Three days later, John strolled through what had once been the centre of operations of the West Gestalt. It was an empty husk, a Protected Space that would soon collapse on its own due to the lack of maintenance to keep it up. Silence was as dominating there as it had been in every other barrier they had visited.

By the time Fusion’s forces had pacified the entirety of the East Gestalt and saved the last few survivors, the western guild had already been gnawed clean. John was the vanguard of the operations and he found nothing but the remaining shells. Some Lorylim spores still hung around some areas but, for the most part, the first foe had retreated.

In a little more than a week, the Lorylim had appeared, corrupted several thousand people, and evacuated them somewhere else. The speed was worrying, but the unique circumstances led the Gamer to believe that things went tremendously faster than they normally would have. As was already established, the Gestalt practice was fertile soil for a corrupting outside force.

What exactly the Lorylim had done with those infested humans was a question John didn’t have an answer to. Whether they had been converted into meat for Lorylim to use for the manifestations or kept as corrupted hosts that could still manoeuvre in the mundane world, John didn’t know. The latter had many more worrying implications.

“How do I stop the Lorylim?” John mumbled, as he walked through the corridors. They had an absolutely incoherent design to them. Individual after individual had added their personal flair to the surroundings, each one being replaced as per the West Gestalt scheme of having an interchanging origin of memory sharing. One would expect the design to grow more unified with time. Instead, it seemed to grow more confused. Mixing minds muddled into design choices that were internally as incoherent as they were between the contestants.

“You fucker better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking,” Eliza growled behind him.

“Depends on what you think I’m thinking,” John returned, for once at an actual loss what she meant and without even a clue what she was getting at.

Rave, with her almost uncanny harem-reading abilities, stepped right into the conversation. “Ya know the whole ‘absorb all of the Lorylim to kill them’ thing? Are ya thinking about that?” The rest of the present harem, even those connected to his mind, looked at him with worried eyes. Of all the words of Izha, it seemed those had struck the most fear into them.

“I’m not and I won’t be,” John asserted, scolding himself for having not noticed their worry on this previously. “I’m trying to do the right thing and that means I have to put myself in harm’s way oftentimes, but I’m not a martyr at heart. I’d like to survive past the end of my story,” he told them. “Once I’ve changed the world to be more like I would like it, I say we retire in the Palace and concentrate on making a family or twenty.”

The joke didn’t land, the harem was too busy letting out sighs of relief. John was left wondering if he underestimated how willing to sacrifice himself he seemed to be to others. Further than that, given that his dearest partners in the world had that reaction, perhaps he was actually more leaning towards martyrdom than he thought?

‘I will have to spend some time in introspection…’ the Gamer thought, burning the relieved expressions around him into his memory. If there was a part of him that would rather die heroically for the good of the world than preserve the happiness of his women, then he needed to rein that part in. The only sacrifice acceptable was the one to save one of them. Everything else was for a person better than him. ‘For all my virtues, I’m not willing to be nailed to a cross while people would cry for me.’ “I love you – all of you,” he said out loud, to make the depressing feeling in the air go away.

The desolation of their surroundings was only a secondary concern.

When it came to unpleasant surroundings, the silent, empty building didn’t even rank in the top 10 of the last seven days. There were no horrifying Remus spectres running around, no Lorylim lodged in walls, no confused thought constructs corrupting the landscape and no liquified human remains anywhere. It was just an abandoned building with the occasional spore flying around – none of which were strong enough on their own to corrupt the bodies of the group. Whenever they found a denser concentration, either Salamander or Nia could take them out with ease.

In the spirit of preserving their surroundings in their search for clues, John favoured letting the blank take care of things. For a long time, they found nothing but empty bedrooms, kitchens and other facilities to make life comfortable. They even stumbled over the machine that must have been used for the gestalt ceremony, a layered, cone-shaped construction with several tanks on each level that had been connected via now broken tubes.

“No signs of the Sands of Time anywhere here…” John mumbled. “Maybe they struck here before they went east and Remus only became active after they were done here?” There was no definitive answer to the question, as no one that had witnessed the events unfold in total was there to speak to the Gamer. All they had for certain were the shattered remains and more of the confused building to explore.

Metra broke down another door for him, some of them were locked for some doubtlessly annoying reason, and stepped inside. She grunted in a surprisingly pleased fashion. “Hey, John, look at this.”

Peeking behind her, John echoed her joy at the contents of the room. It was small, barely big enough for three people to move inside. There were several screens stacked on top of each other, covering an entire wall. Taped to the wall next to an empty seat was a floorplan and, right underneath it, a sheet with code numbers. A large glass case on the right-hand side held a server.

All of it was currently offline, but it clearly was a security room. It being unharmed, from screens to server, was cause for some hope. “Nia, can you make sure it’s clean?” the Gamer asked. Lorylim couldn’t infect software, but hardware was a surface like any other and the last thing John needed was to have spores blasting out of whatever cooling mechanism that thing had.

“Yes.” The pariah’s direct answer was swiftly followed by a surge of strangeness in the air. A liquid that devoured all colour oozed from her follicles, taking the shape of a visor in front of her face. “I detect no magic. It is clean.”

“Alright.” John nodded and pulled out his mobile phone. He shot a photo of the server, then called the person he sent it too. Scarlett picked up immediately, “So, what would be the quickest way to allow you to search through this thing?”

