Chapter 708: The flip side (NSFW)

“I know how you like us. After a fight.”

Haley grinned and waved at some of the other girls to get closer. In a few seconds, nine of Mason’s women were standing in a line. In lingerie. Making a collection of sexy, pouty faces and poses.

“Oh this is ridiculous.” Demi covered her protruding belly with a hand. “I look like a whale. Haley’s eyes are bloodshot. And half of you are so tired you can hardly stand.”

“Would you just…” Haley glared and lowered her voice. “We agreed we’re doing this! He’s been through a lot worse than us!”

Mason stood in the doorway of his private residence, glancing back and forth between his women. Haley was right. He’d nearly died a few times in the final battle. His veins had been full of divine poison. He’d just about blown his brain up by overloading on mana.

Oh, and then he’d learned they were all clones, which he assumed was a secret better to take to his grave. And he lost his brother to another world. And he’d spent the last few hours making himself carry the bodies of the dead players who fought for mankind.

But…looking at all his women in their ridiculous line, arguing about how best to cheer him up…well. They already succeeded.

“How about a movie,” he said. “With too much popcorn. And a giant mattress on the floor. Just for cuddling.”

The human girls all started grinning. The elves and orc looked resigned. Lodie wobbled on her feet but beamed. She loved movies more than Rosa and Lexi, if that were possible. Though it was like watching a cat paw at the screen.

“Action!” The goblin princess stabbed a hand in the air. “With lots of explosions!”

Even Mason gave her an incredulous glare.

“We just fought the biggest battle ever.” Demi spoke for all of them. “You literally blew yourself up with a machine gun. And now you want explosions?”

“Movies aren’t real.” Lodie shook her head at looked at everyone like Demi was an idiot. “Oh! And I’ll do the corn popping! I like how they…you know.”

The girl was consistent, Mason had to give her that. And the truth was she was impossible not to like. He also found himself staring at her exposed, perky green ass as she half bounced, half limped towards the kitchen in her underwear.

“Just cuddling, remember?” Lexi busted him as she came up and took his arm like they were going on a date. She led him towards the nearest couch. “Relax and sit. We’ll do everything. Becky and Dura can carry the mattress, I’m sure.”

“I could use my scooter!” Lodie shouted. Just about everyone called back ‘no’.

“OK, geez. It was just suggestion.”

Someone started some music. Some kind of smooth jazz without words. Mason slid his ‘mortal’ bar down to near the bottom and tried to do what Lexi told him.

Haley brought him a plate full of different kinds of food he couldn’t identify, but he didn’t care. It tasted amazing and he chewed with closed eyes. Ayet brought him some wine. After gulping it and almost coughing at the burn, he maybe even felt like he’d had alcohol.

They got the mattress. They covered it in pillows and blankets and shoved it up against a couch for a headboard. Then they piled in with Mason vaguely in the center. Some kind of action flick from the 1990s. Possibly with Bruce Willis.

Haley was out cold before the opening credits. Becky followed soon, and Demi moved up to the couch when she got uncomfortable. But she lay right next to his head, stroking her hands through his hair. His eyes were fluttering in less than an hour, and he drifted off to Lodie asking what something was for the thirtieth time.

Some girls stayed on the mattress. Others did their bathroom routines and moved to their own rooms, or the huge bed in Mason’s. After a good nap he was feeling a lot better, and like some kind of horny shark smelling lust in the water, Haley perked up with his libido.

He quietly spread her legs and took her there on the mattress a few minutes later. He kissed her slow and deep and smiled when their eyes met.

“Better than a hammock in a tree?”

She stifled a laugh and moaned as he kept going, digging nails and heels into his back as she wrapped herself around him. She felt amazing, so soft and warm and wet and his. He felt like he hadn’t been properly touched in months, and realized how much of the detail he’d lost with his near impenetrable form.

Every touch sent little chills through him. Haley soon realized and trailed her fingers up and down his spine, giggling whenever he shivered. With his ‘mortal’ body, he was damn near tired and sweaty by the time he finished. But he enjoyed every second of it.

Haley also failed to keep things quiet. Soon there were other sleepy girls with fluttering, lust-filled eyes. Others popped up to leer like those rodent things in Madagascar from behind couches or doors.

He sighed, and waved in all takers, taking challengers one by one. He made it through four before laying flat, staring at the ceiling, utterly spent.

Haley literally checked his temperature. The recently filled Rosa popped up from under him like she was genuinely alarmed, and suddenly there were four or five women all hovering over him in alarm.

“I’m fine.” He smiled like an idiot, brain hardly working. “Can’t a man get enough?”

There was a lot of muttering. Someone suggested a healer. It was his own fault, he supposed. A real ‘you fuck it you buy it’ situation. He’d definitely been spending a lot more than a normal man could afford. Sometimes you had to pay your tab.

