Collide Gamer Chapter 755 – How John met their Mothers

John stood before the summoning circle with crossed arms and ntally wrestled with a decision. Looking to his left, finding his girlfriend gazing at him with questioning eyes, he explained, “I’m not sure if I want to just do the traditional summoning or if I want to peek into the other elental planes.” He rubbed his sternum absent-mindedly as the mory of the pressure the Mother of Water had put him under resurfaced. “Not sure if I want to et my other mothers-in-law.”

“Kinda sure the other four won’t be that bad,” Rave suggested. “That aside, not like they can permanently harm you.”

“It’s still going to be wholly unpleasant if they decide to do things to ,” the Gar humd to himself, his head swaying from left to right and back again. The circle repeated as he thought. “Well, I know the Father of Light kind of liked and I don’t think I have done anything to change that. Gno and Sylph have both evolved without problems so far. Really, only Salamander’s… well, I don’t even know if she would still qualify as her mother. I would go with yes, Mother of Fire sounds pretty universal, even if there is a step in between there.”

“Grandma of Fire just doesn’t have the sa ring to it,” his girlfriend said. “Anyway, doesn’t seem like ya have to fear anything.” She tip-toed over and slung her arms around his neck. “When did my tiger ever back down from sothing he was afraid of anyway?”

“A couple of tis, because I happen to think that fear can be a pretty good warning sign for things that you should stay the hell away from,” he answered honestly. Next to him, his girlfriend let out sothing between a grumble and a complaining ow. “What, you hoped I would push out my chest and give you the cliché hero answer?”

“What if I did?”

“Then I would tactfully remind you that we both prefer alive and that you’re going to marry a complicated, well-intentioned politician of a nerd, not so straightforward, brave hero of a jock.” He gave her a bemused glance. “You knew what you were getting into here when you decided to spend ti with the lanky, smart guy.”

“I knew I was in for so fun, not a dedicated relationship that would have help conquer the USA in the middle of it,” Rave defended herself. “That aside, since when did ya get the authority to tell I’ll marry you?”

“I had that since you stole my heart.” He winked. “You were so distracted keeping that thing safe, I had the ti to take sothing back in return.”

“That’s actually kinda creative for corny talk.”

“I have to keep you entertained sohow.”

“I’m entertained by brave nerds with big brains and big ambitions.” Rave slapped his ass, sothing that made John stand a bit taller from the suddenness of the action. She also kept groping his firm behind for a little bit afterwards. Not all that unusual, in this household. Leaning up to his ear, she whispered, “Lem rephrase the earlier question: when did my tiger ever back down from anything because he was afraid of sothing?”

“Your tiger never did that,” John answered firmly. “The John Newman that didn’t know you did. I know that fear is an emotion that should inform decisions, not cause them.”

Rave kissed him on the cheek. “That’s my boyfriend.” She sounded oddly proud when she purred those words and he loved how her tone resonated inside him. After a second slap on his ass, she stepped backwards and spoke loudly again, “Now get on it, I wanna cuddle Gno, chat with Salamander during workout and – I know this sounds crazy – I miss Sylph babbling.”

“THANK FUCK!” Eliza suddenly shouted. “I thought I was the only one who was damaged enough to think that!”

“Just as long as she doesn’t make a ss in my kitchen,” Aclysia joked, halfway at least.

John kneeled down at the circle and reached for the outer circle. His fingertips made contact with the black chalk. His mana flowed in as he activated the first Skill. The way he thought of it, the only proper way to do this was to go down the order of acquisition, which ant he would start with Gno and work his way through to Stirwin.

It only took a few monts for the circle to react and pull him into the other realm. The transition he experienced was much different. Rather than the room filling with water and fading, it was him that fell apart. His skin, flesh and bones broke apart into grains of sand and chunks of stone. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, especially once he closed his eyes to ignore the admittedly unnerving visual experience. It was like his muscles relaxed beyond their physical ability. For a mont, he was nothing, just another segnt of the sedint. A state of mind that he could have, with ditation, prolonged.

However, the Gar was a person with a busy mind. Too quickly, his thoughts consolidated into the purpose he had and the thirty other things he had to do in the next few days. The earthen plane reacted to this firm mind by giving it a proper avatar. John burst out of the sand, wearing the clothes he wore in reality, and looked around.

He was sitting, lower body still subrged in sand, in a very small desert surrounded by a dense forest. ‘Those two bios do look very odd next to each other,’ John thought as he got up. The change from yellow grains to brown earth and green grass was so sudden, the Gar felt like he was looking at an incredibly high-resolution version of Minecraft.

Other things about the landscape pointed to the sa conclusion. Floating rocks, oddly shaped mountains and hills, and a seemingly random assortnt of plant life were among the foremost things. What went against the idea, however, were the earth elentals walking around, tiny pebbles, living beanstalks and strange mud creatures among the most present, and the sky. It was still blue, but not because air bent sunrays, but because a gargantuan ceiling made of crystal had assud the colour. The sa crystals seed to be the origin of light in this place.

