“That was mean,” John said, taking his girlfriend’s hand while also looking at the quest pop-up.

“Ya have your mean little tricks, and I have mine,” Rave said, cat-earless, and pulled him to his feet.

“I am impressed,” Copernicus commented from the sidelines; “You actually managed to activate it, even if it was only brief.”

“Yeah, all to beat John, totally worth it!” she exclaimed.

“Not that I lost though,” John smirked and pointed behind her. The black blade Ashkandi raised, her clothes unsullied as if she had just arrived, Aclysia stood there, eyeing both of them up.

“No fair!” Rave complained.

“Really? How fair is it to face a summoner without any familiars, then? That aside, you said ‘no elementals’. Aclysia are you feeling particularly earthy today?” John presented a load of questions.

“I only feel adoration for you, Master,” Aclysia said with a smile, which quickly vanished to make room for a stern look; “I, however, dislike the state of your clothes. This kind of dust doesn’t mix well with the washing machine.”

“Ah, don’t worry, I will just Craft them clean once I get some mana back.” John made a calming gesture, to keep the maid’s critical gaze to a minimum.

Rave just dusted off the worst of it. “So, we officially hit the point where ya can just mop the floor with me,” she stemmed her hands into her hips. “I mean, I knew we would get there, but I still feel meh about it.”

“Meh?” John asked; he couldn’t really make heads or tails of the term.

“Ya know, just ‘It’s unfair, but what can you do, really’, that sort of feeling,” she shrugged with a sigh; “Meh.”

“Ah, yeah, I get that,” John had spent a lot of time in the past spending in that kind of mood, before his powers gave him a prospect at a future that wasn’t boring and normal.

“But don’t ya think that I will just be left behind in your dust, tiger,” Rave grinned and lightly punched his shoulder. “If I can’t outpunch ya, I will at least be within the top 3. Just gimme a few years, and I will give Thana a run for her swear-loving money and rise to rank 2… beating Nathalia seems a bit harder though.”

“I would love to see that,” John laughed and embraced her with a kiss.

At the side, Aclysia let out a jealous little squeal. Rave laughed and waved her to step closer. Aclysia’s lips met hers, then John’s, then his met Rave’s again in the best group hug imaginable.

“God knows I love you two!” he declared and pushed his face into their breasts.

Sure, there wasn’t much to press his face into, they both only had B Cups, but those tits were attached to his favourite girls in the world, so that didn’t really matter. “Tiger, you’re a massive pervert,” Rave laughed when he brought his head back up. Both girls kissed him on a cheek, Aclysia the left, his girlfriend the right one. Life was good.

“Mhm, I wanted to follow this with Jane fighting other strong enemies,” Copernicus’ meowing ended the blissful moment with the reality that they still needed to train, “but if she already knows all the basics, I guess just having her fight until exhaustion is good enough. What say you, John, would you like to take her on a dungeon run?”

If a cat could have grinned in a mean way, then this would have been the point where John expected to see it. Instead, the light elemental just started purring in a self-satisfied manner.

So, they left that barrier, had John gather up his elementals and Momo, and then John had a look at the monster table. “I mean, whatever we fight, it will majorly out level you,” he informed his girlfriend.

“Eh, it’ll be fine,” Rave said and had the cat ears appear on her head again; “Just gimme something to pounce at!”

John hesitated and checked her current stats.

And then compared them to Aclysia’s.

From a raw stat-standpoint, Aclysia was ahead by quite a bit. Rave triumphed in Agility by about 40 points, but that was the only advantage she had, numbers wise. However, Rave had her unique magic while Aclysia’s skills ranged from niche to mediocre. She mostly shone because of the passives that were stacked on top of her.

‘Someday we will get you something interesting,’ John thought and prayed for interesting perks the next time he was going to update them, which was still at least another week or two off at the current acquisition rate of Skill Levels in conjunction with the patch.

But the reason why he compared them wasn’t to pitch them up against each other, no, he was just checking whether Rave would be able to hold her own from a mathematical standpoint. Aclysia, with her stat line, was able to handle two to three enemies on her own. By that logic, Rave would be able to beat at least one, which was good enough as far as John was concerned.

“Okay, let’s run through some random dungeons until midnight rolls around,” John said and just picked ‘Alchemic Creatures’ for a start. It was floor based, so if he wanted to gauge how good Rave was performing, that was the best choice.

They found themselves at the base of a gargantuan, triangular structure. It rose high into the sky; its surface pulsating as the three gigantic pumps that stood at its edges transported some kind of blood-like liquid through the building.

In front of them was a cutout in the wall that allowed for an easy entrance. “Huh, this is different,” he said and started moving.

“It’s so big! Hihi, that’s what I said,” Sylph giggled as she flew ahead.

‘Any enemies?’ John asked mentally as the speedy air spirit went scouting.

‘Nuh-uh, just this glowing field thing that glows and fields and thingies,’ Sylph said. ‘Something is behind it though, looks weird, also three corridors with symbols above them. They look cool, kind of curvy.’

They quickly caught up with her; the room she had described was down a short hallway. The three rusty walls had the same glass pipes that had been visible outside, turning the room into somewhat of a hollowed-out image of the building at large.

