“John! It has been an eternity since you called me!” his mom’s enthusiastic voice rang out in response to his somewhat nervous greeting. In typical fashion, he had gone in with one of the worst possible predictions and thought she would be mad. Brenda proved to be just glad to finally hear him again. “You sound good, great even. How is Germany?”

“Oh yeah, about that,” John awkwardly cleared his throat as he mentally went through his story again before repeating it out loud. “I am actually back in America.”

“What? Since when?” his mother was understandably surprised. “I thought you would be in Germany until the end of the school year.”

“Yeah, me too, but I actually dropped out.” At least that got a moment of baffled silence. Quickly going on to lift whatever state of shock his mother was entering, he said, “I put my head together with another tech-skilled person I met on the internet and we started a small business. It has been going great so far, so I decided to make it my full-time job.”

“Oh… so you are all well and making money?” she asked.

“Lots of money,” he assured her, sweeping under the rug where exactly that money came from. Lying to his mother (even by omission) didn’t feel great, but she wouldn’t believe him if he told her the truth anyway.

She made a relieved noise, “Wow and here I was worried you just jumped off your educational path without a plan.”

“Nope, I got it all figured out,” John promised, and they continued chatting.

____________________________________________________________________

Eventually, John held the phone up to his girlfriend’s ear. Currently sitting on the blue sofa of the living room around the bridge, eating ice cream out of a large bowl, she looked at him confused for a second, licking her lips clean, before speaking into the phone, “Hello?” The next words came in an immediately chirpier tone, “Hi, Brenda! It HAS been a while. Yeah, I should totally call ya on my own, John is too busy to do a lot of the time. Yeah, I will just get the number out of this phone. Mhm? Oh no, I know about all…13, 14, 15 girls he has. He only said 12? Well, two are kinda up in the air, one more so than the other one. No worries though, polygamy is working a-ok. It’s called Polygyny when it’s just one guy? Huh, expected John to grab some smartassery like that by now.”

John had only told his mother about 13 girls in his harem, even giving her short non-magical descriptions of them, because Scarlett was still not practically in and the third artificial spirit didn’t even exist yet. It also seemed that Rave was counting Momo, whereas John had mentioned her as someone he slept with but not actually part of the harem.

“I am heading out,” he told Rave and kissed her on the cheek.

Rave grabbed him by the collar when he wanted to pull back. “Hold it one second, Bren,” she requested, lowering the phone to give John a proper goodbye kiss with tongue. “There, now ya can head out, tiger,” she winked at him with a large smile. As John left the room in a good mood, he heard, “Don’tcha like Bren?”

Aclysia met him in the hallway, she had gone down to the cabin Metra was ‘sleeping’ in. Much to his surprise, she actually emerged with the berserker babe in tow. As expected, Metra was stark naked. “In the name of all the fucked up eyes that Marduk had,” the dirty blonde cursed, rubbing her head like someone desperately trying to wake up. “I really need to power up some more before I use that again.”

“Can I ask what ‘that’ even was?” John had not imagined for her to wake up at this random point after a week and for those to be her first words.

“I was about to pull the barrier into chaos,” was the whole answer she gave. “I could have ripped Seminaris stupidly smart face off.”

“You really hate your sister,” Aclysia pointed out.

“How could I not? Scheming bitch and I separate ways, all made up and stuff, after the fall of Babylon and the next thing I know she kicks a plot in motion to kill my king candidates, pure annoyance,” Metra rolled her neck. “Then again, the fact that they were successfully murdered just proves they were unworthy.”

“Regarding that king candidate thing…” John began; there was more than a little reason to believe that had to do with why Metra had been so annoyed with him in a previous conversation.

“You are out for the running,” she interrupted him outright, confirming his suspicions. “Because you refuse to be a king and want to be a president instead, or whatever you are going to call it.”

