Walking His Own Path
Starving Elf, Afternoon. Kane's cabin in the forest. The moment Hans dropped his pack, hellish training began.
"Two this time." Kane tied two logs together with rope and hoisted them onto Hans's shoulders.
"Urrgh...!" Hans's knees buckled. The weight was on an entirely different level from before.
"Run!"
Hans forced himself up the mountain slope, screaming. Sweat poured like rain, and his breath burned in his throat. That was when he heard it.
"Oh my, how foolish." A familiar voice drifted down from above. Hans looked up to see Serena perched on a branch, legs crossed seductively. She clicked her tongue in pity.
"Have you thought about it? I've even laid out a fluffy feather bed in my nest." Serena uncrossed her legs, flashing a glimpse beneath her skirt. The pale green panties blended with the forest foliage, creating an oddly alluring sight. "Shall we start lessons tonight? I could teach you very kindly... with my body."
She was certain. No man exhausted by this grueling training would refuse her sweet offer. Who would turn down trading ten years of hardship for nights of passion until pregnancy? Hans stopped, panting heavily. Serena's pale thighs and the secret place between them drew his gaze. He swallowed hard. He wanted to go. He wanted to throw the logs aside right now and throw himself into her embrace. But—
'If you take the shortcut, you'll never beat the woman you want to defeat.'
Kane's words were etched into his mind. Hans squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. He shook his head firmly.
"I'm sorry."
"......Huh?" Serena's eyes widened.
"If I take the shortcut... I don't think I'll ever be able to beat the person I want to beat." Hans smiled through his sweat-drenched face. "I'll walk on my own two feet. Even if it's slower, it's more certain that way."
Serena stared, mouth agape. "Rejection" had never been part of her expected scenario.
"Wait, seriously? Ten years, you know? I'm offering my body too. Are you impotent or something?" she cried desperately, but Hans answered only with a battle cry.
"Hup!" He adjusted the logs and began climbing the mountain again, passing Serena in silence.
Left behind, Serena's face flushed crimson with shame and wounded pride.
"Y-you stupid human! You'll regret this! I'll make you regret it so much you'll pound the ground!" She shouted in frustration, yet her eyes never left his retreating figure. That bear-like back was foolish, but strangely... cool.
"Just you wait. You think I can't seduce you?" She bit her lip and vanished into the forest. But her gaze burned not with surrender, but with fiercer competitive spirit.
A few days later, at the Ludel village security force training ground.
"Hah!" Karen swung her wooden sword with a shout. The air-splitting sound was no ordinary one. She wiped her sweat and steadied her breathing. After being demoted to the countryside, she'd expected her skills to stagnate or decline. After all, she spent her days buried in paperwork or dealing with drunkards. But lately, something felt off about her body. It was as light as a feather. Her grip strength, her reaction speed—everything felt better than during her prime.
"What is this...?" Karen swung the sword again. In that instant—
Fwoosh! A bluish haze rose from the tip of the wooden sword. Faint, yet unmistakable light.
"This is... sword aura?" Karen doubted her own eyes. The threshold of an Aura User. The entrance to a realm countless knights spent their entire lives chasing without reaching—she now stood before it.
"How...?" She looked down at her palm. Then she realized.
"Of course... it's the power of turbid energy emission!" Karen's eyes gleamed with conviction. All those countless "training sessions" with Hans. The process in which he stimulated the deepest parts of her body and made her release what she believed was turbid energy. Karen had no idea in her wildest dreams that the shameless lie Hans had told was actually the most certain secret technique for clearing a woman's blocked energy and expanding her mana core. No rigid knight manual in the Empire had ever written about "mana circulation through orgasm." In this excessively conservative society regarding sex, the very idea of using pleasure as a training tool was taboo. But the truth was sometimes hidden in the most obscene places.
"Hans... your teachings weren't in vain! You're a true sage!" Karen clenched her fist in emotion.
…At the same time, in the nearly restored ruined temple. Heretic Inquisitor Lucia knelt before the altar in prayer.
"O God..." She closed her eyes and focused. But something was strange. In the past, drawing out divine power had required intense concentration and time. Now, however—when she extended her hand, the chalice on the altar was instantly enveloped in brilliant light.
Hum—
Divine Force poured forth like a waterfall. As natural as breathing, yet overwhelmingly powerful.
"The next stage... is right in front of me." Lucia trembled. After receiving Hans's "purification ritual," she felt as though not only her body but the vessel of her soul had expanded. Because he had sucked away and swallowed her impurities with his mouth, her divine power had become even purer—she was certain of it. Of course, this too was a misunderstanding. In truth, mana and divine power were two sides of the same coin. The only difference was whether the energy gathered and released from the lower dantian was called "mana" or "divine power"; both flowed through the body's neural network. The extreme orgasm Hans had given her pushed Lucia's entire neural network to the brink of overload, and in the process, her hardened divine power circuits activated and expanded beyond their limits. But the devout Lucia could never understand this biological mechanism. For clergy who made abstinence their law, the explosive amplification of divine power from releasing suppressed sexual desire was a sacred blasphemy and taboo that must never be revealed.