John sent out the sa ntal signal he had when resummoning Undine and waited for sothing to happen.

“U-uhm, so,” an equally royal and shy voice reached his ears from sowhere, and he looked around to find its source. “Thanks for taking good care of one of my children… t-they all deserve it and… yeah, that! Bye!” There was another delay and then the panicked voice said, “Gno, just go ho already, this is embarrassing!”

In a sudden but firm move, John was pulled from this realm and back into his body. He opened his eyes to see Gno standing in the circle in front of him. “You really take after your mother, don’t you?” the Gar asked, very certain that he had just been addressed by one of the strongest creatures in the wider existence and that that very sa creature had been too shy to show her face.

“I-I guess?” Gno answered and then puffed up her cheeks in a mildly annoyed fashion.

“What’s the matter, cuddle rock?” Rave asked and walked up close.

“I didn’t want to stutter first thing coming back…” the earth spirit answered and then let out a loud, “Umu!” when Rave threw herself at her. “I missed cuddles with squishy warm things,” she said while hugging the harem leader back.

John, anwhile, shouted in a choked off fashion, as his girlfriend’s thoughtless indulgence in her hug-addiction damaged his summoning circle more than a little. He then sighed and, since the damage was already done, added himself to that hug. “How was ho?” he asked.

“Fun,” Gno answered with a big smile. “Nothing to eat, but Mother knew who I was and cared to hear about you and so we had a lot to talk about! She is really wise and powerful!” John expected a ‘but’ there and it ca a few monts later. “…However…” Not quite the word he guessed, but close enough, “...she is a bit of a recluse and very, very… uhm… closeted about sexual behaviour?”

“Ya REALLY take after your mother, don’t ya?” Rave repeated John’s earlier statent. “Glad ya got over your pervy denial streak though.”

“I’m not a pervert!” Gno raised her voice and got a bunch of doubtful glances. “I just… like u-unusual things, okay!”

“Stop being as fucking dense as a rock, you rock,” Eliza threw her hands into the air. “Being a pervert is basically a requirent to be with that love-falafel over there.” She pointed at John. The most adequate reaction he had to that was to shrug and wave.

“Uwuwu…” Gno didn’t have any further counters either. Instead, they cuddled so more and then she and Rave stepped off to the side. After about five minutes of redrawing damaged lines, John then went on with the summonings.

Next up was Salamander. She was the one who had the highest likelihood of garnering him so animosity. There had been no reports of fire spirits reacting as negatively towards corrupted among their kind as their watery cousins did, however. Even more than that, fire elentals were, even ahead of shadow, the ones that had the highest amount of demons in their ranks.

What exactly a demon was still eluded John. It seed to be more of an esoteric title given to things that were vaguely ‘evil’ and had an affinity for contracts than an actual classification. The thing was just that John hadn’t heard of demons as their own thing yet. There were no warlocks that he knew of and no ‘hell’ plane, just as there was no ‘heaven’ plane to his knowledge. All demons and angels he had encountered so far had been in Instant Dungeons, the one that sotis appeared in churches being the sole exception.

Whether that made them extrely rare or non-existent, John didn’t know. He would definitely prefer to live in a world that had succubi. Then again, he could have done without devils and things that preferred to feast on human organs. A difficult trade-off.

The point was that there was ample reason to hope that Salamander’s scars weren’t seen as sothing that necessitated purging. ‘Only one way to find out,’ he thought and initiated the ritual. A storm of fire rolled over the walls, consud John’s field of view and, extrely quickly, pulled back to leave him standing in an ashen field.

Whereas the plane of water had been creepy and the plane of earth surprisingly friendly, the plane of fire was simply desolate. Large volcanoes endlessly erupted in the distance, making the sky a black amalgamation of ashen clouds that rained their particles down to the craggy, grey landscape. Towers of obsidian and glass rose as sharp spikes from the knee-deep cover. Occasionally, an opening in the floor would send a geyser of fire upwards, creating intense gales of heat. Thanks to this being an astral projection, John didn’t think anything of the warmth.

One would expect a realm dedicated to fire to be bright, but John found this place to be even darker than the water plane. Sure, there were flas just about everywhere, but those contended with the ash rain, and few were so bright that they could illuminate everything under a black sky. The horizon was a glowing line, orange at most stretches, with so areas that were blue, white or green, indicating at least a few different kinds of bios.

John must have landed in one of the deserted neighbourhoods of the realm as he saw no elentals around. ‘They might be hiding underground,’ he theorized, when another geyser flickered up close to him. A bunch of tiny Salamanders huddling together and pooling their powers to create an occasional explosion sounded like a very fire elental thing to do.

He didn’t take the ti to investigate, dropping the ntal call and imdiately seeing the orange of the distant horizon flare into an intense crimson. It was too quick and too well-tid a change to be coincidental. More importantly, the light peeled out of the line of the horizon and rolled towards him like a rapidly expanding bushfire.

