The Gamer Chapter 1303 – Fusion Festival 10 – The proper support structure (Patreon)

‘Quick, put something together!’ John reached out to Aclysia, while shaking the hands of the various people that had gotten off the boat. How this caught him off-guard, he did not know. A movement of all of these important people should have been something he caught in some shape or form. Maximillian and Luna smiled in the background; they clearly had conspired to get this done without his or Lydia’s knowledge.

These weren’t just some token representatives either. Romulus himself coming was a big deal, of course, and the other guilds had sent someone worthy of being an entourage to the Apex. The Sons of Odin had sent a demigod called Kulvin, not one known in any mundane telling of Norse mythology, but one of Odin’s literal sons nonetheless. Prometheus had sent the grand rector of the Constantinople library, Socrates (not the historical figure), one of the most influential people in the guild of knowledge-seekers. From the Great Sultunate hailed Prince Osman, first in the succession for the title of sultan.

Not only was this a massive concentration of political power he was dealing with here, the average level (haremettes of the prince excluded) was 250. This made John feel quite a bit bigger, after Romulus’ presence had so overtly humbled him.

“I hope that relationships won’t be strained due to the way the pantheon has treated Nightingale,” Kulvin said, while shaking John’s hand. The blonde man was covered in blue markings that were part of his skin, forming shallow trenches all over him. It was fascinating and a bit gruesome, particularly around the face. “This is not an official apology,” he added, his tone reflecting remorse.

“Fusion has no intention of entering an adversarial relationship with Odin’s Sons – although I won’t tell Nightingale what to think either.”

“Will she have a position of import?” the demigod asked.

“You will have to find out tomorrow, like everyone else.” Giving a direct response here was unnecessary, that was enough for Kulvin to figure out what the truth was regarding recent rumours. Their conversation ended there as well, as John turned to the prince of the Great Sultanate. “Greetings,” he said plainly, offering his hand.

The Middle Eastern man looked dismissively at the hand. His dark eyes matched his dark hair; his skin was of a paler complexion than one would have expected given his origin. Whether that was due to an indoor lifestyle or because the ruling class had, through the generations, come to have a considerable amount of northern blood into them, John did not know. He had a solid jawline, wore a suit, and a turquoise cape around his broad shoulders. All around, he had a quite westernized appearance.

Finally, Osman took the Gamer’s offer. He shook once, then let go. This was less a clash of cultures manifesting and more of a political dispute discharging in frosty diplomacy. Fusion’s actions had disrupted much of the Great Sultanate’s modus operandi. It was the primary member of the Divided Gates still using slavery (arguably, others just used a different term for similar practices). Consequently, John’s deal with the Abyss Auction had made their internal affairs a bit more difficult. Doubtlessly, they would retain the institution for longer and just come up with a domestic way to trade slaves.

Still, the two guilds were ideologically opposed on this and other points. That a representative of the Great Sultanate was even here was a surprise. Not one that would lead to the thawing of relationships, John had no interest in getting cosy with slavers. He also had no interest in getting involved in that area of the globe, at the moment. Too far away, nothing gained, too many great powers around, too strong an enemy. He had enough of a headache with the Japan situation. ‘One goal at a time,’ he told himself. ‘Keep things lukewarm with the Great Sultanate.’

“I look forward to my accommodations,” Osman stated, then stepped away. The three haremettes, all incredibly attractive women in belly-dancer outfits, followed him two paces behind, their heads lowered. For what it was worth, these women did not seem unhappy with their position. To John, this kind of behaviour was still foreign, at least when observing it from the idea that it was ‘proper’. When one of his women followed submissively after him, that was a sexual treat above everything.

“I have been looking forward to meeting you!” Socrates enthusiastically grabbed John’s hand with both of his own. The man was old enough that his hair was almost entirely white and, like the original Socrates had been reported to look, he was built like a boulder. Despite his fading hairline, his face had surprisingly few wrinkles. His white eyes looked John up and down. Like Romulus, he wore a toga, but his revealed a fair amount of naked chest, whereas the Apex wore clothes underneath. “You are quite fascinating. I have received a copy of Marie’s transcripts about your exploits and added them to the library. I have a number of questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Later, perhaps,” John responded, freeing his hand with a stronger tug than he meant to. His joy at this international recognition was subsumed by a growing migraine. ‘You can get through this,’ he told himself.

