Chapter 63

Night of Day 12 since entering the gnome’s warren; The Demon Realm

Sunghee pulls me over to her while Fox is taking a nap, tugging at my sleeve. I still think we have several hours before it would become day time in the other world. I am trying to gesture for her to not wake her up and not doing anything risky, but she ignores my hand gestures.

“You are right to let her take a nap,” Sunghee says smiling wickedly. She is patting my shoulder affectionately.

“You think so?” I’m curious what she thinks. We keep our voices low. Her eyes are shining brightly.

“Heck yeah! And she worked hard to help save us!” she winks. She’s leaning in really close.

But her eyes are really fixated on me. It’s really weird.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why not silly!” her eyes are glistening with mischief.

“So help me figure out this thing. She says I have access to the grimoire magic system. But I don’t even read Egyptian. So in the end I’m stuck again just like before and like always,” I said.

“Yeah, but I do read Egyptian,” Sunghee says, her eyes twinkling.

“And I can help you, if you help me,” she smiled big while leaning close to me. She almost kissed me just then but pulled back.

My heart beat rhythm just jumped up a notch as I thought about what she’d just said. I force myself to calm a bit. If I try to go to fast or get desperate it will probably ruin things.

First find out what she is and her background. Then go from there.

“Eh? So how do you know your job and whatever it is?” I asked. “Come to think of it, what is your job?”

“You want to know about the job system in this world?” she asked.

“Of course!”

“I have ‘Adventurer’ as a job, plus I have an adventurer license. Just one wasn’t enough, I found out I needed both. But there’s a way you can pull it up,” she said. She had a strange charming look on her face.

So are adventurers like the cowboys or mercenaries and soldiers of this world?

How did she pull it off? It must have taken a really long time for her to learn how to read Egyptian. I wonder how long it took.

“There is? But we tried that already. We tried saying status, skills, show me status, show me job. For many hours we tried everything we could think of! We tried everything already!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah but you didn’t say it in Egyptian or an ‘ancient code’ equivalent,” she chuckled.

“It figures…I had wondered about that actually but it’s not like we had anyone with us to teach us how to speak Egyptian with no Egyptian classes or teachers available. So what happens if you do that? Can you show me?” I asked.

“You know, that’s really weird because when my school crashed here, we had a few people with the language magic. They started teaching people the basic phrases to open and close stuff in the magic windows immediately,” she said.

Suddenly I realized the trap. Someone had been purposely cutting me out!

“Damn Yuta. So he could have helped people at any time,” I cursed.

She says something weird and suddenly the blue screen pops up hanging in mid air. It’s my first time seeing that someone can do it on their own without help. I can see on the screen what looks like a computer image of Sunghee, the way she’s dressed now. It has symbols for other stats too.

“See this is how mine looks,” she shows it to me. “See it’s even got my cup size over here.” She sticks her tongue out at me playfully.

“Hey cut it out. I’ve wanted to know this for like almost a month with our lives on the line for it. Of course you can show me that part later,” I added quickly. I’m not too disappointed but I’ve waited so long for real class and status information I’m afraid to delay it any longer.

She giggled.

“No way, how is this possible?” I asked finally looking closer. The blue window was neat and orderly. I wanted with beautifully written hieroglyphics standing out boldly.

“Basically when the demons invaded this world, like she said, the guardian spirits of this world pooled their power to create a way of growing soldiers to fight against the dark. They knew that without a system like this they would eventually fall to the greater numbers the demons produce all the time. They also didn’t want to be bogged down with something cumbersome and that uses a lot of their time. So they needed a system people could use that was solid and wouldn’t require a mentor over their shoulder all the time. They also knew they were few in number, even while powerful. So their system had to be able to help mentor newer soldiers and not just produce them. If they lost all their time teaching each soldier individually then they’d lose too in a different way. So they observed other worlds…”

“So you can pull up your stats and abilities? Everything?” I asked, being very interested.

She nods slowly. “Over here, that symbol is my strength, that’s my intelligence, agility, wisdom, appearance score, and basically it will have a measure for pretty much everything. Although, one issue is that the demons a long time ago got together and modified the system by a huge consensus magic spell to block the ability to show morality in the stat windows. Because there was enough of them doing it and even some of the humans wanted it too, it was allowed to change. So it’s still unclear when you look at someone’s stats if they are trustworthy or not. Otherwise their agents would never be able to hide.”

