked fast and efficiently. While the Sons of Rome have reclaimed the south, the Illuminati have swept across the Great Plains and wrestled the Gobbo Nation back from Lorylim control. From Atlantic to the Pacific, the territories of Fusion have been liberated.”
That was the Gamer’s announcement that played on every news station at least once an hour since that morning. It was always accompanied by another announcement.
“Inhabitants of the Guild Hall, you are advised to either follow protocol to move to Boston in search of shelter or prepare yourself for danger. The Guild Hall will be moved to the frontlines at 20 o’clock.”
19:58.
John looked at the display with nervous anticipation. He sat by the swirling rings of the Heartkiln, because that seemed like the place to be. He had asked to do this alone and his women respected that, staying upstairs. Not that there would be anything too hard about what he was going to do, physically speaking.
19:59.
The seconds ticked by, each longer than the last. The vibrations of the air moved by the concentric rings circling around the core of blue mana. The Heartkiln, the evolution of the Guild Heart, brought about by the Starforger Class, had several esoteric tools and additions sticking out of what had previously been a perfect sphere. It all looked quite impressive.
20:00.
John turned his attention to the window before him. ‘I do wonder what it will feel like,’ he thought and pressed the button to confirm the relocation of the Guild Hall.
The answer was a prolonged and heavy tug on his everything. It started small and swelled in intensity. The rings around the Heartkiln ramped up in their rotations, until even the outermost one, ten metres across, was just a blur.
John’s curiosity drove him to hasten for the stairs, his pondering isolation ended in favour of another desire for knowledge. The crowd of twenty haremettes that had waited above were already in motion, the few that had waited for him following him as they headed outside.
The sky was covered in shifting rainbows. Colours shifted, consolidating further, while that tugging sensation grew more intense. The entire island was buzzing, as if something was using it as a massive cord. The sound gradually rose in intensity, a low hum that dominated everything, and then they teleported.
Space stretched, then stopped. It was like a hard stop on a rollercoaster. All momentum was suddenly gone, but John only felt like his soul was getting forced forwards, while his body experienced no inertia whatsoever. The duality of sensation was as dizzying as everything else about the experience.
The Guild Hall was several hundred metres in the air.
It boggled the mind. The sheer scale of the island flying was only made more ludicrous by the fact that the entirety of the water on it stayed put. It reached the edge of the cylindrical Protected Space and then simply stopped flowing. If any of the ships had been left in the Harbours, they could have sailed a circle just fine.
More interesting than the unchanged state of the Guild Hall was the place they had arrived, however.
John turned to his women. Following the universal success in curtailing the Lorylim and regaining control over the eastern areas, practically all of his haremettes had been recalled. Only those that were on the west coast remained stationed where they were. The rest of them were here, with him, aiding him in feeling like they were inching towards the day that things could be peaceful again.
It wouldn’t ever be the same as before, too much had been lost. Still, he hoped for a bright future. Being surrounded by this much beauty made that easier.
Recalling the ones on the offensive had been a simple decision. Recalling the ones on garrison duty had been a bit less simple and had even been met by open disagreement among his generals. John understood them, with Izha’s range a renewed attack on population centres was likely. He had to trust that they could take care of that themselves. By his estimation, it was better to strike at the heart of the corruption as fast as possible.
Lorylim needed time to process bodies. They were a fast-acting mutator, of that there was no doubt, and could take over any human, fantasy species or elemental at a frightening pace. To turn all of their drones into something more threatening, however, was a matter of days and further time given added to the refinement.
That was why the Death Zone had existed and it was also why the Lorylim, ultimately, had lost the momentum. For all of the losses Fusion had taken, they had killed enough of these matured Lorylim, be their amalgamated elementals or empowered Abyssals, that the first foe could no longer push with the same power.
All of the people that the hivemind had absorbed, all of that biomass, was pulling back into Alaska. Given that Tiamat had attempted to not only recreate her own body but also her long-dead husband, there was an element of time involved.
Between Gaia having it out for their enemy and that pressure, hurrying things along was the natural order of things.
