Power of Sex
HUMAN : BAEK JAESEONG — 4
The buttons crowding my vision answered every move I made. I tapped the one labeled Skill, which had been blinking at me like it had somewhere to be, and a new window unfurled in front of my eyes. It looked a lot like the Status Window, but the contents were a different animal entirely. I read it the way I'd read my stats: slowly, missing nothing.
[None]
The Skill Window was a void. Nothing written, nothing to parse, which made it wonderfully easy to read. Words like the ones from a moment ago poured into my head—not just as sound, but as text burned across my sight. It felt less like reading and more like someone was cramming the information straight into my brain.
You have viewed the Skill Window.
Tutorial completion reward: 10 Bonus Points and 100 Credits.
Next, the button marked Inventory started to blink. I had the shape of this now. The first tutorial was apparently just tapping and reading every window I could interact with. Nobody had bothered to explain a damn thing, but the visual cues were loud enough.
I opened every window there was. The Status Window was the only one packed with information. The rest were as blank as the Skill Window, with nothing worth reading at all.
By the time I was done, the tutorial rewards had added up to fifty Bonus Points and five hundred Credits. I had no idea what to do with either of them yet, but getting something for nothing still felt pretty good.
"Huh? Now the part that says Bonus Points is blinking."
The moment I finished the most basic tutorial, something else shifted. The Bonus Points line on the Status Window pulsed, advertising itself like a neon sign that wanted to be touched.
No order came with it. No voice telling me what to do. A little plain-language instruction would have been nice, but this tutorial seemed determined to make me work for it. For all I knew, the struggling was the point.
"Fifty Bonus Points from the rewards. So what the hell am I supposed to do with them?"
I should have taken games more seriously. Truth was, I'd always been more of a novel kid than a game kid. It wasn't that I'd never touched a controller—I just almost never touched RPGs. Which meant I had all the game-sense of a brick when it came to a situation like this.
I studied the Status Window with a lot more care this time, and my eyes settled on the stats sitting right above the Bonus Points line.
Maybe I could pour those Bonus Points into my stats. The hunch was strong enough that I reached out, careful, and gave the word Strength a light tap. The 24 ticked up to 25. The 50 Bonus Points ticked down to 49. Called it.
"Oho. So I can raise Strength with Bonus Points. Which means… what, I'm actually getting stronger?"
It was an absurd thought, but if I followed the logic of everything that had happened so far, that was exactly what it meant. I struck a clumsy bodybuilder pose.
Obviously that wasn't going to tell me a damn thing about whether my muscles had grown. I realized what a stupid-ass stunt that was in about a second and straightened up.
Besides, I'd only gone from 24 to 25. A single point. Four percent, maybe, if you wanted to be generous about it—I wasn't confident enough in my math to swear by the number. Either way, it wasn't a change I was going to feel in my bones.
"Still got forty-nine Bonus Points left… might as well dump a pile of them in."
I wanted to invest enough to actually notice a difference. I poured in a full twenty-five points and drove Strength all the way to 50. Considering I'd started at 24, that was more than double. Plenty to feel.
"Ugh—okay, that's a full-body muscle ache."
Had I just done something wrong? A jump like that might not be great for a human body. I hadn't thought about any of that when I'd been shoveling points in, and now I was starting to resent the me from ten seconds ago.
The thought melted as fast as it came. The faint soreness running through me vanished, and in its place my whole body felt so clean and light I wanted to break into a sprint. I swung my arms in loose circles, just to see.
"I can feel it from nothing but moving. Yeah. I'm definitely stronger."
The change was staggering. What kind of principle even made this possible? Whatever it was, I could have sat through a lecture on it and still understood nothing. Maybe this really was the power of an Ability—mine, awakened without me even knowing it.
"Wait. There's an Ability line on the Status Window."
I finally looked at it.
— None —
The word None sat there like it owned the place. Did that mean I hadn't become aware of my Ability yet? Or that I, as a human being, had never been born with one at all?
If it was the latter, then some of the finest scholars on the planet had gotten it spectacularly wrong. Their theory said every human was born with at least one Ability.
