Realization
I was staring blankly at the monitor when the intercom buzzed and snapped me back to myself.
On unsteady feet I checked the screen, and there was Se-a noona standing outside, looking awkward.
I opened the door without thinking.
"Ah, hey? Dan-woo... wait?"
She started to greet me through the open doorway, then frowned and hesitated the moment she actually saw my face.
"Are you okay? Did something happen?"
"No. Nothing happened. Come on in."
I let her in with a voice that had all the life wrung out of it.
She started to lean in the way she had yesterday, as if to catch my scent, then stopped and looked back at me. The worry on her face was almost painful to see.
"Are you really okay?"
"Yeah. Sit on the sofa. Juice alright?"
"You don't have to go to all that trouble..."
I herded her toward the sofa over her protests and went to the kitchen. Even as I pulled the juice from the fridge and poured it, my head was a complete mess.
How is that even possible?
I was still in a daze from a sight I couldn't believe even after seeing it with my own eyes.
I... what the hell am I...
I was just putting the carton back and about to bring her the glass when it hit me. I had told noona to sit on the sofa. My mind had been elsewhere, so I hadn't thought it through — but in front of the sofa was a table. And on that table was a computer. And currently displayed on the monitor was...
"N-noona! Don't look!!"
I finally grasped the situation and bolted for the sofa, but I was already too late. Noona had frozen solid, staring at the screen.
It's over.
What was up on the monitor was my match history.
A record of utter, humiliating defeat.
At first I'd told myself I was just rusty. It had been a long time, I was still getting my bearings. One game. Two games. As the match count climbed, the cold sweat started, and then the fear crept in.
Is this even an achievement a human being can accomplish with their own two hands?
That was exactly what I thought. There were bad players, and then there was this. Ten losses in a row? Fine. That can happen.
The game I'd been playing was League of Glory — LOG, or just Glory, depending on who you asked. A MOBA. Five versus five, team-based. In other words, teammate luck mattered enormously, so a total wipe was something you could swallow. One kill, sixteen deaths, three assists? Pathetic, sure — but if the other side was actually good, I figured it was understandable.
The problem was that they weren't.
It was AI. I was playing against AI! How do you even put up numbers like that?
I had been utterly demolished by a machine. There was no way they'd stuffed AlphaGo-level intelligence into a video game, and the lowest difficulty had no business being that hard to begin with. In short, I was just genuinely, extraordinarily, unbelievably terrible.
"Se-Se-a noona?"
I called to her. She didn't say a word, just kept staring at the monitor. I fought the urge to let my legs give out and tapped her lightly on the shoulder.
"H-huh? Did you call me?"
"Did you... see it?"
An awkward silence settled over the room. Of course she saw it. That was why she'd frozen.
I couldn't take the atmosphere anymore. I went back to the kitchen, finished pouring the juice, and brought her the glass. Noona took it without a word and raised it to her lips. She didn't ask me about any of it after that, either.
That she was being considerate enough not to say anything hurt more than I needed to admit.
"I-it's fine. A guy being bad at games isn't..."
"Stop right there."
"...Okay."
With noona's consolation, my remaining lives hit zero.
"Noona... isn't this expensive?"
I asked, looking at the desk and chair she'd just finished setting up.
"It's not that expensive, so don't feel pressured."
Not that expensive?
Even at a glance, the desktop was premium solid wood, mounted on a motion desk that adjusted height without so much as a tremor. And the chair was a Herman Miller — the undisputed king of ergonomic design, expensive even back on Old Earth. Watching noona gift me all of this and then talk like it was nothing was more than I could take.
I slipped up behind her while she pressed down on the desk, checking it wasn't wobbly or defective.
"Really, don't feel burdened. I'd rather you use it as much as you want. That's more... hyaah!? D-Dan-woo!!"
I wrapped my arms around her before she even noticed I was there. I looped them around her slender waist and pulled her flush against me, not a sliver of space left between us. Her body heat came through in full.
"Thank you, noona. I feel like all I ever do is say thank you with words. But I mean it. I really am grateful."
"Nngh... I-I get it, so your arms..."
Se-a noona set her hands on the arms wrapped around her waist. Whether she actually intended to peel them off was another matter — there wasn't an ounce of strength in her fingers, just a touch light enough to tickle. That only made me hold her tighter.
"Hngh!"
Even in a situation like this, the way my mind was changing hadn't let up. That large ass pressed right between my groin and my navel, soft and springy in just the right measure, and I barely held back the blood rushing downward. I didn't feel much resistance to thinking these things anymore. I could feel myself changing by the day.
"Being like this... it feels like we're a couple, doesn't it?"
"W-what are you talking about! Stop teasing noona and let go already!"
She scolded me at full volume, but she couldn't hide what was underneath — the heat, the anticipation, the want. Hot sighs started spilling from her lips. Her breathing grew ragged.
I took the hand she'd left resting on my arm. Stroking the back of it with my thumb, I rose onto my toes and pressed my lips to her ear. The fact that this was the only way I could even reach her nearly brought tears to my eyes.
"I love you, noona."
"...Huh?"
She froze at the confession. Was there a chance? If I pushed forward like this, would she take it? What exactly had made her freeze?
"Ahaha. That's how a couple would whisper it, right?"
"A-aah! Y-yeah, I guess? Noona wouldn't know. I've never dated anyone."
