DAY 120
EARLY MORNING
Wow, I give you a souvenir, and this is the thanks I get? No help freeing me from Orphan-Tanuki Mountain?
ON THE ROAD IN THE KINGDOM
ALCHEMY REFORMED MY BROKEN BODY. It breathed fresh life into me, cell by cell, in fierce waves wracking me from my head to my toes. Behold, the powers of magic conversion—an ability that turned deadly poison to desirable panacea, toxic magic to therapeutic medicament. Neidanshu combined with Qi Wizardry and Alchemy’s transmogrification. Capital Lovemaking and lowercase lovemaking knitted HP and MP together into new, more powerful flesh—which did not help me beat the dungeon emperors. Not one bit.
I woke up earlier than any person has any right to, threw on my armor, and buckled down to the serious business of wreaking revenge. The full force of my equipment thrummed through me. My Alchemical engines revved. Energy surged through me and channeled into my poor, defenseless, half-asleep teenage boyness, giving him the awakening of his life. He quivered to attention. He shuddered with the tremulous quality of a newborn fawn. Quivering man-whip in hand, I turned to the dungeon emperors and found…horrible smiles on their waking faces.
So much for a surprise attack! My poor teenage boyness, now ringed in by a wall of feminine foes, was soon spent. He was sent to the point of no return. He was rendered limp and deaf to my commands. The Magi Draining Bottle sent me back to square one, and I went down in a hail of red, white, and yellow pom-poms. My cheerleader combatants descended on my immobile teenage boyness like a pack of harpies. The verdict was in: The cheerleading uniforms were a big hit.
“I didn’t even know it was possible to weaponize pom-poms!”
The girls shook certain spherical objects. These items bounced. They boinged. They traveled up and down the length of my body in a great rustling of cloth, setting my senses on fire and sending my sensory faculties straight to heaven.
“Did you know the word ‘pom-pom’ comes from the French ‘pompon’? ‘Pompon’ refers to a small ball or tuft of cloth. In America, home of the cheerleader, this became ‘pom-pom.’ An unassuming name for such a majestic piece of equipment, in my humble opinion. And this usage of your majestic pieces of equipment should be outlawed the world over, methinks! Especially six at once, all bobbing up and down!”
“Rah! Rah! Sis-boom-bra!”
“Gwaah!”
My recent transformations and the dungeon emperor machinations brought on serious stimulations, causing major elevations and shuddering palpitations!
“Whoa, girl! Easy does it! Didn’t they ever tell you slow down, you’ll mess up if you go too fast? You’re messing me up! I’m about to make a mess in every direction at once, at the rate you’re going! You’re tossing me around like a piece of fruit in a blender! I’m shaking like a leaf in a tornado!!!”
In between all the external tossing and turning, my qi found the time to race through my bloodstream and trace thousands of patterns through my body. I was capital-A Activated. I was stuck in 24-7 On mode. Let the record show that I did not give my qi the permission to do this, but lack of permission never stopped my qi. It just kept on merrily drawing sigils inside me, enabling one inscrutable chain reaction inside of me after another. Neurons fired. Signals flew.
“Safety first! You need, rest! Relaxation!” (Fine print: Tee him up, and…fore!)
“Yes. You must, heal up.”
“From you! I need rest all right! I need a dotted half rest! That’s a rest equivalent to three beats, or in this case three beatings of my mea—I mean, why yell fore when there’s only three of you? Three eager mouths sucking and fu—ghhhk!”
I was so spent, my body refused to cooperate with me. Nothing moved when I told it to, but my musculature had plenty of ideas of its own. It synced with my skeleton and set about putting me to rights. My capillaries cavorted with my cartilage in a convalescent cotillion. Tendons tangoed with tissues. The epidermis and the endocrine glands announced their engagement in an effectualness-enhancing enterprise.
“Which is why none of you will listen to me, huh? You’re too busy remaking me from the inside out to let me move? Oh, but Haruka Jr.’s still in perfect working condition, I see. Figures.”
“Go, fight, win!”
At long last, my attempts to force cooperation out of this sorry excuse of a human body fell flat. My efforts to disguise that I was little more than a shambling, ragtag mess of mishmash body parts disintegrated like sand. Improvisational Alchemy and haphazard Revival on steroids had made me a broken shell of a person. I couldn’t mecha pilot this miserable mess into functioning like an ordinary body—no one could! My only saving grace was Wisdom. Wisdom studied this lumpish hulk of disparate systems and construed a means of indirect control. Wisdom gave me the keys to live ordinary life. Wisdom let me fight.
“TL;DR I’ve pushed myself too hard… And speaking of too hard…”
“Master, master, number one! We’re all here to make you c—”
This very phenomenon, see, was what had caused me to lose control and disappear yesterday. Wisdom had to, via a deft network of mathematical conversions, control every rambling, shambling, disparate system that made up my body, each with its own quirks and characteristics, and madcap, idiosyncratic verve. It was literally running me on an emulator. The fact that I could move at all was a miracle.
