When I woke up, Rose was in my bed, somehow.

What the fuuuuuck?

How was that even possible? I turned my head to try to look at her, but her head was nestled between my neck and shoulder, so I couldn't get a clear view of her face. I could, however, feel the warmth that indicated her entire body was pressed firmly against mine, and there was no mistaking the arm thrown lazily across my chest. My thoughts short-circuited for a second as I processed the feeling of her smooth, bare legs and her tank-topped boobs pushing against my shoulder—she was on her side, just like Sophia, which I would assume was to maximize the surface area of how much of our bodies were touching if that didn't sound like the thought process of an obsessed crazy person.

But really. How was it even possible? I tried thinking back to the autosave, and... What, did it happen while I was asleep? The notification only faded away when I woke up and saw it? Okay, so either love point memories went back before the autosave, or the autosave happened while I was asleep. That... maybe changed things? It was hard to tell without information.

A more pressing question was what the fuck to do now. Did I wake up Sophia the normal way? Did I wake them both up at the same time? Was I going to have to engage in sloppy elf/human makeouts while Rose watched, judgmentally? That seemed both unwise and potentially a recipe for disaster, with that disaster being "stabbed in my sleep."

Why was it that my thoughts increasingly turned to women stabbing me in my sleep lately?

Not knowing what else to do, I decided to just wake Rose up and let the dice roll where they may. It was slightly difficult to do, considering that Sophia had my left arm pinned down and Rose had my right, but detaching my right arm from Rose and waking her up in the process was half the idea. Luckily, she didn't need any armpit tickling or questionably symbolic nose-licking to wake up. The incidental rubbing of my arm against her boobs and stomach as I tried detaching it led to her opening her eyes.

"Good morning, Malcador," she said, opening her icy blue eyes and shifting in bed to pull her head out of the crevice that had blocked me from seeing her face.

Only then, with her moving, did I notice the incredible smell in the air. It was familiar, yet no less intoxicating; it was like I was laying in a bed of roses, encapsulated in a sweet and bewitching scent that brought me a little closer to heaven. I couldn't stop sniffing. I felt like fucking Sophia on crack, but it was too good. I couldn't stop. My head drifted in the direction of the source of the smell, and before I knew it my nose was pressed against Rose's bare skin, just below her neck and above her boobs. I took one good sniff and melted, then realized what the fuck I was doing. It completely looked like I had just leaned over to take a whiff of her morning cleavage, because that was what I had done. I pulled my head back in a start and noticed her smirking at me.

"Smelling the roses?" she asked.

"Yes. Fuck. Uh, how are you here? Why are you here?"

"I walked, and because I wanted to be." She was sitting up now, having let the covers fall down to reveal she was wearing a similar tight tank top to the one I had seen her wear at the elvish inn that one night. My brain froze again. I was used to Sophia getting in bed with me barely wearing anything, as fucked up as that was, but she was more of a cute smallish girl than anything. Rose, on the other hand, was fully mature and looked like a fucking super model. The difference was incomparable. It felt like I was some filthy hobo who had just somehow woken up next to a famous and yet barely clothed Hollywood actress; the situation just didn't seem real, somehow. I managed to resist the urge to gawk at her perfect curves and consider how they had just been pressed up against me, though.

I sat up as well as I could with Sophia clinging to me and faced Rose at an eye level. That actually resulted in Sophia sitting up as well, but she was still sound asleep, apparently. She was a very hard sleeper, it seemed, and nothing short of wet physical contact would wake her up at this point. Perhaps this was the difference between a princess allowed to laze around and a paladin who got woken up by fantasy drill sergeants at the crack of dawn to fight dragons and bandits or whatever.

"Detailed answers, please. You know why I would be concerned about you moving around before I woke up."

"Very well, if you insist. I happened to be spending the night enjoying some fine meditation on my lonesome, when suddenly I recalled the events of your last excursion through time, and the confessions we made. You were still asleep, though I could not say how long ago this was exactly, due to the nature of our environment. This should also explain the why, incidentally."

