Mind, and Manipulation (6)
Hmm.
I rubbed my chin, watching Sophia's shoulders heave as she gasped for air. Her Phase Power had climbed to 3.5 million — the very peak of C-Class, a step or two short of B. The moment I laid Mental Manipulation over her, a heavy pressure settled on me, as if my head had sunk deep underwater. My nape ached as well, the way it might if mental fatigue had piled up there.
It wasn't more than I could bear. The stiffness was about what you feel walking out of a theater after a single film, and the pressure was only pressure — nothing that actually bound what I could do. If I pictured it as a pen, I could probably keep some fifty ability users of Sophia's caliber inside it.
The TP cost, though... a tenth of her current Phase Power? A frightening amount. Three hundred and forty thousand in a single stroke. An ordinary ability user recovered only about a tenth of what I did, so a normal Mental Manipulation user could never afford to throw this power around in the real world.
As her panting eased, Sophia wiped the sweat from her brow with her sleeve and slowly raised her head to look at me. She sucked in a breath, then blinked again and again, like someone staring at a thing she could not believe. A clear light gathered in her eyes. She lifted a hand, caught the one I had cupped to her cheek, and spoke in a voice bright with excitement.
"Ah, Master. Are you truly my Master?"
"Hmm?"
"If it would be of any help to you, I want to offer my body and my heart — all of it...! Wh-what is this feeling?!"
Her attitude had plainly changed. When she first arrived at the house there had been a sense of obedience, but this was something else. Yes. Submission.
"Submission."
"Ah! So this feeling is...!"
The moment I named it, rapture flooded her face, and she squirmed as if she had no idea what to do with a heart so full. The density of an emotion clearly followed the amount of TP I pushed into the Klein Bottle when I drew it out.
I was a little startled myself, but my three lovers — and Choi Soohan most of all — wore looks beyond words. None of them had expected Mental Manipulation to take hold this immediately. Watching Sophia stand ready to grant anything I so much as mentioned, Franc and Hwayeon seemed quite grave. Yeongeun, of course, already looked to be weighing how best to spend the power.
When I took my hand from Sophia's cheek she let out a small ah and twitched as if to reach after it, then drew back, the very image of a puppy whose bowl had been snatched away. It lasted only a moment. She fidgeted, wretched with the wish to do something for me and nothing to offer, and Franc, watching her, tilted her head in puzzlement and spoke.
"Sophia? Did it feel as though you had been placed under Mental Manipulation?"
"What? Yes. I felt a hot, warm energy flowing in through my eyes, Lady Franc!"
"Then we will not be able to use it by laying it on in secret, steering someone for a moment, and letting them go."
"I don't think that's true! I only felt it because I already knew. If I hadn't known, I would have thought I was simply feeling poorly and let it pass!"
So it really was the emotion alone being worked. Sharp as ever, Sophia corrected the point Franc had raised, and at the sight Yeongeun touched her own cheek and smiled like a politician.
"She truly looks as if she would do anything she was told. Seoha, shall we have her try something? Anything at all."
"What should I have her do?"
I had gone looking for submission first so I could get my hands on the Dark Matter Slime, but what order would actually confirm it? Nothing came to mind. I turned to Yeongeun, and she offered a suggestion with a wicked little smile.
"Sophia feels sexual shame and embarrassment very keenly, so there is no better command for testing submission than this!"
I had a bad feeling.
"Sophia? It seems Seoha wants to watch you masturbate."
"Hey. What are you saying."
The instant I turned on Yeongeun, dumbfounded by the outrageous line, Sophia did not hesitate. She flung off the long brown skirt she had arrived in, kicked her green panties away after it, and reached for the modest thatch of straw-colored hair—
"Stop! Put your clothes back on!"
Legs spread wide, the golden grass at her groin laid bare, she had been about to part that straight-split cleft with her fingers. At my shout she hauled the skirt back on and pulled her panties up just as fast, then sparkled at me as if waiting for the next order.
Watching Yeongeun giggle, I could feel a headache coming on.
"Don't give weird orders."
I growled it under my breath. Yeongeun let out a delighted little laugh, looked at Sophia as if deeply impressed, and went on.
"Sophia is so shy of showing her body that she wears a rash guard even at the pool, and one rough command has her dropping her bottoms without a thought. Tell her to strip naked and run into the street and she looks ready to obey. Planting submission really is something, isn't it?"
"Shall I?"
"Don't!"
I barked it at Sophia, who was already shifting as if to act on Yeongeun's words, and then let out a sigh.