I decided it was better to take a step back than keep pushing. I still couldn't read her at all. Of course she'd never dated anyone — but reading a woman's heart was just too hard. This was a gender-reversed world. Maybe I should have just done whatever I felt like, boldly, without overthinking it.
If it had been our first meeting, maybe...
Back then, it might have been possible. But we'd spent time together. Walked. Eaten meals. Gone out. The more hours and memories we stacked up, the harder it became to just say it. That was how precious she had become to me.
Falling in love in five days. I really was an easy man.
"C-come on, let go now. You've teased noona enough, haven't you?"
"I'm not teasing you."
"Huh?"
Looking at her flustered face, I thought it: even if she lost her reason right now and crossed the line, that would be fine. I wanted her to.
But that was my side of it.
If that happened, noona would be crushed by guilt.
Even if I didn't refuse her, she would be disgusted with herself for losing control first. The guilt would be enormous. She might even give up her position as Escort Officer of her own accord. That wasn't what I wanted. So I stopped here.
"Dan-woo?"
She finished a long breath, composed herself, and spoke.
"You can't just do things like this carelessly. At the very least, you should never do this unless it's with someone you love."
She was right. A hug — especially a back hug — was something you didn't do carelessly even on Old Earth. Add whispering love into someone's ear and layering it with suggestive remarks? In this world, it was basically the same as begging to be raped.
"I know. But this is a first for me. Receiving goodwill this direct. This pure."
The original owner of this body had been a weak, pitiful person. Until the day he graduated elementary school, he had never met anyone who approached him with genuine kindness. They always came with eyes and gestures steeped in greed, and they ate away at him. And I hadn't been much different. On Old Earth, most people approached me based on my face alone. Nobody had ever purely worried about me as a person, or paid attention to who I actually was.
That was why the goodwill Se-a noona showed me made me so happy. It was worth more than its face value. Worth enough to be sure it was love.
When I pulled her into my arms, amid the lust boiling up through me, I had felt it clearly. This was love. This was what love was. The feeling I had wandered so long searching for — the one I couldn't even look for, because I didn't know what it looked like, or where I had left it. I had finally found it.
They said people change when they fall in love. How I would change was something I would have to wait and see. After all, whispering love into noona's ear just now was something I never could have imagined doing in my right mind.
Se-a hurried out of the villa and climbed into the parked car. On any other day she would have scanned the surroundings thoroughly before getting in, but right now there wasn't even room for that in her head. Breathing hard, she tossed her white coat onto the passenger seat and dropped a hand beneath the cushion.
"Hah... hah... hurry, hurry..."
Rushing, she fumbled for a button she couldn't find and reclined the seat. She could have adjusted it from the display on the dashboard, but she was too far gone to think that far. The Audi A8's spacious cabin gave her more than enough room the moment the seat went back.
She unzipped her pants and pulled them down to her ankles. Even though the yellow wide-leg trousers were breathable, heat poured from between her legs. Alone in the empty car, her sex covered by nothing but a pair of panties, Se-a lifted her legs onto the dashboard and slowly reached down. She brought her fingers to the fabric, already soaked and clinging wetly to her groin.
"Hnngh♥"
She masturbated regularly. A proper release of tension sharpened her focus. But this was different. She was incomparably more sensitive than usual — like someone who had been interrupted mid-act over and over, or like someone who had just come through climax after climax without end.
The speed of her fingers rubbing over the panties climbed. The wet sounds grew louder with it.
"Nnh... hngh... Dan-woo-nim! Dan-woo-niiim!!"
She cried out the name of the one she loved and worked her fingers harder. Her other hand slipped beneath her knit top to tease the pink buds at the center of her breasts. She rolled the stiffly erect nipples between her fingers, pinched them, demanded more. But the climax she had been waiting for would not come.
"Not enough... not enoughhh... nnh!"
She needed something bigger. Without the hands of the man named Dan-woo — the ones that had touched her body and set her on fire — she had no choice but to chase stimulation mindlessly. It made her realize just how intense the mental pleasure he provided really was, and it made even clearer that he was someone she could no longer do without.
"Dan-woo-nim. Dan-woo... Dan-woo! Hgngh!?"
The moment she dropped the honorific and called his name, a sensation close to the pleasure she had been waiting for finally arrived. Thinking this was it, Se-a yanked her panties down and started furiously rubbing her clitoris and the surface of her pussy. The wet sounds went beyond slick to outright sloshing, fluid flicking onto her thighs, and the hand at her nipples increased in intensity.
"Hngh! Good! So good♥ Dan-woo! Nnh♥"
Even as she moved violently, she did not put her fingers inside. It was a rule she had kept since childhood. The only thing that would go in there was the cock of the man she loved. Yes. Dan-woo's.
After about three minutes of this, the trembling in her body grew worse.
"Haaang♥ It's coming! Dan-woooo♥ God! I'm coming♥ Hngh! Hoooooh!?"
Se-a cried out vulgarly as the convulsions took her. Whether by chance or instinct, the squirt that burst from her pussy hit the hand she had in the way, and she managed not to soil the rest of the car. The seat, of course, was already a lake — but that had been the case since she started.
"Hah... hah... nnh♥ Dan-woo, I love youuu...♥"
Twitching irregularly, she whispered love to a man who was not there. If this had been a manga, heart marks would have floated in her yellow eyes.
Without even realizing it, Dan-woo was in the process of taming his own Escort Officer.