The Aberrants That Appear (4)
Breakfast without Yeongeun was done, and Hwayeon had finished getting ready for work. She called the elevator and stood waiting, then caught sight of me still in my everyday clothes and asked, puzzled,
"You're not going to school?"
"I am. There's not even two weeks of winter break left, so the teachers have been letting us off easy, you know? I just have to be there by ten. But what about you, Hwayeon—you're not going? From what I've seen lately, Noona doesn't seem to be going either."
"I filed for a leave of absence."
"......You didn't file that just to sweet-talk me into going with you later, did you?"
On the off chance, I narrowed my eyes at her. She cleared her throat—ahem—and, when the elevator arrived and the doors opened, wordlessly wedged herself inside.
She actually did?!
"I only took leave because it's a critical time. Don't misunderstand."
"Sure. I'll let you have that one."
I snorted a laugh and waved, and Hwayeon, face gone red, smiled and waved back before the elevator carried her down.
Hiarid followed, bowing to me at the waist before she spoke.
"Heavenly Lord, I shall be off to the research institute as well."
"Yeah. Take care."
I watched Hiarid take flight from the terrace, then turned to find Sophia coming out of her room—tights clinging to every line of her, jeans and a leather jacket over them, a backpack a little smaller than she was slung on her back.
"Oh, right. You said you were joining a raid for three days starting today?"
"Yes!"
I remembered. A few days ago Noona had asked to borrow Sophia, saying the next round of the subjugation battle would need a lot of Recovery-class ability users, and I'd agreed.
"All right. Don't get hurt. Come back safe."
"Ah...... yes!"
She hadn't expected me to see her off. Those big round eyes blinked, and then she broke into a bright smile and bowed deep at the waist.
Sophia left looking pleased, and once Suhan stepped out as well, saying she had errands, the only ones left in the house were Franc, Miho, and Darky.
Miho was flopped on her back in the middle of the living room with Darky parked on her stomach, sunk deep in a game. Every so often she yelled "Die!" or "Drop the loot!!" and thrashed her two white legs, and each time her knee-length skirt flapped and laid her strawberry-print panties bare.
I tugged Miho's skirt back down—she was too absorbed to notice Darky watching her with a thoroughly done-with-this face—and looked down at the little slime. Since when had this one learned to pull expressions?
Darky had been sprawled belly-up on Miho's stomach, soaking in the warm morning sun. As I drew near they popped upright and stretched both arms straight out at me.
A pick-me-up gesture. I caught the two outstretched hands and lifted, and they dangled, swaying, looking at me.
I sat on the sofa with them in hand and looked closely. I fiddled this way and that, lifted an arm and lowered it, squished and kneaded the small body all over, and they quietly yielded to my hands.
And yet...... translucent enough that you could barely see them from a distance, but up close the nipples showed plain as day. The shape of the vulva, too, was visible in full. Could they not change the body's form into the shape of clothes, the way Franc could?
I was looking at the faint protrusion of a clitoris when curiosity got the better of me. I laid them down and spread those small legs, and what opened up was smooth as a woman's after waxing, cleft in a single straight line.
I parted it gently with my thumb. The form was identical to the real thing. A slight push up the mound, and there was a clitoris peeking out from where thin skin had wrapped it, a urethra like a pinhole, even the folds of a vagina. And the anus—since when had I gotten around to checking that?
I set my pinky at the mouth of the hole and gave it the slightest pressure, and the inside of their body began to change into the shape of a vagina and a uterus, accepting my finger.
Wrinkles and a womb took form inside that translucent body, like an onahole, conforming to my finger, the artificial sex mouthing and kneading at it. Watching that, I thought a rich pervert might pay a fortune to buy this one.
A slime, by nature, ought to be able to move an artificial sex reshaped from part of their own body however they liked. But the way they mouthed my finger once it was inside them—literally like a living creature—left me with nothing to say but that it was impressive.
They'd taken human form to please me, investigated Hiarid's genitals, even reproduced the feel of Yeongeun's breasts. So this much was only natural, wasn't it.
Darky let their limbs go slack, looking down at my finger inside their translucent body, diligently rippling the artificial sex and swallowing around it.
I moved the finger this way and that, watching the sex change shape to follow it, then had them hold poses—mostly lewd ones—and started to feel like I understood why girls play with dolls.
You could see through to the other side, yes, but at a glance it was a pretty doll that looked like a person, and moving it around gave me a strange pleasure, as if I were moving a person however I pleased.
"Seoha? What are you doing?"
Franc, done tidying the room and carrying the stripped sheets, had come out, seen me playing with Darky, and asked with one brow slightly raised.
"Doll play?"
"This is doll play, sir?"
Franc smiled the way you smile at a cute child and started for the laundry room—then stiffened, body locking up, at the words that came out of Darky's mouth.
"Thought it was basic foreplay for sex, sir."
Franc turned her head in a motion that looked like it ought to creak, trembling eyes moving back and forth between me and Darky.
