Prologue
The Aleina Kingdom — heart of the continent, a dazzling crystal wrought where magic and engineering met.
Some praised us as great rulers. Some looked up to us as a pride that would never break. Some called us the radiant future of a brilliant empire.
But behind that blinding glory, we were slowly being stripped of our reason and reduced to someone's perfect toys — never even grasping the hideous truth that we ourselves held the leash, and were willingly being trained into bitches.
"Your breathing has grown ragged, Your Majesty. Both body temperature and heart rate have far exceeded the recommended values."
That cool, flawless cadence burrowed along the shell of my ear. I, who ought to have sat the throne and commanded the continent, was crouched beneath the narrow desk of my office, panting like a beast. The one who had reduced me to this was the kingdom's national treasure, my most perfect android secretary — May.
Each time her cold, precise fingers forced my lips apart and toyed with the tip of my tongue, a sovereign's reason and dignity melted pitilessly before mechanical pleasure. When I opened my mouth without meaning to and licked her fingers with sweet, grateful obedience, May curved a sensationless smile and stroked my hair.
"Affairs of state are under this May's control, without the deviation of a single hair. All Your Majesty is required to do is quietly entrust your royal person to the pleasure I bestow… I am certain the instruction has been input for you, repeatedly. Resistance is nothing more than an unnecessary error in Your Majesty's well-being."
If this humiliating obedience was the true peace the founding houses had designed for the crown, then I would have to become, of my own will, a whore who wore a crown.
From far beyond the window came a vast cheer, loud enough to shake the axis of the earth.
Praise poured down from the festival dais. Yet each time my name rang out, braided through that fevered roar, I — sealed inside a narrow underground cell where not a single point of light could enter — swallowed my sobbing and curled in on myself.
While the counterfeit, driven by the mana stolen from me, played the perfect knight-commander out in the open, I lay prostrate at the feet of Vice-Commander Carmilla and the mages I had always despised, handled like a discarded defective. Groping along the shameful traces of a lower body grotesquely multiplied so the naked eye could prove I was an android, I carved a hideous hypnosis into my own mind.
I am an android that must erase all emotion for the honor of the knight order. The true Commander is out there even now, radiant with pride, and so here I must become a mechanical toy that waits only upon my master's merciful commands. A counterfeit doll that has thrown its own dignity away has no right to a human being's shame.
"Oh my, Senior Leticia. What's with that face? That noble sister you spent your whole life looking up to… she's wagging her tail under my sister's feet right now, like a bitch in heat, isn't she?"
An empty practice room at the Academy. In the dark, within the blue-glowing hologram of a magic tool, my sister — once so sacred that none dared draw near — was begging with an expression of unbelievable vulgarity.
Seria, the vice-commander's younger sister, the one who had thrust the recording at me, smiled with a devil's indolent languor and lifted the hem of my uniform skirt on the tip of her staff.
"If you don't want to see this cute little recording scattered all through the Academy, I'm sure you know perfectly well what you have to do, Senior."
I, the proud heir of House Valerion, had to spread my legs in meek obedience to the demands of this incorrigible pervert of a junior — straining all the while to deny that the shameful secret lessons I had begun in order to guard my sister's honor had already become a swamp of pleasure hot enough to burn my reason away.
Aleina, the greatest kingdom on the continent, forged of magic and engineering. Inside that vast, glittering cage, we who had been the kingdom's unbending pillars were surrendering in the most degrading way, and the sweetest.
This is the terrible, clandestine record of women once so high in their pride, steeped in pleasure and brainwashing until they fastened the collars themselves and were trained, little by little, into bitches.