10. Demon in a Bottle (19)
10. Demon in a Bottle (19)
The Madosa who served the Demon God Sinepekus possessed a technique for erasing their own names.
By using it, they could wipe their presence from the world entirely.
It was employed, more often than not, to escape life-or-death situations.
As potent as it was, the price was steep.
Once a name was erased, the individual wandered the Garden of Whispers—Sinepekus's domain—like a wraith, stripped of all memory of who they were.
Recovering one's sense of self from that state and returning to the mortal plane unaided was impossible.
So they prepared an exit strategy in advance.
They entrusted a reliable person to regularly perform a rite that invoked their name.
If someone called that name, they could reclaim their identity within the Garden of Whispers and return to the world.
But the Demon in the Bottle, born inside a flask, had never possessed a name to begin with.
The Creator who made him gave him none.
The moment he escaped his flask, his existence began dissolving from the world automatically.
Flesh and skin sloughed away like waterlogged sand.
To be denied a name—denied even a taste of the freedom he had just seized, dissolving into nothing.
He raged against The Creator. He despaired at his fate.
Right when he had abandoned everything, he heard a voice.
It belonged to a young woman, barely twenty years old.
She was searching for her master in the middle of that horrifying scene of destruction.
The demon exerted every last scrap of his authority to gather information on her. There was no motive behind it.
It was simply the only thing left he could do before dying.
And that final, desperate act brought him unexpected hope.
He learned of an ability she had acquired just days earlier.
It held the power to fix a living creature in its current state.
Even a fatally wounded animal would see its injuries arrested the moment it entered her flask.
If that power worked on him too—
He might just survive.
He took the gamble. It paid off.
He was back inside a bottle, but he had slipped from the Black Magician's grasp.
And after seventeen years of relentless research, the Demon in the Bottle had, at last, both a body capable of walking outside the glass and a name sufficient to sustain his existence.
Stolen from someone else, true.
"Haaah."
Clara drew a deep breath and let it out.
She, who had spent most of her life inside that glass prison, had finally stepped into the outside world.
She tapped the bottle she'd inhabited for seventeen years with a playful finger, mimicking the original owner's speech.
"Hello. My name is Clara."
Weeks of gathering information on her meant she could replicate every verbal mannerism perfectly.
From inside the bottle, the amorphous liquid let out a gurgling rasp.
"Grrrgh... Wh-who are you...? What gives you the right to take my body...? Don't make me laugh! I'm Clara! I-I'm the one who's Clara...!"
"You can shout whatever you like. Officially, the world recognizes me as Clara now."
Clara sneered down at the seething liquid monster.
This would let her evade over ninety percent of all existing tracking and detection abilities.
She stoppered the glass bottle and covered it with a black cloth.
The spell she'd woven was a kind of trick—it overpainted the ownership of a name and a body.
Maintaining it required the original owner to stay alive.
"Behave yourself. I can always give the body back later."
She tucked the bottle onto a shelf in the corner.
Then Clara turned her attention to her new form, examining it in detail.
Two long legs extended beneath a short skirt.
White stockings in a stretchy fabric hugged her thighs, leaving a sliver of skin visible.
Standing on soft legs instead of hard, jointed chitin was undeniably novel.
Even the fact that she could balance on just two limbs felt like a miracle.
A shiver ran through her—the scent of soap tickling her nose, the stiff fabric of a school uniform against her whole body.
Every sensation was unfamiliar, raw, new.
Sinepekus's bestowed authority had let her amass a breadth and depth of knowledge surpassing any scholar alive. The spell to steal a body and name was her own design.
That knowledge had let her serve as a convincing mentor to Phairen without raising suspicion.
But the world she knew was only what she'd glimpsed through glass and overheard in whispers.
This was the first time she had ever felt anything—no matter how small—with a body of her own.
She wanted to try chocolate.
Was it truly as delicious as the rumors claimed?
She wanted to ride an airship.
What did it feel like to soar through the sky?
She wanted so many things.
Lost in her imaginings, she was interrupted by Phairen's trembling voice.
"M-Master? It really is you, isn't it?"
Clara turned to look at the corner of the room.
Phairen was slumped on the floor, her entire body quivering.
"Phairen, my darling disciple."
Clara felt no hesitation calling her that.
The arrangement had begun as a deception, but for seventeen years Clara had genuinely taught her a great deal.
Phairen was, in truth, her real disciple.
Clara studied her chalk-white face.
She had watched this woman for more than ten years.
By now, she knew Phairen better than Phairen knew herself.
The woman was drowning in fear.
Not guilt over having harmed a student with her own hands.
Phairen would do anything for her master. Besides, Clara was a criminal who'd been caught trying to kill someone. Phairen felt no compunction about using her.
What Phairen feared was that her master, having finally won freedom, might no longer need her help—and might leave.
Clara decided to give her disciple the reward she'd always craved.
It was thanks to Phairen that she could walk the world like this.
"Come here, Phairen."
At the summons, Phairen crawled toward her on hands and knees.
Clara stroked her disciple's pale cheek.
Thanks to the secret techniques Clara had taught her, combined with her own tireless effort, Phairen's skin, at well past thirty, was no less youthful than a twenty-year-old's.
"You're beautiful."
"M-Master..."
Phairen's eyes quivered.
"Truly, you're lovely."
Clara's lips pressed over hers.
Phairen felt her heart stop dead.
