Chapter 196 – Next in Rome.
By the time they were done they had wrecked the second room. Not nearly as badly as the first one, there were no further drugs involved after all, but the w marks were still all over the ce. They had changed from the whirlpool (which was, together with the fridge, one of the two objects that had survived the debauchery unscathed), to the bed of pillows, now a mass of spilled cotton stuffing, and basically just fucked everywhere.
The reason they had to stop was that Nathalia ran out of food. As long as they had something to eat, Nathalia had been able to bridge the pauses between John hardening up again with eating and Aclysia. It had also served John, who had to battle the resurging debuffs. This was a new kind of heavy duty fucking he was going through.
“This is it then,” Nathalia stated and mmed the refrigerator so hard it toppled over backwards and reduced the whirlpool to the sole survivor of this sex session. “I have no more food, I am quitting this job.”
John raised his eyebrows in wonder, “That seems like a rather drastic conclusion to make.”
“I have not been exactly subtle when I got here and now that I have fucked you again, I have no more reason to stay,” Nathalia dived into the key mess that had been her pillows and brought some clothes up. “I had a craving for oiled up male bodies, I doubt I will get better than your form after your newest improvement.” Her draconic features vanished as she put on these clothes. “So, I will leave before I get into trouble with the authorities of the empire.”
“Afraid?” he asked.
A scornful nce told him only that she did not appreciate thement, not that he was wrong. “It is just not worth the trouble,” she stated.
John got his clothes in order as well, simply pulling them from his inventory into the correct slots. Following the mood, Aclysia formed her winter get-up.
Nathalia waited for them by the door. She wore a crimson red coat, open at the front to reveal a ck sweater that stretched over her tits, and ck jeans with brown shoes. A displeased grimace settled on her attractive features. “Clothes are vile things.”
John had to agree that clothes that aimed to hide her curves rather thanplimenting them looked alien on the dragoness. Not bad, by any description, just unfitting. Like painting a tank with peace symbols. As artistic as the art may be, in the end there was a dissonance there.
They walked through the messed-up massage room. The stench of cum and sweat was as strong as before, not helped by the room’s temperature. That it didn’t waft over into the neighbouring room had been nothing short of a miracle. “Don’t you have to clean this up?” John asked.
“Who is going to make me?” Nathalia challenged him, kicking the remains of the lounger. Loudly, it mmed against the wall, breaking even further.
John ignored the ufortable feeling radiating from Aclysia at the sight of that unwarranted destruction. “Point taken,” he said instead. He still hadn’t worked out the proper bnce between pushing her and staying on her good side. ‘It’ll get easier as the power imbnce shrinks,’ he reckoned.
They left the Illusion Barrier and walked to the front desk. Unsurprisingly, the shift of the initial girl had ended. Now there was some guy sitting there and he greeted Nathalia with a wide smile. “Hi, how are y-“
“I quit, I found a more satisfactory partner,” Nathalia threw a key into his direction. The man looked shocked.
John ced his keys on the table. “Thanks for the stay,” he said, trying to only sound respectful. He failed. He could hear a bit of boasting sneak into his tone. It didn’t feel good. Most of all because there was an undeniable implication here that he needed to have cleared up. He waited until they were outside. “So… you had sex with the guy?” John asked and tried to make the question sound as nonchnt as possible.
“With him and like ten others who ended up in my room.” Nathalia’s answer was in and careless.
An answer John had expected, even if he did not like to hear it. “And you were in that room for…?”
“3 or 4 days, it honestly blends together,” Nathalia opened the door and they stepped into the pitch ck of the winter night.
John was distracted from the unpleasant conversation by his phone. He had pulled it out of his inventory to check the time. It was 10 PM. ‘I’ve spent almost 10 hours literally fucking around,’ he realized, while scanning through his notifications. He had seven missed calls. Six of them, exactly 1 hour apart, were from Lydia, thest one, merely ten minutes ago, from Rave. The exnation he would give them would be the straightforward truth. To justify that it was entirely valid may be more difficult.
Just another unpleasant conversation to have after this one.
“So, you like me, right?” John carefully asked.
Nathalia’s brown colouration hid it rather well, but John imagined that he saw her blush a little at the sudden question. “I would say that I am rather interested in you indeed.”
“And yet you sleep around like that?” John was not sure if he was being a hypocrite or not when he asked that. He hadn’t fully worked out yet what the morals of polygyny were, as opposed to having a polycule. He only knew that he very much liked being one man amongst many women and wanted to keep them to himself. Nathalia was included in that.
