Rewiring the Witch
"...."
The Witch had kept resisting right up until she didn't. In a matter of moments, every last reaction drained out of her.
Originally, I'd planned to overwrite the Curse Seal entirely and swing her loyalty away from the That Person she kept invoking, pointing it at me instead. The difficulty, unfortunately, ran higher than I'd expected, so I just wiped the whole thing clean.
The original design had been a delicate piece of work. Specific actions would fire a dopamine reward amplified dozens of times over, gently herding her behavior until she took genuine pleasure in submitting of her own accord, or recoiled hard from the mere thought of harming the being called That Person. I didn't have the understanding to overwrite something that grand and granular, so I scraped it all out and rewired the priorities: control of her body defaulted to me, first and last.
With tentacles rooted through every inch of her, I could feel her slightest twitch. If she tried anything stupid, I could flip her mind itself on and off, just like this. That had me wondering whether I'd have to stay plugged into her body at all times—but once I linked the fertilized egg, it worked like pairing a device. I could stay connected to the Witch and run her without being physically jacked in. As expected: electronics always play nicer when you stick to one brand.
A long, wet slide, and I pulled out. Behind me the Witch let out a hollow, flavorless moan, like a doll with its soul yanked loose. I left her there and headed for Doctor, flashing a thumbs-up to say it was done. She huffed a dry laugh and started scanning the Witch with an assortment of machines. And beside her—
"Pregnant... heehee...♥ M-my belly's actually gonna swell up...♥"
Topaz was already drawing up plans for a second generation, a sloppy grin on her face as she spun out her happy little fantasies.
Unfortunately, that was still impossible. For now.
Implanting the fertilized egg in the Witch, I'd felt something like two options—the way you queue up units in StarCraft. One of them sat locked, like I hadn't climbed far enough up the tech tree. Instinct told me that whatever came out of the Witch would be a tentacle like me. Not so much a child as another unit in a colony I controlled. Linking the egg had felt exactly like being connected to the Witch myself, so I figured it just meant one more body I could puppet.
Judging by what Doctor had said, ordinary tentacles didn't work this way. Whether that was because I'd possessed this body or because I was some genuine mutant, I couldn't tell—but it was a blessing in disguise. A normal kid I could live with. A tentacle junior, though? Even I wasn't quite ready for that...
"Tentacle, can you wake this bitch up?"
A click.
"Hah...! You've got some nerve."
"Heh heh... So you underestimated me, did you? You didn't even bother restraining me properly...!!"
The Witch struck every dramatic pose in the book, gathering mana as if she meant to fire off a blast, and thrust her hand forward. Nothing happened.
"What?! My mana... why?!"
"So it's a Curse Seal that just locks down her actions entirely. Not complicated. Clean."
"Kh!! What the hell did you do to my body?!"
Climax.
"Nnnghaaah?!♥"
A wet squirt. Then a longer, hissing gush. Her attitude—acting like she was somebody when she was nothing but an Egg Dispenser—pissed me off, so I made her come.
"Ah...hngh...♥ I-I can't... st..."
She climaxed, then flopped face-first onto the floor in the most pathetic heap, planting her head in the slick she'd just gushed. It suited her perfectly.
"So on top of forcing her actions, you can also drag a physical response out of her with no stimulation at all? Or is it that tentacles are just that strong on the sexual side, so you can make her climax from nothing?"
Doctor watched the Witch come out of nowhere and sank straight back into contemplation. She never once stopped working her machines or running the scan. A scholar down to her bones, that one.
"Hmm... hey, Tentacle. Think you can refine this Curse Seal further?"
I... can, technically.
I wouldn't be able to match the fine grain of the seal she'd originally been wearing, but I could probably approximate it to some degree. The catch was that I needed to parasitize the target, root tentacles through every last corner of their body, and stay linked through my main body or a fertilized egg. I pointed at the Witch, then gave Doctor a few light pokes just below the navel. She seemed to get it.
"Hmm... yeah, parasitism plus pregnancy is a bit... or is it...? Haah."
"Sis, why the big sigh~"
Topaz, who had somehow snapped back to her senses, came over and patted Doctor on the back.
"It's just... people still holding on at the erosion stage should be treatable if we can flush it out with this guy's semen, right?"
Doctor let out a disappointed sigh and pointed at the Witch sprawled on the floor, looking a little downcast.
"We've just gotten our first case proving that once someone's already fallen, flushing out the Black Mana doesn't bring their mind back."
"Hmm~ it's not because of that Black Mana-laced ovum Tentacle put in her...?"
"That's completely isolated. It's just being burned as energy for cell division—zero effect on her. I wanted to blame the Curse Seal... but this guy wiped it and it didn't make any difference."
The bright smile from earlier might as well have been a lie. Doctor's face had gone bitter, and I decided to try a little harder. If you don't know something, you study...!
A slithering rush.
"Ah! Tentacle?"
