When I looped back, Rose and Sophia were there. My soul was whole again, and I could feel it. I leapt over the table, pushing past Medea and Hilda to embrace Rose and Sophia in a hug. Rose hugged me back, and Sophia kind of pouted while also furtively hugging back. I buried my face into their chests and let a few tears trickle down my cheeks.

I didn't know the truth behind their feelings. I couldn't read their minds and see if love points were corrupting them or not. But I knew my own feelings, and if this wasn't love, I didn't know what was. The burning warmth in my heart as I hugged them. The sheer relief to see them alive. The desire to never let them go again. My heart ached with passion. Was it all love, or was some of it fueled by lust? They say that killing off attractive women in movies elicits stronger emotional reactions than killing ugly ones, because the viewers are implicitly thinking that they had a chance to mate with the attractive woman, and lost it when they died. We were ruled by our dicks in subtle ways, and it was true that Rose and Sophia were incredibly attractive. My feelings had to be, to some degree, influenced by how hot they were. By my urge to have sex with them. But I could feel it. That wasn't the whole story.

I just had to hope it wasn't the whole story for them, either. That they felt this burning passion in their heart alongside the burning aching of their wombs or whatever. That lust was a factor, a piece of the beautiful picture, but not the entirety of it. That it was genuine love, not sex-induced brainwashing. That, perhaps, their feelings were unusually intense for some strange reason, but no less real for it.

"It's okay," Rose said. "We're here. We haven't left you."

"Hmph! As if we'd stay dead forever. What are you, dumb?" Sophia said, patting my back.

I stayed silent. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to apologize for letting them die. The problem was, I had left them unguarded. It was my duty to protect them. To make sure nothing would ever happen to them. What would have happened if not for the time loop? It was too horrifying to think about. At the same time, it would be even more wrong for me to get overprotective and never let them go off on their own. Now that would be to deny them autonomy. There was nothing I could do but keep trusting them and do my best to protect them where I could.

We continued our embrace even as the explosions started. Maybe we would have spent the entire loop like this, giving each other strength through warmth and love, but Daiya tilted up her head.

"I sense a Greater Demon. This is unusual."

I broke apart the hug, though to be honest I would have liked to stay in the warmth forever. Cold, hard reality waited outside of their warm bosoms. No offense Daiya. Your cold, previously hard bosom is not inferior in the least.

"Xetrathia or Aeneas, I presume. I told them we're here. No point invading any other spot."

Rose lifted an eyebrow. "And they remember?"

"Xetra's one of the Five. She's using the love point memories to change her strategy each loop."

"And you earned these points how..?"

"I think beating her in a fight, then beating Aeneas in a fight in front of her.

"Ah. That would do it. Demons love displays of strength almost as much as dragonkin do."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. They are obsessed with duels and honing their personal strength. To take a demon woman's hand in marriage, even, you must first beat her in a duel." Rose flashed a smile. "Perhaps they are not so different from us after all."

I left the implication unspoken. "You know a lot about demon culture, I take it? Do I even need to ask?"

"I may have participated in a crusade or two in my day."

"Let's pretend I didn't ask. Anyway, let's go." I turned to Daiya to tell her to open a hole in the wall, but found her standing with her arms kind of... awkwardly outstretched? She was holding them forward, kind of like a zombie, but slightly wider.

There was a pause. She stared at me flatly, immobile. I stared back at her. Her arms remained outstretched.

"Do you want a hug too...?" I finally asked.

"It seems that you did," she replied dryly. Ah. So she was doing this for my sake, or... maybe she just wanted to participate? To not be left out after seeing Rose, Sophia and I hug? Oh well. No reason to not give a swift hug.

I walked between her arms and hugged her. It was surprisingly difficult since she was like three feet taller than me, and my face kind of invariably ended up buried in her massive tits as I tried getting close enough to wrap my arms around her. The one saving grace here was that she was wearing her fully-covering dark gray robes that lacked a boob window, so it wasn't overtly sexual, just slightly uncomfortable. I looked up so as to avoid literally burying my face in them, and saw her looking down at me with her full lips curved into an almost imperceptibly slight smile across her usually blank face.