“Anyone want to touch down with me?” he asked his present women.
“Me! Me! Me! Me!” Sylph bounced on the spot, one hand raised. “Pick me! I am a pick me girl! I want to be picked up, put down and bent over! Not right now, obviously, but do pick me!”
“Sylph, you bimbo bunny, he doesn’t pick us, we just go along,” Salamander declared.
“OH! Then I am picking myself!”
“Same,” Rave weighed in.
“I will not be left behind in this situation,” Lydia stated.
“I’ve had too much time away already, I’m watching,” Metra agreed.
“I concur, the Master creature deserv- requires oversight,” Ehtra chimed in.
“I want to be there,” Nia gave her opinion.
One after another, the entire harem expressed their desire to come along. John understood every last one of them. It had been too long since they had all moved together. The absence of Eliana and Aclysia in all of this was starkly apparent, despite them making up only 2 in a group of more than 20. Lu Zhi was also missing.
“Mind if I accompany you?” Lyndell stepped out from behind a nearby corner. The gothic beauty held an e-reader in her hand, an object that wandered into the shoulder bag she had acquired from somewhere. The grey thing worked strangely well with her aesthetics. “You are moving to meet my ally, are you not?”
“You could put it that way.” John considered her request. Having her move along when he was going to touch down with all of his harem could send the wrong signals… which he did not care much about, all things considered. “We’ll need your help at ground level anyhow.”
Lyndell took a few rapid steps in his direction, then stopped shy of joining at the head of the group. The spike of enthusiasm hardly surprised John. He had not needed Nathalia and Scarlett to tell him to know that the ancient entity continued to have her eyes on him. She was very obvious about it. Tagging along might have been her attempt to further ingratiate herself with the women before she made a more obvious move on him. It would have been the proper thing to do.
John had his attention pulled to Claire and Beatrice. The two maids grabbed his arms, the former taking advantage of the early darkness of the time of year to absolutely press herself against him. “Master, I’ve missed you so much, Master!” she said, borderline moaning his title. Addressing him directly made her shiver in wanton ways. “Never send me away for that long again! It was so horrible!”
“Demand: I want cuddles and kisses after peace is established,” Beatrice concurred. Her passive tone was compromised by her own little swing of obsessive love. She had a much, much better handle on it than even Aclysia, but the root of her mind being a copy of the first maid did still manifest at times like these. Not that the obsession was anything besides her own after all this time had passed.
Serving him was just what the maids wanted to do. He loved them for it, among many other reasons. To prove worthy of that service was one of the bigger motivations to remain a good man.
“After all of this is over, I’ll pamper everyone silly,” he promised.
They descended to ground level utilizing a large metal platform and a combination of various magics. Velka decided to invite herself to that meeting, landing on the hovering sheet mid-flight. She was immediately beset on all sides for scratches and pats.
‘And people think my harem spoils me,’ the Gamer thought, then directed his gaze at the area ahead. The smile on his lips died.
Before them was an ocean of rubble, interrupted by massive fortresses of alchemical genius. Refinery towers the size of skyscrapers were surrounded by chitinous walls. By the looks of them, the actual biological matter inside them had been killed and sterilized before the Lorylim arrived to deprive them of an easy way in. Within the walls were industrial structures, vast concrete blocks connected by pipes sometimes several metres thick.
Some of the fortresses had fallen. Towers of scorched Lorylim matter sprouted from them, their colour faded to an ashen white. John observed Nia and Lyndell closely, watching for any signs that they spotted a sudden and worrisome surge in enemy activity. Nothing occurred. The game mechanics appeared to have been right on this one – the capital of the Gobbo Nation was once again Owned Territory.
They touched down on a half-cleared plaza. A glorious copper statue stood atop a fountain. It had been deliberately left to rust, forming the green patina typical of that metal. An appropriate colour for the smug shortstack on her pedestal. Even dirtied by dust, the sassy expression was evident.
