Mantle of the Gods [LitRPG / Slow Burn / FTB Harem]

Aelin didn't have a comeback.

I had plenty of fun basking in the stunned look on her face. Rix was the only one in the room who had known who Pixie was, so they all looked surprised, but the look on Aelin's face was priceless.

"How..?" Aelin couldn't finish the question.

"Well, you see…" I smirked. "When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much..."

The pillow got thrown back at me. I swatted it away with ease.

"I don't want to hear about your mommy and daddy issues!" Aelin stuck out her tongue. "Are you saying Trent has a brother?"

I looked over at Rix. The knowledge that Iver was Trent's brother wasn't known within the Mundane and Adventurer circles. It seemed like most of the Gods knew, though I hadn't met many.

"Yes." Rix shrugged. "They don't want to get in trouble for having a kid, so they're wanting Trent to claim her." She looked at me. "Though it would probably be safest if we keep with the story that she is Pixie Warray. It's surprising that the Primus haven't made good on their threat. Probably the only reason is that he's been helping to put out fires that could eventually hurt the Gods as a whole. But if all of the sudden lots of his kids that are the same age start popping up…" She slid her finger across her throat.

"I'll try to remember to talk to Klix about that." I shook my head. She had a point and it was definitely something that was going to have to be considered.

The mood got somber as everyone started thinking about Trent being unconscious.

We sat in silence for a few moments before I remembered the original reason that Aelin had been brought into my room.

"Aelin, is there anything else that you want to ask?" I looked at Justia. "Is there anything that you can think of that she doesn't know?"

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"I've got something." Aelin pulled her knees towards her. "What's up with the High Priestess thing?" She looked at Justia. "Doesn't that mean the two of you?"

I sighed. I was starting to get tired of answering that question. "Not like that." I waved my hand back and forth between the two of them. "I'm not a part of whatever the two of you want to do." I looked up at the ceiling as I tried to think about how to answer the other part of her question. "Honestly, I don't know much about it other than the rumors you hear on the street." I nodded at the Healer. "Justia might know more, but I have a feeling this union is very premature, though I'm not sure why Mavery rushed it."

"For the two of you to grow together." Rix shook her head. "It's the same reason why Trent didn't take the three of us to the fifties and start powerleveling us."

"What?" Aelin looked between us.

"Think about it like this…" Rix pulled up her shirt enough to show her defined golden abs. "When you gain weight, if you do it slowly, there aren't any stretch marks. But if you gain a lot of weight too fast…" She drew her finger over her stomach. "Stretch marks." She shrugged. "For the three…" She shook her head. "Five. Of us, our connection with each other will get stronger. As we get into the higher levels we should start noticing that we get a small stat bonus when we're in a party together."

We all stared at Rix.

I managed to recover first. "How do you know that?"

Rix shook her head. "You know all those times that Trent took me for private training while the rest of you worked on teamwork?"

I nodded slowly. The redhead was level seven and while the rest of us had been working on fighting in the Dungeon, she had been shadowing our teacher and getting personal lessons from him. Considering her knowledge on topics that I was unaware even existed, I was starting to appreciate what she'd learned.

"So if we level up slowly, then we get stronger?" Aelin sighed. "I was hoping that we'd be able to graduate early."

"Given these first three months, I wouldn't take that off the table." I nodded at Rix. "Who knows when the next one of us is going to have to take one for the team."

So far Rix, Gesai, and even Astrid had been forced to kill someone with a mantle to protect us. Gesai had done it twice, so it wasn't unrealistic to think that one of us was going to be put in that situation before we graduated.

There was a knock on the door, but it wasn't Ether.

Oz stormed into the room and launched herself face first onto the bed. I heard muffled screams before she rolled over and took a few short deep breaths.

"I. Am going to. Kill. Her." Oz picked her head up enough to look at me.