‘Easy choice, Physical Double and done,’ John thought. The rest was good, but that left thing was exactly what he wanted going forwards. Activating it, the Mandala Sphere warped into the copy of him in a matter of three seconds. Unlike before, the outside was no longer a shifting mass of blue and purple, but now had the proper colour of John’s clothes and the tanned, light brown of his skin. It all still looked a little bit translucent, with the plates of the Mandala Sphere visible under the surface if he really tried to find them. Regardless, it was progress in the right direction.

And, as Gaia had promised, his dick was there. It was hanging limply, but John was pretty happy that he didn’t get an erection while staring at a mirror, essentially. He was a bit of an egomaniac, that was undeniable, but there had to be a limit to everything.

Anyway, it was there, it was a bit see-through and John couldn’t test right now whether he actually felt things that secondary cock felt like it was a sexual organ. ‘I kind of hope yes, but that begs the question whether it will also hurt terribly when someone kicks me in the secondary balls… wait, I am immune to basic physical pain, that wouldn’t even bother me, no need to worry about it. Wonder if it shoots like arcane jizz though?’

Things to test after he had beaten the boss. After all, he had said he wouldn’t have sex in any way until that was done.

One might think that the first day would have been the worst. That would be wrong. The first half of the first day of his announcement, he was still riding out the previous night. For the rest of the day, his motivation was still high. It was the second day on which John was seriously tempted. Going to sleep between his girls, waking up cuddled by naked bodies, taking a cold shower only to see Salamander flying around in nothing but her flaming underwear.

Also, Beatrice seemed to find it funny to tease him. Her actual manners or ways of speaking never indicated anything, but she seemed to spend a lot of her time around him fixing the positions of flowerpots or other things low to the ground. Every time, she bowed by keeping her legs straight and folding down by the hips, making her fantastic ass stand out like the piece of art it was.

Nothing was outside of her usual modus operandi, but John could just feel that she enjoyed teasing him, and he was a bit happy about that. Beatrice showing she enjoyed anything she did of her own volition was good. However, he would have been thankful if it hadn’t been built on his misery.

He could have caved at any point, of course, but since he had said it out loud, he now had to go through with it. Just to prove it to himself. None of the girls would hold it against him. Some of them would use it as the punchline for jokes, but that was expected between friends and lovers. Only John’s own pride held him to his word.

The third day was also quite bad, but not as much. By the fourth, he had himself under control. It was an interesting feeling. He was no less horny and his eyes were drawn to boobs and butts and sultry lips at all times, but he just felt a certain clarity. It was like passing that point when being hungry, where the body just accepted it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so it went and suppressed the feeling for the moment. Being sated would have been much nicer though, so John didn’t suddenly turn into some sort of sage.

He was nicely distracted running numerous dungeons though. Arena, Floor and Assault, he mixed and mingled those while Magoi and Magnus worked on figuring things out. It built him a nice backlog of loot that he could feed to the Artificial Spirits, got him a total of 4 more levels, getting him to 199, and his money stacked up high again.

As for the extra 28 Stat Points, he put them into Strength and Agility. For now, he decided to get all Physical Stats up to 125. It was an arbitrary number, but he felt that going for 250, the next threshold for a bonus, would have been a bit much for a short-term goalpost.

There were 9 days left, when Magoi and Magnus finally had everything adjusted. Apparently, they had gotten done a day earlier but double and then triple checked everything. Given what was at stake, John wouldn’t have it any other way. They just had to close and recreate the barrier with that new Fateweaving in place.

“In old times, Fateweaving had to be tuned to the individuals within a barrier, rather than just sapient beings in general,” Magoi explained how it worked. “The quickest way to find their soul pattern in there is to look for things that had parts of yours, because you’re connected and all that. The same can be said about the elementals, so we decided to simply do that as well, while we were at it. The drawback is that only the people in the barrier right now are covered though.”

With his bases covered, John was now free to wipe as often on the unknown boss as he wanted.

________________________________________________________________________________

They stood in front of the molten stone gate at the end of the lava-framed tunnels. Greyish black, it closed perfectly, despite the surface of cooled lava being wavy and unsteady in its shape. Several metres tall and with no handles, it looked like a boss door. John wondered how it would open.

He wondered that from the safety of sitting outside. There was no way he would enter the boss room himself. His core contributions could be given from a nice distance. Although there was no chance of him dying now, there was still an important difference between him getting ‘killed’ and anyone else. If any of his girls were lethally wounded, they got teleported out. If he got caught in something deadly, then all of them were teleported out. His death was an instant wipe, while there was still hope to win the fight with one woman down.

Gnome and Aclysia each put a hand on the stone door and tried to push it open. They had no success. John got a window.

‘Chucklefucks,’ John thought and began the march into the caves and towards the door. As he walked through the hot air, he missed his old suit. That one had been enchanted to make him comfortable no matter the environment. While his current one was also drenched in magic, it wasn’t as powerful and so he was sweating as he passed the basins of lava. It only got hotter the further he went in.

It occurred to John that this was the first time he actually walked into the Raid proper. That very first time, from which they had retreated in less than a minute, notwithstanding. His strategy of throwing hordes of sexy familiars at enemies to beat them up for him while he was making plans and supplying resources truly was unfair, at least as far as Instant Dungeons went. While that didn’t put the greatest of light on his manliness, at least as far as that was defined in traditional terms, John didn’t mind it. It being unfair spoke to it being effective and he was all about that life.

