The Magryph eventually had enough of the attention and curled up to sleep. Leaving the little furball alone to rest and grow some more, John and Eliza turned away from the network of wood, plastic and strings that was Velka’s habitat and left. Once outside, it only took a little talk to decide the rest of the day’s happenings.

John had to get back to work and his maniac lover, being not on duty to ‘sit under the table’, split off to instead go after her hobbies. Namely being: watching trash TV and painting something. They would meet again in the evening for the resummoning of Undine. It would (hopefully) not be of any importance. The abysstide elemental would be around for a minute, say everything was alright, and hop right back into her home plane. That was the presumed course of things anyway.

Just in case that wasn’t so, Siena and Eliza wanted to be around, being Undine’s closest friends in the harem.

If nothing else happened, at least they could go and feed Velka her dinner afterwards. The Magryph ate three times a day. Well, if she could have fed herself, she would probably have eaten all the time. That Velka got enough food and was growing properly, John had been assured after sending some pictures to Judith, his contact at the breeding farm.

Waiting for him in his office was, instead, his very own girlfriend. She tended to him for an hour, doing as a good girlfriend did and enthusiastically making him cum repeatedly, while joking and bantering whenever Jack was in some meeting somewhere. After her time was up, she was replaced with Lydia. There was a ten-minute transition period where both of them worked on his cock. Nothing got done in that time.

Although John would have never said it out loud, the sessions with Lydia must have been his favourite. Since her ascension to an hourglass figure and awakening as a blowjob slut, her skill and enthusiasm in giving head was just legendary. That only put her slightly above most of the harem, though, and John would have hesitated to call her the best. There were too many flavours to choose from, after all.

Skill wasn’t the main reason why he enjoyed the times with her under the table the most. It was the raw psychological thrill of it. Here she was, empress of another (much stronger) country, kneeling under his desk, vibrating butt plug in her ass, her red lips closed tightly around his shaft and drinking his seed greedily. John wasn’t even sure if anybody, aside from her bodyguards, knew that Lydia was taking near daily trips over to him. Only a dedicated few nobles, upper administrators, and palace service staff knew that the newly erected pavilion next to the embassy was a teleporter that went straight to the other side of the globe. Nobody but Lydia and the Knights of Teuton could even verify that ridiculous statement.

If someone would have told him on his 18th birthday that he would have the queen of Germany sneak out of her palace every day to serve him, while she was getting off over and over again from blowing his rod, his smartass would have likely pointed out that Germany hadn’t had a monarchy since the end of the first world war.

Regardless, she was there and she was urging him to continue his work through slightly unpleasant contact of her teeth with his dick. Once her limited time had been spent, John got into the common, but always wonderful, treat of a double shift of Aclysia and Beatrice. The passive maid was always eager to please him because she was in the room for most of all the other shifts. That John was getting sucked off under the table hadn’t changed the fact that she was his secretary, sitting at her glass desk only a few metres away.

A glass desk through which he could often see one hand working between her legs.

The last shift of the day then fell to Siena. While the novelty of her blowjobs had worn off by now, she was devilishly good at them regardless. John was really spoiled when it came to getting head. In his opinion, he had more than earned all of that.

When he put the last period to the last email he wanted to get done, he checked what else he had on overhang for tomorrow and found absolutely nothing. He had actually finished everything that had fluttered in throughout the day and his entire backlog. He couldn’t remember when that had happened last.

When he finally shut down his computer, pulled out of Siena’s throat, and left the office, it was no wonder that he was in an absolutely tremendous mood. It only improved when his post-work shower turned into a full body massage in the bathtub. Aclysia, Beatrice, Rave, Siena and Eliza, all five of them surrounded and rubbed him in all the right ways for about twenty minutes. Enough time for each of them to ride him once.

He arrived in the summoning room right on time, as clean as he possibly could be, relaxed down to the soul and with nothing on his mind but the immediate happenings. ‘What a ridiculously great day.’ John smiled as he inspected the black chalk circle. ‘Note to self, redraw with paint,’ he thought as he redrew some lines that seemed to have blurred out a little bit, despite all the care everyone had taken when leaving the room.

