John awoke ever so gently. He felt clean, he felt warm and he felt secure. He also was all of these things. Through a miracle of clear-mindedness, they had managed to celebrate the last half-hour of the orgy in the showers, before making it to the bed and falling asleep immediately. It had been something around 4 hours of uninterrupted fucking. Even the Artificial Spirits needed to rest their consciousness after that.

“Hey, Master,” he heard Metra’s voice in his ear after he yawned and stretched a little bit. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see more than a thing. The thing being his Gamer ability windows telling him how much longer it would take for the Vision of Calamity to be repaired. The answer being: not long enough for it to be worthwhile to get out bed without them.

“Morning, Mat,” he mumbled, feeling the First of Wrath sliding on top of him. Aclysia must have left the room already, otherwise she would have claimed that spot already. A look through the Mandala Sphere confirmed this. Aclysia and Beatrice were missing, likely preparing breakfast. Well, lunch, it was already noon. The elementals had also retreated somewhere else. It was Eliza, still fast asleep, snuggled up to his left, Metra on top of him and Lydia resting her head on his right. There was also his girlfriend, who he remembered to have fallen asleep where the queen now was. Her unsteady sleep movements had transported her to the foot-end of the bed, though, where she was now sleeping in a position only a cat could find comfortable.

Of course, Nathalia was no longer around. Her body had eventually dispersed, the shards that she had formed out of gone from obsidian to normal, translucent glass, molten into a near-perfect sphere. Observe had placed it in the Epic crafting material category, the remains of a godly avatar. There were, however, no direct uses for it. John had just placed it in the Guild Bank, something would be done with it.

To the very last second, he had made sure Nathalia got his attention and his love. It may not have been her real body, but he had valued the time nonetheless.

The only person John didn’t know the whereabouts of was Scarlett. In all likelihood, she had woken up ahead of everyone else and went to work. He would find out in a minute or two. First, he had an ancient weapon lying on top of him, a very much wet pussy on top of his morning wood.

“Want me to take care of you, my king?” she asked, in earnest subservience. The treatment during the orgy really must have stuck for more than John had initially guessed, as none of her usual aggressive behaviour went through. She wasn’t grinding against him, she wasn’t just taking him, she wasn’t even wording the suggestion in a way that made it more of a foregone conclusion. She was simply offering.

“God yes,” was the first reaction John had, groaning as Metra’s slick pussy enveloped his cock. “You shouldn’t call me your king. I still don’t want that title.”

“I know, such a fucking shame.” She sounded more like her usual self now, sitting up to ride him better. Bringing the Mandala Sphere around, to get a good view of her chiselled body in the meantime, his hands explored her “You really fit the part. Regardless of whether or not you take the role, you deserve the title. You’re not as strong as Sargon yet, but you’re getting there. I can firmly say that you’re a better lover than he was. Being taken by him felt great, but you… serving you feels fantastic. You’re the first king I don’t mind being a sex slave for.”

“Is that what our relationship is now?” John wondered. “Well, I guess I did say that yesterday, but you don’t have any obligation to keep to that. It was a spur of the moment thing.”

“I am your servant, your lover and your sex slave, and whatever else you want, John,” Metra moaned and laughed at the same time as she said that. “Fact is that I have come to love you and my love is hard earned and odd. As long as I take an interest in you, I will be more than our contract demands. Show me how you write history, my king, and I will be on your side.” She sighed lustfully as his hands explored the details of her thighs. “I won’t call you king in public, if you insist.”

“I do,” John answered since he didn’t want that title. Being favourably compared to a legendary historical figure first thing in the morning by someone who had actually known that figure was quite an ego-booster. It didn’t take too long for him to shoot the first load of the morning up into her.

Metra bit her lower lip and kept her orgasmic groans suppressed, knowing he wouldn’t approve of her waking the rest of the harem. It really did seem that she respected him and his authority deeply now. In the past, she would have just screamed her lust out. That she was taking the whole ‘slave to HIS desires’ thing seriously only served to upgrade his erection from morning wood to iron-hard meatpole.

“Well, you seem happy about this development.” Metra grinned, not failing to notice. The movement of her hips continued, even as the two girls on John’s side slowly awoke. Held back screams or not, they were making a lot of noise and it was about time to get up anyway. “You’re a total pervert after all.”

“Guilty as charged.” John shrugged with a somewhat smug expression on his face. “Having willing sex slaves is like… up there in my sexual fantasies.” The operative word was willing, as in, having taken and remaining in the role of their own accord. “I’m looking forward to your future servitude, Mat.”

“Just point me in a direction where there is slaughter or your dick and I’ll be satisfied,” she exclaimed, then gasped and leaned forwards, supporting herself on his muscular chest. “Speaking of that fucking cock… by Chaos, that thing makes me weak… It feels way too good to ride you.”

Lydia grumbled as she blinked a few times in an effort to wake up. “And you have the audacity to claim that privilege first in the morning.”