“Not like you to get hung-up on the semantics,” John pointed out what felt like hypocrisy. The fact that Metra did not have a quick answer to that was all he needed to know that he struck some cord. “But fine, tell me when you feel like it. Did Aclysia inform you about the latest happenings?”

“Yeah,” she answered, “guess I will go protect the Enclave again while you are gone.” Already about to turn, she was given pause when John threw something at her.

“New clothes,” he told her; she had ripped apart the last set when throwing her armour on. These new ones were enchanted to flee into John’s inventory when she did that. Of course, that would only work if they were close enough to each other, but it was better than nothing. “You are not going to protect them naked, are you?”

“Well, it would give them something to look at,” Metra stated but put them on regardless. They were her usual kind of clothes, an extremely short crop top, basically just a strip over her breasts, and hot pants. Both were black with grey areas that were see-through over the non-naughty bits. “These aren’t bad,” she said.

_______________________________________________________________

John stood there with crossed arms as a beam of light descended on him from the heavens. It was golden and consumed everything around him, from the grass of platin grace to the dark, fertile soil. It parted, like water around a globe of glass, over Mana Protection, failing to break through the pre-charged layer. Eyeing the extra layer on his health bar, John saw the attack had burned off about 2/3 of his pre-charge. Meaning that, in total, he would be able to take more than four of those attacks. Mana Protection was, at this point, almost the skill John had almost wanted it to be.

He was fighting the boss of the Tier 26 Angels dungeon, albeit he really wouldn’t have called what he was fighting an angel. The blinding light of the attack vanished and left his own eyes blinking to get rid of the purple imprints.

What he eventually focused on again looked somewhat like a gargantuan tulip equipped with thorny tendrils, each of them headed with a smaller tulip, in a round formation that gave the feeling of a chandelier. In typical Angel dungeon fashion, everything was bright, clean and looked like it was worked from only the finest material.

They had been quite lucky to run into a boss that was capable of dropping an essence so quickly. Alternatively, Gaia was doing them the favour and changed the loottables up. Alternative alternatively, the supreme deity had reworked all the loot tables to encompass new crafting materials that John would now actually use for something.

‘Master, you should have let me take care of that!’ Aclysia informed him as three of the ten tendrils came for her. Instead of blocking, the weaponized maid switched out Eclys (they had bought Adaptive Bladery back) and brought down Marath on the central one, cleaving it in two with the reinforcement effect from Servant’s Strike. The other two tendrils went straight for that opening. In the second they needed to get there, she activated Fortification at maximum Devotion.

Razor sharp the flower petal may have been, but against Aclysia they did very little damage at that moment. Between Baelementium, one of the highest-grade metals out there, being her main component; Titanic Exterior, a high defensive-boosting attribute; and now Fortification all being stacked, taking strikes like this was exactly what she was good at.

In other fights the ability to absorb the majority of the enemy’s damage output would have been even more useful. However, the even distribution and limited range of the tentacles were an unintended advantage for the not particularly intelligent boss. If the Golden Tulip had the ability, it would have gone after Aclysia with all of its tentacles, leaving it wide open to attacks from the rest of the group.

As it was, it instead focused on all sides evenly with the multi-tasking ability of the instinctual. The three tendrils that had attacked Aclysia pulled back, two of them looking like crumpled pieces of paper while the last was cleaved deep into the vine itself. The former fixed themselves quickly, but the cleaved one stood still in an S-shaped position, hanging its head like a sick flower. It was healing but only slowly. It was unlikely they would have to worry about it before the fight was over.

The central tulip opened its petals wide and spewed an array of light into the sky. ‘Well, somebody has to soak these, and you are preoccupied!’ John declared, making a run for the impact site.

He was a fair bit faster thanks to enchanting all of his Gamer’s equipment with All Stats +5, for a total of +20 over all four articles. He also had put +5% Mana Regeneration on them. Not particularly exciting bonuses, but they did the job. There was still room on them, but he couldn’t stack the same enchantment twice on the same item, so he was still debating what to do on that front.