"Not entirely," I said, attempting to point at her like I usually did, but we were so close together I would have had to like, wedge my hand between us. Another reminder of how close we were. Her breath tickled my face each time she spoke. "So we confessed our secrets and love, then had a private kiss. What does that have to do with you sneaking into my bed at night like a lust-crazed elf?" I gestured towards Sophia, who was frowning and nestling her head against my arm to stay asleep despite being uncomfortably propped up.

Rose raised an eyebrow. "There is nothing unusual about lovers sleeping together. You might find it is the very definition of the word. Or what, would you have preferred that I pretend not to love you for months as part of some bizarre mind game that would have made us both deeply unhappy for no reason?"

Maybe it was just my exponentially increasing Chadness stat talking here, but that idea definitely seemed unpleasant to me.

"Okay, point taken. Your presence here makes total sense and there is nothing I can do to logically decry it as anything but the most rational thing to do considering our mutual love and attraction to each other."

Malcador: Master of romance. Rose leaned forward for a kiss, and I responded in turn. It was a short, not particularly heated kiss, but it was one that spoke of familiarity and ease, like we had been married for years and kissed a thousand times in that period. We broke away easily, each feeling fulfilled from the softness and warmth of the other's lips, but not overwhelmed.

Damn, she was good. I had been fully prepared to call her, dare I say it, an obsessive stalker for having felt compelled to slip in my bed and press herself against me while I slept, but now it just seemed like the obvious thing for anyone in her position to do. The love was in the air, and we both wanted to be in the other's presence. It made complete sense for her to casually join me in bed in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but tight and revealing bed clothes. Of course, a big factor here was that she didn't seem to be considering all this some holy ritual like Sophia did. Rose didn't appear to be in heat, nor did she appear to be on the verge of offering me her wet panties in a ritualistic sacrifice. Admittedly, her erect nipples were forming extremely noticeable bulges on the chest of her tank top, but I was pretty sure that was just a normal physiology thing. Like morning wood but for nipples. Fuck, I wish I had google right now. I could google "morning nipples" and confirm whether or not this theory was true, but unfortunately, I was stuck in fantasy land and had to go with my gut. And my gut was saying: Malcador, those are morning nipples. Do not question it further.

My gut was rarely wrong, so I went with it. At the end of the day, Sophia was extremely slutty, and waking up with her was like waking up next to a slutty Freddy Krueger that threatened blowjobs and sweaty elf sex instead of impalement. Every encounter was tense and nerve-wracking. Rose, on the other hand, was not slutty at all. She was a fine woman in control of herself and her urges. Thus, waking up next to her was like waking up to an incredibly sexy sister who you had a professed romantic and physical attraction to. It was a bit awkward, but both of you knew you were going to start your day platonically and with only a little romantic kissing.

"Okay," I said, and hoped that said everything because I didn't really know what else to say.

"Okay," Rose replied with a calm smile. "Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get changed."

I nodded, but then realized an uncomfortable truth. The bed was pushed against the wall, and Rose was on my right, so the only way for her to get out of bed was to crawl over me. That meant she had crawled over me to get in, which was challenging some of my previous assumptions, but there was no time to rethink what had already been established as true.

"Wait, let me—" I began, but before I could say "wake Sophia up and move," Rose was already crawling over me to get out. She didn't even bother to go the long way around the end of the bed. She took the direct route over my lower stomach and legs, right in front of my face. To say that I got a better whiff of her in the process was an understatement, on top of a slow-motion view of her entire bodyline and curves. Jesus Christ she was so hot. She even placed a hand on my muscular torso to steady herself, which seemed unnecessary, but there was so much contact going on I didn't really question it. The process had to end with her butt in my face, of course, allowing me a full view of her fantasy hot pants. To be honest, hot pants had always baffled me. There were like, what, two inches of cloth? They barely covered anything. I never understood why someone would wear them. But now I did. They were obviously comfy and easy to wear, and now that I saw them up close, I was forced to accept that they tightly hugged her butt in a way that emphasized just how shapely it really was. Hot pants were the god combo: comfy, and sexy. It only made sense why so many would be drawn to them. You got so much value out of a small package.