The documents on Mental Manipulation users I had received from the branch chief were clearly no lie. This was Mental Manipulation in the literal sense — touch the emotions, rewrite even the mind, and steer the target. So what was the limit of a B-Class user's capacity? Could they manipulate a single Highest-Rank Variant? Judging by Ha Cheolsu, who had lost his mind going for two, one ought to be possible. He could not have taken a second Highest-Rank Variant after his mind had already snapped.
While I was sorting it through, Hwayeon half-covered her face with one hand, sighed from deep in her chest, and spoke, eyeing Sophia, who looked itchy with the need to be doing something.
"It's a good thing you finished Ha Cheolsu quickly, Seoha. If you hadn't, this really might have become a disaster."
"Yes. Just as you said, it actually worked in our favor that he went down the criminal road. If he had hidden that wicked nature and built his rank and position step by step from the bottom, he would have been a serious threat."
Franc took up the thread, smacked the still-giggling Yeongeun across the thigh, and regarded blindly submissive Sophia with a faintly uncomfortable look. Before Yeongeun could issue another strange order, I spoke.
"That much is true. I'll release the Mental Manipulation, so look into my eyes."
"Yes!"
I drew up all seven threads of emotion and poured them into Sophia's eyes. Her irises flickered black once and returned to their original deep sea-blue. The same quantity of TP drained away in a long pull, and the instant the manipulation lifted, the pressure I had grown used to in my head vanished. I felt refreshed, as if I had just had a scalp massage.
"Ah..."
Freed of it, Sophia looked dazed — then flushed hard. She pressed the skirt down between her thighs with both hands and began stealing glances at me. Because she had opened herself in front of me a moment ago, no doubt. I ignored it and asked.
"Tell me how it felt."
"I-it's all rather dizzying..."
"No headache? No strain on your body? Nothing like that?"
"No. From the moment the submission went in, my heart started fluttering. And when I acted on your orders, Master, I was so happy and so glad I could hardly stand the excitement."
...So that was why she had gotten wet.
"If you are uneasy, Master, you may inject the submission into me again!"
She said it that way, but her face said she wanted to feel the sensation once more. Choi Soohan, listening, wore a tempted look — I could see it through Spatial Perception. What was this? Was the mental pleasure of Mental Manipulation so great that it bred this much dependence in so short a time? I hesitated, then nodded.
"Just now the submission seemed fairly concentrated. Let's check a little further."
After that I adjusted the TP, drew out colors of emotion, and tested them. As expected, the more TP I fed into the Phase Power pattern shaped like a Klein Bottle, the denser the corresponding emotion became. The feeling I had first injected into Sophia, for instance, had been drawn with about 10 TP. An emotion drawn with 1 TP was extremely faint, and once I raised it past 100 she seemed unable to feel anything except what I had put in her.
Whether the TP spent creating a color of emotion had any relation to the TP consumed in casting the manipulation, it did not seem to. A tenth of Sophia's Phase Power — 340,000 TP — kept being spent regardless.
The problem appeared once the count passed ten. I injected submission with 300 TP and then released it, and Sophia complained of a headache.
"Uurp. I-I feel sick, and it's like needles stabbing the back of my neck over and over... Like someone is hammering the crown of my head... urk."
I listened to her dry-heaving, her face gone pale, and examined her brain with Spatial Perception, but nothing in particular had changed. I lit Mana Vision in my eyes and went over it again in detail, and there it was: the Phase Power drifting above her neck had gone slightly turbid. Set against the rest of her body, the Phase Power in her head looked cloudy at a glance. So that was the aftereffect.
I reached out and laid a Healing Touch on her head. Her expression eased considerably, but the darkness under her eyes did not return to normal, and the Phase Power stayed cloudy, so I fired a Stage 5 Healing Wave. A wave of blue light wrapped her whole body and faded, and the murk pooled in her brain thinned a great deal. Sophia seemed to feel it too; the exhaustion in her face loosened.
"Ah, I'm all right now!"
A Stage 5 Healing Wave could mend fatal wounds and even illnesses thought incurable, and it still could not fully clear this. The aftereffects were more serious than I had expected. Good to know.
I could not send her off in that state, so I told Choi Soohan to take her to an empty room and let her rest. Supported on Soohan's arm, Sophia went in, lay down, and fell into a deep sleep the moment she touched the bed.
"Hmm~ So the strength of the emotion has to be tuned to the target's temperament with TP. Bright, lively Sophia sits at about 30 TP, and if you calibrate a target's emotional intensity against that, the behavior won't come off as awkward."
