Delicia still did not join them when it was time for breakfast.
This was alarming thrice over. For one, it meant that she missed not one but two of their daily orgies, that of last night and that of this morning, which was just highly unusual and, John would argue, in times like these stress relief was necessary. For two, she was a maid by her volition and her not participating in the cooking was a breach of the duties she had taken on. For three, it meant she wasn’t talking to anyone over bread and bacon either.
Individually, none of these points mattered. Any haremette could have a day where they weren’t in the mood or wanted to take a break or retreated into a quiet corner. Delicia, chatty as she could be when in social situations, was actually more of an introvert.
John did not want her to return to the lifestyle where she shut herself in and worked all day. He also understood why that kind of life was currently necessary. As he chewed on some toast, he made his decision. “I’ll check on Delicia.”
“Right now?” Aclysia asked, when he stood up. There were uneaten things on his plate and a competition for who would suck his dick under the table. He stepped away from both with a nod.
“I want this sorted, can’t enjoy anything otherwise.”
Aclysia’s concern for his nutritional intake aside, the harem as a whole was supportive, nodding and voicing their approval in their individual ways. “Wait for me,” Scarlett told him and headed for the bedroom and their clothes storage therein.
“Why?” John wanted to know.
“Because I am fucking asking you to!” she shouted back from the bedroom. “I’m leading the crafting crew, I’m going to be there when one of my workers is making you worry.”
“Should we all tag along?” Hailey asked.
“No, that would make this unnecessarily cluttered,” Scarlett answered, already back out of the bedroom. Rather than her full suit, she had only thrown over a loose, white tank top and tiny yoga pants. Such clothes got a lot more efficient when everything beyond the torso was sturdier than anything found in mundane space. “I expect this to be a simple conversation.”
They departed immediately, leaving the rest of the harem to continue their morning chatter and such. “I am really lucky that you all are so understanding,” he said, as he and Scarlett moved down the corridor.
“It’s a simple calculus. We want you to be available for us if we need it, so we won’t be upset when you make yourself available for one of our own.” Scarlett’s legs moved with a light mechanical whirl behind every step. Her hips swayed side to side. The lines of where her thighs connected with the sockets and glimpses of her exospine beneath the rim of her shirt made her round rear all the more alluring.
‘I really have a thing for the unusual,’ the Gamer thought. “I can still express my thanks for it.”
“As you should, because as fucking odd as we are, we still have our boundaries.” Scarlett directed one of her red eyes on him. “Once all of this is over, we need to have another talk on the cap on how many women can be in this harem, because I don’t trust Rave to pressure you into that 30 limit on her own. She’s as much into collecting cute girls as you are.”
There was harshness to Scarlett’s tone, but no accusation. It was difficult to complain too much when she was complicit in the crime of liking the potentials. The policy that only universal agreement to adding a haremette was good enough had been in effect since Lee. There had been 6 new haremettes since then.
“I’ve been good recently,” he responded, a slight smile on his face.
“Can’t disagree with that. Been taking that whole ‘having a harem not building a harem’ thing to heart. Too bad the women still chase you.”
“The fact that I’ve shown the ability to not try and get women into the harem before it is time means that I should have the ability to pick and choose if any of those offers aren’t what I think is best for us.” He said that as much to her as he did to himself. He wanted this to be the case, weak as he was to the mixture of cute, dangerous and sexually submissive that he was the world’s biggest magnet for. Such was the benefit of being at or near the top across multiple hierarchies of skill, power and reputation.
“Any particular interest in the three that are currently throwing themselves at you?” Scarlett investigated.
“I cannot say. Lyndell is an oddity, Fianna I have difficulty to see in that way, and that Layla woman I scarcely even know. All of them are what I would consider incredibly attractive, especially Lyndell…” He paused for the inevitable joke.
“You love monster girls.”
“…I really do,” John sighed. “It’s not even that I think women are not attractive, by God I do, it’s just that some choice additions make my brain shed all the happy chemicals.” He gave her a bit of side-eye. “What are the odds you specifically designed your limbs to make little sounds because you knew I would like the robotic touch?”
