The Gamer Chapter 956 – Max Splash! (Patreon)

“I’ll pursue control of water,” Maximillian made his decision. “Better to go with what is more likely to work and have synergy, before I try something else.”

John nodded. “I would go with the same. Anyway, through this teleporter then.”

The two young men emerged on the west side of the Guild Hall, right inside the Water Shrine. The air inside the small palace of ice and ice-like crystals, less an actual building than a downscaled representation of one, was blood-freezing. After going from the usual winter of the Hudson Barrier, to the artificial summer of the Guild Hall, being thrown back into a surrounding where their breath crystallized was pretty unpleasant. The enchantments in their clothes kept it from being as painful as it could have been.

While the Water Shrine usually exuded a level of coldness, the source of the current sub-zero temperatures was a half-sphere of white snow that sat in the middle of the room. A hole on top of the flawless igloo let the brilliantly blue liquid that formed on the ceiling drop down into the occupied space.

When John and Maximillian stepped closer, a pair of light blue eyes appeared on the igloo. They had a mean shape, heavily slanted and without irises. They reminded John of cartoons he had watched when he was very young, especially once they turned round and nice, after recognizing him. “Earl Newman,” a casual voice came from the igloo, along with the sound of crunching snow as the elemental changed its shape.

“Fruh,” John greeted the snow elemental, watching him assume the form of a humanoid torso with oversized arms and a swirling pillar instead of legs. “I told you, you don’t need to call me Earl. That’s what the fairies of the Midnight Forest call me.”

“Ah, but it is such a good title for you,” Fruh remarked and backed off to the side with a somewhat goofy bow. “I’ve been doing my best to protect the essence, as Undine the Daughter tasked me to.”

“I commanded you to not call me that,” the voice of the abysstide elemental rang through the little palace. A moment later, Undine rose from a nearby puddle. Black antlers extended from dark blue hair, golden eyes sat in a deeply attractive face. The vast majority of her body was slime and a shade lighter than her hair. Only her lips and fingernails bucked that trend. Usually, her nipples and toenails would have joined that proverbial rebellion, but Undine shaped neither her sexual markers nor her feet. Her conjoined legs instead ended in a puddle of slime, giving them the appearance of a tightly sitting skirt. Her nicely defined midriff and otherwise clearly bare breasts clashed with that impression.

Red lines in a swirling pattern curved over her red side. The highest point, ending below the eye, was somewhat hidden by the unequal part of her hair. The lowest swirls reached all the way to her ankles. An additional mark was placed above where her pussy would be. Albeit the design was somewhat similar, the lines were more consolidated and interwoven, forming, in blue so dark it bordered on black, a heart with lines to either side that symbolized the shape of the womb. Not that Undine’s transparent body had a womb.

“You are a great daughter of our Mother, though,” Fruh complained, his tone reflecting his somewhat simple mind. “It is a title of utmost hono-“

He suddenly stopped when Undine tilted her head. It was such a tiny gesture, causing her hair to fall and leaving her right eye uncovered. More than the gesture, it was the colour of her eyes turning from gold to a crimson red that silenced the snow elemental. Her dark blue lips opened, forming a couple of words in the language of elementals. They were so unnaturally calm that John got a chill despite not understanding any of them.

“U-understood,” Fruh stated and turned into a pillar of snow. Likely he tried to stop himself from saying anything else that was stupid.

Undine blinked, her eyes reverting to their usual golden colour. It was rare to see them become red, especially nowadays. It was a holdover from her Lorylim corruption. In the past, they had surfaced whenever she had Unleashed, but that had then also accompanied her sanity slipping for the duration of it. Just like she had control over the swirls nowadays, she seemed to be able to manifest the red eyes whenever she wanted. Seldom, they surfaced when she was extremely agitated.

‘Her training the other elementals to see it as the last stop sign seemed to have worked,’ John thought. He was well aware of what his elementals did with their islands, even if he didn’t follow all the intricate details of the policies. Part of what each of his elementals needed to do was establish their authority and, often, that involved violence. Although Undine’s aggressive capabilities were rather limited until she Unleashed, she was still powerful enough to subjugate any of the lesser elementals capable of using the Elemental Islands to travel between the two dimensions.

“Hello, Undine,” he greeted his water spirit.

Rather than answer, Undine flowed over to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Their lips met quickly, Undine greedily extending her slippery tongue and John reciprocating with just as much enthusiasm. Soon, he held her by waist and ass. Undine’s legs formed only so her butt had the proper shape for him to grope. She raised one and pressed her thigh against his side.

Pulling back was no easy task. For one, because her lips were delicious and her body so much warmer than the environment. More importantly, Undine didn’t want to let him go. ‘Sorry, Max, but what my women want, my women get,’ John thought and leaned back into the kiss. He went more aggressive, forced her to submit to his tongue. When he slapped her ass, she moaned. That seemed to be enough to finally satisfy her hunger. “I love you,” she said while pulling back. Every syllable was like a crystal-clear note.

“I love you too,” he responded. “Thank you for coming to greet me.”

“I yearned for your presence, Master,” Undine responded and looked over to Maximillian, “and I thought I would offer help for his second attempt at finding knowledge about my kind.”

