Volume 25 - The Incarnation Wedding (1)
"Achoo...!"
A rather chilly wind swept across my bare skin, jolting me fully awake as the cold came rushing in. Instinctively I pulled Orca close beside me and gathered her warmth against my body. Once I could bear it well enough, I scrambled up, snatched a blanket, and threw it over the both of us.
"Ah. We left the door open."
We must have fallen asleep with the door leading out toward the hot spring still ajar. Autumn or not, the dawn wind was cold enough that we had nearly frozen solid. Feeling certain we would catch a cold if we stayed like that, I kept Orca in my arms and pulled the blanket tight over us.
"Nngh.... Can't breathe."
"Sleep well?"
"Ehehe, Cali. Wow—I wake up and you're right next to me. Is this a dream?"
"Would it be a dream?"
True enough, unlike with Rosaria or Nia, this was my first time sharing a bed like this with Orca. Waking up tangled together like this felt genuinely warm and good. I spent a long stretch of the morning nuzzling naked against her, until the forgotten morning hour arrived and I was startled by a staff member walking straight in to prepare breakfast.
"Ah, it's quite all right. If this is inconvenient, shall I come back a little later?"
"...I-If you're fine with it."
It wasn't as though we were in the middle of sex. All we had been doing was rolling around naked under a blanket, fooling around. There was no reason to throw her out and interrupt work she still had to finish.
"This is Anaru Hot Springs, after all. While I'm preparing the meal there are even guests masturbating anally and the like."
"Huh...."
Don't say that so calmly, damn it. The place had barely opened and already villains like that had come through—that was even more legendary. No, wait. Calling them villains might be wrong. Wasn't that simply what this hot spring was designed for?
"As long as they aren't guests trying to force anything on us, everything is okay. That's how the service manual is written."
"...So even anal masturbation was okay."
"Ordinary masturbation is okay too."
That was information I truly had not wanted. For any pervert who wanted to show off their masturbation to strangers, this place would practically be a holy land. Still, I found myself impressed by the way she kept smiling and providing service while saying all of it.
"Has it been hard since you converted to Anaru Hot Springs?"
"Not at all. If anything I'm glad business is good.... Honestly, there were far more strange people before the remodel."
"...Really?"
"Yes. Just a flood of male guests constantly trying to get physical. We had no choice but to take their business if we wanted to survive, but...."
On this side, she explained, the guests mostly focused on their own masturbation or on sex with their partners. They barely touched the staff, preferring simply to watch, so it was somewhat better. Of course the gazes themselves were lewd, and sometimes the staff became masturbation material—but at least no one laid hands on them, which was something.
"And honestly, it's kind of cute."
"Huh?"
"Watching them get so absorbed and happy all by themselves, I started thinking it was a little cute."
"...People's faces when they finish are kind of cute, yeah."
"You think so too, guest?"
We apparently shared similar tastes in the strangest places. Once the conversation opened up we talked about all sorts of things, and eventually it came out that we had come here as a kind of field study. The staff member who had been mid-breakfast prep then brought over several anal toys and began explaining them by way of demonstration.
Wait—how had it suddenly turned into this?
"Waaah...!"
It wasn't as though she was putting on any lewd performance. She simply described the tools, their proper use, and the precautions. Orca, apparently interested, switched instantly into full listening mode and began soaking up every word.
"You insert these beads one by one, and once they've expanded you yank them out all at once. They say it's incredible."
"I wanna try it! Cali, buy me that!"
"...Please ring us up."
"Thank you."
Giant anal beads. Was there anything this place didn't sell? Still, she explained everything with real professionalism. Honestly, if you ignored the fact that the product was anal beads, she felt like an extremely skilled salesperson.
"Aahh...."
"Sleep well?"
"Oh, is it morning?"
"Yeah. She was getting things ready. We'll take it from here now, please."
"Yes~. Just a moment."
The staff member dropped the salesperson mode that had just been selling anal beads and smoothly switched over to finishing breakfast. Once every dish was prepared, she bowed to us and said:
"Please enjoy your meal. Master."
Calling guests "Master," deliberately bowing at every formal greeting like this—someone who knew a thing or two had clearly written the service manual. Honestly, when she bowed in that outfit the fabric rode up a little and the exposure increased, which was pretty damn arousing.
"Tada!"