Her master's tongue swept lightly across her gums. A simple kiss, but it was more intoxicating than any caress Phairen had ever felt.
At last.
She.
Had won.
She had claimed her master's heart.
Their lips parted.
Clara wiped a trace of saliva from the corner of her mouth.
"I'm not yet accustomed to moving this body."
"Ah, M-Master."
Phairen gazed at her through tearful eyes.
She shook her head.
"Call me Clara. Otherwise, what was the point of hiding inside this body?"
Meeting that smile, Phairen heard the sound of her own heart detonating.
Words were an adequate tool for conveying intent. But transmitting emotion between people sometimes required expression—sometimes gesture—sometimes touch.
For seventeen years, the only communication she'd shared with her master was words.
But today, finally.
In the truest sense, she was with her master.
Her master had expressed her feelings toward her.
Ecstasy surged, and with it, every suppressed desire erupted at once.
Phairen seized the girl standing before her by the wrist.
Clara's brow furrowed.
"Wh-what are you—?"
It was the first genuine pain she had ever experienced.
The unpleasant sensation she'd only ever heard described—she thrashed, trying to wrench her arm free.
Then her disciple did something utterly unthinkable.
Slap.
Clara's head snapped to the right from the shock.
She stared in disbelief.
Phairen had struck her across the face.
"Wh... wha...?"
Clara gaped, her mind blank.
What just—?
What had this woman done to her—?
No—what had this woman dared to—?
"Stay still!"
Phairen snarled low, fixing her with a predatory glare.
It was a Pressure Signal—the technique taught in the taming discipline. A low-frequency growl backed by intense eye contact and motion, used to dominate wild beasts in a battle of wills.
Clara flinched and curled in on herself like a startled fawn, the sting on her cheek hot and sharp, tears prickling at her eyes.
She had never seen this side of Phairen. Not once in seventeen years of watching her.
"Wh-what do you think you're doing, Phairen...?"
Clara tried to summon her authority as the master, but the only sound that escaped her throat was a terrified girl's whimper.
Phairen smiled, a cruel pleasure curling her lips.
"You will address me as Professor. Isn't that right, Clara?"
Her hand slid smoothly beneath the uniform skirt.
Her fingers traced Clara's thigh, light as a teasing tongue.
Clara's legs jumped.
She registered the tickle, the embarrassment—and with them, a prickling, electric pleasure coiling upward from between her thighs.
"Hn... ngh, wh-what is—?"
She couldn't finish.
Phairen's mouth sealed over hers.
This was nothing like the "grace" Clara had bestowed moments ago. This kiss was aggressive, viscous, and suffocatingly deep.
Phairen's tongue slithered inside her mouth like a snake.
Even as she devoured her master's lips, Phairen pressed the tip of her index finger firmly against the cleft just visible above Clara's underwear.
Clara gasped sharply, her thighs quivering. The sight made Phairen's mad love for her master swell unbearably.
"Sniff... ngh, P-Phairen... why are you..."
"You really have to ask?"
Phairen gazed at her with eyes glistening with desire, her hand wedged between Clara's clenched thighs, pressing harder.
"Hik!"
Her master's hips bucked.
Clara had utterly failed to grasp what seventeen years of suppression had done to Phairen's heart.
Phairen had loved her master, but that devotion had never once been comfortable or easy to bear.
At a fundamental level, she'd lived in constant fear that the bottle would shatter—that it would all end. She never permitted herself a moment's ease. Always on guard, always forcing herself taut.
Sometimes, when his demands had been unreasonable or defied common sense, resentment had flared.
But she'd crushed the urge to refuse and silently carried out his orders.
Every single day she'd lived coiled in tension.
For seventeen years.
It resembled the tangled love and resentment between a bedridden father and the daughter forced to nurse him.
She'd had no outlet for the stress.
Terrified her hand might slip without her noticing and shatter the glass, she'd swallowed her rage, always trembling on the edge of disaster.
But now, at last, her master had found a safe body.
And she had revealed her feelings.
It was hardly strange that everything dammed up inside Phairen had now blown wide open.
"Ah, nn... my b-body feels s-strange... s-stop—!"
"You mean, 'Please stop, Professor.' Don't you?"
Phairen's hands explored every inch of Clara's body.
Clara's back was drenched in sweat; her whole frame trembled.
So this was what it was.
This was—
Something words alone could never convey.
It was carnal desire, the first she'd ever known.
All the logic and knowledge she'd accumulated collapsed utterly in the face of pleasure.
"Sensation... ngh! It's... absurd...! Nothing but internal secretions, and yet...! Hngh... P-Please stop, P-Professor...!"
The words of submission finally spilled out.
Weeping, drooling, she begged her disciple.
Please stop.
Phairen didn't stop.
She was unbuttoning her master's blouse now, one button at a time, deliberately slow.
Both hands roamed upward, tracing Clara's slender waist.
Clara couldn't even muster a pretense of resistance.
She just whimpered idiotically, writhing where she lay.
Phairen's hands finally reached the soft mounds and seized them roughly.
"Hnghk!"
Clara's back arched. It felt as if her respiratory center had been paralyzed. Her hands and feet curled involuntarily.
Phairen lapped lightly at the nape of her neck and whispered.
"You're adorable, Master."
That night, the demon who emerged from the bottle tasted the sweetness of chocolate she had so desperately craved.
And she experienced the sensation of soaring through the sky aboard an airship.