Kalina couldn’t feel her legs.

Not in the dramatic way people said it in porns or in romance novels. Her case was different. She literally couldn’t feel the lower half of her body and she was lying on a cold stone floor in a house that belonged to another woman - an elf woman who was also her new boyfriend’s wife.

She hoped at least he was her boyfriend but it was a talk for another day. It was so soon for now.

Three hours ago she’d walked through a glowing door in the middle of a garden café in İstanbul and stepped onto a different planet. She’d been carried through a dirt path village with stone houses and alien trees while trying not to hyperventilate. And before she could process any of that Eren had kicked open a door and put her on a couch and the rest of the afternoon had turned into something she didn’t have a word for.

I didn’t know my body could do that.

She wasn’t the type of woman who thought about sex. She’d had partners in her twenties but the experiences had always been neat and organized like everything else in her life. Quick and functional and mostly for the other person. She’d assumed that was just how she was built.

But whatever happened on that stone floor and then on the couch and then against the wall had rearranged something inside her that she couldn’t put back. Her thighs were trembling and her stomach muscles ached and her lips were swollen and she kept pressing her tongue against them because they tingled.

She turned her head. Eren was in the small kitchen area filling two cups with water from a clay jug. His shirt was still off and the late afternoon sun coming through the window caught his skin, which made her stomach do something stupid.

It was embarrassing but Kalina wanted to lick his abs.

Again...

He was too pale but it wasn’t a sickly white. It was the kind that looked like marble in the right light and his muscles moved differently than any man she’d ever seen. Everything about him was denser than it should have been. She’d dug her nails into his back hard enough to leave marks on anyone else and his skin had just stayed smooth.

"This is your wife’s house, I guess." She said it flat while staring at the ceiling then looked around like it was the first time she was seeing this place. Like the last three hours didn’t happen here but someplace else. The furniture was simple handmade wood and the walls were rough grey stone with cracks filled by some kind of dried plant material. A clay pot sat on a shelf next to dried herbs she couldn’t name. It was too crude for her taste.

Eren walked over and crouched beside her with a cup. "Emily’s. Yeah. She’s on Earth right now with my family due to the cramped space in my house."

He said it like he was telling her which parking spot he’d used. Kalina took the water and sat up slowly. Every muscle in her core protested.

"Your elf wife.. is on Earth.. with your family." She drank the entire cup. "And we just had sex on her floor."

She could see so many problems with his indifferent attitude.

Eren scratched the back of his neck and poured her a second cup from the clay jug. "She knows about you. And you should probably know she’s pregnant."

Kalina stared at him for exactly four seconds then put the cup down and started looking for her sweater.

..

An hour later they were walking through the outer edges of the village and the part of Kalina’s brain that ran numbers for a living was doing what it always did. It was calculating.

The houses on the outer ring had all been burned down recently and the damage was massive. Charred beams stuck out of collapsed stone walls at ugly angles and entire orchards behind the homes had been reduced to fields of black stumps. The ground was covered in a grey-white layer of ash that crunched under her shoes and the smell of old smoke hung in the evening air weeks after whatever happened here.

"A dragon did this?" She touched one of the cracked foundation stones. The heat had been intense enough to turn the mortar between the stones into powder that crumbled when she pressed it.

"Thirty meter body." Eren walked ahead of her and pointed toward a mountain range in the north that looked too sharp and too close. "Flew over the village for hours spraying fire in every direction. Everything outside the Totem’s protection ring burned. The orchards, the bigger ranch, dozens of houses. All gone in one afternoon."

"What’s the Totem?"

"A small tree in the center of the village. It generates some kind of protective barrier. Old magic. The elves don’t fully understand it either but it saved everyone inside the ring from being cooked alive." He kicked a piece of charred wood off the path. "The heat from the flames was bad enough to nearly suffocate us even inside the barrier. I had to evacuate the whole village to Earth through my portal. A hundred and twenty people in two trips."

He moved a hundred and twenty people to a different planet in two trips. Just casually mentioning it while kicking burned wood.

Kalina was quiet for a moment. She could hear something in the distance - metal hitting metal, a rhythmic hammering that echoed between the surviving houses.

"Who’s that?"

"Some of the elves came back after the fire. They’re building new barricades and training with weapons." He grinned. "Thadric - he’s the rancher - he basically turned into a military commander while I was gone. Volunteers with swords and everything."

She filed that away. Organized labor and military structure in a population of a hundred and twenty. Not bad for a starting point.

Then he told her about the system.

That was the part where Kalina stopped walking.

"Wait. Every living creature?" She turned to face him with her full attention.

"Every one. You kill something and the system registers you. You get a level. You get stat points. Strength, perception, agility, intelligence." He held up his hand and squeezed the air like he was crushing something invisible. "I started with base stats around seven or eight. A normal human baseline. Now I’m over sixty in most of them. That’s why I can crack walls and carry you around like you weigh nothing."

"And these stats are permanent?"

