Softened Steps and Scarred Walls
Having finished purchasing their provisions, the Wolf Mercenary Group set out once more for the Halrot Kingdom.
"Whoa! My steps feel so light!"
"Is this magic? First time I've ever gotten any!"
The newly joined mercenaries could not stop marveling at the mage's spell they were experiencing for the first time.
"Did we look like that once?"
"Why does that make us feel even more embarrassed?"
The veterans, watching the newcomers revel in magic's power for the first time, felt an inexplicable flush of secondhand shame as they remembered their own earlier selves.
Still, these were mercenaries who had flocked to the company precisely because of Kaisent's growing renown as a mage. Receiving a mage's support magic lifted their spirits and quickly forged a buoyant mood.
"Huh? Vice-Captain, your walk looks… weird."
After they had been on the move for a while, the mercenaries traveling alongside Fredrick pointed out that something about his stride seemed off.
He was walking with a strangely alluring posture, as though deliberately showing off the elegant lines of his legs. Had he been wearing anything tight, those curves would have been on full display through the fabric.
"Becoming a woman changed my hips. My usual way of walking feels awkward now. Until the curse is lifted, I plan to walk like this."
"Heh. So women's bodies are that different from ours?"
"Doesn't make much sense to us, but coming from the vice-captain who actually went from man to woman… somehow it sounds convincing."
Fredrick had always been the serious type who might crack a joke but never told this kind of lie, so the mercenaries simply accepted it and moved on.
They marched without a single rest until lunchtime, then set up a simple camp in a suitable spot for a meal and a breather.
"We walked almost two or three hours straight without stopping once until lunch."
"One spell completely changed our travel speed, huh?"
"The mage in my old company just sat in the wagon and did nothing! Feels like we've been scammed all this time!"
Experiencing support magic for the first time and covering long distances without rest, the mercenaries chattered excitedly, conversation blooming among them.
Men who had come from different companies or who had only banded together for the same job now clustered in small groups, introducing themselves and swapping stories.
"Food's ready! Come and get it!"
"Huh?"
"Wait… that voice?"
A mouthwatering aroma drifted over, accompanied by a soft, unbroken voice that had not even reached puberty. The new recruits' eyes went round.
Kaisent—the company's most critical asset, the mage who was supposed to conserve his strength for any emergency—was standing there with a ladle, cooking.
The veterans swarmed forward at once to receive vegetable soup and the bread they had bought earlier. The newcomers, however, hung back, eyeing one another.
In their experience, a mage whose services were priced in gold coins was elite personnel; the idea of one doing something as menial as cooking simply would not fit inside their heads.
"What are you doing? Aren't you going to eat?"
"Uh, uh… it's not that…"
Only when the veterans prodded the ones still standing around did they finally accept their portions and return to their spots.
"Slurp—this is… good?"
"Right?"
The vegetables had been simmered carefully, but more than that, the balance of flavors was astonishingly precise.
Every soup they had eaten before had been a rough boil of whatever greens were on hand. This one had been composed so delicately that no vegetable's taste clashed with another.
"Hey. Hey, you."
"Yeah? What?"
"Is it really okay to make a mage do chores like this?"
In the end, one mercenary could not contain his curiosity and grabbed another.
"He's been doing this ever since he joined. He said he wanted to, so we just let him keep at it."
"A mage joins a mercenary company and volunteers to be the cook?"
"Well… when Kaisent first arrived, he didn't come in as a mage. He was a demi-human refugee."
The captain and vice-captain had told them to keep quiet about certain things, but this much seemed safe enough, so he shared a little of Kaisent's background—the story Lillian and Kaisent themselves had fabricated: that he had been attacked as a black mage the moment he arrived in this world and had therefore hidden the fact that he could use magic.
Truth and fiction were mixed, yet revealing that he had reached this level of skill after less than a month of study would have caused real trouble, so there was no choice.
While talk of Kaisent blossomed around the camp, the subject of the conversation himself was elsewhere.
"Mmnh♥ Haaum♥"
In a secluded corner he was receiving devoted kissing service from the vice-captain the veterans both respected and feared.
Damn it… why the hell do I have to do this…!
Forcibly renamed Priscilla, she wound her tongue around Kaisent's as he smiled up at her, arms locked around her waist.
"Pwah…♥"
"You still don't seem to know how to use your tongue properly. It's just like swordsmanship. Control the strength, add technique—go hard when you need to go hard, soft when you need to go soft."
"Kh…"
Being lectured on kissing by someone far younger than herself made Priscilla bite her lip in pure frustration.
"I'll show you again how I use my tongue. Remember it well."
"What? I don't—mmph!"
Before she could finish answering, Kaisent thrust his tongue into her mouth and clamped a firm hand on her backside so she could not escape.