That’s an interesting story.

“So you really can see stuff,” I’m floored.

Right now I wish I could go back and waste the betrayers in our group that had cheated us out of this. I’d found this out a whole month later than they had.

“Repeat after me, ********,” she says.

What was it she said?

Languages are hard. The sounds she was making and trying to show me, felt slippery like oil that I couldn’t avoid being clumsy in trying to use.

I don’t get it. I keep repeating it but at first I couldn’t even tell what she’d said. I had to have her go slowly enunciating every syllable. It’s like making my head hurt. Egyptian is difficult and seems to want to give the tongue seizures. Maybe my mind wasn’t built for memorizing this planet’s version of Egyptian.

That got me wondering too…is this version of Egyptian different? If you had two communities speaking the same language and over time they don’t talk to each other wouldn’t their languages grow apart a bit?

Or maybe I only think its Egyptian. Technically languages can be different but use a similar writing system. I won’t be able to tell for now, which it is.

It takes several tries before I can even get one word right. I still don’t get it. We will be here a long time. But I’ll be in serious trouble if I can’t look at my own skills and stuff. I start to sweat from deep stress.

She shakes her head, “go slower. I’ll say it slowly too. ******.”

Eventually I learn the Egyptian word for status. She makes me practice it like fifty tries in a row to make sure I don’t forget it and so I can maintain consistency. Around the twentieth time of those fifty tries I am able to get my status screen to popup. But she doesn’t explain it to me right away.

I’m just happy there was some progress at all.

But she doesn’t stop there. She then teaches me the word for job and skill tree. After what seems like ages I learn this word. It’s pretty awesome after I see what looks like a skill tree.

“Uh oh…”

“What’s uh oh mean?” I asked, starting to get nervous.

She’s looking over my skill trees and frowning significantly. Because of all the Egyptian symbols I’m not even sure what the heck is going on.

“So this is weird. Your skill tree looks like a total mess,” she says; she searches around looking at a few things and trying to open things with her fingers roving over the screen.

“Uh, crap. Is that bad?”

“Do you understand anything about what you are?” she asks.

Why is she saying it like that?

“Well the others think I’m some kind of healer job. But I haven’t a clue. There weren’t very many of us that made it this far alive, thanks to that criminal Yuta,” I said.

She touched the screen and was trying to click around to look at stuff. One of the icons she clicked on was something that looked like a white star icon.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“I’m not sure yet? Your status has weird code,” she commented. “Hang on, let me figure this out.”

“Ah, OK, this looks interesting. Maybe this will show us something,” she said quickly.

I didn’t say anything and waited. I was totally dependent on her to help me through the gibberish.

Maybe the slave collar system was the best thing of all? At any time earlier Yuta could have shown us this crap and didn’t because of wanting personal gain. With the slave collar on her and Fox they wouldn’t ever be able to cheat me right?

“Heal, spell. Heal power is determined by Wisdom stat it seems to be saying. Effectiveness increases with more experience and power with magic. Does receive some kind of bonus through intelligence I see. Well that’s interesting but not that secret really,” she shrugs.

“It’s new to me though. We started with basically nothing,” I reminded her.

“Sorry.”

“But healing power is good right? I’m not like below average? The cost of using it is so high I sometimes wonder if I’m below or ahead of the game,” I asked.

“Hell yes! It’s rarer than gold. Almost nobody has it, that’s what slows people down after a fight too. But you know, why did it give it to you? I wonder why you?” she said thinking aloud.

“Good question, but I don’t know the answer either,” I said.

“Maybe…”

“So is there anything we can use?” I asked.

“Yeah there’s a lot of stuff, I see you have a light spell, and a paladin holy light too, recently acquired. But this is weird. Those aren’t in your job skill trees. I’m not sure how you did that,” she looks puzzled.

Ah, so the incident with Vira was cheating? And I wasn’t supposed to get those two skills?!

That seemed to fit actually since I’d created those skills through facing adversity. It had exciting potential actually as I thought about it…what could that mean?

“Eh? But I learned them anyway?” I do remember learning them but I thought they were close enough to my skill tree or on it.

“You weren’t supposed to be able to learn those. How did you do it? I’ve not been able to see anyone cross skill trees like that,” she crosses her arms under her chest, pushing them up more to distract me. Of course her nipples are sticking out again. I’m not sure if she’s doing it on purpose or not yet.