“EHEM!” a voice came from above the colourful gathering of Abyssal elites. Momo softly touched down on the ground and clapped her hands, to get everyone’s attention. “Fusion is greatly honoured that you all come to attend our first anniversary. Although we weren’t prepared for this many guests, we have made arrangements for your stay until Monday. If you would follow me, I will show you to your quarters and where to get refreshments.”

Simultaneously to her announcement, the voice of another maid surfaced in John’s head, ‘Guarantee: we will see to the proper quartering and lodging of everyone. You will receive updates in ten-minute intervals. Please be at ease and enjoy your time with Maximillian and Irielz.’

‘Thank you,’ John responded, suppressing the relieved sigh that was rising. He couldn’t show that in front of so many potential allies or enemies. “As you heard, my chancellor will see to it that you are all cared for,” he lent his authority to Momo’s words. “If it suits you, I will see all of you during dinner.”

There was a general air of agreement around that, and the representatives and their entourages, whether those were dates, wives, haremettes, or servants, all made their way down the main road. The crowd parted around them. Everyone was eager to catch a glimpse of the ruling class of the Abyss.

John caught Maximillian’s gaze and made a gesture with his head. His buddy understood. He and Irielz peeled out of the crowd and walked in a different direction. There was momentary confusion among the onlookers, but the fact that the soldiers proceeded with the rest of the gathering tipped them off that one was an official procession and the other a private affair. The vast majority of people either followed after Romulus or dispersed, having had their fill of a visual spectacle.

“Everything alright?” Maximillian asked, when they had walked for like three minutes with barely anything said.

Rave grabbed John’s arm and squeezed tightly. Her eyes reflected the same question. Looking around, the Gamer led them to a secluded spot by the pier. There, he was confident enough to speak truthfully. “Honestly…” John hesitated for a moment. He felt pathetic admitting he was stressed to his friend and he felt dumb for thinking that. The worst thing about the stress was that it chipped away at the same confidence he needed to deal with it. Gathering himself, he continued, “…the truth is that I am getting a bit burned out at the moment, so that was a bit much.”

“Oh.” Maximillian fell silent; Irielz’ face went from concerned to truly concerned. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have kicked this off…”

“Don’t be, you didn’t know.” John stretched, already feeling better for having admitted to his problem. “I’ve already lined up plans for a big vacation. I might not be quite as suave as usual, but I’ll manage. I do have a good poker face. Fundamentally, I am thankful.”

Of all the reactions Maximillian could have, he had the best one John could have asked for. Slapping John on the shoulder, he just stated, “You’ll get through it, buddy. I believe in you.”

“Thanks,” the Gamer smiled and returned the gesture.

“Pro-tip, don’t start drinking. I don’t mean don’t become an alcoholic, just don’t start drinking during the gathering. It’s really tempting to keep going.”

“He knows what he is talking about,” Irielz added.

“He was never that bad,” John defended his friend. Even during his worst excesses, Maximillian had control over himself. Still, it was advice best heeded.

“Ya wanna go somewhere?” Rave asked, dropping the controlled speech now that the official event was over.

“I implore you to take us somewhere private,” Maximillian stated, staring at the crowd. “I’ve been cramped on a boat with the Abyssal elite for a week, I can use a break and some quiet.”

“Speaking my language.” John tapped around a menu and got a ferry to their current position. In this particular instance, it was actually the fastest way to get where he wanted. Ten minutes later, they landed on the Newman Private Island. To be precise, they stopped at a beach in the southern half of the channel between it and the Fusion Administration to the west. Deliberate formations and the wavy shape of the coast made that area as shielded from gazes as was possible without putting a wall and roof around it.

“Ain’t the best place for a dress.” Rave was loosening the decorative clothing before she had finished the sentence. It fell into the sand, leaving Rave standing topless, only covered by the pink panties she had picked out earlier.

John noted that Maximillian’s eyes dashed over and did the once-over anyone instinctively would have done upon spotting a bombshell like his girlfriend in the wild. Then he kept his gaze to the proper areas, even when Rave stripped out of the last article of clothing on her ass well. From previous talks with his friend, the Gamer already knew that he had a similar code of honour as himself. One did not desire the partners of someone else, especially not one’s friends.

For that same reason, John only took basic notice of Irielz, who wordlessly followed Rave’s example and stripped out of her own dress. The succubus had nipples of a darker grey colour, with a slight pink tint to it, and was every bit as hairless as any of John’s haremettes. Her large breasts shifted notably, as she bowed down to strip off her panties.

The one part John’s eyes did get stuck on, in a purely platonic and interested fashion, was above the crotch of the succubus. There was a bright pink mark above her sex, a heart-shaped core with decorative tendrils expanding to the side. It was incredibly similar to the Lover’s Will mark, even if the exact design differed. “You stealing my ideas now?”

