The Contract (5)
"...So you're saying that normally, succubi get married before they come of age, and then they hold their coming-of-age ceremony?"
"That's right. You got it."
"But you had yours at thirty-five, and then you just sponged off your family and goofed around for fifteen years?"
"......Yeah."
Liliana answered around a mouthful of fried chicken, chewing away.
"Why, though? Did you just like slacking off that much? You're a succubus. Don't you have urges? Marriage, lust, all that?"
"I did at first. Then I started gaming, and it just... went away."
"Then why didn't you get married back when you still had those urges?"
"Th-there's a reason I couldn't get married..."
"A reason?"
"Y-you're seriously going to make a succubus say this out loud? You piece of shit..."
"...?"
Liliana glared at me like she wanted to bite my head off. What the hell was her problem? Was she hiding some enormous secret? Don't tell me she was actually a guy.
"I look weird, okay?"
"Huh?"
She looked weird? I studied Liliana's face again. No, that couldn't be it. She was plenty pretty.
"Not my face, you moron! My tail!"
"Your tail?"
That heart-tipped tail of hers? I'd actually thought it was pretty cute, the way it kept fluttering around.
"Haaah. Humans really don't know a damn thing. I was born with a tail that's way shorter than other succubi's."
"What's the problem with a short tail?"
Liliana's tail looked like a perfectly normal length to me. If anything, it seemed on the long side. That was supposed to be short?
"...A succubus has to satisfy a male with her entire body and wring every last drop of affection out of him. That's the entire reason our species exists."
Liliana hung her head, clearly mortified at having to say any of this herself.
"Hell's sex culture is incredibly advanced. The place is ruled by a bunch of stupid, fight-happy races that don't know the first thing about culture, and their males are almost all sex-crazed."
"Okay, but why does the tail come into this?"
"The tail is an important part of a succubus. The perverts who abandon their own kind to marry a succubus are the ones who've completely lost their minds to lust, so they take tail play very seriously."
"Tail play? I can't even picture that."
Wrapping a guy up with her tail and shaking him around? Why use a tail when you have hands?
"No, you shove the tail up the ass and hit the prostate—"
"Aaaagh, fuck! Shut up!"
"Why are you screaming?! The prostate is an important erogenous zone for males—"
"You crazy ass-fiends!"
Prostate or not, I could not picture anything going into a guy's hole back there. Licking around the outside, maybe. The second something went in, I was out. So this was the filthy truth of those demon-race ass-fiends. Next time I ran into one, I was killing them all on sight.
"Anyway, that's why every high-ranking demon who wanted a succubus turned me down... and then I started getting marriage proposals from fucking orc and goblin chieftains. Mom told me to just marry one of them anyway..."
Unrealistic, and yet somehow a painfully realistic problem.
"So that's why you stayed a fifty-year-old virgin?"
"...The average succubus lifespan is a thousand years, and I'm fifty, so in human terms I'm five."
"I decided I wasn't buying that line after I met a twenty-five-year-old elf."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"It's a thing."
That was the last thing Liliana said before she finished off every last piece of chicken on her plate. I'd even brought her a bowl of rice, and she'd eaten it like she was about to cry.
"Is it that good?"
"It's amazing! Food isn't just for survival. It can be this much fun!"
Liliana was shedding more tears now than she had when that tattooed pig had grabbed her by the hair. This girl was seriously bipolar.
"What did you usually eat in Hell?"
"Hmm, stir-fried hell-centipede with bell peppers, rotten apple juice, that kind of thing? Oh, sometimes we'd have hellhound meat, but compared to this chicken it's just garbage."
Liliana gazed at the empty chicken box with mournful eyes.
"Alright, enough. If you're done eating, come sit over here."
I sat on the bed and patted the spot next to me.
"I-I've never done anything like that..."
"That's not what this is. Just come sit down."
Liliana perched beside me, fidgeting.
"My tail's short so I won't be perfect, but I'll do my be—"
I ignored her and pulled out a notebook and pen.
"First, tell me what you're good at."
"...?"
"Anything that can make money would be even better."
Time to start squeezing Liliana for everything she was worth.
"You're a summon contracted to me, so you might've already started to feel it, but keeping you around costs money."
"It costs money...?"
"Yeah. More precisely, I need mana stones. Maintaining you runs about ten grand a month... or, put simply, enough money to buy a thousand of those chickens you just ate."
"H-huh. A thousand chickens... just how much money is that..."
Liliana's eyes went wide as she started folding her fingers, trying to calculate. Was that actually helping her get a sense of the number?
"Which is why I need you to tell me what you're good at. Something that makes money would be ideal."
"W-watching dramas...?"
"How is that going to make money? No, wait — you're good at magic. Teach me some of that."
"O-oh. Okay."
"Alright. That's one."
I jotted it down in the notebook.
Liliana's Magic Classroom
Learning something like charm magic would definitely come in handy.
"Uh... I'm also a really good eater."
"You're a succubus and you can't even say you're good at sex?! Shouldn't you be passing your techniques down to me or something?"
A succubus whose talents were watching dramas and eating food? Had she completely lost it?
"I-I've never actually done it, so that's a bit..."
"Ugh. Fine, tell me something else."
"Hmm, I'm pretty good at games too."
"And what are you going to do with that, huh? Next."
"W-well, the people I play with always say I have a nice voice..."
"A nice voice..."