“Uh…I was experimenting and learned them by accident,” I said.

She giggles. “It’s rare that someone can learn spells not already in their job chart; like super really rare if you take my meaning. The odds of that must be incredibly small. Perhaps that was what helped unlock the grimoire magic option. Hmm let’s try something.”

She clicks on a few more things. “Here are a few things too, did you know about monster cores?”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“Building up more monster cores let’s you buy skills,” she says.

“Monster cores? I didn’t even hear about that,” I respond.

“Wow. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of them before,” she looked at me strangely. “How odd.”

“Shit. That damn Yuta. He would have known about this right? Was there any reason he could have missed explaining to us this idea of monster cores?” I asked her.

She thought about it a minute, “well…probably not. They are one of the first things you see on the status screen. Also if his job is the language enchant, it has its own help system. So it’s pretty doubtful. And I’ve heard of people scamming people to get them from others who didn’t know how they worked. If your colony or summoned group was brought here the same way mine was and if he didn’t tell you about monster cores he was probably taking them for himself when ‘interpreting’ other people’s skill trees. If they didn’t understand the magic display windows they wouldn’t have even had a clue what was going on. He could have brought up the trade window instead of the job window and they wouldn’t even know.”

That jerk…actually listing pages of the F word after him wouldn’t describe him badly enough. This was beyond evil. I was so angry and upset I couldn’t even speak for a good ten seconds.

“And you were in the gnome caves right? Didn’t they tell you anything about that?” she seems annoyed.

“Nope. Jeez the gnomes knew about this too? Only they told me I can’t use magic for a few days until my manaburn condition leaves,” I said.

“Seriously? They have issues with humans so it’s understandable. They’ve suffered a lot from humans and were probably just too scared to tell you right away, not that it makes it OK. I can’t believe they’ve survived this long!” she shakes her head.

“You think they were malicious?” I asked.

“That’s so like them. They weren’t malicious I think but just scared, I want to remind you. People do stupid stuff when they are scared. It doesn’t make it OK, though. They would want a healer, but they are afraid of human dominance. They might have been afraid of the healer getting more powerful than their own earth mages, which are like sacred to them. Here I’ll help you out. Now before we go any further I want you to do exactly as I tell you,” she coaches.

“OK? And this isn’t some trick? You aren’t trying to leave or go free?” I asked.

She shakes her head, “No. You saved my life. So I’m yours. Forever. I’m actually too far into this to be safe to be let go. Your support through the slave collar…whatever… is helping with my mental stability. I’m afraid I’d break down if you weren’t here to keep me in check.” She gives me a big French kiss after leaning in close. Somehow her eyes burn with a homicidal hunger though, that makes me feel like she’s unbalanced. She’s still like petting me and smoothing back my hair with her hand while admiring me.

I’m starting to enjoy this part of it. It’s not every day that you have topless girls stroking your hair while leaning against you. I’m feeling a bit embarrassed by it but can’t look down because if I do I’ll be staring at her chest. How come it doesn’t bother her that I’m seeing it anyway?

“OK, I’m going to trade and give you some of my monster cores. Before I got captured I’d saved up a bunch of them. But I want you to use them exactly as I suggest,” she says.

She does something and a separate blue screen pops up. It’s all in Egyptian but I do catch a numerical figure of 3,512 of something. She clicks something on her end. Then she points to where I click. Then the windows close.

“So I just gave you 3,512 monster cores. You can purchase 3 abilities with them,” she says.

The fudge…is this for real? But I’d have to ask her how to buy abilities with them too. Free abilities? No way!

OH MY FREAKING, WOW?!

“OK. But isn’t that a pretty high cost? That’s over a thousand each?” I said.

My eyes widened for sure.

She nods. “It’s expected that of course super powers would have a high cost. Just getting one ability is pretty unreal you know!”

“I suppose that’s true,” I admitted.

“By the way, the adventurer job lets you trade and unlock being able to give and get monster cores with others, which is one of the reasons it’s so important, but not all jobs do. Some people have to go to the temples for this and get a cleric or monk,” she winks again.

“Hmm. Thank you.”

“Yeah. Now you get it. It’s pretty freaking hard to build abilities in this world. There’s always war, and plus additionally if you have to do that much work to get just one skill…you can see why Fox Girl is jealous of that Grimoire status opening up. She’s probably searched for a way to get it for years,” she said.

