“Oh Gaia, thank you for being so gracious,” John mumbled, only half-sarcastically, when the pop-up finally happened. It was 13:12 o’clock, he and the rest of the crew had spent the rest of yesterday analysing the match of Maximillian and his team against their clones. Without a doubt, the enemy team had done the same. The videos were freely available online, after all.

What this led to was a simple fact: Now all or close to all cards were on the table on both sides. This was ultimately a somewhat even trade, despite what one would initially think with John revealing all of his elementals and what not.

It was highly likely that the enemy team was already aware of most of them, in the first place. Undine and Siena had been revealed during the Janna Lenko incident, so they had already known he had elementals. From there it wasn’t too unlikely to suspect that they got somebody with a talent for reading auras (maybe even Alexej himself was able to do that) to just sniff out how many exactly he had.

The biggest losses were probably the reveal of Combination and, to a lesser extent, Spell Storage. The latter he could be somewhat eased on by the fact that the way he used it wasn’t exactly well-visible. The cameras only had shown the dark glow emanating from his hand and then quickly destroying the shield, so they could only speculate what exactly that glow had been.

The same was true in the opposite direction, sadly, as Maximillian had whipped out some sort of short-lived sphere that had done something without him even paying attention to it. He would have used it with something in mind, but it was a mystery from just the cameras.

Aside from that, they learned a bunch more about Mario’s and Nariko’s actual fighting patterns. Especially for the former that was important since they had only ever seen him either get stomped or fight with sub-optimal glass weaponry.

For Nariko, the only thing they got was the confirmation that she usually ran a ‘defence over offence’ strategy where she would tire her enemies out or wait for a good opportunity to strike.

The limits and conditions of Alexej’s powers remained a mystery. Ankleshanker revealed nothing new, but, while probably the least useful person of the enemy line-up, he still wasn’t to be underestimated.

Following that, John had done his usual ‘fill the time’ program of filling up girls with his spunk. Wonderful times all around and there was no risk of pregnancy involved. John wanted to be a father someday, but not anytime soon.

That brought him to the current day, Wednesday the 3rd of January. He had been grinding through an almost four-hour long Assault, with the patch reduced experience, to finally get that level. If Gaia’s one-week estimate was to be trusted, he only had two more days of this to endure.

Anyway, it was time to raise his Agility to 50, that should prompt two windows.

Well, that was marginally useful. It would help him aim Shardbound, but that was about it. If he was a ranged centric build where aiming was more important instead of a summoner, where using his own spells was really more of a thing he did with excess power, it would have been quite good.

This was even less useful for him, although he would take it. He learned to live with a lot of pain already, being more warded against it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

And now he was back to the question of what stat he should up next. Since his conviction on Nia had changed, he effectively was out of Relationship Slots now. While that was foregoing the possibility that Nia could reject him or something, John just calculated with what he had in mind.

That aside, he had already gotten her into bed once, so chances were that he could win her over. It wasn’t like he had nothing to offer in return: he was somewhat charming, had the body of a Greek half-god (and getting ever closer to an actual god), was powerful and could satisfy pretty much every sexual need in existence (as long as it was in his own comfort zone).

But Relationship Points were less an actual thing than an abstract representation of how many girls he could keep happy thanks to his heightened Charisma without them fighting over his attention. In other words, he wasn’t hard-pressed to change the current situation, and 25 points also weren’t the world to farm. If push came to shove, he could dedicate like a week to constant grinding, and he should get there no questions asked.

He should have that sort of time once this tournament concluded, and he wasn’t likely to meet any more girls before then. Charisma was postponed once more.

Intellect was then the next choice he had come to last time. He also felt like it was time to raise that thing; his weaknesses, while still there, had been raised from ‘abyssal average’ to ‘pretty decent’, so now he at least didn’t have to worry about people much weaker than him outperforming him on a melee standpoint.

‘Although I should pick up some martial arts… I wonder if there is a Skillbook for that,’ John thought as his decision fell on Intellect. Getting it to 250 would take a while, and he was open to taking a detour into Charisma if needed along the way, but for now that would be his course of action.

Actually, he should just hit up the Abyss Auction and look it up. He had the spare money anyway. He hadn’t bought skillbooks in an eternity, primarily because there was nothing that was either better than what he had or was something he wanted.

