Lewd and Impure Intentions (1)
After finishing Nanav's massage, I still had work hours left in the day.
The first thing I did once I'd wrapped up the red-haired barbarian warrior's upper-body session was the same as always — check the profile of my newest client, Nanav.
Name:Nanav Tarcun
Age:21
Unique Ability:Axe Mastery(A-rank) / Iron Will(B-rank)
Muscle Tension — 60%
Fatigue — 80%
Stress — 60%
Libido — 50%
What shocked me most was her age. I'd braced myself for the possibility that she might be over forty and still wouldn't have been surprised — and then the number staring back at me was twenty-one. That was disorienting in an entirely different way.
…She was actually younger than me?
No matter how I looked at her, she hadn't seemed younger. All that "Guild Oppa" talk — I'd written it off as flirting, or just her acting cool and unbothered. The idea that she genuinely was my junior had never crossed my mind.
In hindsight, her outer composure had always been at odds with how frantic her inner thoughts felt. Once I framed that as the emotional register of a girl barely into her twenties, it started to make a certain amount of sense.
And if I was being precise, it wasn't that Nanav looked old so much as that the aura she carried made her feel older. The way she stayed composed in front of a man without blushing or flustering. The fact that she was taller than Guildmaster Aisia and had a chest on par with Senior Elin's. None of that made it easy to clock her as younger than me. And yet here she was — barely an adult.
Yeah. In this world, judging a woman's age by her looks is basically a fool's errand.
As Senior Elin had told me before, adventurers in this world didn't age the way ordinary people did. Something like elves — no matter how many years they racked up, they still looked eternally young by human standards. Whether the elves of this world were actually a long-lived race, I had no idea.
Either way, age barely mattered at this point. What actually mattered was Nanav's condition after the massage.
Her libido is surprisingly the lowest of any woman I've worked on so far — but the rest of her numbers aren't exactly great.
And even those figures had already come down somewhat after a single upper-body session. Still, the low libido was unexpected. Lowest among everyone I'd massaged so far, by a clear margin. Fifty percent wasn't nothing, of course — but the fact that it sat below both Guildmaster Aisia and Senior Elin was genuinely curious.
Senior Elin is still at sixty-five percent even after I worked through her chest once.
At least when it came to sexual desire, Senior Elin and Guildmaster Aisia might actually outrank her. How meaningful that gap was, I still couldn't say.
For the record, Nanav was both my first and last massage client of the day. A full gold coin was a steep price for most adventurers, and word had clearly gotten around that what she'd received was nothing more than a shoulder, back, and waist rub. If an adventurer was going to drop a gold coin on a massage from a man, they were probably hoping for something more than that — but I wasn't particularly interested in women who approached me with that kind of ulterior motive from the jump.
Anyone who came at me purely for my body was, compared to Senior Elin or Coco, more likely to be the dangerous sort. I'd initially filed Nanav under that same category — but after reading her thoughts through Massage Mind Reading, I figured it was fine to keep things going. The girl under the surface was pure-hearted, and she was even younger than me.
That said, I still can't give her an Erogenous Massage today.
Libido at fifty percent meant she still had room to hold out. Senior Elin, on the other hand, had spiked as high as eighty-five percent before settling only slightly — so today was the day to catch her and work her through it properly.
With that in mind, I carefully broached the subject with Senior Elin over dinner at the guild, asking whether she might come by my place after work.
"Hey, Senior Elin."
"Mm-hmm?"
"Do you have any plans after we get off today?"
"…Why are you asking all of a sudden?"
"Nothing weird. I was just wondering if you might come over to my place for a bit — if you're free, that is."
"…B-Beor's house?!"
Her voice jumped with surprise as she echoed my words right back at me. Instantly, half the adventurers in the dining hall turned our way. Realizing a beat too late how loud she'd been, Senior Elin ducked those stares and sank back into her seat.
"Is it really that shocking?"
"I-I'm not shocked…. A guy shouldn't just casually invite a girl over to his place…. It's dangerous…."
"What's dangerous about you, Senior? And your Unique Ability isn't even a physical enhancement type."
"Y-You don't know that…. What if I only told you about Thought Acceleration and kept my other Unique Abilities a secret?"
"…Well, I guess that's not impossible."
Of course, I'd already confirmed through my own Unique Ability — Vitality Massage — that Thought Acceleration was the only one she had. In that sense, Senior Elin was a "safe woman" in more ways than one. Even if things ever came down to raw strength, I was pretty sure I could take her.
And honestly, from the moment I'd arrived in this world, she'd been the person I most wanted to get close to. There was no reason not to give her the same lower-body massage and Erogenous Massage I'd already given Coco.
"S-So…? Why do you suddenly want me to come over…?"
"…Nothing major. I was hoping you'd help me with some massage 'practice.'"
"…M-Massage practice?"
"Yeah. Now that I've officially started offering massage services at the guild, I figured I should get a bit more serious about learning the craft. And right now, you're pretty much the only person I can ask."
If I swallowed my pride and begged hard enough, Guildmaster Aisia would probably say yes too — but between the two of them, Senior Elin was the one more likely to go along with a request like this. Especially after what had happened in the guild lounge earlier, when she'd already let me work on her chest. We'd made real progress. And more than anything, she clearly enjoyed being massaged by me. The odds of a refusal were low.
"Are you busy after work? If you are, that's fine, I just—"
"N-No no! I'm not busy at all! A-And if it's a favor from Beor, even if I were busy, I wouldn't be!"
"Huh?"
"I-I mean…. Th-That came out wrong…. A-Anyway, I'll help. Okay!"
She nodded rapidly, mumbling through her embarrassment as if trying to bury it. At last — the moment I'd been waiting for. Everything was in place to cross that line with her for the first time.
"Come on in, Senior."
"E-Excuse me…."
At my invitation, Senior Elin stepped carefully inside, scanning her surroundings like a meerkat on high alert. That vigilance was almost certainly thanks to how off my place looked.
A two-story house with plenty of rooms — and only one person living in it. A wide open space where the kitchen bled into the living room, furnished with nothing but a single massage sofa built for one.
Coco, being on the innocent side, had breezed past the weirdness without a second thought. But someone like Senior Elin, who'd actually lived in the world a bit, was bound to find it strange.
"Sorry. I don't really have proper furniture."
"N-No no. It's nice. Minimalist."
"I think before I lost my memories, I'd only just moved in. That massage sofa over there is a recent purchase too — the place was completely empty before that."
"Hmm, I see. Oh — if you ever need a table or something, don't buy from the commercial district. Ask the lumberjack lady who lives on the edge of town. Furniture-making is her hobby, so she'll sell you whatever you need for cheap."
"I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the tip."
Even now, she was patiently feeding practical life knowledge to the amnesiac version of me. All the more reason to make sure today's lower-body massage and Erogenous Massage left her thoroughly satisfied — and brought every one of her remaining stats, stress included, back into balance.
"Senior Elin — shall we get started on the massage?"
"Ah, right. You wanted help practicing. Do I just go sit on that sofa? Or… is it a chest massage again, like earlier?"
"Lower-body massage."
"Mm-hmm, okay. Lower-body mass— wait, wh-what?! L-Lower-body massage?!"
Just as I'd expected — the moment the words left my mouth, Senior Elin went visibly flustered and made me repeat myself.
"Yes. A lower-body massage."
Moments like this called for maximum shamelessness and dead-serious conviction. I had to sell the idea that what I was about to do was nothing more than a "massage" — pure physical contact with no lewd or impure purpose behind it whatsoever.
…Even though, in reality, I was harboring intentions far lewder and more impure than anyone else's.