We Reunite to Catch Up — and It's Two Days of Rape?
When I came to, I was lying on my side, cradled in Vincent's arms — perhaps he'd held me that way to make breathing easier.
"Adela, you're awake?"
"Mm... Vincent, what happened to me?"
"I think it was too much stimulation. You passed out. Are you all right?"
"If you were that worried, you should have stopped."
Perhaps because I'd taken so much of him, a raw ache smoldered deep in my lower belly. For a womb that had been violated, though, the symptoms were remarkably mild. I had braced myself for a bloodbath, so a mere stomachache was almost a mercy. If not for the sloshing fullness inside me, I might have convinced myself it had all been a dream. I'd never imagined intercourse was even possible in that manner.
My body shivered, as if I'd lost my warmth while unconscious.
"Cold? Should we soak in a warm bath?"
Whether it was consideration or simple desire, I couldn't say — but when I tried to sit apart from him, he gathered me firmly into his arms and lowered us both into the tub. Flower petals floated across the water, lending it a lovely fragrance.
"Adela, we have a lot of catching up to do, don't we?"
Only on the third day since he'd abducted me could I finally hold anything resembling a real conversation with him. At this long-awaited reunion, what my disciple had done to his teacher was abduction and confinement, followed by rape and training. What master and disciple anywhere under heaven mends their estrangement like this? It was depravity, plain and simple. And Vincent was, for all intents and purposes, a child I had raised myself. Follow the threads far enough, and this boy had declared he would turn me — as good as his own parent — into his female, and had succeeded in facing me as man against woman.
"Haah..."
Nothing came out of me but sighs.
"How is your body? From the way you're moving you seem fine, but earlier you were acting like something had swallowed you whole. I was terrified I was going to lose you."
I resented him for what he'd done — that much was true. But it was equally true that I worried for him.
"I'm sorry. There's... something I've been dealing with too."
In Vincent, speaking with his eyes averted, I could see the deflated boy of years past. I drew his head against my chest and did my best to soothe him.
"It's all right. Go on, tell me. We'll look for an answer together."
Vincent, unable to answer for the longest while, seemed at last to make up his mind there in my arms; he heaved a deep sigh and began to speak.
"When I killed the Demon King... I ended up taking a part of him into myself."
"A part of him...? Don't tell me the Demon King's power passed into you..."
"That's right. Think of it as the aftermath."
So this was what the leadership of every nation had been keeping under wraps? The strongest Hero in history, pushing himself too hard in his rush to slay the Demon King, had picked up a piece of the Demon King along the way? For them, burying it and praying nothing came of it would have been the only option. But whatever their circumstances, the fact remained that they had thrown my precious disciple aside to agonize alone. Just you wait, you bastards.
"We'll find a way together. I will bring you back."
A task more important even than hearing news of my past-life mother had fallen into my lap. By the covenant he'd bound me with, carrying his child was beyond my power to refuse. But it had to end there. Through coupling with that brat of a disciple, my body had learned pleasure as a woman — and I suspected that if he set his mind to it, he could knead my very sanity loose with pleasure alone. Add his inhuman stamina, an endowment that by birth stood above every other man's, his overflowing lust, and the demonic energy that eroded me at intervals, and he would clearly ravish me at least twice a day.
The problem was my position: I could offer no resistance to his aggressive onslaught, and whenever he decided to drive into me, take it I must, without moving an inch. Judging by how many times I'd fainted in two days alone, my becoming his female was a foregone conclusion.
I did not want to be corrupted into a female.
A child, once conceived, I would simply have to accept. What fault could a child possibly have? If one came, I would love it devotedly, with all my heart, as its mother.
As for Vincent, I would have to find a way to return him to what he'd been before the Demon King took root in him. I could not leave my child to live out his days with some strange calamity clinging to him. And before my fall into femaleness was complete, I would find a way to void the covenant, settle this twisted relationship once and for all, and return to being nothing more than master and disciple. My goal: to bless his future, then vanish, together with the child.
"Have there been any other strange symptoms since then?"
"That flare-up just now was actually the first."
If I left him as he was, there was no telling what would happen to his body. The matter had to be resolved as quickly as possible — not a single hour to lose.
As I held him and steeled my resolve, this time it was Vincent who asked:
"Now it's my turn. Adela — what exactly happened to your body?"
What happened? A difficult question. If he truly wanted an answer, the only honest one was that my body was at this moment carrying my disciple's seed, pregnant, walking steadily — step by step — down the road of female corruption. But that was surely not the story he was asking after.
