Chapter 100 Harem.

Chapter 100: 100 Harem.

"Sir Grey, the coffee apparatus has betrayed me again!"

That was the first thing I heard the morning after the ritual.

Elsa’s voice, shrill and outraged, drifting up from the kitchen through the floor.

I hadn’t even opened my eyes yet and I already knew she was... embarrassed about it, which was new information I shouldn’t have had access to.

I lay there for a second, trying to figure out how exactly I knew that.

It wasn’t because she sounded embarrassed. She sounded annoyed.

But underneath the sound, inside my chest, I could feel a hum of frustration laced with shame, and it was coming from her direction.

Layered underneath that, I could feel Ayra’s warm contentment thumping along like a happy heartbeat, and further down, Juniper’s quiet, meditative mood somewhere else.

It was the emotional bond link.

Champion’s Resolve came with a lot of perks, but this one was going to take some getting used to.

I flexed my hands above the covers and felt the other difference.

My fingers closed tighter and the tendons in my forearms stood out sharper.

STR 20.

I’d gone to sleep as an already super fit guy and woken up as something a bit closer to a comic book character.

When I rolled my shoulders, everything moved smooth and easy, almost weightless.

"GREY! It is ON FIRE!"

Right. That sounded like a situation.

I got out of bed with a groan.

By the time I made it downstairs, Ayra had already put out the coffee filter with a damp towel and Elsa was standing three feet from the machine with her arms crossed, looking at it like it was too blame for whatever had just happened.

Through the bond, I could feel her embarrassment spiking underneath the bluster, which was genuinely useful because her face was giving me nothing but indignation.

"I was testing my magic in an attempt to speed up the device’s coffee-making process," she informed me. "It betrayed my kindness."

"Actually, you set the filter on fire, Princess," Ayra said.

Elsa nodded like Ayra had only proved her point. "It was brazenly unreceptive to my methods."

I walked over and straightened Elsa’s tiara, which had gone crooked somewhere in the mini-crisis.

The embarrassment spike smoothed out instantly through the bond.

Okay. So that’s how this worked.

I could feel what they were actually feeling underneath whatever they were performing, and if I responded to the real emotion instead of the surface one, things went smoother.

When Ayra bounded over and her excitement crested so high it felt like standing next to a subwoofer, I said "Good morning, sit, breakfast in a few," and her emotions leveled off without the typical trademark four minutes of bouncing and barking.

It was like having cheat codes for my own household.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that yet.

Useful? Definitely. A little invasive? Also definitely.

Whatever.

STR 20, DEX 17, CON 16.

I was built different now, and the morning routine was the first place it showed.

I moved through breakfast prep more precisely than I ever had.

When I cracked eggs into a bowl, each one split perfectly with zero shell fragments.

My hands did exactly what my brain told them to, with zero lag and zero waste.

I also made some coffee the right way.

Breakfast for five.

The number didn’t faze me anymore. I had the rotation down.

Juniper had her meat-and-egg plate first because it took the longest.

Then I mixed the pancake batter while the bacon sizzled, and I made a separate stack for Elsa because she didn’t like her pancakes mixing with those of less highborn members of the household.

The coffee was also started again, without any potentially combustible attempts to speed up the process of turning ground up beans into magical wakeup juice this time.

Juniper came down and joined us next.

She slithered into the kitchen, settled at the table, and nodded at the plate I set in front of her before looking at me with crimson eyes that saw right through everything.

"You’re processing the bond link well, I see," she said.

"It’s a bit... loud," I admitted, leaning against the counter with my coffee.

"It will quiet down. Your brain is adapting. Within a week, it’ll be background noise unless someone experiences a strong emotional spike."

She took a precise bite of scrambled egg. "Think of it as learning to filter a new sense. Like when you first got the party awareness and couldn’t stop feeling everyone’s location."

I sipped my coffee and nodded. "Yep, I figured it’d be about the same."

Elsa was listening while pretending not to listen, which I could now confirm because the bond broadcast her emotional state whether she wanted it to or not.

She was curious but maintaining some detachment from us as she drowned her pancakes in syrup, took a bite, and made a noise that I was going to have to ask her never to make in public if we ever ate at a restaurant.

"I feel different too," she announced, setting her fork down. "My magic reserves have expanded noticeably in addition to the stat boost."

Ayra’s tail paused mid-wag as she turned to the princess. "It didn’t help your coffee-making prowess."

I reached over and squeezed the princess’s hand as her embarrassment flared up and she almost started laying into Ayra. "We’ll work on the coffee thing tomorrow morning. Together," I said.

Ayra’s submission routine continued on schedule.

She presented her rear at breakfast with the standard "I’ve been terribly wicked, Master, and I require firm correction" speech, complete with the "Pah-tooey!" and the fake spit.

Same performance, same words.

But the bond told a different story underneath.

The emotional undercurrent wasn’t arousal, wasn’t even the performative defiance.

Just a deep, steady love, expressing itself the only way she knew how.

That was interesting information, and I would have considered it charming if it weren’t so fucking nonsensical.

