My lusty days and hardworking nights continued like that for a whole month without anything too weird happening. It really made me understand that practically all my neighbors were well… hermits.

Seriously, EMP spent most of her time with her animals and didn’t even bother texting the rest of us much since she had Scylla to keep her company. With the octopus girl’s manipulative powers, I was kinda worried for EMP, but it seemed like there was a sort of resistance that built up when it came to Telepathy. For example, after that first time where she was turned into a creepy puppet, the subsequent trips that Chameleon made with me psychically connected to her, didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the girl in the fish-tank.

In a similar way, EMP was able to easily resist Scylla’s powers since she raised her from a very young age. The only reason she was influenced that one time, was because Scylla had grown much more powerful in the time she hadn’t seen EMP.

Angel would talk on the phone for hours if you gave her the chance, especially about Asian webnovels, anime, manga, movies and video games. However, since she was living with Lioness, Viper and a bunch of mysterious ‘cats’ that I had yet to see, she didn’t feel the need to leave her house. With Lioness there, even the miscellaneous tasks like carrying ‘goods’ to and from her house didn’t require the golden brat to go outside.

Demoness was in a similar situation. She wasn’t alone in her house. There were a few Minions or maybe they were more like pets… I still didn’t completely understand the situation, but I just hoped that they weren’t sex-slaves. Hell, I think we all know that they really were sex-slaves, fuck. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds though, because as far as I knew, they were more like the BDSM kinda slaves. Hardcore massochists even more extreme than Chameleon.

If not, I think that EMP or Chameleon would have done something by now. Or maybe not. After all, I hadn’t even bothered to go over to her house myself to find out.

Anyway, Cicada stopped texting all of us at some point. Either she was busy with something or just got bored of both me and Ana already. Lioness constantly went on hikes, swam in the ocean, hunted dangerous animals like leopards or bears with little to no weapons. She did at least carry some guns, ammo, spears, knives and other stuff though. So I wasn’t too worried about her getting herself killed.

The two of us would hang out every few days. As Michael, I would usually go kayaking, have a shooting or archery competition that I would definitely lose, worked out in the gym or played video games. When she came over Chameleon’s house at night about once a week, we would spar together, literally play around with real but blunt swords and other weapons, test melee weapons on ballistic gel dummies, carcasses or straw targets… And obviously eat a lot of really fancy food that my girlfriend made for us! 

Of course, Lioness also helped us carry a cow upstairs to be butchered one time, and she also started taking her hunts over our house whenever she had something that was too big or difficult to handle on her own. And given how often she went hunting, she came over more and more as she got more familiar with us.

By the way, if you’re wondering how strong Lioness is compared to Ana… Ugh, both Chameleon and I would have been seriously injured by just a few ‘light’ attacks if she hadn’t been pulling her punches. Seriously, she had super regeneration, so her muscles and bones would heal rapidly. Thus, the more she worked out and got injured, the stronger her muscles and bones would become over time. The only problem was that she got limited by equipment rather than biology.

Even the high-tech gym in my basement didn’t have a machine that could be used to bench press over two thousand pounds. The heaviest dumbbells I had were only about 200 lbs, but she could curl over 500 lbs easily. The problem then became that if she used one hand to try and do curls with a regular bar, it would probably snap in half once you put over 500 lbs on it. There were some tricks that she could use though. An example would be doing push ups with two or three barbells full of weights on her back, but that would definitely fuck up her spine and ribs, and also probably cause her muscles to grow really weird to compensate.

Ultimately, she had to settle with the strength she had and just maintain it. I mean, for fuck’s sake, do you know how many calories she needed to consume just maintaining a body that absurdly powerful?! Not just calories, but she had to eat obscene quantities of protein all day every day or her super-metabolism would make her hard-earned muscles disappear in a week or two.

In fact, that was part of the reason why Chameleon was so skinny and her muscles were so lithe, even though she worked out or performed a lot of manual labor all the time. A powerful metabolism is a double-edged sword, though a weak metabolism is also not completely negative. After all, if you’re in a situation where you don’t have much food, a higher metabolism would mean that you’d starve to death more quickly.

According to my theory, you would need something like Qi or EMP’s ability to absorb, store and convert electrical energy in order to exceed Lioness’ limitations. But how limited is she really? She weighs 500 lbs first of all, which is a lot, but considering the density of her muscles and bones, along with her height of six feet… I’d say it’s a pretty normal weight. 

Lioness can bench press four times her body weight, ten times in a row, but she gets tired quickly with that much weight because of the sheer amount of energy the process needs to burn through. She can deadlift eight times her body weight, which is four thousand motherfucking pounds. But there’s still the problem of energy once she reaches about ten reps. With lower weight, she can obviously do far more reps without getting tired. The truth is that at those high weights, her muscles are constantly tearing and straining, along with the bones and even veins. Hell, she almost broke my bench and cracked my floor apart one time, but fortunately the equipment in my gym along with the material of the floor is all pretty fancy.

I can’t say that Lioness is bulletproof, but we tested up to .38 special pistol rounds, and they basically flatten and bounce off her skin. Only leaving bruises and welts at most, which disappear in seconds. However, unlike video games where the higher the caliber, the more powerful the round, reality is a bit more complex. The most important aspects are the shape, weight and material that the bullet itself are made out of, and how much propellant is involved.

Magnum rounds travel faster and hit harder because they use more gunpowder than a typical handgun round. Rifle rounds generally have far more gunpowder than a pistol round, due to their much longer shells, and the bullets are not only heavier/longer, they are often designed for accuracy and penetration. Now just penetrating isn’t really that great either, because unlike a normal human, even a fragmenting hollow-point .357 magnum round was more like getting a bunch of splinters for Lioness.

Within a few minutes, she managed to squeeze them out automatically though I also used some tweezers to speed up the process. The normal .50 caliber rounds caused more pain and had more power, but couldn’t penetrate the side of her thigh, chest, arm or abdominal skin. The .44 magnum hollow points were significantly more troublesome than the .357, but ultimately stopped before piercing the muscles as well. By the way, when a person flexes a muscle, it makes the muscle harder and more durable, while a loose muscle would be easier to pierce. So why didn’t we let her loosen her muscles? Well, she was so ripped that she kinda couldn’t. Even in a natural, relaxed state, most of her muscles were still fairly taut.

Aside from that, have you ever been relaxed when someone was about to hit you? Especially if they were shooting a loud pistol at close range and you knew about it beforehand?

Anyway, she eventually convinced Gemini and Michael to test a steel shotgun slug on her abdomen. Yeah, I know, it was stupid. Up until that point, we had been using fmj rounds at most, which would still deform against her skin and muscles. But steel rounds? Unfortunately, Lioness wasn’t the ‘Woman of Steel’.

“Aaah~! Fuck dude! Oh my God~! Agh~! It hurts so much hahaha~! Ugh~!” She was laughing and crying while bleeding all over my front yard, with a hole the size of a fucking golf ball on her back, while the relatively small hole on her abdomen healed pretty quickly and easily. Thankfully, even the internal damage seemed to be gone within a few hours. But there was still a pretty big patch of untanned skin on her back that helped her remember she wasn’t invincible.