John, a spoonful of soup hovering in front of his open mouth, stared at the window with annoyance. “What’s up?” Rave asked. “Ya look like Gaia just sent you nudes and it turned out she was a trap all along.”

He decided to let the spoon finish its journey and move the soup into his bowels before answering. “Well, Gaia decided to nerf my shit… once more,” he stated and checked that new feature he got.

“Yeah, that’s pretty bad…” he mumbled to himself, then explained what exactly had been changed to the rest of the crew. Currently, all elementals were active, so, together with the Artificial Spirit costs, he would pay 35% of his mana regeneration at any given moment. Thankfully, his five levels in Elementalist pushed the 25% from his five elementals down to 18,75%. In other words, he paid 28,75% of his mana regeneration in total.

Quite the brutal step up from the previous 11%. He was still left with more mana regeneration than he had before the Wisdom Efficiency Upgrade (obviously), but he’d much rather not pay this much, especially since these were the costs before he decided to use any of his five Possession Slots for up to another 5 mana per second.

“To be fair, this is more a case of actually paying what I should, I guess,” John sighed, accepting his fate. These Skills had been laughably cheap for what they were doing. They still were, considering that he basically got a full dungeon group for less than 30% of his mana regeneration.

If he had any complaints about this whole thing, it was how the cost calculation took from his sum-total MP return, not just his base regeneration. It made things like Tip less good, but that was a price he had to pay.

Well, once he got Elementalist to level 20, the elementals would be free of cost anyway. Which was actually amongst the most busted things in existence. Just getting the class to level 10 would put the new cost on par with the old one.

Sadly, he couldn’t pull the same thing with Artificial Spirit. While Puppeteer did give it a cost decrease, it wasn’t the sticking bonus. That left him with no effective way to reduce its cost, since he would much rather have Elementalist or Arcanist as his active class with their much more useful bonuses.

“Well, on the plus side, I can get back to running Assaults,” he finalized and went back to eating just as Nia turned her head and stared at him. “…Yes, that does mean there will be Soulpotions again,” John answered after a moment of silence passed. An abrupt nod and the blank stood up and left the room, presumably to go back to training.

For a moment, John expected Lydia to call after her. No such thing happened though. Instead, the rest of them finished their own meals (Nia had done that much at least) before the princess opened up the meeting.

“As much as I hate to admit it, today’s game was greatly advantageous for us,” Lydia spoke, using a handkerchief to methodically wipe off her already clean lips. John still couldn’t quite believe that red was natural.

“Yes,” John agreed. “And it presents us with a new question. Jane, you think you will be ready tomorrow?”

“According to Cappy, I got it down as perfectly as I can, given the small amount of time I had for it,” Rave answered with a shrug, folding her hands behind her pretty, pink hair; “So, I guess that’s a yes.”

“As said before,” the sun cat meowed over from the back of the couch, upon which he was currently lazily lying, “if she wins, she wins on surprise alone. She will be using a thing that should take her a few more months of actual training to use effectively and years to master it. One more day will not make a difference anymore.”

“Which means I get another day to prepare myself,” Lydia attempted to put the handkerchief down but was quickly stopped by Aclysia who went ahead and took it from her to toss it away. “Thank you,” the princess gave a grateful nod to the weaponized maid.

“It is to my enjoyment to be of use, your highness,” she answered and began cleaning the rest of the table as well.

John took a sip of orange juice, wanting to repeat the new game plan in detail just to make sure he got it right. However, Momo got ahead of him there, “New sequence of fighters is therefore: Rave, Lydia, Nia, and then the second group fight.” There was the reason why Lydia hadn’t stopped the blank from leaving, her position in the order had remained unchanged.

“Not accounting for any games, how do we feel about our point situation?” the support asked.

“Well, right fucking now, we are tied,” Thana said, taking a break from stuffing her face with a chocolate bar to become part of the conversation.

“Affirmative,” Lydia said and reached for her own beverage, mint tea, before continuing. “Currently, our situation is better than I originally anticipated. I knew that Thana would win her fight, but neither the point gained from John’s success nor the game were expected.”

“So, we are doing good,” Rave pointed out.

“Better than catastrophic isn’t necessarily good,” Lydia pointed out, “but, roughly speaking, this is rather fortunate, yes.”

“You still have not answered my question though,” Momo went back in, tapping on her kindle to turn a page. “How is our point situation going? What is the prediction of our performance?”

“Going for the realistic answer: we will leave this round with another tie,” Lydia answered. “This is under the assumption that we will lose all three upcoming matches but win the group fight.”