“John, unless you dedicate your life to it, you have no chance of satisfying me on your own,” Nathalia spelled out her opinion on the matter. “The idea that I would quit other men for you just because I have taken a…” She made arge, uncertain gesture. Apparently she wasn’tpletely aware of the feelings he knew she had for him yet. “…well-founded interest in you, is preposterous. I remember you yourself being involved with a pink-haired annoyance.”
“Her name is Jane and she happens to be my girlfriend. This,” he gestured between them, even including Aclysia, “is all with her agreement.”
“I’m not your girlfriend,” Nathalia stated inly. “I im you for the nights I fancy for my entertainment. There’s nothing else to this.”
John fell silent, because he did not know what to say. The urge to have her be his was still there, but she did not reciprocate. Before he could work out the next step of having her see things his way, she asked a question.
“How much control does your girlfriend have, John?”
“Well, if she doesn’t like a girl in my harem, she can tell me not to fuck her anymore,” John answered, he had an inkling that this would lead to trouble.
“Complete, I understand…” Nathalia was lost in thought for a moment. “It doesn’t matter. As said, I’m not one of your harem.”
John wished to change that or to tell her that the technicality wouldn’t actually let her get away with it. However, no words managed toe together as a proper sentence in his head. What could he say to her that would make her break with 10,000 years of sleeping around for him? Was it even wise to ask her? Was this more than a passing infatuation for someone exceptionally hot?
He didn’t know. He was frustrated with himself and her. His best choice here, he reckoned, was to walk away and deal with this another day.
“Well, anyhow, I’ll have to go home now.” John extended his hand. Nathalia looked at it like it was the sole of his shoe after he had stepped in a dog turd. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him into a passionate kiss. The frustration he felt was swept up into a confusing storm of skipped heartbeats and pleasure. The enticing smell of incense and firewood filled his nose.
Suddenly, she broke the kiss and softly pushed him away. “Now run before I make the decision to abduct you right now, John,” Nathalia warned him.
Heughed, but then he saw the serious look in her eyes, a mixture of greed, lust, jealousy and love. She wasn’t kidding, if he didn’t get away right now, it was unlikely he would ever see his girlfriend again. It was also his chance to make her his all the way. Different loves tugged at him. In the end one was more powerful than the other. “Okay, nice to see you, hope we get together again soon,” he spouted some hasty phrases before literally running away.
“Next in Rome,” the dragoness shouted after him.
That was almost enough to have him stop and turn around to look at Nathalia in confused shock. If she had been banished by Romulus by crossing him on the day of Pompeii, jumping right into the centre of his power seemed plenty stupid.
“Next in Rome,” John repeated quietly to himself. As if Nathalia would be stopped because an idea was stupid. He gleefully smiled like an idiot and only then realized that his left hand clutched two new obsidian shards. ‘Must have handed them to me during the kiss,’ he thought and pulled out his smartphone.
Then he called Rave back. “Finally, back alive?” his girlfriend chirped at the other end. Nothing about her tone indicated that she was mad or even annoyed.
John’s smile broadened a little wider. ‘This woman is just too good for me,’ he thought. With a skip in his step, he set out to return to the house. “You will not believe the day I had,” he began his recounting.
“YOU WHAT?!” Rave shouted. Apparently there was a limit to how much of his shenanigans she would put up with.
John was back in the mansion and had repeated in detail what he had only quickly exined over the phone. Her shout wasn’t in reaction to meeting Nathalia, the fucking, or that it had taken him ten hours to get back. It was a reaction to the words: “I think I am starting to love her.”
“Do ya just throw out’ya’feelings’like’christmas-cards?” she slurred in an even worse way than usual.
John couldn’t help but feel fascinated by the fact that he, after months of their bantering rtionship, managed to get his girlfriend seriously mad over something that was actually his doing. “Well, no,” John said, “I mean, technically I have known Nathalia for months now.”
“Technically ya have known Lydia for months, yet ya do not love her,” Ravemented.
“Well, given time…” John carefully suggested. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. Whether it was just because he was a man, because he was a man who had been starved for female attention for 18 years of being a nerd, or because he was him – he just found it easy to have feelings for every attractive woman who gave him the time of day. He knew he had some semnce of reason in his head. He hadn’t felt this way about Victoria. He hadn’t felt this way about Nathalia either, before she had shown herself to be more than just a hungry slut.
Not that Rave looked like she wanted to hear about the logic behind his attachments.
“Besides, we fell for each other after just a week,” John reminded her.
