The Gamer Chapter 547 – Apologies (Patreon)

John ate for two when Aclysia presented them all with a nice mixture of scrambled eggs, diced bacon and potatoes. The smell of the sizzling fat and the fluffy look of the yellow scrambles put his body in consumption mode. He was loading the food into himself, one tightly packed forkful at a time. Rave was similarly digging into it with enthusiasm. Eliza ate without any care, like always.

It was nice to be back home, even if the palace still felt less like his actual home than the yacht. The new living room was more fitting to their lifestyle in every aspect. The kitchen of John’s large apartment on the floor was open towards the eating area, allowing Aclysia and Beatrice to speak to and see everyone as they cooked. The large table fit their familiarity much better than the wide spaced cantina, where they had to split into at least two groups in order to give everyone a seat at a table.

Here, everyone had space, there were even a few more empty chairs. The smooth-edged table was also more than wide enough to have someone kneel between John’s legs without anybody kicking that lady in question. Just in case.

That meal was quickly finished, despite how much they ate. After some time just sitting around, chatting about this and that, letting everything rest, John decided to do something productive. He put in some new contacts and went into the hallway that connected all of the rooms. Doing so with closed eyelids, he at least prevented himself from falling on his face until he arrived there.

“Okay… here we go again,” he said, taking off the glasses and leaving them in his inventory. Wide-legged, he stood still and just focused on the end of the corridor. He moved his eyes, the Possessions still focused the end of the corridor. Two different points as well. That wouldn’t do at all. Centring the position of his irises, he focused both lenses on one point. He took a step forward. He didn’t fall. He took a step sideways. He felt nauseated, had to catch himself on the wall, but finished the motion. “So far, so mediocre,” he mumbled.

Being able to move in a straight line while tunnel visioning on something was not exactly useful. John had to figure out how to look around and move at the same time. It was a thing people took for granted, as John had, now he was thankful that at least his legs still worked. Even if they didn’t want to behave quite like he wanted.

Keeping one hand on the wall, John tried the next thing. If he could keep the vision of Possession locked in a forward gaze, he wouldn’t encounter the problem of his brain getting confused with the extra layer. Instead, he would just be moving his eyes normally.

That approach yielded some good results. Took some concentration, but with enough practice, that should fade into the background. Moving his eyes around in test, John eventually felt confident enough to take another step.

One, two, three, it was almost like his eyesight had only improved, with all the biological flaws removed, as he continued walking. He began moving his head around, it still worked. His brain quickly got in on the action, realizing what was going on and accepting this new vision as the same it had always worked with.

Smirking, John looked over his shoulder, still walking forwards. Looking back, his girls also smiled, everything was going well. Until John moved his head again. With parts of John’s mind on their own, the contact lenses reflexively focused faces on their own. No matter how much his brain believed them part of his natural vision, the lenses weren’t. One locked in on Metra, the other on Beatrice, even as his eyes and neck moved around. John knew what came next, but was helpless to stop it. His sense of balance turned into a complete mess, he tripped over his own foot and slammed on the floor.

He took a deep breath in and a long breath out as he did his best to find out where up and down was. “Welp, so much for early celebration,” he said, rolling over, pulling himself up and sitting against the wall. It seemed impossible to unify the vision of two Possessions to this degree. “I will essentially have to learn how to see with each eye and then both together,” he said, gulping down his annoyance. With one eye closed, he stood back up.

It worked poorly; the extra layer of vision was still impeding with how he had learned to orient himself since being thrown out of his mother’s womb. However, it did work, with one hand on the wall, John made his way down to the next door, Rave’s private quarters, and back. He was walking like a drunk, but he was still walking. Slowly, he got more confident.

He attempted opening the other eye again, but that hit him with such confusion that he immediately reverted the decision. Barely, he caught himself by making a large step forward. “You don’t just have to stand there,” John said out loud while he continued to practice. He was still pretty furious about his continued failures but he tried to take it with humour. “Say something, just watching me run up and down has to be pretty boring.”

