Jake’s body still buzzed from the sex.

Or had he even had sex? His dick had barely touched her, but it sure felt like he’d done something.

Besides teleport himself and the girl to another dimension, of course, and raised some weird number to 75.

The blonde girl knelt down and started untying the girl he’d had sex with, while the cat person — she really did have cat ears and grey skin — looked his naked body up and down judgementally. “He doesn’t look like much.”

The girl he’d tied up grunted past the gag while the blonde girl struggled to release the rope binding her wrists and feet together.

“Ayla said he’s the one,” said the blonde woman, “and her judgement is good.”

“Ayla said that all the people there would look like her.”

Jake pointed to the girl on the ground. “She’s Ayla?”

The cat-girl buried her hands in her face. “Fucking hell. She brought an idiot.”

“Well, he can certainly tie a knot. Maybe that’s why she chose him.”

Jake knelt down and fiddled with the knot. It had gotten tighter from her struggling.

So instead of untying that one directly, he loosened the square lashing that bound her arms. As that unraveled, she was able to move them more freely and create space, eventually slipping out of the loop that connected her hands to her feet.

“Clever too,” said the blonde girl. “I’m Emily, by the way, and that’s Clawdia.”

“Jake.” He extended his hand towards her and they shook. Her skin was lily-white and creamy smooth, and her lightly curling blonde hair fell across a strong, bold face. Her handshake was firm.

She was almost as beautiful as Ayla, and yet completely different.

Astounding.

Ayla undid her own gag, then tackled Jake to the ground and kissed him deeply. Clawdia sighed and Emily stayed silent.

Eventually Ayla pulled back and giggled. “You wonderful, wonderful man. They said I wouldn’t be able to find anyone I could connect with well enough to get back, that it would take weeks or maybe months to develop that rapport even if I found someone compatible, but you… you must have the most wonderful heart, to be able to connect like that.”

“Uh… thanks?”

“Great,” said the cat-girl, “we’ve got an idiot with a heart. You know there are plenty of men like that here. You didn’t have to cross dimensions for that.”

Cross dimensions? That would explain the purple sky and the real-life cat-girl, but it opened up a whole new set of questions. Or was this some elaborate trick? Either way, he needed to get back to the tournament before he lost his shot and had to wait another three years.

“He’s also the most skilled tactician in the kingdom,” said Ayla. “He faced off against an enemy with significant advantages and won… and he did it with a Rogue job sphere. I would have spent months raising our Connection Rating if that’s what was necessary.”

“Hmm…” Emily put on a thoughtful expression. “Not that there are many other choices, especially since you two have already bonded, but I do think I’ll accept him as Master.”

“You’re too easy,” spat Clawdia. “You escape one method of enslavement only to work and build yourself another.”

Master? Enslavement?

Ayla rubbed her head on his chest and hummed a joyful tune. That gesture stopped most of his questions… he could lay here all day with her. He hugged her closer to him, felt the comforting plump of her breasts against his chest as he brought their faces closer together to kiss.

Emily gestured towards them. “You’re telling me that doesn’t look better than being part of Xerxes’s army? And it looks as if she’s going to be keeping him busy enough, so it’s not like he’ll be making big demands on you physically.”

“Freedom or death,” insisted Clawdia. She tensed her hand — or was it her paw? — revealing sharp claws.

Emily shrugged. “Well, I personally hope you get freedom… but I’m afraid it will mean death.”

The cat-girl’s pointy ears twitched and she dropped into a crouch. “Someone’s coming. They’re wearing armor. Get to cover.”

Ayla lept up, accidentally kneeing Jake in the stomach, then falling over herself. Her feet were still tied. Clawdia sighed and used her claws to slice through the rope, then handed her an oversized shawl. Ayla slipped it over her head, letting the thickly knitted cloth drape over her shoulders and hang down to her knees.

Jake got up and, now that Ayla’s warmth wasn’t overpowering all other thoughts, he was suddenly aware of the seriousness of the situation. He might not just miss the tournament semi-finals… he might have been drafted to fight in some sort of war! Did they really think that a gamer like him would be able to strategize in a real-life war?

