The Perfect Ensemble of Deception and Misconception
The next morning, the secret chamber of the Blake County Estate still hung heavy with the sticky scent of the two women’s lust from the night before. On the enormous bed, Camilla—the Empire’s Knight Commander—lay sprawled like she had fainted dead away after their all-night frenzy of violent coupling. Beside her, Countess Carna, her ego perfectly erased, mechanically wiped the knight’s naked body with a damp towel, her eyes utterly vacant.
I buttoned my shirt with leisurely fingers, savoring the grotesque yet strangely mesmerizing sight.
Yes… seeing them together like this really drives the difference home.
Carna, with every emotion surgically removed to suit the Count’s tastes, was a flawless machine. Every thrust, every act of service, every stroke of the towel was executed with mechanical precision and zero vitality. Camilla, however, was something else entirely. I had deliberately left her ego intact. She writhed in shame and depravity, yet the moment pleasure flooded her veins she responded more sensitively, more violently, than any common whore. The spectacle of a noble, fully alive soul drowning in ecstasy was an unparalleled heat that no mere wind-up doll could ever hope to match.
If you’re going to purchase a hypnosis doll, you should dominate the emotions themselves instead of castrating them. Only a fool would fear that and leave them as brain-dead decorations around the house.
I sneered inwardly at the Count’s stupidity.
Even if she falls slightly short of Camilla, to waste decades keeping a woman like Carna—whose youthful sensuality would make you doubt she’s past forty—in a vegetative state… what a waste.
While I clicked my tongue in genuine regret for the doll that could have retained the intellectual allure of a mage, Carna finished her assigned tasks and helped the unconscious Camilla out of the room.
Click.
Only after the heavy door of the secret chamber opened and shut did Karin finally move. She had been curled in the corner like a corpse. Now her legs shook like a newborn fawn’s as she staggered upright. The memory of her two mothers tangled together, howling like beasts in heat, still seemed to have broken something inside her mind.
She had not even dared to breathe while they were present. Now she fixed me with a murderous glare, her disheveled hair unable to hide the raw, animalistic lust that had been etched across her face the night before.
“You filthy animal… How—how could you look at our mothers being degraded like that and still feel such disgusting desire?! Are you even human anymore?!”
Her voice cracked and splintered under the weight of shame, fury, and bone-deep terror. I simply curled my lip in a cold smirk, utterly unmoved.
“Hmph. Any man with blood in his veins would have his instincts flare at such perfect visual stimulation. Though I suppose an impotent old cripple whose lower half is already dead might not understand.”
The jab was clearly aimed at the Count, who had no doubt been spying on us through magic from some hidden corner.
“And before you condemn me, why don’t you look at yourself first? You’re red-faced and furious, yet you were the one who lost all reason and panted like a bitch in heat the entire night.”
I finished the last button and looked down at her with mocking eyes. The sheet beneath the still-naked Karin was soaked through with the fluids she had spilled.
“F-fuck! That—that was because of the filthy hypnosis that bastard put on me! It wasn’t my will!”
Karin snarled back, but my sneer only deepened.
“Hmph, how convenient. Blaming everything on hypnosis is a rather pathetic excuse, don’t you think? Where did that brave knight go—the one who boldly declared she would endure watching her mothers’ intercourse with her senses driven into overdrive? In the end, wasn’t it you who couldn’t withstand the overwhelming stimulation and clung to me, begging?”
“……!”
“Your doll body craved its master’s touch. Who was it sobbing in my arms, pleading, ‘Please touch me, cover this maddening sensation with your hands’? Who half-hung on me, demanding I ravish her however I pleased?”
The merciless barrage of facts drained the color from Karin’s face in an instant. She had nothing to say. On the second day, she had proudly amplified her body’s sexual sensitivity with hypnosis to overcome the journal’s effects. But enduring the visual and auditory onslaught pouring through the mirror—while her forcibly heightened instincts screamed—was simply impossible. In the end, to escape the overload, she had crawled into my arms, begging for her master’s heat and hands.
A cruel paradox: the very attempt to overcome hypnosis had only bound her more tightly to her owner’s touch.
“Kh… ugh……”
Crushed by total defeat, Karin bit her lip and hung her head. I softened my expression into that of a gentle comrade and lightly patted her shoulder.
“No need for self-reproach, Karin. Consider it excellent acting and training to perfectly fool the old man’s eyes. Now, it’s time to head to the knight order. Return to that peaceful daily routine where no one knows the horrible truth we share.”
My voice was perfectly calibrated—calculated salvation wrapped in warmth. Karin could only gather her uniform with trembling hands and look up at me, her eyes swirling with despair and helpless dependence.
Some time later, in a secluded corner of the Third Administrative Office at knight order headquarters, the scratching of quills and clacking of magic typewriters filled the air above mountains of paperwork.
Having properly witnessed the Empire’s darkness yesterday, Karin had become extremely cautious. In an office full of watchful eyes, she would only communicate through carefully passed notes.
I had already used Carna—fresh from her duties with Camilla—to contact her at the dining hall and secretly monitor the Count while he remained shut inside his workshop. The contents of the note Carna had slipped me on the way to work were now being relayed to Karin.
The Count made a backroom deal with the president of the hypnosis company yesterday. The moment you impregnate me and I give birth to an heir, he plans to eliminate me and take complete possession of both you and Captain Camilla.