“If it wouldn’t make me feel so bad, it would be fucking funny,” Metra answered instead. Evidently, she picked now to finally talk about her own shortcomings in the recent clash. “I have failed in my contract to protect you, Master, and for that I fervently apologize. I owe you a deeper service now.”

“Could you make that up by stopping to pedantically insist for me to be king?” he suggested in a joking tone, back to walking around with one eye closed. He saw Metra raise an eyebrow before he turned around and walked in the other direction. ‘How much harder even this would be if I didn’t do these coordination exercises for the Puppeteer levels,’ he thought.

“…I am really weirded out by you not being pissed at me,” Metra told him with an irritated tone. “Your contract with me was to protect you until you no longer need me. I prioritized fighting Seminaris for my own reasons, just assuming you would be fine. If I had at least attempted to make my way back…”

“If I had decided to actually check the fort instead of going to the White House,” John interrupted, “none of this would have happened either. If Abraham hadn’t gone ahead and rushed his decision, we would have been spared most of it.” He switched the eye he was training with, immediately falling back on the wall whose support he hadn’t needed for a couple of steps. “There were a bunch of messy actions involved in this outcome. I am not blaming you for being teleported out and duking it out with your… I want to say sister, but with the total lack of genetics, that sounds odd.”

The relation between Artificial Spirits by the same creator was, even if John had made three very similar looking girls, more like a sorority than an actual family. There were no blood relations, no shared time of growing up together, no actual parents to speak of. John saw himself as little a father of the Artificial Spirits as he did when he encountered a race he designed in Spore. Others probably had a different mindset towards them, but others also didn’t sleep with them or bump them up to complete sapience within two weeks tops.

“Sister still works,” Metra decided, “like sister in the sisterhood. English is an odd fucking language in these things. Woman from the same origin is what I would use, but who has the time to say that shit?” With that topic done, the berserker babe visibly relaxed. “Alright, can’t comply on the king request, older oaths and all that fuckery, so you try to think of something else I can do for you down the line.”

“Sure,” John continued on his way up and down the little distance between his door and Rave’s unused apartment. “…You know, this would be the best time to give me your complaints,” the Gamer added as the boring task of taking guided steps was once more accompanied by silence. The person, or people rather, he was talking to wasn’t physically around, at least not until that comment.

As a unit, all five of his elementals materialized. Well, all six of them, but Stirwin immediately began running elsewhere. Peeking at his mind for a moment, John found out that the hatchling was on his way to try and find Nia in the house. The Gamer had no idea how to tell the chomping little thing that he wasn’t going to find the blonde anywhere around. Then again, he wasn’t even sure if he could guarantee that. Nia was by far the most mysterious of his harem.

John had to worry about the actual thing at hand here. “Go on,” he told the clique of elemental women. “You all are mad at me for the way I acted at the end, aren’t you.”

“I am,” Undine was the first to come forward, her own blind eyes opened wide with anger. Their normal golden colour had fallen to the red of her attacks of madness, betraying the true depth of her feelings. Anger, resentment, most of all, however, a seething disdain for the fact that John refused her the right to make the decision. “You always speak of freedom,” her voice was the melody of a storm breaking on a cliffside, “yet, you deny ME the final right to…”

“Okay, okay, I’ll… just… step in here… please?” Gnome grabbed the ocean elemental by the shoulders and gently pulled her into the back row. A deeply unmelodic growl escaped the slime girl, but she let it happen. “You already understand why we’re angry, right?”

“Yes,” John admitted. How could he not? If their roles had been reversed, he would be fuming at the mouth as well. One of his girls, sacrificing herself and dooming him to just watch. Only time and relief had held him back when the roles were reversed.

He had barely made it with his life thanks to another, largely unrelated, person sacrificing himself. “Even Abraham dying, whether he did it for me or in an attempt to protect his legacy, was more than I want in people sacrificing themselves for me,” he turned his heel and, standing with one hand on the doorframe, looked at the elementals with both eyes. “You want your choice to die for me, okay, but you understand my side of the story, don’t you?” He fixated on them. “Because I have been the survivor before.”

