Entry Preparations and Persuasion (7)
Hwayeon had been sitting collapsed for a long while, face buried in her hands. At some point she lowered them and pushed herself up, swaying. I reached out to steady her and asked, carefully.
"You okay?"
"I'm not okay……."
The shock must have been enormous. She hung her head with a haggard look, and it was plain there would be no more training today.
I'd grab Ispect and head back. I opened the storeroom door to look for it—and stopped cold. Why is this here?
The moment the door opened, there was Ispect, set down right in front of me with nothing else around it, and I couldn't make sense of it. Why was it here? I bent, took hold of the spear, and Nuhodi's excited voice burst through my head at once.
"So that's how it was. The reason that woman—who'd sooner break than bend—hangs herself around your neck is that peerless viril—"
"Say one more word and you'll find out what breaking feels like."
"……ity. Ahem."
I shut her up before she could finish that nonsense, but this auntie clearly had a remarkably open mind where sex was concerned. When she'd been put through sexual torture she hadn't looked particularly crushed or pained—maybe it hadn't been mental fortitude at all, just a sexually open disposition?
Anyway. I let out a heavy sigh.
"What gives. Why are you here?"
"I asked Darky. To bring me close to the door."
"……You were peeping?"
"The act lovers share is tender and lovely enough to set the heart trembling. And the frail, nasal cries a beloved woman lets out in the midst of an affectionate coupling—how they stir the breast……. There, I've admitted fault, so don't put any strength into it. I really will break!"
I'd started squeezing the shaft, and Nuhodi cried out in a panic. Honestly. Dead, body gone, nothing left but a soul lodged in a spear shaft, and she was this cheerful?
I soothed Hwayeon, whose mind looked cracked clean through, wrapped an arm around her waist, and hauled her upright, but she only stood there, limp. I'd get her washed and put her to bed. A little sleep and she'd come back to herself.
I gathered up Darky, sprawled in a soggy puddle, and Space Leaped back to the bathroom at the house. Hwayeon still just stood where I'd set her, staring blankly.
"Want me to wash you?"
"No…… I'll wash myself."
I left her slowly peeling off her tracksuit, stepped outside, and tossed Darky—still squirming around on my palm—onto the living room carpet.
Splat! ……squirm, squirm.
It sounded like a wet towel hitting the floor. Darky spread a little, wriggled himself back together, and sloshed across the carpet toward Miho, who was lying prone and lost in her game.
I set Ispect on its stand and was heading back in to wash when I glanced into the bedroom. Franc and Yeongeun were still romping through dreamland. It was nearly lunch, and they still hadn't woken. Had I tormented them too hard?
I undid the Soul Stone necklace I'd hung around Franc's neck and put it back around my own. Her eyes cracked open, heavy with sleep, and she spoke in a voice thick and hoarse.
"Seoha……?"
"Yeah. Sleep a little more."
"Yes……."
I stripped and stepped into the bathroom. Hwayeon was soaked through, slumped with her head resting on the rim of the tub, out cold. I sat down beside her. She didn't react at all, so I reached over and drew her in by the waist.
"Let's get you washed and into bed. Sleep a little and you'll be fine."
"……Okay."
Half out of her mind, Hwayeon washed, came out, and changed into a loose pair of pajamas without so much as touching the soaked tracksuit she'd left behind. I watched her wobble to the bed, crawl in, and drop into a sleep like death, then stuffed her clothes—drenched in her arousal—and mine into the washer and started it.
The machine began to rattle and churn, and the door to Suhan and Sophia's room beside the utility room opened. Sophia peeked her face out.
"Ah, Master! If it's laundry, you should have left it to me."
"It's fine. Just Hwayeon's tracksuit and my clothes. But……."
What's with that outfit?
Sophia was wearing a black shirt and a black flare skirt, with a white apron of layered frills tied over them. At a glance it looked like a slim, simple maid uniform. She'd bought fabric and a manual sewing machine not long ago—so this was what she'd been making.
"You made that yourself?"
"Yes! I made them for Miss Suhan and me to wear! Does it please you, Master……?"
She asked with a look that had only just started to worry I might hate it. I stared at her a moment, then nodded.
