(Caution: Exhaustion) Ep.4 - The Queen (2)
(Caution: Exhaustion) Ep.4 - The Queen (2)
"Euh... uuhh..."
Delin lay sprawled on the floor, twitching helplessly. His eyes were wet with tears.
The strange drug the Queen had injected into him had scrambled his mind, and once its effects wore off, every pleasure he'd experienced replayed itself endlessly, tormenting him.
"Heh... eh-eh..."
It was nearly impossible to tell whether he was crying or laughing.
What was certain, however, was that
his cock, milked dozens of times until it was shriveled and tight, now hung utterly limp, completely spent.
"He-euh... guhk..."
In that state, Delin trembled like a small animal drenched in water. Pitiful. Pathetic.
Watching him like that, the Queen smiled. Her expression, like that of someone utterly delighted by a cute puppy, showed no sign of fading.
"Just as I thought. You really are adorable, Delin-gun."
Her emerald eyes seemed to see straight through to his very core...
The Queen gazed intently at Delin with those lovely eyes, stroking his head.
"Could this be love? Seeing you whimper so adorably makes my heart flutter too."
Her words were sincere, without a hint of falsehood. For the first time, she felt genuine fondness for Delin.
The Queen, unable to contain her sense of betrayal when her longtime friend Neva left, had taken a man into her bed on a fleeting whim—
but this was the first time she'd ever shown this much interest in a man.
***
A few days prior.
While bathing and mulling over Neva's matter, a man had appeared before the Queen.
The Queen had little interest in men, so her plan had been simply to seize him, gouge out his eyes, and roughly send him on his way...
but then she caught sight of the tattoo etched onto Delin's wrist.
The man hadn't paid it any particular attention, as if he'd forgotten the tattoo entirely himself, but the Queen knew full well what that tattoo meant. She knew it better than he did.
...The legends passed down only to those who inherited the throne, generation after generation, contained tales of those who had received the gods' blessing.
He was far too small and frail to have received a god's blessing, yet the Queen was certain. This man was a rather peculiar one.
But his uniqueness didn't end there.
While she had been 'interrogating' the women captured along with Neva, she'd heard stories about a boy with a tattoo on his wrist.
It didn't take long to realize that the man from the women's stories and the man who had wandered into her own bath chamber were one and the same.
The Queen was already convinced.
...In the end, the Queen took Delin into her arms.
Perhaps she had been a little hasty. Was it the result of curiosity?
She had wanted to experience firsthand just what on earth had made Neva fall for such a dim-looking son of a bitch, and why other women were entangled with him as well.
In truth, even she herself couldn't give a definitive answer.
Just a fleeting curiosity. That was all it was.
What she felt when she first held him was
that sexual intercourse with a man was rather bothersome, though the feeling was quite pleasant nonetheless.
A brief amusement, enough to dispel her boredom and irritation to some degree.
His face was decent enough, and from this man—small enough to be entirely enveloped in her embrace—the Queen received an unexpected impression.
So learning about it and actually experiencing it were two very different things. That was what the Queen realized.
Even after that, as she 'played with' the women who had caused so much troublesome commotion, the Queen heard some truly curious stories.
Especially when she had tried to touch the smallest girl, Neva had told her a great many things.
She had said: Your Majesty. Please, have mercy. That child is my little sister. Torture me instead.
Because that reaction felt so novel, the Queen had wanted to torment the girl called Neva's little sister a bit more, but at the knight's desperate pleading, the Queen granted mercy. For old times' sake.
And so on the first day, Neva alone endured the Queen's interrogation. Face to face for the first time in a long while, she was even more beautiful, and the Queen etched her lesson directly onto that beautiful body.
However, even stranger than the lesson were the detailed excuses Neva blurted out while being tortured.
"I never meant to leave you, Your Majesty, please... please just listen to what I have to say..."
The words that spilled from her were, quite literally, absurd beyond belief.
They'd fought over a single man?
She'd left her Queen's side over a single man?
Despite being granted an entire week of leave, she hadn't been satisfied with that and had gone chasing after a man?
What a fascinating and utterly idiotic story.
The Queen suddenly grew curious.
Tormenting the knight who'd abandoned her and run away, along with the thief who'd seduced her into fleeing—that was important too,
but the more she heard, the more curious she became about the boy called Delin.
Her curiosity only grew.
Curiosity...
On the second day,
the day she began torturing Philmark as well—not just Neva,
the day she held Delin while simultaneously pressing the women for their crimes—
the Queen felt an indescribable, strange sense of elation. This affair was surely an entertaining story sent as a gift by the gods.
Inevitability sometimes disguises itself as coincidence when visiting mortals, but in the end, it is all merely part of fate.