It was a tough job. He rolled his eyes and slid up his divine meter, checking if he could modify Gaia’s Blessing. The answer was yes. Yes he could. And he cranked up the intensity as he started pulling in girls.

Before long he had them in a pile. Every piece of him that could be inserted into something found a willing participant. The girls forgot how tired they were. They moaned like porn stars. They stared in slack-jawed lust at him, and sometimes at each other. They got their mouths on anything in range.

He kept at it until he’d exhausted everyone but Becky, pounding his cowgirl last with enough force to loosen the floorboards. When she finished she just lay there like a kitten in one of those videos, falling asleep mid-meow around all the other sleeping, satisfied women.

He grinned and kissed her sweaty forehead, giving a half-awake Demi a final grin and hand-squeeze. Then he formed his vestments and went out into the night.

**

‘Progenitors’ didn’t really need sleep, apparently. Even before his new power, Mason hadn’t done it much. He could have dropped his meter again to mortal mode, but the nap and brief time with his girls had honestly been enough.

He was so used to problems. To dangers and crises and in a constant race against time to be stronger, better, more ready for the next challenge. The game was over. The war for the prime had been won. But he knew he had one more thing to do before he could put away the ‘horned prince’ and become a man again.

To kill some time, he Shifted and flew over the forest, testing his new divine power, seeing the world like a god. At max meter the laws of physics were more like guidelines.

He Feywalked across the world with no effort or landmarks, blinking across continents like he had a permanent teleporter. He watched the prime through a Wayfinder power that was more like Google Maps—except in perfect, real time, zoomable enough to watch the furtive eyes of a squirrel.

It was too much power. An impossible freedom that left him wondering what any creature like that would become. What it should do with itself. He hovered over an ocean trying to imagine what it was like to be roboGod, feeling maybe the smallest inkling.

In the end, he decided he’d never truly know. And didn’t care to.

He plunged into the ocean and explored the depths, seeing the beauty of this new world with perfect sight in the deepest dark. He found a whale the size of a building, and gave it a wave. It snorted and called him an idiot through One with Nature as it swam off. He chuckled and watched little air bubbles float away.

He waited until sunrise to be polite. And then he woke Carl, Alex, his scouts, some elves, and a few others. It was pretty easy when you could click their names from anywhere in the world, and talk to them like you were in their brains. He tried not to think about Blake, but wished he’d at least had the chance to mess with his sleep a few times.

“What? What’s happening? Who is that?”

Carl jumped up in a panic, naked and blinking in exhaustion as Mason’s voice hit him.

Just come to the scout’s enclave. And stop being so loud or you’ll wake up the…

Carl’s baby woke up and started crying. Sylvie hissed and stared daggers, no idea what her husband was doing. Mason quietly severed the connection.

Twenty minutes later, he was standing in the scout’s enclave with most of his command team and all the key scouts. Plus the elven high mage and some of his people.

“Thanks for coming. I know yesterday was…long. But I have two trapped soldiers.” He met Alex’s eyes and gave him a small smile before looking around the room. “I need to get to the infernal plane, and the abyss. I was hoping the people in this room might have some ideas how.”

Haley warped beside him in a comfy looking bath robe. He needed to find a way to turn off her assistant powers, or something.

“You’re leaving again? Already? Why? I mean…it can’t be that important!”

Mason did his best to ignore the now awkward looking collection of helpers.

“Can’t leave Phuong in hell, can I? Imagine if it was Becky. Would you want me relaxing a month while she suffered who knows what?”

Haley slowly deflated, realizing how many people were around and pulling her bathrobe tighter.

“How long will it take?”

“Not long.”

“Quite long,” Alex said.

Mason turned and glared. The Belarusian didn’t even flinch.

“Lying bad for soul.”

“I wasn’t…I was just…and you can speak Russian, God damnit. Or whatever ‘Belarusian’s’ speak. There’s nothing listening to you anymore.”

“Then how does translate?”

Mason considered that and found he had no response. He took a breath and met Haley’s blue eyes.

“We don’t know how long it’ll take. Could be a few days or weeks. Hell maybe I can do it in hours.”

“Not likely,” Alex mumbled.

Mason took a deep, calming breath. The man was the light god’s avatar. Practically a saint. It would probably be bad karma to break his legs.

“Probably a few months.”

Haley reacted how one might expect. Her face went from disbelief to rage to guilt-inducing sadness in about two seconds.

“You’re going to hell? For a few months? Now?”

Mason did his best to think of something comforting. ‘Only if the elves can portal me?’ That made it sound like he might get blown up in an accident or something. ‘I don’t want to go’? Alex would probably bust him with another perfectly timed witticism about lying.

“We’ll have years together.” He took her shoulders and attempted his best comforting smile. “Decades and decades. And it’s perfectly safe now. You’ll hardly miss me.”