Sadly, or wait fuck what am I saying, Rose didn't wave her ass in front of my face suggestively or anything. This encounter was all business, purely transactional: I endure the discomfort of her crawling over me, and she gets out of my hair/bed marginally faster than the alternative. Had Rose been a slut, maybe she would have "accidently" slammed her ass in my face along the way like Hilda or Sophia certainly would have, or waved it around a bit before moving on, but no. She was cold as ice, and had a mission: get out of bed. Nothing would stop or distract her from this. The ass passing by my face was purely incidental and a mere momentary inconvenience for us both. I applauded internally. Finally, someone who made sense and acted rationally. She truly was pearls before swine.

Once Rose was out of bed, I turned my attention to Sophia. I felt like I had just spent an exorbitantly long time talking to Rose, somehow, and I didn't want to spend forever with Sophia as well. I decided to speedrun waking her up by starting with the kiss, just to see what happens.

Answer: Her eyes shot open with surprise after half a second, and then she melted into me, so half-asleep she didn't even think to close her eyes to hide how her pupils were morphing into hearts before my eyes. Whether that was symbolic or literally happening was a question that would have to be tackled later. I stood up during the kiss for maximum efficiency, and since Sophia's preferred method of sleeping involved wrapping her arms and legs around me, she went right up with me. The sight was probably comical; a small elf girl clinging to a tall hunk's upper torso while engaged in the previously described sloppy elf/human makeouts. I was struck with the urge to go outside and walk around like this, as kind of a signpost "Haha look at this slutty elf" kind of thing, but I was naked aside from my boxers and unlike Sophia, I was a bit hesitant to walk around so exposed. The hypocrisy of the situation escaped me.

I eventually grabbed Sophia's waist and pulled her off me. The suddenness of the kiss seemed to have thrown her off; without any time to emotionally prepare and get a grip on herself, she had gone full elf and given a sloppy as hell kiss instead of the gentle one I was used to. I had only myself to blame there, but it wasn't a problem. She calmed down once she was detached and back on the ground, the shining womb tattoo slowly fading back to an inert pink beneath her translucent dress.

Sophia looked around, getting her bearings. She frowned visibly at Rose, but didn't say anything. I had to assume there was some mutual understanding between them. I was fully ready to accept that members of a harem gained a telepathic connection that allowed them to plot schemes to befuddle and ultimately bang the highly desirable harem protagonist (e.g. me), but in this case it seemed like less that and more just the reality that neither of them could speak out against the other without being a hypocrite. Sophia demanding to know why Rose was here naturally would lead to questioning why Sophia was here, and that was not something Sophia was willing to say openly.

It struck me, then. The nature of a harem resulted in a situation where all haremettes had significant power over the other, creating mutually assured destruction in the event of any open move. How had I not seen these obvious parallels before? A harem reflected cold war politics, with a steady gathering of information and propaganda to be used for political victories rather than any overt military movement, which threatened to destabilize the whole situation and bring doom to everyone involved. Sophia speaking a word here would be like initiating the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, with Rose (the Soviet Union) threatening to nuke Sophia (the USA) and Sophia (the USA) threatening to nuke Rose (the Soviet Union) in retaliation. The only winning move was not to play. The only winning move was to stay inactive, and silent.

Reality crashed down upon me like an avalanche. To criticize a harem protagonist, or a member of a harem, for not progressing the relationship was like criticizing the USA for not retaliating to the Soviet Union's aggressive military expansion into Cuba by plunging the world into nuclear Armageddon. It was unfair, and unreasonable. It was a criticism that could only be made from a position of comfort and safety, far away from the danger. Only upon entering the political and militaristic web of a harem for oneself could one understand the sheer danger and empathize with the oh-so inviting paralysis that was a stalemate.