Just because he tried to live honourably didn’t mean he had to live like a moron. Too many people thought that they could always just do the right thing in the proper manner and it would just lead to a magical wonderland. ‘Those people are still better than those who give up on any sort of a better world in the name of personal gains though,’ he scolded himself, before his mind slipped too far into justifying the other side of things.

He arrived in front of the door and took position in the middle of the group. Aclysia and Gnome once more pushed the molten gate, and now it began moving with the scrunching of stone on stone. The air got even hotter, although the ever-present smell of sulphur was replaced with a sweet and smoky fragrance, a bit like meat roasted over charcoal crossed with vanilla.

Aclysia and Beatrice led the way into the room behind, being their fire immune vanguard. For a moment, John wondered if he should test Gaia’s patience and just not enter. The door was open now, the window hadn’t said he had to enter. The intent was clear, though, so John decided to not tease the supreme deity that had been so gracious recently.

That sounded equally nice and foreboding. John closed the window and went in with the rest of the group. For the moment, everything was quiet. The only sounds were their footsteps and the bubbling and splattering of lava. A ring of the glowing orange was surrounding a stone area at the centre of the room, fed by lava falls that trickled down along the walls from some immense height. The room was enormous, both in width and height. At the east and west parts, about 200 metres apart from one another, were large holes in the walls. Stepping stones led over the ring of lava towards them. Perhaps calling it a lava moat would have been more accurate. It was easily twenty metres wide. The ceiling could have been a whole kilometre away, or more. It was a sky of stalactites and smoke clouds, so distant did it appear to be.

The group stepped over a bridge of segmented stone that connected the entrance to the central platform. The door snapped shut behind them, causing a loud noise to echo through the arena, which should have been impossible given its size. Everything looked black, red and orange, but nothing had a purity in its colour. Even the surface of the lava was stained with spots of black, where little islands of slag had formed on top.

The boss was nowhere to be seen. Given the general likeness to Onyxia’s Lair that this Raid had, John had expected the boss to be a large black dragon lying sleeping. The boss arena looked a lot like the World of Warcraft equivalent as well. However, there was no enemy to be seen. The only thing that John spotted that was odd was a throne at the far end of the room, standing on a platform across the lava moat.

As the group stepped further towards the central stone platform, the segments of the pathway disappeared one by one, sunk under the lava. “Can you raise them back up?” John asked Gnome, not expecting a good answer.

Only very slowly, she nodded. “Yes… but the earth here is hard and seeped with magic. It would take a lot of strength to control anything.” That was about what he had predicted to happen in terms of balance. Gnome’s magic being reduced in strength was expected. At least her physical power had increased to compensate slightly, apparently that was the bonus a soil elemental got from being in a volcano landscape.

Gnome wasn’t the only one suffering from the environment. Himself, he was properly glistening with sweat now. The air was surprisingly humid, making it stick to him in all kinds of gross fashions, even though he hadn’t even really run yet. Undine was in her glove form, sticking to his hand, and he could still feel her discomfort radiating from her surface thoughts. Sylph and the Artificial Spirits seemed fine, however, and Salamander was unsurprisingly happy in this environment.

“And there you finally are, my dear guests,” a female voice suddenly greeted them with a mocking, courtly tone that only self-entitled aristocrats and great actors could produce. Although the voice came from nowhere and anywhere, John’s and everyone else’s attention immediately turned to the throne. It was still a good four-hundred metres away, so the figure that now sat down on the red-tinged stone seat wasn’t all that easy to make out.

Sylph was ready to make her way over, but John held her back with a mental command. ‘Let me,’ he told her and the Mandala Sphere began flying. Unlike through Sylph, Observe could be cast through Possessions, so sending it out there was going to give them more information, even if it would take longer.

“I must say, I have enjoyed my existence, as unceremoniously as it started, I would be rather sad to see it end now,” the woman’s voice continued to speak for everyone to hear. The group kept a look around, John adjusted his stance, lowering his centre of gravity to have a better reaction time. His feet almost got stuck in one amongst the myriad of tiny cracks that covered the ground.

“Are you saying you have been here this entire time since I created the Raid?” John asked in a moderate tone. Whether he shouted or not, the lady could either magically hear him or not.

“Certainly. I guess I should thank you for that rather than kill you, but I yearn for the world outside. Ah, such a base desire I indulge in, but alas, the only way for me to become an entity to leave this place is to kill you and take your life force. Such is the covenant Gaia establishes with us creatures your Instant Dungeons create.”

“So, I’ve heard, whether or not I believe it,” John answered and only got a moderate chuckle in response. The Mandala Sphere was now close enough that he could see her quite clearly. She was intensely beautiful, a woman with black hair, long, elegant limbs, in a dress of red satin. However, her eyes were entirely filled with a glowing orange, a simple, slit pupil of black in the middle. When she smiled, she revealed shark-like teeth, triangle shaped things unfit to eat anything but fresh meat ripped from bones.

He was really happy he had made the Fateweaving preparations.

“What you believe or not, what is true or not, I don’t really care,” Presta announced, clapping her hands together. The earth began to vibrate softly. “This is the only path to reality I know, so I will take what I must.”