"Yeah. It suits you."
"Thank you!"
The fear that I might not like it vanished from her face, and she beamed as if every care in the world had been lifted. I stroked her hair, combed back as neatly as Choi Soohan's, and the way her face went tomato-red was so funny that I snorted and stepped out of the laundry room—only to find the living room in an uproar.
"Auugh! What are you doing, you water bug!"
Slrrk? Slrrrip!
Splat, splosh!
"Whaaat? Why would you— auugh!"
……Darky kept trying to crawl up between the legs of Miho in her short skirt, and Miho clamped her thighs, raised a fist, and pounded him while snapping in irritation.
Blurb, slrrsh!
"……Kaak!"
I couldn't tell what she'd heard, but in an instant Miho's pitch-black pupils went white. Her fox ears and tails shot up, her claws lengthened, and she shredded Darky into dozens of pieces in a blink. The pieces pattered down across the living room, and Darky, entirely unbothered, began stealthily gathering himself back into one mass—while Miho ran over and threw herself into my arms.
"Master~! Darky keeps trying to touch me there!"
……Ahem.
I did my best to hide how flustered I was, watched the reconstituted Darky slosh, then beckoned Hiarid, seated on her own sofa, and asked her to interpret what he was saying. Between earlier and this, the little guy had a strange habit of trying to grope women's bodies. I needed a word with him.
"Hey. What's gotten into you all of a sudden. Earlier you ate up all the love juices Hwayeon spilled—that was you, right?"
Slosh-slrrk-blurb.
"It was water that contained TP, so I ate all of it. Did I do wrong?"
Huh? Hmm. So a bit of my semen had been mixed in. Well, he was an Aberrant, so he'd have a greed for TP, and if that was why he'd eaten it…… nothing to be done.
"She was shocked because you ate, right in front of her, something embarrassing that came out of her own body."
Blrrb? Slosh, slosh.
"What is an embarrassing liquid?"
……Perfect timing, actually. While I was at it, I'd teach the little guy to speak and pump some general knowledge of human life into him. For a good while after that I instructed Darky on human sex, the things married couples do, how people think, social life, and emotion—what he ought to do, and what he must not. It would be a problem if this happened again.
He formed a circle with a tentacle as if to say he understood, and I asked him.
"That aside, you're a slime. Why are you so interested in human bodies?"
At the question Darky suddenly flipped, twisted, wrung, and mashed himself, then began to glug and bulge into a human shape. He was transforming!
"Uh……."
Miho and Hiarid both stared, startled, as he squirmed his way into human form—and before long he had become a human woman. Miho's face and body, Yeongeun's breasts, and the shape of Hwayeon down there. If not for the black, translucent liquid he was made of, the likeness was precise enough to mistake him for Miho.
"Waaah? How'd you do that? What is this?"
Gape. Gape-gape? Gape-gape?
Miho examined Darky's form—now identical to her own—with open wonder, turning this way and that, and he mirrored her like a reflection, even copying the shape of her mouth.
"Ahaha! It's like a mirror!"
"A-ha-ha! Like a mir-ror!"
Gape! Gape-gape!
He worked his mouth furiously, imitating her. If he had an ability like this, why hadn't he shown it sooner?
Anyway, the moment I reached out and touched Darky in Miho's shape, I knew the inside was hollow. Well, with only two or three liters of liquid to work with, shaping a person left him no choice but to fake the exterior alone. After mimicking her for a moment he began to tremble all over, failed to hold the form, and spilled onto the floor with a wet flop. Reshaped into something like a silicone breast, he swayed from side to side as if begging to be looked at.
Slosh-slosh~ slosh!
"Watching how people act, and watching Master, I became interested in human behavior too. I was trying to touch in order to satisfy my curiosity."
"Ahem. Got it. But like I explained earlier, you can't touch places like that without permission. If you want to touch, you ask first."
Slosh!
"Yes!"
At the words get permission, Darky sidled toward Miho. Still clinging to my arm, she snapped at him with an angry face.
"I'm not giving you permission to touch!"
Slrrk…….