“Is magic really so great though?” I wondered.

She was still stroking the hair on my head. When she did it would make the boob closest to that arm move up and down, while partially touching it.

…

It’s hard to concentrate when she’s trying this hard to win me over.

“I’m not an expert on Fox’s but partly I think why people are attracted to magic, is that they really sucked in by the idea of something that someone else can’t take away. Think about it, we both have studied history. When a king takes his soldiers and tramples the lands of his neighbors, and takes their people as slaves, the first thing he does it control them and take away their rights and privileges, as well as their tools and weapons. I think that’s the real reason people are infatuated with magic,” she finishes.

“I think I agree with you,” I said.

I can’t help but notice she’s got her arm around my waist holding me tight next to her. Wow she is seriously falling hard for me? I can’t believe it. Plus she’s like better looking than most models.

But in the back of my mind I’m wondering how I will reconcile the Asakura account with the Sunghee account. It could be a lot of trouble later…

I have no clue how I can tell Asakura about Sunghee. Somehow telling Sunghee about Asakura doesn’t seem like quite as big of a land mine, but it still wouldn’t be fun. She’d probably cry…

Dang.

The stress of figuring out how to reconcile them has momentarily frozen me in fear. Of course I like Sunghee, and like her enough to want to be with her permanently. But I also like Asakura too, and I’ve liked Asakura for this whole school year since she became my teacher. I think it grew slowly over time though; it wasn’t an instant affection.

I close my eyes to think about it. I can’t risk losing her.

“OK, let’s take another look. Remember, let me help you. I can get this thing to work out for you. I’ve already been through all the stuff you have over many years of watching my friends suffer,” she winks.

“OK…”

And based on what she just said, I don’t have a choice but to accept Sunghee. I won’t survive this world without her bringing me up to speed.

She clicks on some more stuff then there’s like an error beep. “Oh that’s why…huh…you layout is really unusual. There’s something strange going on here. I’ve never seen anything like this. Wait a minute, I think I missed something.”

She pauses and doesn’t respond for a bit. Then she’s typing like on a keyboard going over the different icons to interact with my blue screen. At first I’m worried about what she’s up to but she reassures me that she’s just looking at things. “The reason why you are having so much trouble is because you actually have 3 jobs. How did that happen? It’s not supposed to let you do that. Only a very rare few demi-humans can do even two jobs and that only comes along once every few hundred years.”

She looks at me weirdly.

“Three jobs? What?” I’m confused too. I look to her to explain it.

“It’s not supposed to be possible. But in your case it happened,” she rolls her eyes. “So…strange…”

“Yeah, you have the healer job which was probably what you originally had first, you have the grimoire magic user status which was unlocked later, and you have a demon racial job. I’m not sure how or why but your demon box unlocked the demonic job race or whatever it is option to you. That’s not supposed to be an option for humans. But because I’ve never seen anything like it I can’t tell you that much. It looks different and is harder to read,” she raises an eyebrow.

“How can it be harder to read? It’s the same language in writing isn’t it?” I asked.

She’s flipping through things and clicking and opening things. She then slows down to address the question, “well. It’s like it’s written in the same script and language but is also written with somewhat general terms. Like this word here could be interpreted in more than one way. Also are the same things used the same way? Who knows? There could be differences in several ways because of it,” she finished.

“Dang.”

“Yeah make that double damn,” she said.

“There are demon jobs?” The revelation of this fact stuns me.

“Yeah, I didn’t know that either but it makes sense. The demons have heroes too, although I wonder if they even call them that. It makes you wonder right? What if they call their Demon Lord a Savior or Hero class job, even while we’re calling them Demon Lords? And they might call the human heroes a Demon Lord that we are calling a Hero class? It’s a point of view problem isn’t it?”

“Uh, that’s messed up,” I said.

“But who’s to say it isn’t true? It could really be like this. You’d only find out differently if you were heavy into language analyzing, and doing research on that or magic code right?” she asked.

“But good and evil are definitely real,” I countered.

“Yeah, and I agree with you on that, good and evil are definitely real. But language is fluid and sometimes the real meaning gets lost in how languages change over time. But what if they don’t know that? I mean most the time when I see something like an orc or an imp I haven’t gotten a chance to really ask them what’s up, who do you guys work for and what are your jobs? But it’s definitely possible or true. You are the first demon race or job race, whatever you call it, that I’ve seen. But I’m worried more about what it might mean for your future than anything else, since demons don’t naturally coexist well in this world,” she hints.