Lucia caressed the altar with an ecstatic expression.
"Hans... you are a true seeker. The one who saved my body and soul."
***
Deep in the forest, the elf village.
"Tch, tch..." Serena stomped back into the village in frustration. She couldn't believe she'd been rejected by a mere human.
"Serena, you've been acting suspicious lately." Her fellow elves stood waiting at the entrance with arms crossed. The forest elves looked elegant and refined on the surface, but their eyes gleamed like starving hyenas. Without men, they had grown dangerously sensitive.
"Where do you keep disappearing to? Are you eating something delicious all by yourself?" One elf approached Serena and sniffed.
"Wait... this smell..." Her eyes flashed. "This is... a human male's scent, isn't it?"
Another elf snatched Serena's right hand and pressed her nose to it.
"It is. And it's a very... strong smell."
Serena flinched and stepped back. She realized her mistake. When she'd pressed that massive thing of Hans's through his underwear in the forest, the beastly musk that clung to her palm had seemed too precious to wash away. That had been her undoing.
"W-what are you talking about! I was just on forest patrol!"
"Don't lie! The pheromones are practically vibrating!" The elves swarmed her.
"You were trying to hog the honey all to yourself, weren't you? Where is he? Where's that man?"
"We're desperate too! The bloodline's about to die out!"
Their eyes gleamed with madness. Serena finally sighed deeply. She couldn't hide it.
"Fine... a decent one wandered into the forest." She roughly gestured the size of Hans's member with her hands. "A very... sturdy one."
"......!!" The elves' eyes rolled back.
"Bring him here right now! Share him! For the sake of species preservation!"
"That's right! Keeping him to yourself is a crime!"
Chaos erupted. Serena outwardly replied, "Alright, alright. I'll bring him when I get the chance," but inwardly she was thinking differently.
Hmph, not a chance. I found him first. Her lips curled slyly. I'll seduce him first, lock him in my hideout, and enjoy him to my heart's content. Once I've sucked him dry to the bone and gotten bored... then I'll hand him over.
***
"Hans was such an easy child to raise." Beyond the steaming teacup, Hans's father reminisced about the distant past. A polite, frugal son who had taken care of himself since childhood. Thinking of his youngest, who had even yielded the right to inherit the family business to his sister and walked into the thorny path of the academy on his own, the father felt more guilt than pride.
"That's right, dear. How much must he have been looked down upon, a commoner among those arrogant nobles? And yet he never once complained about how hard it was—that hurt even more." At the mother's sigh-filled words, Hans's older sister Tatiana pouted.
"Exactly! If he's graduated, he should come home and act spoiled for once. Why is he holed up in some backwater like Ludel without even contacting us? I'm going to go there myself and drag that brat back by the collar!" Though Tatiana, as the next head of the merchant guild, already made powerful merchants tremble, in front of her brother Hans she was nothing more than a hopeless "little brother fool."
"Right. As it happens, there's business with a client near Ludel in a month, so why don't you stop by and see our son's face on the way?"
The moment their parents gave permission, Tatiana's eyes gleamed dangerously.
"Just wait one month, our Hans. Big sister will come and hug you so hard your bones crack."
In truth, there was another reason Hans had chosen to attend the academy. The incident that turned their peaceful household into hell had been his sister Tatiana's excessive lack of boundaries.
"Hans, let's sleep together. Okay?" During his vigorous teenage years, Tatiana would frequently crawl into Hans's bed wearing a thin slip that was practically see-through. The sensation of smooth legs and arms tangling around him in his sleep, the soft press of her ample breasts. Every time he glimpsed the pale skin exposed carelessly between her clothes, Hans had to recite the national anthem in his head while suppressing his raging instincts beneath the blanket. If this continued, he would truly become a beast. The terror that he might cross the forbidden line of incest and destroy the family drove him forward. Of course, he had also dreamed of a rosy future. In his past life's memories, what was the academy? It was the flower of youth and the cradle of harems! A rosy campus life where he would escape his sister's overwhelming temptation and become entangled one after another with blonde noble ladies or pure saintesses. Of course, reality had been the hellfire of the class system.
"Achoo—!"
Meanwhile, deep in the forest near Ludel village. Hans, who had been running up the mountain path with logs on his back, let out a loud sneeze.
"What? Is someone talking about me?" Hans wiped his sweat and tilted his head. The sudden chill down his spine—was it just his imagination? He dismissed it lightly and began climbing the mountain again, completely unaware that Tatiana, the final boss threatening his harem(?) and the very person who had driven him into the academy's hell, was coming.