14. Melting Point (28)
14. Melting Point (28)
He wrapped an arm around Anais's waist. But before she could feel a flicker of embarrassment at the contact, she turned to him in pure shock at his recklessness.
"What are you doing, Troupe Leader? You—you can't do this...."
The man before them was none other than the Crown Prince of the Empire. For Wonderstein to step in and block him was tantamount to a direct challenge against his authority. The imperial guards, grasping the situation, fixed murderous glares on him.
"You scum! What do you think you're doing!"
"Stand back this instant!"
"How dare a man of your base station—!"
The knight who had escorted them here shifted into a stance poised to draw his sword.
He could have lost his head at any moment, yet not a hint of fear showed on Wonderstein's face. As always, his expression was filled with an unhurried smile. But his mind had gone cold and still.
Is this brat really the Crown Prince Nikolai?
A small sigh escaped his lips. The disappointment was as large as the expectations had been.
The Crown Prince whom the entire nation believed in—whom they supported as the man who would change the Empire's future. In the original story, he was a figure who had died so wretchedly that no one could ever imagine pairing him with a romantic interest.
Had the tragedy simply inflated his halo beyond all reason? The boy before him now was no different from any other noble he had encountered on his travels. Worse, he verged on the flippant.
Would he change as he aged? Or was this the butterfly effect of failing to dispel Merisa's petrification? The answer was unknowable, but one thing was immediately certain: nothing about the man in front of him matched the rumors.
"What, are you trying to say she's your woman?"
Koka raised a hand to calm the guards who were about to step forward. Though he had only been serving as the Crown Prince's body double for a few days, he wielded that authority with surprising ease.
Back in his hometown, he had led a pack of street toughs from one village tavern to the next, so he understood the dynamics of power intimately. He knew exactly where the lines he had to defend and the lines he mustn't cross lay.
"Fine by me if so. Forcing myself on a woman isn't my way. As you can see, we're wagering goods here. If you want to claim the woman is yours, join the game. Ah, the little one next to her too, of course."
Nika's shoulders trembled violently when Koka singled her out. The idea of having her body groped by a man was revolting enough, but to be toyed with by these men she had already classified as "trash" was beyond the pale.
Would it not be better to simply reveal her identity? No. Absolutely not. Anything but having this disgrace exposed. In the end... was pandering to these bastards the best option?
Wonderstein steadied her shoulders—she had been on the verge of panic—and quickly calmed her down.
"This child is only fifteen."
Koka snorted at that.
"So what? I'm fifteen too. Oi, light."
He wedged a cigarette between his lips and accepted a light from a courtesan beside him. Then he blew smoke at her. The woman coughed uncontrollably, her nose stinging, but he ignored her and blew another lungful of smoke directly into her face.
Fifteen years old by international reckoning—the equivalent of a first-year high schooler back in Korea. Even in Korea, strict as it was about minors, plenty of kids that age got into alcohol, women, and tobacco. Here, in an era where people married at that age, none of this was even a real flaw.
But that aside, Wonderstein simply didn't like him. His manner was arrogant, his behavior boorish.
Wonderstein had no intention of letting this man lay a hand on either of them. Nika especially—she had done nothing wrong except accept his request to play a game together. He had a responsibility to protect her.
"Very well. I'll join Your Highness's amusements."
"Hahaha, that's what a man does! That said... both these wenches have awfully small chests. Oh, wait... you're not just using protecting them as a pretext, are you? Be honest with me! Which one's tits really caught your eye?"
The young nobles burst into raucous laughter at Koka's jest. The courtesans joined in, mocking the two women's lean figures. Anais's and Nika's faces burned scarlet with humiliation.
Wonderstein, betraying nothing at the spiteful joke, wrapped his arms around both their shoulders and stepped into the bath. They both flinched the moment he pulled them close but accepted his embrace without significant resistance. They too understood that this was the only option right now.
They sat down directly opposite the Crown Prince.
"Good. A new participant pays the accumulated pot to enter, right?"
So said Koka, cracking open a fresh bottle of vodka beside him and filling a glass to the brim with a loud glug-glug-glug. He thrust it toward Wonderstein.
"Down it in one go! We all drank about that much. For the record, this is also a game. If you can't empty it in one shot, you lose. Since it's your solo game, the prize to wager is yours alone. The lips of one of the two women beside you!"