Rave jumped from the couch, this discussion was happening in the living room of all ces, and started walking up and down in front of him. “Great, so what we have is a thing you could have with any girl or what?” she asked, taking the worst possible interpretation of what he said.
“No, what I have with you is just… awesome through and through.” Words failed him. He scratched the back of his head and sighed. “I love you, Jane. I absolutely love you. I can’t imagine being without you in my life anymore. I just… feel like I can also swoon over and love others.”
Rave stopped in her pacing, her angry expression softened a tiny bit. “I can easily ept swooning, but love… and that arrogant dragon of all people… Ya know what, as per our agreement you can’t sleep with Nathalia anymore.”
For a moment, John’s jaw locked up. He could feel the entire strength of the muscles press against his upper teeth. The pressure enveloped his brain, while his heart elerated. A variety of emotions poured together into an angry cocktail. Rave’s challenging re did not make it better. He was about to say something, anything, when fate intervened.
“You can actually do that?” a hard voice asked. The fighting lovers looked at the neer. “I came to see what themotion was about,” Lydia, holding a pot, said, “and also to get more tea. Mostly to get more tea, now that Aclysia is back.” She ced the pot on the table, “I am however most intrigued by what you just said, mind informing me about the context and validity of that agreement?”
“The fact that John gets to sleep with other girls means that we had toe to terms with a few things,” Rave answered in a rush, “Like that he has to tell me who he sleeps with, that I get to tell him he has to stop seeing certain girls and that we go back to just us whenever I want.”
Lydia nodded repeatedly, but her eyes spelled out a certain worry. In the pause, John’s Wisdom reasserted himself and he thanked whatever power had sent the princess over. Managing to remain cool-headed, he nodded. “That is indeed our agreement.”
“Well, legally speaking, Rave is in the right then,” Lydia stated.
“Sure, but…” John had a hard time arguing the case, so he dropped it and tried another angle. “Do you seriously think that I could stop Nathalia if I wanted to?”
“No, but there’s difference between consensual sex and rape, ya moron,” Rave shot him down.
“There is also a massive difference between my love for you and my love for her,” John exined again. “Stopping me from sleeping with her won’t change that.”
“Oh great,” Rave threw her arms into the air, “what else am I supposed to do then?”
“You could stop being such a scaredy-cat, I love Aclysia almost as much as I love you and yet I never felt the urge to leave you for her,” John half-shouted.
The room was filled with silence. “Aclysia? Almost as much as me?” Rave blinked rapidly and tilted her head. Her confusion reflected on John.
“How could you not know that I cared for her so much?” the Gamer asked. “I told you everything she did for me when we trained to save you. I love her. I love every one of my familiars. They kept me standing and helped me to walk when I was ready to ruin myself.”
Just opening her mouth, Rave created a number of sounds that grew increasingly frustrated. Her mouth snapped shut with an audible ck. “Listen here,” she finally managed to press out, her face starting to grow red.
Again, Lydia intervened, this time by clearing her throat. “I believe you could use a mediator,” she suggested.
With authority in every step, she got between the two of them and sat down to John’s right. She gestured to Rave to take up the empty ce to her own right, so that Lydia sat in the middle. With crossed arms, Rave fell onto the couch.
“Now,” Lydia said slowly, “I think the underlying problem here is not the actual physical contact but the fact that you dislike the girl he fell for this time. Do I understand this correctly?”
“No, it''s just that he actually FELL for another girl,” Rave stated, “and now wants to act on that while still maintaining his rtionship with me.”
“Jane, that already happened,” John reiterated calmly. “I went on a date with Aclysia yesterday. I was alone with her for three weeks, yet, when I got you out, I didn’t want to break up with you. What I feel for her is the closest to what I feel for you, but it''s still not the same. You’re my first love, my…” He would have said more but Lydia gestured him to shut up.
Rave became very silent. “Fine,” she admitted, “I don’t like Nathalia, so that’s why, ya happy?”
“No, I am happy if you pull back that ridiculous taboo.”
“So ya won’t obey it?”
“I will!” John almost shouted. “By God, I will, but every time I will think ‘I could if only it weren’t for my girlfriend’, what do you think will do more damage to our rtionship, sex with a girl you don’t like or a constant grudge?”
“Ya should be thankful that ya get more than me at all.”
“Like you don’t love it,” he snapped back immediately. “Can we stop acting like I’m the only beneficiary from this harem agreement? You yourself said that you wanted to have fun with pretty girls when we made it and you get to do that plenty. You love this.”
