The Gamer Chapter 1559 – The, perhaps, last Intermission (Patreon)

Nathalia gently brushed the hair back on Eliana’s head. It was the third time she had done it and it wasn’t for any purpose besides touching the pretty little psycho ever so carefully. John stood behind her, the two of them the only ones by the hospital bed.

“I know we should not have favourites,” the dragoness hummed, “but I confess she’s always been one of the ones I like the most in our harem.”

“You can have favourites – I should not,” the Gamer stated.

“Do you fail at it too?” Nathalia asked.

“All the time.” It was an open secret, if it could even be qualified as a secret. Obviously John had favourites, his fiancée was the official head of the harem and Aclysia had always been his second most loved girl. After that, it was either Eliana or Lydia, sometimes Momo, maybe Undine or Gnome or… It was a steadily fluctuating list that he wouldn’t even start to try to nail down. Even if he was feeling like repeating the mistake of making an actual, physical list, he could not. Back then, he had not loved them all as much as he did now. There had been differences in the levels he cared for them. These days, it was just a difference of what mood he was in.

Nathalia just hummed with deep amusement. For a few seconds, there was just them, listening to the sound of Eliana breathing. Then, John asked a question.

“How do you feel knowing how far gone Orkos is?”

“I suppose the core of your question is whether I feel I have not wronged him,” Nathalia cut to the heart of it. Confirming, the Gamer nodded. The dragoness didn’t catch the gesture, her soft gaze still lingering on Eliana. “It doesn’t matter if I might not have done what he accuses me of. I didn’t know it before, I never remembered. All that ever mattered was that it cut true.” Her eyes were wet for a moment, but she refused to let the guilt overwhelm her again, instead giving John a confident smile. “I’m not straying off the path that equips me better for our future just because I may have a pass on one sin. There’s plenty more I have to live with.”

“I really am mighty proud of you, lady.” John bowed down to her and gave her a kiss. It broke when she gave his lower lip a mildly painful bite.

Before he could turn that into banter, Eliana stirred. Grumbling, she shifted. Her eyes flew open, widened even further in panic, and she sat up as if launched by a coiled mechanism. She looked at him and Nathalia. Instantly, she relaxed. “Oh, thank fuck,” she breathed out. “I thought I was on some lab table or… fuck, I don’t know, fucking trauma fucking… How long was my useless ass out?”

“Just about five minutes,” he led with the good news. “We didn’t know how long you would be out, so we decided to put you on the sidelines for a bit.”

“There’s still a quarter chance that my ass gets dragged out there,” Eliana stated.

“Yeah, and you might not recover fully before you do,” John delivered the bad news.

The failed goddess pulled her eyebrows together. “Shit fucking beaver cunt put more holes in my cells than he has in his brain from the dementia… Fuck, I don’t even know how comfortable I am making jokes about dementia, shit is terrifying.”

John wouldn’t have stopped her if she had cussed about it, it wasn’t the worst to ever come from her mouth, but he did appreciate that she identified some line she was only willing to skirt. “At this point, we don’t have to be too worried,” John said. “It’s four versus one and it’s three more fights today. We can grind Arkan down.”

“I’d still like half… no… fuck, I’ll need a full hour for this shit. Fuck, arcane burns fucking suck. I only need three holes, who blasted me with magic radiation?!”

“More importantly…” John reached past Nathalia to grab Eliana by the shoulder. He pinned the pretty little psycho to the bed, staring deep into her amethyst eyes. “…who allowed you to call yourself useless, hm?”

“Uhm, uh,” Eliana sputtered, her eyes dashing to the side, before remembering that no one had allowed her to avert her gaze either. With a quivering gaze, she met his demanding glare. “I’m just a useless set of holes though?” she asked in a sweet tone.

John narrowed his eyes and she shrunk down a little. The smallest part of him was aroused by those words. A larger part chuckled at the absurdity that one of the strongest beings in the world had self-esteem issues. The vast majority of him was upset at her for those words. “You are my Eliana,” he spoke harshly. “You just gave us a major victory.”

