The Gamer Chapter 1644 – Bachelor’s Night 3 – Layers (Patreon)

The three of them roamed the streets.

Evening had turned to… later evening. The advanced time of day meant fairly little in the midsummer. “Nice temperature today,” Maximillian hummed.

“…Fuck,” John cursed. The two other men turned to him. “I just thought it might be a bit cold. Then I checked my phone via Skill and it’s 20 degrees. It’s not even windy.”

“Your hotter half is getting to you,” Magnus stated.

“Wouldn’t surprise me if you one day literally get attached at the hip.”

John massaged the bridge of his nose. Keeping his eyes closed made him realize the pleasant tingle of alcohol in his system. After standing up and walking for a bit, the tipsiness had decreased to a mild buzz. “Yeah, neither would I… Where are we going next?”

“There.” Maximillian’s decisive exclamation made John raise an eyebrow. Up ahead was a corner store of the party variety. That was to say, it only sold two things: booze and snacks. The gravity king led the way and his fellow bachelors followed along. “Hello, good sir!”

“Hello,” the clerk greeted them.

“I’ve been told my bills have been paid in advance?”

The clerk looked at them with a little more than passing interest, then realized who he was talking to. A couple of nods accompanied by a, “Of course, my king.”

The entire conversation had transpired in fluid Czech. Maximillian spoke it because that was expected of his dynasty, John spoke it because he had learned Polish for Eliana at one point and the leap to Czech hadn’t been large, Magnus spoke it because a Fateweaver had to speak all kinds of languages to do business. At least, that had been how things worked in the past.

“Splendid.” Maximillian headed over to an open freezer where the cans of premixed long drinks were stored.

John had a lot of his sensibility regarding money drained out of him over the years. He could remember the last time he had shopped for groceries and it had been almost two full years ago to date. It had been back when he had been sat in Cologne by Lydia, following the debt he had taken on. Since then, it had been the maids taking care of everything.

Even with that degree of distance, John cringed at the prices of the canned long drinks. Maximillian threw two at each of his friends. ‘Gin and Tonic,’ the Gamer read the label. ‘At least he knows me.’

Grabbing a bag of chips on the way out, Maximillian left as quickly as they had come. His drinks hovered next to him, apparently anchored to him by relative position. “Is that something you can just do passively?” Magnus asked the question on John’s mind.

“Being a quarter elemental does have its perks.” Maximillian made a minimal gesture and one of the cans hovered towards his hands. Once he had opened up the bag of chips, he exchanged it for the can. “Just a casual defining of myself as the gravitational well for those objects and then counteracting natural gravity and air resistance to assure they’re static in their relative position to me. Simple as breathing.”

“Show-off,” John grumbled, putting one of his cans into his inventory for cool-keeping. With a satisfying hiss, the other was opened in his hand. “And now?”

“Now we meander,” Maximillian declared.

And so, they did. Three young men (two young men and a man in his forties appearing twenty-five-ish) just wandering about the city. They followed the roads to dead-ends, poked their heads into openings that no longer served a purpose, and complained about the crooked architecture.

“I can’t!” John shouted and gestured at the intersection.

To his left was a path that led down-city. The street was wonderfully built. Every three metres, a shallow step moved one down the decline. In the middle, the steps were flattened into ramps, allowing any kind of wheels to go up and down with relative ease.

On the right was a crooked nightmare straight out of a clown show. Slanted houses loomed up to half a metre forwards from where their foundation touched the road – which was far from a straight line from building to building. The street was a descending, grime-touched pavement of cobblestone. Light rain earlier in the day had made it all slick.

The worst part?

The left street was clearly older.

“WHO MADE THIS?!” John yelled, then cleared his throat. “Maybe the alcohol is getting to me.”

“Or maybe your latent psychosis is,” Maximillian teased.

“The only person out of touch with reality is whoever made that street. What terrible, terrible person had oversight over it?”

“Probably nobody,” Magnus offered an explanation. “Must have been cheaper to build it this way. Ignore proper procedure and just stack up stones.”

“It’s not cheaper in the long run,” John grumbled. Before anyone could point out the problem with that sentiment, he continued himself, “Yes, I know, some people are not capable, do not have the opportunity, or do not care to plan for the long run.”

“And that is why we take charge,” Maximillian stated boastfully. “For we, the born and bred elite, carefully guide the nation, keeping it out of the hands of those who would sell our assets and future for short term gain.”

John swallowed his anti-monarchist sentiment for the time being. They had had those arguments several times before. While he was ready to have it again and again until the end of time, as all philosophical debates tended to go, he did not want to have it in broad daylight.

“I would like to go a layer deeper,” Magnus suddenly said. “I stuck to the surface so far.”

“Sure, let’s descend a bit,” John said, exchanging his first, now empty can, for the second. The bag of chips floated his way. “Much obliged.”

“Much obliged…” Maximillian repeated with an amused undertone. “Sometimes you speak less like an American and more like an old-timey English man.”

“Well, to start with, the British did not take all the class with them when they left.” John chewed a bunch of chips and barely remembered to swallow before continuing. “More importantly, I’m not your standard American. My family situation was a bit weird.”

“Doesn’t your first point contradict the second?”

“A bit. Now, follow me!”

“As if I don’t know how to manoeuvre my own city.”

John ignored the groom’s words and took point. To his dismay, they had to use the grimy violation of architecture. Down a triangular corridor (that, John was certain, had once been an open alleyway), they moved, swiftly finding a turn into the underground version of the street.