“Can’t you do anything by yourself?” the redhead asked mockingly, the creaking of a chair in the background proving that she was moving around. “Let me just pull this picture up on the big screen… alright, seems to be a pretty standard server construct. Do ya see a power source anywhere?”

“I could try to locate it, there has to be a mana generator somewhere in here,” John said and, cheekily, added, “Can’t I just put my phone on the server and you work your Technomancer magic?”

“Be happy I can still control advanced electronics through a wonky satellite connection passing into a magical pocket dimension, you ungrateful stud,” the technomancer sassed back. “If I was there in person, I could power the server and interface with it no issue, but even I can’t work that tech miracle from a distance.”

“Yet,” John said. “I should power level you some time.”

“If you can figure out how to do that, more power to you. Sipping your Experience Potions will take a while though.” Scarlett hummed, likely still inspecting the server image. “If you can power it up, you’d just need to get the phone into the same network as the server and I could do the rest. Cable connection would be easiest.”

“Right…” John stroked his chin. Of all the things he carried in his inventory, a cable for his phone and adapters weren’t part of it. “Is there an alternative? I don’t want to rely on finding an intact mana generator and getting the wireless running.”

“You could just take the storage out of the server and get it somewhere I can access it,” Scarlett informed him. “I trust you can do that much yourself?”

“I probably could, but let’s play it safe,” John said, putting her on speaker and handing the phone over to Eliza. “I’ve built more than a few PCs, but this is a different beast.”

“Tech illiteracy disgusts me,” Scarlett let out a disgruntled sigh.

“We should spend an afternoon with you teaching me about connecting hardware components then,” the Gamer joked, while breaking the lock on the glass case by giving it an intense tug.

____________________________________________________________________________

“Day two of the… kekekeke…hahahaha….” The mocking, animal like laughter of the man echoed from the speaker as red lines formed on the bandages wrapped around his thin body. “Day two of the corruption. Master Izha insists I let you know, John Newman, he insists I leave you something. So here I leave it to you. A little piece of the puzzle and my cut body. I minced my flesh, my foul flesh. I wish I could leave it behind. Izha insists, insists so strongly, that I still have use. Aahhh, I’m so tired of bleeding. I want to end myself and so much more with me.”

Jackal Bearings stepped out of the camera frame. The video went fast forward, slowed when he was seen again. John kept track of the date in the corner. “Jackal struck in the West Gestalt five days before the corrupted alchemist arrived in the first barrier we visited, bringing the total time of the Lorylim operation up to about two weeks.” That was still an insane pace to eradicate two entire organizations of large size, as far as Abyssal guilds were concerned.

“And so end the Gestalts,” Metra said.

“Can I just say,” Rave chimed in, “that it bothers me a whole lot that it’s gestalts in English, but it’s a German word that would actually be ‘Gestalten’ in plural?”

“Since when do you fucking care about grammar, seizure hands?” Eliza wanted to know.

“Since right now.”

John thought while his harem bantered. Experience and power kept them calm to a degree that a regular human watching them would probably have found unnerving. Even with all the revelations of recent days, they continued to muddle on as always. A stressed mood was reserved for the actual dangerous situations they found themselves in from time to time. Watching a security tape in the safety of their temporary base didn’t qualify as such. Only the harem was in the room. Chemilia and Ted were scheduled to join them, but had been held back by something.

Something that must have been resolved, as both of the generals came barging into the room without knocking. “Bad news, John,” the pale-pink-haired woman announced, once she had closed the door behind herself.

“We’ve got so few of those at the moment,” the Gamer mumbled, his dry humour kicking in before his concern could. “What is it?”

“The Sands of Time are disappearing.”

John peeked up at that report. “What do you mean disappearing? Are they diminishing inside the barrier we set up?” A quick nod and the Gamer had just another thing to ponder about. “Fantastic, now we can’t be sure if Remus is actually forming a new body anymore. I’ll have to update the Horned Rat on this and ask that he lend me some tight-lipped operatives.”

Chemilia seemed unwilling. “Do we have to involve that infamous god?”

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” John answered with a proverb. “For all his scheming and enigmatic behaviour, I’m at least certain that my and Richard’s goals run in the same general direction. Keeping tabs on Remus and whether or not he returns is too important to have qualms about things. Still,” he looked to Nia, “I will insist that those operatives report to you as well. Finding out if and where the Sands of Time are now gathering is your highest priority.”

“Understood,” the general of the special forces said, bowing her head ever so slightly. “What is the secrecy level?”

“We’re keeping Remus’ potential return as secret as we can. Since his existence in the Hourglass isn’t exactly public knowledge, keeping the name under wraps should be easy. Rather than Sands of Time, the soldiers should be informed that it is Memory Sand. That it doesn’t exist doesn’t matter at the moment, we’ll just have to deceive them about it.” John sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Romulus can’t know. Lord knows what he will do when he finds out. He might lead a crusade here and set up shop just to find his brother again. I want myself to be the only reason why anyone might follow things in America. That way they won’t meddle directly. There’s also still the chance this isn’t Remus at all…”

“Are we keeping the Lorylim secret as well?” Ted asked.

“No, we’ll be upfront with that. We got somewhat of a handle on it, after all,” John told them. “That aside, we’ll have to introduce some stricter measures when it comes to checking on new arrivals in our cities. The Lorylim have a lot of bodies now, I would be surprised if they didn’t send at least a few our way. The exact way we handle that will have to be debated with parliament… as will be what we do with the surviving members of the East Gestalt and the land of both guilds.”