The new bed was amazing. Now that there were five of us—not counting Eve—and one of us was a huge humanoid dragon with a wingspan of several meters, we had outgrown the small bed inside Calla's tree several times over. Thus, the only place that could accommodate the huge new bed was the System's battery room.
For once, when we went to bed, we decided I wasn't going to be in the middle. It had been my request, given how they pretty much forced me to take the center role in our bond. A little form of payback, but one that actually damaged nobody. Zery was the obvious choice of course, and she wasn't allowed to complain at all. She still put up a token effort before grudginly accepting, sleeping on her belly so that we could use her massive wings as covers, enjoying the sensation of her slightly wet scales on our naked bodies.
Yes, we were irrecuperably gone. But her scent was intoxicating, and her arousal filled the air with pheromones that made us all feel that much closer. We were so madly in love with each other that we could literally get high off of each other's smell and sweat and heat.
I was surprised to wake up back in the middle, though. Somehow, the dragon had moved from her initial position and rotated ninety degrees. Now she replaced our pillows, so that we were sleeping on her thighs or arms. I shifted a little, trying not to wake the others. They would wake soon enough anyway, the bond syncing us all up.
Instead, I stared at the ceiling and enjoyed the strange coolness of Zery's skin on my face.
The light crystals had been dimmed, but the soft glow of the angelic core behind us provided a suffused, gentle light that made us feel very cozy.
"Do you ever wonder if the core gives out some sort of magical radiations?" Elyra whispered in my ear, caressing my face.
"Are you worried about turbo magic cancer?" I asked her, chuckling.
She smiled. "Now that you mention it, maybe? Do you think it might give us some cool mutations?"
"Did someone say turbo magic cancer?" Vespera said all too loudly.
It was enough to kick us all awake, and after a moment we decided that the angelic core wasn't going to give us fantasy cancer.
"It… will… not," a whisper through the bond confirmed.
"Hey Eve," I said. "How are you feeling?"
"Bwuh," she moaned. "So sleepy."
"You can rest," I told her. "We are heading to the city to get a quest and start farming some monster cores. You'll get plenty of energy soon enough."
"Ah, you, ah, I should warn…" she began, trying again a moment later but only managing some confused mumbles before trailing off to sleep again.
"She's so cute!" Vespera said. "I wanna squeeze her and eat her up!"
"She feels so different now," Calla said. "The bond is changing her so much."
Her expression was dreamy. I booped our little dryad on the nose, enjoying the look of surprise on her face. Of course she would think about changes and such before anything else.
Finally, though, it was time to get up from the bed and make the trip to the city.
"Should we try the new underground tunnel we found?" Vespera proposed.
"We don't know where it leads," I argued.
She grinned. "Precisely!"
Elyra shook her head. "Always a troublemaker. How about we do things properly now, and explore later? We have other priorities, you do understand."
Zery chuckled at Vespera's reaction, the dragon enjoying this immensely. We emerged back on the surface and began our trek back to the city, making very good time. Even though stats did not interfere much with the day-to-day happenings of life, at least for now, we could dial them up and move faster than our previous top speed while still making it feel like a pleasant stroll.
Yellow and orange leaves swirled in the wind, the first signs of the coming winter. The trees were shedding their foliage, save for the evergreens, which stood tall with their needles and thick trunks. I wondered what winter was like here in this world. I only saw snow once in person, and it had been an almost magical experience.
Then the guild token beeped.
"Flash tide," I said after reading the warning on it.
We broke into a run, tearing through the forest and hills, heedless of obstacles and changes in terrain. Zery carried Calla, the dryad having the worst allocation of stats of us all for a quick sprint, and soon enough she was also carrying Vespera. I got Elyra a couple of minutes later. Unlike the demon, she could endure more than a quick sprint, but still her stats were a fraction of mine.
We reached the city nine minutes after the initial alarm, seeing the defenses being mustered. The walls had been fully repaired, the new parts dark like the void where my transmuted Blackstone had replaced the enchanted white bricks that were no longer enough to keep the monsters at bay. Other parts were in the process of being replaced, a brick at a time.
I thought the guards would stop me and the girls, but they didn't. They didn't even ask for my identity, recognition flashing in their eyes. One of them I thought I recognized from one of the three-letter dinners, but not the others.
"They all know it is you who supplies the stone for the wall, lad," a voice said from behind me.
I turned around with a big smile. "Ted!"
"Long time no see, lad. You missed a dinner," the dwarf said. His eyes glowed. "Rocks below you've been busy! I can see why you preferred that over dinner. Your stats almost tripled!"
His voice had been loud, presumably on purpose. The guards near us shifted and eyed us when we thought I didn't see, not knowing that with five of us there was little that escaped our eyes. Especially Zery's, whose head was on a swivel.
"What are you doing outside?" I asked Ted. The minute was almost over, and we could hear the rumble of monsters about to crest the hill. The sky was darkening, like a thunderstorm was coming, except it was monsters.