I felt a little kinship there. I never hugged anyone before coming here. I had described myself as a stone-cold motherfucker, I was pretty sure, and what that actually meant was that I had no friends or loved ones. Daiya, I knew, was in many ways the same. Gems did not have friends. They had obedient mineral dwarves they could control through psychic powers if necessary. Daiya's body was cold, lacking any blood coursing through it, but my warmth spread to her, just as Rose and Sophia's warmth had spread to me. It was a chain of friendship and compassion; if you showed one person warmth, then they would spread that warmth on to others, such that a single good deed could cause ripples of kindness throughout all of reality. Sometimes, you just had to let yourself open up to that kindness.

Then, just as I was about to step back so I could breathe, something large and heavy crashed into me.

"Glomp!" Hilda exclaimed, hugging me from behind and pushing herself against me. Instantly, I was squished between two pairs of massive boobs; Daiya's suffocating my face, and Hilda's pressuring my spine. Daiya had modeled much of her body after Hilda's thickness, so the pain was real here.

"Bhlhida!" I struggled to say, my voice muffled by Daiya's chest. "Mhlet gho!"

"Never," Hilda said. "You think you can just hug a bunch of other girls in front of me and get away with it? Huh? Huh, bub?"

"Nghugh," I said, which translated to "I will no longer be hugging anyone if I literally suffocate to death during one. The trauma will last forever."

Luckily for me, Medea burning jealousy came to the recipe. She pulled both Daiya and Hilda off me, freeing me from the boob pincer attack.

"Goodness!" She exclaimed. "Look at how red in the face is. You were killing him with that."

"Yeah," I said, gasping for breath. "I owe you one, Med—"

Before I could finish speaking, she wrapped her arms around my head and pulled me down, such that my face was buried in her own chest. The chaste, clean scent of her priestess robes lulled me into silence as her softness enveloped me like pillows.

"It hurts my heart to see you in so much pain, my love. Here. Allow me to heal you with a warm embrace of my own."

The hug pile. It was growing too large. The hug pile simply kept getting taller. At this rate, I would pass out from oxygen deprivation, and wake up in Medea's sex dunge... dung... dungeon... Oh my god. That was literally her plan. That conniving slut. She saw a moment of weakness and struck, but literally. Okay, no more hug time. As heartwarming as all this was, and as much as it confirmed that our love was real and not anything else beyond a shadow of a doubt, I wasn't about to let myself get knocked out by boobs then taken to a sex dungeon.

I detached myself from Medea before her clean scent literally put myself to sleep. Her arms tightened to stop me, but a quick tickle of her lower stomach sent her buckling over with lust from an aching womb. Easy.

"Okay!" I said, loud enough to drown out any protests. "Let's get going!"

Daiya waved a hand, and a section of the wall opened it. She went the extra mile this time and created a set of stairs out of the wall of the palace, leading down to the street. No more needing to jump out awkwardly.

I peeked my head out of the hole in the wall to examine the war situation. A quick look confirmed that 50,000-some dwarves had died while we engaged in harem antics. May they rest in peace. They died for a noble cause.

Close by was a large contingent of demons coming this way, presumably to try and sack the palace. At their front marched Aeneas, judging by the armor. So he had come alone. Maybe Xetra was trying to solo Flare or something. Well, might as well ask.

"Guard the fort," I called behind me, then used my Athletics skill and immense STR to leap from the hole in the wall to where Aeneas was, making sure to use Wind Cutter to slow my descent. Landing at full speed would have formed a crater, and there was nothing more lame or edgy than making a crater with your landing. There was a limit to how cliché one could safely be.

Aeneas faltered for a moment at my sudden appearance, but lifted a hand to stop his contingent of demons. He stepped forward to face me. "If it is a duel between generals you wish, then a duel it shall be," he said, voice brimming with heroic honor.

I looked around. "Where's Xetra?" I asked. To be honest, if the key to this loop was unlocking her heart, then this entire dwarf hold invasion flat-out didn't matter. Daiya was ahead of her time. She knew what was up.

Aeneas frowned. "Xetriathia."

"What?"

"Her name is Xetriathia."

"Oh. I mean, I'm sure she doesn't care about a little nickname. Her name is kinda long and hard to remember."

"I care. Names are sacred, and honorable. My father General Mascar bestowed upon me his name, and I intend to honor it, just as Xetriathia intends to honor hers."

"Do they have some meaning in demon language?"

He puffed out his chest with pride, as if he had a stock answer prepared for exactly that question. "No. We give them meaning through our actions, as our forebears did."