“Okay, so if I’m following… You say I put on my new equipment before calculating if it would cause havoc. Then, when it inevitably caused havoc, I lost control. And so that’s why you’re furiously sucking me off? Because what goes around cums around?”
Nod nod. Rattle rattle. Schluuurp.
“Sorry? What was that last one? Gwoooh! Okay, I figured it out!”
My body now recomposed itself. All systems were aligned; all structures were unified. Pieces cooperated like a well-oiled machine. Every body part worked toward a different goal, but in that difference, a common purpose emerged.
“Really? Operation: Intrabody Magical Sigil High School Boy Raising Project is optimizing my Skills to give me better prowess in bed? Talk about a schlong con!”
My Skills and Effects expanded exponentially. Chemistry worked miracles of dark mathematics; Sex Monad multiplied by three sexy dungeon emperors times a cheerleading buff crossed with hot girls mixed with horny thoughts compounded by puberty-powered puissance equaled a very bad outcome for Haruka. Yeah, let’s get out of here!
I nyoomed out of the sex carriages and caught up with the others not a moment too soon. Ah, sweet freedom! (By the way, the other carriage was called the That Damn Horse Who Doesn’t Listen to a Word I Say ft. the Unwitting Nerds and Idiot Passengers Being Pulled to Kingdom Come Express. Snappy name, huh?)
“Yo. How’s it hanging? You finish your dungeon too? How was it? Not that a banal backwater dungeon will amount to much—but you’re idiots, so it’s not like you’d know the difference.”
“Man’s multitrack drifting the insults today.”
“It was lame, dude. We crushed it in no time flat.”
“I’m surprised how fast it went.”
Slimey wanted to ride the rest of the way home with the boys, but I didn’t approve. All this filth, this grotesquery, these unwashed homes of geekery and gormlessness…and don’t get me started on the carriage! “One, there’s no room. Two, it’s full of boys. Three, the furnishings are trash. Four, it’s full of boys. Five, the seats are terrible. Six, it’s full of boys. Seven, it’s not fit for anyone but the geekiest and stupidest of passengers. It’s the worst?”
Bobble bobble.
“You’re the worst!”
“It’s a crappy carriage because you made it that way!”
“Yeah! How come the girls get a swanky carriage and we’re riding in shit city?”
“’Cause why would I sink effort into making seats for guys? I don’t wanna think about where dudes’ butts are gonna go. Think about it. You wanna imagine the best care and comfort for an old man’s ass?”
“…Well…no.”
“Wait, but you coulda just copied the girls’ seats!”
“You’re telling me you made these seats worse on purpose?!”
It was rare to have the whole Boy Bunch back together. And let’s keep it that way! Too many boys in a carriage made for one stinky, stuffy ride. But it could be fun in its own way, especially since we would be going our own ways soon. Before long, we’d have to start hosting proper class reunions to get us all in one room again. The other boys were making lives for themselves here and putting down roots in this fantasy land. Which, frankly, made me feel bad for the fantasy land…
“Welp! It’s been good seeing ya. Nerds, you’ve got a ship to get back to, a beastfolk fluffing paradise to run.”
“Uh…we still want to visit the frontier, you know. Say hi every once in a while, that kinda thing.”
“And the ship’s on loan to the Beast Kingdom.”
“We like the Beast Kingdom’s pseudo-Japanese food, but nothing beats the frontier’s advanced technology and culture!”
“And, uh, we don’t allow fluffing in any of the maid cafés.”
“Or Sex Gods!”
Ah yes, their maid cafés did ban Sex Gods. The discrimination, I’m telling you… We needed a Sex God civil rights movement, and fast. Oh wait—did it even matter? I was a Sex Monad now?
“Yeah, what’s the deal with the Sex God ban? The isekai genre is full of discriminatory crap, but who in their right mind would discriminate against the noble Sex God? I’ll have you know, there’s been many a case of a poor, lonely Sex God crying outside a store that barred him entry! A whole city’s worth of cases!”
“The girls made us do it. They said we had to protect the beastfolk girls from the Sex God at all costs. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Side bar, but when they said, ‘Protect the beastfolk girls from the Sex God! He’s dangerous!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.’”
“Better add ‘no tentacle-groping the maids’ to the rule list.”
“Wait… I’m not allowed to tentacle-grope the maids?”
“…Uh, yeah? You think???”
That was news to me! I knew getting handsy was a no-go, but surely it didn’t count if they weren’t hands!
“What about Magic Hands? Or Magic Threads? Don’t tell me they’re banned too!”
“In what universe would they be allowed, Haruka?”
“Sex God or no, you wouldn’t even be let in with a cloud of ominous, wriggling hands and tentacles.”
Ah, the maid café! The sole paradise of earthly delights available to the teenage boy, the one treasure trove not locked behind an 18+ verification wall. And yet, due to his tender age, so often this pleasure garden’s walls were too high for our fledgling philanderer to clamber over… Why, oh why, did the newest maid café fresh off the fantasy world presses have to be denied to me too?!