[Vol. 4 pt. 23]

And so, we quested.

There wasn’t much to gain from it, for me, aside from personal satisfaction and getting to spend time with the others. After all, I was already at the level cap. Even doing the quests on other classes to level them up wasn’t exactly effective since doing quests was a pathetically slow method of leveling. Running a single dungeon would take the same amount of time it took to complete one of the game’s overly long quests and reward about ten times the total amount of experience during it, not to mention be more engaging and offer better rewards.

Questing was very much designed with the roleplayers and lore hounds in mind. For somebody like me who didn’t really care about the game’s plot and side stories… the quests were tedious. At their absolute best, they made me feel just a tiny bit emotional at times, and the emotions they could make me feel were nothing when compared to the emotions I might feel from literally anything else.

I just wasn’t into story and questing in an MMORPG. All I wanted was fun dungeon combat and lots of lewd sex. Mainly the latter. Everything else was just side content that I didn’t care about unless the game tried to force it onto me, and the way that I cared about it in that regard was negative.

But it did give me something to do while hanging out with the others. Plus, no matter how useless the quests were for me, they did give me a tiny bit of a feeling of pride and accomplishment by clearing them out of my quest log. It was nice seeing the number of quests I had finally going down instead of sitting at the max amount possible for forever.

As for Lily and Meadow, they both got to level up and unlock content during it, since a decent amount of the game’s dungeons and other special content forms were locked behind completing specific quest chains, and then there was Akorya who was having fun screwing around on classes too low leveled for where we were since she never really bothered leveling up her alternate classes.

And by screwing around, I mean that she used her lower level to aggro every monster she could while running around before pulling them all back together to us.

Games always did that. Players above monsters’ level would get ignored by the monsters while players under the monsters’ level would grab their attention way more easily.

That was what Akorya too advantage of to cause trouble for us. She always did it whenever I wasn’t looking and while I was on my lower-level classes, too. She knew that I could wreck the mobs if she did it while I was on my higher-level classes, so she waited until I was switched back onto a lower-level one and not paying attention.

The resulting chaos was us getting swarmed by monsters and having to actually try our hardest to kill them.

Honestly, it was fun. Akorya’s attempts at causing chaos made the day more exciting and helped to make questing more interesting. It also gave me something to threaten punishment for. Of course, the more I threatened to punish her for causing us trouble, the more motivated she was to cause said trouble.

But what was the point in threatening punishment if not trying to entice the person into doing something that earns punishment?

It was a win-win for everybody involved. Well, maybe except for Lily and Meadow who struggled to keep up with the chaos. Lily especially. Given that she was a healer, she was the one responsible for keeping us alive, and she had to desperately heal us to do that as a result of Akorya’s actions. Meadow, meanwhile, struggled to know who she was supposed to focus on and what to do when going up against as many enemies as Akorya would aggro.

It was probably good training for both of them. Lily got to learn how to heal under stress a bit more and Meadow got to learn when to prioritize AoE abilities and when to prioritize single target abilities. In many cases, AoE skills were worthless when up against just two or three enemies. Single target abilities usually did more total damage at that point. It was only really when going up against four or more enemies that AoE abilities came out on top since, at that point, they did more total damage than the single target ones. In a similar light, Lily learned about when to prioritize group healing or single target healing. None of us were on a dedicated tank class, unless I caught on to Akorya misbehaving and managed to switch to my main class before she could pull me into combat, so the aggro was spread out across us which resulted in all of us taking some damage.

But more importantly, Lily learned something even better.

She learned when to DPS and when to heal.

No matter how long MMOs existed for, people still always argued about whether or not healers should be pure healers or if they should be expected to do DPS, too. As far as most developers were concerned, healers were expected to deal damage as well and balanced endgame encounters around that fact. Even if healers contributed the least to a group’s total damage output, they still often contributed enough to avoid rage timers and the like.

So, I made sure to instruct Lily to try and hold back on the healing until we were below half our total health, and then to spam a few AoE heals until we were all back up to a decent amount.

Lily was the kind of girl who just wanted to focus on healing and not have to worry about doing damage, but she was also the kind of girl who wanted to do her best and not feel like she was holding anybody back. Just focusing on healing meant that there was downtime where we were fighting and she was standing around doing nothing or keeping us capped off by over-healing us, so I started the process of changing what it meant to be a healer for her.

Healers were damage dealers first and foremost who only healed when the party needed it. They were DPS with a side of healing.

Even just thinking that would probably cause countless healers to come for my head. That was why I never bothered making videos talking about game mechanics outside of lewd ones.

Pissed off gamers arguing about intended mechanics and individual choices were even more annoying than the people who tried to ruin my career whenever I said something in a slightly offensive way.

Overall, though, it was a fun day of spending time together and clearing out my quest log.

In total, I managed to finish… sixty out of the hundred quests I had accepted, I accepted another thirty since completing some unlocked others, and then having room in my quest log allowed other quests to be visible again which resulted in me accepting enough quests to have a completely filled log again by the end of the day.

I remembered why I had issues with quests in the first place and why I never bothered going through them.

I hated seeing those exclamation marks above NPCs’ heads. I had a compulsive desire to get rid of them, and the easiest way of getting rid of them was by simply accepting the quests. Once they were accepted, I didn’t need to actually do them. And once my quest log was full, I wouldn’t be able to see any more new, potential quests at all. And all of this led to me simply never doing quests because no matter how many I did, there were always more, resulting in me ending up in the exact same position that I started in since I didn’t like questing for the sake of questing enough to ever complete them all.