“There’s more than one way to happiness, Lydia,” John told her, the Mandala Sphere shifting. Soon thereafter, Lydia was getting her ass fucked from behind by Jack, while hugging John’s arm. Being in two places at once was awesome. Eliza woke up last, and he was about to suggest to her cussing self that there was a lot of space on his face, when he suddenly heard the ringing of his phone. “Eliza, could you get me that?” he asked, as the blood mage was closer to the nightstand.

“Yeah, sure, why the fuck not?!” she cursed while crawling over Rave’s still sleeping form over to the device. “Greet me with the sight of two whores taking your cocks, then send me to fetch your fucking phone, you absolute piece of double-dicked garbage. Make me a mindlessly jealous piece of dumb ass.”

“Come back here quicker and I just might be close enough to give that dumb ass a spanking,” he suggested and successfully motivated Eliza to return with his smartphone quicker. Just in time for the Vision of Calamity to finish repairing as well. Eight and a half hours, it had taken, which meant he had also slept for almost that long. Just in time to take the phone and answer the call, he had them Possessed and put into his eyes. “Hello, John Newman here.”

“Do you always take that long to answer your private phone?” a snarky voice came from the other side. It was a bit distorted by the typical difficulties of transmission, but he did recognize that sarcastic servant immediately regardless.

“Do you always take that long to call friends and family?” he bantered back, then gave Eliza’s ass, nicely presented to him, a loud slap. Since this was not a business talk, every other act of lovemaking around also continued. “No, but seriously, where the hell are you, Momo? How have you been?” He had a bunch of other questions, but he needed some basic answers first.

“Well, first things first, happy belated birthday,” she answered. “I can hear it’s been happy. Let me guess… well, one is Eliza, definitely. Also, I hear Lydia moaning… third I barely know so… Metra?”

“Thank you and full score.”

“Great. Meant to call you yesterday, but had to find out that the shops were I was didn’t take dollars, so I had to fly to a whole different city where there was an Abyssal presence to buy a new phone.”

“…Okay, I slightly change my initial question: where the hell are you that they don’t take dollars?”

“Turkmenistan,” she answered straight out.

“… And what are you doing in Turkmenistan?” It was a state north of Iran and Afghanistan. John spared himself the question if she knew to avoid the local population. It was one of the most totalitarian states in the world, with a clear Muslim majority. A combination that usually didn’t spell well for female independent movement. Not that she had any reason to fear them. Just Gaia could get annoyed if Momo ran into too much trouble.

Again, he thought her smart enough to veil up and keep her head low, at the very least. Better yet would be if she could go invisible or something.

“Well, this is going to take some explaining,” Momo responded. “You got the time for me to go over everything that happened since we parted?”

“Just… one second…” John answered, came inside Metra and Lydia, then was back at her with his full attention. “Okay, yes, go ahead. You can skip to the part after you left the Austrian court, I am well in the picture until that point.”

“Alright, so, I went to Greece to get information, spent a long time in the local library, which is terrible, don’t ask. I found that an item that I was searching for was inside a treasure city, or something like that, in modern day Iraq…”

“You mind if I put you on speaker?” John asked, this sounded like something that Metra wanted to hear. She gave him the go ahead, and so it was done. The little orgy they had going on was also temporarily halted, this sounded a bit more important. Even Rave joined them, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. After hearing Momo’s voice, the Lightbearer was quite focused though.

“So, I found that ziggurat with all of those supposed treasures inside. You got anything against me plundering Mesopotamian cities, Metra?” It was a genuine, if somewhat aggressively delivered, question.

“Did you open any graves?” the berserker babe asked.

“No, only treasure chambers.”

“Then I don’t give a shit, go on.” Metra visibly relaxed, slouching against the wall. It wasn’t that she was relieved, just that she no longer had to get ready to wreck Momo’s face when they next met. “Don’t disturb the dead, that’s all I care about.”

“Alright. Well, I found that place, some ancient art piece depicting the chaos dragon Tiamat, all the Metracanas, Gaia, and some other stuff…”

“Wait, I know where you were now!” Metra laughed out loud. “Piece of shit family portrait, that could only have been Lyoste’s Rest!”

“So THAT’S what the name was!” Momo shouted out. Why she hadn’t just called to ask Metra from the start about something she was certain to know at least something about was another question John didn’t bother asking. She would have had her reasons, even if it was something as stupid as ‘wanting to have her own adventure’.

“Do you have a photo?” he instead wondered, since that picture sounded pretty interesting.

“…I WOULD,” Momo let out a disgruntled sound. “If some sort of wolf Lorylim and Leryala hadn’t smashed right through it.” That announcement made Metra so unreasonably joyful that she fell over laughing. “WHY ARE YOU ALL SO HAPPY ABOUT DESTRUCTION OF ANCIENT HISTORY?!”

“Because it was a sentimental piece of crap!” Metra responded still giggling. “How is Leryala anyway? What was SHE doing there?”

“I made sure she left satisfied,” Momo giggled in a lewd way, confirming that her time with John and the harem did leave her a bit perverted herself. “Anyway, she was looking for raw Astrotium in the name of Enki or something, I got this staff...”

Metra snapped back up, just as John stared at the phone as if he could look deep into Momo’s eyes through it. This had just changed from a little tale to something that could have wide-reaching implications. “What did you just say?” the berserker babe asked.