"I'm on call to check the wall, of course," the dwarf rumbled. "This be the first tide with our new upgrades. You see, turns out your Blackstone carries enchantments crazy well, so we've been using it to improve the whole magic circle around town."
I nodded, switching to magic vision. Elyra had beat me to it, of course, and we all saw what he was talking about. The Blackstone wasn't just on the visible parts of the wall that had been replaced. There was a ring of it underground, running the whole circumference of the city. That explained why Ted had sent us a message that he was out of Blackstone even though the walls were still mostly the same as before.
"Aaaand, they are here," the dwarf said gravely.
At once, the guards let the last few workers inside, and shut the main gates. Ted grabbed my arm, pulling me inside. "Come lad," he said. "I'll be on watch right inside. You can keep me company if you want."
"Do I need a guild job for that?" I asked, letting myself be pulled along. I let Zery go in first, followed by Calla and Vespera.
"Nope," Ted said. "It's all hands on deck in these situations. Even without a job, there are standard guild rates for contributions unless you specifically take a job that's incompatible with basic defense. In that case, you leaving station even if to save a life, might mean the collapse of a whole block."
When I finally entered the gate, I felt a tug on my sleeve.
"What your angel girl be doing, lad?" Ted asked, some worry beginning to mark his brows.
I felt Elyra check our shared mana pool. It was full. "Can I try something? I will be quick," she asked.
I looked at Ted. He looked at me, then at the guards. There were nods and the men were gone, leaving only us down here. "They be watching from up," he whispered to me, making it clear that whatever we were about to do, people were going to see it and talk about it. It better be good.
I had no idea what Elyra wanted to do, but it was bound to be fun. I grinned at the dwarf. "Time to make waves," I said.
Elyra's halo glowed. A magic circle appeared in front of it, one I had never seen before. It was a mix of things, a strange amalgamation of languages, where I recognized five, no, six different signatures.
Then a red laser shot out of the circle, immediately burning through a third of our mana pool. It arced wildly, cutting horizontally through the horde of monsters coming our way.
"By the beards of the ancestors, so long they touched their balls," Ted said, mouth so wide his jaw almost reached where he said the beards of his ancestors reached. "What the fuck?"
I had never seen him lose composure, but this time I could see why. Wherever Elyra's laser touched, the monsters fell apart in pieces, bisected and very much dead.
If Ted knew what I was feeling through the bond, he'd probably lose it. The bond was flooding with energy!
"We don't need to touch the cores anymore, nor do we need to be near the battery!" Calla chirped happily in our minds.
"It's, uh, beginning to be a bit much?" I said as Elyra's laser kept cutting through the monsters. She barely made a dent in the horde, but the tide was so thick she must have killed hundreds.
"What Sol said. This headache is unbecoming of someone such as me. We need to deal with the excess energy," Zery added.
We reached a consensus almost immediately. Half of it we shunted to Eve, who greedily accepted it all without problem. Half of the remaining went to the angelic core battery back in the System control room, confirming what Calla said. We didn't need to be close to it anymore. Not in this sector, at least.
Even better still, we could decide what split to use. Before, the System would decide for us or, in the case of classes, there was a preset percentage based on the class rarity. Now it was in my hands. Our hands, but again the girls deferred to me.
The remaining 25% went to empower the bond. It deepened, the invisible lines connecting us widening, and the energy pooled up and transformed into raw potential. The stuff of level-ups. We could see it now, thanks to our newest, sweetest girl in the bond. We could see glimpses of what the System saw. This was XP or whatever it was called, trying to push us to Bond Level 6.
Then the flow ended. Elyra slumped, and we dragged her inside. Ted was still stunned, but he managed to seal the door behind us moments before the tide hit. It shook the whole wall, and shouts began to reverberate from all around, where the well-oiled machine of city defense began to take care of the threats.
I noticed, idly, that the shouts and the rattling and the sheer noise of the tide were much less than they used to be before. I asked Ted, who replied mechanically. It was all thanks to the new Blackstone, he said. Then he blinked, recovering, looking at Elyra and then at me with hunger in his eyes.
"Lad," he said. "This jump in power. How many levels did it take?"
"One," I said.
He shook his head, swallowed, cursed, blinked with his eyes not quite moving at the same time, then cleared his throat.
"How close are you to the next? Think this tide might push you?"
"It might. Why?"
"How much mana did that thing cost?" he asked instead of answering me.
Elyra replied for me. "I only used a third," she said, still recovering from the spell. "I did not want us to be left without."
The grin on the dwarf's face widened. "And that is only one of your girls," he said to me.
"Only one spell from one of the girls, yes," I confirmed.
"Good, good," he said. "Let's make waves, shall we? EVERYONE!" he shouted. "YOU SAW WHAT THE LAD DID! LET'S MAKE SOME SPACE FOR HIM. WE DON'T NEED NO FUCKING GUILD TO LEND US THEIR STRONGEST. WE DON'T NEED NO FUCKING CHASMERS. MAKE SPACE. THE THREE LETTER CLUB MEMBER SOL NIGHTGUARD IS LEADING THE DEFENSE THIS TIME!"