“I believe it is more accurate to say you humans stole the looks of my kind.” Irielz lovingly caressed the mark above her womb. “A succubus naturally forms this when she enters a permanent accord with a man. It’s a mark that I decided that I’m only interested in the semen of Maximillian.”

“And is she ever,” Maximillian joked, while putting his fiancé’s dress into his pocket dimension.

“Swimsuit,” Rave demanded, when he had put away her clothes. Amused, the Gamer reached into his inventory and pulled out a very basic, one-piece swimsuit. It looked like the kind that actual swimmers wore, when working out by doing their daily lanes.

As prepared as John liked to be for everything, the size of his inventory was still limited. The only way he could have gotten her one of her swimsuits would have been to have access to the Mandala Sphere and the Ambassador Double, which was still over a week from returning. Instead, he handed her the single, size-adjusting swimsuit he had in his inventory at all times.

It being a simple blue and pretty basic in design did not prevent it from looking incredibly attractive on Rave. Quite the contrary, after having been dragged through several anime by her, John found that this scratched a special itch. It looked remarkably similar to the ones that schoolgirls typically had in those shows.

John tapped a button and switched, instantly, from his suit into a pair of swimming trunks.

The two pairs stood at the beach, one stark naked, the other dressed in swimwear. A difference that Maximillian immediately commented on. “I’m used to John being weird about these things-“

“Right, I’m weird for having some basic shame and decency left.”

“-but you, Jane? Really? I thought you’d be the skinny-dipping type.”

“I ain’t getting sand in me, that way lies terror,” the feline Lightbearer presented the same rationale as she always did when they visited the beach. John wasn’t sure how justified that was, considering Rave was a superhuman among the superhumans of the superhumans. For her to get any sort of infection downstairs, there’d need to be alien mega-virus involved.

That being said, John would not fault his girlfriend for being paranoid about this. After all, if she was correct, then he’d be bereft of fucking her for… a couple of minutes, probably, Undine could take of it anyway. No reason to even engage in that discomfort though.

Maximillian and Irielz looked at each other, shrugged simultaneously, and then everyone’s eyes were instead drawn to Copernicus and Hawpler. The solar feline was batting the black hole over the beach as if he was a particularly large toy. Where the gravity elemental rolled along, an unnatural trench was left in the sand.

John couldn’t help but laugh at the display. It was so absurdly mundane, despite the actors and effects involved. Copernicus stopped to hiss at John – and only to hiss at John, the light spirit resumed playing with his fellow elemental immediately. ‘These creatures are so fascinating,’ the Gamer thought. ‘All magic and yet have the instincts of so many animals… or of people. Technically still animals. Eh, distinction enough.’

They all took a swim in the crystal-clear water together. There were many advantages to the way the Clearwater Fountain worked. For one, John didn’t think he would need a shower, as he would have after submerging himself in the disgusting, probably glass shard filled gunk of the regular Hudson. For two, they could see all of the little fish and other critters they shared the water with.

“Huh,” Maximillian let out a loud, interested sound. He made a raising gesture with his left hand and a sphere of water shot out of the greater body around them. Contained within it was one highly confused crab, trying to escape the prison of water and gravity that now kept it hovering in mid-air. “Is this another one of your Guild Hall’s spawns?”

“No, that’s an actual crab,” John told him. “A magically mutated variant of the Red King Crab, to be exact. We’ve introduced it to help break down biological waste and to keep the starfish population down. Which we had introduced to keep the clam population in check. It’s a whole thing.”

“And what keeps these things down?” Maximillian asked.

“Well, they grow about two metres across, are delicious, and, this specific variant, comes ashore during night so…”

“Fit for consumption,” Irielz summarized John’s thoughts. The succubus took that a bit more literally than John would have anticipated. Pulling the crab out of its prison, she opened her mouth wide and chomped through carapace and organs, instantly killing the young crab. She proceeded to devour it whole.

Maximillian didn’t even bat an eye at that. John was minorly shocked, because he hadn’t seen Irielz display such behaviour before. Even though she was a remarkably empathetic demon, she was still a demon, so that shock faded quickly.

“Delicious.”

“It would be better if someone cooked it,” Maximillian told his fiancé.

“I don’t know. There’s something about absolutely fresh meat nothing can beat.”