I couldn't help but smile. I had kind of expected to hate Aeneas after everything he did last loop, but really, he was just kind of a nerd. In a way, it was funny. Demons here weren't generically evil harbingers of destruction. They were deeply honorable and dutiful, which led to death and destruction incidentally as they prioritized their ideals over the lives of others. It was a tale as old as time; all the military of a country had to do was paint war and 'defending your country' as the highest form of manliness and honor, and just like that, kids like Aeneas were running to their deaths. Those who didn't were ripe for the mocking. It was almost comical in its simplicity.

It was a little less funny that Rose and Sophia got wrapped up in it, but if I was going to hate anyone, it should probably be the military-industrial demon realm complex, rather than the eighteen year old trying to save the world based on misguided principles a corrupted society enforced upon him.

"I don't want to fight you," I said. "Let's talk."

Aeneas's eyes hardened. The boyish look from a moment earlier was gone, and he gave me a sharp stare. "I will make no deals with the devil."

"B... But, you..." I looked at his red skin and goat horns. "That's my line. What?"

He raised his sword. "I will duel you in honorable combat, win, and save the world. The lives of all the people in the world rest on my back. I cannot lose!"

"Okay, fine, but only if you tell me where Xetrathia is if you lose."

"No. That's too risky."

"I thought you would never lose?"

His eyes shifted. "E-Erm, I mean... It's just a precaution."

Aha. I was starting to see why Xetra wasn't so impressed with this guy. Lots of blustering, but at the end of the day, he didn't quite believe in his ideals. He lacked that fire of a true visionary, and, as far as I could tell, the proper weight of a warrior. He was all soft on the inside, and probably prone to failure and backpedaling. Not that I wanted to read too deeply into him totally fumbling this moment. It happens to the best of us.

"Fine, whatever. She's probably just in the Demon King's castle anyway."

"N-No! Why would you think that?!"

Oof. Not even a poker face.

"Adios," I said, and jumped away to think for a second. I could have punched his face in, probably, but again, I didn't want to be too edgy. Being overpowered was a careful balance of maintaining an air of false humility so as to not enrage those annoyed by people who recognized their own strength. Sure, I and everyone else knew I could beat the shit out of Aeneas, but if I actually made a point of acting on that, I would look arrogant as fuck. Absurd, I know, but it was life. Even the strongest people in the world had to act like they were just like anyone else, unless they wanted their honesty misinterpreted for arrogance. One of the many struggles being overpowered and having a huge dick.

Anyway, once I could no longer hear his shouting (he really wanted to win a duel upon which the fate of the world hung in balance), I contemplated my next move. Going to see Xetra seemed like the most obvious next step, but as far as I knew there were no teleporters to the Demon Realm in any of the usual places. There were the hidden circles the demons were using, but they were probably invisible and cloaked with a bunch of shit that would be really annoying to uncover. I wanted to take the lazy way out here, and the laziest way out seemed to be just asking someone else to think for me. Maybe Rose knew where it was.

I leapt back into the hole in the palace wall. "Rose," I began, then paused and looked around the meeting room. Rose, Sophia, Daiya, Hilda, and Medea were all absorbed in a game of what seemed to be fantasy poker. Rose smirked and laid out a royal flush, inspiring groans of agony and frustration from the other girls as they pushed all their chips her way. "Uh."

Finally, they noticed I was there. Medea and Sophia froze, while Rose managed to put up a fairly convincing poker face. That explained her recent victory. "Ah. Back already?" she asked.

"Yes...? What are you all doing?"

"Passing the time with a harmless game of cards," she replied innocently.

"For what stakes...?"

"Why would we be playing for anything but money?"

I looked to Hilda. She faltered. "W-We're not gambling our collections of your hair, nails, tissues, and discarded articles of clothing! I promise!"

I closed my eyes, paused, then opened them. "Rose, do you know where the Demon King's castle is?" I asked.

"Of course," she replied, maintaining eye contact while stealthily sliding her chips into a bag. "It is on any map. I suspect any royal will know where it is."

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

Any royal, huh? That gives me an idea. "What would be the fastest way to the castle from here, assuming I don't want to spend weeks trying to uncover a demon teleporter and figure out how to use it?"

Rose placed a finger on her chin in thought. "If you mean 'fastest' literally, then there are many lethal ways to travel vast distances in mere moments."