The only winning move was not to play. And so, Sophia remained silent. Rose remained silent. I remained silent, and erect.

It occurred to me that this autosave happening while I was in bed might have been one of the unluckiest things to ever happen to me. Every loop from this point on I would awake in bed with both Sophia and Rose, wedged between the USA and the Soviet Union at the peak of their hostilities. There was no leaping straight into the action here. I had to play ten moves of chess just to stand up, and from there, well, I wasn't confident in my endgame playing. I yearned for the old days, where I just had to deal with a raging battlefield and an orc swinging his axe down. Where had those simple days gone? Why had I allowed myself to be swept into a geopolitical confrontation localized entirely to my bed?

I resolved, then and there, to not get caught up in this shit again. I would toss the chessboard out and leap out of bed abruptly in a way that begot zero description whatsoever. Sophia would balk. Rose would be confused. But it was the only way.

I nodded to myself and looked down, only to see both Rose and Sophia staring at me, fully dressed. I had spaced out so long they had both finished getting dressed. Meanwhile, I was still just in my boxers.

Rose smiled to herself.

"What?" I asked.

"I was just feeling lucky that I got to be the one to experience this."

"What do you mean...?"

"The loop where you first wake up with me, that is. I presume I will be doing it every morning from now on, and you will not be so thrown off the second or third time."

I frowned. Clearly, Rose did in fact consider the loop an interruption of her consciousness and a form of murder, despite the sacred vow. Though, in retrospect, only Hilda had actually spoken the vow. Rose had just given a noncommittal thumbs up, which in retrospect was a nonverbal way of saying "I disagree but do not want to voice my concerns because you have to loop anyway and saying anything would just be giving you more of an emotional burden to carry." Wow, you could really say a lot with a noncommittal thumbs up.

"Rose," I began, but she waved a hand to interrupt.

"Don't you have somewhere to be?"

"...Yeah, I guess I do." I winced. She had, perhaps, noticed that I was kind of trying to put off what came next, because it was miserable. "You can take Sophia to the dining hall, I guess. I'll be going to the dungeon alone."

She nodded, and turned to go, but I stopped her.

"Actually, wait. I nearly forgot. Is the autosave before the queen is abducted? Could you try and stop the queen from being kidnapped when you wake up?" I asked.

Rose gave me a blank look. "I will if I remember," she eventually said, sounding just a bit ashamed of herself. Like that was really something she should have thought of herself, but she had been too distracted by something to think about it for even a second, and she knew that in an infinite number of loops, the thought would never occur to her a single time before it was too late. There was much you could intuit from a bit of shame in an ice queen's voice.

"Thanks," I said, and with that I left to go talk to the High Excavator Duran, after putting on my armor and the like. Life was hell.

The teleporter """""maze""""" seemed designed to laugh in the face of my "treat every loop like it's one you can win" motto. I had to try out 243 different combinations, and the only way to do that was through mass repetition and death. I could minimize the number of loops it took, but only through essentially mass-sacrificing other people in the name of discovery, which I was hesitant to do. Put simply, I just did not know the exact nature of the loop. It was fully possible that when I looped back, the world kept going, and only I splintered back. The nature of the love point memories was muddled by the fact I had a "soul connection" with all my companions, which was in fact linked directly to the love points, so I couldn't make too many assumptions there.

In short. If you really got to it: I could either do this in 1 loop by sacrificing up to 242 dwarves, or I could do it in up to 242 loops by sacrificing only myself. (242 instead of 243 thanks to the process of elimination.)

