Two Candies
There are two kinds of people in this world.
Those who carefully read the instruction manual that comes bundled with every purchase, and those who ignore all that nonsense and just mash every button until they figure out what it does.
I was fundamentally the latter type of human. Sera was the former.
Her approach to data collection turned out to be far more old-fashioned than I'd expected.
"First, clean this thoroughly and tell me whether there's any difference compared to absorbing sweat directly from my body. I hate to say it myself, but I'm not the type who smells."
As she unfolded her uniform and held it out to me, there was only one thing I wanted to say.
"I am not a washing machine."
"I'm not asking you to do laundry, Jin."
"I find it difficult to understand what effect you're hoping for."
"All energy must be considered in terms of efficiency and ease of refinement. What you need is my bodily fluid — not the act of extracting fluid from me itself, correct?"
In other words, she wanted to know whether collecting saliva or blood ahead of time and using it later would still work.
And then she went even further.
"We should also research whether fluids from other people or mutants can serve as a power source. People are out of the question for now, but mutants — out there beyond the ship…"
"I refuse."
"Are you a child, Jin? If it means survival, there are things you have to do even when they repulse you."
I refuse for the sake of my humanity.
Sera's clothes were already inside the suit. She'd hung laundry on me before, using me as a drying rack from time to time, but this was the first time anything had come inside.
And when I reflexively began absorbing the sweat from them, the difference was far greater than I'd anticipated.
The amount of power that accumulated was vanishingly small.
"Almost no energy is being absorbed."
"That's a lie… no. You wouldn't lie about something like this. Is it true?"
I could have spun any story I wanted if I'd meant to deceive her, but it was the truth. Having always absorbed energy directly from a living body, I'd never even considered the possibility.
"Hmm. So stockpiling it separately won't work. There might be a hypothesis that the base substance of the power source dissipates on contact with air, but extraction would be just as difficult either way. In that case, next…"
A short while later, Sera sat lost in thought, her palm lightly bandaged where the bleeding had stopped. On the table sat roughly half a cup of collected saliva.
"Strange…"
Several more tests followed, each one bordering on outright experimentation. The results were as follows:
There was no upper limit to absorption, nor any foreign matter expelled in return. Whether it was sweat, tears, or blood, the rise in power remained roughly the same. And even when the quantity increased, the energy absorbed did not scale proportionally.
"I can't get a handle on any clear conditions or methods at all."
"What if we simply do it the way I always have?"
"Leave it to you, you mean?"
Wasn't the whole point to obtain as much power as possible? Until now I'd been reading the room and absorbing energy in moderation — but if she was willing to cooperate, I could finally quench this thirst in earnest.
The way a spider instinctively knows how to spin its own silk, I too knew by instinct how to draw power more efficiently.
If I had to put it into a metaphor, it was like eating candy. Not just any candy — the kind that oozes sweet syrup from the inside.
Teeth are harder than sugar crystals, so in theory you could just crush the whole thing. But in practice that was impossible. Unlike candy, a human being split in half loses all its flavor and fragrance completely.
What mattered was the process itself: cracking the hard outer shell just enough for the sweet energy within to flow free. And the factors that determined that efficiency were precisely what Sera had failed to grasp.
"Does it hurt?"
"No. It actually feels good. If our situation were different, I might have bought one of you and kept you in my cabin."
The sensation of her nape being kneaded loosened the tension from her body. Compared to the power I'd gathered at the bridge and the airlock, the absorption rate here was pitiful. Her pulse was perfectly steady; her eyes were closed in something like comfort.
Watching everything in time with the slow rise and fall of her chest — the contraction of muscle, the secretion of neurotransmitters, the flow rate of her blood — something else came into view.
A single circular ring gathered near her heart. Unlike her blood, it carried a faint pinkish tint within the red, and it was drawing toward the left hand I'd wounded earlier to draw blood.
I peeled back the bandage and lifted the scab. This time, a considerable amount of energy was absorbed — nothing like before.
A single round circle that ordinary people did not possess.
Level 1.
A thought flashed through my mind, and the pieces locked into place.
"Sera. How do you distinguish an ability awakener from an ordinary person?"
"Hmm? That would be by the density of the mana they possess…"
Mana. That was exactly what I needed.
How do I draw out what's buried so deep inside that body?
Judging by everything I'd experienced so far, the answer was already clear.
"Hn?"
Restraints coiled around her waist, and Sera lifted her head in surprise. At the same moment her tension spiked, the red aura rippled outward through her entire body like a wave.
A substance activated by tension and arousal rooted in the human survival instinct — something like adrenaline. Even so, the bulk of her mana remained tightly knotted near her heart, as if reflecting her own stubborn will and temperament.
The urge to smash that ring, to bite into it and pour out everything inside — that was the thirst I felt.
"Jin, where are you suddenly— nh, hah!?"
A light bite to the rim of her ear drew a strange sound from her throat. The wrist that rose on reflex, the legs that had been slowly drawing together — both were caught and held.
I wasn't trying to plant the fear of death in her. I wanted to dismantle her reason slowly, persistently, until she offered that mana up to me of her own accord.