John didn’t feel particularly great about that, but he decided to stand his ground and wait. Protectively, he raised a hand to his eyes. An unnecessary precaution against the wall of ash and dust that preceded the closing-in firestorm. Blinded for over a minute, the Gar felt sothing gargantuan and very hot settle in front of him.

A large hand swiped the storm away like John would have done with a waft of cigarette smoke. Towering before him and shrinking rapidly to a size more comprehensible sat a woman. Her skin was of a glowing orange, like lava or heated iron, and radiated extre heat John felt despite his lack of physical presence.

Her body was surprisingly plain. Attractive, yes, with an hourglass figure and breasts that would have been large if she had shrunk to a human’s size and basically small hills on her enormous fra. The Gar couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to be surrounded, with his full body, by those red-nipple crowned things.

Grinning exactly like she knew what he was thinking, the Mother of Fire looked down at him. She had a face with a pronounced jawline, sharper than John preferred but not in a masculine way. Her smile was devilish and large, red lips revealing exclusively pointy, black teeth. Her eyes were like Nathalia’s, layers of orange that heated up until they arrived at a golden-white core. Her ears were long and pointy. Eyebrows and hair were a steady flicker of multi-coloured fire. Red and orange were the most pronounced, closely followed by black and only minorly completed by all of the other colours that flas were found in. None of it was ever steady, aside from the wild shape her hair took, cascading down her back and shoulders.

‘Not on fire yet, so that’s a good sign,’ the Gar thought, looking up to the Mother of Fire as she leisurely leaned forwards. One of her legs angled, she rested an arm on her knee to better look down at him. John also got a good look of her crotch that way. Unlike her breasts, he did not have any real curiosity towards how it would feel to be surrounded entirely by a large vagina. He liked to remain outside of the bodies of giants.

In the middle of her stomach, where the navel would usually be, John spotted the prismatic gem that he had also seen on the forehead of the Mother of Water. Magoi had since confird that this was the usual look for a Hearthstone.

“You seem to be the one,” the Mother of Fire stated, her shark-like, black grin making her inspection of him a fair bit unnerving. She raised her head and looked over her shoulder. “Yo, Salamander is-“ Whatever she found must have annoyed her as she clicked her tongue. “Slowpoke,” she declared and gestured in a way that John couldn’t see a lot of, thanks to the rest of her body blocking the view.

He could, however, feel the entire realm shifting at her command and Salamander suddenly appeared next to John on the floor. Sohow, she still managed to stick the landing and stood up next to John. “Yo,” she greeted in much the sa fashion as her elental progenitor. “How do you like my ho, John?”

“A bit too much fire for my gentle, human soul,” he returned with a joke. Seeing that she was neither hard nor worried put his mind at ease. Salamander smiled and a chuckle from the Mother of Fire made the earth shake.

“Steady nerves, I like it,” the Mother of Fire said and introduced herself, “I am Plasia, First of the Fires and mother of the sa. I offer my na to you, John Newman, as a sign of respect. Understand that you are to keep it in your mind and your loved ones just as I keep your na to my realm.”

Respectfully, he bowed his head. “You won’t find in breach of contract, Plasia, I have honoured mine. Including the tis it wasn’t in my best interest.”

“And you wrote contracts so you can exploit them with your best interest, I have heard it all.” the Mother of Fire made a tossing gesture and yawned. Not out of disrespect, John read from her still amused expression, but for a lack of care for etiquette. “Let be clear, any enemy of the deep-dark-deep-down-bitch is sobody I fundantally like.”

News must have spread fast among elentals for John’s treatnt at the hand of the Mother of Water having already reached her. Either that or the news of Undine’s corruption were so old that everything afterwards was just presud as true. “I don’t really aim to have her animosity,” the Gar answered truthfully.

“You would be an idiot if you did,” Plasia cackled. “Who would ever want an elental mother as their enemy? The Faith-leech in his concrete imperium, maybe, given how much he has to gain from slaying one of us.”

“Romulus doesn’t strike as soone out for unnecessary conflict.”

“I will let my son be the judge of that and continue dwelling where I belong,” Plasia stated and shrugged. “Not that I have a lot of choice in the matter. You obey the contract of nas we put in place and we obey the laws of space that Gaia put in place. Everyone obeys sothing – except her, arguably.” Another dismissing wave of her hand. “Whatever it is, I don’t worry. I wished to see you for myself and show that not all of us are reactionary puritans like my younger sister.”

“I’m thankful for that,” the Gar said earnestly. Every bit of assurance was a load off his paranoid soul. More than that, her being here and saying her na had gotten him quite the hefty Achievent reward. “If I can ever be of service, I’ll gladly give it my consideration.”

“Oh, you will be of entertainnt, if nothing else,” Plasia said, only to disperse into a storm of crimson embers and roll away as a firestorm, just like she had arrived.