“I’m never going to be free,” I said, sighing with Meadow at my side atop the grassy hill we were standing on. Meanwhile, Lily and Akorya were setting up a picnic blanket up ahead. Lily had the idea of having a picnic once we were done grinding quests for the day, so it was time for that.

“Maybe… you should do that one quest you want without worrying about all the others?” Meadow suggested. It was a good suggestion, honestly, and one that I probably should have just gone for in the first place rather than hopelessly try to go through the rest of the quests first.

“I know. I think I will. The problem is that… it doesn’t exactly tell me anything specific to do. All the objective lists is proving my worth to become a champion of Lust. So, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve gotten some more sex-based achievements, I’ve broken a few records, and I have a dungeon dedicated to sex which is growing more and more popular. But the quest objective has never been updated. I know my one friend, Sophie—she’s Gluttony’s chosen champion. She basically told me all I have to do, probably, is a bunch of sex stuff until the quest updates and gives me a more specific questline to follow. But it’s been a while and nothing has happened.”

Meadow looked up at me and blinked a few times before saying, “One moment!” Before I could react, she said, “Done! I found out what you have to do.”

“You—you can do that?”

“I have access to almost everything. Actually doing anything inside of the system would make it too obvious I’m here, but just looking at it is no problem! Do you want me to tell you what you have to do?”

I thought about that for a few seconds. On one hand, I wanted to accomplish it on my own without any cheating. Getting knowledge from her about what I had to do to complete a hidden objective, which wasn’t known to anybody and could only be obtained via non-intentional means, was basically cheating.

But I also wanted to get it over with.

“Tell me what I have to do for the current step… but don’t tell me what I have to do after it,” I answered. “I only want to know the part I’m stuck on. If I end up stuck on the next part, I’ll ask for help again.”

“Got it!” Meadow replied. “Okay. So, for this part, you already met all the requirements except for two.”

“And those are?”

“You have to… umm… you have to… well… Alyxandria of the Crimson Court and the Lost Queen of Futanaria, Aria. You have to… you know, make them submit. In a lewd way.”

“I have to fuck them into submission?”

Meadow blushed a bit and nodded.

If that was all I had to do, then things just got a lot clearer. But at the same time… they also got far, far harder.

Alyxandria of the Crimson Court was an endgame raid boss. She was also a giant dragon. Not a dragon monster girl or anything like that, but an actual dragon. The kind of dragon where one of her claws was bigger than my entire body. I… didn’t even know that she could be fucked into submission given the massive size difference there. I was going to have to figure out some incredible tactic to make her cum over and over until she was defeated.

And then there was Aria, more commonly known by players as “Queen Futa.” And that nickname of hers was then shortened to the inevitable… “QueeF.” But nickname aside, defeating her would be far easier. She was just the last boss of an endgame dungeon rather than a raid, and she was actually human sized unlike Alyxandria.

So, I had to fuck a dragon and a futa.

Fucking a dragon and futa into submission were all that were standing between me and the next phase of the quest.

I just had no idea how I was going to defeat the dragon. She was old content, so any casual max level player already had gear that was a higher item level than what was needed to defeat her before, so actually reaching her with a group wouldn’t be difficult at all. It was just the fucking her into submission part that was going to be hard.

Unless…

“I’m going to need Wally and Sophie for this,” I said. “With their help, I think I know how I might be able to fuck a dragon into submission.”

“A dragon, eh?” a familiar, but different voice asked from behind. Honestly, hearing the voice made me jump a little. It was the voice of an older man, and there wasn’t supposed to be an older man around us.

And when I turned around to see who it was, it was that same old man I sat in the city with before. The cool, old guy who had his own harem of girls and boys probably too young for him obsessed with him.

“Fred?” I asked.

“You remembered! Good on you, boy,” Fred replied.

“Where the heck did you come from?”

“Ah, well, was gathering some iron down there. One of my boys is trying to level up his blacksmithing and I’m too cheap to buy the iron from the market for him, so thought I would mine it myself. Saw a familiar face up here, so thought I would come say hi. Now, what’s this about fucking a dragon?”

“Well, nice to see you again, as random as this is.” While I talked to him, Meadow tucked herself away behind my back, only poking her head out from behind me to look at Fred. Meanwhile, Lily and Akorya were apparently busy making out on top of the picnic blanket they set up. That usually happened whenever I left them alone for more than five seconds. “And yeah. I have to go fuck Alyxandria into submission.”

“Ooh. Going to be Lust’s champion, eh?”

“You—you know about that?”

“Aye. Did that questline myself. Made it to the final step then dropped the quest. Figured that role would be wasted on somebody like me. Better to let somebody younger have it.”

I blinked a few times when I heard that. I already respected the old man, but I respected him even more after hearing that.

I also felt about ninety percent less special than I did for having the Lust’s champion questline seeing as how somebody else apparently already had it and basically finished it.

“Now, I know that dragon’s weak spots,” Fred continued. “I can tell you everything you need to know to make her squirm for you. She might be a big lady, but she’s as sensitive as any of them.”

I wanted Fred to be my grandpa.