"Nngh-uuuuung~~~~~♥"
The rough squeeze that crushed the soft flesh of her rear and the long, knowing tongue that stirred inside her mouth hit her at the same time; a light climax rolled through her and the strength drained from her hips.
"Nn-chuup♥ Chub♥ Fuh-haa♥"
"Hehe. You've become a body that can feel from kissing alone."
"Th-that's because you… nnh-uuung…♥"
He's making it so I can't even talk back♥ I'm getting dragged into this kid's pace♥
Her body, hypersensitive after that small climax, refused to offer any resistance the moment his tongue began to move again.
"Pwah♥ K-Kaisent… th-that's enough…♥"
"Mm~ Even when you say stop, you're the one wrapping your arms around my neck and refusing to let go, Priscilla."
"!!"
Just as he said, Priscilla had both arms locked around the smaller boy's nape.
To anyone watching, it would have looked as though the woman were the one clinging and begging for more.
"N-no, this is…!"
"Are you signaling that you want a lovers' kiss? A man ought to answer that, right?"
"W-wait…! Nngh! Nn-chuuup♥ Jupaah♥ Chuchuk♥"
Obscene wet sounds of tongue being sucked and bitten filled the air; Priscilla's arms around Kaisent's neck tightened even harder.
The height difference forced Kaisent to tilt his head up, yet because the woman was leaning down, the kiss itself was perfectly comfortable.
Kaisent's tongue coiling deep inside is dangerous…♥ It feels so good my mind is going white…♥
Squelch—
"Hhyauh!?"
At that moment Kaisent slipped a hand inside her trousers; his fingers met a pussy already soaked with love juices.
No caress, nothing more than the bare contact of finger against folds, and Priscilla's brain sparked and began to melt.
"Aha~ Just from kissing you're this wet? You actually wanted this, didn't you, Priscilla?"
"N-no! It's the curse! Becoming a woman, getting this lewd—everything is the curse!"
She began defending herself desperately, hoping that if she kept talking Kaisent would lose interest.
"And! I was a man to begin with! No matter how much I look like a woman now, I was still a man! Do you like doing it with guys like some homo!?"
An ordinary man might have recoiled, but Kaisent had grown up in a world that recognized the vast diversity of countless races across the cosmos; the accusation meant nothing to him.
"In the world I came from, there's a race called the Junbakunorek."
He began describing the race precisely to show her that insisting she was still a man was pointless.
"They possess both female and male symbols at the same time. No matter how much they've lived as men, the moment another male of their kind penetrates them they become women and live feminine lives for the rest of their days."
"!!"
"There are also races that switch between male and female depending on temperature. They freely enjoy harems and reverse harems, tasting both male and female pleasure without any hang-ups."
"…"
Even the elves and dwarves she knew had cultures and values different from humans, yet compared with the races Kaisent spoke of they were nothing.
"Even if someone is born male, if they think and act like a woman, they're no different from a woman. Just like right now."
"Hhk!!"
Kaisent withdrew the fingers he had slipped inside her trousers, deliberately brushing them across her pussy on the way out.
That fleeting stroke of pleasure set her body burning again.
"Besides, the priest who explained the gender-reversal curse said that having sex with a man would turn you into a woman. He never said anything about becoming lewd."
"!!"
"In other words, this lewdness is yours, Priscilla."
"N-no! I'm not some lewd human who—mmph!"
Just as she desperately tried to deny her own lewdness, Kaisent struck again with a surprise kiss.
"Nnmuk!? Nnh-uuuuung!! Nn! Nnh-eung!!"
Squelch—chup—chuchuchuchuk—churrrrup~~♥
With exquisite control of pressure he sucked and bit her tongue, making it clear that everything until now had only been instructional.
I'll make her cum from kissing alone.
He's trying to make me cum from just kissing! As if a mere kiss could—!
But Kaisent's assault was on an entirely different level.
His long tongue—gift of his dragon blood—coiled around Priscilla's like a living thing and began to suck it in a relentless piston motion.
"Kh-fuuuung♥ Pwah♥ W-wait♥ Abm—♥"
Sensing real danger, Priscilla desperately tried to pull her neck back and escape for even a second, but Kaisent caught her tongue between his lips and refused to let her go.
Nibble-nibble—squelch-squelch—sooop—
"~~~~~~~♥♥"
He began gently chewing and stimulating the captured tongue with lips and teeth; the pleasure racing through it made Priscilla throw her arms around his neck of her own accord.
Like lovers, she clung so tightly their breath mingled. Her nipples stood out hard against her clothes; her large breasts were crushed against Kaisent's body under the pressure.
Chuuuuuuuup——!!