I gave her butt a little pat, and then politely asked her to clean up the resulting mess with a bucket and a mop.

Clementine came down much later than everyone else, which wasn’t exactly out of character.

Blackpink had been thumping through her door since eight, which was her version of a morning alarm.

She clacked into the kitchen in my borrowed sweats and a tank top, grabbed the coffee pot, poured a mug, and stood at the counter drinking it while staring at us with narrowed eyes.

"You all look different," she said. "I don’t like it."

"Ritual afterglow," I offered with a smile and a shrug.

"Gross." She took a long sip and looked me up and down over the rim of her mug. "Your shoulders are wider this morning."

"STR 20."

"I don’t remember what that means and I refuse to learn." Her eyes dropped to my chest, lingered, then snapped back up to my lips. "God, you look like such a good seat. Fuck you, asshole."

She was taking the ritual stuff better than I thought she would, at least.

I poured her more coffee without being asked when I noticed her mug getting low.

She looked at the full mug, then at me, and her ears did a cute little happy wiggle despite the resting bitch face she was determined to wear like a mask.

"Your coffee is still shit," she said.

I shrugged. "I know."

"Make it less shit, Mr. Moneybags. Get a good coffeemaker and some premium beans from the asscrack of South America or wherever good coffee comes from."

I chuckled. "I’ll add it to the shopping list for this week."

The day proceeded into something that passed for normal, at least around here.

Elsa asked me to teach her to use the coffee maker properly now, not tomorrow, so we spent twenty minutes at the counter while I walked her through the steps.

She burned the first batch.

The second batch was weak but drinkable.

The third batch was actually decent, about as good as my machine could do, and when she tasted it, her face lit up bright enough to compete with her tiara.

"I have manifested a beverage!" she announced, holding the mug aloft like a trophy. "A warm and adequate beverage! Grey, taste my creation!"

I tasted it, and it wasn’t bad. "That’s good, Elsa."

"Of course it is. I am a princess. Goodness is my birthright—it is owed to me in all that I attempt."

But her voice cracked on the last word, and the bond hit me with a surge of pride so intense it almost knocked me sideways.

That was pretty cute, honestly, though I probably needed to find a real hobby for her at some point.

Ayra had started maintaining my weapons when things quieted down.

I found her in the living room that afternoon with my sword across her lap, running a whetstone along the edge as she watched SpongeJohn SquareKnickers.

Her tail swayed slowly, contentedly.

When I sat down beside her, she just looked up, smiled, and said "The edge was getting dull, Master. I hope you don’t mind."

"You’re good at that," I said, beaming at how natural and serene she looked doing it.

She tested the edge with her thumb and nodded, apparently satisfied. "I maintained weapons for the Moon Mother’s temple for fifteen years. Every blade is sacred."

She set the sword aside carefully. "Master?"

"Yeah?"

"Last night was very special to me. I’ve never had such a romantic thing happen to me in my whole life."

I blinked, recalling through a Vietnam-style flashback the constant, explosive, physics-defying hydroblasts that emitted from her pussy with every thwap. "Super romantic," I croaked in an attempt at honoring her reverent tone.

Her tail thumped hard on repeat as she picked up the whetstone and went back to work.

Neither of us apparently needed to say anything else.

I felt content to know that I had apparently made the correct response.

After Ayra went outside to play fetch with Clementine, who found it too funny not to indulge the dog-girl, Juniper spent the afternoon on the couch with an encyclopedia volume.

Her tail coiled around my calf where I sat beside her, and this had become our thing without anyone deciding it should be.

She read, I sat nearby and scrolled on my phone or read my own book while her tail maintained contact, and every few pages she’d share something she found fascinating or horrifying about Earth science.

"Your planet has a molten core that generates a magnetic field strong enough to deflect solar radiation," she said, not looking up from the page. "In Antheria, we achieve this through layered ward stones maintained by the Archon’s Council. Your world does it automatically. With magma."

"We’re efficient like that."

She smiled without looking up, and her tail tightened around my calf by a fraction.

Through the bond, her emotional state had shifted from that morning’s careful distance to warmer and more open.

She was letting me read her, one page at a time.

That evening, Clementine cornered me in the kitchen while I was doing dishes.

She leaned against the counter with her arms crossed and her tail swishing in a restless pattern that I figured meant she was working up to something.

"I need to get this out of my system," she said.

"Get what out—"

She balled her hands into fists, clamped her eyes shut, and shouted at top speed, "I told my mom about you and that you turned me into a horse girl and took my virginity and now I’m living with you and three other girls and she says I have to marry you. Also, you’re Presbyterian now."

I blinked. "What kind of timeline are we talking about here?"

She was blushing effusively, her eyes barely opening to see me.

I remained calm mainly because at this point nothing could shock me. "I dunno. A year? I can try to push it but..."

She just shrugged rather than finish the thought.

"Noted," I said, maintaining a patient smile.

Welp. Six months ago I was eating gas station burritos alone in a W-Mart break room.

Now I had a harem of supernatural hotties, and the equine Korean one just initiated a shotgun wedding.

Life was weird. But I could handle it.