Banter with a Friend
"Mmph!"
Delicious. People always say food tastes better after a hard day's work, but hot fried chicken and a cold draft beer beat anything else in this world. And while I was at it, I'd ordered pizza too, and was currently sharing my breast milk with the orc triplets through a milking machine.
In short: a world where nobody got hurt. Complete.
"Man, that was gorgeous. Look at this — nobody makes a face this perverted mid-birth. Even among Breeding Wombs, it's rare!"
Ei said that as she hit play. The screen filled with my face, slack and vulgar with pleasure, and an orc being born from my pussy.
"Hmm. Main content should be my face, the pussy mid-birth, and the overall pose. For the face and pussy, stick separate feeds in the top-left corner — if the pussy's the big shot, the face goes small, that kind of thing."
"Ooh, so you watch one while the other runs as a secondary?"
"Exactly. Ei, you catch on fast. I like that."
I said it around a mouthful of pizza. Ei already had a knack for filming, and she was absorbing my suggestions and growing at a frightening clip. Calling it teaching was a stretch — it was more like tossing her inspiration — but she took it and forged her own technique out of it.
Truly, growth fueled by passion was a terrifying thing.
"So what now?"
"Heading for the Holy Kingdom first. You said it's at the western edge, right?"
I called up the continental map the status window had shown me. The Fargis Mountains and Fargist Village sat roughly in the center of the continent. This godforsaken, enormous mountain range practically split the land in half, and where the mountains finally gave out in the south, desert took over.
East of the divide: the Kaisa Empire and the Demon Realm. West: the Allied Nations, and at the far western tip, the Holy Kingdom.
My goal, first and foremost, was to arm myself with a stacked party and go wreck the Demon King at the eastern edge.
And strong companions alone wouldn't cut it. I had to get stronger too—
"Huh?"
A question bloomed in my head. There was a way to get stronger. A method so textbook I wanted to slap myself for not noticing it sooner.
"Levels… don't I have those?"
Levels.
A numerical index of strength and rank. Usually a game concept — but I had a status window, and I had stats.
And yet levels alone had been nowhere to be found.
Status window!
Current Level function is LOCKED.
Cannot be unlocked with Shop Points.
Locked. Why locked? Between the shop and everything else, for something that made me a Holy Maiden, this system sure loved its restrictions.
"Ei, you're an angel — you know anything about levels? Between the shop and this, I've got a lot of quiet limits on me. Am I actually the last hope or what?"
It genuinely made no sense.
Even the heroes who started out with a cypress stick didn't have their level-ups locked.
"Ah, that? Simple. The previous heroes beat the Demon King and then turned on humanity. Because of the level system, no one could match them until they died of old age, and even the Goddess couldn't lay a hand on them while they were alive."
Heroes' betrayal.
Common enough. But the why was the problem.
"Isn't killing the Demon King supposed to set you up for life?"
"Mmm… lots of reasons, but the most common one is that someone hurt or murdered the hero's wife or kids. The kingdoms that did it were so ashamed of being the aggressors that they scrubbed those parts from the record. And then history repeats. Oh, and for reference — the heroes who defected to the Demon King's army already lost their status windows, but the power doesn't go anywhere. They're still strong as hell, their lifespans balloon, and they're danger rank number one."
"Fuck. So that's why the Goddess lost, too?"
"Yeah. The Demon King just sat on his throne. The Four Heavenly Kings were the ones who brought the Goddess to her knees."
I was dizzy. Dizzer than the aftereffects of giving birth. I nearly dropped my pizza, but managed to avert that particular disaster.
"Is there any way to unlock levels? Even with party members, being stuck as a heal-and-buff dispenser makes me a little nervous."
Honestly, I was hoping Ei would solve this for me. She'd cracked my shop somehow, so I figured it was worth a shot.
"Sorry. Levels are locked down tight — even I couldn't do anything about it. If you want to fix it with demonic energy, you'd have to become a demon or a demonkin."
Ei answered with an expression caught between apology and firm resolve.
Status window. Show me my level.
Name:Serena
Level:1 (LOCKED)
Level one. Just one. Meaning I was extremely weak. Thank god I had a lot of divine power — without it, I'd have been a total washout who finished in a single pathetic spurt.
In that case, I at least needed a way to raise my stats.
Hoping against hope, I opened the shop window and dug around for anything related to stats. After a long search, I found what I wanted — but.
Status Point x1 — 10,000 Points
Not enough. And a one-to-one exchange rate at that. Worst of the worst.
"Would training raise my stats?"
