They left the conference room again only to move somewhere else entirely. It was Vita who led them down the sterile corridors and flights of stairs. The latter were plastered with the motivational advertisements often used for public spaces. Parts of sentences stretched downwards, each step a new line. Being on the way down, John had relatively little opportunity to read any of it, but it seemed to tell a continued story of a guy named Drej. Whether this had any importance to anything, John could not discern.

“Do not attempt to find this room on your own,” the dark-haired woman told John. “It might jeopardize her final lesson.”

“Fine,” he agreed. If that was the condition, he needed to see her again immediately, he would take it. “How much further do we need to go anyway?”

“Zero steps,” Vita answered and smoothly opened the white door to her right. “Only the humans may enter,” she added when John and his entire group tried to follow her. She didn’t leave them any window to force themselves in either, standing in the doorframe.

“You expect me to leave my John alone with you?” Aclysia asked. Although her tone remained relatively tranquil, her body language spoke of open hostility. Her legs were positioned to allow her an immediate jump at the pariah, should she try anything. “After what you did earlier?”

“Yes.” The empty smile Vita responded with had the weaponized maid materialize her dagger. Without as much as a single word, Beatrice followed suit. Perfect and Salver glistened silver-white and sharply in the artificial illumination of the colourless corridor. “Are you sure you want to attempt this?” the dark-haired blank questioned and raised her left hand.

The space above it ceased to be. There was no energy that coalesced, nor did the blank tear some sort of hole into the fabric of the world. It was more like someone taking a brush and expertly drawing a weapon with a single stroke.

The knife was sleek, a single piece of blackness without a guard and no clear separation between blade and handle. Like her dress, the way it looked in the light felt off, messing with depth perception and making it generally unpleasant to look at. Doubly so for John, as he averted his gaze and realized it left blind spots in his vision. They started as completely black holes, only to fade into a grey filter that slowly reverted to normal. It was akin to staring directly into intense light, something that John hadn’t needed to worry about since his vision was replaced.

Aclysia and Beatrice suffered from the same effect and took defensive postures. Being unable to look in the general direction of her weapon would be an extreme drawback. Just as long as they didn’t focus on it for too long, they were able to keep the black spots from forming.

“Could y’all chill for a bit?” Rave stepped in between the hostile parties. “Put the weapons away, we’re going to be friends and all that. No need to skewer each other over this.” Having said that, the Lightbearer glared at Vita. “Although ya should apologize.”

“I apologize,” the dark-haired woman immediately responded to the surprise of basically everyone, except for Wendy. The goddess was busy playing with her phone. Tilting her head in an intrigued fashion, Vita dismissed her weapon. “That is what you wanted, is it not?”

“Ja,” Rave said and looked back over to the maids. “Come on, girls, they’re just weird, not actually out to harm us.” The ‘weird’ allegation was a tad weakened by the fact that a still nude Rave presented it. Completely comfortable being naked all this time, the Gamer’s girlfriend stemmed one hand into her sexy hips and wagged her finger at the protective servants. “Relax a bit, I’m going in there with him and I don’t need more than these to be effective.” She pulled the finger in to make a clenched fist.

Radiating their unhappiness, the maids listened to the head of their master’s harem by first relaxing their stances and then dismissing their weapons entirely. “”We obey, Mistress,”” they said and bowed in unison.

“Only the humans, then,” John agreed as well and Vita stepped aside. Thus allowed to enter, he and Rave stepped into the room, the door getting closed behind them.

It was even whiter than the corridor. Smooth walls curved into the floor, denying the existence of any corners and making John feel like he was inside some sort of plastic capsule. An overabundance of light took the depth out of things. Light that had, as far as John could see, no origin. There were no lamps anywhere, no hovering spheres of magic, no fires or anything else. The room was brightly lit, as if the laws of the world demanded it so.

In that whiteness, John had trouble making out the girl at the opposite end of the room. In the dress of a favoured pariah, the same Vita was wearing, and with her fair features, she almost melded with the background. Only the bright golden colour of her hair and the pale blue of her eyes let John see her, as she rose from some sort of invisible chair.

“”Nia!”” he and Rave exclaimed at the same time, hastily walking forwards. With measured steps, the blonde came in their direction as well, her beautiful face as empty as ever. After about three steps, she stopped. John and Rave ran face first into an invisible wall.

John rubbed his forehead as he staggered and took a step back. Straining his vision, he was barely able to make out some kind of glass. “A warning would have been nice,” he said to Vita, who snickered in the background.

“Haven’t we established that I’m not here to be nice to you?” the dark-haired woman asked.

John’s left eyelid twitched dangerously, but he had a much more important person to pay attention to. “Hello, Nia,” he said, putting his hand on the glass wall.

“Hello, John,” she responded. Her tone had changed a bit since he last met her – for the better. Rather than the unreadable, emotionally distant voice of the social and magical pariah, she now managed to express a modicum of emotion in her tone. It wasn’t much, but it made it easier to understand her. “I’m glad to see you.” From a normal person, he would have expected a smile there, but Nia’s face stayed still. That hadn’t changed in the least.

Instead, John looked for her feet. The front half of them peeked out of the flowing skirt of her dress. By the wiggle of her toes, the Gamer could read that her happiness was genuine. By the time he looked back up, Nia had placed her hand opposite of his on the glass. A thin wall separated them, but he liked to think he could feel her warmth regardless. “We missed you.”