Only Eliza and Siena were there, everyone else was waiting back in the normal apartment for the news. John bowed down and used the Abysstide Elemental Summoning Skill once two of his fingers touched the circle. One second he felt the relative warmth of bare concrete in the inside of a magically heat-regulated building, the next it was the surface of shifting water.

The ground rippled from his fingers outwards, the tiny wave growing and replacing the grey ground with the smooth surface of a deep blue ocean. An ocean that began to rise, just as the room vanished completely around him. As the water went higher, the surface crawled over John’s skin. It never truly connected, forming a layer around him. He was being submerged, but not truly let in.

Staying calm, instinctively knowing that this was normal, John let out all the air in his lungs before the water reached his head. He closed his eyes, felt the cold envelop him. ‘It’s on me to let the water in,’ he thought and took a deep breath through his mouth.

Water flooded him and with it a moment of alien confusion. His consciousness drifted into another realm. He opened his eyes and found himself in depths unfathomable. He was floating, somehow, in an ocean without end. The surface was an eternity away, the bottom non-existent and all around him was the vastness of the ocean. It was quite beautiful. Tiny elementals, appearing like baby squid or tiny jellyfish, floated around as tiny particles through the paths of light that made it past the surface. They weren’t steady. Whatever the light source was, it rose and fell in unsteady intervals, sending lances of light into the darkness below. Where they couldn’t reach, bio-luminescent elementals shifted.

As beautiful as it was, as a human, John couldn’t help but be unnerved by the way the water limited his field of view. Aside from the elementals nice enough to glow, he didn’t know what else lurked down there. This wasn’t his natural place to be and he wouldn’t have been able to explore even if he wanted to. That required a much, much more extensive ritual, one he only knew was theoretically possible but didn’t know how. The summoning circle only enabled him to create a temporary connection to this realm. That he was even able to dip into it with his own soul and perceive it was proof of his own level as an elementalist.

Instead of staying around longer than he needed to, he stretched out his magic and called out with his soul. The connection he had with Undine rippled in the nearby water.

That was all he had to do. The summoning circle was charged and the call was made. Wherever she was, she could perceive and follow it. If she had been an unruly elemental, he could have invested quite a bit more mana into things and forced her to come out. As it was, he could either leave and wait in the real world, forced to stay in contact with the circle until she popped up, or just wait where he was. This scenery was a bit more interesting.

A high-pitched sound rang in his ears. ‘Am I getting soul-tinnitus?’ John wondered jokingly, checking his ears while looking around for the source. The ocean around him grew brighter. In a dash, as if caught in a current, all of the tiny water elementals around disappeared into the distant seas. Pressing one hand against his ear, the Gamer was now absolutely certain of something.

The noise was not coming from within and it was growing louder. From a high-pitched tone, it grew into a myriad of different sounds. The scream of a banshee. The swirling of immense amounts of water getting displaced. The titanic howling of currents around John as he felt himself getting raised by invisible hands. The oppressive beating of his own heart in his ears as he was face to face with the closest thing to omnipotence in this realm. He heard all of this as if he was in his flesh, as if he had developed to hear underwater.

Violently, he was ripped through the surface. The rain above was more oppressive than the completeness of the ocean, falling in vast streams from a black sky. There were less bubbles of air in the rain than water that fell. There was no sun, only lightning that danced endlessly over black clouds. They illuminated a black silhouette. John could see naught but the outline of her head, two gargantuan eyes of silver and a prismatic dot that sat in the middle of her forehead. He hovered in the air, somewhere between two unfathomably large hands, the rain getting forced into his insides through mouth and nose. Despite the ease at which he had breathed water earlier, he was now drowning – in a worse fashion than he could have ever imagined.

“I CAN’T CLEAN HER!” Her voice overpowered everything else, even the desperate beating of his heart. A beating that got weaker and weaker as John’s manifested body bloated and was crushed at the same time – a prison of water forming around him, the pressure increasing by the second. Just as he thought his skull would cave in, his eyes bursting like eggs, he was suddenly thrown back. The Mother of Water could no longer hold him in her realm.

His back hit the wonderful certainty of hard concrete and he desperately snapped for air. Confused, he looked around, felt around; his eyes were there but what he saw didn’t make sense. The Mother of Water was burned into his vision, an image that did not let him go. Even now, he saw the rivers that made up her hair slither around like the snakes of Medusa.