“Ah yeah. Does it mean I’ll become evil or something? I wonder why it would give me that. It doesn’t seem like it would fit with a healer job,” I whisper aloud.

“As near as I can figure the grimoire magic user status was unlocked by interacting with others’ skills by accident and acquiring stuff out of your normal skill tree; probably because that’s what grimoire magic is in the first place. Then you had a healer job from the beginning too, but the demon box as an artifact you’d obtained trying to influence your destiny may have something to do with the demon race unlocking. But I’m currently not sure if any side effects from healer and demon race job will or won’t be an issue in the future,” she hypothesizes.

She continues to stroke my head and neck, keeping me close. It feels nice.

“But what is my demon race job or whatever it is?” I asked.

She points to the demon job icon. It’s like a picture icon of some kind of scepter crossed with a whip. “Slave Summoner or Demon Summoner I think? I’d get a demon lexicon to check that to be sure. It’s not like we can google stuff on this planet and I am not perfect with altered hieroglyphics. Early on when this world was still pretty new the demon’s altered their own system of hieroglyphics and so you’d have to talk to demons to get more information,” she says.

“Eh?! Seriously?” it actually sounds kind of cool. But why would she be so open telling me that? But it was also a letdown in that it would be incredibly hard to get better information. Not even a large city would likely have a bunch of demon lexicons lying around, and that wasn’t even considering the cost of printing and demand affecting all that.

“Yeah, the best part is that if I’m reading this right. Your healer job would mesh perfectly with it, but that still doesn’t mean there won’t be a side effect,” she says.

Isn’t what she just said contradictory?

“Why? Or …I mean how? Don’t they oppose each other?” I asked.

“Well temporarily your heals are lowered because they are in opposition to your Demon Summoner job, but in the long run it’s a good system to overlap. Your bonus stats from both jobs could eventually raise both to obscene levels of strength because of the stats being raised over time in conjunction with bonuses and class bonuses. The heals and spells used by a healer complement your summon slaves ability, which is already unlocked. The healer buffs and stuff will also help in strengthening your slaves,” she says.

As she says it, suddenly it makes sense why it takes so many heals to work on just one person and one wound. It means I’ll also have to put forth a lot of effort.

“Eh? So how does that work. I have so many questions,” I’m wondering what to ask first.

“Well the good news is that Demon Summoner is a cool job. After all you get like beautiful women and use them with the demon box to do what you want. It’s very strong too. There’s a default spell here to summon them, which I’ll go over with you later, but we shouldn’t try it with your condition as it is now. The problem is that some people know what a Demon Summoner is and they have a bad reputation. You can never reveal this job to other people. You will be hunted and find all kinds of trouble if people know about this. People hunt Demon Summoners and they normally serve the demon side of the war. Paladins especially hate them. Fox Girl probably shouldn’t know about it since Fox beastkin have been hunted by demons for a long time. If she finds out I’m not sure what she might do,” she looks at me seriously. She glances over at where the Fox Girl is sleeping peacefully.

Damn. If she had heard that know…I look at her carefully to make sure she’s asleep. I hope she can’t hear stuff in her sleep. Fox people don’t have some kind of ability like that right?

Gulp*

Sunghee slaps my face playfully bringing me back to reality. “Focus. I need you here.” She snaps her fingers by my ear playfully.

“But if paladins hate them why would I be able to learn a paladin spell?” I asked.

“That is the weirdest thing of all. I’m not sure but maybe just being close to the heal job would make the most sense.” She chuckles. “It means you have a lot of potential. Learning a spell of an opposing alignment isn’t normal, if you were comparing the demon race thing by itself but you have other things going on. But as you get more pulled into the demon realm from having a closely aligned demon job or race, I’m not sure what that will do when you try to activate a paladin holy light. You might just get burned by yourself.”

Shit, is that really possible? I’m like not sure how to work this now.

“Eh? I didn’t think of that. I suppose it’s possible? OK, so I need to get abilities and use these monster cores, while taking care of the manaburn condition,” I said.