There was no defensive Skill that could be bought that outdid Mana Protection. Shardbound was apparently a Skill that was reserved for people that had practiced manipulating their own mana for 50 years. Whatever he could find using skill books in the ‘ranged mana based attacks’ category just couldn’t compete. Same applied to Arcana Strike and Mana Blade.

He already knew that he could get a high tier light elemental whenever he wanted by getting himself the Perk in Elementalist. The route of getting himself a Skillbook instead led to those elementals that were always Tier 1 and freshly created. As Siena had shown, her terribly dysfunctional personality aside, previous life experience was pretty useful. At this point, the best spells he had were those he already had or upgrades that money couldn’t really buy.

What else could he get? Well, it was time to look into the areas where he didn’t already have stuff.

Crowd control spells were an argument, but between Gnome and Undine, he felt like he had that field covered in earth and water prisons. He had Momo for buffs (and the ones he could buy on the Abyss Auction were kind of meh anyway). For most spells that even sounded remotely interesting, there were no Skillbooks but a way to buy contact info to go on a journey to find a school and then try to impress the teacher enough to teach it to him.

While that sounded pretty interesting, it wasn’t John’s style.

Next up were crafting professions, but Craft and Enchant already covered most of those, and he only ever used the former to patch up equipment or wash his bedsheets. Alchemy, that was a thing he could probably learn, but for what use? He didn’t feel like a potion seller.

The knowledge itself was worth it, in a way, but currently, he didn’t want to waste his time on it. Maybe when he was, like, level 543 and he literally had nothing better to do on a day he took off from grinding Assaults.

As he stepped through the gateway and into the gardens, he was looking for some martial arts books, which was a thing he should have done way sooner. He so rarely got into melee fights that he forgot how much he sucked at them. With that experience having been made in front of the world, he was now self-conscious enough about it to fix the problem.

‘Here goes hoping that I can actually just learn it,’ John thought and awaited the books’ arrival. The drone came as diligently as always. Books, because he had ordered three of them. He sliced the box open with the sharp index finger of his clawed left, Purgatory still equipped from just having left an Assault.

Luckily, he could disable the fire of the fully stacked weapon with the ease of flipping a switch with his brain. If that hadn’t been the case, he would have set fire to the gardens, which would have been a shame as he was making great progress in regrowing the damn thing. That was thanks to the fusion between Undine and Gnome, a nice, very quiet girl that just blushingly did what he asked of her.

Seeing his elementals combine into expected (and sometimes not expected) characters was very interesting to behold. Well, sometimes it was amusing or terrifying as well. It also served as some effective bonding for them; they all seemed to get along quite a bit better. John was a bit worried they would ‘normalize’ into a single personality over time, but so far there were no problems.

He picked up the first book and was promptly greeted with a window.

This one he had gotten to see if he could pull a Rave and boost his physical stats. He fulfilled the requirements easily, so he learned it and went to see if it was any good.

Disabling his mana regeneration was an absolute no-go. With Possession, his elementals and the artificial spirits active, it wouldn’t just be 0 either, he would run an impressive deficit for a stat boost that was less than what Purgatory provided.

Granted, it would eventually grow to 50%, but the mana cost wouldn’t change, and that was his main problem with it. If he could push the cost down to something like 50%, then he would consider it useful, but anything above 90% pushed him in the negative (with the other passive things costing around 10% of his mana regeneration).

John honoured the terribleness of that skill by making it the first one he added to the ‘do not display’ function of his skill list.

Next up were two books about actual martial arts. One was simply about boxing, the other an actual abyssal fighting style called Arcweaving. He picked the first one up.

So that worked and was easy enough on the requirements. He accepted and was presented with a new passive.

Not the greatest thing in existence, but the pure knowledge of how to move his body more effectively was nice. He took a typical boxing stance, fist raised to protect his face, and took a few quick jabs while being light on his feet.

He stopped, largely happy with the results and looked at his hands. Purgatory he knew would be able to resist a lot of impact, so his left hand was protected. His right, typically reserved for and currently covered by Undine, he was less certain about.

‘Can you make this glove as hard as your water barriers?’ John asked the water spirit.

‘Even harder,’ Undine promised as she poured mana into the exterior of what was her own transformed body. Physically, there was no difference, but he could feel the power flow over his skin.