They continued swimming, coming across fish here and there, some spawned by the Guild Hall, others ‘invasive’ from the surrounding Hudson. Irielz and Rave remained out in the water, while the boys pulled back to a green strip. Maximillian didn’t want to put his naked, wet butt on the sand. “What vacation do you have planned?”

“I’m going to buy a farm and tend to it for a month, minimum. Get a scene change, spend some time working on what I want, or not working at all.”

Maximillian nodded. “That’s not too different from what I did.”

In the spirit of things, that was pretty accurate. There were stark differences between partying while pursuing an actor career and building a farm in terms of labour and activity. When it came to the structure of it, they were similar though. Maximillian had wanted to do dramatics for himself, rather than the court, it seemed.

“My break was a lot longer than a month though.”

“What happened to you is worse than anything that happened to me, so that’s justified.” John grabbed a pebble and absent-mindedly threw it into the water. Maximillian just sat quietly next to him, not disagreeing. The Gamer still remembered how Herman’s betrayal had stung at the time. He couldn’t even begin to comprehend the hole that Alexej must have left in Maximillian’s life. An aide and friend of an entire life.

John had gone through his fair share of suffering, of various forms, but he didn’t think he had been struck with an event that terrible. Difficult to stomach was that it inevitably would happen to him, in some form or another.

“Even if this isn’t the best time, I thank you for having gotten the ball rolling on the Divided Gates visiting today.” John decided to get back to that topic. “How did you do that anyway?”

“I was always a loyalist, so I have Sol’s ear… you know about the Sun and Moon Agreement?”

“I actually haven’t heard of that one,” John said, immediately interested. Instances of him learning something new about Abyssal politics were growing more infrequent and it still tickled his interest.

“It’s a part of how the Sons of Rome keep their overlordship over the many members of Romulus’ Empire. The details are more complicated, but in summary: Rome will send Sol to people who are proven loyal followers of the empire and Luna to people who are reformists or potential secessionists.”

“And since your family has been influential loyalists for generations, you have solid connections to Sol… and Lydia has good connections with Luna because she has always been an outspoken reformist…” John summarized. “Less of a political agreement than an informal structure, if I get that right?”

“There are certain rights, privileges and difficulties one could find themselves in depending on what side of the day-night cycle one finds themself in. It’s a one-thousand step spectrum. One of the oldest and repeatedly amended parts of the empire’s legislature.”

“Jesus,” John mumbled, imagining what kind of book that must be. “Anyway, so you have access to Sol?”

“Yes, and she was supportive of me and Irielz. It served to comb over difficulties with the greater nobles in my territories.” That made sense enough, Sol would be in favour of harem lifestyles and John could imagine her and Irielz got along. Mostly because the succubus was a calm-minded and charismatic person. “During her support, we talked repeatedly. I brought up that I wanted to attend this event; Sol voiced she wanted to speak to Nightingale again to hear what exactly had happened after she sacrificed herself.”

“That’s a way to put it,” John said, mild jest swinging in his tone. From what he heard of that fight, Nightingale and Sol had practically opposite instincts when it came to their fighting strategy, which had culminated in them not properly supporting each other. John had known that had been a threat, but he had been out of good pairs to put together and hoped that two goddesses would have the pure power to overcome their lack of synergy.

Although he was biased against her, because Nightingale’s perspective made sense to him (and she was one of his), the Gamer did have to admit that Sol’s decision to blow herself up had been tactically sound. Arkeidos would have slowly ground them down. Diminishing the power of his body in one massively damaging move so Nightingale could permanently immobilize him was as brazen as it had proven to be correct.

“From there, I suggested that Romulus himself may attend. You and he are on good terms and it’s in the interest of the world to keep it that way. He seems to agree with that, I would note, considering that he is here.”

John wished he could have made a joke that a conflict between him and Romulus could have totally led to the end of the world. The thing was that it was a figurative possibility. Earth would keep spinning no matter what they did, but between John’s growing new power and Romulus’ ancient and accumulated might, they could grind the current order of the Abyss to dust if it came to blows.

‘And I am sitting on Remus,’ John thought, feeling a twinge of guilt. Maximillian knew nothing about that. This was one thing he could not trust his friend on. Not noticing the Gamer’s internal turmoil, Maximillian continued.

“When Romulus moves, the world watches, so I mentioned this to a chambermaid and two days later I had requests for further information from Prometheus. As per plan, it cascaded from there. Only the first prince of the Great Sultanate attending was a surprise.”

“And now we just wait for the Horned Rat to show up too…” John grumbled.

“You think he’s going to show up?”

“There’s no way he’ll miss this.”