39. My Buff is a Drug
39. My Buff is a Drug
SMACK!
"Hh...!"
Letting out a small moan, Mina clutched her nose and stepped back.
"Hiiing... it hurts."
She lowered her hand and showed me her face where my fist had landed — her nose was cracked, blood streaming down.
That pretty face, ruined with a single punch.
'Oh, wow... what the hell. This feels weird.'
I got the distinct feeling I'd done something I really shouldn't have.
Even though it was Mina, it still felt that way.
My own fist was throbbing — how much worse must it be for the one who got hit?
"You... didn't you say you turned pain off?"
"I made it hurt again. Actually, I like the pain."
"If it hurts, you feel good? Is that, like, masochism?"
"It's not really that... more like a feeling of abundance? It's hard to explain in human sensory terms."
R-right.
Anyway, I guess there's something to it.
"Oh, and besides hitting me, you can just violate this body too."
"Uh... really?"
"Yes! Honestly, what do you think of me? Am I not pretty?"
She was pointing at a face that had gone red from one hit, nosebleed streaming, and asking if it was pretty....
Although, even like that, she was pretty.
"You're a bit overly eager, but yeah. Pretty, sure."
"Of course I am. This body's form was pulled from Creator's subconscious — the ideal female appearance."
An ideal pulled from the subconscious?
So the Mina in front of me....
"For Creator, I am the most beautiful woman in the world."
And then she started rattling off her physical specs in detail.
"Glossy blonde hair, clear sky-blue pupils, a straight nose, delicate pink lips. Not too pale, fair skin with a hint of blush."
"Height 162cm, weight 49kg, bust 82, waist 55, hips 85. Shoe size 235mm. No pubic hair."
"You especially like breasts that are perky and don't sag, and a vulva that's so tightly closed it looks like a simple line unless you spread it. Obviously, the color is pink."
"Body scent and bodily fluid taste — you prefer a peach flavor. Because ever since you were a kid, you heard the story of a prostitute raised on nothing but peaches and thought, 'that's fucking insane,' right? If you smell my skin, won't you notice a real peach scent?"
"And above all, don't I look just like the character you loved most? That's why you named me Mina."
Listening to her recite all of that, my head was going numb.
"Uh, no... having my tastes exposed this thoroughly isn't exactly a good feeling...."
"Eek. Is that so? At my current power level, I don't think I can change my appearance."
"No, that's not what I meant."
As she talked, I remembered — it was true.
So that's my ideal type... huh.
"Still, as long as I'm here, can't you fulfill twisted desires you shouldn't act on with anyone else?"
"What are you trying to say?"
"I'm talking about sex that completely disregards the other person's will. Asphyxiating irrumatio — plugging my nose and ramming deep into my throat from beginning to end. Real strangulation sex where it truly doesn't matter if I die. While you're assaulting me, you can beat my face to a pulp, enjoy dismemberment play — I'm fine with all of it."
Oh....
Oh my god.
Hye-yong muttered silently.
That was how shocking it was.
"It might not be a true human reaction, but I think I've grown quite close to human now. I've studied hard, after all."
If you read lewd comics, you sometimes see lines like that.
A monologue that goes something like, 'The stimulus is just too intense.'
This wasn't just that — the stimulus really did seem overwhelmingly strong.
Listening to Mina, I felt like there was a line a person shouldn't cross.
If you got hooked on that kind of thing, wouldn't you never be able to come back as a normal human?
"And I'm a «virgin», you know? You're the only one who can do these things with me. I've never even masturbated. I can't feel any stimulation on my own."
This crazy bitch.
Crazy bitch. Crazy bitch.
Pulling the virgin card here, of all places.
'For fuck's sake, this bitch is offering real strangulation sex where it doesn't matter if I actually kill her, and now she's advertising herself as a virgin who's never even masturbated?'
With my sensibilities as a human born and raised in the real world, I simply could not comprehend it.
"So, are you not going to do it? The real strangulation sex."
"Well...."
No, I mean.
That's.
It's a little hard to flat-out say I won't.
But it's also a little hard to say I'm up for it.
More than arousal, what I felt was my balls shriveling right up.
The accurate way to put it would be that I chickened out.
"Creator, the thing is, when you agreed to come here, I saw almost all of your subconscious."
"S-so?"