"Non-lethal, please."

"Perhaps a dragon would be your best bet, then. One could fly you there in perhaps an hour or so."

"Great, just what I was thinking. Later."

I strode out of the room, waited a few minutes, then poked my head back in. Everyone had their hands clasped on the table, staring directly ahead.

Hilda smiled at me. "You already pulled that trick," she said.

"Oh yeah. I forgot." I seemed to recall Hilda not caring and continuing what she was doing back then, but I supposed everyone was a bit more hesitant when it came to revealing their secret collections of Malcador artifacts. Thinking about it, nothing showed the growth I had undergone on my journey more than the fact there were now five women crawling over my half-naked body at night and picking parts off me while I slept. Back in the day, it had just been Hilda. Almost brought a tear to your eye. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Anyway, I left for real, heading to the Beastkin Teleporter. Rose had said in a previous loop that Flare was hunting around the teleporters for me, and hopefully she would still be around. I could probably blackmail a ride out of her one way or another, since violence was... violence was...

I paused, and took a quick detour to the dwarfhold's armory. I didn't really want to get rid of my epic steel armor, but I didn't want to go up against an enemy using fire while wearing metal. Shit got hot as fuck. Give me leather armor any day. I wasn't sure how physics-accurate this was, but I remembered my plate armor melting last loop. That was painful in the moments I lasted before dying.

After swapping to some much more flexible leather armor, I headed through the teleporter to the Beastkin Empire.

The other side was the same as always. Vaguely roman architecture, soldiers rushing around, mass death and hysteria, etc. It was still relatively calm near the teleporter, though, and so it wasn't long before I found a red-haired girl stomping around in a black dress. It occurred to me her parents probably forced her to wear the dress against her will. Cute.

"Ah!" she exclaimed upon seeing me. "There you are!"

"Yup," I waved.

She slammed her thick tail against the ground with excitement. "I want a rematch!" she exclaimed again, reaching for the hilt of her axe.

I looked around. A rematch with me was really the main thing on her mind when the capital city of her empire was being burned to the ground? There was probably something up here. I pondered for a moment, then landed on a possibility.

"Have you ever lost a fair fight before?" I asked, making sure to use the qualifier 'fair' since Aeneas had ambushed her with a legendary sword made specifically for killing dragons. That, it seemed, was not particularly dishonorable. It really said a lot about American imperial jingoism in the Middle East; it was all honor and justice and freedom, even when launching missiles on dirt houses. Not to get political with this. Sorry, forget I said anything. Aeneas's Dragonslayer sword was just that much of a blatant metaphor, I couldn't help myself.

"Never!" she said proudly, then slammed her tail again. "Before you, I mean!"

Now, my first instinct might have been to blush about me being her first, but we were talking about an imperial princess. The top dog of the dragons. Er, the top lizard. She was a big deal. Her dad probably ate like 1,000,000 deer people a day. I could guess a lot of the people she faced always let her win in the end, just to avoid being politically punished. Or something. Basically, until I knew more about dragon culture, I wasn't going to get too cocky about being the first person to beat her in a fight.

"I see," I said, trying not to be distracted by her tail. There was, like, a hole in her dress for it? And god, that was a surprisingly thick tail. I couldn't help but measure it in cock-widths because, as mentioned, I couldn't help but see dragon tails as butt plugs. And lemme tell you. Her tail was like a whole bag of dicks. "Alright. I'll give you a rematch if you do me a favor."

"Okay!!!"

"Could you fly me to the Demon King's castle?"

"Sure!!!"

Easy.

But just as I was congratulating myself on being a genius, Flare turned around, held out her arms in a T-Pose, and then waited with her wings spread out.

"Uh...?"

"Well?! What are you waiting for ?!"

"For you to transform into a dragon...?"

"Beastkin don't transform! We are what we are! Now, hurry up and grab on!"

ಠ_ಠ

What the hell is she implying? Does she want me to... to just grab her waist from behind? And she'll fly off, just like that, in human form? Does... Does quantum mechanics allow that? How do dragon wings work? Suddenly, I'm very curious about the physic principles that dragon wings operate on. Are they actually magic, like some kind of Flying skill? Or do they need to generate lift?

"Hurry up!!! Or we'll just fight now!"

"Fine, fine. Just... Just give me a second."

