Give with a Doe, Take with a Mal
I had an utterly filthy dream in the middle of the night.
Faceless women surrounded me, pawing at me like a toy—except every last one of them held a blade, so it was nowhere near a sexy dream.
...But I'm pretty sure one of those women was holding a fleuret.
Sitting on the sofa, I stared blankly toward Chaeyeon. She was sleeping soundly, snoring softly, looking completely at ease.
The other women always seemed to struggle to fall asleep, their positions looking uncomfortable—yet here she was, face so peaceful all by herself.
I twisted my faintly aching body this way and that to loosen up, then lifted the water bottle from the table and drank from it mid-air.
Wiping my mouth roughly with the back of my hand, I thought,
Is it because the crow called her “her”? What a nasty, unsettling dream.
My lust still boiled as fiercely as ever, but I'd been using it as fuel to crank up my workout intensity even higher, so I could endure it reasonably well now.
Though the lower half that twitched every morning was still pretty damn annoying.
When I grabbed the laptop and headed out of the book café, someone rustled among the women and a head poked up.
“Mmm... Oppa, where are you going?”
“The gym. I need to start doing morning workouts in addition to the evening ones.”
“...Didn't you do almost six thousand pull-ups before bed last night? And now you're going to do more the moment you wake up...”
“Increasing the pull-up count doesn't mean much anymore. Time to add some weight.”
I grabbed the new water bottle I'd left in the hallway outside the door and spoke to Yejin, who followed me out rubbing her sleepy eyes.
“When Im Chaeyeon wakes up, tell her to come to the gym. We still have to do the shopping we couldn't finish yesterday.”
“Ah... okay. Got it.”
“If you're hungry, eat first. Don't wait for me.”
After that, stepping out of the main building, the gloomy weather that had been hanging around since yesterday was still going strong.
Hooo...
I exhaled a small breath, but no visible vapor.
It was an alien phenomenon against the frozen trees and morning frost around me.
Expressionless, I approached the leaves, tucking the water bottle and laptop under one arm, and brushed the surface of a leaf with my other hand.
Then I stared hard. The frost that should have melted slowly on my fingers kept holding its beautiful crystalline form.
But Oppa, did you know? Every time I hug you, it feels like... you're so cold I can't even feel any body heat.
Recalling Chaeyeon's whisper from some time ago, I narrowed my eyes.
My body temperature disappeared after that. No—more precisely, it dropped. Cold enough to feel like a corpse.
But the irony was that this boiling desire remained the same.
As its performance grew stronger by the day, this damn body was making it harder and harder to call myself human—mind or flesh.
Like just now, when I saw Yejin and wanted to strip her clothes off and devour her lips right then and there.
The social norms and moral sense drilled into me over twenty-four years of life, along with my patience, were slowly racing toward their end.
...And yet before the apocalypse, I thought I was pretty good at self-control.
Should I lose to some beastly breeding urge and trample a kind girl like that?
I stared at Yejin, who had followed me out into the cold for no reason and was waving, then turned my head away.
I was certain that if I went any further, I'd forget even the bare minimum of lines.
If I didn't somehow vent this lust...
Fuck. Should I ditch Im Chaeyeon and go cruise the red-light district near Suwon Station by myself?
It wasn't that far from here. If I just wandered around holding a can of Spam—or even just a bag of bread—it would definitely work, but...
For a moment. Then I let out a hollow laugh.
Trading with whores in a ruined world. What a joke. Really, no joke like this one.
Looking up at the sky, I muttered,
“What's morality, and what's free will supposed to be, anyway?”
It was better when I was just happily beating the crap out of that orangutan bastard.
The simple, crude high of a fight didn't cling stickily like this lust, and there was no emptiness after it ended.
If I dragged Kim Yejin to the gym right now and did the deed...
How wretched would I feel at the end of it?
Repeating that to myself over and over, desperately trying not to look at Yejin, I walked toward the gym.
“Take care, Oppa! I'll make a really delicious breakfast!”
Without looking at her, I just raised a hand in greeting.