Nothing happens without reason. One simply hasn't yet grasped the reason.
Turning over the tattoo on his wrist and the women's tales in her mind, the Queen came to understand the reason.
He had been sent to her. The gods had sent a gift for her—for her, who had always been so bored despite devoting herself to the kingdom.
With that realization, the Queen once again shared a bed with Delin.
There too, the Queen tasted a woman's pleasure. A pleasure that allowed her to understand, in her own way, why other women became so obsessed with men.
But still, the Queen could not comprehend the commoner-like mindset of being bound by mere sex or love. The pleasure was certainly intriguing, but the idiotic act of staking one's life on it was beyond her understanding.
To the Queen, sex held no particular meaning,
and it was simply more enjoyable than sitting still and staving off boredom.
No, it was more an investigation of the man than a pleasure, really.
Just what was he?
What was he, to bear a god's blessing etched on his wrist, and to be entangled in these headache-inducing matters with Philmark and Neva?
Was this not truly a mysterious thing?
A man standing at the center of every incident, like the eye of a storm...
On the third day,
she told the five bound women about having sex with Delin, and each of them revealed a variety of reactions.
The thief cursed as if she would kill,
the knight shed tears and sharply turned her head away,
the witch ground her teeth furiously and spat curses,
the wolf thrashed and told her not to lay a hand on Seobang-nim,
and the girl simply watched nervously, trembling like a leaf.
That day, the Queen drove stakes through the hearts of the witch and the wolf. Both hearts soon stopped, and both quickly lost all signs of life.
Playing with all five was bothersome. Aside from a few who needed to be tormented a bit longer, it was wiser to simply kill off the remaining stragglers.
Well, there was no particular reason to torment them anyway. With just the remaining three, she could enjoy herself for a lifetime. And right now, there were simply too many other amusements.
After killing the two, the Queen hummed a tune and painted joyful futures in her mind. Just how much more enjoyment would this man sent by the gods bring her! What sort of stories could she craft going forward, with that man, and Neva, and that thief bitch, and Neva's tiny little sister?
The god's blessing surely possessed a special ability. Wishing to wield that ability herself, the Queen continued humming as she began to interrogate Neva and Philmark relentlessly.
...But the two hardly opened their mouths. For some reason, they endured with a resolve to never speak, even if it meant death.
So the Queen touched the small girl. When she moved to torment her, Neva once again shed tears and begged for mercy.
"Very well. Then shall we have a little chat?"
"Don't... say a word... no matter what..."
Despite the thief's dissuasion, the knight had no choice but to open her mouth to protect the girl. One might call it a truly idiotic act, but the knight—eyes forcibly pried open—simply could not endure watching the girl suffer.
She could have endured having her own eyes gouged out and her flesh carved away, but she could not bear to watch her precious little sister, reunited after so many years, in agony.
Watching this, Philmark ultimately opened her own mouth. If that stupid knight bitch spilled everything, there would be no going back, so she had to step in to at least carve out a few escape routes.
"He can go back... to whatever point he wants..."
It was a statement from the thief intended to give only limited information, but the Queen already knew about that ability.
The jumbled legends passed down over hundreds of years.
Legends that ordinary people now dismissed as fairy tales, no longer believing in them.
The Queen was able to easily deduce his ability from the legends handed down through the royal family.
It was, quite literally, a jackpot. An ability that could deviate from the flow of time itself.
"Hmm... Is that so? Thank you for telling me, so this time let's make it our thief-ssi's turn."
***
Back to the present.
"For about the next month or so, we'll be training together like this. Understood?"
In her hand she held Delin's leash. The sleek black leather felt quite high-end and sophisticated.
"So adorable..."
As if she truly saw him as a puppy, the Queen fondled Delin's chin this way and that, lavishing him with unreserved affection.
"We'll stop here for today. Now, we must be going, yes?"
Yet her training and conditioning were utterly strict. With the appropriate carrot and stick, she kept Delin trembling in fear.
When the Queen rose and pulled the leash, Delin had to immediately crawl after her on all fours. If he didn't, her training resumed at once.
Delin felt terror at a training so intense he had nothing left to shoot and would end up pissing himself. More than anything, he was terrified that he might become strange through that training.
"He-ehp, heh-ehhp..."
And so Delin painfully heaved his small body up and crawled after the Queen. His mind blank from the bizarre pleasure she gave him, he had to desperately crawl while looking up at her beautiful body.
If he didn't, the training would begin again.
The training that felt good...
"He-eup, heu-euup..."
With a mouth gag forced between his lips—keeping his mouth pried open and mangling his pronunciation—he crawled diligently.
And so the full-scale conditioning began.