Chapter 61: Volume 1- [ - 62 ]
I looked down at the sisters. The system overlay showed their values — and the numbers had dropped. Sera’s breasts: ten points each. Lira’s: ten. Their pussies: twenty points each. The numbers had been higher once — before the night of the marathon, before the hours of fucking had drained their value like water from a cracked vessel.
‘Each fuck drops the points,’ I thought, kneading a pink nipple and a rose one in synchronized rhythm. ‘I cannot milk cows that are already milked. The sisters are depreciating assets — their value diminishes with every orgasm, every position, every load I pour into them. The law of diminishing returns.’
‘I could create scenarios. Impregnate them, then fuck them while pregnant — a new role, a new context, a temporary value bump. But that is a short-term fix. A patch, not a solution.’
‘Why go through the hassle? There is a saying from my old world: reloading a gun is slower than switching it. The sisters have served their purpose. They generated the points that opened the door. Now I need to walk through it — and on the other side are three Heroine-tier women whose point values are in the thousands, whose bodies are untapped, whose narrative weight makes them worth a hundred times what the sisters ever were.’
My hands squeezed. Both sisters gasped — a matched pair of soft, muffled sounds against my neck.
“Lord—” Sera whispered.
“Master—” Lira breathed.
“Rest,” I said. “Both of you.”
They quieted. Their bodies relaxed against mine, their breathing deepening, their hands going still on my chest. They slept — or dozed, or floated in the half-conscious space between waking and dreaming, their bodies so accustomed to my presence that my lap had become their natural resting place.
I looked at Mirra. She was across the chamber, her knees drawn to her chest, her eyes on the floor. Her internal voice was a quiet, repetitive loop:
‘He called me Mirra. His mother’s name. He looked at me and saw his mother. I look like his mother. His lost mother. He misses her. He—’
The seed was growing. I needed to water it.
I stood. Carefully — lifting the sisters and setting them on the bench without waking them, adjusting the bedsheet over their bodies. I walked to Mirra. Sat beside her.
“You should rest,” I said. “The second half will be harder.”
She looked up. Her brown eyes were wet but steady. “I — I know. I just — I cannot stop thinking about the others. The party that ran. They were — they were not bad men. They were just scared. And I—”
“You did not blow up the bag on purpose,” I said. “And you did not make the dungeon spawn goblins. You were in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with people who were not strong enough to survive the situation. That is not your fault.”
‘Not my fault,’ her internal voice echoed, and the words felt strange in her mind — unfamiliar, like a language she had heard but never spoken. ‘He said it is not my fault. No one has ever — the others always said it was. My fault. My bad luck. My—’
“The other parties,” I said, and my voice was gentle, probing, the voice of a man who wanted to understand. “The ones that were killed. Tell me about them.”
She told me. All of it. The Swords of Dawn — her first party, the kind one, the one that forgave her. The trap in the second-floor corridor of a level three dungeon, the ceiling collapse, the three men who died while she survived because she had been bending to pick up a dropped vial. The second party — the Iron Hammers, less kind, less forgiving, the blame sharper, the resentment building. The monster surge on the fifth floor, the overwhelming wave of creatures that should not have been there, the three fighters who held the line while she ran, the sounds of their deaths behind her as she fled.
The third party — the Silver Arrows. Cold, professional, the kindness gone entirely. They had taken her because they needed a healer, and they had treated her as a tool, not a person. The explosive bag — placed by their rogue, she had been told to camp beside it, she had not known — the blast, the goblins, the three men who had survived the explosion and fled into the dungeon rather than face the monsters outside.
‘And now they are gone too,’ she whispered internally. ‘And I am still here. Because I am unlucky. Or lucky. I do not know which.’
“You survived,” I said. “Four parties. Four catastrophes. And you survived every one. That is not unlucky, Mirra.”
She looked at me. The word — her name, his mother’s name — landed differently this time. Not as a surprise. As an anchor.
“Then what is it?” she asked.
I held her gaze. Let the silence fill with the things I could not say — that she was blessed, that a goddess had chosen her, that the adventurers around her had been tested and found wanting, that the universe had been weighing their souls and they had been too light, too selfish, too weak to survive the proximity of divine attention.
“I do not know,” I said instead. “But I know this — you are here. Alive. And that means something.”
She looked down. Wiped her eyes. When she looked up again, the tears were still there, but something else was too — a flicker of something that was not hope, not yet, but was the space where hope could grow.
‘Thank you,’ her internal voice whispered. ‘No one has ever — thank you.’
I patted her shoulder. Stood. Walked back to the bench where the sisters slept.
‘The seed is planted,’ I thought. ‘Now it needs time, and water, and the right conditions. She will be mine. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon.’
We cleared the dungeon.
Seven floors. Seven hours. The monsters came in waves — goblins, kobolds, corrupted wolves, a nest of giant rats on the fourth floor that swarmed from every direction, their teeth clicking against Seraphine’s shield, their bodies falling to my gun and Elwen’s spells. The fifth floor held a troll — a hulking, regenerating mass of muscle and rage that Seraphine held at bay with her shield while I emptied the Serpent’s Fang into its face. Six shots. The troll fell. The sixth floor was traps — Elwen’s detection spells finding the pressure plates and tripwires, Seraphine’s shield absorbing the one that Elwen missed, the corridor exploding in a shower of stone dust and shrapnel that Seraphine walked through without flinching.
“Your endurance is remarkable,” I said, watching her lower her shield, the surface pocked with shrapnel impacts. “The way that blast hit you and you did not even step back — that is not normal durability.”
Seraphine looked at me. The compliment landed again — on the pride, on the warrior’s soul, on the part of her that had spent her life being treated as a wall and wanted to be seen as a person.
“My shield technique is based on anchoring,” she said, and the explanation was offered freely, without prompting — the first time she had volunteered information rather than responding to interrogation. “I root my stance to the ground and distribute the force through my entire body, not just my arm. It is a Durren technique, actually — developed by the Durren army for their shield-bearers.”