This was, as far as I could tell, an impossible moral dilemma to solve. Or at least, come to a conclusion I was satisfied with. The lack of information was just too significant. Maybe 243 loops would create 242 hellish realties that got consumed by the flames of the Excursed due to my sudden disappearance. Or maybe not. Maybe 1 loop would result in 242 dwarves painfully starving to death due entirely to me. 242 little grey Jeffries haunting my dreams for all time. Or maybe not. Incidentally, dungeon teleporters only worked on sufficiently sentient beings; the teleporters wouldn't activate if I dropped, say, a box on them or anything. Somebody had to sacrifice themselves, not something.

I decided, eventually, on a compromise. Maybe it wasn't the best thought out plan. Maybe there was some clever mathematical thing I could do to brute force the combination. Unluckily for me, I was no math god. I was but a humble ordinary earth male whose 1332 points in INT did not seem to be granting him any superintelligence. So I had to do what seemed like the best to me.

"Ho there, Duran," I called, and he waved me over.

"Malcador! Jus' the man I wanted ta see. Ye need to get goin', and fast."

"Yes. But first, two things. One, your maps are shit and wrong. You might want to warn any of your men who have them. How do you guys even map out the second floor when it's such a terrible place?"

"Ye wouldn't want to know," Duran said gravely. "If it weren't fer needing to close the damned hole we opened on our first trip, we wouldn't be goin' back there at all. I fear fer yer quest if the maps ain't accurate no more."

"That brings me to point two. Do you happen to have two dwarves I can borrow? Ideally they would be asshole-ish enough that someone who murders them would be able to say 'Eh, they were assholes anyway' and stop thinking about the moral implications of their actions, but not asshole-ish enough that they would disobey orders and run away from the singular individual guiding them deeper and deeper into a dark dungeon."

Duran gave me a long, searching look. There was a pause. Eventually, he clapped a hand on my shoulder. "Malcador, that's a mighty strange request, but I trust ye ta do the right thing. I'll get ye yer men."

I was so moved I could cry. This was it. This was the power of Bromance. This was the power of the Male Best Friend. We offered each other unconditional trust, and in return we got the best brotherly love anyone could ever ask for. This was a dwarf I could trust my back to. A best friend I could count on to be there when I needed him, no matter what. And I, there for him. If he ever came to me asking to engage in experimental coitus, I would refuse, but not while showing visible disgust at his form and then blowing him off for months after while he sadly watched me fuck my harem with aplomb. I would be there for him every step of the way and ensure he had a hot dwarf wife pronto. Actually I wasn't sure if dwarves had wives here. I was astoundingly ignorant of dwarf culture. But in honor of him, my best friend, Duran the bro, I vowed to ask the two dwarves I was going to murder by pushing in teleporters about dwarf culture before pushing them into teleporters and murdering them. Surely over my many loops I would learn much about their culture.

And indeed, that was my plan. The Compromise. The middle ground which arguably was the worst of both worlds, but the one that allowed me to say I did the best I could without thinking harder about the implications. Put simply, I had chosen to solve this in a maximum of 81 loops by bringing two helpers. There were 81 "final rooms" of 3 teleporters each, and I would have them (unwillingly) test 2 of them, then try the 3rd myself. Worst case scenario, I would commit 160 murders. That wasn't necessarily a big step up from 242 murders, but an important factor here was that I didn't actually think I could get 242 dwarves down in the dungeon anyway. There was barely space in the elevator, nobody would want to go, it was a logistical nightmare, they would all know what was happening as soon as we got to the teleporter floor, etc. The "theoretically perfect loop" was truly theoretical. It would probably take many, many loops just to make it happen at great personal expense, if it was even possible. Not to mention that some of the dwarves might die along the way from all the encounters. Point being, it was a mess.

So, while 160 murders wasn't a huge step up, it was something, and they were assholes (according to Duran, whom I trusted with my life). It also reduced the maximum number of loops to 81 from 242, which was a huge load off my shoulders and would lessen the chance of me fucking snapping while traversing the dungeon over and over and over and over.

