Ted was surprised when I told him that that I could cast again so soon, and that I could probably do it two more times in quick succession. I thought about lying to him, waiting some time doing nothing and then making up excuses about a meditation technique or something else, but decided not to.
What did it matter if he learned of another little secret of mine, right? I was pretty sure that he hadn't bought my made up excuse about my stats either.
"I appreciate your trust in coming clean to me," he said after I explained what we had just done. "I bet you did it because you didn't want to lie to my face knowing that I knew, but I appreciate it nonetheless, lad. It shows that you are a good person."
Since we were at it, I told him some vague details about my class and shared some more information. He could ruin us already, might as well use him as a source of information about the world so that we could finally stop having to guess our way around the city. Most importantly, once he learned that I had no idea what mana recovery and meditation usually looked like, he told us what he knew about it.
"It's just a primer, lad, I'm no mage or anything, but it's better than just making shit up as you go. Stupid lies like meditation techniques would make people want to look into your secrets, hoping they can get the secret ore vein you're mining, not knowing that you hide much deeper secrets in your depths."
Turns out, magic scaled off of Intelligence and Wisdom, just like common sense told me. Each spell was different in how it scaled, and there were entire books with common general and class-specific skills and how they scaled, because of course the System told you nothing.
"It used to," Ted explained. "But, in case you didn't notice, it doesn't have energy to do much these days. People had to figure everything out with trial and error, and some clever ways to measure spell damage and strength. Anyway, I digress. It's not really important to you since, apparently, your girls can't see their statuses."
I nodded. "That's right."
"The other important thing about Intelligence and Wisdom, beside spell scaling, is this. Imagine you are in a mine, since I'm a dwarf and I get free pass at telling mining metaphors. Between you and me, I hate enclosed spaces."
He leaned in, pointing up at the half-hidden ceiling of the lithos block. "I hate this city, and what it represents," he said.
When he moved away, his face was once again all sunny. "So, in mining terms. Intelligence, lad, is how rich the ore vein is, how big your pickaxe is, and how strong you are at swinging it. In arcane terms, mana points per second. Wisdom? It's how deep your cart is, the mana pool's total size. You took a third of your girls' mana pools, and filled up your own. This gives you an idea of your relative Wisdoms. It's all feelings, because again, System sucks these days."
Finally, his explanation touched upon the important part.
"If Int and Wis are the same, you get a full pool every 24 hours. You do the math from that, I can't be arsed. And, of course, meditation. It speeds up regeneration a little bit, but that's where it gets interesting. You can gain a general skill that makes it more efficient, from single digit percent all the way to an actual multiplier. It takes a shit ton of cores to level, but some people do go down that path."
I asked him about skill levels, since so far I never had to spend cores to do that, and he sighed. It was with a heavy heart that he told me that yes, even leveling skills took cores to do after a certain point. It had to do with the monsters' ability to process the mana in the world into something that the System could use, apparently.
"Which brings us to today. You have already cast once, and even though I don't think the guild grunts cared overmuch about you, you do tend to attract eyes. Well," he paused, looking at the girls. "They do. The demon in particular. Some of them are bound to notice if you go around casting willy nilly after spending the whole day acting like a Strength focused brute. Again, you need to keep a low profile. Also works for me. If it's alright with you, I am going to hide your identity, which means I will need to come up with an explanation as to how I came into possession of all this high-quality stuff you are making. People know I was hiring a specialist, but if I overdo it, it will bring attention on me and, by extension, you. Which you don't want."
"Is all this really necessary?" I asked.
Ted simply sighed and looked at Elyra. "Lass, you look like the reasonable one here. You tell him, please. He MUST. BE. PARANOID. You hear me?"
She laughed. "I hear you, thank you for looking out for us."
"Bah," the dwarf said. "Keeping your identity hidden will benefit me as well. Sol might trust me because I am nice, but I think you and the demon will trust me more if you know there's an interest for me there as well, correct?"
"Damn right," Vespera said, arms crossed and looking quite threatening.
"Then you have a better head on your shoulders than him."
"Hey," I said. Since when did Vespera become the expert here? I was the former low-life hauler.
Seeing her smirk, I could tell that she was enjoying this immensely. Joking with Ted at my expense? Right up her alley. I let her have her fun.
"Okay, so here's what we will do. You cast once today already, late morning. Your build is that of a classic tank, Str and Vit galore, little to nothing in the other categories save for the general points. Which are always balanced, so one mana pool a day tops. We can stretch it by saying you got a meditation skill and some lopsided points in Int, but that's it. Two casts per day—the first one early morning, the second one right before turning in for the night. Go for a nice walk or whatever, and come back near midnight. I'll be here, and I'll have some nice piles for you to transmute. The grunts will have left, and no eyes on us. Alright?"
"Sounds good," I said.
"Good lad. And remember, always be paranoid. Now go, sightsee or some shit. I got stuff to do."
◈◈◈
Left free to our own devices, we wandered the city for a while. The sounds of battle weren't too bad unless we went to the peripheral lithos blocks, blending into a sort of annoying background droning sound that wasn't too dissimilar to the sound of the hauler engines.
As we wandered, we also learned that some of the more central blocks were closed to the general public.
"Of course, measly E-rank workers don't get a pass," grumbled a rather grumpy Vespera.
We slowly gravitated back to our room in the guild inn, since talking among ourselves out in the city didn't fall under the be paranoid doctrine that Ted suggested we follow with so much enthusiasm. Vespera had tried to disobey such directives more than once, but Elyra always shut her down with force. Unfortunately, she was probably right to do so, because already by simply not talking to my slaves I was drawing much less attention than before. People still looked at us with interest, it wasn't common to have humanoid, attractive girls as slaves, but the nature of the looks was much different.
