Collide Gamer

Chapter 136 – The remaining gifts

Contrary to his expectations, Nathalia was the first one to get up. “This was worth my while,” she decided and lightly tapped the nearby wall. Rock liquified and parted, soon letting volcanic light flood in.

The intensity surprised John – as far as his mental layout of the battlefield had gone, the cave had been near the centre of the structure. A map that was entirely useless, when in the domain of a goddess, he quickly realized. The island had already become undone and what little of it remained was drifting back to the shore.

 “Did you move the island while I was trying to fuck your brains out?” John asked while getting up.

Nathalia raised an eyebrow, as if that question did not even deserve to be uttered. “You believe above average fulfilment will make me unaware of the ongoings in my own Sanctum?” That answered that well enough.

Rather than risk upsetting Nathalia with more of his words, he turned his attention to the windows that had popped up.

Easy choices. Only thing he would be interested in would be what an Epic Gag was. Would Gaia tell a great joke or would she gift him a ball-gag and if the latter would that maybe be the gag? Well, whatever the case may have been, John chose to go with the Big Spoon.

Second choice he had to go with Tragedy; he just had more use for Wisdom than Charisma. Immediately, he checked out the Epic item he had received.

 Once again John was wondering what ‘Lightweight’ was supposed to mean really, as the blasted thing was just way too heavy to lift for him. Tapping on the Attribute revealed a description. ‘Great, now I no longer have to guess,’ he thought, while reading.

The window stated that the enchantment reduced the item's base weight by 10% per Level of Lightweight. In other words this thing was 30% lighter than the sword would have been without the enchantment. A fact that boggled John’s mind as he strained to pick it up. The best he did was get the handle to the height of his hip, while the black-red tip of the blade dragged, screeching, over the ground.

“Where did this come from?” Nathalia wanted to know.

“I got it for fucking you up the ass,” John answered truthfully, gaining both a raised eyebrow and a small chuckle from Nathalia.

“Interesting,” she took the blade off John and effortlessly raised it into the air.

Its haft was made for only one hand but extended long enough to be gripped with two if the situation called for it. With a blade that extended for a full metre, it was neither a true longsword nor a shortsword. A bastard sword was probably the right word to use. The blade was only sharpened at one side, the back completely straight, the smooth black surface glinting in the light of the magma all around.

“This is a good weapon,” Nathalia said, before adding in a less convinced tone, “for people at your power at the very least. Do you still have that creation of yours?”

“Aclysia? Yeah,” John answered, “I will give it to her.” The dragoness nodded, then let John coax her into helping him put the sword into his inventory. On his own, that would have been a struggle.

Something very light settled on his shoulder. “Okay, sex is awesome, I lose the bet to Sylph,” Salamander announced, her voice right next to John’s ear. Turning his head, he found the blaze elemental sitting on his shoulder, once more down to a diminutive size. Even now she was bigger than before though (about as tall as his hand).

“So you can change your size as you like or...?” John investigated, eyes naturally drawn to her boobs. Clad in fire, the two mounds remained outstandingly large. His palms remembered the sensation all too well.

Salamander shrugged, making those firm boobs jiggle, “Mostly no.” She pushed herself off his shoulder. Hovering in the air in front of him for a moment she explained, “So this seems to be my minimum size.” Her body flared, being nothing but fire for a moment before consolidating into the tall woman she had been minutes earlier. The only notable difference between the two forms was how tall she was. “This is my maximum size, everything in between is stressful to keep up,” she collapsed back into the hand sized form and returned to John’s shoulder. “It's more of a binary than proper size shifting.”

It was another thing of note that she apparently didn’t need to think about not burning him, which was a massive improvement to her burning holes into his furniture. Salamander acknowledged that as well and flashed him a smile – before suddenly disappearing.

John felt her move at rapid speed through their mental connection and immediately ran after her and the dragoness who had kidnapped her. The Necklace of the World Ender, he secured in his inventory as he ran.

A thousand curses echoed in his mind, as he felt Salamander being submerged in water again. He ran as fast as he could, but he still needed two minutes to arrive where Nathalia had in a near instant. “That was for the ‘love lizard’ comment,” the dragoness growled, holding a soaked fire spirit. “I do not forget, small one, and now…”

“Oh, nooooo,” Salamander gasped irreverently. “Please not again, oh big, scary dragon, I am so afraid of your insecure actions of retaliation! I will behave, I swear…” A short pause. “Granny.”

The water splashed over a metre high when Nathalia slammed the elemental back into the hot spring. “I have changed my mind. My help will take another form – and you will need to find a new familiar.”

‘Just go incorporeal!’ John told Salamander.

‘You think it’s that fucking easy?!’ the blaze elemental shouted back. ‘I’m being drowned by a fucking goddess!’

“I can feel your attempts to disentangle her.” Nathalia shot him a deep gaze. “I’m a high dragon, my very essence is touched by the Abyss. Creatures of my strength don’t need enchantments to crush the essence of elementals.”

John was sorting his arguments to make Nathalia reconsider, if she was even fully serious in the first place. If she meant to actually kill Salamander, she could have done so twenty times over already. Before he could make a plea, he noticed that the water was beginning to boil. It was weird in the first place that it didn’t, being in a place of this level of heat, but it was even weirder that it only started now. John finally realized that the centre of that heat was where Nathalia kept her hand underwater.

Salamander was using her newfound powers as a Tier 2 elemental to boil away what was hurting her. The pool was quickly vanishing, which made the dragoness rapidly pull her hand back. “Blasted girl!” she cursed and tossed Salamander aside like a boring toy. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get water here? The Faith of volcanoes hardly feeds lakes.”

