It had been a challenge to do the usual without tentacles, but Apexus managed to achieve the satisfaction of his women. Aclysia refused to join immediately. It took her watching her darling and Reysha fool around for about thirty minutes, before she decided that just covertly touching herself wasn’t going to touch it. Although she stayed much quieter than usual, she still joined them. Reysha, as she had announced, had no qualms at all.

“Pretty rare to see a group like you running around,” Tep commented the next morning. Despite the noise, he hadn’t lost a wink of sleep. Any adventurer with enough experience learned to sleep both lightly and through whatever ruckus was happening, depending on where they were.

“What do you mean?” Apexus asked.

“To start with, it’s considered bad luck if two women sit at a table with one man,” the effeminate adventurer responded and then shrugged. “If you put any stock in something like that. More seriously, I mean that most adventuring groups with relationships break apart pretty quickly.”

“Do they?” Apexus wondered about that. Their group seemed stronger for the fact that they were all in love with each other. Thinking about it, he did recall the trial that had been Birchia though, not to mention a lot of other squabbles they had over time. Although the slime didn’t understand humans perfectly, he knew enough to understand that their group could have broken apart in the past.

While the slime thought, Tep kept talking, “The best I saw work out, in the long term, is two couples making up one group. When there’s polyamory going on, or if it's one couple with a third person without a significant other, it usually ends with someone feeling excluded. The group members first get estranged when it comes to social settings, then their dungeon performance diminishes, and ultimately they break apart.” The group leader took a pause to look over to Reysha and Rel, who were sparring at the moment. “Granted, some groups manage to keep their combat ability high despite their private differences. That’s rare though. It’s difficult to fight well together with someone you don’t really like anymore and with whom you have to spend days or weeks in tight spaces.”

Apexus just nodded and watched the playfight play out. Ultimately, without her weapons, Reysha proved unable to make Rel submit. The best the tiger girl managed was to make the much larger woman fall over. Once Rel got a hand on Reysha though, the fight was over. No matter how much she kicked and struggled, in a fight where lethal means were disallowed, that was the end of the rogue’s rope.

“Good fight,” the muscular female complimented.

Reysha let out an unwilling grumble as she sat down somewhere to lick her proverbial wounds. Taking it upon herself to cheer up the redhead, Aclysia walked over. After a couple of ear scratches by the fairy, Reysha was too occupied with purring to pout.

Rel walked over to Apexus and Tep. “Yo, big guy, you want to have a go?” she asked.

The slime hesitated. On one hand, he was interested in testing his power against a humanoid who was of a strength-oriented Class. On the other, even a playfight bore the risk of him getting discovered. To win some time considering the question, he chewed on some dried dungeon monster remains. Since they could hardly go after their usual eating habits with this quartet around, the trio had tapped into their stocked-up food. They had to churn through it anyway, as the magic faded away and left the dried snacks as little more than mildly flavoured dust or otherwise without nutrition.

  Glancing over to Reysha and her unharmed state, Apexus decided to oblige. “Fine,” he agreed and stood up.

“Alright! How serious are we taking this?” Rel asked, rolling her shoulders to relax them. “We have two healers here, so might as well get a bit more serious.”

Apexus had to consider that again and then slowly nodded. This was getting risky now, but Apexus really wanted to know how he would measure up against an adventurer utilizing magic. “Just don’t wound me,” he told her and took off his top. Rel was already wearing nothing but minimalist clothing.

“I’ll do my best to be gentle,” she promised with a grin on her attractive face. She raised both hands into a fighting pose and Apexus mimicked as much after he took position opposite of her. The people in the room continued talking, but everyone was watching while the two giants stepped towards each other.

Neither of them stopped and, in a silent agreement, they both raised their hands and met each other in a frontal assault. Hands locked, Rel clenched her teeth, and the two large humanoids pressed against each other. Apexus was taller and wider, but Rel reinforced her muscles with magic. She was a Fighter, a standard continuation of the Brawler Class with some Warrior elements mixed in. As such, her main forte was to increase the strength of her actions, reinforce with mana what will and adrenaline alone did not enable.

In Rel’s specific case, she specialized in bursts of power. Her arms felt hot, her fingers clenched, and she managed to push Apexus back. Her satisfaction about this was cut short as the humanoid chimera kept a calm face and continued to push back. While his arms were no less tense than hers, he lacked the instinct to show his effort openly. All he did was keep up as long as he could.

The intense torrent of mana couldn’t be sustained for long. Like most other things about the human body, the magic circuits needed rest at some point and so Rel cut the flow before she dealt damage to her own fibres. The tide only reversed slowly, as Apexus had to recover from being pushed so far back. Gradually, inevitably, he continued on. Rel’s face was red at this point, her breathing audible, pumping oxygen in and out of her nose.

Suddenly, she gave in and her head came straight for Apexus’ nose. He reacted fast enough that they met forehead to forehead instead. The impact did worse to her than him. He had no brain inside that thick skull of his that could be shaken by the impact. Taking the initiative, he raised his knee up high and straight into her stomach.

Sharp as the tip of his knee was, her abs were as hard as a stone wall. The attack accomplished nothing, and Rel quickly wrestled free one of her hands before he could restore his balance and landed a retaliating strike on his own midriff. While he didn’t have magic to resist the blow, he had no reason to fear it either. The muscles there were strictly for mobility and strength purposes.