As Sylph had said, there were two notable things in the building. One was the blue glowing energy field under the ceiling, something shifting behind it. The other were the three passages with different symbols over them. Fairly boring symbols as well: a ‘/’ on the left door, an ‘O’ on the middle and an α on the last one.

“How do these look curvy again?” John asked.

“Just look at them, but don’t look at the first one, since that one is super-straight,” Sylph palavered.

“Fair enough,” he let it go and glanced from the passages to the ceiling. At the corners of the energy field glowed the same symbols.

“Okay, so this is most likely the boss room and we need to fulfil some sort of condition to activate the boss behind that energy field,” he theorized.

“Which meowns we gonna go into the passages and look for that stuff, right?” Rave meowed a question.

“Yup,” John confirmed. They went for the left door first.

It took them up a flight of stairs. A very long flight of stairs, during which they were attacked by spider-esque creatures that crawled over the ceiling. They were rather small, about plate size, and didn’t do a lot of damage, but they did spray a sticky liquid that slowed them down.

Not that that really mattered as long as he had Undine around. Whenever they had cleared one group of those spiders, the water spirit just cleaned them up. Then they went further up the stairs. Eventually they arrived at a large crystal standing lonely in a circular room.

John had a look around, but there was nothing else going on here, just the crystal with the symbol carved into the socket it was resting in. “Video game logic demands we smash it,” was the conclusion he reached.

“At once,” Aclysia nodded and took out Vol’Jin’Zul. A strike of the giant blade later, the room dimmed in a way that implied it just went into emergency power mode.

“That ought to have done it,” Momo said with a heavy sigh.

“What are you sighing about?” John wondered.

“Just the sheer stupidity of designing a structure in a way that the power source is plainly visible and easily destroyable,” she pointed out.

“It’s game design, don’t nitpick it too much,” Rave said, patting Momo on the head while passing her.

“I just don’t want to go down all of these stairs again,” the pink-haired girl complained and looked at the corridor. “Oh, that’s neat.”

John looked down with her. All the stairs had folded down, forming a continuous slope downwards. “This seems like an invitation to either get the worst friction burn of all times, a very bad rolling exercise ooooor…” he looked at Undine.

“THIS IS AWESOME!” Rave exclaimed as they were sliding down the slope on Undine. Normal water wouldn’t have done much, but the viscosity of her slimy body was more than enough to make this possible. Luckily, they only had 3 people who needed to fit on top of her: himself, Rave and Aclysia; the rest could either fly or went incorporeal.

He did feel bad for Gnome missing out on this, but Undine could only stretch herself so far. “End in sight, get ready!” John warned and sent a whole bunch of mana to the ocean elemental. The momentum they had gathered had to be slowed in a preferably non-drastic fashion. Down in the future boss room, water was created just in front of them, successfully slowing them enough to make a running landing.

“Whu, okay, 2 more to go,” John said as they headed for the middle passage. That one was an elevator fight. They stood on top of a slowly descending platform with a hole in the middle as waves of enemies jumped down on them. They were some kind of half-biological, half-mechanical humanoids with grotesquely out of proportion limbs and giant mouths on small heads.

Their only real strength were numbers, though, and so they had a relatively easy time fighting them. After about 5 minutes of those things, the platform stopped, and the hole in the middle filled with the next crystal. They smashed that one, and the platform went back up, throwing yet more enemies at them.

The last corridor had them fight three mini-bosses at once called the Triumvirate of Bio-Engineers. It was a typical group encounter: one of them attacked from range, the other in melee, and the last one threw out random AoE effects.

While challenging from a resource perspective, the encounter by and large was dull. It was just some filler. To his disappointment, the boss wasn’t much different.

When they returned to the central room, the energy field lowered, and a glass tube lowered from the resulting hole in the ceiling. Inside was a giant eyeball, thousands of fleshy tentacles hanging from the end of it.

First there was a buttload of adds that spawned: the little spiders and grotesque abominations they had fought in the first two passages. Then the glass tube opened, and the eye flew out to attack them with laser beams and its tentacles. Once it was sufficiently damaged, it went back into the tube, which was then filled with some kind of healing liquid that went murky with the boss’ blue blood.

As an intermission, the triumvirate spawned again, one after the other. Once they had those beat, the boss came out again, changed colours from white to blue and black and used stronger versions of its previous attacks more frequently.

It had been a pretty standard phased fight. “This is an okay way to spend time,” John thought, checking the loot for anything interesting.

“I just find it interesting how much stronger the enemies you spawn have become,” Rave noted.

“Truth be told, I think they are easier nowadays,” he said. “My toolkit is so broad that they have very little they can do that I can’t counter or prepare for the second time. Compared to the Spectre, these guys aren’t particularly scary because I always have a way to deal with them… Not that they aren’t dangerous anyway.”

John may have sounded like he was glossing over these things, but he wasn’t stupid enough to underestimate enemies that scaled with his level. In typical Gaia fashion, his benefactor and torturer would throw something at him that was stupendously hard to beat once he let his guard down.

“Well, the advantage is that I keep getting more experience in dealing with unordinary combat situations,” he stated and dumped the largely useless loot in his inventory. “Let’s go run some more dungeons while we wait for the evening. Might as well.”

“Might as well,” Rave agreed.