“Yes,” Lydia snapped at him, anger mixing in with the returned iron of her tone. Despite her regained bearings, her face turned red again. She kept her eyes entirely fixated on her ruined piano. “I do not make a habit of sharing my leisure activities with anyone, John Newman.”
“Well, us plebs call that a hobby,” John said, trying to introduce some levity into the situation. Lydia did not react at all to those words, so he continued in a calmer tone. “I’m surprised you picked dancing and music as yours though.”
Lydia remained motionless for a little bit, the still hovering keys the only extension of her that moved in any capacity. She shook her head, when her attempt to slot them back in failed utterly. “Following…” she started, stopped, glanced at him for a second, then continued, “…a certain event in my youth, my honoured grandfather took me in. Warfare, economy, and such practical things were the backbone of my royal education. I had many tutors, but art… art he taught me himself.”
Her red lips drained of colour where she pressed them together. She ran her hand over the polished wood of the piano’s top. The large instrument was still beautiful, which made the damage all the more saddening.
“Eventually, he advised me to pick up an instrument. He said that he always enjoyed exorcising all he could not say into melodies. I made my choice and he personally gifted me this piano…” She stopped and let out a deep sigh. “I lost control there… and now it's destroyed.”
John sucked on the inside of his cheeks. There was a guilty twitch inside him, although he could only feel so bad. Lydia had lost herself in the moment and he couldn’t have known better. “And the dancing?” he asked softly, both to keep her mind engaged and because he was curious.
“A personal addition. I did it at first as a challenge, to weave my control of the keys with the distraction of physical motion.” Lydia plopped down on the stool next to it. At the end of her explanations, Lydia locked eyes with John again. Her flustered looks were reduced to a small blush. Her hands went back to braiding her hair. “Promise me again that none of this will ever leave this room, only you and Maximillian know of this, and I would like to keep it that way. It is… a matter of personal comfort. I would like to keep it that way.”
John pushed himself off the ground and stood. “I promise, but… why would your rival know of this? Seems like a strategic misstep,”
Lydia raised an eyebrow in response. “You haven’t looked into my background at all?”
“No, should I have done that?”
“I am flattered that you didn’t, but generally talking: Yes. Especially if you are working for somebody like me. Much surface intel about me is easy to come by.” The princess gestured for a nearby ring of metal to approach. It broke, then clasped around the tip of her braid, securing it. “You might as well learn it from me then. Maximillian and I used to be a couple of some description.”
That news hit John fervently unprepared. Not that it hurt him, he had barely started to like Lydia as a woman and he was far away from loving her as much as he did Rave or Aclysia. Even if that were the case, he knew that Rave had pulled some stunts before she knew him, which included there being nudes of her on reddit. He knew people had pasts and there was no reason to get jealous about reasonable degrees of mistakes.
This was, however, notable in another way. “So, this tournament is basically just a lovers' feud cranked up to national level?” he asked, aghast.
“No!” Lydia was quick to smack that assumption down. “Our opposition on this issue is what first brought me and Maximillian together. He turned out to be surprisingly charming in private. I will spare you the details of the few months of our relationship. It was a standard story: two people fall in love over a common issue, they talk, they love, they start finding things about the other one that rub them the wrong way. In the end it turns out that they are unable to come to an agreement on the most basic things, finally that very thing that brought them together becomes their greatest difference. It turned out that our ideals were incompatible, so I decided that we should go back to being just enemies again.”
With a ‘clack’ the last of the keys laid down into its place inside the piano. The instrument was restored at least on the surface, the complicated mechanisms setting themselves back together under Lydia’s influence with an ease only deep understanding allowed. However, even as all of the metal got into its correct place, the wooden parts of the big instrument were splintered or broken. When Lydia pushed a key, the sound didn’t come.