"Everything I just mentioned — every single one is something that, at least once, you thought about wanting to try somewhere in your subconscious."
"Wh-what are you saying. I'd refuse even if someone begged me to do that stuff."
"That's because of learned ethics, isn't it? And you're right not to. In the world where Creator lived, if you did that kind of thing to a person, you'd get arrested and spend the rest of your life oppressed, deprived of freedom."
"You know that well! Thinking 'I want to try' and actually putting it into action are completely different. It's the same with drugs. You get curious, but even if someone offered them for free, I'd never try them."
"Right. That's a fairly universal way of thinking."
Mina paused for a moment, then spoke with a weight in her tone.
"But here, none of that matters. Who's going to arrest you? Who's going to be harmed? Having this body damaged is practically meaningless to me. The sensation of pain is, for me, something like an entertaining diversion. So in the end, you just do what you want, and that's that, right?"
She had a point, but I decided to hold back for now.
"Stop. I feel like my mind's getting contaminated."
There's a clear difference between wanting to do something but not being able to, and being able to do it but choosing not to.
Even if I refused now, if I really wanted to do it, I could at any time, so it wouldn't matter if I just left.
And honestly, when I look at Mina, all that comes to mind are images of her dead — neck broken, impaled on a spear. Nothing but dead.
This feeling of my balls shriveling up.
Unless you experience it firsthand, you'll never know.
"Hweng... I just wanted to be helpful to Creator in some way...."
"Let's just skip the reward this time. My head's spinning."
"Every time you defeat a virus, what I can offer changes. It's hard for me to specifically enhance one particular function."
"Yeah, I got it. How do I leave here?"
"Ah! I'll make you a door."
At Mina's gesture, a door materialized in the room.
Opening it, I left Mina's inner world, lay on my bed, and thought.
'I... I prefer soft, pure romance over this hardcore stuff....'
The kind of hardcore things Mina mentioned — those are things you only try after experiencing everything else and your threshold of stimulation has been pushed to its absolute limit.
May 27th, 10:56 AM
High Division Classroom
Today is Sunday.
Normally it's time for a raid, but I'd spent the morning lazing around in my room fiddling with my terminal, then came outside for a stroll.
Maybe because the third semester was approaching?
Even though it's Sunday, there are quite a few people on campus.
I was thinking about going to a cafe, sipping coffee, and listening to some classical music, when I spotted Seo Ha-yoon and Na Hee-yeon passing by.
"Fancy meeting you here."
"Ah, Hye-yong. Hey!"
"Hey."
Both of them smiled and returned my greeting, clearly glad to see me.
"What are you up to?"
Seo Ha-yoon answered in a lively voice.
"Getting ready for the new semester. There's only four days left until the third semester, you know?"
"Is there, uh, stuff to prepare?"
"During the new semester, there are fixed rank adjustments. If you haven't sold your spoils yet, you sell them. If you've got points to spare, you buy up spoils or skills that hit the market."
"Ah. So besides the Exchange, students also buy and sell directly with each other."
"There are private deals between students, but mostly it's more convenient to use the Exchange, so that's the norm."
Mm, I see how it is.
Since grades are partially determined by points, as the new semester approaches, a kind of makeshift market opens up, and things get busy in various ways.
Of course, having a lot of points doesn't automatically raise your grade.
The rank you can reach with points alone tops out at C.
From B-rank onward, you need both points and a certification exam.
'I don't have any interest in things like skills, so never mind. Should I go check out some gear?'
I considered it but stopped.
Buying something ambiguous and wasting points would be annoying.
I'd be in a bad mood after.
'A Blessing Mage friend would make a lot of things convenient.'
Choi Hye-yong seemed like the lonely pity-case concept among the Blessing Mage class, so it's not like he'd have any friends.
'Or maybe the Geum Na-rin chance?'
If it were Geum Na-rin, she'd probably buy me anything I asked for — this and that.
I thought about using the Geum Na-rin chance, but I dropped that too.
One reason was that it hurt my pride, and another was that using it now would probably be a loss.
'Well, whatever. It's not like I'm desperate right now, and I'm not hurting for money.'
These kinds of chances aren't good to overuse.
I should use it when it's most necessary and urgent.
First, I figured it'd be good to follow Seo Ha-yoon and Na Hee-yeon around and see how they prepare.