That wasn’t the greatest thing to think about while absorbing a torrent of light crashing down on him, but there wasn’t much else to think about either. As to why he ate that damage – to his mana – it was because this attack would spawn a Holy Moss Hulk if it just hit the ground and those things were literally unkillable. Okay, maybe not literally, but so far it had just regenerated its earthen body, no matter how terrible the wounds were it had taken.

On the plus side, they had tunnel vision and were very slow, so Sylph was kiting the one that had spawned when they had just avoided the mechanic.

’15, 14, 13, 12,’ John counted down. These AoE attacks happened 20 seconds apart from each other, so much he had noticed by now.

Gnome stopped another tendril attacking Aclysia with her body and just squeezed the flower between her arms. “Please just stop, please just stop,” she pleaded, not particularly in favour of torturing bosses that looked this pretty.

’10, 9, 8…’

In the meantime, Salamander and Aclysia took out another tendril each by themself. With the stone elemental still holding, and slowly squishing, another one, there was now a wide-open side to the boss.

‘Gnome, give Aclysia a boost, we are going to finish this,’ John instructed when he reached five, giving her mana for that endeavour. The brunette stomped with her foot, creating a grey stone platform that diagonally shot upwards from underneath Aclysia. Mentally coordinating the effort, as Aclysia and the elementals did not have a direct line to each other, John kept a keen eye throughout the whole operation.

At the highest point of the platform’s darting ascend, the weaponized maid jumped off, taking as much momentum as possible with her. She had Marath raised high, red life energy flowing out of her arms and into the guard, charging the blade. A grey and golden fire soon encapsulated the silver blade.

The flower petal opened right on time, the Golden Tulip about to send another of its solar attacks flying. The golden glow appeared on Aclysia’s face at the same moment she brought down Marath and unleashed the shockwave, buffed up by Salamander.

Unlike Eclys’ thin silver wave, the ranged attack of Marath looked almost blunt. It was wide, highly concentrated red, and more of wedge than a blade. The endfire followed in its wake and all of it crashed right into the vulnerable heart of the boss.

Its still functional tendrils extended and thrashed around as the boss burned out from the inside, until they finally stopped and the boss exploded into dust and loot. At the same time, the Hulk took its final step and became a mountain of dirt.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Sylph flew over and poked it with a tiny finger. “We had such fun playing tag, come on, dirt guy, get up again. Sorry, I don’t mean dirt guy as an insult! I know, why don’t give you a cute nickname, like Dirty!”

Salamander flew over and bowed down. Now that that she was permanently stuck in a different height, the endfire elemental looked even more like the caretaker for the usually much smaller Sylph. “Its dead.”

“Nooooooooooooo!” the tempest elemental cried out like she had just learned her favourite doughnut shop had closed and dropped face first into the dirt. That muffled the rest of her cries, but her genuine sorrow still swept through the mental channels. Eventually Salamander went beyond herself and told Sylph she would play tag with her to make her happy again, letting John pick up the loot unobstructed.

Well, Aclysia and Gnome picked up the loot for him, but he could check it. The former radiated an air of dissatisfaction, apparently the weight of Marath had caused her to miss the actual centre of the boss. Her Strength was currently the main stat they raised, but it would probably take 300 points before she would be able to handle the cleaver perfectly. Even then, it would be only because of all those percentage bonuses she had.

Anyhow, there it was, the Essence of Beauty. A, who would have guessed it, golden liquid that came inside a boring, run of the mill glass jar that John expected to find jam in. It also behaved very much like jam, being at that border between solid and liquid. Getting this was no surprise, the first kill bonus had been a guaranteed Epic drop and this was the only one in the category.

Now he only needed two more, best different, essences and the other ingredients. And this day was basically already over. “I really have to work for my stuff nowadays,” John mumbled. “I wish I could just do this as a montage or something.”