She nods. “Basically manaburn is a condition caused by constriction of mana flow and inflammation of material in the mana flow, or from trying to force the flow out too quickly over time and too much. All we have to do is increase your mana pool and your mana regeneration rate. The good news is because you’ve been fighting all this time and didn’t know about how this worked you can increase your skills since you not only have the monster cores I gave you, but also the cores you’d harvested by fighting orcs on your own.”

“Is that good?”

“You have enough to get several skills. So it’s good. But we want to be careful what we choose. Please listen to me on that because I can help you know what can give you the fastest growth early on,” she winks again. She can’t seem to keep her hands off me. It’s wonderful…in a way, but also very tempting. I don’t think I can hold out for long.

She looks at the blue screen again. “Hmm I think this will work.” She’s under the Demon Slave Summoner job tab. “Click on this one,” she says.

“What’s it say?” I asked.

“It’s called ‘Shared Mana Pool. Basically it means you are linked between the mana pool of each of your slaves. It ups your total mana by 10% of each of your slaves, which would be me, and Fox Girl here right? It also unlocks shared mana pooling bonus and bonus for mana regeneration, meaning you would have a percentage of the mana regeneration from each of us stack onto your own through a special connection.”

“Is more mana really the best thing though?” I asked.

She nodded. “This world magic is dominant. Most mages never have enough mana pool too. A lot of mage duels are determined not by attack power but rather by mana pool too.”

So there’s something like that? If I had more mana skills then something like this would be totally bad ass.

“So would that also help replenish Fox Girl even while she’s sleeping in status and I’m outside? I’d have to experiment with it to be sure. I wasn’t sure if the mana pool would also be affected by those sleeping in status,” I said aloud.

Sunghee suddenly twitched funny and seemed to look at the stars. “Well…that would have benefits on both their end and yours I think. That’s kind of interesting to think about actually.”

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She looked stiff. “Ah sorry, just getting tired I guess.”

Was there also a skill to unlock more of the soul crystals? I wanted to get Haruka and Ayumi Sensei free.

“Only ten percent isn’t much though. Is the percent for mana regeneration also the same,” I said.

“Are you kidding? Fox people have huge mana pools stored in their bodies, just for one of them. And Fox Girl isn’t just a normal fox beastkin. She’s also a strong mage among her own people. So having any percent of her mana pool is like way above what others would have. By chaining it into your stats, your mana pool will be WAY higher than 10%! As to the mana regeneration rate that is more based on practice and building compatibility with both of us. But if you think about it your job with a big increase in both of these has potential to be way overpowered,” she explains.

Very cool so far…

“Does that mean all beastkin have magic affinity or just the fox beastkin?” I wondered.

She shrugged, “I wouldn’t know. You’ll have to ask her that when she gets up.”

In the end, I still didn’t get all my questions worked out. I just have a billion more research questions now to figure out.

I end up clicking it and buying it. Immediately I feel a sort of weird freshness in my mind. But it also feels kind of fiery and angry too. Was that her emotional state carrying over? I can feel a weird sort of inner confidence growing inside me, but it’s also a bit twisted and angry too. I can definitely feel its working. It’s weird, feeling like almost like what a second heart beat flow would feel like.

“I think it’s working,” I said.

She nods but somehow seems skeptical for some reason. “I’d still wait to try it. But if we got that far it’s a good sign. But if you are a Slave Summoner or Demon Summoner, whatever it is, then your mana pool should build back up pretty quickly now. That will help cycle out the mana infection. But it still needs time to cycle out the inflamed mana core. I think you will be OK, now. But try not to do anything that uses magic for another day or so. But the increased flow should pump out all the problems and get you back to normal.”

Whew*

“OK, But what are my other options for skills?”

She then clicks something. “Hmm that’s odd. Demon jobs don’t cost as many monster cores as light side jobs. That’s so unfair!”

“Eh? Seriously?”

“Yeah, that used 500 monster cores, but I’d thought it would use 1,000…” her jaw drops open. “You could get pretty powerful quickly with this. No wonder we are having a hard time fighting demons if they are able to evolve faster than we can! Do all of them have this?!” she’s staring at it in horror.

“This is bad if they can all do this!” she said in shock.

“That’s awesome for me!” I say.

“Not if you’re fighting one of them it isn’t,” she huffed.

“But isn’t it weird that they are about half the cost? There has to be a reason for that right?” I asked.

“That could be, I’m not sure if they have a side effect or something instead,” she started to say…but as we checked it, it didn’t say why or anything else about it.