He was standing completely naked in a foreign world, and they were trusting their lives to him!

Or, at least, Emily and Ayla were.

“Come on, idiot meat,” said Clawdia. “The others will be disappointed if you die.”

They were all running out of the open grassy meadow and into a thick stand of trees.

He followed.

Clawdia pointed, then proceeded through a series of hand gestures. The other two apparently knew what it meant, so they flattened themselves against the nearest trees.

“What’s happening?” asked Jake.

“The trail is over there,” Emily whispered as she pointed. “Clawdia told us that there are two of them, male guards. Heavily armored, with a war hammer and a sword, so that limits the likely job spheres they’re holding. Five hundred feet.”

Job spheres? Just like in FTO?

Surely that must be a coincidence.

“Hurry,” she said. “Perform the ritual so that we can fight.”

“You can fight without a male telling you what to do,” said Clawdia.

“Yes, but we’re better together.”

“Uh… Aren’t there there guards coming?" asked Jake. "I don’t have time to tie you up, and then if you moan too loudly…”

“Just the collar part,” said Emily. She’d fished one out from somewhere and was holding it out to him. “The sex will come later.”

He slipped the collar around her neck and spoke the words: “I bind you to myself.”

The collar snapped shut and glowed blue.

“Thank you, Master,” she whispered.

He had another person calling him Master now. It was more matter of fact than how Ayla said it, less an unstoppable attraction and more of a title, but still… in the space of an hour, he’d gone from virgin loser to having two beautiful women voluntarily give him complete power over themselves.

This had to be a dream. He’d wake up and find that he’d overslept the tournament, that he was back serving slurpees and waiting for the machines to automate him out of existence.

Yet this all felt so real. And if this was a dream, the cat-girl would be into him as well, he’d have had sex with all three of them by now, and he wouldn’t still be naked and hiding from guards.

Or was this a VR simulation?

Reality Mode.

Nothing happened. If he was in VR, then they’d hacked the system to remove the meta controls. If that was the case, then there was no way he was getting out until someone found him, and if Todd didn’t find him then they’d let him out after the tournament. Mike was dirty, but not a murderer.

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Then again, the way he’d gotten here was by having sex on the couch while Todd guarded the door, and while he’d heard of memory erasure tech, it left a muddled confusion rather than a sharp false memory. So the most likely explanation really was that he’d teleported to a different dimension with a beautiful nymphomaniac and been asked to save the world.

“Concentrate, and be quiet,” whispered Clawdia. “They’re approaching the range of human hearing.”

Jake flattened himself against a tree and listened.

“You sure they went this way?” asked the first guard. He had a whiny, high-pitched voice.

“Who the hell knows,” said the other gruffly. “But they can’t have gone far. It’s been what, fifteen hours since we had to start looking?”

“We’ve been working for fifteen hooouuuuurs… You’d think that we were the slaves here. Besides, they could be anywhere. I heard a rumor that they took a teleportation stone.”

“They took the type that doesn’t work, so joke’s on them. They were probably relying on it for their getaway plan, too.”

“But we still haven’t found them. No one has. All this effort, and for what? Three untrained girls? There are better uses of our resources, that’s what I say. The war in the west, for one. We start another battle there and we could capture three more nekos faster than this stupid slave hunt.”

Clawdia flexed her furred hand, silently bringing the claws in and out.

“Easy…” whispered Emily.

Clawdia reached into her bag and smiled. As she did so a subtle layer of light came over her, like shadows from a shallow wave or cracks in a parched earth, and she took on an air of ferocity.

“Please don’t,” whispered Ayla. “The systems in his world are slightly different. He hasn’t had time to…”

“What are the odds they’re still free?” asked one of the guards. “Likely they got captured by some enterprising Master wanting to expand his own slave force. It’s not like you can really tell any of them apart.”