"Nnh, hnn…! Jin, wait…"
"I'm gathering mana. Please hold still a moment."
"No, but this is different from usual…"
"Wait, Sera."
"Kyah!?"
I breathed my voice against an ear flushed scarlet — from the bite mark, or from embarrassment — and the strength drained from her body, her resistance thinning. In that opening I climbed the smooth line of her waist and reached the upper body where she sweated most.
The neat fall of hair at her nape, the line of her neck, the places below the collarbone where skin folded against skin — all of it crowded together. The hollow of her underarm, the underside of a chest fuller than expected — every spot was sensitive.
The tension that bloomed the instant a mechanical arm touched her was worked loose by the slow, deliberate chewing of her ear.
"Nnh, haah…!"
The taste and texture rising from the creases of that pale skin were enough to strip the restraint from a body that had already become a machine. In the roughening of her breath, a sweetness had begun to mix — and before long, both of us had fallen quiet.
— Vmm.
— Vmmm.
I bent both her arms back a little more roughly. I left red marks along the nape of her neck with the intake ports. But the most effective method of all, surprisingly, was letting her hear my voice.
At first I'd thought it was just because her ears were ticklish. It seemed she found it intensely arousing.
And so the power that had sat in the mid-teens climbed steadily toward twenty percent.
"Nnh, hhk. Aah…!"
The trembling in her waist grew sharper. Her small toes curled to their limit. Hair grown longer than before cascaded forward like a waterfall, and her arms and legs shoved unnaturally against the mechanical limbs.
"W-wait! Jin, stop for a second — hnnn!"
I was the sort who held back from anything she disliked — but not now. Fine cracks had begun to spider across the circle wrapped around her heart. A little more stimulation, and all that mana would come pouring out.
Where do I catch it? The mouth? Or the eyes?
"No! Don't — ah, aaaah…!"
While I was still deliberating, Sera's legs stretched taut as she hit her limit — and the circle shattered.
The beautifully cascading remnants of her mana, before I could prepare for them at all, spilled straight downward.
Energy purer than anything I'd taken before began to fill me — and in the same instant, Sera scrambled out of the suit.
Only then did I realize her mana had been absorbed not through the mechanical arms, but through the lower lining of the chassis interior.
"Hhk, hh… snf… hhk!"
With no oxygen outside the conference room, Sera could only crouch in the corner with her back turned. Once my senses returned, I carefully extended a mechanical arm, offering her stockings and underwear, and asked:
"Shall I wash them for you?"
"…If you make that joke one more time, I will throw you into outer space."
Even a word of comfort offered at the cost of my reputation as a washing machine failed to land even slightly.
Discovering that an ability user's mana could be converted into power was an enormous harvest. I'd worried that shattering the circle in the process might have done her body harm — but by the time Sera finished sleeping and we moved out for the second rendezvous, the problem had resolved itself.
It's regenerating, little by little?
If anything, it seemed to be rebuilding itself into a structure slightly more solid and complex than before. The fragments that hadn't made it back to her heart in time, I'd eventually finished off myself — so the residual charge had grown considerably as well.
"……"
Sera walked with her head bowed, not saying a single word. Even for someone who put rationality first, this particular brand of embarrassment seemed hard to overcome. I couldn't exactly ask her to do it again, so I simply hoped time would smooth things over as we arrived at the meeting point.
Having learned from last time that numbers meant nothing, they'd come with only three people this time.
"Why so few?"
"Because we still haven't heard what you can offer. If you want something, say it yourself and take it."
"Is that so? Then I'll say it now."
Still utterly unflustered, she glanced through the bag her companions had brought — then suddenly stepped forward. The casual line she tossed out made Sera, riding inside me, flinch hard.
"You've been running this unit pretty rough. Almost wrecked it."
"What?"
"From the outer armor to the hydraulic systems to the circulation — there's not a single part left intact."
The way she took hold of me and turned me this way and that carried a note of genuine pity. The sharp-edged hostility from before was nowhere to be found; it was hard to believe she was the same person.
"How hard did you push the core for it to be screaming like this… Leave it like this and it'll blow. Or fall apart."
"What are you getting at?"
"I'll fix it. Myself. That's the condition for receiving supplies going forward."
Sera finally forced her sealed lips open, shaking her head as she said she couldn't trust that. I felt the same. Whatever else, I was no ordinary suit.
"A powered suit is not a toy. And I have my doubts about whether you even have the skill to repair this."
"I know perfectly well this child isn't a standard suit. But you don't need to worry."
"Child…?"
"Hup — haah."
She drew a single deep breath and, without warning, pulled off her welding mask. The bare face that emerged was strikingly bold.
"I can grasp every scrap of knowledge related to machines, peer into their structure, and hear the voices of cold iron and faded rust."
Hair the color of fresh yellow, swept to one side — and golden eyes that shone even more brilliantly than the hair itself.
"In a word: I'm a genius."
And more than that — a small ring shaped like a gear, now faintly visible even at a distance, confirmed that every word she'd spoken was true.