“It wasn’t a nice ending, and Maximillian never really got over it, it seems. And I don’t mean that he didn’t get over me, we both have moved on since, but his pride didn’t take the hit very well. Wherever we meet, he starts a fight. I guess I am not much better, actually answering his minor insults. Where I aim to federalize the country, he aims to centralize it around Vienna’s court. Where I am stern, he is lax. Where he is decisive, I wait for information. The current state of our country created two people that promise solutions. This burden put us together, gave us something we shared, but our solutions tore us apart,” she heavily sighed as, no matter what she did, the instrument did not produce a single tone. “It was good for both us and Germany that the relationship happened. However this tournament will end, neither of us now care too much about the other to be a constant thorn in the other’s side, despite us not getting along very well. At least, that’s what I hope for us. When all of this is over, I hope to drink tea with him again; even if he and I weren’t good lovers, I think he can be a loyal friend,” the princess gave up on the instrument with a disheartened expression. “This will require an expert to fix…”
Wordlessly, John stepped up and put a finger on a key. A moment later he pushed it down and a single light note echoed through the room. He smirked at the surprised Lydia. “It's still largely broken,” he explained when Lydia pushed another key and nothing happened. Gesturing at the ruptured frame, where the keys had been violently removed, he continued his explanation. “It’s the same Skill that allowed me to destroy and repair that glass yesterday; however, something of this size and complexity costs a bit more mana. I will need 2 or 3 more full mana bars to fully repair it.” ‘And it didn’t even give me a new level in the skill, I know why I stopped concentrating on that,’ John thought.
Lydia pushed the key he had just before and the clear note rang out again. “Thank you,” she whispered, “this instrument means a lot to me.”
“I was the one who broke it.” John was ready to take the blame. He couldn’t have known better, but sometimes it was best to just assign to oneself the guilt anyhow. “I shouldn’t have startled you.”
Shaking her head, Lydia rose from her seat. “It was my carelessness that allowed you to startle me in the first place.” She stretched. The red dress was not quite capable of keeping up and revealed a bit of side boob. “Would you help me out of this?” Lydia asked and pointed at a near invisible fold in the dress. “I can’t quite reach the zipper, and I need to get into something fitting for the speech I have to hold in about thirty minutes.”
They both knew that was a lie, the zipper wasn’t regular metal, but it was still just metal. She wasn’t even close to being out of mana, so she could have opened that zipper with the ease of a thought. Also, she was a member of the Abyss still, which happened to entail being a human at over-the-peak performance, she could have reached the zipper if she wanted to. He would have been an idiot to comment on that out loud, however.
“Of course, princess,” he stated in a servant’s voice and gently tugged at the zipper. She wore very little underneath.
Ten minutes later he was shushed out of the room with an extremely wanting erection. The princess had acted like she didn’t know what to wear, until the very end, pushing out her curves and private parts throughout the whole conversation of ‘what suits me best?’. As he left, Lydia, in a slightly more decorated version of her usual uniform, stepped past and to the front door. Apparently, her driver was already waiting.
“Strict timetable, yet still finds a moment to tease me,” John mumbled as the door closed behind the princess. His goal was to get to the couch as fast as possible. Walking with an erection his size was seriously uncomfortable. He fell onto a cushion with a relieved sigh. A moment later, he heard something wet flowing over the wooden boards of the floor. He turned around and saw nothing, but, when he looked back in front of him, he saw the blue goo that was Undine take her womanly shape between his legs.
They didn’t exchange a single word. The water spirit loosened, then removed his pants. John was more than happy to be taken care of by whoever of his harem was around and Undine seemed to be the quickest this time. He probably radiated such extreme horniness that every single one of his familiars had felt it. Aclysia walked out of the kitchen, saw that she was too late, and turned around to get back to whatever she was actually doing. He would not have objected to her joining.
Undine was about to wrap her soft lips around John’s dick when his pants buzzed atop the coffee table. For a moment, he was tempted to completely ignore the phone call, but he didn’t want to miss anything important. What if it was Lydia, who had forgotten her keys and speech notes, and now stood outside the door? Unlikely, granted, with her being able to open whatever metal lock she wanted with the flick of a finger. Still, it could be happening and if it did, he would pay the price for ignoring the call. With a sigh he decided to make it quick. Undine, sending displeased waves, handed him his phone.
“Hello, John here,” the Gamer greeted.
“Oh, h-hi, it’s me, Herman,” the apothecary said from the other side.
John sighed heavily once more; if it was a girl calling him, he would have gestured Undine to just roll with it and enjoyed the blowjob while he was talking, but getting pleasured while a dude was next to his ear felt weird.