"I told you I was cursed with demonification, remember?"
"I knew you'd taken the curse in my place. That's why I set out on the journey to slay the Demon King."
From someone who had despised his destiny as the Hero so bitterly, it had flustered me considerably to hear, after our parting, that he'd suddenly taken up the Hero's journey after all.
"The Church of the Holy Kingdom told me you'd been cursed in my place — and that to lift the curse, the one who cast it had to be eliminated."
Just as I'd suspected. Thinking back on our earlier conversation, the Church had exploited even his devotion to me, all to use Vincent for their own ends. They probably told him who cast the curse, too.
"So... I'm still confused. The one who cursed you with demonification — I definitely ended their life with my own hands. So why haven't you returned to a human body?"
Watching him puzzle over it so intently reminded me of when he was small, and before I knew it, I was stroking his hair.
"So that's what I never told you. Vincent... thank you. For going that far, for my sake."
Grateful was grateful. Because of me, my disciple and son had apparently swallowed his hatred for the Hero's destiny he so despised — and turned a blind eye to the atrocities of the Empire and the Holy Kingdom.
"It started after that. Anything I ate came right back up, and the more I tried to circulate my qi, the more my channels tangled and ruptured."
"What? Then... how have you survived?"
Vincent's pupils wavered.
"Strangely enough, though I couldn't keep down a thing, I never starved."
"Now that you mention it, for a body that hadn't eaten in all that time, the feel of your inside was pretty good."
He was veering off onto another outrageous tangent, so I floated a different topic to turn the mood.
"About your party members."
"You must have been startled when I brought uninvited guests in. I'm sorry — for bringing them into our home."
"No, you have nothing to apologize for. Your friends are, to me, the friends of my disciple and my son."
"I'd rather you called them your husband's former coworkers."
I wished he would stop saying such embarrassing things.
"I heard you traveled with the Imperial Princess under the Empire's patronage. Did you... forgive them?"
"First, the Empire wasn't the only patronage I received. Second, I didn't travel with the Princess alone, either."
"Then... the Empire is still keeping you silent about what happened back then?"
Chilled by the edge in my voice, he answered with a nod instead of words. How desolate it must have been for him.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know any of it."
Because of me, had he swallowed the Empire's shameless ingratitude and joined hands with his parents' murderers? And I — ignorant of all of it — had urged him to marry the Imperial Princess. No matter how desperate the moment, no matter that I'd been blurting whatever came to mind, there are things one may say and things one must not.
"To think I actually asked you how you'd feel about marrying your parents' enemy. And I knew full well what your situation was..."
I released him from my arms, took his hands, and bowed my head.
"I'm truly sorry. I misunderstood. I apologize."
He pulled me into an embrace, as if to say it was truly all right.
"It's okay, Adela. Just don't ever tell me to go to someone else. Stay by my side."
"When you put it that way... that's just low..."
"You're the one at fault, Adela. So you'll take responsibility and stay beside me. You know that, right?"
In the end, it seemed I could not win against this man.
I shelved the arguments I couldn't win for later; right now, I wanted to hear about his party members. What kind of journey he had made in my absence — as his teacher, I could call it my duty to know.
"What do you think of them, Adela?"
As if he'd read my mind, Vincent turned the question back on me.
"Well, judging from the little I've seen: the Saintess is kind and deeply considerate. The Duke's daughter is honest, lively, and warm-hearted. The Imperial Princess is fundamentally good, and values order over her own comfort. How's that? Close?"
Vincent answered with a broad grin.
"People really do live the way they look."
"Or maybe it's the life they lead that shapes the impression they give."
"That's right. They're good people."
Nothing more needed to be said. The expression on his face as he spoke told me, roughly, what kind of journey he had shared with them. Every day must have been hard — but I could tell there had been plenty of joy in it, too.
"Does the Imperial Princess know your story?"
"Yes. The first thing I told her was that I couldn't trust you."
"She had no idea, did she?"
"It broke her heart like it was her own."
Sympathy is something anyone can give. But a woman like her, with her own kin possibly entangled in the affair, could never have played the ignorant bystander.
"It seems something far bigger than I imagined is tangled up in all this. Even with the Princess's status she couldn't resolve it, and she'd end up in tears."
A political problem that even the Imperial Princess's rank could not solve...
"She sounds like a wonderful person."
"She is. She even proposed to me — said we should marry and change the Empire from within, together."
"What?!"
A wonderful person... right...?