This fucking body of mine.
I ground my teeth.
A little later, I worked the deadlifts and squats so insanely hard that time lost all meaning, finally managing to crush down the seizing lust.
Clunk—
Kwaaaaaang—!
Barely standing on trembling legs from the workout volume that had punched through this body's absurd regenerative power, I set the barbell down. The 150 kg weight crashed to the floor with a deafening racket.
Then I blinked a few times, and the overload on my flesh faded in an instant.
I admired the insanely defined thigh and calf muscles twitching, then pulled off all the plates.
Lifting the completely empty 20 kg bar, I gauged the center for a few seconds, then switched from two hands to one.
Maintain balance. Maintain balance.
I could still swing it at full power if I gripped hard enough. But the center of gravity would shift, and my body would tip every which way with the swing. I had no interest in looking that ridiculous.
Pull-ups are a full upper-body exercise. Nothing better for emphasizing balance, but this should be enough.
I tensed the muscles sequentially from arm to shoulder, then spun the bar once in a full circle.
Almost there. Almost. Just a little more and it'll be possible.
I set the bar down, loaded the plates again, and was about to start benching when Chaeyeon opened the gym door with light footsteps and came in.
“I'm here, Oppa. I was so determined to wake up early, but maybe because I worked out with you yesterday, my body feels a bit...?”
Chattering as she approached, she had no choice but to stop mid-sentence and stare at me.
Twitch, twitch—
Of course she did. Before she arrived, I'd been grinding my body for nearly ten minutes without a single rest, so my muscles were flaunting a definition that couldn't get any more pronounced.
A male limit that no steroid or drug could ever match—only inhuman regeneration could show.
I glanced at the speechless Chaeyeon, then pulled on the winter T-shirt I'd taken off and said,
“If you're here, go play with the crow for a bit. I'll finish my workout and then we can start shopping.”
“Uh, um...”
She tried to answer, but even with the skin covered by clothes, the absurdly pumped muscles made the T-shirt look like a compression shirt, and Chaeyeon stammered a little.
“Ah, okay. But... aren't you cold?”
“Not at all. I took it off because I was hot, actually.”
As I continued the workout and muscle regeneration kept happening, at some point my body temperature had shot up rapidly. No idea how that worked, of course.
Ignoring her as she awkwardly averted her eyes in a way that didn't suit her, I approached the laptop and opened the screen.
“Shopkeeper. Open up. It's past opening time.”
...Umm.
A bird that had been sleeping on a king-size, ridiculously ornate bed staggered up and stretched a little.
“What kind of AI sleeps and stretches? Isn't that all just settings?”
...Master, you're the same as ever first thing in the morning. I've told you several times that I'm a living creature just like Master.
“So that's all settings too. How can something inside a laptop be alive, no matter what?”
As always, whether Master believes it or not, it's strict reality.
I shook my head slightly, and as the crow got up, the bed vanished in an instant.
She stretched again, yawned, then looked at me with bright, sparkling eyes.
So, what kind of product are you looking for? Master's unnecessarily high standards mean you still don't have enough Tar, so is it for the ladies again?
As the crow turned its head, Chaeyeon, who had composed herself, approached my side.
“Yes. Like Oppa, I want a tattoo, not an item. The kind that makes my body stronger.”
Hmm. I expected as much. I've roughly figured out the tastes of Master's party. But you don't want the exact same product as Master, right?
The crow and Chaeyeon's gazes both locked onto the back of my hand.
“...Of course not. I haven't even collected fifty Tar yet, let alone a hundred.”
A combat mark with a minimum price of fifty Tar or less. A bit ambiguous, but not impossible. Let's see...
Without even showing us the list, the crow rummaged through things on its own, then stopped its hand.
How about this one? I picked it for the effect that best matches the form of the weapon our customer has.
“...?”
At the image fixed on the screen, Chaeyeon floated a question mark, and I looked back and forth between the sword at her waist and the tattoo on the screen, then said one thing.
“What the hell does fencing have to do with that?”