“What’s up?” John asked, trying to hurry this along.
“I call because of that thing you wanted me to bring to you,” Herman said.
‘Right, the spine,’ John scratched his head. He hadn’t forgotten about it, but he had tried to not think about it too much. After all, he had finally reached happier times again. “What about it?” he asked, knowing he sounded a bit brash. He just really had other urgent matters to put his hands to. Well, Undine’s hands. Mostly her mouth.
“I don’t really have time to bring it to you. There is a lot to do with that veteran meeting coming up, and I’ll be pretty busy afterwards too. So, if you and or Rave could come to the meeting and pick it up, that would be nice. Would like the company while I am getting squashed by the stories of old war heroes,” said Herman. “You’ll probably be busy with the whole election stuff…”
John nodded, then realized how stupid that was, excused himself with most of his blood being somewhere else, then finally answered, “Sure thing, just write me the address and time, and we’ll find time to swing by.”
“Will, do. Thanks, friend.”
He put down the phone a moment later. Undine massaged his, only slightly, limp dick to get it into full hardness again. She slowly lowered her lips, John was watching intently, ready for the moment his sensitive cock would finally get some pleasure. Undine’s outer layer, the shape of a dress, melded back into her body when she felt his desiring gaze.
A Quest window blocked the view when it finally got indecent.
John really had no mind to think about this right now. But he had to take this seriously, because of who this Quest came from. Therefore, to the (shared) extreme displeasure of the slime girl between his legs, he ordered her to stop once more.
Why would the Horned Rat give him a Quest to take a spa day? What did he know about that god? Pretty much nothing, but he seemed to be somewhat invested in John’s survival, otherwise giving him Mana Blade didn’t make a lot of sense.
Why would the Rat want him to go get a massage? Probably to get some sort of message from somebody there. Why he would make it so complicated, John didn’t know nor care. He still hadn’t cracked that prophecy, and he wasn’t even trying to understand the Rat’s reasoning without having understood that first. A free Class Level was absurdly good though, and he did think he was safe, at the very least. He smashed that Accept button.
Then, he could concentrate on that blowjob.
“Yes,” Lydia snapped at him, anger mixing in with the returned iron of her tone. Despite her regained bearings, her face turned red again. She kept her eyes entirely fixated on her ruined piano. “I do not make a habit of sharing my leisure activities with anyone, John Newman.”
“Well, us plebs call that a hobby,” John said, trying to introduce some levity into the situation. Lydia did not react at all to those words, so he continued in a calmer tone. “I’m surprised you picked dancing and music as yours though.”
Lydia remained motionless for a little bit, the still hovering keys the only extension of her that moved in any capacity. She shook her head, when her attempt to slot them back in failed utterly. “Following…” she started, stopped, glanced at him for a second, then continued, “…a certain event in my youth, my honoured grandfather took me in. Warfare, economy, and such practical things were the backbone of my royal education. I had many tutors, but art… art he taught me himself.”
Her red lips drained of colour where she pressed them together. She ran her hand over the polished wood of the piano’s top. The large instrument was still beautiful, which made the damage all the more saddening.
“Eventually, he advised me to pick up an instrument. He said that he always enjoyed exorcising all he could not say into melodies. I made my choice and he personally gifted me this piano…” She stopped and let out a deep sigh. “I lost control there… and now it's destroyed.”
John sucked on the inside of his cheeks. There was a guilty twitch inside him, although he could only feel so bad. Lydia had lost herself in the moment and he couldn’t have known better. “And the dancing?” he asked softly, both to keep her mind engaged and because he was curious.
“A personal addition. I did it at first as a challenge, to weave my control of the keys with the distraction of physical motion.” Lydia plopped down on the stool next to it. At the end of her explanations, Lydia locked eyes with John again. Her flustered looks were reduced to a small blush. Her hands went back to braiding her hair. “Promise me again that none of this will ever leave this room, only you and Maximillian know of this, and I would like to keep it that way. It is… a matter of personal comfort. I would like to keep it that way.”
John pushed himself off the ground and stood. “I promise, but… why would your rival know of this? Seems like a strategic misstep,”
Lydia raised an eyebrow in response. “You haven’t looked into my background at all?”
