The Gamer Chapter 1654 – Days until the Wedding 3 – Blessed Quiet (Patreon)

A jungle was not a place one associated with peace, yet it was so. The Jungle de Des, as it was called, existed in tranquil reverence to the mistress of this island.

One hand raised, the other pressed to her chest, Undine swayed to the rhythm of her own song. Every note was a crystal reverberation, echoing between trees with the purity of a piano key. All chose to listen, from the birds that sat among the trees to the water spirits sitting in the surrounding soil.

John did not choose to listen. He was too captivated by her beauty, too taken by the moment, to be given a choice. She entranced him with every liquid fibre of her being, this black-scarred water spirit of his. Dark were the winding patterns on her right side. Dark, if not quite as, was the slime that made up her being. Dark, almost black, the horns that sprouted as forked antlers from her head. Light, the colour of crystallized amber, were the eyes with which she beheld… what?

She beheld him. Him and the woman in his arms. Him and Lorelei, who were swept up by her enchanting sight and siren’s call. A little smile twitched at the corner of Undine’s lips, elevating the note she held with her glee.

The entirety of the surrounding lake seemed to tremble with her delight. No, it did not seem to – it did. The crystal clear water of the purified Hudson around the Water Island’s coast trembled in the wake of the abysstide elemental’s voice. No waves were made, for Undine was no mistress of waves. She was a mistress of the smooth serenity and so the stirrings were an ebb and flow that defied all reason. The water shaped a dome around them, wishing to vibrate with the euphony of the songstress of the seas.

The liquid closed far above. Thicker and thicker, the membrane became, dimming the light of the fading summer day. Fish swam up the stream, as eager to bask in the song as all else.

For all that were allowed to listen, the song was dedicated to only two.

John and Lorelei sat together in the shadow of a great tree. Him against the trunk, her against him, they beheld every second of what was enchanting them. Lorelei silently wept tears of sadness, joy, and all in between. John understood, feeling the emotions in his throat.

It was a song of loneliness, of being a betrayer, of corruption, regret, and boundless joy. It was a song of comradery, of love, of attraction, and eternal gratitude. It was a song of life, of rising from mistakes, and from the struggles against committing such mistakes again. It was a song of kinship, a song of trying to be worthy of redemption. An ode for all that had been forgiven, that the abysstide elemental would never forget.

John did not understand a word of it and yet he understood it all. The language of old elementals remained a mystery to him and would perhaps forever. It was one of the unsolvable riddles, a code that humans were not meant to break into. A language that existed for them and them alone and yet elementals were of humans. They were constructs of Faith. So it was that the language he could not speak or decipher was one that reverberated in his soul like all beauty of nature did.

The language was sung like a river meandering down a hillside. Gentle streams sprang from crags in the mountains, from glacial ice and rain-swelled lakes, and grew to a torrent swift and narrow, before widening to a tranquil drift. On and on, the song went, until the memories met the current, the ocean of possibilities that awaited them, and stopped.

The world was poorer for the sealing of her lips.

The dome wept as it retreated. Drops of water and water spirits fell from the underside of its supernatural surface. Sunlight shone through again, as schools of fish hastily swam back to the body of water proper, where there was depth for their kind to play. The birds chirped first out of grief, then to restore the normalcy of the jungle.

John blinked, beginning to return from the entranced state. He felt heavy, as if he was underwater. The sensation faded as he moved to withdraw a handkerchief from his inventory and dry Lorelei’s tears.

“You are a sparkling diamond in the Lady’s creation,” the seer whispered. “A triumph of her magnificence given liquid form and the voice of a chosen.”

Watching a slime girl blush was ever entertaining. Visually, it was barely different from any other woman blushing. The face tinted towards red, giving her a purple hue. It was the idea of how that colour change could even occur that made John chuckle.

‘Then again, is it weirder than any of the other elementals? She’s a shapeshifter, at least, everyone else is just energy.’ The thought distracted from the fact that he had to try and present a compliment that matched Lorelei’s. He had nothing. One of the drawbacks of not earnestly believing in a higher power religiously was that he didn’t have access to that level of flattery and oaths. Taking the easy route out, he let all of his love and appreciation for the beauty of her display flow through their mental connection.

He was swiftly rebuked. The gates to her spirit chilled shut by permafrost.

“I want to hear your words,” the goth slime demanded.

John sorted them as best he could. There was a mild irony here, considering he had forced Undine to become more talkative following that incident in Rome. “The beauty of your voice is acknowledged by everything. The water, the trees, the flowers, and the birds all know to listen to you and you alone. You deserve that attention. By all that I love, I swear you deserve it.”

Undine flowed over. Her lower body was an elongated mass, but John mostly cared about the part that was now pressing against him anyhow. Dark lips found his in a deep kiss. He embraced her with the arm he had available, pulling her into a hug shared with the seer. Still, the fact that the white-blonde haired woman did not get jealous at the scene made his heart flutter. Instead, she pressed a kiss of her own on his cheek.

The harem life had not yet stopped being novel. Every day he woke up in it, he was again amazed that he had made it to this point.

“What a blessing you are,” John whispered, before turning his head to kiss Lorelei properly. Tongues playfully wrestled. Two Undines pressed kisses on his neck.

“Master,” she whispered in his ears, her crystal clear voice speaking from two mouths.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnn-nn-n-n-nn-nnnnnnn!