"Anyway, I guess this power isn't an Ability. Which is funny, because it already feels like it's in a completely different league."
Maybe this was the kind of power that made Abilities look like a joke. I decided to keep mapping the situation before I got poetic about it. The Bonus Points line was still blinking, so I dumped every last point I had left.
I put them all into Luck. Luck was everything a person couldn't control. Could poking a floating window like I was raising a game character actually make me luckier? If it could, I was staring at one of the world's secrets with my own two eyes.
Every other stat sat comfortably above 20. Luck was sitting at a miserable 12, and that bugged me. I spent the rest of the points and watched it rocket to 36. Triple what it had been.
Tutorial completion reward: 50 Bonus Points and 500 Credits.
So that had been the tutorial: spend every Bonus Point you have. Had bumping my Luck scored me the reward as a happy accident? A little plain explanation would have gone a long way, but this system had no interest in being kind to me.
I could still reason my way through it, so I wasn't complaining yet. Keep this up long enough, though, and I was going to hit a wall I couldn't think my way around.
This time, the Ability line was the thing blinking. After everything so far, I knew the move. I reached out and gave it a light tap, and a prompt bloomed in front of me.
Liberating an Ability requires 10,000 Credits.
Each additional Ability liberation costs twice the Credits spent on the previous one.
Your first Ability, however, may be liberated free of charge.
Liberate an Ability?
"What? Liberate an Ability?"
The words jumped out of me before I could stop them. Anyone else would have done the same. Liberating an Ability was, in plain language, awakening.
"I can awaken? And if there's additional liberation after that… that means I can get more than one. That's what it's saying, right?"
In all of human history, not a single person had ever held more than one Ability. And according to those oh-so-brilliant scientists, a human being couldn't open two or more even if they wanted to. Even if you were born with several, the moment you liberated one, your body's mana pulse locked itself to that Ability and that Ability alone.
Every Ability had its own distinct mana pulse. It varied a little from person to person, but the broad shape stayed the same—Natural-type fire users, for instance, all put out pulses that looked alike. Liberate two Abilities at once and those pulses would collide, and the internal damage that followed couldn't be undone. That was why the scientists said two or more was impossible. I'd heard it explained, clear as day, on a television documentary years ago.
"Liberate an Ability… so that means I get to be a Hunter?"
I was stunned. Properly, completely stunned. I swallowed.
A Hunter.
That had been my dream long before I'd ever wanted to be a writer. About as realistic as wanting to be president, of course. I hadn't even been old enough to seriously picture a future, so there had been no pain in giving it up. There had been nothing to give up in the first place. Hunters weren't made by effort. They were made by talent.
"A Hunter. I still can't believe it."
Everything up to now had been hard enough to swallow. The idea that I could awaken an Ability was harder still. But the strange system windows hanging in front of my face had already planted a lot of faith in me.
I decided to believe them.
Liberate an Ability?
The system pressed me. Of course I would. Not unlocking it wasn't even a choice I had.
You have liberated an Ability.
An Ability will be assigned at random.
A donut-shaped loading icon bloomed in front of my eyes and spun in lazy circles. I waited for the next message. Ten seconds stretched until they felt like ten minutes.
"Huh? What? Power of… what?"
I checked my Status Window. The Ability line had changed—just not in the way I'd expected.
Power of Sex (SSS-Rank)
"What is this? The power of sex?"
Abilities came in more flavors than anyone could count. The estimate I'd heard was something north of a hundred thousand. I wasn't a Hunter specialist, so I didn't know the catalog in any real detail—but I had never, in my entire life, heard of an Ability like this.
I reached out, careful, and tapped the words Power of Sex. The line stretched downward, and a detailed description unfurled beneath it.
◈ Exerts influence over all acts related to sex.
◈ During sex, the sexual pleasure of both the user and their partner is amplified.
◈ Both the user's and the partner's abilities grow according to the degree of pleasure.
◈ If a partner is made to experience a Defeat Orgasm, they can be enslaved.
◈ The effects of Power of Sex can be toggled on or off.
I am no Ability expert. But I can say this with certainty: no Hunter in history has ever possessed an Ability like this.