Apexus pulled his head back and retaliated with a headbutt, causing Rel to lose her sense of everything for a solid second. Before she could hit the ground, Apexus caught her. Raising her free hand in surrender, he then guided her fully to the floor. Tep came over quickly and cast a healing spell on her head.

“By the Progenitor, what kind of stamina do you have?!” Rel asked, clearly agitated and still breathing heavily. “What’s your class? Monk? Please tell me you are a Monk and you’re just good at hiding exhaustion.”

“Yes,” Apexus took the offered lie.

“You did strike me as pretty monk-ly,” Tep hummed. “I don’t want to sound offensive but you seem to consider your actions to an almost… inhuman degree.”

“No offense taken,” the slime stated and helped Rel back up once her small concussion had been fixed.

“Pretty atypical for a monk to ‘travel’ with beauties like these though!” Ungi chimed into the conversation. Aclysia and Reysha, who was in some kind of petting trance, didn’t really react to that. “Where’re you from anyway? You’re a pretty unique humanoid, if I may say.”

“I don’t know,” Apexus answered with a vague half-truth. While Ctania was the obvious answer, where Apexus really came from was still a mystery. “I am me. That’s all I care about.” Before they could think of any more questions, Apexus shifted the focus of the conversation. “So, what is your relationship with each other? Outside of the working one, I mean.”

“We’re part of the same adventurer Chapter,” Tep answered. Apexus nodded, even though he had absolutely no idea what that meant. He felt like that wasn’t a thing he could just say out loud though. “We usually meet up for this job every year, because the groups we are actually part of don’t feel like dealing with White Ice.”

“And you don’t work together otherwise at all?”

“Only if its convenient,” the androgynous healer shrugged.

What the humanoid slime gathered from that was that a Chapter must have been some kind of communication network between different adventuring parties. Something between the groups and the guild, to make organizing easier on a smaller scale. “I see,” the slime looked up to the large crystal in the ceiling. Even though it was morning, the crystal, whose intensity and kind of light was connected to the current state of the sun, was dimming. It was a change that started yesterday evening and would come to its completion by noon. Similarly, the water was gradually stopping.

Apexus pulled his clothes back into their proper place. “Let’s get going,” he suddenly said and pulled his winter equipment out of his bag. Aclysia and Reysha reacted to that with a bit of delay, but nodded.

The quartet was a bit surprised by the speed of that decision. “You’re heading north?”

“Yeah,” Apexus responded.

“I guess we’ll see you in a guild outpost sometime?” Ungi added, his tone making it sound like a question.

“Unlikely,” Aclysia answered, while the humanoid slime pulled the thick clothing over his robe. “We will not stay on this Leaf for any further time. We intend to clear out Myrlight and then attempt to get a job protecting a caravan on its travels to another Leaf of appropriate difficulty.” That was a lie she had prepared in advance.

“Huh… well… maybe you’ll meet one of us again sometime, somewhere else,” Tep shrugged. “Some of us want to stay here, some of us want to go. Fate weaves in odd ways. May you find your roles in the great play.”

Aclysia lowered her head respectfully, “May the curtain rise on another day.”

There were some further words of goodbye exchanged and then the three of them headed for the exit while the four of them stayed. All in all, it had been a pleasant little encounter. Apexus doubted their paths would ever cross again. Creation was too vast for that and their path too complicated. There was no reason to make it a definitive ‘never’ though.

“Any reason ya wanted to get out of there so quickly?” Reysha asked, once they were past their usual hunting grounds and far beyond any reasonable doubt that they could still be heard.

“They started to ask too precise of questions,” Apexus told her, leading the way through the snow. It was a clear day, which was a blessing in its own right, with neither wind nor fresh snows covering them. What was already there never really melted, however, and so Apexus still had to lead the way while the two girls followed in the path he created.

“Fair’nuff,” Reysha slurred her answer and looked back. “Were a nice couple days. Pleasant people. They did ruin the mood though.”

“Yes…” Aclysia agreed weakly and sighed. “It is pleasant to know that we pass at least minor scrutiny easily at this point.”

They took a couple of minutes to just chat about their impressions about their own acting. Where they had to improve their lies, what parts of their story they could change up for the next encounter, to keep even rumours of their location obscured, and if they should stick to their current fake names. Eventually, their conversation changed to what they thought about the talks they had with the four – or three, rather, as the elf had not said more than fifty words over the several hours they spent together. Once they were done with that topic, silence followed.

“A Monk, hm?” Apexus thought out loud.

“That was super funny,” Reysha giggled. “They mistook your inexperience with deliberate thought.”

“What’s the difference, if the outcome is a well-formulated answer?” Aclysia defended her darling.

“Difference is that the answer is pretty hit or miss.”

“Like your jokes?” Apexus asked.

“HAH!” the redhead laughed. “Okay, yeah, you’re getting pretty good with me, but you’re still hella awkward with random people. Plus, your face is still most of the time. I can read your tone, they can’t.” She pointed behind her, in the rough direction of the cave.

“That you two understand me is enough,” the slime stated. “Enough for me to be happy, at least.”