‘Talk about wasting space,’ John thought, raising his hand to leave the barrier and read the remaining windows. ‘At least it’s kinda good?’

“I did wonder about that.” John scratched his head as he headed out. That was another lucky break in this entire thing. Overall, the dungeon had been of middling difficulty. He had needed to burn a few item cooldowns, but only Arcane Ascension really stung in that regard. That it was relatively short, having only taken 30 minutes, was a nice contrast to the previous slog.

The gathered girls also seemed surprised to see him back so soon. He came out of the gate of light and strolled right into a pause. Lydia was gathering her breath, clearly covered in sweat. She was drinking water that had small particles of metal floating in it. She was using it to keep her mana high while also rehydrating, in all due likelihood.

“Seems like I come back at the perfect time,” he said and stopped. Rather than go towards the house, he made an inviting gesture towards the gate he had come from. “If you’re resting anyway, why don’t we check out what the recent loot has been? I only took a short glance at it earlier.”

“I take your request as you having suceeded in your Quest then?” Lydia asked, while fighting to get on her feet. Realizing his mistake of not helping her, John was ready to resume moving towards them after all, but Aclysia was already next to the queen and offered her hand instead. “Thank you, Aclysia.”

“It is always my pleasure to serve, your highness,” the weaponized maid said fluently. The elementals also approached, chatting among themselves. Beatrice quietly hung around, as usual.

“Please, you no longer need to call me such.” Lydia smiled and put a hand on Aclysia’s cheek. “You’re a cherished friend of mine – and much more than that. You are someone I love.”

“Lydia…” Aclysia blushed a little bit, at a rare loss for words, then the two of them leaned towards each other, “…I, as a lover of Master and a woman of character, I too adore you.” Before John’s eyes, two members of his harem shared a moment of tenderness, then they exchanged a long kiss. It took almost ten seconds to end and tongues were clearly involved in a semi-aggressive fashion.

Not only was John incredibly happy to see his harem get along incredibly well internally, this also gave him a respectable hard-on. For the latter, he didn’t have time right now. “Do I have to assume that the training you did while I was gone was a bit more involved than fencing?” he joked, once the two women had put a bit of distance between them.

“Do not assume such silliness.” Lydia shook her head and took a quick sip out of her sports bottle. “Any such activities will be delayed until after the training. Although I will not deny that I would appreciate having Aclysia around me more frequently.” She looked over her shoulder. “Or any of you, for that matter.”

“What about me, what about me?” Sylph asked and flew around the queen’s head. “Do I get to hang around with you, Lyly? I want to! You have tasty cookies next to sweet tea!”

“I am certain it can be arranged, just don’t distract me from work,” Lydia said and a hovering slate of metal slowly pushed Sylph out of the queen’s field of view. “And let me see where my stride carries me, if you would be so kind.”

“Yes, yay, of course!” Sylph declared and sat down on Lydia’s shoulder. The weakness the royal had once allowed herself, to love John, had seemingly bloomed into a bunch of related weak spots. As it was, John couldn’t feel too bad about making Lydia softer in this regard. He had a feeling both she and her nation would be happier for it, as the decades ticked by.

They entered the gate and then the Loot Basin. Like always, it felt like they were inside some mixture of a depot and small-town supermarket. Metal shelves were stacked five layers high and equipped with plastic rails that could hold paper cards. On those paper cards would be written what the item was and how many of them John had gotten. They were also useful for some other automated processes, namely throwing them away (by throwing the paper card in the bin inside the Loot Basin) or feeding it to the computer, making it create the Abyss Auction pages for him.

While the Loot Basin was, theoretically, infinite, it cleared itself out after a week at the latest, so John couldn’t use it for storage. At the moment, there were only the usual five rows, each dedicated to one rarity.

“Ka-ching,” John made a bad money sound as he took the paper card allocated to the money he had earned in the latest dungeon. He simply threw it into his inventory and, after a short grace period, all the money stacked into the shelf vanished. The paper card was also gone, all the money now residing in his inventory in its place.

Then there were some pretty random things. A silver button, an elegant fork, a children’s book covered in glitter, and other very much sparkly items. Doubtlessly the Shiny Thing that the Magryph could drop. There were also a few feathers and scrap metal from other mobs, but nothing interesting. The next row, for Uncommon drops, contained much the same. Nothing useful among it.

In the Rare category, they found the Shield of the Ravenlord and one of the swords the Corvus Knights had used. Neither were particularly useful, so John just kept them to feed to his Artificial Spirits for level progress.

Epic was much more interesting.