"Hnh-uuuuuuuung~~~~♥♥"
He delivered the finishing blow by sucking her tongue hard; Priscilla's knees gave out so completely that without the arms locked around him she would have collapsed on the spot, legs trembling.
I… came from just… a kiss…♥
Why did a kiss feel this sweet, this good?
Why was she feeling a woman's joy and happiness?
Why did this child suddenly seem so lovable?
Having climaxed from a kiss alone, Priscilla tried desperately to hate both herself—heart pounding while held by a boy whose androgynous charm was anything but masculine—and the situation she was in.
Yet no matter how hard she fought, the little boy intent on conquering her only looked more adorable, and the pleasure only whispered of addiction, of wanting to feel it again.
"Hehe. You came from just a kiss, didn't you?"
"N… no… I didn't… cum…♥"
"Is that so? Then fine."
Her legs still shaking, her pronunciation ruined, Priscilla stubbornly insisted she had not climaxed. Kaisent found even that amusing and simply accepted the denial.
"I'm hungry, so let's eat."
He moistened his throat with slightly cooled soup and tore into the bread, smiling brightly at Priscilla the whole time.
Puzzled by the mysterious smile, she brought the soup to her lips—and a sharp tingle shot through her tongue.
My tongue… it's tingling…!
The tongue that had climaxed from kissing alone was now registering even food as a source of pleasure.
Only then did she understand why Kaisent had been smiling, yet she still had to eat to fill her stomach.
Every time she chewed and swallowed, pleasure flickered across her tongue; she twitched and left a damp mark on the spot where she sat.
My body is growing more and more perversely lewd. If it gets any worse…
If it felt this good, living as a woman for the rest of her life might not be so bad.
Hhk!? What am I thinking!
Her male memories still made her resist, yet her soul—already rewritten as female—was steadily growing accustomed to a woman's life and to the pleasure of being trained as one.
That day Priscilla struggled through the entire lunch with constant pleasure in her tongue, then somehow returned to being the Fredrick everyone respected. She could not, however, stop her pussy from throbbing and leaking.
Aside from encountering various refugees along the way, the Wolf Mercenary Group reached the Halrot Kingdom without major incident.
And there they learned that the kingdom's situation was far worse than expected.
"Are those… all corpses?"
Beside the city ringed by walls lay the remains of what looked like massive pyres. The problem was the sheer size of the scorched ground.
Normally bodies were stacked high when burned; the ash traces left on the earth covered nearly the area of a sports field.
"Hey, look at the walls."
"Looks like the fighting was brutal."
The city walls themselves were shattered in places; some sections had collapsed entirely.
The company made a temporary camp outside the walls. Then Lillian, Priscilla, and Kaisent entered the city to look for work.
Inside the walls, too, undead had clearly broken through: buildings lay in ruins and battle scars were everywhere. The citizens who should have been bustling about were cowed and barely left their homes.
"Lillian."
"Yeah. The aftereffects of the civil war really are worse than I thought."
Neither Lillian nor Priscilla looked particularly surprised; they had expected something like this.
Like the army of Countess Akina they had seen before, the regular forces of this world were equipped with weapons of mass slaughter.
Orcs, aside from the spinning iron spheres they slammed into walls, still fought with cold weapons and could be handled relatively easily. But when forces armed with those advanced weapons clashed with one another?
Naturally the weapons were destroyed and the armies were consumed at terrifying speed.
The Halrot Kingdom's civil war had drastically reduced the armament level of its regular forces. Then the vampires had raised undead and compounded the disaster. On top of that the Dead Moon had struck, spawning undead that swelled into hordes and assaulted the cities, further bleeding an already weakened army dry.
"In a situation like this work is overflowing, but… heh…"
"Captain?"
"…Sorry. An entire kingdom's people are suffering, and here I am happy that there's so much work. Looking at myself makes me feel ridiculous."
An ordinary mercenary captain might not have cared, but she was a woman who had once been a princess of a kingdom. The blood meant to rule a people now thought only of the mercenary company; a light self-loathing stirred in her.
"That isn't your problem, Lillian."
"Kaisent."
"Whatever the case, this country's problems are for its rulers to answer for. There's no reason for an outsider like you to feel anything about them."
"…Thank you, Kaisent."
It was pure common sense, yet Kaisent's attempt to ease her guilt drew a small smile from Lillian.
Lillian still hasn't cast off the royal part of herself. She says she'll grow the company and take revenge on the Saryeong Kingdom, but if she ever does defeat them…
Once the Saryeong Kingdom was dealt with, Lillian would stand at a crossroads: mercenary captain or royalty.
I have to make sure she can choose what she truly wants.
Kaisent quietly renewed his own resolve—to help her make the choice that was truly hers.