"What kind of nonsense is that. Sophia isn't pumping weird knowledge into you again, is she?"
"Negative, sir. This body was made for Master and Master alone! If it's for Master's pleasure, reshaping this body is easy as pie, sir!"
Look at that—proverbs, already. More to the point, watching Franc flinch at every word out of Darky's mouth, I felt a cold sweat coming on.
"......I don't need any of that, so don't talk like that. And you sound exactly like a barracks grunt. Can't you fix it?"
"If you don't like it, I'll fix it. But strangely, I like this way of talking."
Darky tilted their head. A creature loyal to me had no reason to lie, so what they were saying now had to be the truth.
"No. Do it however you like. I don't want to force you to change something you enjoy."
"Yes, sir!"
Franc, as if my hobby worried her, walked two steps and looked back, three steps and looked back, making it very clear how much it was on her mind.
Honestly, I did want to try Darky's hole once. They'd altered a half-liquid body to build structure and implement an artificial sex, and I was curious what that would feel like.
Before I became an ability user, I'd wanted to try an onahole. Nowhere would sell one to a minor, though, and Noona treated my room like it was hers, so I'd given up early.
After that, having sex with Franc, and Hwayeon, and Yeongeun, I realized the pleasure of sex includes an exchange of feeling, and that's what makes it feel good.
Sorry to say for Darky, but because of that, I could say I'd lost interest in onaholes.
Putting it in, from their standpoint, would be no different from rubbing a little eraser against skin, so it wasn't quite the act I wanted. Put bluntly, it would be no different from jerking off.
I had three attractive girlfriends. Masturbating would be an insult to them.
I was never, ever going to have occasion to use this one's artificial sex.
Then, for a moment, one use for them occurred to me.
If a woman turned up someday whose reason I needed to melt with pleasure and brainwash, I'd use this one. They could change form at will, and from what I'd seen of those tentacles used on Hiarid, if I had them transform and go to work on a woman's front hole and back hole...... heh heh heh.
The obvious candidate would be Morgan le Fay. If I'd met this one a little earlier, I might have used them to break Sophia's reason. A bit of a shame.
"I have a feeling I'll be needing a lot of help from you."
"This one will serve Master with heart and soul, sir!"
......Wow. That is some serious boot-camp talk.
Watching nothing but the news until ten got boring fast, so I decided to head to school early and sent Yeongeun a text. Nothing to it—just a single line.
A reply didn't come quickly.
After I got to school I switched seats with Lydia for practice, and spent the time at the very back of the classroom using my will to make Mana Bullets a little faster, a little wider or narrower, a little smaller.
Practice got faintly boring, so I lifted my head and looked around the room. Each of them, in their own way, was buried in study or reading to prepare for the future—or enjoying some hobby to bleed off piled-up mental fatigue, sleeping or listening to music or watching a movie on a phone, carefully enough not to bother anyone else.
Set beside that, the third-year classrooms at the high school in the next neighborhood, three kilometers from Euihan High School, were pure chaos.
A glance through Spatial Perception showed kids who'd brought food, spilled it on the floor, and cackled about it; kids who'd brought laptops and were blasting movies at full volume; kids who'd brought pillows and blankets, spread textbooks on the floor, and gone to sleep on top of them.
Sitting on desks to chat barely counted. Others stacked desks and chairs as if they were attempting modern art, until someone tackled the pile and brought it down. Some left their bags at school and bolted over the wall. In one corner, delinquents had drawn a curtain and were smoking.
Deafening noise, free of charge. Most of the third-year classes were no different. There was one room that might have been a college-track class, throwing themselves back into study—but that look of having no room to spare, of pouring everything into it, weighed on me too.
Beside that, Euihan's third-years enjoyed their hobbies with ease in their hearts. The difference was so great it was hard to believe they were the same high school students, the same third-years.
Why a gap like this?
I was starting to understand why obsessive parents would spend a fortune, if that's what it took, to send their kids to an outstanding elite school. Mencius's mother moving house three times for her child must have been for exactly this reason.
Chin in hand, I was quietly surveying the nearby middle schools and third-year classrooms through Spatial Perception when Franc poked her face in and blocked my view.
"What is it?"
"You seemed to be thinking hard about something, so I wondered what."
"I wasn't really thinking. I was just looking, through Spatial Perception, at the chaos in the third-year classrooms of the nearby high schools."
"Chaos?"
We kept our voices down, but the classroom was so quiet that the kids who caught mine glanced this way.
I explained what I'd seen. Franc looked at me with a you're lying, right? face, and the kids around us wore uncertain looks, as if surely no one would go that far.
The seven from that friend-group had gone off to the club room or out to exercise; only Kang So-ra and Cho Min-ho were left, and both of them wore baffled expressions at my story.
Cho Min-ho, catching my eye, was still too shy for anything else. He just gave a goofy little smile and turned back to his book. Kang So-ra, as if it were a bother, flopped down on her desk again.