I nervously approached her from behind. This was completely new territory to me. I extended my arms around her waist, then pulled back.

"Surely we should just, like, tie a minecart to you or something. I can ride in the minecart. You can be like a blimp, and I, your passenger."

She turned her head around and growled, her sharp teeth visible. Oh lawdy, don't bite my dick off.

"No! That would go against the pride of dragonkind. Nobody saddles us!"

So, what, tying a minecart to her waist would damage her pride since it was symbolic for a saddle, but it would be totally normal for me to just grab her waist and let her fly off just like that? This... This couldn't be right. Surely this was, like, a corruption of culture. Pureblooded, normal dragons got corrupted into half-human beastkin, but in their hubris they tried acting like they could still give rides or whatever. God, how fucked must Beastkin Empire culture be? It was a good thing I was only getting a glimpse of it here. The full thing would probably drive me to madness.

In any case, it seemed like I had no other options. I steeled my resolve and hugged her waist from behind, which gave me a full picture of her toned tomboy stomach. This was going to be an uncomfortable ride, especially if she got sweaty. Hopefully dragons took dicks poking into their legs as a sign of polite gratitude rather than anything more profound.

With that, Flare flew off, her sizable wings stretching out on either side of my head. She didn't even have to get a running start, she just wooshed into the air and off we went. I concluded, as my minor fear of falling to death compelled me to bury my face in the back of her dress, that they were probably operating more on magic than anything. They weren't generating that much lift, and we were zooming pretty fast through the air.

"Do you give rides often?" I called, straining my voice to be heard over the rushing wind.

"Not really!" she called back. "Usually only the purebloods do! Halfbloods aren't really supposed to give rides, I think!"

Oh, okay. She was just an idiot; and I, an idiot for going along with it.

"Where are the purebloods during the attack?" I called again. Rose said it would be like an hour or something; might as well learn some misc info while on the way.

"They all went to investigate something at Dragonmount's peak! I dunno, really!"

That was weird... Were there some external forces influencing this invasion? Hmm. Maybe I should just go tell Xetra that, really; flat-out tell her invasion is bunk and being influenced by weird outside forces. I could talk to her about how the Goddess isn't actually evil and get all the facts straight. Maybe have a candlelit dinner. Love point memories seemed to be the only way to end the loop without mass death across the entire continent, so maybe I just had to propose to her then rapidly say 'Also the invasion is doomed to fail due to outside forces.' or something. I felt like that was kind of missing the point, though. Xetra was exploiting love point memories to change her approach to the invasion, sure, but the memories were incidental to the love. I couldn't just "convince her" to stop the invasion logically. Any message back would be enveloped in love, and there was no avoiding the romance angle to all of this.

Which made me realize something.

"Actually, are they even going to let us in the castle? We're kind of both people they want to kill," I called.

"Definitely not!" Flare called back. "We're going to have to fight them! I can't wait!!!"

Hmm. Well, if it was going to take an hour to get there anyway...

"Flare, if you notice an orb of fire growing to sun-like sizes beneath you, just ignore it and keep flying."

"Okay!!!"

I started charging up an Omega Fireball, which was my name for the fireball I dumped infinite mana into through mana regen. I was excited to use it again. I suspected their castle would have some magical defenses, and the orb would just cause a little damage, but enough for them to think I could bust out another and destroy them at any moment. Ideally, they would stand down and let me talk to Xetra.

Flare flew on. We swiftly fell into silence; I became increasingly focused on not letting my singular arm slip off her waist while using my other hand to manage the ever-growing fireball beneath us. I really wished she would have gone with the minecart idea; I kept slipping to the side slightly, and if not for her thick tail providing something of a seat for my legs to lock onto, I would have slipped beneath her and been in a very uncomfortable position.

(Also, the sweltering sun over the Demon Realm did end up making her get sweaty, but I didn't need to wax poetic about the divine nature of dragon tomboy sweat. We're all men of culture. We know.)

An hour passed with us only rarely flying over settlements. The wastes were vast, and the Demon King's castle positioned far from anything alive, to force human Heroes to travel on foot for weeks before arriving (as per some kind of traditional pilgrimage Heroes had no choice but to follow). It was my understanding that a normal Hero, not a Heir, appeared within Penndrack once every hundred years to slay the Demon King and fight back the demon hordes, but the details were unknown to me. We shared the same class, though; I still had Hero on my stats sheet.