I'd only been out a few minutes, but I dove straight back into the Witch's pussy and headed for her womb.
"Oooohhngh?!♥"
This time she came hard enough to squirt not just slick but a stream of bright yellow piss. I left her to it and burrowed in fast. I could have done this remotely, but the harder the job, the more precision you get from hands-on control.
Right... time to rebuild the dopamine system from scratch.
What I found looked like the fried reward circuit of a modern human who'd doomscrolled themselves into oblivion on short-form video—a system mashed into tatters to suit someone else's tastes.
If I take this... and do this...?
"Nngh?!♥"
And like that?
"Hnghhooooh!!♥"
Whoops, my hand slipped!!
"Grrrk..."
There were a few minor issues along the way—the Witch spraying nosebleeds, foaming at the mouth, blacking out for a couple of seconds here and there—but I managed, somehow, to lay down a foundation where doing good deeds would release dopamine. Enough to give her something approaching a human-adjacent sense of morality.
The work ran dozens of times harder than I'd expected. I'd been privately thinking nobody else would be able to pull this off—and then I realized the problem was this bitch herself.
The good-deed-to-dopamine circuit just wouldn't connect, so I cracked her memories open a little, hoping to graft the reward system onto past acts of kindness. There wasn't a single scrap of anything you could call a good deed. She'd never even been a magical girl. I could read that she'd been the daughter of a crime syndicate boss, but everything after that cut off cold, like someone had deliberately erased it. All that remained were her memories from after she'd started managing an artificially opened dimensional rift, met Topaz, and everything since. As if someone had been diligently, methodically wiping everything that came before.
Huh... so maybe this bitch was just garbage to begin with, and wiping the Black Mana still left a piece of shit?
A perfectly reasonable suspicion. And after reading through all the bullying and atrocities packed into those memories, I got so pissed I sentenced her to five hours of the most humiliating pose I could think of: the Shameful Spread-Eagle Dance, infinite replay.
"W-what is this?! Pussyyy! Pussy! F-fuck!! Stop!! Pusssyyy~! Pu~ssy! Aaaaagh!!!"
Naturally, I put her back in her right mind first.
I also tuned the reward system so that filthy acts would still tug at a craving for self-destruction—and then set it so she'd feel a powerful aversion to that craving as well. She'd feel the urge to ruin herself, and feel disgusted with herself for feeling it.
But you're being loud, so go yammer outside.
She was getting a bit noisy, so I put a limiter on her voice—drop it even a little and you could barely hear her—and headed over to Doctor.
...How do I even explain this?
Doctor and Topaz were uncannily good at reading my body language, but even so, walking them through the Witch's backstory and everything else was going to be a stretch.
"What's up? You got something to say?"
I was still wrestling with how to explain when Doctor, with that eerie sixth sense of hers, spoke up. I still didn't have a decent way to get it across, and she tried again.
"Is it that you can't figure out how to explain? Just try expressing it as best you can. I can more or less follow."
?!
I jolted. She could actually understand what I was saying? Had she seriously reached the point of building a tentacle translator... for the sake of that unhinged tentacle-lover, Topaz?
"I know what you're thinking, and no. It's just a translator. It reads the intent carried in mana along with brainwaves and roughly parses the meaning."
Ohh... I see.
"I won't catch every detail, but I can get the gist. Go ahead and explain."
Encouraged, I boiled it down to the essentials: the Witch's past, and the fact that I could probably fine-tune the Curse Seal even further.
"She wasn't... a magical girl? How...? Haah, that's not what matters right now. We're going to need more test subjects, for one..."
She processed the explanation, showed a flicker of bewilderment at the Witch's past—and then the dejected look vanished. She was muttering to herself again, already laying plans. I felt a wave of relief.
"Heehee, Tentacle. Thank you~!"
Whether she was acknowledging my hard work or not, Topaz swept me into a grateful hug.
Yeah... nothing beats Topaz's chest...
"Hehe... I know, I know. I think you're the best too~!!"
Now that I knew she could actually understand me, I felt a weird little flush of embarrassment as I soaked in her embrace.
"Tentacle! Just in case—can you read this?"
I was still luxuriating in Topaz's arms when Doctor shoved a hologram screen packed with text in my face. Luckily I could read the writing too. I nodded yes, and she broke into a huge grin and asked that, going forward, if we treated any other Witches, I put Curse Seals on them based on this manual.
...Th-this is waaay too biiiig!! This stuff will not fiiit in my head!!
I wanted to refuse. But those exhausted eyes were sparkling now, bright and clear as Topaz's, and a man who can turn down a beautiful woman asking for a favor is either gay or a psychopath.
"Ahaha, hang in there...?"
I accepted a manual dozens of pages long. She left in high spirits, saying she was going to make a drug that could flush Black Mana using my semen. And there I stayed, being petted in Topaz's arms, embarking on a study session I had absolutely no business being in.