Honestly, I was mad. I hated the dungeon for making me do this. I hated that I had to bust out mathematical formulas to determine the ideal amount of death and suffering to cause. I hated that, on some level, I valued not having to do 161 tedious loops more than I valued the lives of two dwarves I didn't know. It was like I was being confronted with my ignorance and my lack of idealism here. Like the dungeon was laughing at me. Haha, if you were better at math or smarter at alternative solutions this would be easy, but you're not so it isn't. Haha, if you were more of an idealist, you would suffer 242 loops to not have to murder anyone, but you aren't so you won't, and there still might be 81 realities full of more suffering with you gone.

All in all, this seemed like a kick in the dick. Floor 2 of the dungeon wasn't hard, fun, or engaging. It was a time-waster, and a life-waster. It ate up time and lives. You had to trade time for life, or life for time, and either way, it would be an unpleasant grind.

(I had talked about it to Rose in the room, and she hadn't come up with anything better, so there was that, at least. Maybe there was some outside information neither of us had, like sentient boxes or ropes or something that would activate the teleporter without inflicting any suffering or something. It was impossible to say, which was why real-life problems involving magic were so fucking hard to solve perfectly.)

Anyway. Duran got me my two asshole dwarves, and off we went. I didn't bother stopping by the dining hall; it would hurt to see my three companions before immediately leaving for the dungeon to die and loop back. Obviously, I could have worked with them instead of these dwarves, but killing these nameless stone dudes 161 times seemed better than killing Hilda, Sophia, and Rose 60 times each.

I just wanted to be free of math. Why couldn't this have been a normal dungeon? Why did it have to be one designed to waste time and make everyone inside of it miserable? Was this the effect of the demons coming through the hole? Man, fuck those demons.

I trudged into the elevator with them and waited as it went down. We hadn't spoken. Dwarves weren't very talkative. I was stuck between asking them about dwarf culture and staying silent so as to not learn anything about them. It was miserable. I felt miserable.

The first floor was uneventful. Eighteen encounters, just like before. The minimum path. The dwarves were fighters, but I was over leveled enough by this point it didn't really matter. We got to the second floor.

My plan was to start at the left and go right. It would be easier to track, since I had to keep all this in my head, and because it felt like thinking any harder about it than that would lead to paralysis as logic looped upon itself. Start at the right in case they planned for you to start at the left, but maybe they predicted you would expect that so they actually put it at the left, but maybe they would predict that you predicted that so... etc. It was an infinite loop of "how many levels of thinking are you on," and ultimately didn't mean much. This dungeon laughed in the face of such things. The only way through was time, time, time.

And so we went. Left, left, left, left. Final room. The dwarves turned to look at me. Which one next, they said.

In my head it had been so easy. I would say "left again" with a laugh, and then one of them would go through it. They wouldn't come back, and the teleporter would shut off. The other dwarf would be confused, and in that time I would shove him onto the second one. If that teleporter shut off, I would walk into the third. Easy. One room out of 81 cleared. Repeat 80 more times at most.

But I couldn't say it. Thoughts of Jeffrey with a dagger sticking out of his head flashed through my mind. "Why did you do it?" he asked, blood streaming down his cheeks in the shape of tears. His face overlapped with the dwarf's. "Why did you do it?" the dwarf asked. The dwarf split into 80 more dwarves. "Why? Why? Why?" they all asked. I had no answer. I was afraid of dooming alternate realities. "Do you know alternate realities exist?" Kind of. Not really. "Then why did you kill us for them?" I was scared. "Why? Why? Why?" I don't know what happens to reality when I go back. "Why? Why? Why?" THERE'S NO WAY TO KNOW! "Why? Why? Why?"

Silence. The real dwarves were waiting.

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

"Can you two make it back on your own?" I asked.

They looked at each other, and nodded. They had silver on their foreheads. Maybe they were some of the best fighters the Excavators had.

"Okay. Do that," I said, and walked into the leftmost teleporter.