Anyway, it was clear when we finally arrived. The castle was perched at the back of a massive city; a black, towering collection of spires and bridges that loomed over a collection of equally black buildings. I got the feeling they made all their buildings out of obsidian or something, possibly just to look cool. Either way, we were here.

"What now?!" Flare asked.

"Wait for like five minutes. Let them get a good look at the mysterious second sun in the sky, and potentially evacuate or whatever. Maybe Xetra will wave us down or something."

And so, we waited. The full hour had made the fireball into a miniature sun that crackled with overwhelming magical energies once again. Being able to smash craters into the floor with my feet definitely gave me overpowered vibes, but nothing quite compared to the Omega Fireball. It would probably spook the fuck out of them when it hit the magical barrier around the castle/city and exploded.

The only response from the demons was to shoot some arrows up at us, or something, but they melted within the might of the fireball. Actually, it might have been ballistas and not normal arrows, but it was hard to tell since they burned up so quickly. Anyway, I didn't see any big white flags being waved in surrender, or Xetra trying to signal me to stop, so I decided to launch the bomb and see how they reacted once scared.

And so, I did. I launched the fireball and watched it fall slowly down upon the city and castle like a falling moon. The loud roaring of the fire as it built up speed was almost deafening, and if not for the inherent property of Elemental magic that protected the caster, I would be getting the hell out of dodge. Luckily for them, all major cities had magic barriers, s—

The blue magical barrier around the city flashed once, then shattered into a million pieces, not even holding back the fireball for an instant. It... It kept falling, right into the center of the city, then exploded into a flash of blinding white. I shut my eyes to not burn out my retinas just from looking in the general direction, and not even Elemental protection stopped the buffeting wind from slapping us back in the air. I hugged onto Flare's waist for dear life as she twisted in the air, trying to correct herself.

With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

Skill Up! Elemental Level 100!

Bonus: +25 Base INT!

Tier Bonus: All Elemental spells cause more destruction.

Love Point Gained! Flare +4

Milestone Reached! Crush has become Obsession!

The bond between your souls has strengthened even further.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So,

The question is,

How unethical is it to nuke a city and kill thousands upon thousands of people if you're just going to loop back in time anyway, and you didn't actually mean to do it in the first place?

I mean. Let's be real. I'm not about to say this was ethical. My question began and ended with wanting to know just how unethical it was. Like, was it 'a white lie you feel guilty about for a bit'-unethical, or was it 'may you never forget the magnitude of your sins in hell, bastard'-unethical? Like. Should I have nightmares about this, or would it be fair for me to just loop back and pretend it didn't happen?

I peered down at the crater in the desert-like wastes where the castle and city had previously been. Only a few chunks of obsidian here and there indicated either had even existed there in the first place.

Like. Okay, this was like Fallout. Everyone nukes the city and loads a quicksave. Literally everyone. Are all gamers worldwide unethical? I don't think so. And don't say "But you're in an actual other world!" Bitch, I leveled up eight times from that. The possibility this is a simulated video game is real, and only a true simp would get up in arms about the morality of actions done in a verifiably fictional world. Most of the many many corpses that just became EXP for me were probably barely sentient NPCs running bootleg Radiant AI or something. It would actually be unethical for me to care about them, because then I would be implicitly holding gamers responsible for nuking cities in their video games. Basically, this was a serious topic and not one we should jump to any conclusions about.

Also, let me check my stat screen real quick.

General Information Attributes Skills Name Malcador Name Value Name Level Species Human STR 8407 Sex 100 Sex Male DEX 5314 One-Handed Blades 100 Age 18 AGI 7059 Elemental 100 Class Hero (Level 30) END 4917 Athletics 87 HP 9834/9834 (+49.17/sec) INT 10548 Dodging 73 MP 14594/14594 (+72.97/sec) WIS 7297 (more...)

Look.

I would never say that it is ethical to nuke a city for EXP. But you had to admit. Those were some pretty impressive gainz. God damn, over 10k INT. That's the sign of a philosopher, and someone who is literally 100x stronger than they were at the start of a game.