“Aclysia, would you mind if I punched you?” John asked; “Just to estimate the hardness of this glove.”

“I much prefer it over the reverse, Master,” Aclysia answered with her typical little bow. They faced each other, and John threw a punch.

While it was far from perfect, it was at least properly aimed and used his muscles in a systematic way instead of just flinging his fist forward and hoping it would connect and do some damage. His right hit Aclysia’s shoulder.

He definitely felt the impact rattle his bones more than with Purgatory, but it also wasn’t all that bad. It was like the difference between wearing a proper glove and just having tightly wrapped bandages over his arm. Although the bandages had the advantage of immediately healing whatever damage he had done to himself.

‘Surprised the rings don’t get in the way though,’ John inspected the Ring of Ash on his left and the Ring of Fire on his right. The black twins with the small orange gemstone on top should have done some rather mean things to his ring fingers, even if they were on top of their respective gloves.

‘Some extension of Gamer’s Body maybe?’ John thought. Game characters didn’t usually get harmed no matter how impractical their set-up was. While he was sure that he couldn’t pull an animation mistake and draw a sword through his own head, there seemed to be at least some leeway here.

At that moment, he noticed yet another window. Tinkering with new things always caused some sort of flood.

Well, he might as well check it out, even if he was certain he would not level it any time soon.

Was okay, but nothing that persuaded him to change gears.

Anyhow, he had one last book, and that one he had picked with care. It was one of the few that broke with the ‘go to a teacher’ rule while also looking satisfyingly powerful and had cost him a whole 50 million dollars. While that may turn out to be wasted money, John started to lose connection to value.

The fact that money was something he could just generate (and magically not cause massive inflation in the process) was a slightly worrying topic, but the fact was that John didn’t really have anything to use the money on. Maybe he should start a loaning business or something?

‘Huh, that is new,’ John thought. He had been under the impression that he could only acquire classes through doing things; the idea that he might have needed books or teachers in addition to other requirements had not crossed his mind.

It made sense, from a perspective of his powers. Lots of games had classes that required you to know a certain person or fulfil a quest to get access to it. It was a bit random, but that was forgivable. The fact that the attempt was even made to force a game engine into reality was daring, and it largely worked in John’s favour.

‘Well, that goes straight into my inventory,’ John thought and put it away. That thing would be on the backburner for a while, as he was currently using the skill levels to continue Elementalist. At the earliest, he was going to be able to use that book with level 210. That was if he got the next levels of Combination with every level of Elementalist, then stopped at level 9 of the class and then went right on with the requirements for the Arcweaving class.

Which wouldn’t happen. The goal was to get Elementalist to 20 and make his elementals free. Afterwards, they would see what was going to happen.

His phone rang with Prussia’s Gloria, a ringtone he had, very tastefully, picked for Lydia. Absent-mindedly, he picked up while still checking his numbers. “Where are you? As per schedule we have to arrive in the arena early. Causing trouble with organizers is impermissible!” the princess immediately laid it down on him.

“Relax, I am on the front-lawn,” John told her and waved at the opening door.

“I see,” he heard Lydia’s voice, seeing her red lips move in the distance thanks to focusing on them. He would enjoy that Agility Perk more than he thought, he realized, as he followed every movement of the lusciously curved things.

He turned to Aclysia as he put the phone down. “I will be off then,” he said his goodbye.

“I will follow your fight on television and prepare a vast meal for your return,” his weaponized maid said with a bow.

“That sounds like my victory is already assured,” John said.

Aclysia stepped close and smiled at him. She placed a quick kiss on his lips, “You are my Master. I believe in your victory.”

“And if I lose regardless?” John said; there was at least one-matchup where that was a very real possibility.

“In that unlikely case I will be here to soothe you,” Aclysia embraced him and then danced away after he took a deep breath of her scent.

She had picked oranges for today, a scent he linked to a nice home and their early days spent in the house his mother had left them in.

“I will be ready to respond to whatever mood you are in when you get back,” she promised with a badly executed wink that lasted too long. Some parts of Aclysia still had problems with mimicking, it seemed. “But I would be very eager to please you if you return hungry from battle,” she added and then passed the rest of the group coming out of the house, her short skirt revealing her perfectly round bottom.

The greatest motivation a man could ask for.