‘Oh, now that’s very useful,’ John thought and chose the middle option. That was basically exactly what he wanted right about now; his project was going to be finished relatively soon after all. That aside, it was just the best choice. A free, semi-permanent Possession with Spellcarrier and the ability to save 1000 mana, even if he himself couldn’t use it, was just obscenely strong.

Adding to that the fact that John had way more mana regeneration now and Possession, with its immense cost of 1 MP per second per slot used, was getting commonly usable again.

Even with seven, his new maximum, Possessions active, and with Elementalist chosen as his active class, he had over 10 mana per second to spare. Once he got his desired Extension, he would have a very nice, new tool in his toolbox.

‘The problem is still actually using spells in conjunction with Possession in a way that makes it better than the elementals,’ John thought. This was more of a problem of all of his own offensive spells costing so much mana.

Spellcarrier could only transfer spells he himself had after all. With the notable exception of Possession itself. A mechanic preventing him from hopping from one object to the next while removing his own body from the premise, no doubt. Not that he was free to do that in any case, as Possession was affected by range to some degree. It was like the latency increased by every kilometre. Past a certain point, about three kilometres away from himself, it got very bad very quickly. Also, Possessions couldn’t enter or leave barriers on their own.

Like everything else in John’s arsenal, it was designed in such a way that it couldn’t quite break reality as they knew it. It was, however, still pretty dirty. He made a mental vow that, now that he had the Wisdom to keep it running in the background without feeling heavily cut in his regeneration, to abuse the skill more. It replaced the previous vow of always keeping one potential Class Level around for whenever he beat the Elementalist Challenge.

‘Getting synced with three is just asking way too much,’ he mentally grumbled as he dismissed all windows and looked at the Harbour in front of him. As he was right now, he could easily connect with one of the elementals completely even without equipping her. Two he could pretty reliably tap into for short-bursts. There definitely was progress from his daily attempts. Three remained a distant dream. So John had changed his stance on the matter.

Anyway, none of that was particularly important right now. It was just that he had the moment to think and the Puppeteer Challenge had been conveniently beaten while he was standing there with nothing to do but watch the ship anchoring on his Guild Hall.

It was much smaller than John’s yacht, but that wasn’t a fair comparison. Covered in the typical greyish blue colour of military sea vessels, it would be hard to spy at a distance. A bunch of antennas were growing out of it, some of which looked purely technical, many more magical in their design, John noted the differences and similarities to normal warships.

Two-barrelled artillery turrets, one at the back and one at the front, were maintained. John could easily imagine why. Guns weren’t common in the fighting class of the Abyss because people got too fast to aim them properly and bullets were too small to put proper enchantments on, not to mention that people quickly developed the necessary defences against small, purely physical projectiles. In lower levels, they still saw use.

There were two ways to offset the disadvantages: one of them was to invest the truckload of money for things like Baelementium bullets, and the other was to just upscale the calibre. Carrying an entire howitzer around wasn’t the best way to fight, so people still didn’t like to do that. With a ship, that was an entirely different story, however.

So, not only did they have larger shells that properly allowed some magical stuff to be done with them, which made them dangerous to some higher weight classes, but in naval combat the actual win condition wasn’t limited to killing the enemy, sinking their vessel would also do it. Ranged explosives would absolutely do it as well.

What was different from a normal ship was the abundance of jump-off points. Boarding was a viable strategy even in the 21st century if most of your crew had equipment that allowed them to walk on water. John knew, from the plans he had purchased online, that this ship was pretty good for a guild the size of the Little Maryland. Perfect for patrolling waters and secure shorelines. However, it would not be a decisive factor in a large-scale Abyssal war. What was a flagship for a small country was just an accompanying vessel for larger ones. There were a couple of monstrous battleships out there that could sink islands with their combined firepower.

Things got pretty ridiculous once a large calibre cannon was combined with a crew of several hundred mages charging it. Which was exactly why John wanted one. It was a giant ‘do you even dare challenge this?’ question for any faction considering an aggressive action towards Fusion. If they got it build and working, that was. At the very least, it was an excuse for John to put some of his money into the pockets of the people working on the project. People on his payroll were generally loyal people.

The warship came to a halt and the crew on board got busy lowering a plank to let the people get off board. As it wasn’t a vessel owned by John, the Harbour didn’t do it automatically for them. Their ship suddenly doing things on its own without anyone aboard knowing why would have raised a couple of awkward questions anyhow.

John positioned himself and his entourage nearby in patient wait. It was himself, Rave, Aclysia, Beatrice and a small group of officials that he had invited over. “I hope you had a pleasant sail, generals,” John shouted up when a group of four, headed by the familiar face of Chemilia, walked down the slope of the lowered plank of metal. Their uniforms gave their identity away even more reliably than their company, numerous medals on their chest and stripes on their shoulders signifying a strong military code and culture.

“We ran into some small troubles with more of those… eels,” the female general was obviously unwilling to call them by their actual names. “Nothing too bad, however.”

Before John could answer, a loud sneer could be heard from one of the other three generals. The person in question took a step forwards and crossed his arms. “Seriously thought we would be visiting somebody who took better care of his territory than Abraham.”

About two heads taller than John, but of a similarly lean build, the general stared down at the Gamer in wait for a reaction. His height alone was imposing, but his completely hairless body was covered in midnight blue tattoos, adding a somewhat delinquent aura to his discipline. The kind of guy that looked like he could do anything at any second now.