Glass blocks let daylight fall through the ceiling which was the bottom of the road above. The buildings continued below ground. Two more stories were visible at this level, with more likely going deeper below. Some ended up in the system of tunnels that had been worked into the bedrock the city was built on, others ended in private streets that connected only the specific buildings. Everywhere between the lowest and the highest level were similar arrangements, with some levels not having any outcropping at all. The only way to leave them would be a staircase or elevators going up to a higher level – which rarely existed top to bottom. The layers of Prague were built on top and under each other. Many new blocks were part of the same general structure, but belonged to wholly different people.

It was the kind of mess only several dozen generations of shifting property could produce. The rapidly different life expectations between Abyssals did not help. Neither did the sizable dwarven and kobold population that had, predictably, taken residence in the stone city.

Where the daylight was not sufficient, be it due to depth or time of day, glowing crystals picked up the slack. Each house had its own, and from the vastly different looks between them, it was within each house’s care to make sure their light source was working. Which, to the credit of the inhabitants, they were. Typically, the crystals lent themselves as a backdrop to house numbers hammered from metal. At other times, they were business signs.

To make things even more confusing to the general layout of the city, this particular street was basically level. It ended in a hard wall of practically unworked stone on both ends. In between was a thirty metre by seven metre space, more walkable garden than road. Any ‘traffic’ between houses appeared to happen by hand cart.

“It never stops amazing me how blatantly mundane most of the Abyss is,” John said.

“What do you expect?” Maximillian wondered.

“High fantasy, but I get urban fantasy.” John scratched the back of his head. “Ignore me.”

“Would if I could, buddy, but you talk for three.”

“Really, you say that to me?”

“You speak because you want to hear yourself talk, I talk because the people want to hear me.”

John shook his head. “And I am the one with a lingering psychosis?”

“You must, because I’m not the one thinking that it’s cold.”

“You are the one who thinks that whisky cola is a good drink, though.”

“In that, I agree with Max.”

John stumbled forwards, the verbal daggers stabbed in his back hurting him on a near physical level. “Magnus, consider your research grants cancelled!”

“Fine. Max, you looking for a Fateweaver to employ?”

“Oh boy, do I?” the gravity king answered with an enthusiastic question.

“Oy, that’s treason.”

“I was fired.”

“Don’t make me actually fire you. I have enclosed spaces and a fire spirit!” Magnus pulled out his phone. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to write Eliana that you made an incineration chamber joke,” the Fateweaver threatened in such a calm tone that John was not certain how much of a jest that was.

“Now, now, there is no need to get hasty,” he made his best attempt at dissuasion. “How about we instead… concentrate on exploring a few layers deeper, eh?”

Maximillian snorted with amusement. “So panicked he turned Canadian. Does she even mind these jokes?”

“Sometimes and I’d rather not ruin her night.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask.” Magnus put the phone away again, the threat having stayed that. “How is it to have a partner with such a short span of memory?”

Irielz, like all other demons that had been relocated from New Libraria, had lost her memories the moment she stepped out of the guild’s borders. It was part of the contract they had agreed to, by force or by choice. Mostly the latter, it had to be said, as the majority of New Libraria’s population had been made up of demons that came through a Kingdom portal the Demon Lord Galku had kept stable.

‘That happened like 8 months ago,’ John realized. ‘Crazy how time flies.’

“It generally doesn’t come up,” Maximillian said. “Every now and again I’ll make a reference to something and then she’ll just tilt her head. I rather enjoy telling her everything.”

“You would,” John hummed.

“How come you never picked up one of the demons for your collection, huh?”

“Because I don’t ‘collect’, otherwise my harem would be way more diverse than it is.” They found a staircase that led further down the underground structure. “In case you did not notice, I have the Yellow Fever.”

“Among other things,” Maximillian joked, while following John down the narrow staircase. It was yet another case of a structure no modern architect would approve. John felt crammed walking on his own. Neither the walls nor the roof here were more than a hand’s width away from his skin. “You definitely have a preference for lighter skin tones.”

“Yes,” John admitted readily. If he had to pick, he preferred pale women. Much like his preference for medium busts and wide hips, or his preference for women that were tall but not taller than him, it was not an absolute. “I’m not as picky as you are though.”

“I like huge tits and I will not be shamed for it.”

“You still into older women?”

“My taste in MILFs has shifted from finding them into making them,” Maximillian declared proudly. The words bounced off the narrow walls. Thankfully, they emerged at the second underground level a moment later.

It was almost entirely dark. The layer above had been an underground garden, this was a cave. A singular entrance, opposite of where the group emerged, was flanked by thin, dimly glowing crystals. It was barely enough to make the absolute darkness penetrable with regular sight around the door – and only around the door.

“Huh,” John said and scanned the environment.

“I can’t see a thing,” Maximillian mumbled.

“There’s nothing here,” John assured. His sight peered through the darkness as easily as a finger penetrated a wet paper towel. “It’s an ominous bar entrance. ‘To the Darkness’.”

“Was that on your list of places you contacted?”

John shook his head. “Doesn’t mean they weren’t informed though. We can always pay while we’re in there.” The Gamer downed the rest of his second gin and tonic. Magnus mimicked the gesture. Maximillian was already through his drink. “Want to go in there?”

“Eh, sure, for a pint,” Maximillian decided.