“You have my gratitude.” The exiled king bowed his head. “Going around with Jane was entertaining, but not that productive.”

“As it often is with the leader of this harem,” Undine said with the hint of a smile. “Tell me what you seek.”

“Just someone who can help me with understanding basic water magic, really,” Maximillian said.

“That won’t do,” Undine denied, giving John a quick glance. The Gamer understood and, as little as it pleased either of them, they disconnected. Now with legs, Undine walked over to the gravity mage while John went to the centre of the room. A pillar of stone with a basin on top stood there; in it pooled the liquid that dropped from the ceiling. Elemental Essence of the water variety, likely some of the most potent of the world. While that was reason enough to protect it, the real value lay in the thin, light blue cube of metal that floated on the surface.

John carefully took the tiny cube, smaller than a die, and quickly put it into his inventory. Poseidury was like mercury, turning liquid at relatively low temperatures. Prolonged contact with his hand alone would have made it start running and it would have been a pain to get off the floor. ‘Fruh really is the ideal bodyguard for this,’ the Gamer thought. That the snow elemental cooled down the metal to a degree that it remained solid was a nice bonus, but it was really his strength that he had been given this task for. His dull nature masked it, but Fruh was level 201. He was among the strongest elementals that had visited the islands so far.

With how valuable the Collimets were, leaving their spawning pools unguarded would have been foolish. If worth alone hadn’t been enough of an argument for John, then the crawling speed at which the conversion took place definitely made him want to make sure nobody meddled in the process. Reaching into his inventory, he pulled out a bag. It was filled with cubes of iron, each cut to be exactly 1 gram. The Elemental Essence converted that mass into one of the Collimets over the course of 50 days.

Technically, the one he had just retrieved wasn’t quite done yet, but since he was there he might as well grab it.

After dropping the new cube into the basin, he looked up to Fruh. “Good work,” he told the snow elemental. He was unlikely to hear it from Undine. Not with how often he seemed to accidentally call her ‘the Daughter’. Given the bad relationship they had with the Mother of Water, that title was not something either him or Undine wanted to hear.

“Thank you,” the snow pillar responded, a smiling mouth forming on the snow. Like his eyes, the black blob reminded John of a comic depiction of a mouth. All that was missing were the perfectly angled teeth. “It’s very comfortable sleeping here, Earl.”

“You’re welcome to stay,” John said and stepped back. The moment he had distanced himself enough from the basin, Fruh turned back into the igloo.

“A teacher, favourably a female slime but at least a woman,” Undine summarized the description Maximillian had given her. “Many possibilities.”

“That’s not a complete sentence, Undine,” John lightly mocked his water spirit, while putting his arm back around her narrow waist.

“He understands,” the slime girl responded with a neutral look on her face. The gold of her right eye shone softly through her translucent hair. It was incredibly beautiful. “I shouldn’t need to say everything at length.”

“It would be a good habit,” he told her. Keeping Undine speaking with more than the absolute minimum number of words was often a challenge. She was more obliging if people were listening that she couldn’t mentally communicate with, but that didn’t change her nature as a withdrawn spirit. Not that John needed her to invert into an extrovert, just for her to be sociable. Which, to be clear, she absolutely was by now. John liked teasing her, was all.

“Perhaps,” was all Undine had to answer and stretched towards his mouth. “Kiss me again, then we go.”

Once outside, Undine told the two young men to step on top of a platform in the snow. Its form was too deliberately round to be an accident, and the ice railing that popped up around them definitely wasn’t natural. Neither was that they suddenly started sliding across the landscape at the speed of a golf cart.

It was a strange scenery they found themselves in – strange and beautiful. While the sun kept shining down on them with the heat of the summer, the blue landscape of the Water Island preserved the feeling of winter. Only a few places were covered in snow, many more had the glistering hue of ice. For the most part, the island was empty. The arms, shaped like segments of a snowflake, expanded into partly frozen water. Water elementals moved about the place, all of them in tune with the serenity.

What kept their snow platform moving was a chain of medium-powered elements that kept shoving it along the white areas of the island. They moved up the ‘spine’ of the island, ever closer to the tip. They stopped where the last two arms of the island branched off towards the Hudson.

“Am I in heaven?” Maximillian asked; it was a very justified question.

Between crystals small and tall, of colours between ocean and azure, flowed, stepped and rested slime girls of many shapes and colour. Common was a simple, watery blue, but others had to them a green or red hue. All of them were grown well, the apparent age of an adult or older still. The child-like form Undine had when she was Tier 1 could not be found anywhere among them. Most of the slime girls kept to themselves, relaxing with their backs against the cold-exuding crystals or sitting in the many small ponds that littered the landscape.

That was until Undine raised her voice. Rather than shout anything, the abysstide elemental sang a series of three long notes. Their high pitch reverberated pleasingly in John’s ears and spread wide over the land before them. Slime girls everywhere raised their heads and started moving.

“Where are all the slime… men?” John had almost said boys, but that sounded incredibly wrong. ‘Wonder why it is that calling women girls works but calling men boys is just insulting at best,’ he thought.