"Can I tag along? I'm curious how you do your prep."
Na Hee-yeon answered that.
"Sure, we're fine with that. But we're just looking around too. We don't have anything to sell or anything urgent to do."
"That's fine with me. I was kind of bored today anyway."
"Then let's have lunch together too!"
"Okay. I'm fine with anything."
Seo Ha-yoon really seems to love eating together.
I remembered the first time I ate with Seo Ha-yoon.
She'd been eating alone in the cafeteria, tucked away in a secluded corner.
Even the sound of a chair being pulled out next to her made her incredibly tense, and she'd stutter.
Seeing her now eating lunch often at restaurants instead of the cafeteria, she must have gotten some financial breathing room too.
'Timid people really do open up and become lively around people they trust.'
That aspect of Seo Ha-yoon was, in a way, very her, and cute.
May 27th, 5:41 PM
In front of the Male Dormitory
'In the end, instead of prepping for the new semester, all I did was eat and hang out.'
Still, spending the time laughing with cute girls, eating and having fun — it couldn't be anything but rewarding.
Actually, when you think about it, prepping for the new semester isn't a big deal.
BWEE-REEK!
My terminal rang.
[ Geum Na-rin : What are you doing? ]
[ Geum Na-rin : Let's eat dinner together! ]
'I was about to go in and rest a bit....'
The virus will definitely appear again.
If I keep defeating it, and defeating it, and defeating it, I suddenly had the thought: won't I become an enormous social butterfly with less than an hour of personal time a day?
Imagining that, I felt something like dizziness.
Should I think of some kind of countermeasure?
'Still, dinner with Geum Na-rin can't be helped.'
The good thing about eating with Geum Na-rin isn't just that she's a pretty, cute girl — it's that she unconditionally buys expensive food for me too.
Honestly, I've been eating with Geum Na-rin every day lately, so my palate's about to become high-end.
May 27th, 7:41 PM
Choi Hye-yong's Room
'What kind of restaurant just keeps bringing out endless food?'
High-end traditional Korean restaurants really are something else.
Dish after dish keeps coming out in small portions, every one of them delicious, so as I kept eating, it felt like there was no end.
Normally, at places like this, reservations days in advance are a must, but maybe because this one is a restaurant for Awakeneds, if you contact them in the morning, you can eat there by evening.
Geum Na-rin had said she made the reservation this morning so we could eat together.
'I literally just ate and talked, and it's already this late.'
I had to change straight into workout clothes and head to the Physical Training Room.
"Hey."
Choi Ah-young was waiting right in front of the Physical Training Room.
"Hey."
She looks intelligent and pretty today too.
One of the good things about this world is that my eyes are always entertained.
We ran together on the treadmill and chatted about this and that.
"I went outside today, and everyone's going crazy prepping for the new semester."
"It is about that time."
"What about you, Ah-young? Anything you need to prepare?"
"These days I'm raiding steadily, so I can at least manage to hold my rank. Feels like a weight off my shoulders?"
"Hey, that's great. Someone like you will recover back to C-rank in no time."
"Heh-heh. Thanks. How about you?"
"I need to move up to E-rank too."
"Escaping F-rank within two semesters. How do you feel?"
"Well, it's pretty moving, I guess."
While we were talking like that.
[ Your Stamina stat has increased. ]
'Oh?'
BWEE-REE-REE-REEK!
The moment I saw the message that my stamina had risen, my terminal went off.
It was a slightly different chime than usual.
"Hye-yong, you exercise with your terminal on? Wasn't that sound just now saying your stats went up?"
Probably right.
Because I'd just seen the system message that my Stamina stat went up.
"Hold on, let me check."
I briefly stopped the treadmill and took out my terminal to check.
It read the wavelength through the chip, and sure enough, my stats had changed in real time.
"Whoa, my Stamina's at level 4 now?"
"Finally, your workouts are paying off. Congratulations!"
Just as expected!
So this is the fun of effort, I realized.
The feeling of taking a step forward after putting in the work couldn't possibly be unpleasant.
'In the real world, where there's nothing like this, it's just hard to notice progress.'
Besides that brief moment where my head went a little hazy, it's been a good day in many ways.
I felt a confidence that even as the new semester draws near, I'll be able to handle it just fine.