“Now would you look at that,” John said, walking past the gathered pebbles and to the singular item that caught his attention. It was a gauntlet, although that was selling it a bit short. More accurate would be to say it was a futuristic piece of battle equipment that attached four blades to the fingers of a gauntlet. Looked at from the front, they had a triangular shape, more like a wedge than a traditional blade, with the edge on the palm side of things.

Those wedge-blades were of a simple metallic colour. Nothing fancy like Mithril or the misleadingly plain look of Astrotium, but in between. Just the honest, metallic shimmering of refined steel. Each claw was attached to a finger segment, black metal covering the three sub-segment and the joints underneath. Notable, the thumb had no blade, only a covering. The palm was made out of a flexible, brown leather, while the back was one thick plate of the same black metal, trimmed with bronze and a sigil in the shape of a raven on it. The gauntlet continued further up, also making up a guard for the lower arm.

It was clearly inspired by a lightning claw from Warhammer 40k, but compromised in size and ridiculousness to be wearable by a human.

John couldn’t resist and put the thing on. The second he had pushed his fingers as deep into the sci-fi weapon as was possible, he heard and felt the internal arcano-tech operate. The entire thing shrunk to fit perfectly around him, plates adjusted their position and the Suit of the Chosen extended downwards, just like it did with Purgatory, to meld with this new equipment. Cables interwove with the black fabric and added a bit of roughness to the sci-fi look.

John moved his right hand around for a little bit. Making a fist was absolutely impossible, thanks to the length of the claws. The metallic things were themselves longer than the Gamer’s fingers. When he relaxed his hand and let it dangle at the wrist, it reminded him a bit of a velociraptor. ‘It did say it had another form,’ John thought and tried to trigger it. Nothing happened, until he tried around a bit more. Only when his fingers were straight and pressed together did the mechanic spring to life. The plate at the back of his hand slid back and with it the blades followed previously unseen rails, snapping into position further down.

“Neat,” John hummed, now able to make a fist. Thanks to the plate having slid back, the movement of his wrist was limited, he could no longer pull it up, but that was a worthwhile sacrifice for being able to grab things. Grab things in a very limited capacity, it should be said.

The blades still extended a fair bit beyond his knuckles. They would make every punch a very messy (and effective) experience. It was clear that this was a weapon, designed for harm first and everything else second. Purgatory also inhibited his ability to grab things by virtue of its sharpness, but this also limited his dexterity. The difference in quality was evident, but the Talon of the Ravenlord was still impressive.

‘I suppose this will be a good second hand weapon, outside of Fire and Flow Ascension,’ the Gamer thought, wondering if there was a way to set this to automatically unequip whenever that Attribute was activated. Sure, Purgatory’s secondary manifestations didn’t consume any Equipment Slots, but there was the physical limitation of having only one right arm to wear a gauntlet on.

Upon his mental inquiry, a window opened to confirm exactly that and he pressed it. Options were a nice thing. “At least I got something out of this…” he said and looked towards the rest of the contents. While doing so, he noticed Lydia looking bothered. “Something the matter, Lydia?”

The queen was standing next to the shelf segment that held the Mithril pebbles. Had held the Mithril pebbles, they were currently hovering in front of Lydia. “Six… seven… eight…” she counted out loud. “Eight pebbles.”

“Sounds right,” John answered and dragged his newest equipment piece into his inventory. “It should be nine, I know, but I took one and put it in the Loot Focus.”

“This says a total of ten were dropped,” the queen retorted and tapped against the plastic rail.

“Oh, nice, another one… but why is it eight then…?” Now John shared her confusion.

“Announcement,” Beatrice chimed in from the side, “this paper card declares the existence of 5 Elementium pebbles. Present are only 2.”

“Okay, this is only getting odder,” John said and stepped out of the row, following a hunch. “Look around the other rows,” he instructed the elementals, “alert me if anything moves.”

“Why would anything move?” Lydia asked, while she and Aclysia were following the Gamer. “Your loot has been strictly limited to items. Not once have your created enemies been able to leave an Instant Dungeon.”

“You’re right about the second part but wrong about the first,” John told her. “First time I had the opportunity for a live drop was when I fought some rat-wolf creature that was guarding a chest inside my first larger Instant Dungeon.” A chest that had contained Nathalia, funnily enough, but that would have distracted from the point. “Relatively recently, I got a living slime pet out of a dungeon and added it to the Menagerie.”

He stepped into the Legendary shelf. If he said he expected it to be empty, he would have been lying. As there were no further items in the Epic category, he knew for a fact that the Firstkill Bonus for Radiohead Mark 2 had netted him a Legendary item. None were around. At least not around the layer at chest height, where items usually were stored first. He did find a paper card for one item named ‘Children of the Sun’ though.