Karin’s crimson eyes trembled violently as she read the note I slid toward her. She looked up at me sharply, as if demanding how I could possibly know such explosive information. I kept my face blank and wrote another note in reply.
My mother, Countess Carna, seems to experience a temporary awakening of her ego when she is forced into unjust sexual acts by my father, just like yesterday. After returning to his side in that awakened state, she apparently overheard several things from the loose-lipped old man. She secretly passed them to me in a note on the way to work this morning.
Karin chewed her lip and nodded at my flawless lie.
I see… Indeed, Aunt Carna’s eyes yesterday were filled with killing intent.
Her gaze held both hatred for the old Count and deep pity for me, whom she believed was living on borrowed time. I dipped my quill deeply and wrote in what appeared to be an urgent, desperate hand.
If things continue like this, both my life and the safety of you and your mother will be in danger. We need to accelerate our research to break the hypnosis by increasing the intensity of the training—more quickly, and more harshly.
Karin frowned for a moment, then snatched the quill from my hand and scribbled a reply.
Still, it’s a silver lining in our misfortune. The old man’s condition is “my pregnancy.” That means if I simply don’t get pregnant with your child, he’ll have no justification to dispose of us. We still have some time.
It was a fairly clever conclusion drawn by a mind working overtime. But I sneered at her shallow relief and immediately drove a cold spike of reality into the corner of the parchment.
Don’t be stupid. Have you forgotten what my reputation is like outside? The degenerate Edric who lives only for women has obtained a perfect, top-grade doll like you. Do you really think that suspicious old man will believe I couldn’t impregnate you within a year? He’ll notice immediately and dispose of us all.
“……!!”
The moment she read the final line, Karin’s face flushed crimson, as if she might burst like an overripe tomato. The coldly rational calculation for survival had finally slammed into her pure mind with brutal clarity: she would have to sleep with this scoundrel every single day for a year and bear his child if she wanted to live.
Overwhelmed by shame and confusion, Karin completely forgot she was standing in the middle of a busy knight-order office filled with prying eyes.
Bang—!
She slammed both hands on the desk and shot to her feet.
“Who the hell do you think you’re going to get pregnant within a year, you crazy bastard?!”
Her thunderous shout echoed through the entire Third Administrative Office. The clacking typewriters and scratching quills stopped as if someone had flipped a switch.
“……Huh?”
Karin finally realized what she had done and sucked in a horrified breath. Every knight and clerk in the room had turned to stare at our partition. Their eyes glittered with shock, curiosity, and sudden understanding.
“Did Senior Karin just say… what I think she said?”
“One year… to get pregnant?”
“No way! Karin and that degenerate Edric?!”
“Wait, Captain Camilla has been visiting that scoundrel’s mansion every night to ‘make a child’… Don’t tell me the Blake family has chosen Karin as their daughter-in-law?!”
The moment the silence broke, the office exploded into an uncontrollable frenzy of excitement.
“Oh my, so Captain Camilla’s nightly visits to the Count’s estate were all part of a formal agreement between the families!”
“So the only way to tame a degenerate is with love, huh?”
“No! That’s not what I meant at all! We were just arguing like usual! Don’t jump to conclusions!”
“The knight who swore she would never treat him like a person is now treating the degenerate Edric like a human being!”
“What did you say?!”
In mere seconds, their “ordinary argument” had transformed into a dazzling scandal of political marriage between the Blake Count family and the Knight Commander’s house, complete with a one-year pregnancy deadline. The rumor raced through the entire knight order like wildfire.
“No, that’s not what I meant…! Why are you all—?!”
Karin’s face burned so brightly that steam seemed to rise from her skin. She waved her hands desperately, trying to explain, but the situation had already hardened into concrete. No one would listen to her denials now.
In their heads, a romantic fantasy was already unfolding: only Karin could reform the infamous scoundrel, so she must make the noble sacrifice. Colleagues watched her with fond smiles, as if gazing at a bashful bride-to-be, while others shot me looks full of murderous curses.
A romance-fantasy plot I never asked for.
I pressed a hand to my forehead, pretending to be mortified, and hung my head as though ashamed that such a serious matter had been made public. Yet beneath my palm, an uncontrollable smile of pure, wicked delight crept across my lips.
Back when I read the original novel, this exact cliché—“the misunderstanding rom-com scandal”—had driven countless readers wild. And now I had created it myself, with perfect timing, straight from the girl’s own mouth.
Heh heh heh. As expected. A sub-heroine is still a heroine, after all.
Trapped inside a scene straight out of a romance-fantasy office story, Karin finally collapsed onto her desk, burying her face in both hands with an expression of utter despair. She was no doubt cursing her feather-light tongue and shedding tears of blood inside.
Thanks to her slip, however, I had gained the perfect smokescreen for the outside world and a natural justification for the two of us to cling to each other openly. Even within the horrific, miserable story I was orchestrating, everything was proceeding beautifully.
This is getting truly entertaining. Since the rumor’s already out… perhaps tonight’s “training” should be even more explicit and filthy to match it.
Gazing down at Karin’s slender shoulders as they trembled in despair, I wore the face of the most vicious, leisurely reader imaginable—eagerly anticipating the next episode.