“Hey!” Rave acted up on the implication that she would lose.

“What?” Lydia met the blue-eyed gaze with her own, filled with an iron will. “As Copernicus is eager to remind: your victory would be based entirely on surprise. I do not base assumptions on risky factors. I invite you to surprise me.”

Rave opened her mouth to give a semi-heated response but then managed to stop herself and fall back into her chair. Taking her hand, John gave her a proud smile. He liked that she managed to keep her hot-headedness in check at times like these, it showed that he wasn’t the only one who was positively influenced by their relationship.

“Challenge accepted,” was all his girlfriend said, with a relishing grin no less.

“I see little chance for me to win against Maximillian,” Lydia reported the rest of her predictions, “his range is much higher than mine. If I win, it will be solely because of his arrogance. Nia might have the best chance to win, but I honestly do not have a good enough grasp of what she is capable of, and that goblin doesn’t have a lot of available info about him either.”

John pondered about the whole situation for a moment. “If we win the group fight, you are in a winning position,” he finally spoke up. If they were able to win this one, they would be able to win the other. John had already beaten the probably strongest single member of the enemy team in this round, so it was safe to assume that he and Thana would win their fights (whichever those would be) in the randomized match-ups of the third round as well.

As long as they entered the last round on a tie, chances were that they would get 5 out of the 8 points of that round. Unless they threw 4 points worth of games their way and the enemy team won the other three of the remaining match-ups, their team was likely to win.

They had their hand on the cup; all they needed to do now was wrestle it from the enemy. ‘The true beauty of this is that it is going by the worst-case assumption, which is us losing all three of our next match-ups and then proceeding to lose all the ones not involving me and Thana in the next round,’ John thought.

Lydia must have been of the same mind, as she allowed herself a slight, self-assured smile. It was of the kind a victorious warlord wore before engaging his cornered enemy in a perfectly calculated battle to end a long and tedious campaign.

It was gone just a moment later; the princess did not want her own pride to get into her way. “Yes, we are favourite to win if we end this round in a tie,” she finally answered. “However, we are not fated to, and we haven’t even secured the requirement yet. Let’s not get hasty.”

John finished his glass and stood up, “Well then, I better get to work.” He headed for the door, changing from his lazy gamer get-up consisting of slouched pants and a comfortable t-shirt to his suit. The only item that wasn’t changed in the process was Gamer’s Preserver. There was no reason to get out of the thing that made him comfortable in pretty much every environment.

“What would that work be?” Lydia asked him.

“Grinding as much as I can, putting Soulpotions out and seeing if I can get more class levels, the usual,” John answered. “Aclysia, you ready?”

“I will need another minute to load the dishwasher, I will be with you shortly, Master,” the maid shouted back from the kitchen.

“I see,” Lydia sighed. “I would like to accompany you for training purposes, but I get the feeling I would slow you down.”

“Yeah, we have hit that stage,” the Gamer scratched his cheek in an awkwardly apologetic motion. “I guess I could lower the difficulty, me becoming stronger isn’t the highest priority right now… knowing Gaia, you will get reduced experience if I do though.” ‘A tutor program would be nice,’ John thought.

He knew that his powers couldn’t just allow him to elevate people to super powerful status just like that. What he could accomplish in propping up with just the Soulpotion was already quite stupendous, although there had to be a soft ceiling somewhere.

As people in his group got a strongly reduced version of his EXP gain, there would be a moment where the Soulpotion was merely a drop in a very, very large, empty bathtub. In reality, there would still be progress, but it would be negligible.

‘It doesn’t help that Gaia keeps tinkering with the allied EXP formula,’ he continued his mental complaints. It was clear that the supreme deity did not want John to just be able to mass-produce super soldiers by the way she just changed everything around whenever.‘She should just put in some hard-limit if that’s her problem. You can only boost X amount of people per week or some other limiter like a maximum of levels. Can’t be that hard,’ John thought; ‘Anything that is understandable.’

“…If I could get her back in my bed I would spank her glorious ass so hard right now,” John muttered under his breath.

“I am ready, Master.” Aclysia stepped up to him. Nodding, he looked back over to the table where the other girls were sitting, expectantly waiting for him to say something.

“Gaia is revamping my group system to be actually understandable; maybe I can take you with me again once she is done with that,” he explained. “In typical Gaia fashion, she will probably need a few days for that though.”

“She is the guardian of normality. It is a wonder she even finds time for you,” Lydia pointed out.

“I guess.” John shrugged it off. “Anyhow, going to grind for four hours, see you in my bed if you feel horny tonight and tomorrow if not.”