Hearing Yeongeun, Hwayeon nodded, pressed the corner of her lip lightly with her thumb, and murmured.
"That's right. When she received the emotion made with 300 TP at the end, none of Sophia's original personality remained — only unconditional submission. It was like watching an artificial intelligence."
"But when we tested 1 TP, she was calm, and she still clearly followed orders, didn't she? I'm not sure the difference in her usual behavior actually shows in how concentrated the emotion is..."
Yeongeun stroked Franc's platinum hair as if she found the tilt of her head adorable.
"Perhaps because you have never stood in an employer's place, Franc? To my eyes, Sophia was obeying unnaturally."
"But a person's mood changes with the day and the situation. I think unnatural behavior can come out easily enough when the heart isn't in it."
"You can see it that way. But if you don't mind the little things, the quality never comes through. A tower built with care collapses starting from exactly those trifles."
"...Is that how it is?"
"If someone begins to suspect Seoha has Mental Manipulation and starts digging into the people around him, those little fragments can gather into a dagger aimed at him."
"..."
Franc closed her mouth and sank into thought, persuaded by the weight of a woman who had taken more political attacks than anyone. Yeongeun drew an arm lightly around those shoulders and looked at me with a calm gaze.
"...Why are you looking at me like that?"
"We've confirmed it on a C-Class, so now we ought to cast Mental Manipulation on a B-Class and check the burden it puts on the mind, shouldn't we? Otherwise we won't have an estimate for the Dark Matter Slime."
I had told her not to say things like that. My brow twitched as I stared at her, and Yeongeun, stung by the look, promptly found something else to occupy her. I turned to Choi Soohan, standing straight at one side of the living room.
"I'm going to raise Suhan to B-Class. What do you all think?"
At the sudden announcement Soohan's eyes went wide. My three lovers looked at her for a moment, then each of them nodded.
"Suhan has worked incredibly hard all this time, hasn't she? I agree."
"Miss Suhan is to become a B-Class as well?"
"It isn't a bad decision, but if it comes out that Choi Soohan — whose growth potential was nothing more than D-Class — has suddenly become a B-Class, it will not end as a minor stir."
"True enough. Even so, I don't particularly care if it gets out now that I can charge people with TP and raise them. Do I?"
I answered Hwayeon's point with an easy smile, and she smiled faintly and nodded.
"That is true."
Having my lovers' agreement, I beckoned Suhan.
"Suhan. I'll need your help too."
"Yes! Only say the word."
As if she had already sensed what came next, Choi Soohan's eyes lit. She crossed the room in quick steps and knelt before me.
"I'll raise you to B-Class. After that, we'll test Mental Manipulation."
"Yes!"
At the promise of B-Class she looked overcome, then gave a small nod.
"Go change into something simple."
"Yes!"
I withdrew Spatial Perception from her as she hurried into her room to change, and took stock of the Phase Power I had left. My maximum was 18.92 million. Testing Mental Manipulation on Sophia had burned through a great deal of TP, and firing the Stage 5 Healing Wave on top of that had brought me down to 2.7 million. I was recovering 0.1 percent a minute — eighteen thousand — but if I meant to pour TP into Suhan and then cast the manipulation, I would be better off filling up first. Raising Yeongeun to B-Class had taken about 3.4 million TP. I would need Phase Stones.
I used Space Leaping into the vault, brought out several high-grade Phase Stones, and then sensed Hwayeon's and Yeongeun's Phase Power. The two of them had taken in a truly enormous amount of my essence over that time. When Hwayeon first met me she had held 11.07 million; now she had grown to 17 million. Yeongeun, a C-Class at 1.76 million five months ago, had eagerly indulged my sexual fantasies ever since and stacked hers to 15 million. Against the day they rose to A-Class I had set aside twenty high-grade Phase Stones — 200 million TP. I wasn't sure it would be enough, but I ought to set a day aside and try pulling them up.
— Mashter...
Raise all my lovers to A-Class, station Hiarid, Miho, Choi Soohan, and Sophia, and use Mana Vision to plant goodwill in Grand Blue's key officers. Then even if I was away a long time hunting that blue-skinned demon, Grand Blue would keep running just fi—
— Mashterrr!!
I was still lining the plan up in my head when Miho — I hadn't even noticed her clinging on — sat herself on my knee and shrieked.
"Huh?"
I stroked the soft-looking white hair of the girl glaring up at me in a sulk, and she smacked my thigh with her small hands, protesting at the top of her voice.