“You defeated the enemy that defeated me,” Nathalia weighed in, her tone just as domineering. “Would you dare suggest I am useless? Less useful than you to boot?”

Objectively speaking, Nathalia currently did less for Fusion than Eliana. Something she aimed to fix and also not the point. What was objectively true did not matter, only Eliana’s perception of it all. Nathalia’s recent breakdown may have taken her down a dozen pegs, but she was still confident in being a goddess and Eliana still saw Nathalia as someone that could be aspired to, in terms of confidence.

The answer was, therefore, inevitable.

“Of course not,” Eliana mumbled quietly. “I… was useful?”

“Very much so,” John encouraged and patted her head. “I love you.”

“We love you,” Nathalia added.

“Whawharmrmhrash.” Eliana turned into a fountain of stammered words and noises. After kicking the sheets for a few seconds, she wound herself free and gathered herself. “Fuck you! You’re using me to generate safe passwords, you cock waffle!”

“Well, if the bottom fits,” John joked.

“Asshat.” Eliana pushed herself off the bed and made for the door. Catching her by the shoulder, John made her stop. She glared over her shoulder, all faux-threatening, then hummed when he turned the grip into a massage. Stiff muscles turned soft within a few rolls. “It’s too soon to pamper me.”

John, for once, agreed. He had every intention to do so eventually, but right now they lacked the time and facilities to thoroughly pamper all of his women that had recently done their utmost to move Fusion forwards. How could he even start without a massage table, a bottle of oil, some incense, and a jacuzzi?

Well, he could start in a variety of much cheaper ways. That was something he was still aware of – especially after the Oklahoma vacation. He was, however, in a position to shower them in luxury and he would do so. What was he rich for if not to do so? The two most legitimate uses of money were to make his harem happy and to fill his Steam library. Everything else was, at best, a necessary expense for national security.

While his mind went through the various questions of spending at the side, his mouth kept moving. “You shouldn’t go out like that.”

Eliana looked down at her naked body. A frustrated groan preceded her reaching into her dimensional pocket and retrieving the usual three articles of clothing. “I fucking hate this,” she lamented, tugging at the flexible leatherwear covering her chest. “Ban clothes, John!”

“I feel like that would be the truest example of government overreach that I could think of,” John told her. “It’s not like it’s illegal for you to head out naked either. Not like the Abyss has public decency laws. We just do these things because we should or do you want to raise our children in a world where there are many naked people running around?”

Eliana gave that a few moments of earnest thought. John himself had considered the question many times, because he would have loved to see the yoke of dress as 100% optional. By pure logic, he did not think nudity itself was anything to be ashamed of in public. There was no necessary connection between being undressed and doing various things that were degrees of unbecoming. There was an argument to be made that people would get more comfortable with themselves when they saw that everyone else was as imperfect as they were.

That being said, the subjects of sexual harassment and assault, especially when minors were involved, were so uniquely discomforting that erring on the side of caution was certainly wise. Because some people would not be able to behave properly, because drunks would always exist, and because things were as they were, casual public nudity was a terrible idea. If everyone, at once, agreed that it was acceptable, then it could be done in a wholesome way, but instinctive morality being what it was, any attempts to start transforming society in that direction would first be picked up by the actual degenerates.

Eliana grumbled something at the end of the diatribe and just took him by the hand. “Let’s join up with the rest of the cunt squad.”

John formed a link with Nathalia, and together the three of them returned to the watching area. Walking arm in arm with the tall goddess and the short blood mage made him feel like a pimp, if only because his arm was around the shoulder of one and the waist of the other. There were only five centimetres between him and Nathalia, but twenty-four between him and Eliana. Her head was at the height of his collarbone.

‘And that’s my little bundle of mania,’ John thought, giving the pretty little psycho a long and loving gaze that only stopped when he stumbled over a stair step. Eliana laughed loudly, Nathalia chucked, both kept him upright, and he blushed a little bit.

They returned to the platform to the sound of Dra chastising Jeff.

