Chapter 225: Old Mate’s GPS Is A Health Hazard

The warm memory of Cherry’s hand guiding my smoke fingers somewhere interesting still lingers as I drift up the shaft. For luck, she said. I’m a six-foot hovering smoke-snake with an Aussie lunatic for a god; I make my own luck. Still, couldn’t hurt.

The lie I told them about "business" barely registered. It’s not a lie if I’m having fun, and I plan on having a lot of it. A new leaf, that’s what this is. A new snake, maybe. Up here, no one knows me. No one expects me to be the guy who runs a sewer casino or charms cops in the dark.

Up here, I can just... float. Be smoke. Watch rich idiots lose their shirts on horse-girl races and not give a single fuck who notices.

It worked for her, I suppose. Below me, Twawi’s noise fades out. Above me, nothing but pipe and dark and the occasional drip of water that definitely isn’t clean.

Alright, Old Mate, give it to me straight. Does lying to my girls to go cause some topside chaos make me a bad person?

[System: Mate, you’re a six-foot monster snake. The bar for ’bad person’ is somewhere way below you.]

I’m talking about the principle of the thing.

[System: Oh, that. Nah mate, that’s just efficient relationship management.]

I told Lyra and Cherry I was going up top to do business. Which is technically true, in the same way it’s technically true that a bloke going to ’check the mail’ is definitely not going to look at his ex’s Instagram for the fourth time today. I am going up top. I am also absolutely going to cause some kind of chaos while I’m there, and I did not mention that part.

They’re gonna find out eventually.

[System: course they will. Cherry’s gonna sniff it off ya like a dog smelling bacon in your pocket]

Great.

[System: speaking of which]

No.

[System: you get one more girl, right, just saying, hypothetically, and the whole harem unlocks poison immunity. ALL of em. Full poison immunity, across the board, no more worrying about them accidentally getting poisoned, or one of the girls during a cheeky bite session]

I nearly stop drifting altogether. Wait, that’s a real unlock?

[System: as real as taxes mate]

So you’re telling me if I go pull some random woman in Ami City, Lyra and Cherry get a system upgrade.

[System: yeah nah it’s beautiful actually. Real "the more the merrier" energy. Practically a support build at this point]

That’s insane.

[System: that’s the Indulgence System baby, we don’t do subtle]

I keep gliding up, smoke curling off my scales. Down below, Lyra’s running my casino and Cherry’s passed out on my cushions. That’s my hoard, perfectly content, not a possessive thought between them. Why would they need to be? They’re bonded to me. I could drift back in here with a three-headed monster girl, and they’d just ask if she contributes to the bottom line. That’s the difference between being a pet and being a king.

So hypothetically, if I did end up bonding with someone else...

[System: Oh, here we go. Strategic horny strikes again.]

Purely to protect my current girls.

[System: Yeah mate, proper selfless sacrifice, bloody hell a true hero.]

Are those two actually going to care?

[System: Care? Mate, the more girls tied into your bond, the more protection and stat-sharing gets passed down to them. Cherry’s probably hoping you find a third just so she gets an extra skill and another person to order takeout with, and Lyra?]

Lyra?

[System: Lyra will look up from the books, calculate the extra defensive buffs, stamp ’Approved,’ and go right back to counting money. They don’t give a shit who you add, mate—they just care that every new bond makes the whole house harder to kill.]

I laugh, a plume of thick smoke trailing out into the air. Honestly, that tracks perfectly. No toxic jealousy, no weird drama—just two girls who know another bond just means a bigger shield for the whole den.

Alright, where am I even headed, please give me directions, I wanna hit the horse girl track first.

[System: say no more mate, got you covered]

Old Mate’s directions rattle through my head, a string of lefts and rights delivered with a confidence I’ve learned to treat as a warning label. Still, I’m bored of pipes and ready to watch some idiots lose their life savings on a horse-girl race.

I bank left, my smoke fins catching the stale air, and glide down a rusted corridor. The hatch at the end is a joke—fused hinges and a dead keypad. I don’t even pause, just dissolve into a cloud of dark crimson smoke and pour through the gap. Why knock when you’re the fog?

Light hits me. Actual sunlight, or the artificial dome equivalent Ami City uses, bright and clean and smelling like grass and popcorn and animal.

Animal?

Not just one animal. A whole zoo’s worth of animal, ripe and warm and rolling over me in a wave that makes my tongue flick out before I can stop it.

What in the fresh hell, am I at a petting zoo?

I hover there for a second, still smoke, still shapeless, just taking it in. There’s the popcorn smell, sweet and buttery, mixing with something muskier underneath, hay and fur and the specific tang of animal poop that no amount of Ami City tech can fully scrub out.

Somewhere off in the distance, kids are laughing. At animals. Which would be fine, except I just poured out of a maintenance hatch expecting a horse track and instead I’m getting Old MacDonald’s Farm energy.

At least the sun’s not too bright, I think, drifting up a little higher to get a better look around, but then I make the mistake of actually looking up.

Two suns? Not one sun with some weird lens flare situation going on. Two actual separate suns, sitting in the sky as they’ve always been there, like this is just how mornings work now.

Uh, Old Mate, quick question.

[System: shoot]

Why are there two suns?

[System: because you’re not on Earth, mate, obviously]