"Sol Nightguard, tell us a story," the demon girl demanded, sprawled onto the bed with her head on my thigh.
"What do you want to know?" I asked. I had so many stories to tell that I almost didn't know what to say, all the memories of my old life blending together into a grey soup.
To my right, Elyra was sitting against the wooden wall of the room, with one of her wings acting as a pillow for me. "The way Vespera said your name makes me wonder," she said. "Was your name common back in your world?"
I paused as a wave of memories hit me.
Meanwhile, the demon girl perked up, looking at me from below while still laying on my thigh. "That's right! Was it common or was it strange?"
"You could say it was rather common, but not for the reason you think. You see, Sol was one of the names they gave to orphans."
"Orphans?" she asked. "Does it have a particular meaning or is it just a random name?"
"It was the name of Earth's sun. The star at the center of the solar system that served as humanity's home for millions of years, before we spread to outer space."
"To think that people lived up there, between the stars." Elyra's expression was dreamy. "I know it was another universe, parallel as you call it, but maybe…"
"Come down to earth, angel-cat," Vespera said with a smirk. Then, looking at me, she brushed a finger against my cheek. "So you really are a spacer, star-boy. The sun of our lives, even when we are stuck in this dark damp ugly and smelly shithole of a city."
This made Elyra giggle. "Star of our lives… I like it. I am going to call you that, moving forward." She blushed. "In private, of course."
As the angel said that, I saw fire in the demon girl's eyes. The way they shone red, and what she said soon after, made my heart skip a beat. "What about your last name, star of our lives?"
I took a moment to recover. "Well, my original last name sucked. Randomly generated by a computer. I wasn't going to keep that, you know?"
"So what did you do, star-boy?" she asked impatiently, hanging from my every word.
"Well…" I said, trailing off as I ran a finger of my own on her face. She had stopped a while ago, too engrossed in the conversation, and I missed her touch.
"Want a little kiss for that information?" she asked me seductively.
"Not gonna say no to that, but I wouldn't want to make Elyra feel excluded."
Vespera pulled herself up, grabbing the angel's hand and eliciting a "eep" of surprise from her. "Who said we are going to exclude her? How about this: let's swap stories. Whoever doesn't have anything to say, will have to do something… naughty. I'll start first. Whoops, I have no memory of my life before you found me. I guess I'm going to give you a kiss instead!"
Chapter 25.5 (NSFW)
Vespera's hand lingered on my face before she finally pulled me towards her. Since she was still lying on my thigh, I had to bend down quite a bit to kiss her, but I managed. We touched, a simple tap on the lips slowly becoming something much more sensual that she abruptly cut short with a smirk.
"Don't get too greedy, star of our lives," she said seductively. "Now do her."
She was nodding towards Elyra, who was looking at us with unfocused eyes and a flushed face lost in pleasure. Was the feedback she got from the empathic bond enough to reduce her to this state? Actually, I knew it was. The raw desire I felt from Vespera alone was enough to make my heart beat like crazy, waves of heat and pressure coming from my chest. I knew it had an even bigger effect on my little shy angel.
When I touched her, it was enough to bring her back to the present and she literally threw herself at me, kissing me with much more passion than her demonic counterpart. When we broke apart, there was a thin bridge of saliva between us that stretched before shattering into a few drops that fell on the bed and our clothes, making little wet stains.
"So," Vespera said, pulling herself up so that she was sitting cross legged and looking at me. "What about your last name?"
"Well, as I said the original one sucked. When I started hauling supplies between space stations and solar systems, the first thing I did with that money was to have it changed."
"Was it you who changed it to Nightguard, then??" Elyra asked eagerly, speaking in close to my ear as she wrapped around me.
I smiled at her, brushing a hand against her wings and making her shiver. "What, you don't like it?"
"Oh, no," she purred, leaning into my touch. Her breath was scalding. "I love it."
Not wanting to feel left out, Vespera scooted closer to me and took my hand in hers. "But why Nightguard?" she asked.
"I liked it," I said simply.
The answer stunned her for a moment, and she stopped stroking the back of my hand before shaking her head in disbelief.
"That's it," she deadpanned. "Truly?"
"Truly," I said. My hand snaked free and went to grab her thigh, squishing the soft flesh right at the edge of her armor.
Elyra also scooted closer, leaning down and putting her head on Vespera's thigh so that we were a mess of tangled bodies. She wiggled her wings, demanding scritches.
"I personally am glad, mmh," she moaned, melting into my touch. "I am very glad you chose that name. I quite like seeing it in my status. Elyra Nightguard. Two names, both given by the star of my life."
"Of our lives," said a pouting demon. Her hand hovered close to the angel's back for a moment, almost wanting to join mine under her clothes for some back scritches, but then she retreated.
Seeing this, I grabbed it and forced it to join me. Now suddenly under a double assault, Elyra began to shiver and moans escaper her mouth without her even noticing.
"Well, it seems that Elyra Nightguard is too far gone to properly communicate anymore," Vespera joked.
"What about you, Vespera Nightguard? Do you also want some scritches?"
She hummed theatrically, making a show of thinking about it. "No, Sol Nightguard. I think I quite prefer what you are doing with your hand on my thigh."
With a snap of chaos magic, her armor vanished, leaving her completely naked. I used my index finger to slowly drag my hand forward, towards her body, one millimeter at a time, squishing and kneading her skin. Each time I grabbed her flesh, a little shock went through her body, intensifying as I got closer and closer to her private parts.
When I finally reached them, I brushed gently against...
[Continues on Patreon (gold tier)]