She did have a nice voice, to be fair. The problem was her mouth was so filthy it kind of got buried under all the swearing. Pretty face, nice voice, but she dropped F-bombs every time she got bored...
Wait.
Hold on. This was a character that reeked of money.
"Want to try streaming?"
"Streaming? Like, going on TV? That's a little much... When I was a kid I did a news interview and people tore me apart for having a pretty face but a short tail..."
"No. You just talk to yourself and play games."
Wasn't Liliana exactly the kind of character internet stream viewers would eat up? Pretty, great voice, decent at games, and she'd swear at them too — they'd lose their minds. And she was a virgin, on top of that. Have her cuss people out, then act all embarrassed whenever something dirty came up? That was a goldmine.
And I'd already thought of the perfect way to generate massive aggro. Victoria Academy's dorms gave every cadet the exact same room. Meaning you couldn't tell whose room it was just by looking at it.
A mysterious cosplay girl attending Victoria Academy...?
By day, I was a Victoria Academy cadet. By night, a sexy succubus cosplayer? Even if someone tried to investigate, they'd search the girls' dorms, not the guys'. No chance of getting caught.
I'd have her stream for a few days and the reactions would come on their own. If they didn't, I'd just spread it anonymously myself.
"Heheh..."
"What the hell is that perverted look. It's pissing me off."
The succubus-for-sale stream was about to begin.
"Alright. First I need to learn some magic."
"Sure, I can handle that much."
"You're a succubus, so you know magic that charms the opposite sex, or gets them worked up, right?"
"What do you take me for? Of course I do."
Finally, something useful. She was a succubus — of course she should know this stuff.
"Is there magic that makes a woman fall in love with me?"
If something like that existed, I could skip the whole conquest and just clear the game on the spot.
"There is, but the gap between the caster and the target has to be enormous. It'd probably work if the difference between you and them was about the same as you and a stray cat."
"Then I don't need it."
There was no way that kind of gap existed between me and the heroines.
"There are all kinds of charm magic. On the small end, it just raises someone's affection. On the big end, it dominates them completely."
Was that the spell she'd used on the tattooed pig earlier? The complete domination kind?
"Normally I can go all the way to full charm... but my mana's dropped since I got here. The wavelength doesn't match this world's mana, I guess. So it only lasts a few seconds."
"..."
That wasn't it. It was because of the contract. No need to tell her the contract even existed. There was a clause that made me responsible if she got hurt, for one thing. Besides, it was better if she had at least one unknown source of anxiety. That way she wouldn't try anything stupid.
"I'll start by teaching you a basic charm magic circle."
Liliana spread her hand and began drawing a magic circle with her mana.
"Huh?"
I frowned at the circle. This was a magic system I'd never seen before. Nothing like this existed in the human world.
"Don't look so shocked. Demon magic has been developing for eons. There's no comparing it to a human system that's barely a few centuries old. Whenever they capture human slave-mages, they always say they're amazed."
It was a high-level method, no question. More efficient than the human system, and it burned less mana. If I studied it a little longer, I was pretty sure I could get a feel for it. I'd have to ask her to teach me more later.
"Which is why I can't guarantee I'll actually be able to teach you my magic. I've never taught anyone before, and our systems are completely different."
At last, Liliana finished the circle.
"Charm magic is fundamentally a spell that raises the target's affection. The more attractive the caster, the stronger the effect, so other races can never get the full benefit out of it."
I kept studying the circle as she talked.
"Just observe it for now. You won't get results right away, but if you keep at it, you might start to see the pattern."
I analyzed the mana wavelength coming off the circle with Mana Sensitivity, working to understand it. Hmm. It was a little tricky, but I figured I could at least attempt it. And I had a test subject sitting right in front of me. Why not give it a try?
I cast charm magic on Liliana.
"For reference, even I took over a year to learn this, so—"
Thump.
"Wh-what...?"
Liliana's eyes went wide. Her face flushed red, and I could hear her heartbeat pounding louder.
"H-how are you using charm magic already?!"
"I'm kind of a genius."
As expected, Liliana's level as a mage was far above mine. Even in her weakened state, she'd noticed my charm magic instantly. Or had she? Maybe she just suddenly felt more affection toward me.
"Y-you crazy bastard. Hnngh!"
Liliana pulled up her mana and shook off my charm.
"Fuck. That felt disgusting."
A succubus who used charm magic complaining about getting charmed. Talk about a double standard.
"Sorry. I didn't think it'd actually work on the first try."
"...Be careful. Using charm magic openly is a massive breach of etiquette."
"Got it. I'll be careful. Teach me another spell."
"Haaah. Fine. I'll teach you a spell that makes someone feel love, not just affection. It won't work on me anyway, and if you try it I'll kill you."
"Ah, wait. Is there magic that makes someone hate the opposite sex?"
Liliana looked at me like I was something foul stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
"There is. Are you trying to steal some other guy's girl? No NTR. You horny bastard."
"It's not like that, so don't worry about it."
And she really needed to stop calling herself a succubus in public. What kind of succubus hated NTR?
"Well, if that's the case, I can teach you."
Perfect. This way I could make Lucy hate me even more. The path to conquering Lucy was still long and treacherous.
I wanted to be a sweet, decent guy too, but I didn't have a choice. The world was forcing my hand.
But that was fine. I was Lee Ho-yeon — the bad boy.
Playing the villain... I was used to it by now.