“John, I have located the missing pebbles,” Lydia informed him and pointed at the lowest level of shelves. She must have used her Innate Ability to scan around for the tiny things. Going down on all fours, John lowered himself to floor level and spied into the depth of the shelf.

A pair of dark red eyes looked back at him. They belonged to a chimeric creature, a mixture between a panther and an Australian magpie. A cat tail was slung around its paws and claws, the base of it framed by tail feathers. While the cat parts of it were pure black, the bird parts were all black and white, with the dark parts only slightly dominating the light ones. Holding a silvery-white pebble in its white, black-tipped beak, the Magryph chick tilted its head. Around it lay some more of the pebbles and under it was a softly glowing, golden disc.

“Well, hello there, little buddy,” John said and, noticing the culprit had been found, the rest of the harem soon converged on their position. Carefully, he reached out and tried to take the Magryph out of its hiding place. This only got him swiped at by the tiny front claws.

The behaviour wasn’t particularly surprising, this was a cat-raven after all. What got John more was the thing that he actually felt his skin being broken. He didn’t care whatsoever for the pain, but at his Physical Stats, something like kitten scratches shouldn’t be hurting him. At least while he wasn’t being looked at by mundane people, at which point Gamer’s Body did some self-nerfing to not display his abilities too clearly.

Regardless of its actions, John succeeded in grabbing the animal with one hand and pulled it out of hiding. In protest, it dropped the Mithril pebble and let out a sound that John found to be an odd cross between a fire alarm, a synthesizer and a seagull. It was an extremely obnoxious sound, but that was the point.

Hind legs and a puffed-up tail dangled out the bottom and only the bird head, with panther ears twisted back in an aggressive display, peaked out from the top. The Magryph chick was tiny. It continued to let its protest be known. John carefully placed it down on the floor, where it immediately tried to run away. John blocked it with his hands. To which the chick reacted with more synthesized siren wobbles and by spreading its wings in a tiny threat posture, presenting the talons in a ‘threatening fashion’. Three claws went forward, one to the back, slightly larger than the rest.

Apparently, the animal wasn’t able to fly yet. Which made her little hoard way more impressive since it would have needed to climb up and down the shelves to get to any of these items. ‘I call it an animal, but technically it’s the same thing as the monsters I killed… well, minus the unrelenting drive to harm me. That is a pretty important distinction.’

“John, do please tell me that is not a Magryph.” Lydia sounded more than a bit shaken.

“I could do that, but I would be lying,” he said. “Judging by your reaction, they are pretty rare.”

“Fifty,” Lydia told him. “A total of fifty, or around that number anyhow, live on the globe. They are raised exclusively by one family in northern Australia.”

“Anything useful they do?” John asked, while having a sharp beak peck at his hand. The neck of a bird could stretch a surprising distance, he found. “Aside from trying to hurt poor nerds?”

“I only have heard of them being the world’s greatest treasure finders; they’re attracted to ‘shiny things’ like hogs are to food.”

“No doubt about the attracted part.” the Gamer nodded. “Aclysia, can you oblige it for a little bit and throw it a pebble?” The weaponized maid obeyed, picked one of the pebbles the Magryph had hoarded and handed it over to the aggressive little thing. Immediately, upon picking the silver-white metal out of Aclysia’s hand, the Magryph grew more docile.

The siren cries stopped and were replaced with another sound. More acceptable, but no less odd, the Magryph let out a series of robotic voodoo notes. As someone who had stumbled over the cry of the Australian Magpie on Youtube before, John recognized these as being an actual sound they made.

“The vocal range on this thing…” the Gamer mumbled. “Do they only get about one and a half metres in general?”

Lydia shrugged, her arms crossed. “I only know what I do thanks to the urging of one of my treasurers that we should invest in a Magryph for Natural Barrier expeditions. I am no expert on the field of chimeric creatures.”

The cat ears turned atop its head, as the Magryph slowly placed the pebble down and then played with it by knocking it around with its beak. Expectantly, it occasionally looked up to John and let out a single cry, now closer to the high-pitched cry of a baby chicken. “What do I do with you?” John asked with a sigh. Ever since he had initially touched it, a window was hovering in his field of view.

‘First Quest I got with a Punishment segment,’ John thought, but clicked accept anyway. It would be any of these three choices anyway. “First things first,” John said and left the rest of his harem to watch the chick while he retrieved the remaining items. “Let’s go back and do some research. Then we’ll decide whether we keep it or not.”