— I wanna evolve too! I wanna help Mashter too!
"...Haha."
Watching her puff those plump cheeks and insist so brightly, I couldn't help a snort of laughter. Come to think of it, Miho was nearly through her ethics and morals textbooks, wasn't she. If I evolved this one, how much taller would she get this time?
Late as it was to say so, she had become something like Grand Blue's mascot. Snow-white hair, always in a modified little hanbok, trotting and darting about — cute enough that you wanted to take a bite out of her, and her fame had climbed like no one else's. How famous? Aunt Hyeryeong would say that any Grand Blue employee who didn't know Miho was a spy. Go down into the mixed-use complex and you could easily spot people recognizing her and happily taking pictures from a distance. Some even camped all day in the lobby of the complex's shopping arcade just to catch a cute photo of her.
As that popularity rose day by day and pictures of her began uploading to the internet, something unpleasant followed. People from various facilities that researched aberrants showed up telling me to sell her. Among them, an Arab prince I had become acquainted with at Grand Blue's founding ceremony reacted the most fiercely, and I ignored every message, his included.
Sell her? Sell who, exactly.
Miho and Choi Soohan stood in an entirely different place from Sophia or Hiarid. Sophia and Hiarid had come at me meaning to kill me. Miho had only been drawn by the lewd scent coming off my body — no, not that. She had been drawn by Franc's Soul Stone. And Soohan had put me in danger by mistake, in a way that only made her look like a fool.
I gathered Miho, still waiting on an answer, into my arms, stroked her fluffy tail, and spoke.
"Shall we, then? Next time I'll evolve our Miho, and I'll have to take her help."
— Promise!
She thrust a fist at me, stuck out her pinky, and fussed for me to promise already. When had this kid even learned that? She shook her hand as if to say hook pinkies this instant, cute enough that I really did want to bite her, and I burst out laughing as I linked mine with hers.
"Heh. All right. Promise."
— Ehehe.
Having won it, Miho laughed like a little rascal and went hopping around the living room. Franc, fighting a smile, pulled out her smartphone and photographed her, while Hwayeon and Yeongeun snorted along.
While they played, Choi Soohan came back out. Not in the ultra-slim shorts Hwayeon or Yeongeun wore, but still in black shorts that failed to cover even half her thigh, with a white tank top.
"Come here. Turn your back and sit."
"Yes."
Flushed, she sat with her back to me, twisted up the hair she had grown neatly to her waist, tied it, straightened her spine, and let out a trembling breath. She was so tense I thought I could hear her heart pounding all the way to my ears.
In the butler's uniform, Choi Soohan was unmistakably a woman, and her looks were feminine, but the boyish impression of the clothes gave her a strongly androgynous air. Like this, though — tank top, shorts, hair twisted up — she was every inch a refined young lady in her early twenties. It struck me anew. The first time I met her she had been a brash tomboy, hair dyed yellow-blond and puffed up like a lion's mane.
"I'm starting."
"Y-yes!"
I kept it brief. I set my hand on the bare skin of her exposed waist, worked the Mana Sieve, and began pouring TP in. Soohan bit her lip and strained with everything she had to endure the stimulation. Her body trembled finely, her ponytail swayed like a pendulum, and the thin tank top drank her sweat until the heating skin showed through. The face of a beauty twisting as she forced down pleasure seemed worth paying to watch.
In no time she was sweating as if caught in rain, and unlike last time she seemed unable to hold the sounds back. A strange, broken nasal moan spilled out of her — ...hht, huu... kkh. ...hyu. Between her crossed legs, what leaked from her like a broken faucet was forming a small puddle.
...I quietly focused my sense of smell and took a sniff, and there was no scent at all. Franc was apple in scent and taste, Hwayeon plum, Yeongeun cherry, so I had wondered whether every woman gave off some fruit from her body. Apparently not.
Leaking twice what she had last time, bending at the waist only to straighten, hunching her shoulders only to open them again, Soohan fought the pleasure with all she had — and the instant her Phase Power hit 3.5 million, she collapsed toward me like a puppet with its strings cut. Her head came to rest on my knee, her mind gone, and her body, passing through the forced rise of a class, filled the living room with a grinding, creaking sound.
I kept pouring TP into her to that music and watched, and sure enough her breasts began to sway and swell again. At this size... a C-cup? A beauty damp with sweat, her groin soaked through, slumped there defenseless — that was quite a sight in its own right.
...Ahem.