“100%,” Scarlett answered drily.
“I knew it.” John laughed, then let his shoulders drop slightly. “You are correct though, once this is over, we should have another meeting about this specifically. Might even be worthwhile to make a public announcement.”
The idea made Scarlett blow air out of her nose. “A public announcement to say the harem is full. You must love your life.”
“Most of the time.” He bowed over to give her a peck on the cheek.
They arrived by the door of the workshop. It had magically changed since John had last visited it just a couple of days ago. What had been just one more of the seemingly endless number of doors within the folded dimensions of the Great Harem Palace had turned into a double-sided gate. The corridor in front of it had altered itself to accommodate, or maybe one of the haremettes had tampered with the settings while John wasn’t looking. In any case, it was much broader than before, big enough for a forklift to potentially deliver crates of materials if needed.
The change of design made stepping into the magical industry hall that was behind it more sensical. It was still a mess of things that hadn’t gotten put in their proper place yet, but the advancement of work was nonetheless evident. Hailey’s massive furnace tower was at a state where it was actually in use, the mana-enriched embers within smelting down the rich ores from the Mine, pooling the produce in a massive billet for further refinement once Hailey got to it. The metals melted slowly, slow enough that it was a sensical process to leave the furnace running overnight.
‘That has to be a fire hazard though,’ John thought. “OSHA would not be happy about this running unobserved.”
“OSHA can kiss my ass,” Scarlett responded with a hint of genuine hatred in her tone. It was just the libertarian distaste for overseeing bodies coming to the fore.
They walked away from the heart of the crafting crew’s activities, past Scarlett’s corner of sci-fi and arcano-tech, and towards Delicia’s alchemical laboratory.
Like the other specific areas of the workshop, it was its own complex of rooms, large and small. Most of them were filled with crates. In fact, compared to the other areas, John got the impression that hers was the least put together of all so far.
This partially had to do with scale, no doubt. By the nature of alchemy and its need to put together esoteric brewing contraptions that, at Delicia’s level, could fill out entire houses, the craft was given a much greater amount of space. Only Hailey, with her various smithing operations, needed more of it. Lee and Lorelei needed so little for their enchantment operations that they practically shared a space for simplicity.
John got the feeling that the primary reason why Delicia had not bothered setting up the majority of her laboratory yet was that she was only executing the same project over and over again. Support for this idea came to him when they followed the noise of a man’s pained grunting.
In that segment of the lab, everything was in order. The mixture of highly enchanted glass and brass Baelementium tubes wove along the walls. Cauldrons and flasks were connected to each other by complicated pathways, liquids of varying colours flowing between them. Where the rigid materials did not suffice, some fantastical kind of plastic was employed instead. All of the fluids fed into an internally segmented pipe that brought four different liquids into the large main chamber where Delicia was operating.
The air was steamy and reeked of a particularly unpleasant mixture of damp drywall, iron and ozone. A dehumidifier under the ceiling was working overtime, whirling away above a massive, cylindrical container of some silvery metal. A mechanism stirred whatever was inside.
Something exploded. “Shit!”
John and Scarlett turned their eyes to the right, to find Delicia with a flask in her hand whose bottom had burst into a rain of glass shards and alchemical fluids. A huge cleaning slime, one that was easily identified as Trashpexus, began slurping up the mess. Presumably, the average cleaning slime would have gotten melted eating whatever it was eating.
Delicia did not even linger on the matter, simply dropping the destroyed flask into the slime and then turning to get a new one. She jammed it in a socket under a funnel, opened a valve slightly, then let a viscous liquid drip into it. While that was happening, she whirled around to one of the two people that had been in the room with her.
Strapped to a table, Hyozuma was in no good state. His naked body was entirely covered in the Lorylim scars – almost entirely. Whatever Delicia was doing to him was working, having led to the restoration of the groin area and part of the face. The flesh in those areas was the bright pink of the freshly healed and was far away from something John would have called pleasant to look at.
Almost as unpleasant was the fact that Delicia grabbed what amounted to a potato peeler and stripped a layer of scarred flesh off. She immediately applied a healing salve afterwards, then hurried on over to some other instruments. The flesh was put into a machine, which then began to beep.