Side effects?

That’s not good.

We go through several more minutes of this trying to figure out and read the windows. Sometimes we have to go slow because while Sunghee studied Egyptian really hard, there are some things that she had to think about and some words that are complicated. Some of the words you just didn’t see everyday even if you had a newspaper in front of you too.

My options are unlocking a healer buff spell for combat stats +10%, Magic Shielding spell of some kind, +10% mana pool, Cure Disease & Alter Biological Structure, and some kind of weird magic bolts for the things I can buy with the healer job. But each of those abilities costs a full 1,000 monster cores, because they don’t come from the demon job side it seems.

We discuss and look at the other options.

First we can’t tell how Grimoire magic is earned except that I have one spell scroll for it. I decide to open it last.

Options for Slave Summoner; an additional +10% Shared Mana Pool with shared mana regeneration rate, Demon Pheromones, unlock additional slave slot, and a few things that didn’t look like they’d help much like +1% to all stats.

So right away I picked and confirmed another upgrade of the +10% Shared Mana Pool upgrade. It would stack with the other one I’d already picked. Being able to use it meant I’d be able to have a huge amount of mana since it was all compounding off Fox Girl. It also seems I can do some of those upgrades more than once.

That’s even weirder. How do I know which ones can be duplicated?

But I have some unexplained things as well. Like if I have to buy slave slots. How did I end up with two of them already? Isn’t that kind of cheaty or was that gained from conquering bosses and facing adversity with death and life on the line? I guess it had to do with fighting and forcing it open from the shadow boss that the demon box spawned.

But maybe there were other work around to unlock without using monster cores? If so I should buy special stuff that I can’t get from fighting on my own and after that seek every opportunity out to do combat trials.

Then I asked Sunghee about the Demonic Pheromones upgrade. It sounds pretty interesting after all.

“Are you sure you are interested in demon pheromones? I can teach you everything you need to know about sex…” she leaned in giving me a deep kiss. She kept our lips locked for awhile.

Wow.

My ears were totally on fire…

“What’s it say though?” I probed again.

She read the upgrade, “User’s body fluids act as a type of DNA attraction tool and marker to spread unity among Slave Summoner’s …followers…” when she used that word she looked at me funny. “Prolonged use may create addiction in …followers.... Helps in managing difficult or resistant slaves; will not alter fundamental original mentality or personality of slave.”

“That sounds fun actually,” Sunghee suddenly had a crazy gleam in her eye. “Actually this one is a must. Yeah I’d definitely do this one. It would soothe out or problems with that stubborn kid,” she added. She’s somehow looking at Fox Girl.

But when I bought it another upgrade showed up in the list of what we could get in its place.

Advanced pheromones option; Enhances sex pheromones further, beyond original level. Pheromones are active within all biological fluid of Slave Summoner. Pheromones promote calmness and control in slaves; immediately addictive to Slave Summoner slaves. Slave Summoners bodily fluids act as an aphrodisiac upon exposure. Contact with bodily fluids creates intense feelings of lust and horniness in target slave; non-slaves also receive more diluted effect.

“Oh, let’s get that one too!” Sunghee says. By now I know she’s nuts. But she’s nuts for me so it’s cool. But I better be careful and not the horse runaway with the cart. I’m curious what else will work out. But she’s getting ahead of things. I need to slow her down, but she’s really excited.

She translates the next part. As it’s bought without my consent; she’s going overboard it seems.

Altered advanced DNA pheromone option; On top of prior upgrades, Demonic Summoner pheromones may now capture attract and become addictive to non-slave targets. Slaves will be friendly almost instantly to Summoner but may become suicidal upon release from service, hence use with caution and responsibility; slaves easily ensnared and addicted by nearly any contact with Slave Summoner DNA once in a slave crystal. Daily use causes significant lactation and breast growth in target. Alters body chemistry to become servile to slave summoner without having to coerce or request slaves to do so. Inhibitions significantly lowered. Increase in sexual fluid production in Slave Summoner. Slave Summoners bodily fluids act as natural form of birth control.

Danger: This upgrade may cause significant irreversible DNA altering in the Slave Summoner as well.

Hmm, not sure what that means. It didn’t say how it affects the summoner either. I find that perplexing. Usually I avoid things that are irreversible.