“I am not back yet,” the blank pointed out, her right-hand wandering to her waist as if she could grab something out of a purse. “I apologize if I will be hard to read without something to read my tone,” she regretfully stated, making it clear that she had reflexively looked for the cards John had gifted her in Amsterdam.

“You’ve improved without them,” John let her know. “Maybe I shouldn’t have given them to you in the first place. Sort of removed the incentive for you to improve if you had a reliable crutch.”

Several moments of silence ensued and the Gamer simply waited. With icy blue eyes, she stared, radiating her alien power. It had grown, but it was hers and John could be as little intimidated by her continued stare as he could feel genuine disgust for this mark of her powers. “I love you.”

John felt the butterflies in his stomach swarm out into the rest of his body as a warm and pleasant shiver at the sound of those three little words. As weirdly placed as they were in this conversation, hearing them from her was wonderful. It was the first time she had said them to him. “I love you too,” he said, and the unthinkable happened.

The corners of Nia’s mouth curved upwards slightly. It didn’t last long and it wasn’t overt, but it was definitely a smile. Where it faded from her lips quickly, it stayed in her eyes for a while. She pressed her lips on the glass, and as awkward as it may have looked, John reciprocated the gesture. A moment later, she stepped fluidly to the left and repeated the gesture with Rave.

“We got a new pet,” Rave announced.

Suddenly Nia pressed her entire upper body against the glass as if she wanted to escape. Her voice was the slightest bit accelerated as she listed, “Turtle? Armadillo? Pangolin? Arkatheon? Pig? Basilisk?”

“A Magryph,” John said with a big smile, watching as Nia’s butt wiggled excitedly. Although she lacked the extreme curviness that most of John’s girls displayed, the gesture was adorable and attractive. As he was a connoisseur of all shapes of the healthy female, with a clear bias towards tall and athletic ones, Nia’s lean body was a bit outside his traditional desire but tickled a fancy that hadn’t been satisfied in a while.

“You look better,” the blank pivoted the topic. She pointed at their faces, her arm slowly swinging back and forth between them like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. “In face and body and soul. The mark connects you in an impossible fashion, like parallel lines that meet.”

“You can have one as well,” John offered, “once you return.”

A long silence ensued, during which Nia stepped back from the glass and excitedly danced a few steps, ending in a pirouette. All of her movements were unrealistically smooth. To someone who was less used to them, they would have looked uncanny. The long ponytail flew after her in an uninterrupted fashion. John only now realized that her hair had been remarkably still this entire time. Perhaps the Nevr’est wasn’t around?

“What is a Magryph?” The blonde blank basked in the anticipation. That she changed back to this wasn’t surprising, Nia had always been prone to jumping between topics, needing anything between seconds and days before she arrived at something she was sure she wanted to say about any topic.

“I could tell you, but I think you’d rather see for yourself,” John guessed and got a bunch of heavy nods in response. “A lot of things happened in your absence, Nia.”

“The Nirvana whispers such,” she stated. “You made your eyes return, this pleases me. I…” She suddenly stopped and walked up to John. Her hand wandered back to where his was. “…I apologize for leaving so suddenly. I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” John asked.

“Of fading away,” she said and placed her forehead on the glass, closing her eyes as she spoke. A deep-seated honesty was in her voice. “One day I will fade, I know it. I never feared it. I only thought that today was not the day. Then, when it threatened to rip me from you, I feared it. In the panic and confusion, I left to search for more strength.”

“And the Great Empty One brought her to me,” Vita chimed in. “To ease her fears and show her the love of the other side.”

‘And who would be better at easing the fear of fading than the one person who has ever returned from the Nirvana?’ John wondered, feeling the Alice theory strengthen. His attention stayed with Nia, however. “I understand and I forgive you,” he said.

Nia fell to her knees like a glass of water whose container had suddenly disappeared. There was the important difference of her not becoming a puddle. “Thank you,” she said, her tone empty of emotion again. “I want to pat Copernicus.”

“He’s running around the building,” Rave let the pariah know. Although the sun cat was remarkably independent, he couldn’t go nearly as far away from his summoner as John’s elementals could. A hundred metres was about the maximum he could venture out from wherever she was.

“He wouldn’t be allowed to enter anyway,” Vita reminded them, and then said, “This distraction has gone on long enough. Ask her what you need to.”

Nia tilted her head quizzically, a gesture that John had missed far more than he knew. “Is it true that you agreed to be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations?” he asked without any more delay. She was evidently safe and wasn’t being mistreated in any fashion. Dwelling in this empty room behind some magical glass, John wasn’t sure what the training was, but if Nia would have been unhappy with it, she would have behaved differently.

The genuine thing that irked him was that she had become, however slightly, better at/able to express herself. Showing the path to a better future and a happier tomorrow for his girls was his burden and his privilege. Others enabling Nia’s smile was almost offensive to him. Those thoughts had barely crossed his mind when an unhappy crocodile growled in his thoughts. Were it not for Vita’s restriction, it was likely he would be feeling a bit of chomping at the nails.

Nia looked up from the floor. “Yes. It helps us both.”

“Alright then.” John nodded. He had a bunch more questions about the how and the why, but he trusted her enough to ignore those and just go along with what was proposed. If Nia had agreed to these terms, then that was enough of a reason for the Gamer to give the Florida guild the benefit of the doubt. Towards Vita he then said, “I accept your little tournament.”