Whether a sunken mood sank the body with it, Darky sagged like slightly melted ice cream, shifted around, then approached Hiarid—who was interpreting for him—and sloshed this way and that to get his meaning across.
Blurb. Slosh-slosh.
"……If that is what you wish, very well. You may touch."
Huh? What did she hear that made Hiarid give permission so readily?
Hiarid rose from her chair, stepped toward Darky, lifted the hem of her dress a little, and set her legs shoulder-width apart. He sloshed beneath her skirt, climbed those long legs, and went up as far as her thighs. Miho and I were staring blankly when he vanished entirely under the skirt. Curious how he meant to touch her, I opened Spatial Perception and started watching what he was doing.
Having climbed to the top of both thighs, Darky produced a bundle of tentacles and peeled Hiarid's thong away. The white thong dropped between her legs with a soft tap, and for a moment I had the illusion of a lily bud falling…….
The scrap of cloth covering her sex was gone, and her inner lips, spread like rose petals, lay fully exposed. Darky began feeding slender tentacles—more than a dozen of them—into her sex, one by one, one by one. Through Spatial Perception, the inside of Hiarid's vagina filled with his tentacles in no time.
Holy…….
I watched the shocking scene unfolding in front of me with my mouth slightly open, and it only grew more grotesque.
"……"
Whether she felt nothing at all, Hiarid stood still with an indifferent expression, while Darky extended sixteen tentacles and slowly traced the folds inside her vagina with their tips, investigating the texture…….
"Master, look at that!"
"Y-yeah. I'm looking."
Darky's body was slowly changing into the shape of the inside of Hiarid's vagina. The deeper the tentacles went, the more an identical passage and opening formed in his own body. At last a tentacle felt around the entrance of her womb, confirmed the size of the cervix, and extended a smaller one that slid—srrk—into the pinhole of the cervical opening.
Hiarid's white legs twitched and trembled, and a small moan slipped from her lips.
"Mmm……."
Slrrk?
"Please be careful."
Blurb.
They seemed to be exchanging something, so I asked Miho.
"What did Darky say?"
"He said, 'Does it hurt? I'll be careful.'"
Having answered, Miho wore a curious look, went up to Hiarid, and flipped her skirt hem straight up. There was Darky, hanging at the middle of those white, plump thighs like panties caught around them, and from the end of his body sixteen tentacles had sprouted, writhing inside her vagina. Once one tentacle entered the womb, the rest began to follow, one and then another, into her uterus.
The mouth of the womb stretched to about the thickness of three fingers, and the tentacles squirmed in through the gap. Hiarid's expression tightened faintly, and she lowered a hand to press on her lower belly. Press or not, Darky shoved every remaining tentacle into the womb—and succeeded. Dozens of strands squirming and writhing inside her uterus made a grotesque sight.
……So that was what he'd been trying to do to Hwayeon?
Through Spatial Perception I could see Hiarid's womb, swollen by the tentacles writhing inside it, squirming and heaving. Her lower belly bulged unevenly along with it. She furrowed her brow as if she hadn't expected him to go this far, but she neither stopped him nor made him quit.
Blrrb?
Perhaps from the sensation of her womb being stirred, Hiarid's white legs trembled in fine shivers, and Darky expressed something.
"I believe the strength may leave my legs. A moment."
Seated, Hiarid spread her legs in an M so Darky could move more easily and Miho could see better. Miho crouched in front of her and began earnestly sightseeing—Darky with his bundle of tentacles shoved into Hiarid's sex, and that place stretched wide to take the whole bundle in. Watching from behind, it was one hell of a view. An angel being had by a tentacle slime, and a nine-tailed fox girl spectating. Slap a title like that on the Certifier community and the views and comments would explode.
Slosh, slosh.
Darky had paused the tentacles while Hiarid moved. Once she settled again, he worked the thinnest of the sixteen and slowly advanced along a fallopian tube toward an ovary.
"Mph."
He tapped the shape of the ovary lightly with the tentacle's tip, then drew it back out of the tube. After that he poked and stretched the outer wall of the womb this way and that, as if testing its elasticity, satisfying his curiosity as he went.
Blurb.