And look. I wasn't about to say I should repeat this over and over until I stopped leveling up. I could narrowly skate by a single nuke as technically not-unethical due to the accidental nature of the event, but grinding EXP through genocide is exactly what I planned NOT to do at the start of everything. This was just a happy accident. For one of the 200,000-some people involved. Let's all just live and let live. Maybe I would need this power to fight Sauron who was definitely going to be my final boss fight. Okay? Okay.

"So... So..." came a voice.

"Huh?" I said, blinking away the stat screen.

"SO STROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG!" Flare half-screamed half-roared, balking down at the crater I had made. A clawed hand grabbed my back, then threw me to the ground.

As I fell at a speed faster than terminal velocity due to the force of her throw, I pondered why not even 8,407 strength was enough to lift myself up by the pants and fly through a physics-breaking technicality. I really wished there was some way to fly that didn't involve gripping the waist of a battle-crazed dragon.

Flare pulled her axe out of the loop on her belt (which she wore above her dress, no doubt to the protest of many) and started racing down after me, swinging the axe like scythe. She was breathing visibly hard, and her eyes were wide open like she was experiencing a fit of madness. Or breeding fever. I had no idea about anything except the fact she wanted to fight me so bad she had lost her mind.

To be fair, I had promised to fight her once we got here, so I could hardly complain.

She opened her mouth, presumably to breathe fire, and so I swiftly used an advanced Elemental spell to make a wall of fire of my own. Technically, all Elemental skills were purely offensive, but you could weave them into a barrier and have your raw mana serve as a shield especially effective against whatever element in particular you were facing. Flare's ungodly hot dragon breath hit my flame barrier and dissipated with an extremely loud explosion.

OK. I tried to remember what I knew about dragon mating patterns I seemed to recall something about female dragons trying to kill male dragons when in heat as a sort of test; if the male dragon died, they weren't worth mating with, if the male dragon lived, the female would fall in love and submit or whatever. For beastkin, their dragon blood intensified during these moments of heat, and that explained why Flare had gotten so much stronger in that last loop. Retrospectively, I had (sadly) failed Flare's previous test, but one could hardly blame me for not expecting actual dragonfire to come from her mouth.

Anyway. How to beat her.

I looked around. I was significantly high in the air, about to crash into a desert and possibly sink hundreds of feet into the sand unless I risked snapping my neck by slowing down with Wind Cutter. Flare was blasting fire at me from above, and her axe had more range than my humble sword. Nearby was a crater containing 200,000-some ghosts who all wanted revenge. Since we were in a desert, Flare had infinite movement and flying potential, whereas I had none. Sauron was on his way reasonably soon.

Okay, this seems like a bad situation all around. I'm just gonna evacuate. Maybe lame, but—

I felt heat beside me. I turned my head, and realized Flare had somehow gotten right beside me in a burst of speed. Her slit pupils were so narrow they were invisible amid the flaming gold of her wide-open eyes, which were completely visible thanks to her short red hair flying up in the air as we fell. I twisted to try to knock her away or something, but I couldn't get my bearings while falling, and she was just too fast. Her axe swung and hit me in the stomach, but... it didn't pierce the skin. It sped up my fall, and knocked the breath out of me, but I was fine. Thank god for high END? Still, I couldn't actually hit her. She was opening her mouth to breath fire again, and I couldn't very well block it here. I was dead.

Or I would have been, if her face wasn't right next to mine.

"Wazurau," I said, and hit her with Miasma. She blinked, then fell asleep in an instant.

Was it cheap? Yes. Should it really count as me beating her? No. But she was unconscious, and I wasn't burned to a crisp, so whateve—

We crashed into the sand of the desert. The battle had distracted me for too long, but rather than sinking into it like I expected, we made yet another crater as we flattened the sand and compressed it as far as it would go. The pain was excruciating, but I had put Flare on top of me so it was only my back suffering. A massive sand cloud filled the air, then settled down on us. It would have buried us alive if I didn't climb onto shaky feet and stagger out of the crater.

Once out, I looked around.

There was nothing but sand for miles. The sun was beating down on us. Sauron was coming soon, and possibly 200,000-some angry ghosts. Even if she woke up and accepted this as a loss, she would probably demand we fuck in the middle of this hellscape. Dragons didn't give a shit. But I did. That sounded like it would be terrible. And if she didn't accept the loss, I would have to fight her again. No thanks. I used Alter Landscape to form a little hut over her in case she didn't loop back with me, then quickloaded away.