A full five-hundred-cc glass of vodka. A spirit that reached a staggering forty percent alcohol. Even among the hard-drinking people of this country, few could down this much in a single gulp.
Wonderstein regarded the offering silently. Scorn and provocations flew at him from all sides.
"What, can't drink it?"
"This is the Kiev-style initiation! You parasitic gigolo-looking bastard!"
"If you're scared, put the women down and get lost!"
Save for one or two exceptions, every dilettante noble gathered here was younger than Wonderstein, and half of them were still teenagers.
The brats' antics were merely ridiculous. Some of them splashed their hands and feet in the water, spraying him.
"Hah! Let me mix a little water into your drink so this body here can drink more comfortably!"
"You'd better say thank you! It's water steeped from our noble selves, after all."
"No. No. There's also a bit of water our Sophia leaked earlier."
"Ooh, Young Master, really now...."
Even as jeers rained down from every direction, Wonderstein maintained a placid smile. He was used to this kind of trouble from broadcasting—random players picking fights. Their actions and their words were on exactly the same level.
"Troupe Leader...."
"Mister Wonderstein...."
Anais and Nika watched him endure the insults with guilt-filled eyes. Each believed the responsibility for this disaster lay with herself. The fact that they could only be shielded, pushing him forward to take the brunt, mortified them.
"It's fine. This is nothing."
Then, as though he had steeled himself, he pressed the glass to his lips and began gulping it down.
"He's going too hard right off the bat! Hey, isn't he gonna keel over any second now?"
"Good, good! Drink!"
"Drink! Drink!"
A cold fire blazed through his esophagus, his stomach, his guts—every inch of the way down. For an ordinary person, a dose this large would not have been shocking if it caused immediate unconsciousness.
But he had just used Devolut to rapidly engineer his liver cells, multiplying his capacity to detoxify alcohol and its byproducts dozens of times over. To him, this was the equivalent of downing a single shot of soju.
"Phew, that's refreshing."
He emptied the glass in under ten seconds. The mockery died in an instant. They stared blankly at the empty glass. Finishing an entire glass of vodka was impressive enough, but the man seemed utterly unbothered.
Koka, who had plenty of experience leading drinking sessions, knew exactly what this moment called for. He dropped his intention to humiliate the man and applauded his liquor tolerance.
"Magnificent!"
"Indeed! I've certainly never seen a man drink like that before."
"Any chance you'd consider coming to our region for a drinking contest?"
The gazes fixed on him shifted dramatically. Men of Kiev revered a man who could hold his liquor.
Of course, nobles ordinarily placed greater importance on maintaining propriety at the table, but the youths gathered here were the sorts treated as embarrassing burdens by their respective houses. Accustomed to rubbing shoulders with those of lower station, they were more familiar with commoner culture.
"Hahaha, good, good. Then claim your prize at once! Pick one of the two and suck every last trace of her lips clean! Refusal will be considered forfeiture of the opportunity, and another man will exercise the right!"
At Koka's declaration, Wonderstein wore a strained expression as he looked back and forth between his two companions. Both of them refused to meet his eyes. A look of absolute refusal was written all over their faces.
Yet under the water, Wonderstein could feel both of them subtly tugging his arms toward their own sides.
A covert signal from beneath the surface. But when he actually trusted that signal and turned his eyes toward them, they both scrunched up their faces as if they would sooner die than kiss him here and turned their heads away.
Is that a yes or a no.
Torn between the two, who kept up a constant push and pull, Wonderstein eventually decided to choose the option with the lower emotional stakes.
"Miss Nika, would it be all right with you?"
Anais was a noble of high rank. Being treated the same as a courtesan would clearly shame her. He had to keep seeing her face going forward, and doing something that might earn her hatred was uncomfortable.
"Y-you want to do it with me?"
Nika glanced over at Wonderstein, then spotted Anais glaring daggers at her over his shoulder.
A strange sense of triumph seized her. She narrowly suppressed the corners of her lips, which threatened to curl upward on their own. Instead, she snarled at Wonderstein, who was looking at her with a smooth, insinuating grin.
"This is absurd. The woman you spent three whole days searching for is right here beside you, and you want to do it with me?"