"……"
Whether he'd finished confirming the state of the womb, the tentacles withdrew from it all at once. Hiarid's heels lifted slightly, and her brows drew together in an erotic pinch. Last of all—perhaps to check how strongly the vagina could contract—the tentacles wove themselves into a net and spread as wide as they could.
"Nnh."
I stared in surprise at her opening, stretched wide enough that Miho's head could have gone in without trouble. Darky shifted a little in that state, then slipped free with a smooth slide.
Slrrk! Blurb. Slosh.
"……You are too kind."
"……"
Miho, blank-faced for a moment at the sight of that opening stretched so wide before her eyes, looked down at Darky as he dropped from between Hiarid's legs and sloshed, then looked up at Hiarid.
"What did you just do?"
"He confirmed the form and structure of my sex with his tentacles."
"Uuung……."
Whether that last image, stretched to the limit, had shocked her, Miho wore a confused expression, then flopped onto her back on the living room carpet and started thinking about something.
Darky sloshed for a moment, then rolled up in front of me. His body bunched, lengthened, narrowed, and thinned until it settled into a single form—one that closely resembled Hiarid without the wings. This time it wasn't an empty shell. The inside was filled with liquid as well, and perhaps because of that he stood barely a foot tall.
Wobbling about like a mollusk, he swayed and sloshed precariously, then quickly found his balance and began to walk as if he were a person. Along the way the surface of his face rippled and his looks shifted a little—a face half Miho and half Hiarid. The body took a woman's form, but the figure and the breasts looked like Yeongeun's.
After walking around for ten minutes or so, he seemed to adapt to the shape quickly. He darted about with movements no different from a person's—tap, tap, tap—then ran to me and hugged my shin. He worked his mouth as if trying to say something. I had tens of thousands of mouth-shapes memorized for lip-reading, and still I couldn't make this one out.
I watched him gape at me for a moment, then picked him up. About as heavy as a two-liter bottle of water? And yet…….
"The texture's a lot like a person's, isn't it? That's something."
Maybe because I'd gone off on a tangent, Darky tilted his head. So I asked Hiarid, who was pulling her thong back on and setting her clothes to rights.
"This guy's working his mouth. Can you hear what he's saying?"
"He asked whether you like this appearance."
Hiarid answered after adjusting her panties and sitting neatly back on her sofa.
Appearance, huh. He'd taken this form for my sake? My feelings about that were complicated.
"You became like that because of me? Well, setting that aside—why did you go feeling around down there on Hiarid?"
Bglrrk? Bubble-slosh.
Every time he opened his mouth, bubble-like things boiled inside his body. That had to be what made the bglorp, blurb, brrrl sounds.
"He says that when my Lord joined bodies with the ladies, you looked exceedingly pleased, and so he wished to do the same for you."
……At a complete loss, I turned Darky this way and that where he hung in my hand, staring straight at me. He was black and translucent, granted, but the features weren't hard to make out. From face to figure, every model he'd drawn on was a beauty, so he came out cute as a figurine. And one thing more: the soft, yielding feel of him was excellent. Like touching a tiny person with no bones. The small swell of the breasts, the plush give of the hips and thighs…….
If this mood kept going, something dangerous was going to happen, so I hurriedly derailed the subject.
"Uh, well. The slime form isn't bad, and this one's nice too. So let's start with those letters I mentioned. Sophia! Get out here!"
Better he learn from Sophia, raised in an educated household, than from Aberrants like Hiarid or Miho. At my shout she abandoned the clothes she was cutting in her room and came running.
"You called, Master!"
"Yeah. Think you could teach Darky some Hangul?"
"You need only give the order, Master! Where is Mr. Darky?"
She looked around, then fixed her eyes on the liquid doll hanging in my hand like a figurine.
"……"
I tossed Darky to Sophia, who seemed at a loss for words, and she stammered and flustered as she caught him in both hands. She looked thrown by the stare of a creature no longer than her forearm, gazing straight at her.
"He's sharp, so teaching him shouldn't be hard. Mind the mouth shapes, so I can read him by lip-reading."
"Ah, yes!"
"Darky, you listen well to Sophia."
Gape!