John lowered his head, “My apologies, General Terkal, but my guild’s navy is not yet developed. I am doing my best to change this, but for the moment we lack the means to properly patrol the sea.” He straightened up again and gestured towards the city, just one river across. “I am more than willing to show you every bit of my land though. The cleaning up there is going rather well.”

“Mhmph,” Terkal sounded hesitatingly impressed and took a step backwards to signify a less aggressive stance. “I will take you up on that offer – right now in fact,” he said despite this. He didn’t look surprised that John knew who exactly he was and neither should he have been. Obviously, John had informed himself about the people going on a state visit. A search engine called Scarlett had been a great help with this.

The thin-looking general was a man of level 75, making him somewhat stronger than Chemilia. He was close to forty years old, but would probably have looked closer to thirty if one removed all of the lines under his skin. Apparently, he had magic that allowed parts of him to transform into beasts he had slain in single combat.

“Oh come now, Terkal, be nice,” a friendly tone caused the tattooed man to go from firm-standing to frozen in disciplined obedience. It belonged to a woman that looked to be between 18 and 20 years old but was actually close to a hundred. She had short, brown hair and cute freckles on her tanned skin that emphasized her nice smile and overall attractive farmgirl appearance – which didn’t quite seem to fit into her uniform. Although that wasn’t all that didn’t seem to fit into her uniform, as she was rather stacked in both boob and butt department. To an almost absurd degree, in fact. At a level of 103, she was not only the longest serving but also strongest general. “We are here for diplomacy, not to test him.”

Although she said that, her smile staying in place, her green eyes wandered to John in a challenging glance that only stayed for a second. What they were officially here for and the talk they actually wanted to have was vastly different, after all. Her name was Imerella and her presence was the most surprising of all. According to John’s info, and this had been backed up by Chemilia, Imerella hadn’t voiced either sympathies for or criticism against Abraham since he took office twelve years ago. The fact that she was getting in on this was either a sign of the real girth of Abraham’s disgruntlement or John was looking at an obvious mole.

Her powers were based on water and rumour had it that she had gone through the same ritual as Lydia had, fusing her permanently with an elemental. Observe neither confirmed nor denied those claims, leaving John as smart as anybody else, but if she was part slime, that would explain her pretty immense tits.

“Right, right,” Terkal grumbled and backed down completely. His respect of Imerella probably came from their age gap. It was even highly likely that the shortstack general had been present for the tattooed man’s training.

The last general in the line-up simply offered John his hand for a shake, which the Gamer hesitatingly took. He felt the metal of the ring on the dark-haired and dark-brown eyed man’s hand pressing against his own. 30 years old and looking only slightly younger than that, Ted was the husband of Chemilia and had a somewhat different story than the rest of them. Where everyone else had been born in the Abyss, Ted had stumbled into it by accident at the age of twelve, latent powers causing him to discover a barrier his would-be wife had made to play in on her lonesome.

It was the start of a love story rather than the horror tale it could have been if his first contact with the fantastic underbelly of the world had been with people that kidnapped gifted children and sold them to mana factories. It wasn’t until he was eighteen that he had proper control over his powers to actually be counted as a member of the Abyss. At level 67, he was also the weakest amongst the generals. Reportedly, he was similar to Rave, in that he had a strong Innate Ability, an affinity for earth magic, but had found more success in martial arts.

Although a pretty quiet fellow, John had to admit that the guy, with his military buzz cut and strong jawbones, was a good-looking man. Only a scar that ran across his face added a grizzled blemish to his otherwise neutral expression. Once their hands parted again, Ted took position next to his wife and took her hand.

‘Interesting that they allow people not part of the guild by birth to rise this high in the ranks,’ John thought. He could imagine that initiates into the Abyss had some special rules going on. New blood was clearly different than somebody like John, who had a bunch of different affiliations by now.

What followed were a bunch of greetings, “Have you met…” and “This is…” alongside a fair bunch of other small, diplomatic sentences that flew around the pier, before John begun showing them around the Guild Hall and explaining everything he was asked about.

He skipped very little. The most important information he withheld was the location and exact function of the Guild Heart, as he found that dazzling the generals with his powers was a better way to convince them to side with him than skipping on a bunch of stuff.

After the Guild Hall, they set over to the main land and wandered around the construction sites. Here, too, John didn’t lie about anything. In any other situation, showing the military leadership of another country the core of your building forces would have been quite the foolish thing to do. Given that they were paralyzed in their ability to take action thanks to Abraham and the friendship treaty he had signed with John, the Gamer wasn’t all that worried, however.

‘Awww yeah, Guild Hall Tier 2 and friendly fire off, baby!’ John thought when the Achievement popped up out of nowhere, only to then hastily return to his talk. “Lastly, this is the police station,” he explained and gestured to a normal building that was part of the skyline. The advantage of having copied New York of all places were a lot of skyscrapers he could repurpose for things. Disadvantage was that the entire infrastructure that sustained the skyscrapers had to be modified for abyssal usage first. “Although still in the initial phases, the police force has been hard at work at maintaining the order I brought to the anarchy of this city.”

The generals looked at least somewhat impressed, but Terkal, evidently a bit of a stickler, picked out a certain word in John’s announcement. “Lastly?” he asked, the place where his eyebrow should have been rising up. “You haven’t shown us either marine or army training quarters yet.”

John had expected such a comment and just smiled softly.