"Yeah, but you'd need years of consistent practice. Real combat experience, too, and actual breakthroughs of insight."
Ei meant it as encouragement, but reality hit me like a wall. Still, I had to do it. If I didn't run toward my goal, I might spend the rest of my life as a Breeding Womb in some monster nest — an anxiety that gripped me even as my womb, umbilical cord still attached, trembled as if it were looking forward to exactly that.
"Aaah! At least for tonight, I'm not thinking about it!"
I raised my beer mug in declaration, then chugged it down in one go.
"Kyaaah~!"
"Right, right! Oh — want to try some drugs? It's a powder narcotic for women that's been spreading through the underbelly of the Allied Nations lately."
At the word drugs, I looked at Ei. In her hand was a spread of paper, and on it sat a powder that looked just like pink sugar. Beside it was a small box-sized package of the same stuff.
"Whoa. Side effects look like they'd be fucking brutal, but the high would probably be incredible?"
"Yeah. One hit and it turns a woman's entire life into a bitch's, supposedly."
Hearing just that much, it sounded insanely dangerous. But…
"So would it even work on me?"
Not to toot my own horn, but wasn't I already a complete fucking bitch? Honestly, during the succubus subjugation I'd barely held back from yanking Malcolm's pants down for a look at his cock. I'd barely stopped myself from thinking about crawling under Jerry's robes for a blowjob.
"Hmm… maybe it'd hit harder if you snort it during sex?"
"Oh."
Not bad. Should I give it a try?
"No — first let's dump these little guys with an orc herd and come back. The goblins took the babies into the cave without a second thought, but what about orcs?"
"A regular nest would be tough. But the orcs at a 'ranch' have so many kids already that three more wouldn't be a problem."
Ranch. A word for a farm that raises livestock.
What that livestock was, Ei didn't bother explaining. I already knew — or rather, I'd already guessed — so she didn't need to.
At those ranches, the livestock was human.
"I know a ranch around here. I'll slip in, drop them off quiet, and get out. Don't worry."
"Aah, thank you. Without you I'd have been stuck raising kids for sure."
And still as Morus's captive, no less. Not that I hadn't considered the scenario where Azazel came alone — but if she had, demon-Azazel would have just killed me on the spot.
She'd still had her head on straight back then, which meant a Holy Maiden like me was nothing but an irritant to a demon like her.
"Ah, but there's one important thing."
Ei said it while sipping her beer. Foam clung to her face, giving her a white mustache, and I couldn't take her seriously — I burst out laughing.
"Ahahaha!"
"I'm an angel — no, a demon — trying to say something serious! That's so mean!"
"Hmm~ so Demon-sama gets foam on her philtrum and still tries to be serious? C'mere, I'll wipe it off."
I smiled with my eyes and brushed the foam from Ei's mouth. And damn — Ei, your lips are pretty, aren't they?
No. Not just her lips. All of her was beautiful. Looking similar to the Goddess was a flaw, sure, but take off the tinted glasses and Ei was an absolute stunner.
I moved toward her. Or rather — got pulled. Like a north pole drawn to a south, some force I couldn't name closed the distance.
Slowly, closer. I looped my arms around Ei's neck and gradually shut my eyes. There was no way she didn't know what I was doing, but she didn't stop me. Instead, she put her arms around my waist too.
"Chuuup♡"
Mouth met mouth.
"Haahp♡ Chuuuup♡ Slurp, haaah♡ Chuuuuup♡"
Tongues tangled, making filthy wet sounds. Faces pressed flush, chests crushed together so hard milk spilled from mine, and past the soft flesh of our mound-covers we found each other's clits and fenced with them.
I slid my leg between Ei's thighs; she slid hers between mine. And then Ei's tail crept slowly toward my pussy—
Yank!
"Yank?"
Yaaaaank♡♡♡
"Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiin♡♡♡♡♡"
She grabbed the still-unsevered umbilical cord and hauled with everything she had♡ The pleasure of my guts being dragged out made me break the kiss mid-stream, scream like a cheap whore, and spray breast milk and love juices all over both our lower halves.
"Ahaha. That's your punishment for a clumsy kiss♡ Try harder next time."
Ei said it, pumped demonic energy into her tail to dissolve my umbilical cord, scooped up the orc triplets, and flew off.
"…Well. She's a friend, so I'll forgive her. Ah — come to think of it, I never heard that important thing she was going to say… eh, I can hear it later."
I watched Ei vanish into the night sky, promised myself another playdate next time, pocketed the gift she'd left behind (the drugs), and decided to make the rest of the day count.