“Yeah, I got Tiolyst, is that bad after all?”

“Nobody cares about that staff,” Metra said dismissively. “Only Seminaris kept bickering that she should have it. You say she was ordered by Enki, yes?”

“That’s what she told me anyway, why?”

“Because Enki should be dead.” Those words were delivered with a mixture of absolution and confusion. An oxymoron, reflected in Metra’s eyes. “The purge of Babylon. Fallen Marduk, Tiamat, Abzu and all the others, Gaia eradicated them for their insolence to even try and strike at her. There is no fucking way that stargazing shitlord survived.”

John hummed as his own thoughts circled around this revelation. This was a new piece on the board that fit into a number of different slots. “Do you know something else about Enki?”

“Leryala said that she would return to North America, to him, and hope to bump into Metra on the way. I guess he is pretty close to you.”

The number of ways the piece fit reduced; its shape became clearer. Sadly, he had no way to confirm whether any of the theories he came up on the spot were true, but on the face of it, John was willing to bet that Enki and the mysterious master for whose help Seminaris had pleaded were one and the same.

That the Lorylim kept creeping up whenever something from ancient Mesopotamia was involved was another thing he noticed. Especially with how Izha had talked to Metra in the past, saying that she had all reasons to be respectful towards the Lorylim. At the time, John had put it off as another nonsensical thing they said, but there was more to it. Much like Enki’s role in all of this, the way the Lorylim connected to Mesopotamia was unclear. They preceded, by all John knew, the empires in the area by an unknown amount of time. At the very least he knew that the Lorylim did not have their origin there.

It would have been a much easier riddle to crack if they did.

“Sorry to interrupt you with that,” John told her. “You just brought me a few pieces that could solve a lot of puzzles. So, what else did you do?”

“I researched the fall of Babylon. You know, since I found out that Gaia eradicated an entire area of the map, I wondered… where was the border? Where did absolute destruction reach? Until where could the aftershocks be felt? I found no answers for that, so I started making my own map… that took the last few months. Still not done with it.”

“I see…” John was forcefully putting his pondering to the background. It was important that he actually paid attention to Momo, now that he heard her again. “Are you happy?” he asked the question most important.

“Extremely,” the support responded. “John, I didn’t think the world could be this small – this big. There are so many things in so little space, so much history, so many people. I…” She took a deep breath. “I thought I would wish to return immediately to you if I ever spoke to you again. And, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I was wrong. I miss you, I miss Aclysia and Gnome and everyone else, but… I have come to love this working loneliness more than them and you. This time spent with my thoughts, doing things that I can do. It’s hard to describe…”

“I get it,” John assured her. “It’s all up to you. Whenever you want a place to call home, my doors are open to you. Whether you decide to join my harem again or just be a friend, it’s up to you. I can go either way… although I would certainly prefer one outcome over the other.”

“Yeah… not gonna lie, I am torn on that myself.” Momo sighed. “Ria and I didn’t work out and… well, I have tried dating since and it just doesn’t seem to work whoever it is. I didn’t realize how easy a relationship with you was until I had something that didn’t work as well. At the same time, I don’t want to come crawling back to you. You know, I really have to mull over whether it’s the right thing for me to choose you after all.”

“Good,” John told her plainly. “Because I’ll be honest as well: I’m not going to take you leaving my harem a second time. I have my own conditions for a happy relationship and one of those is that you aren’t indecisive. I get why you left the first time, life experience and all that, but I am not going to take you wobbling between what just feels comfortable on any given day. If you come back and make a commitment to be with me after all, you do make that commitment.”

“Yeah, we can agree on that,” Momo answered firmly. “I won’t really know until I see you in person again, I guess. Also I am still changing, with all of these new experiences flying in, and I want to feel like that has settled.” Her tone changed into being thoughtful, and carefully hesitant. “It was certainly simpler when I just… oriented myself on the base you gave me. Pre-programmed emotions waned with time, even while I was still connected to you. What I felt for Aclysia no longer feels as forced… what remains is because of the memories I have of her. Ironically, now that you’re no longer my master by mental connection… I do appreciate you more for it.”

“You have all been changing,” John mumbled. “I guess this happens when you don’t keep Artificial Spirits on a tight leash, mentally and physically. They stray from the original vision in unforeseen ways and just become people of their own right.”

“Yeah…” She sighed, then, in a forcefully upbeat tone, continued, “But whatever! Whether I return to you as a friend or yet another lover in your oversized girl cabinet, I’ll decide whenever I actually return. Until then, I should enjoy this freedom!”

“Just enjoy it by only dating other girls,” John stated, only slightly joking. “Don’t care how hypocritical that sounds, but I don’t like knowing there is some other guy fucking you. I can’t and won’t stop you, I don’t have any right to before you have actually decided to be with me again, but I will disapprove!”

“We’ll see,” she cheekily announced. “Anyway, tell me what you’ve been up to. I’ve been out of the news cycle for several months. Something interesting is bound to have happened, right?”

“Yes…” John said, touching his face. “A lot of things have happened.”