“Somewhere,” Undine told him. “It is humanity’s collective imagination that influences our shape. Not many seem interested in liquid men.”

John agreed with that instinctively. Technically, any slime girl with shape shifting capabilities could have altered her looks to be masculine. It wasn’t as if they had chromosomes or other such questions to worry about. ‘Then again, even shapeshifting elementals have a ‘base’ shape,’ he thought, ‘and Undine is locked into her sex. That might just be because of my influence though… wonder if she would be more in-between if I was bisexual… Well, I’ll never find out.’

Heaven came closer to the three of them forming a tide of slime girls that inspected them with curiosity. Watching all of the effectively naked women glisten in the sunshine was a special kind of pleasure to the eyes. John knew that he had the best of them right next to him. Sure, they were all different from one another, but none of them were quite as beautiful as Undine, none of them were interesting in their appearance besides their liquid state and none of them had Undine’s voice. In return, the slime girls, most of which had seen him before, were more interested in Maximillian.

“Introduce yourself,” Undine told the gravity mage.

“With pleasure,” he said and stepped forwards, leaning stylishly onto his cane. “I am Maximillian Franz von Habsburg,” he said, “temporarily bereft of titles, as I take a vacation from my throne as king of Austria.”

The crowd of slime girls start murmuring amongst themselves. The eyes, coloured in the many shades of the ocean, looked at him with great interest. His status would have meant fairly little to a water elemental, but his name carried weight. As one of the leading dynasties of Rex Germaniae, the Habsburgs were famous among the elemental planes.

“He seeks to learn water magic and an elemental who he could form a contract with, once he learns enough,” Undine picked up. “There will be no fusing.”

“We will get close in other ways,” Maximillian declared with a smile.

‘Guess that answers whether or not he’s going monogamous eventually.’ John was completely unsurprised by this development, knowing who Maximillian was and that the Abyss was pretty accepting of relationships with elementals and Artificial Spirits in the first place. It was essentially viewed as bringing a maid into the marriage. Not everyone was comfortable with that, especially if they didn’t like the maid. The personality was usually the greater hurdle than the fact that there was a sexual relationship there. If the elemental or Artificial Spirit was happy to submit to the wife/husband of their contractor/creator, then there were no issues.

The tide of slime girls went into a collective excited quivering. There was so much boob and butt jiggling, lesser men would have fainted from visual overstimulation. “Those willing and able to teach, please speak up,” Undine said and was greeted by a chorus of slime girls singing their enthusiasm. There was an above average feeling for rhythm there, but Undine had been better than any of them even at that stage.

‘My Undine is a great talent.’ John was pleased with himself, especially after his paranoid side was done inspecting his memories. Since he didn’t raise any objections to his own conclusion, that must have meant it was accurate.

“I repeat,” Undine didn’t seem pleased with the answer she got, “those willing and ABLE to teach.” The enthusiastic song died down somewhat as the slimes reconsidered. Crossing her arms in such a way that her boobs were pushed up, the abysstide elemental’s annoyance was made manifest in a way that gave John a rather sudden erection. “Decide.”

About two-thirds of the slime girls backed off immediately, intimidated by their effective ruler. There were no red eyes necessary to make them reconsider. If Undine went that far, perhaps none would have stayed. The ocean of gooey sex-appeal ebbed away further, more of the water spirits breaking under the pressure of prolonged silence.

“Laralia,” Undine spoke up when two slime girls were about to leave. They both reacted to the call and, looking at them, it was immediately obvious why. With their white-blue colour, they stood out a little bit among the crowd, like the foam on top of a wave. What truly made the two of them special, however, was that they looked exactly like each other.

Observe told John that she was a gemini elemental, one soul in two bodies. Splitting was a pretty normal ability for higher tier slime-related elementals to have, but Laralia was only tier 2. This meant that this was her early specialization, just like healing had been for Undine.

“Stay.” The single word caused the gemini elemental to come back and bow her head.

“”We are honoured by your trust, Lady Undine,”” they spoke in unison. Their voices didn’t quite have the beauty of Undine’s, but the synchronicity was nice in its own way.

‘Is she your favourite to land with him?’ John wondered.

‘Her multi-bodies nature will allow her to serve well as his shield. With a lame leg, he will need it,’ Undine gave the reasonable answer first. ‘My other favourites didn’t leave the remaining crowd.’ “Maximillian, you have a dozen remaining candidates to teach you,” the abysstide elemental said out loud. “Make your choice.”

“Make my choice how?” Maximillian asked. It was highly unusual for someone not naturally talented in a field to have a choice between this many elementals. The combination of the gravity mage’s handsomeness, his family name and the capabilities of the Elemental Islands enabled this circumstance.

“Do you need it spelled out, buddy?” John joked, knowing where this was going. “However you please. Undine and I will be waiting over there.” He pointed at a recluse cluster of crystals about fifty metres away.

“I see.” Maximillian raised an eyebrow and looked at the crowd of slime girls. They looked back anticipatingly. “You girls fine if I get a bit more comfortable?” he asked, testing the waters. There was resounding support for his notion. “You’ll have to keep me warm, ladies.”

John had already turned away when he heard the sound of a zipper.