It was clear Haley knew it was happening whether she liked it or not. And also that Mason would have some damage control to do when he came home.

“How will you even get back? You won’t have the elves to portal you, or whatever.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“It’s big problem, actually.”

“Could you…” Mason turned and glared at Alex. “This is a private conversation. Maybe all of you could just…” he gestured across the room. “And no, it’s not a problem, because I’m friends with a plane walking deer.”

He turned back to Haley with what he assumed was a winning smile. She didn’t look impressed.

“You can’t fight a war forever, Mason.”

He thought about Chinua saying almost the exact same words, and tried not to despair. He didn’t want that. He didn’t. He just needed…a little time, you know? To transition.

“Phuong and Annie need my help.”

“And Annie? You didn’t even mention Annie. She’s in hell, too? My god.”

He carefully looked to see if Alex was still listening, and lowered his voice.

“The…abyss, technically. I’ll come back after the hell thing. It’ll be separate trips.”

Haley glared, tired eyes boring into him.

“Why does this feel like some kind of Vegas trip for you?”

“I have no idea. There’ll be demons all over the place. Nothing to eat. Poison air. I’ll miss you and the girls every second.”

“You’re smiling.”

He put a hand to his mouth reflexively.

“I am not.”

Haley punched him in the arm, clearly doing her best not to look like it hurt. Then she pulled her bathrobe tighter and stormed off, stopping to promise all the men in the room she’d turn all their wives and girlfriends against them if they didn’t get Mason back as soon as possible. She slammed the scout enclave door. Mason turned to stare daggers at his ‘high priest’.

“Thanks for the help. Really first rate stuff.”

Alex shrugged.

“I keep soul clean. Better in end, I think.”

“I’m immortal. I could torture a priest for a hundred years. No after-life ramifications.”

That at least got the son of a bitch to shut up. Mason turned and jabbed a finger towards Carl and Erik, asking if this was even a thing, if they could send him and how. They conferred and spoke awhile until the elven high mage cleared his throat.

“We can send you to any plane you wish, King Mason. But your high priest is correct—the return journey is…more difficult. All planes have special rules. Leaving the infernum requires specific exit locations. We don’t know much about them. But I can tell you what we know.”

That got things moving. And pretty soon the elves were inviting some other experts from their ranks, and telling Mason and his people all about the joys of the ‘infernum’. It…didn’t sound great.

“Your memories will be under constant attack,” explained their scholar. “The infernum’s aura will attack your powers, your mana, and your soul itself. No living being can exist there long without considerable aid. But there are places to rest. To hide from the aura. We can give you a rough map of what we know.”

In another hour, Mason had a map of the hell plane uploaded into his Wayfinder. He had a dozen ‘soul trinkets’ the elves said would help protect him. They explained each would change color when it was drained. And that when the last ran out, they didn’t know how long he’d have.

He was honestly less worried than they were. For all he knew, Apex Predator would sort out the problem entirely. But it seemed better to be safe than sorry. He gave his people another few hours to gather anything useful from his own civilians. But there was a lot of ‘maybes’ and ‘probablys’. No one really knew what he was dealing with.

After a very brief goodbye to his girls, he was back in the scout’s enclave with a backpack full of gear, staring at a swirling red portal as the elves finished their magic.

“Take this.” Alex handed him what looked like a rabbit’s foot with a nod and a gesture. “For apology. For before. With woman.”

Mason inspected it and raised an eyebrow.

“Some hidden divine artifact? Will it resurrect me if I die?”

“No. It’s just rabbit foot. Very lucky.”

He nodded like this was the ticket. Mason shook his head and looked at Carl for solidarity.

“You’re a good man, kid. That’s for sure. I like Phuong, too. But if you guys both get stuck down there, no fucking way am I coming to hell to get you. So just, do your best.”

Mason looked between the men. His chief ministers and theoretically the main leaders of mankind.

“I think we might have to address this policy of extreme honesty. You could have just said, ‘don’t worry, we’ve got your back’.”

Carl slapped his shoulder and smiled.

“Don’t worry. We’ve got your back.”

Mason turned on Progenitor at full blast with a quick slide. He grinned as man and elf squinted or covered their eyes and pulled back in panic.

Yeah, he thought, remember what you’re dealing with, you sons of bitches.

He grew himself wings and horns because why not, letting out his Honor Blades and forming his claws on one hand, a sword in the other. Haley was right, of course, as usual. The idea of going down to hell kind of excited him.

If anyone deserved a big steaming pile of his special attention, it was the shit-eaters of the infernum. Maybe he’d make a little side quest of butchering every last demon in sight on the way to finding Phuong. Give them a little taste of their own medicine.

“See you on the flip side,” he tried to say, but more like boomed with a weird, multi-voiced growl. Then he leapt into the swirling portal, and vanished from the prime.