Salamander didn’t but she also didn’t care, quickly flying over to John and hiding behind his ear, “Just stop abusing me!” she demanded. Nathalia looked at her half empty bath with extreme dissatisfaction, ignoring the elemental’s latest comment.

“I will have to get that fixed.” Nathalia sighed, then growled, then shook her head. If he had been any less interesting, John got the feeling he would have been blackened bones by now. “Not having a bath is an unacceptable state of my Sanctum, even worse than not having my spires anymore.” The dragoness raised a hand to the stone in her chest, her face became slightly distorted in the slight agony the next act caused her.

With the sound of a glacier breaking apart, power rippled out through the landscape. It forced John’s aura sight open and for the first time he beheld what Nathalia’s supernatural presence was. It was so thick that she herself was almost invisible underneath it, the golden glow somehow unsteady as it swelled and collapsed for each of the three times she carved a splinter out of the gemstone.

John dismissed the blinding way of seeing her as quickly as he could. The way and flow of Nathalia’s aura had reminded him of a certain other one he much rather not be reminded of for as long as possible. The dragoness was lava amidst a sea of normality, refusing to be one with anything less than herself.

“Give me your hand,” Nathalia commanded while extending her own. A bit reluctantly, John did lay his right hand into hers. Nathalia pressed one of the three splinters against John’s ring finger. The smell of searing flesh was disgusting, and the pain was much worse. Lava bubbled up from the surface of the splinter, wrapping around the half-exposed bone and slowly formed a ring. At the end he was left with a black ring. The orange gem at the top glistened in the light.

‘The main thing is probably that it makes the necklace that much better,’ John thought with a worried look at his HP bar.

“Now, the other hand,” Nathalia instructed.

“Can we postpone that a bit?” John asked.

“Don’t be a weakling, John,” Salamander said.

“I agree with the nuisance,” Nathalia added, a hint of disappointment in her eyes. “You got through the first without screaming, you will survive a second time.”

“No, actually, I literally won’t,” John stated and explained, “This reduced my health to 23, another experience like that and I die.”

Awkward silence. John could see the idea of just doing it anyway go through the dragoness’ head. Thankfully, it did not manifest into action. “I don’t have time to wait for you, is there a way to heal you?”

“Well, if I had a level-up…” John didn’t even have the chance to end his sentence before Nathalia bit his hand. The quick and painful way to acquire a medium to connect with him.

“That did it?” Nathalia asked just to be sure, already grabbing his left hand.

“Ye-aaaaaaaaaah,” John shouted in pain as the searing sensation returned. His flesh was burned right off the bone, as the ring formed around his finger. He was left with a perfect copy of the other ring, pitch-black, the shard of Nathalia glinting at the top.

“There, now you are marked as mine, From now until forever, all shall know to whom you belong,” Nathalia said with a satisfied smirk.

For a second, John contemplated an unwise action and then, despite his better judgement, decided to go through with it. “Actually….” He opened up his inventory and just pulled the rings off their respective slots and into his inventory. Both vanished from where they were, not even leaving scars behind.

Nathalia’s smile froze and died. Arms were folded underneath her scaled breasts. An annoyed tapping of her fingers against her elbow reverberated with impossible volume in the air. “You would refuse my mark, John Newman?” she finally hissed a warning.

“I thought we agreed that I’m not your property.”

“We agreed that I will let you go free to see you grow into an ever more worthy lay.”

“Then let me be clear: I’m not your property,” John pushed the envelope. He had gotten away with too much and was the target of too many investments by her to think he couldn’t redefine their relationship bit by bit. “I do not enjoy being used, Nathalia, and I especially do not enjoy being taken for granted. What I do with you, I do because I like it as much as you do. If that’s not the case, you won’t get what you want either.”

Nathalia pressed a rumbling growl out of her throat. Fire pushed out between clenched, carnivorous teeth. Her lips peeled back to an inhumane degree. She inhaled deeply and took a step forward. John stood his ground. “Whatever,” she finally spat out and pushed the third shard into his hand. “This one you best feed to that creation of yours.”

Latent power tingled in the Gamer’s hand, the shard radiating lingering divinity. “Ehm… could you create a fourth item instead? I think I would get a bigger bonus fro-“

“I lack the ability to create more items for you. Bother somebody else,” Nathalia snapped at him, claws tearing into the air itself. It did not take an especially wise man to realize that he had pushed her as far as he could, so he just shut up and watched the cracks spread through the air.

He realized immediately what was happening. Nathalia was tearing her way back into the Illusion Barrier she had abducted him from – and was having a hard time of it. The initially casual gesture changed to a strained, two-handed prying. The Protected Space was clearly fighting to keep her out and it was almost working.

‘Magoi really is worth 500 billion, huh?’ John thought.

However good Magoi was, it was not enough to keep Nathalia out. The tear opened wider and wider. “I fulfilled my end of this bargain,” Nathalia declared, her shoulders trembling. “Survive, John, I demand you return my investment. When I feel like it, I will find you again.” With those words, she widened the gap to a level that John could walk through. “Now, leave.”

The edges of the tear were trembling and it would doubtlessly take very little time for it to close again. Still, John took the gesture to place a quick kiss on the cheek of the dragoness. The quick gesture of affection made her jolt back in surprise. “Thank you,” was all John had to say, before jumping through the tear. Whether by happenstance or because of an embarrassed goddess, it slammed shut right behind him.