Cho Min-ho, you just keep growing up that pure and upright. Kang So-ra, you need to charge up a bit more.
I went back to practicing mixing my will into the Mana Sieve, wholly absorbed in customizing the abilities I had, when—
Ting.
A text had arrived on the Certifier.
......What are they even playing at. If they have something to say, they ought to sort it out and deliver it all at once—not block her from clocking out and just toss out whatever they feel like while they repeat their own meetings.
"......Should I send Hiarid and Miho to blow up a few American Phase Stone power plants......"
Hiarid was too well known, so that was out, but if I sent Miho shifted into her fox form, they wouldn't know it was me. Even when I was in Britain they'd sent some bizarre bastard to scrape at my temper, and now this again.
I muttered it after sending the text, and Cho Min-ho, sitting in front of me, flinched at the shoulders and looked at me like a frightened puppy.
Kang So-ra stared at him as if he were hopeless, then looked at me and asked,
"You'd really blow them uuup~?"
"Should I really blow them uuup~? America's been looking down on me, weirdly enough, and it bugs me. Even when I went to Britain, they sent such a wreck of people I had to wonder if they actually meant to win me over."
"......That's what the text you just got said~?"
"That's what it said~."
I answered by mimicking her drawl, and she stuck her lip out in a pout. Just then Franc—who had hurriedly hammered out a text to someone—wrapped her arms around my neck and started gently stroking my head.
"You mustn't. You wouldn't, would you?"
Ting.
I was about to answer that I was thinking about it, but a text had come in. I turned the Certifier back on. It was from Yeongeun.
The urgency, as if she'd heard my muttering from right beside her. I stared at Franc, who had her arms around my neck. She met my eyes for a moment, then started slyly avoiding them.
I wrote that far, then somehow it felt like I was taking the anger out on Yeongeun, so I erased it and wrote it again.
This ought to read as me being angry only at America, right? Send.
Ting!
The reply came back quick as lightning.
Reading it, Yeongeun seemed to think I was thoroughly furious, and meant to come soothe me in person. Then the surroundings felt oddly quiet. I looked around. Thinking my mood had soured, even the occasional whispers had vanished, and the kids sat frozen, not daring to move.
A glance at Franc—she was smiling as if troubled. At times like this, just clearing out would make it easier on them.
I headed for the school's rooftop garden with Franc, and she looked back with a pitying expression.
"The kids in class ought to know your character by now. It's a little sad to see them act like that."
"It's because you're my kind, pretty, cute Franc that you trust me that way. The other kids have no choice but to be herbivores faced with a well-fed lion."
Lately I'd been feeling, down to the bone, what it meant to sit in the absolute seat of the one on top.
When I went to the company to make a show of working, I tended to walk rather than Space Leap, and every time, people stepped aside to the left and right so as not to block my path, bowing and sending me looks of admiration.
The same thing continued even when I went down to the mixed-use floors, packed shoulder to shoulder with neighborhood residents.
Anyone who knew me drew well back. People who didn't, spotting those who did, startled and dodged in turn.
If I so much as entered a shopping mall, the customers already there all stuck to the walls or quietly slipped out while watching me, and the clerk who looked highest-ranked, or the manager, came running to attend me as if they'd offer up their own liver.
Return to school, and even the teachers handled me with care. They didn't wait on me the way shop clerks did, but the temperature gap between how they treated me and how they treated the other kids was so extreme I could doubt we were students of the same kind.
Even that arrogant, look-down-on-everyone flower-pig of a biology teacher, who'd grated on my nerves in the early days after my return, was now busy puffing me up, as if she'd never once tried to use me as a stepping stone for the rise of her own reputation. That said it all.
So the kids—sensitive to the mood, smart enough to already understand the society of adults—had no choice but to act thoroughly like the one underneath. Force, authority, or money: I was someone they could never handle, not even if they died and woke again.
"But frien—"
She'd been about to say friends, then seemed to remember something I'd said before. She stopped, and just looked at me with a slightly regretful expression.
The day Hwayeon had been persuading me to go to college—that night, Franc, having heard from Hwayeon a few of the reasons I didn't want to attend, had been heartbroken enough to tear up. She'd pulled me into her arms and been unable to speak for a long while.
I, and Hwayeon and Yeongeun too, had been flustered. We soothed and coaxed her for a good while, then asked why she'd been like that. "It's just...... it was sad, and it hurt, that even making a friend is a situation that requires conditions......" she'd said. The memory of never having made an ordinary friend, because of her birth, had probably remained in Franc as a wound.
She looked at me with that regretful expression for only a moment. Then she changed it, smiled a hehe, linked her arm through mine, and rested her head on my shoulder.
Kind, diligent, tender, sometimes a mischief-maker, honest, and hating lies—Franc. The feeling of her kind heart, which spared a thought even for a small thing like this, seeping into my chest.
And it was the moment I thought how truly glad I was that the one who had met Franc that day had been me.