“No, should I have done that?”
“I am flattered that you didn’t, but generally talking: Yes. Especially if you are working for somebody like me. Much surface intel about me is easy to come by.” The princess gestured for a nearby ring of metal to approach. It broke, then clasped around the tip of her braid, securing it. “You might as well learn it from me then. Maximillian and I used to be a couple of some description.”
That news hit John fervently unprepared. Not that it hurt him, he had barely started to like Lydia as a woman and he was far away from loving her as much as he did Rave or Aclysia. Even if that were the case, he knew that Rave had pulled some stunts before she knew him, which included there being nudes of her on reddit. He knew people had pasts and there was no reason to get jealous about reasonable degrees of mistakes.
This was, however, notable in another way. “So, this tournament is basically just a lovers' feud cranked up to national level?” he asked, aghast.
“No!” Lydia was quick to smack that assumption down. “Our opposition on this issue is what first brought me and Maximillian together. He turned out to be surprisingly charming in private. I will spare you the details of the few months of our relationship. It was a standard story: two people fall in love over a common issue, they talk, they love, they start finding things about the other one that rub them the wrong way. In the end it turns out that they are unable to come to an agreement on the most basic things, finally that very thing that brought them together becomes their greatest difference. It turned out that our ideals were incompatible, so I decided that we should go back to being just enemies again.”
With a ‘clack’ the last of the keys laid down into its place inside the piano. The instrument was restored at least on the surface, the complicated mechanisms setting themselves back together under Lydia’s influence with an ease only deep understanding allowed. However, even as all of the metal got into its correct place, the wooden parts of the big instrument were splintered or broken. When Lydia pushed a key, the sound didn’t come.
“It wasn’t a nice ending, and Maximillian never really got over it, it seems. And I don’t mean that he didn’t get over me, we both have moved on since, but his pride didn’t take the hit very well. Wherever we meet, he starts a fight. I guess I am not much better, actually answering his minor insults. Where I aim to federalize the country, he aims to centralize it around Vienna’s court. Where I am stern, he is lax. Where he is decisive, I wait for information. The current state of our country created two people that promise solutions. This burden put us together, gave us something we shared, but our solutions tore us apart,” she heavily sighed as, no matter what she did, the instrument did not produce a single tone. “It was good for both us and Germany that the relationship happened. However this tournament will end, neither of us now care too much about the other to be a constant thorn in the other’s side, despite us not getting along very well. At least, that’s what I hope for us. When all of this is over, I hope to drink tea with him again; even if he and I weren’t good lovers, I think he can be a loyal friend,” the princess gave up on the instrument with a disheartened expression. “This will require an expert to fix…”
Wordlessly, John stepped up and put a finger on a key. A moment later he pushed it down and a single light note echoed through the room. He smirked at the surprised Lydia. “It's still largely broken,” he explained when Lydia pushed another key and nothing happened. Gesturing at the ruptured frame, where the keys had been violently removed, he continued his explanation. “It’s the same Skill that allowed me to destroy and repair that glass yesterday; however, something of this size and complexity costs a bit more mana. I will need 2 or 3 more full mana bars to fully repair it.” ‘And it didn’t even give me a new level in the skill, I know why I stopped concentrating on that,’ John thought.
Lydia pushed the key he had just before and the clear note rang out again. “Thank you,” she whispered, “this instrument means a lot to me.”
“I was the one who broke it.” John was ready to take the blame. He couldn’t have known better, but sometimes it was best to just assign to oneself the guilt anyhow. “I shouldn’t have startled you.”
Shaking her head, Lydia rose from her seat. “It was my carelessness that allowed you to startle me in the first place.” She stretched. The red dress was not quite capable of keeping up and revealed a bit of side boob. “Would you help me out of this?” Lydia asked and pointed at a near invisible fold in the dress. “I can’t quite reach the zipper, and I need to get into something fitting for the speech I have to hold in about thirty minutes.”
They both knew that was a lie, the zipper wasn’t regular metal, but it was still just metal. She wasn’t even close to being out of mana, so she could have opened that zipper with the ease of a thought. Also, she was a member of the Abyss still, which happened to entail being a human at over-the-peak performance, she could have reached the zipper if she wanted to. He would have been an idiot to comment on that out loud, however.