‘Goblins have a pretty extreme sense of aesthetics,’ John found. What remained of the houses was visibly gorgeous. They liked their rounded shapes and domes, to the point that John would have called their houses borderline suggestive. The fortresses were brutalist structures of concrete, chitin, steel and glass, with every angle precisely calculated to maximize space usage. There was not a single decoration on them.
One such fortress was their destination. Illuminati flags fluttered high above it, marking it as the temporary base of operations for the army that had retaken this space. The vast industrial gate was wide open for them. A courtyard designed for truck deliveries housed the majority of the war council.
The arrival of the Guild Hall had put a hundred people into motion. Supply officers were making arrangements with their peers atop the floating island to get food and other aid down to the city.
John and his women approached the two figures by the massive planning table. The Horned Rat was one, a female goblin with white hair and an almost comically oversized crown on her head another. Ankleshanker stood behind her, arms crossed, a grim bodyguard in dire time.
“It’s an honour to meet you in person, Queen Anastasia,” John greeted the female goblin first.
“Yeah, yeah, save it for the peacetime,” the shortstack responded immediately. For as inefficient as the crown was, the armour on her was anything but. Artifice powered muscle reinforcements in what was both incredibly expensive and advanced enough that he could hear Hailey whistle.
They had primarily interacted with the lewd side of goblin culture so far, because that was the side the species preferred to exhibit. For as much as goblins were highly effective bait for those that liked their women short and stacked, they also had a vicious streak to them. John remembered more than one game where goblins were small, green, crazy war criminals with the morality of a loose shoelace.
“And thank you for doing so much more than anticipated,” John turned his attention to the Horned Rat.
“They retreated, we just kept on pushing, pushing until we had reinforced this area,” the Horned Rat responded plainly. “We have more urgent matters to discuss.”
“That we do. It’ll have to wait for a moment.” John returned his attention to Anastasia. “I take it you heard the news?”
“That you went with the same idea as we did?” Anastasia gave her crown a flippant tap. “Yeah.”
Goblins were scarcely organized. Generally, the various consortiums were in competition with each other, operating from the alchemical fortresses around the country. Because alchemy was generally seen as an inferior craft to enchantment, they had pretty low importance on the global stage, but locally they had power and having a lot of influence on a medium-sized market still kept the Gobbo Nation rich. That getting an entire society of goblins to cooperate was near impossible was what had kept them from becoming more than a local power.
They did have their ways to subvert this. In times of crisis, they elected a monarch who would rule until death. A peculiar arrangement, John found, but it was not really different from what he had ended up doing. ‘Well, it remains to be seen how similar it is,’ he thought. “It is remarkable that you held out this long.”
“Turns out that using personalized mana absorbents is really effective,” Anastasia responded.
John frowned at that revelation. He knew the substance from the Five Days War. Many of the enemy combatants, especially the weaker ones, had carried a capsule of it within a tooth or other hidden compartments on themselves. Once cracked, it rapidly absorbed the mana remaining inside a person, then exploded, turning the person into a living bomb.
It was not popular among most soldiers for several reasons. It was the kind of horrid way to die that only the ideologically possessed would agree to. First it sucked the mana out of every part of the body, which was painful enough, and then it left nothing of the person behind. It also was fairly expensive, as it had to be created individually for everyone. Lastly, it wasn’t that practical. Because it had to be taken orally, it also had to be carried in a way that could be ingested on short notice and the options for that were limited. The ultimate effect was also not that impressive in general. Most people did not have that much mana, especially at the end of the line. The people that did would have needed so much of the substance that they would have needed to fill their entire mouths.
Against the Lorylim, however, John saw the usefulness. To begin with, having the suicide option against those creatures was certainly preferable to the alternative. There was also a short window between infestation and integration during which the mana of the still mostly independent person spiked. Using one of those capsules in that moment would blow a lot of the area to smithereens for basically no cost. The person was lost already at that point.
“Dark times,” John muttered, then straightened up. “I will not demand more than you have already given, but I do need to integrate you into the war effort.”
“Fuck that, we’ll partake in the final assault – we are blowing every last one of those creatures to bits,” the goblin queen responded.
A refreshing simplicity.