"Permanent. And they stack with skills. You can learn skills just by doing things repeatedly and the system evolves them as you get better. Running becomes a speed skill, tracking becomes sensory enhancement. Even cooking has a skill."

This is insane.

Kalina had started her career selling security systems and consulting on infrastructure projects worth millions. She knew how to evaluate potential when she saw it and what Eren was describing wasn’t just a fantasy world full of magic and pretty trees. It was the single most valuable strategic resource in human history. A world where you could take regular humans and turn them into superhumans just by having them kill low level creatures. A world with fruit that cured arthritis and wine that sold for thousands per bottle.

"And the only way in and out is you." She stopped walking and looked at him.

"Door Master skill. But it uses all my mana in every cast. Nobody else on Earth can do it, probably.."

"So if someone wanted to bring workers here or military support or anything at all they’d need your cooperation." She started walking again. Her heels were covered in ash and her cream sweater had a dirt stain on the sleeve and she didn’t care about any of it. "No risk of someone going behind your back and opening their own door."

Eren looked at her sideways. "You’re already thinking about this like a business deal."

"I’m thinking about it like someone who understands what monopoly access to an entire universe is worth."

And I just slept with the only key to a new universe on his wife’s floor.

His wife who was alive and pregnant and currently on Earth. She corrected herself and felt nothing about the correction which was probably a problem.

They walked between two rows of intact houses on the inner ring and Eren stopped to show her something growing on the wall. A vine with small bright fruits that glowed with a faint warm light in the evening darkness.

"Koen vines." He touched one of the glowing fruits and it pulsed slightly brighter. "The trunk needs sunlight during the day and the leaves give off light at night. They use these instead of streetlights."

The vine-covered stone walls looked like something from a movie set but the light was too organic and too warm to be electric. It shifted slightly with the breeze like living candles that couldn’t blow out. Some of the vines had crawled across entire walls and turned them into glowing tapestries of soft amber light.

My company spent three million lira on LED street lighting for a residential complex last year. These elves just grow it.

She was staring at the way the glow caught the sharp line of Eren’s jaw when he turned and caught her looking.

"What?"

"Nothing." She looked away but not fast enough.

Eren’s hand found her waist and he pulled her into the narrow gap between two houses where the Koen light barely reached. His mouth was on her neck before she could complain and her fingers were already in his hair before she could tell them to stop. He tasted clean and slightly sweet and his skin radiated heat that had nothing to do with the weather.

Five years of watching this man carry my coffee and now I can’t keep my hands off him for ten minutes.

She pulled back just enough to breathe. His eyes were different up close. Not quite human anymore. The irises had a warm amber quality and the shape was slightly elongated like he was something halfway between two species. Which he literally was. They looked beautiful and a little dangerous at the same time and she hated that she couldn’t stop staring at them.

"You’re staring at my eyes," he said with that stupid grin.

"They’re weird."

"Half-elf." He kissed her again and this time she bit his lower lip hard enough that he actually flinched. "Ow. What was that for?"

"The floor was cold."

"We can use the bed next time."

"Your wife’s bed. Sure." But she was smiling when she said it and that annoyed her more than anything.

Something moved at the edge of the village. Two enormous shapes burst from behind a storage building and came loping toward Eren with their tails wagging so hard their whole bodies swayed. They were wolves but calling them wolves was like calling a van a car. Each one was nearly the size of a small horse with thick dark fur and intelligent yellow eyes that tracked Kalina with obvious curiosity.

They circled Eren and pressed their massive heads against his legs. One of them let out a low sound that was half howl and half excited whine before both of them bolted toward the forest tree line and disappeared into the shadows between the trees.

Kalina watched them go with her hand pressed flat against the stone wall behind her.

"Those are my wolves." Eren scratched behind his ear like he was introducing house cats. "Fury and Rury. They’re still cubs, believe it or not."

"Those were cubs."

"Cubs with that size. Are you messing with me Eren?"

"Their mother was apparently much bigger." He looked and sounded so certain and serious. Then Kalina realized that he could talk to creatures, monsters and much more.

That explained a lot, but it also brought with it a lot of potential headaches. She put the matter aside for now.

I am on another planet watching horse-sized wolf cubs run into a magic forest after licking my boyfriend’s hands. Okay..

Before she could process the event just finished, something caught her eye in the sky above the mountain range. A dark shape with wings moved fast across the purple evening clouds, too big to be a bird and too angular. It dove behind the mountain ridge and vanished.

"Was that..."

"A drake, probably. It is the second time I saw them to come this south. They usually live in that mountain peaks and eat Wyverns most of the time.

"Wyverns..?" She didn’t want to ask but her mouth said it on it’s own.

"Yeah, drakes and wyverns are smaller than the dragon I told you before. They hunt each other in the deep forest and around mountain peak but Drakes are much stronger." Eren didn’t even look up when he said that.

Oh great. There are drakes and other stuff now..

Kalina liked Eren’s new face but it was irritating now that she noticed he changed so much. Even talking about dragons and magical creatures were normal now.

Where are the vampires-werewolf love triangles, huh. Behind that tree?