“…send me back…” he heard someone sing in terror. His hands grabbed something wet. No, something that was entirely liquid. Something warm and familiar. Despite his momentary aversion to all things water, he grabbed Undine tightly. “Don’t send me back. Don’t send me back. Don’t send me back.” Repeated over and over again, those pleads were a steady chant, a desperate chant for the tormented and fleeing.

Her fingers clawed into John’s chest, as she felt her head press against his shoulder. Wet spots quickly grew there, caused by a bodily reaction to fear and relief that was common among all humanoid lifeforms. Slowly, John realized again where up and down were, felt his own panic settle and let one of his hands wander to the back of Undine’s head. Still, she was begging to stay.

“Shhh,” he made a calming sound and stroked her hair, “you are home now. I am not sending you anywhere. You are safe here. You are home.”

“Don’t send me back, please…” Her voice became quieter, but her desperate chants continued. “She tore and tore, tore until nothing was left, but I couldn’t die and so she just tore again. Washed me apart. Simmered me down. Diluted me and tried to remove what she couldn’t. Don’t send me back. Please, never send me back…”

“I won’t,” John promised and put all of the truth that he could behind those words. With reckless abandon, he dived into her mind. It was a storm of fear, waves breaking on each other, uncertainties swimming around like leviathans hidden under the waves. He was tossed around by invisible currents, he had difficulty staying connected to his own mind. The intensity of her emotions threatened to throw him out and bar him from reentering when she needed him the most. Through sheer will, he stayed in there.

It wasn’t until Siena’s presence manifested in that ocean besides him that he was able to navigate, however. Physically, the shadow spirit kneeled down next to her fellow elemental and carefully put a hand on her back, as if she was touching a delicate piece of porcelain. What was visible of her back anyway, much of the abysstide elemental had become a greyish blue puddle. Eliza was less hesitating, almost throwing herself on top and embracing Undine as strongly as she could.

Together, those actions calmed her a little bit, and with Siena’s help, John dived into the crystal of imperfect ice that was Undine’s mental core. Cracks went through the translucent object, making it visible even underwater.

What his words failed to deliver, his emotions, pouring through their mental connection, could express. He sent her his honesty in the moment, memory of past adoration and images of where she was. Finally, Undine fell quiet, mumbling only a few more words in the elemental tongue. Something about them seemed to amuse Siena, but she managed to keep it to a small smile.

After five minutes of unmoving cuddles, Undine stopped trembling as well. Her body slowly reformed into her usual curves. Another five minutes passed, then she slowly raised her head and blinked. “Bring me home.” Her voice was so tiny and miserable that John’s heart sank in response. He just nodded and picked her up.

The walk back to his apartment wasn’t too long. Siena marched ahead, opening the doors for them, while Eliza and John did their best to chat with Undine about something normal, whenever she showed signs of wanting to talk. By the time they were at the apartment, Rave was already on her feet and awaiting them.

Worried, the Lightbearer walked over and looked at Undine with concerned eyes. After a few seconds, she sighed in relief and put her forehead on the water spirit’s. “You’ll be fine,” Rave stated and quickly kissed Undine. “Right? Ya gonna be fine!”

“I… think…?” Undine responded, more uncertain than weak.

“You’ll be fine.” Rave smiled like the sun and then stepped aside to let John go on to the bath. Inside, Aclysia and Beatrice were already preparing the bathtub. It was only half full, but John put Undine in regardless. It may have been a bit underwhelming, but this apartment in the Palace was their home and this was her favourite spot. John couldn’t imagine a better place for her to return to.

“Do you prefer it warmer now?” John asked, looking at the faucet. It was set to a relatively cold temperature, close to the one she had when being an ocean elemental. She nodded and Aclysia quickly adjusted. “Do you want your ships?” The question came regarding the Christmas present she had received last year. A small armada of wooden ships, enchanted to sail around randomly. Undine usually liked to watch them while she relaxed. This time, however, she shook her head.

“Just hold my hand, please, John,” she requested, her tone consolidating. She reached out, rested her arm on the rim of the large bathtub. Sitting down on the ground, John took the red-marked arm without hesitation. “I… I’ll be fine,” she decided, when she felt John’s hands around hers.