Meanwhile Orca came back wearing the clothes, headband, and even the tail she had stripped off during yesterday's chaos. Standing next to the actual staff member who had inspired the outfit, she gave off a strong sisterly vibe. Amazing that cosplay alone could create that feeling. Maybe it was because the headband and tail were such high quality.
"Thanks for the meal."
"Wow, this is so delicious...."
"You two went to sleep without even eating this yesterday, you know? Thanks to that, we got to eat our fill."
"Hey, that's actually kind of unfair!?"
And so we enjoyed Anaru Hot Springs far more than expected and returned to the academy.
"Cali, what are you doing?"
"Hey, that tickles. Move your tail."
"Tell me and I'll move it."
"...I'm storyboarding the next Incarnation series."
"Huk! The next work is the Incarnation series!?"
"Yeah."
Orca lit up with excitement that the next installment was finally coming, but I was deep in thought while writing this part—the one that essentially held the final story. The early-to-mid sections already had a fixed plan. The ending, though, was giving me real trouble.
At first I thought of an ordinary sacrifice ending or something. But that would feel hollow.
The atmosphere itself would be far darker than the previous work, Incarnation Conception. That made a purely bright ending feel wrong, and a last-minute mood flip like Incarnation Battlefield felt equally awkward. I needed something that truly clicked for me....
"Is it that hard?"
"I just haven't found an ending I can be confident in yet."
Another option was simply not ending the series with this volume, so I was considering that for now. But then I would have to wrap everything up in the next volume, and that brought its own problems. I would need to plot that far ahead to some degree just to decide how to close this one.
"Oh right—did you hear? Anaru Hot Springs is a total smash hit."
"Reservations are so backed up that if you want to go now it takes half a year."
I had always thought it would succeed because the quality was so high. Still, Anaru Hot Springs had become a holy land almost no one hadn't heard of, which left me with a strange feeling. Honestly, because of that hot spring, the trends of anal masturbation and anal sex seemed to be spreading much faster than they otherwise would have.
"That's good. I heard everyone there was having a really hard time. Not anymore."
"There used to be a beastkin mage from that village. After the village succeeded she quit being a mage and started working at the hot spring, I heard."
"At the hot spring?"
"Yeah. She made rooms where even non-mages can get service at a much higher price, and she personally serves there while casting magic."
"Oho...."
No ordinary mage would quit their job to do that without a reason. So that mage was almost certainly the one who had started the whole project. Was the service itself done out of fan devotion to my work? Honestly kind of fascinating.
"But can't you not wear that anal plug around the academy? It's too lewd."
Even if the dedicated panties could hide it perfectly now, just walking around campus with an anal plug in felt dangerous. If she accidentally put force in the wrong place and dropped the thing, it would be a full-scale disaster.
"I only wear it inside the club room?"
"Oh, really? I didn't know that...."
"Yeah. If I swing a sword with this on, it gets in the way."
Orca was clearly saying completely reasonable things. So why did every word sound so awkward to me? Was it because lately she had been saying perverted things as if they were the most natural statements in the world?
"Ah, but Yuria and Rosaria were wearing them outside, right?"
"Yeah. But both of them said some crazy shit about fixing them in place with magic so it was safe, so I gave up."
That wasn't the problem. I was amazed every single day by the two of them ranking at the absolute top of their grades while walking around with anal-plug tails attached. That must be what real genius looked like.
"Anyway, if nothing's coming to mind, how about we go look at the new exhibited works for a change and give your head a rest? It might help."
"Who are you. You're not Orca."
She was only saying normal things today, and I couldn't adapt. Thinking that, I started getting ready to go out just as she suggested—only to notice she was wearing nothing but a bra, with the anal plug still firmly in place.
"...You said only inside the club room?"
"We're leaving academy grounds, right? So no need?"
"What does that have to do with it...."
"We're going to play in the capital, right? Then there won't be any sudden need to use swordsmanship there."
Fuck. I had completely overlooked that she was genuinely thinking only in terms of pure efficiency. She literally just wasn't using the tail because it interfered with swordsmanship. This girl always had a way of thinking that slipped right past my expectations.
"This tail is so cute though—can't I use it?"
"Sigh. Fine. Do whatever you want."
If something happened I would just deal with it somehow. I wasn't leaving her alone, so it would probably be fine.