Lunch with the party is good! The food is much better than Laurent is willing to admit. Also he gets to talk to Eelesia about Nerd Topics.

He does!

This is, all in all, a pretty reasonable way to spend one's time.

After lunch he wants to work out a bit more, and then as afternoon winds into evening he makes dinner. Overnight he snuggles up in bed with his battle harem, and in the morning after breakfast he checks the quest board, which is only barely more interesting than it was yesterday. Another alraune insemination, another lunch, another workout session, another dinner. If they can find anything more useful to do, he's all in favour of doing it, but until then he's content.

The days pass as they settle into their routine.

It takes him three full days to get another Fitness point, and then a full week after that to get another. His body is hard and muscular now, like he's been exercising for months, but, as Coventina explains, the Fitness stat is broader that just how much you can lift or how many reps you can do, and the more esoteric parts don't respond to exercise at the same rate muscles do.

The alraunes slowly get harder to find as adventurers clear them out.

Each night, when they're all in bed together, the lewd slowly escalates. Outside of their shared bed, Coventina and Eelesia both take advantage of Sky whenever the whim strikes, and Eelesia in particular impulsively kisses Laurent a few times when they're nerding out together. In their shared bed, all three girls, without explicitly deciding to, let Laurent set the pace. On some nights, when he's receptive, they'll fuck each other in front of him, beside him, on top of him one time. Coventina encourages but doesn't push. Eelesia is just enthusiastic about him in general but she's less horny than the other two. And of course Sky is just happy to be used as a sex toy by the others.

Killing the occasional incidental monster during their daily tasks (such as the ones that come up from under an alraune) gets Laurent up to Level 3 during this time, as well. This is a comfortable level to be, in Axel. At one point Luna explains how the leveling curve gets really steep after Level 5, so that's usually where adventurers who aren't dedicating their life to traveling in search of dangerous monsters and quests plateau.

When he levels, he puts two more points into Sanity to bring it to 20, marvels at his thirteen Fitness points where once he had only nine, and takes the skills Stormheart and Mystic Eye.

He's happy to snuggle up with/beside/under the girls while they make out or have sex. Eelesia's kisses make him blush, and on one memorable occasion squeak like a startled rodent, but although he's usually too surprised and/or distracted to do much in the way of kissing back, it's clear he feels positively about them.

For lunch and dinner most days, and occasionally for breakfast, he cooks for everyone. He slowly lets go of the fiction that his food isn't good enough to cook for people, and plans meals without the extra disclaimers about how they won't be up to his standards; relatedly, once he's had a chance to get up to speed, it turns out he's a really good cook. Dinner with Laurent is superior to the fare at most available restaurants.

He thinks he would like to level past 5. He brings it up, when Lucy mentions that it's known to be difficult. "I wouldn't want to drag any of you into a lifestyle you found uncomfortable, of course, but I don't intend to hit a plateau in two levels and stay there."

She could probably scheme harder than she is about getting Laurent to stop wearing underwear to bed. She's bought leather cuffs, silk rope, custom-tailored blindfolds, and earplugs for herself, Eelesia and Sky, but they've sat unused in the bedside drawer during actual bedtime, and only Sky's have seen much use at all.

The fact of the matter is, this still feels like a vacation, and Coventina is enjoying the days of just living life. Guilt about neglecting the mission is tickling at the edges of her mind, but... she completely and viscerally understands why her pre-Laurent champions all abandoned the mission to do their own thing. The temptation to do the same herself is there.

But if Laurent isn't going to falter, it would just be embarrassing to slow him down on the mission she gave him in the first place. And also, it really does need doing. Her church has become an abomination and no matter how much fun she's having she can't ignore that.

"You know I'm with you," Coventina tells Laurent, and the double meaning is present but there's also some genuine loyalty in there.

"If we want to focus on leveling up we can plan out a hunting trip to find a locally optimal set of monsters to focus on banishing. Oh, didn't that anatomy book mention something about - "

A massive KA-BOOM rattles the air.

It sounds like it came from the north gate.

Adventurers rush out to see what the fuck happened.

Laurent is among those adventurers, although he makes sure to stick by his team rather than sprinting off ahead of them.

As the crowd bulges out of the gates, they're met by a figure seated upon a throne of flesh. He's huge, tall and muscled like a body-builder, and he sits in all of his nude glory upon a seat formed of a dozen or so nude girls. His arm-rests are licking at his cock from either side in a lustful fugue.

"Heathens!" he bellows in a mighty voice. "Rejoice! For the shackles of inhibition which bind you to shame and ill priority shall this day be struck free from you. I, High Priest Olando of the Church of the First Axiom, have learned of your plight!"

An adventurer at the head of the pack, a Ranger by the look of her equipment, shouts out in response.