“Of course, princess,” he stated in a servant’s voice and gently tugged at the zipper. She wore very little underneath.
Ten minutes later he was shushed out of the room with an extremely wanting erection. The princess had acted like she didn’t know what to wear, until the very end, pushing out her curves and private parts throughout the whole conversation of ‘what suits me best?’. As he left, Lydia, in a slightly more decorated version of her usual uniform, stepped past and to the front door. Apparently, her driver was already waiting.
“Strict timetable, yet still finds a moment to tease me,” John mumbled as the door closed behind the princess. His goal was to get to the couch as fast as possible. Walking with an erection his size was seriously uncomfortable. He fell onto a cushion with a relieved sigh. A moment later, he heard something wet flowing over the wooden boards of the floor. He turned around and saw nothing, but, when he looked back in front of him, he saw the blue goo that was Undine take her womanly shape between his legs.
They didn’t exchange a single word. The water spirit loosened, then removed his pants. John was more than happy to be taken care of by whoever of his harem was around and Undine seemed to be the quickest this time. He probably radiated such extreme horniness that every single one of his familiars had felt it. Aclysia walked out of the kitchen, saw that she was too late, and turned around to get back to whatever she was actually doing. He would not have objected to her joining.
Undine was about to wrap her soft lips around John’s dick when his pants buzzed atop the coffee table. For a moment, he was tempted to completely ignore the phone call, but he didn’t want to miss anything important. What if it was Lydia, who had forgotten her keys and speech notes, and now stood outside the door? Unlikely, granted, with her being able to open whatever metal lock she wanted with the flick of a finger. Still, it could be happening and if it did, he would pay the price for ignoring the call. With a sigh he decided to make it quick. Undine, sending displeased waves, handed him his phone.
“Hello, John here,” the Gamer greeted.
“Oh, h-hi, it’s me, Herman,” the apothecary said from the other side.
John sighed heavily once more; if it was a girl calling him, he would have gestured Undine to just roll with it and enjoyed the blowjob while he was talking, but getting pleasured while a dude was next to his ear felt weird.
“What’s up?” John asked, trying to hurry this along.
“I call because of that thing you wanted me to bring to you,” Herman said.
‘Right, the spine,’ John scratched his head. He hadn’t forgotten about it, but he had tried to not think about it too much. After all, he had finally reached happier times again. “What about it?” he asked, knowing he sounded a bit brash. He just really had other urgent matters to put his hands to. Well, Undine’s hands. Mostly her mouth.
“I don’t really have time to bring it to you. There is a lot to do with that veteran meeting coming up, and I’ll be pretty busy afterwards too. So, if you and or Rave could come to the meeting and pick it up, that would be nice. Would like the company while I am getting squashed by the stories of old war heroes,” said Herman. “You’ll probably be busy with the whole election stuff…”
John nodded, then realized how stupid that was, excused himself with most of his blood being somewhere else, then finally answered, “Sure thing, just write me the address and time, and we’ll find time to swing by.”
“Will, do. Thanks, friend.”
He put down the phone a moment later. Undine massaged his, only slightly, limp dick to get it into full hardness again. She slowly lowered her lips, John was watching intently, ready for the moment his sensitive cock would finally get some pleasure. Undine’s outer layer, the shape of a dress, melded back into her body when she felt his desiring gaze.
A Quest window blocked the view when it finally got indecent.
John really had no mind to think about this right now. But he had to take this seriously, because of who this Quest came from. Therefore, to the (shared) extreme displeasure of the slime girl between his legs, he ordered her to stop once more.
Why would the Horned Rat give him a Quest to take a spa day? What did he know about that god? Pretty much nothing, but he seemed to be somewhat invested in John’s survival, otherwise giving him Mana Blade didn’t make a lot of sense.
Why would the Rat want him to go get a massage? Probably to get some sort of message from somebody there. Why he would make it so complicated, John didn’t know nor care. He still hadn’t cracked that prophecy, and he wasn’t even trying to understand the Rat’s reasoning without having understood that first. A free Class Level was absurdly good though, and he did think he was safe, at the very least. He smashed that Accept button.
Then, he could concentrate on that blowjob.