The sound was so utterly out of place, so utterly obstructive, that John snapped out of his zone of comfort at the speed of reaction. Even quicker than him was Undine, whose eyes switched from amber to a foreboding crimson in the blink of an eye. The tips of her antlers parted into slit oculars, all of them snapping towards the source of the noise. Gooey hair wound like snakes, gnashing maws between them. She was the attractive image of a Lovecraftian entity and she flowed off him as a raging torrent.

“What kind of fucking idiot…” John mumbled.

“A gargantuan one,” Lorelei stated. “I will be waiting.”

The Gamer sighed, then used a series of Magus Steps to catch up with Undine.

He arrived just in time to witness the mass of tendrils, eyes, and maws that was Undine’s extended body catch a man. A chainsaw met the surface of the slime girl. Teeth pulled at the membrane, then the surface tension pulled back, yanking the chain right out of the machine.

The first tentacle had caught the man by the ankle and now raised him up into the air. More swiftly followed, sprawling out his struggling limbs. “UNHAND ME, MONSTER OF THE ISLAND! I’M A CITIZEN OF FUSION!” His tone changed drastically, when he was raised up to the bit of the massive blob from which Undine’s regular form protruded. She sat atop herself, in a sense. “Uhm… h-hello, Miss Undine.”

The red colour of the slime’s eyes flared up in intensity, seeming to bleed into her otherwise white sclera. Teethed hair and eyed antlers trembled according to an underlying wrath that her humanoid body could not contain. Personally, John found the frown still more terrifying than the Shoggoth-esque body that writhed beneath.

The Gamer leaned against a tree and watched the scene with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. The man was a stereotypical looking fellow. Loose jeans and a red-black cargo shirt matched his lumberjack build.

“Why are you disturbing my serenity?” asked the deep-sea medusa.

“A-ain’t this the Logging?”

The question created such an uncomfortable pause that John could hear the manifold mouths gnash in unison. Screams of terror accompanied it when the Lovecraftian mass stuffed the man into its centre, then half-rolled, half-crept its way towards the entrance of the island. A piece of slime remained behind, swiftly shaping back up into Undine’s regular form again.

“Idiot.”

John wanted to request that she wouldn’t be too harsh on him, but he wouldn’t have meant that. It wasn’t the first time that someone that had just arrived in the Hudson Barrier had mistaken where to go in the Guild Hall, but this was its own level of idiotic.

“You were correct,” John said when they had returned to Lorelei. “It was a gargantuan idiot.”

“I foresaw,” Lorelei said. “The Lady granted me clarity on the nature and duration of this interruption.”

“A warning would have spared the moron a half drowning,” Undine hissed.

“You were the Lady’s chosen instrument for this man’s lesson. He shall remember that freedom to act is not freedom from standards.”

“Let’s not think about it anymore,” John suggested. An impossibility, considering Undine was still dealing with it this very moment. Still, he aimed to distract the goth slime from the interruption. An arm around her waist and an insistent smile made the annoyed woman move towards their previous seat. “You’re here with us right now,” he whispered to her. “Nothing else matters, my pearl of the deep sea.”

Undine reacted to such titles positively, especially when they came with snuggles. Getting her cheeks and fingers kissed and liquid form embraced made her eyes change from red back to amber. The last vestiges of crimson disappeared only a few minutes later, after she had presumably loaded off the lumberjack.

Then, they tried to forget all of that had ever happened. Undine was all there, with him, like John was all there, with them. No additional bodies, just an honest shared experience in the shade of the tree, as the sun disappeared behind the mountains.

“I’ve received some criticism for the defensive perimeter,” John revealed.

“Ignore them,” Undine said with such finality that the Gamer did not even feel like explaining the reasons why he received criticisms. Neither did he feel like raising his voice at all after that.

Lorelei and Undine, neither of those two were among the haremettes he would call talkative. They were the quiet types, definitely more traditionally feminine and less tomboyish than most of his harem. A date with both of them was little about conversations had.

What mattered was that he had them. That they felt content in his arms. No great reading skills or mental connection was required to know that they were. Half-lidded eyes and little smiles showed the truth of their happiness on their faces. They nuzzled up against him, resting their heads on his shoulders. He kissed them both on the foreheads.

Then they just existed together. John sunk into a state of meditation, in which time was naught but a stream that moved rapidly and yet with infinite slowness. One moment bled into another. Each breath by the seer was a new revelation of beauty. Her fingers traced the shape of his arm, exploring what she could explore.

“I love you.”

The three words whispered by the songstress sent a wave of goosebumps up and down his being. His toes wiggled almost involuntarily, the rest of his feet following. Barely, he maintained enough stoicism to swallow a squeal. He directed his delight in more appropriate ways, squeezing her more intensely against him.

Her warmth was the tinder for the light of his life. Same was true of Lorelei. “I love you too,” whispered the seer. Her voice was not that of a songstress, yet she spoke with a feminine grace near unrivalled.

“I’m going to die,” John uttered. “I’m going to die and love will have killed me.”

The two ladies rolled their eyes, one formerly blind, the other blind and yet not. They each pinched a side of his face and playfully pulled. “If I may complain, that is not the answer you were expected to give, John,” Lorelei chastised.

A fact that he could only rectify. The duo was leaning up to him, filling his field of vision with the frowns of women entitled, with all justification that existed, to his adoration. No jokes, no banter, just sincerity for those two. A couple of words from the bottom of his heart, that was the extent of what they deserved.

“I love you. Both of you.”

And thus, smiles bloomed on their faces.