"We're good, thanks! The City of Axel is under the protection of the Church of the Lake! You are not welcome here, High Priest!"

Olando the High Priest waves his hand dismissively.

"So a slave to the tyranny of the lesser goddess would say!" he bellows. "But your suffering is plain to see! You have all been warped in heart and soul away from the one ultimate truth! That endless sexual bliss is the birthright of every human, and all thoughts otherwise blasphemes against not just the goddess, but every living soul in existence! So do not fear! I am here only to cleanse your minds so that you may join with the holy orgy!"

He stands, and raises his hand to the sky. "Sacred Greater World Gate! Sacred Greater Frenzy Nova!"

Coventina is angry enough that's she's actually growling. Twisting her own words into a vile mockery of the all that she stands for. How dare they.

The adventurer who spoke before nocks an arrow and fires, but one of the throne-girls jerks up, producing a magical shield. The arrow detonates against the shield with enough force to knock Olando off his throne and send the girls making up the throne sprawling into a big pile, but it's too late to stop the spells.

A light shines down from above. It washes over the city, and anyone it touches is instantly struck by a violent, overwhelming urge to fuck. And then a portal the size of a city block rends open the sky, and thousands upon thousands of oily black tentacles spill out and rain down across Axel as she watches in dismay.

This... is more sexually aroused than Laurent has ever been in his life. In either of his lives.

He almost can't process it; he freezes up, at first, because—there isn't an action connected to this desire, there's no reflection in the outer shell of his persona for the fire suddenly raging within.

He looks to his teammates, because his instinct by now whenever anything new and unexpected happens is to look to his teammates.

Sky exists. She's dripping down her thighs and squirming a little but that's not all that different from how she normally is.

Coventina is fingering herself with one hand while the entire rest of her continues to glare murderously at the fallen form of Olando. She glances over and -

Eelesia collides softly with Laurent, her face filling his field of vision, panting with desire as she kisses him with a burning hunger.

"Gah! Everyone everyone - fuck! The tentacles! Avoid the tentacles! Fuck if you're going to fuck but only each other!!!"

Despite the blast of magical lust that has thoroughly distracted the mass of adventurers, enough of them are single and/or lucid enough to hear the warning and start screaming as they fail to avoid the tentacles.

It's not clear immediately what the tentacles are doing beyond raping everything they touch, but there isn't room to wait and see because the tentacles are everywhere and Laurent's party is about to be caught by them as well.

Kissing Eelesia is the most important thing in the NO IT ISN'T

PRIORITY INTERRUPT

He somehow manages to pull his mouth away from her long enough to "Genesic Echo—Fulmindash—"

—and the lightning sketches out a pentagram around the party and then deposits him approximately back where he started only now everything is much brighter. He sticks his hand into a lingering bolt and squints past the haze and tries very hard to tell his body that it can shut up about how much it wants sex because they have bigger problems. Is the lightning helping at all with warding off the tentacles or is he going to need more than that? Also, how's that infinite mana hack doing?

He's converting lightning from his own spell back into mana. That is definitely not an infinite mana hack, but it is noticeably slowing the drain of Genesic Echo.

The tentacles ignore the lightning completely, but when they enter the radius of Genesic Echo, they smear, like a computer rendering the next frame to the screen without clearing the pixel buffer first. The smeared slabs of tentacle-reality get extremely in their own way. Two problems: One, all this smearing is increasing the mana cost of Genesic Echo rapidly. Two, it's rapidly obstructing their view out of the radius.

Eelesia does not have the self-control for this.

As soon as it is clear that Laurent isn't going to ravish her, she rips a hole in her body suit's crotch, grabs Sky by the hair, and shoves the smaller girl's face into her crotch.

"Need a better infinite mana hack," he mutters under his breath, squinting at the tentacles. "Also need better tactical options." There are so many things he could be doing right now that his body really wants to do and he is doing NONE OF THEM, THANK YOU, not even jerking off while watching Eelesia go at it with Sky, in fact especially not that one because he needs one hand to shove into lightning and the other to hold his sword just in case the sword turns out to help. "Coventina? Would getting Sky to pull these things be a very good idea or a very bad one, do you think—what are they—" Yes, think about NON-EROTIC SUBJECTS like MAGICAL THEORY and NOT about Eelesia's very pretty mouth.

"I don't know! They're not monsters! Monsters don't... this!" She gestures wildly with her free hand at the reality-smearing. "That was a World Gate! It could be anything!"

What can she do. She can heal. Do these tentacles count as harmful magic? She thinks maybe they do, maybe even more fundamentally than anything native to the world.

...she has zero Air affinity. This is going to suck.

"Trying something!" She wrenches her hand away from her pussy and slaps it onto the vibrating unflesh of the nearest smeared tentacle. "Purify!"