Lydia raised both hands before more could be said. “You both have plenty of reasons to be justified,” she tried to calm the situation by using an unusually soft tone. “Yet, I think the reasons you put forward are just pulling away at the underlying issue. Rave, do you trust that John will stay with you even if he loves others?”
“I do,” the answer came unexpectedly quick, “but...,” the word stuck out like a sore thumb, only to be followed by seconds of silence. “…urgh, fuck it, I need this in visual,” Raveined.
“Need what in visual?” Lydia probed.
“Like, just where he sees Nathalia in rtion to everyone else… fuck it just tell me where you see everyone in rtion to each other, if I can’t have monopoly on your dick or your feelings I at least want to see what ya think about everyone.”
“A reasonable thought,” Lydia agreed with an almost mechanical nod. An approving smile was on her lips, as she swiftly fetched some paper and a pen. “A list should suffice, correct?”
John stared at the empty piece of paper. Something at the back of his mind told him this was a bad idea. Under the expectant eyes of his unsure girlfriend and the order-loving princess, he did not feel like he had much of a choice though. He grabbed the pen and started writing out the list.
While he was doing that, the whole of the couch filled up. Aclysia hastened over, the elementals spawned, all at the same time. Only Momo, who had been reading a book in her usual ce even before the fight started, didn’t move an inch.
“What are ya doing here?” Rave asked the elementals. “You are part of his thoughts, ya should know this already!”
“John’s thoughts aren’t as easy as you may think,” Gnome answered and jumped from one foot to the other in anticipation, “we can only get a rough idea, no precise statements. Unless he specifically thinks about a thing.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sylph nodded and flew over John’s head, trying to get an early peak. “HAH, you arest Sally!”
“No I am not, fuck off!” Smander angrily pulled her sister back to get a peek. A little sigh of relief left her when she saw the actual paper.
John mmed the note on the table. “THERE,” he shouted and crossed his arms. This day had taken a turn for the worse and now he was annoyed enough to just not care anymore. The girls bowed over the list.
In the first ce was Rave, his girlfriend looked at the prophesied result with remaining conflict. Number two was Aclysia, who radiated pure happiness about being where she was. Then there was a decorative gap between the two of them and the rest of the list.
Right beneath that gap was Gnome. “M-m-me?” she stammered and raised her hands to her blushing face, holding her cheeks as her mouth stood slightly open and she squeaked in unsure happiness.
Up next was the reason for this whole fight, Nathalia.
“Fine, you can continue sleeping with her,” Rave told him when she saw that, “sorry that I reacted this way…”
“No, I understand, I… honestly, you’re right that you’re giving me a lot here. I… don’t know how to put it… I just don’t know if there is a turning back at this point.”
“…Ya mean we crossed the Rubicon of rtionships and now it''s either we manage to make this work or we don’t work?” Rave suggested.
“I don’t know,” John answered and rubbed his face. Then, they sighed in unison. They just left the talk there. It wasn’t the end of it, but they were both too tired to keep it up tonight. They just knew that they didn’t want whatever this was to end. At least, John read that in her beautiful blue eyes.
The rest of the gathered girls kept reading the list.
Under Gnome, Sylph and Smander were right next to each other. “We fucking SHARE a row… but you know what, number 5 is nice, I can work with that,” the fire spirit said and presented her fist to Sylph.
“I mean, it could be better, but albeit I am not his #1 Lover I am surely his numero uno Courtesan. So this works, I think? Yeah it works. But I kinda want to be higher. Ah, well, I will do it somehow!” Sylph flew back and forth bbering, beforepleting the fist-bump.
The three on the bottom of the list started with Undine, who felt nothing at being thest of the elementals. Whether she was annoyed, angry, or okay with it, John couldn’t know and he didn’t wish to probe too deeply. Second tost was Lydia, whose face was her usual iron mask. Last was Momo, who didn’t care whatsoever and instead turned another page.
John picked up the note and immediately tore it apart. He didn’t wish it to exist, didn’t like the way it forced his mind to try and put something as vague as ‘love’ and ‘care’ into a numerical value. Ironic, certainly, considering he could literally see Rtionship Points.
“I don’t think that list will be urate two weeks from now,” he stated, while throwing the scraps into the trash. “I don’t even think it will be urate tomorrow. I only am certain of three things: I love Jane the most, I love Aclysia the second most, and I love all of you enough to risk my life for you.” He stared at each of them with a look between grim determination and pleading. “I love you. I don’t want to be without any of you. Please, don’t be jealous about this. I want all of you to be happy. Okay?”
“”Okay”” everyone said with varying faces and levels of enthusiasm. Only Undine stayed silent, but that was just like her.