Eliza shifted uncomfortably, knowing her place in that tale. The guilty girl made herself small, playing with her way too long hair. Hugging whatever self-deprecating things she was thinking now out of her was a thing that had to wait for afterwards. The elemental girls themselves, however, didn’t look too happy with that answer.

Not only did it remind them of a pretty dark chapter in their history but the answer was equally unsatisfying and hard to argue against. The real problem here, and it was a stupid problem to have, was that they all loved each other enough that they would die for each other.

“I hate this!” Sylph exclaimed. “This is dumb, fuck it all, I say! Fuck it with a… a…. what would Eli-li say?! A GIANT, HAIRY BEAVER! Fuck it all with Eliza’s giant hairy beaver!”

“Wooooah there, tiny girl,” Salamander plucked the thunderstorm elemental out of the air by grabbing her by her small-formed waist. “You’re supposed to be the comic relief here, not the curse fl- OW!” Salamander released her junior when her hand and nose were each hit with a spark of electricity. “What was that for?!”

Sylph flew off, blasting words in her usually chattering manner. “Lemme finish, Sally! Mean fire salad, Sally, Silly Sally, Sally the evil bitchqueen! I just wanted to say, very cutely and very succ.. succin…SUCCINCTLY did I want to say, that there is a solution to all of this! Obvious solution! Super obvious solution!”

Now it was Siena that plucked Sylph out of the air. The shadow spirit’s hand crept up from behind, quickly fished the green-haired air spirit out of the air, and left Sylph dangling by her leotard between the sharp claws. “What, you vibrating little thing, would that be?”

“Just get too strong to care!” the thunderstorm elemental announced, hands stemmed into her hips and chest puffed out as if she had the best idea in the world. “No need for anyone to sacrifice if we just don’t lose again! Super simple one step plan. Step 1: be the strongest. Boom, Step 2: I have no idea, but step 3 spells profit or something!”

The silence that ensued, well, relative silence, as Sylph continued to chatter about the potential return in gummy bears on cookie investment, was stunned. Because this sheer stupidity was actually the only real answer to their conundrum that could exist. There was no confrontation to be had when they just never needed to sacrifice one of their own to save another.

Siena snickered and tossed Sylph over her shoulder. As the prolonged cry of the air spirit reached out, only ending when she remembered she could fly, the nightmare elemental let her seductive voice form some harsh words, “Well then, our entire problem can be solved only by you, John, so learn to see again already.”

“H-how about we celebrate this with a group hug?” Gnome added something nicer, looking from one of her sisters in summoner to another. “Okay? Please? I mean… We are going to celebrate this with a group hug!” Higher Tier or not, the soil elemental was still forcing herself to be authoritative. She was just more successful at it. Opening her arms towards John, she said, “Come on, you can do it!”

That may have been the toughest challenge John had gotten today. However, they all looked so willing to catch him, one by one opening their arms, that he felt like he had to try. Even Siena was standing there, her claws reshaped into fingers, actually blushing a bit. It was adorable. Too adorable to not sink into her breasts.

Highly motivated, he took one step, and that was as far as he got successfully. The rest of the way, he just stumbled forwards. It was less that he made any progress in the sight department than he got better at catching his falls. Definitely its own value, though, as it carried him successfully across the five steps between them and ended with his face firmly between the biggest cushions around, Salamander’s breasts.

And that’s when he realized that blindness did have an actual advantage. His skin sensitivity was way higher than usual, including the bit where he felt her erotic warmth squishing around his face. Although he had trouble standing upright, especially as the other four girls piled on around him, there was part of him that was definitely erect.

“I am still not done being mad at you,” Undine let him know, one of her arms stretching down to that bulge. “I do, however, like to see this last part of you has returned to its normal state of mind.”

“How about we use it in the traditional way?” John suggested with a smirk.