John was not about to interrupt her mid-operation, so he used the moment she needed to fiddle with that to glance over to Lyndell. The forlorn woman was attached to a medical tube that drew grey blood out of her and pulled it into an alchemical procedure. Her other hand held an e-reader that she wasn’t using, instead keeping her eyes entirely on him. Once he had noticed that, she looked away. Then, as if to prove she hadn’t been caught doing anything, she stared at him again for exactly 3 seconds, before returning to her book.
“Alright!” Delicia shouted and turned on her heels. Rapidly, she marched on over to the Gamer. For once, he was too focused on her face to comment on how much her hurry made her jiggle. “I’ve got like 5 minutes before I need to get back to stirring, so I guess you want to ask where I was for breakfast.”
“And the entire last night, although I can guess the ‘where’,” John gestured at the laboratory. “I’m just here to make sure you don’t run yourself into the ground.”
“Breaks are important for maximum productivity,” Scarlett chimed in.
“For you they are,” Delicia returned. “I absolutely respect that. You, Hailey, Lorelei, Lee, you four need your sleep and destressing. I am metal and magic. I can go on without rest and I need to. You see that reaction vessel?” She pointed at the massive cylindrical thing behind her.
“Hard not to.”
“That’s 5000 litres of reagent fluid that functions as the base of the potion that cures a Lorylim infection by turning it onto itself. I’ll get one potion per 100 litres out of it and, with all other steps that go into it, I’ll need 3 hours per batch. At maximum productivity, I can make 400 potions. Remind me how big our army is, about?”
“Roughly 50’000.” It was an absolutely astounding amount of manpower, especially in the Abyss. Its bulk consisted of the Illuminati’s mass army and the Mandate of Heaven’s banners. They weren’t lacking in elites either. In terms of a singular fighting force in the Abyss, it likely was the strongest allied force that had ever banded together against anything.
“Yeah, 400 potions aren’t going to be making much of a dent in that, are they?” Delicia scratched her head rapidly. Trying to continue the conversation while also contemplating a solution to this. “I’m trying to find a way that makes the creation more efficient that’s not just scaling up in the amount of material I can process. Haven’t found one yet. Haven’t found a lesser version of it that’s more mass-producible either. Anything that I used to thin it out has made it ineffective. You need a particular density of Lyndell’s cells to overpower the local frequency strength of the hivemind and – I don’t have time to explain all that.”
John listened to her until she stopped, then knelt down in front of her. The show woman’s neck tilted from up to down. He took her hand between his and put a tender kiss on her knuckles. His lips came back tasting like melting rubber.
“Probably shouldn’t have done that, I am laced with stuff,” Delicia joked.
“I’ll survive.” He squeezed her hand. “I won’t tell you to stop. What you are doing is necessary, your sacrifice admirable. So, all I can say to you is that I trust you and that I love you. Whatever you need, I will try to get it to you. After all of this is over, I will spoil you.”
“You should always spoi-“ The alarm blaring of the machine that was working on Hyozuma’s skin interrupted the alchemist. After a quick squeeze, John released her hand to let Delicia get back to her work.
He wasn’t happy to know that she would spend the coming days working without pause, but that was war. They stepped out of the room and towards a part of the laboratory that had less polluted air.
“Thank you for having my back there,” John told Scarlett.
“I was just expressing our shared concern.”
“I know that – I also know that you do not have half the same scruples to have people pull massive overtime.”
Scarlett answered the comment with a prolonged pause. “Crunch is needed at times like these. Crafters like us are most useful between battles. The interim is the time of crafting.” She suddenly grabbed him by the collar and pulled him down, staring into his eyes. “Now that I have seen wars from the front and the back, I can tell you that nothing would piss me off more than being worked to anything less than the bone while soldiers out there get stuck in Lorylim-infested buildings.”
“…I understand,” he admitted. “It doesn’t make me happy though.”
“Good.” Scarlett put a kiss on his mouth, then released him. “Now get your ass out of here. We both got work to do.”
John would never disobey a queen in her domain.