“See that?” the black-scaled lizardman asked and pushed a button on his desk. The recreation of the scene below played back half a minute. A cataclysmic arcane explosion reversed. Bits of rubble appeared in an arcane flash, restored from disintegration, then rejoined to form the outskirts of the petrified forest. The inner parts had not been that lucky and the illusion wasn’t detailed enough to truly capture the melting and dusting of the landscape where the arcana strike had initially landed.

“We don’t have to watch this over and over again, Dra,” Jeff groaned.

“Oh no, I think we do.” Dra pressed the play button and the arcane explosion beneath them played out.

The shockwave hit the edges of the Illusion area, then slammed back in on itself. Energy saturated the air with crackling, black lightning and a veil of arcane purple. There was nothing left and in that nothing, bits of charred flesh flew towards whatever part of Eliana her instincts designated as the point to most easily restore from. Everything turned liquid, the flesh too thoroughly burned to be usable anyhow, and from the blood she rose, as if the puddle had the depth of a lake.

Dra stopped when her regeneration had patched her back together enough to cover the majority of muscle fibre, keeping her at the odd middle point between gruesome and as erotic as the pretty little psycho was when nude (or not nude, her thick thighs were exposed anyhow).

“I want to remind you that this…” Dra made an off-handed gesture at the frozen facsimile of Eliana, “…is who you keep egging on.”

“She’s just so bulliable though!” Jeff complained.

“I’LL BULLY THE INSIDE OF YOUR THROAT WITH MY KNUCKLES, YOU DEAFENING CUNT!” Eliana shouted after running up to the railing.

“Let me rewind that one more time,” Dra offered and pushed the buttons. “Giant magical explosion… goddess of genocide rising out of a pool of blood and theeeeeeen…” a few more seconds passed, until Eliana delivered the finishing blow, “…victory against a being that defeated Nathalia. Do you want to try bullying Nathalia?”

Nathalia growled at the mere suggestion, stepping up next to the blood mage and directing her smouldering gaze at the caster. Jeff pulled at his collar, stammering some kind of excuse.

Letting the humbling of the announcer be what it was, John returned to his usual seat. Once there, he folded his hands. Lydia made a very forward move at that moment: she plopped down in his lap.

John could hear the record scratch across the entire stadium when the stern queen of steel wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him for the world to see. Not in the usual, proper way, but with all of the love and passion that usually was withheld for private or at least semi-private moments. All of it was visible through the camera that had been focused on Eliana and her heckling a few seconds before.

Answering the kiss in kind first was natural to John. He kept the questions for after she decided to remove her perfect, ruby red lips from his. A hand tenderly touched his cheek. Her sky blue eyes remained entirely focused on him. “You’re atypically straightforward,” he pointed out, his tone husky and pleased.

“There is one enemy remaining. I’ll allow myself a sliver of your pride, my love. Besides…” she wiggled her finger at someone behind him, “…I have the utmost confidence in our blank’s ability.”

Nia lowered her head into the conversation, only to immediately receive a kiss from the queen as well. The pariah leaned into it eagerly, a fact that John did not have to read from any subtle changes in the position of her shoulder but could see plainly in the ways her lips curved. It was ever a joy to see Nia expressing herself, especially when it came alongside the little smacks of a deep kiss.

The people all around the arena recovered quickly. It wasn’t as if Lydia being part of his harem was a secret, far from it. It was just her brazenness that surprised them all. Of course, they did not know what John knew: that he was potentially one fight away from putting a ring on her. One more fight, then tomorrow to make things official, then his seat among the Divided Gates was clear and he had every legitimacy to propose to her and she had every right to accept.

Lydia invited Nia into his lap and the slender woman joined readily. Although he sat at the centre, they doted on who they felt was their certain way to victory. John had his doubts, to a waning degree. Lydia and Nia were certain and he was not one to distrust their judgement. Question it, yes, as a good spouse was meant to do, but not distrust. Even if she lost, Metra and Eliana were still there and they would have the chance to finish what they had started.

The time to the final battle ticked by and, as if fate itself chose to put all their assumptions to the test, Romulus announced the fighters, “Arkan of the Azure Tribe versus Nia of Fusion in the field of asteroids.”

A final battle, most likely.