"Do you not want to?"
When he replied with a brazen smile, Nika snapped.
"Do you think I'd like it? Getting dragged into a place like this just for being with you and having to go along with this revolting entertainment...!"
"I suppose there's no helping it, then. I've no intention of doing it against your will either—"
As Wonderstein began to pull back, Nika, without thinking, yanked on his hand. Then she bit down hard on her lower lip and whispered.
"...do it."
"Pardon?"
"J-just do it, I said. Th-the k-kiss...."
"Didn't you say you didn't want to?"
"Th-that's because you asked me... I was just giving you an honest answer. B-but we can't avoid it anyway."
"No, you could just let Miss Anais agree to it...."
When he tried to turn his head, Nika hastily grabbed his shoulder.
"Just do it, I said! What are you going to do if they count this as a 'refusal'? You're at least someone I've spent a few days getting familiar with! A-and it's only a tiny bit better, so don't get the wrong idea—mmph."
A large shadow swallowed Nika's field of vision. At the same moment, something hot sealed her mouth shut. Wonderstein's tongue invaded her mouth.
The height difference meant he had to support Nika's waist with one hand and bend forward, naturally arching her spine backward.
Wolf whistles and howls erupted from all sides. But Nika's ears registered none of it. The only sounds she could hear were the man's pulse against her skin and the wet, intertwining sound of tongues exchanging saliva.
Wonderstein aggressively laid siege to the inside of Nika's mouth. If he didn't go this far, there was no telling what nitpicking demand the Crown Prince would come up with next.
It was only a single kiss, but his saliva contained a substance that triggered pleasure. Before leaving their lodging today, he had given Maya a massage and had forgotten to deactivate the effect. Because of that, the more Nika exchanged saliva with him, the more she shivered as waves of pleasure crawled up her spine.
"Nnngh... n-no, I hate this... haah, mmph."
The Crown Prince of a nation was dressed as a girl, locked in a man's embrace before a crowd of onlookers, accepting a kiss and emitting moans like a whore. That reality only made Nika's body burn hotter.
In this moment, the Crown Prince, the man she was supposed to be—none of that remained in her head. From a place she had never felt a single sensation in her entire life, something electric sparked and climbed upward. Deep below her navel, as though an empty chamber had opened there, a muscle clenched once, then released with a ringing tremor.
Her mind went blank. For a moment, she forgot herself and moved the way her body commanded. Nika reached out her hands and traced over the planes of his stomach and chest.
Unlike her own frail frame, his body was firm. She wanted to be held tightly by him. She wanted to take him deeper into herself. Nika wrapped her arms around his neck and actively tangled her tongue with his.
"Pwah-hah!"
At some point—she had no idea how long—their lips parted. A sticky thread of saliva stretched between their mouths.
Nika wiped away the tears that had gathered at the corners of her eyes and quietly opened them. The man who had utterly consumed her world moments before was looking at her with a smile.
"How was it?"
Something about his brazen question, delivered with a perfectly composed expression, irritated her. She did not like it—him radiating such calm when he had completely wrecked the inside of her head a moment ago. She wanted to scream at him, demand what he had done to her.
But Nika's lips would not part. She didn't know what to say. Her mouth moved independently of her will.
"...That was my first."
Wonderstein's smile turned awkward at her murmured confession.
"Ah... I'm sorry. Having your first kiss with an old man like me... I'll make it up to you later."
"How are you going to make it up to me...?"
At her question, Wonderstein failed to find an answer and kept his mouth firmly shut.
Nika bit down hard on her lip to silence the words "one more kiss" that were about to slip out, then tore her gaze away from him.
"Excellent! A very passionate kiss!"
Declaring that he would reward Wonderstein for providing such fine entertainment, Koka bestowed upon him a premium vodka produced in the imperial distillery. The same kind Wonderstein had drunk.
Nika stared at the gift-wrapped bottle.
That had to be the reason. The reason she had acted that way.
The lingering trace of alcohol in Wonderstein's mouth must have momentarily paralyzed her reason.
Otherwise, there was no way she could have been aroused by a man's kiss.
She repeated this to herself, pushing away the lingering afterglow of excitement in her body. But the sensation she had felt for the first time today still coiled deep inside her belly.