“The blonde should be easy to spot. The neko too, although I wouldn’t want to have a neko slave. Disgusting little—”

Clawdia sprinted towards the guards, shockingly quiet for how quickly she ran. They only noticed her when she was nearly on top of them. She pounced on the whiny one, knocking him over and pinning him to the ground. The armor did well to protect him, but then she swiped at his helmet and knocked it off. The blow did damage, knocking almost ten percent off his health bar.

His health bar?

This world had fucking health bars?

Ayla and Emily both reached into the bag, then they also had the strange lighting effect play out across their skin. Emily became tenser, twitchier, while Ayla became more frail and ethereal, subtly pulsing with energy.

“What’s happening?” asked Jake.

“I thought you said he was skilled,” said Emily. “Did I just bind myself to a Master that doesn’t know combat?”

“Things work different in his world,” said Ayla. “Jake, watch us this time, so you may command us efficiently next time.”

He was very aware how naked he was, and how useless he was in a fight.

As if reading his thoughts, Ayla smiled gently and put her hand in his. “The Connection Multiplier is a gift. Without it, we would surely lose this upcoming battle. Now I must fight.”

Clawdia slashed the guard’s face while he struggled, and his health dropped to seventy-five percent. The other guard slammed his hammer into Clawdia’s side, which knocked her off the pinned guard and sent her flying into a tree. Both hits did damage, bringing her down to sixty percent health.

Ayla walked towards the enemy with fire building at her fingertips.

Emily had disappeared.

“They’ve got a mage!” yelled the guard right before the fireball left Ayla’s hands. It hit the man on the ground, who’d had barely pulled himself back to a sitting position before getting blasted in the face.

He clutched at his head and rolled over onto his stomach, screaming. He was down to forty-three percent health.

Ayla was already preparing a second blast.

The guard who was standing stepped to the side then rushed Ayla. Her eyes got wide.

In FTO, you couldn’t switch magic targets once you’d set a spell in motion. Was that true here? It looked that way, as her hands stayed pointed at the man on the ground while her head tracked the guard with the hammer.

Then a knife appeared in that guard’s back, held by Emily.

Sixty-eight percent health.

He grunted. No theatrics from this one.

A flash of light enveloped Emily and the guard’s running slowed.

Had she just done Suprise Attack + Shadow Flash?

Was she playing a Rogue?

The guard turned and swung his hammer at Emily, knocking her back ten feet.

Meanwhile, the fire blast left Ayla’s fingertips and headed towards the man on the ground.

It hit him in the rear, doing less damage than the face shot but still knocking over twenty percent off of his health.

She immediately redirected her focus towards the hammer-wielding guard that ran towards her as ice formed on her fingers.

Shadow Flash wore off on that guard and his running went back up to full speed. He got two seconds of that, running at top speed and closing two thirds of the distance before the ice bolt got him.

He was going to reach Ayla, and he still had thirty percent of his health.

Jake had to do something.

But what could he do?

He ran towards them. He’d figure something out on the way.

Ayla, meanwhile, sprinted away from from the approaching guard. Her Chi — he could see her Chi bar! — drained as she did so.

She turned to do another ice bolt. She could walk while doing it, but only slowly, or she’d lose her concentration.

He knew this, because that was how Mages worked in FTO, and Ayla was clearly playing a Mage.

He also knew that Mages were soft, squishy, with little defense or health.

And she was about to get beaten with a hammer.

The guard ran towards her.

The hammer swung down and knocked her to the ground.

He didn’t knock her back, to where she’d be safe.

He’d knocked her to the ground.

That asshole.

She was down to forty-eight percent health.

The guard laughed as he pulled back his hammer for the killing blow. “Try to freeze me again, bitch.”

Jake sprinted and caught the man in a bear tackle.

Which did nothing.

The guard elbowed Jake in the face, which knocked him to the ground.

“You’re their Master? Don’t make me laugh. Maybe I’ll hammer you first and break their spirit.”

The guard swung his weapon back again, cackling…

And got hit by a fireblast at the exact same time that Emily stabbed him in the back.

Zero health.

The guard collapsed, crumpling to the ground.

Right on top of Jake.

The helmet slammed into his head and he passed out.