Before I can decide on whether or not I want it, she clicks accept, which I’ve learned to tell acceptance from rejecting by now. But it’s not enough. My entire Egyptian vocabulary is accept, reject, status, job tree, and having an idea which job symbols belong to my sets.

“Hey! What if it has an irreversible problematic effect?!” I protested.

She shrugs. “But you’ll become more powerful right! Plus don’t most women want a nice boob job? Think of all the poor flat-chested women that wish their boobs were bigger? This is like the same! I bet Fox secretly wants huge boobs. I mean hers are kind of small you know? And your effect on us will enlarge and perfect our assets if I’ve read this right!”

She’s got an unnatural hunger in her eyes. She’s starting to scare me. It’s like Yumi chasing Rina, but only as a non-lesbian and twice as crazy.

“But I was going to choose something else,” I protested.

“Like what, some stupid ass healing ability? Come on, isn’t a bunch of sex harem job stuff way better than healing?” she gives me a weird look. “By the way I already purchased that one since we don’t want you getting anyone pregnant. So I clicked it too.”

“But… that means I only have a couple points left and I wasn’t going to do that,” I replied frowning.

“You’ll be fine. What I’ve learned from your experience is that you are strong and can learn from others too. You’ll be really well off too if you can get a chance to learn someone’s offensive ability next. But stuff like that is rare and you can’t get from just any monster hunt. You have to seize the rare bits like that if you have a chance. There will be chances for offensive stuff all the time, but to have like a special harem skill? Nobody has that. You also have to save Fox from her small boob inferiority complex. You can bet once you use the pheromones on Fox Girl, she’ll teach you everything she can about her mana,” Sunghee says.

“But she doesn’t want to be in the harem. She also wants her freedom,” I said.

“So can’t you like bend the rules? She benefits too from this. She won’t mind in the end,” she said, after the fact.

Sunghee was acting really weird. Why did she want it this much?

“You sure are acting weird,” I said.

She shrugged, “Blame it on the box. I was in there too long. It can’t be helped if I have a few screws loose.”

Suddenly I understand her a lot more. Fox Girl’s mana and her ability in magic are still far above my own. This can be like getting a ton of free stuff from ‘friend shipping’ her. Would I also be able to get Yumi hooked and have her teach me her energy shield ability?

Well…I’m not sure I want Yumi involved actually. She’s too problematic. Plus she’d totally see this as her slave harem and not mine. She would definitely try to push me out of the way to get at Sunghee and Asakura if she had the opportunity right?

I wonder if I’d be able to learn earth magic too from Saiya? But if she’s a lesbian would the pheromones even work? I wonder how that would work, if they didn’t even play for the same team like that?

Because I want a way to go back from altering the body and the warnings on each of these abilities I take the healer spell of restore/alter body structure. It also has options it seems.

The cool part is now I have a full set of really usable skills and considering the interest effect on all the shared slave mana pools I’m locked into I’ve probably something like doubled my mana pool and my mana regeneration.

The last ability I hook up with is the extra slave slot unlocked. It took me a minute to figure out this one and how it works. But as I take a look at it, I find that I’ve unlocked Ayumi Sensei’s soul crystal. It’s now the same color as Fox Girl and Sunghee’s.

Turning back to the status screen with Sunghee, she tells me there’s definitely something wrong with Ayumi Sensei though. She looks very worried about it. It was good she was in stasis all this time because she’s been infected with something when she was captured. This worries me a lot after hearing her describe it. We’ll have to address this, but for now I leave that crystal in stasis.

She also encourages me to not open or go in there until we can figure out what’s wrong. If we open up the status then she will be exposed to time acting on whatever she’s been infected with.

The grimoire page turns out to be a runic mana shield barrier spell that absorbs damage. Cast-able on any target of the Grimoire caster’s party. Sunghee’s eyes were really big staring at it. Just from her reaction it seems it’s really good. But I’m puzzled at her unnatural interest in it, when she’s a non-mage.

We’re both excited to test it out later on.

“OK! So last part of the test,” Sunghee says winking at me.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to go use your aphrodisiac body fluid and smear the advanced demon pheromones on Fox Girl,” she’s pointing to the sleeping girl that’s only a few feet away.

Gulp*

Do I dare?

Fox Girl is so alert too. What are the chances she knows about this? She was always like two steps ahead of me before. Somehow I feel like alarm bells in my head telling me not to do it.