How to Talk to a Guy
The date was winding down.
No. That wasn't right.
Thinking it over again, the word date felt a little off. For a date, I'd had my girlfriend's little sister along the whole time. And calling it a double date didn't work either—we were one guy short. There was probably some proper word for it if I looked, but...
...Forget it. It wasn't important.
What I needed to remember lay somewhere else entirely. Namely, that Lee Jiyoon's reaction to the recording I'd sent her had been quite favorable. In other words, she'd felt a faint jealousy toward my relationship with Lee Hayun.
The evidence was plentiful.
First. A few hours after I sent the recording, she'd played games with me as if nothing were different from usual.
Second. She could have told me not to send her crap like that, or tossed off something like so you finally kissed, huh—a short text, at the very least—and yet she'd kept her mouth shut and said nothing at all.
Third. When I asked, Want to go clothes shopping with me and Hayun-noona?, she'd nodded without much resistance, even though it must have been a hassle.
Fourth. Just now, even while I was talking about kissing her older sister, the moment I tested her by bringing my lips close, she'd parted hers as if she'd been waiting.
Fifth. She'd even carefully wrapped her arms around my neck and advised me that a more aggressive kiss would probably be better.
Given the kind of tastes she had, I'd expected she wouldn't care much what I did with Lee Hayun. I hadn't thought she'd get jealous enough for it to show this openly.
Anyway. Just being able to pin down Lee Jiyoon's true feelings was no small gain. From here, if I played her right, I'd be able to grip the leash I'd been aiming for and lead her wherever I wanted.
Which left Lee Hayun.
"How is it? Good, right?"
"......"
The one right in front of me. Lee Hayun, who'd been sulking a moment ago about leaving her umbrella at the room cafe, now grinning dopily as she fed a red bean bun into my mouth. All I had to do was find a way to topple her right alongside her little sister.
"It's a shame it's just convenience store stuff, but the taste is pretty much the same. Mm."
"...It's edible."
When I gave an appropriately pleased reaction, her clover-green eyes narrowed into pretty crescents beneath those puppy-like lids. A stark contrast to Lee Jiyoon's eyes, watching us from a little ways back with a thoroughly unimpressed look.
...Truth was, contrary to Lee Hayun's endless praise, the bun itself was exactly the kind I hated. I preferred salty and spicy over this sweetness piled on sweetness. Ramen, curry. That sort of thing.
But for my purposes, I needed to become the ideal boyfriend first. So I chewed and swallowed the bun without letting any of that show.
"If I didn't have my part-time shift, I could hang out with you even later. What a shame..."
"...Later?"
"...Wh-what are you thinking?! Jiyoon's right here!!"
This wasn't the conclusion of some preschooler's logic—I did one thing you wanted, so later you have to do one thing I want. It was more like the reasoning of an elementary or middle schooler: I'll give you tons of what you want, so later let's do just one thing I want?
In a way it was one of the crudest, most shameless approaches there was. But crude methods like that tended to have a high floor. Even with the college entrance exam, wasn't the most common study style just mindlessly memorizing past papers with no technique?
"Why 'later'? I already play games at night with Jiyoon, and she's standing right behind you."
"...Ah."
"Noona. You're not having dirty thoughts over something that small, are you?"
"...Th-that's not it, I just... uuuugh..."
So later, you can pay me back by sucking my cock hard from both sides, right next to Jiyoon. And when I grab Jiyoon's hair and pump cum down her throat, don't forget to take over if she gets overwhelmed and gulp it all down yourself.
That'll be payment enough.
The sea of information.
If you had to name the metaphor most often cited for the internet, it would probably be that one. A sea that, in less than a hundred years since its birth, has come to churn with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of pieces of information. The implication is that so long as a user sets their mind to it, they can dig up any information at all—to put it bluntly, even the most obscure nobody-cares-about trivia from some ultra-niche genre no one was ever supposed to be interested in.
In practice, it's a little different.
Of course, if you sink enough time into it, you can eventually find what you want. The problem is the process of finding it. They call the internet a sea of information. They never said it was a sea of accurate information. So the user has to gather what they've found, then judge for themselves which of it is accurate and which is baseless fabrication or mere personal opinion.
It sounds complicated, but it really isn't. Any adult who's finished compulsory education can manage it without trouble.
There are, however, two kinds of people who still struggle with it.
One is the elderly, who only encountered the internet after their minds had already stiffened, and so remain clumsy with it.
The other—
"...Mmm."
—is a child whose idea of using the internet amounts to burrowing under a blanket and watching YouTube for ten hours straight.
...Or, perhaps, an adult who's only grown in body, having been raised pure and simple on nothing but studying.
"So that's... ...how it is. Mm."
Seven in the evening. The hour when the smell of a gently simmering kimchi stew begins to drift through the air. Han Sua, who'd at some point fetched a cushion and settled comfortably with her phone in hand, murmured under her breath.
If she compiled all the information she'd been diligently gathering, it came to this:
The ears and tails of Mutation-type Transcendents were used for lewd purposes far more often than she'd thought.
Often enough, in fact, that there were porn tags dedicated to it.
The ears and tails of Mutation-type Transcendents are used for sexual purposes more often than expected.
Often enough that dedicated porn tags exist for them.
"......"
Recalling the few videos she'd watched a moment ago, Han Sua let out a sigh that was closer to an ugh.
...This wasn't even fiction. In real life, they wrapped a woman's tail around their hand, yanked it, and pounded a cock in deep, over and over. And the woman—moaning like that forceful male grip felt good, soaking the bedsheets with her fluids.
Was that even a reasonable thing to say?
And that woman, judging by her face, looked like she had a lot of pride...
...Just like me.
"This is weird."
Setting aside whether the act felt good or bad, it was a question. Pulling a tail. Animals clearly hated that. Cats especially—touch their tail and they'd hiss on the spot.
She didn't even have to go that far. She'd been the same herself, back when she was little and hadn't been a Transcendent for long. Not pleasure at all, but a creeping unpleasantness rising over her whole body like goosebumps. That exact sensation.
If she had to compare it, it was like being tickled. You ended up laughing because of that peculiar feeling, but you weren't laughing because you liked it, were you? It was nothing but an thoroughly unpleasant experience.
So why, now that she was an adult, had that become part of an erogenous zone? And judging by the number of posts online, it didn't seem like a rare phenomenon either.
"I don't get it..."
Then, by the same logic, there could be women who soak the bed with their fluids just from being tickled. Did that even make sense...?
Never mind. Never mind.
If there were plenty of other Mutation types like that besides her, she had no choice but to accept that it was just how things were.
Overloaded from excessive brain use, Han Sua pulled the blanket up over her head and stretched with a long groan.
"...Oh, right."
Yozora was a Mutation type too, wasn't she. Succubus base...
Then was Yozora's tail an erogenous zone as well? Last time she'd seen it, there was a pitch-black tail with a heart-shaped tip.
Mmm... Maybe she should ask Yozora once...
No. That seemed like it might be rude...
No, no. She liked lewd stuff to begin with, didn't she? So if anything, wouldn't she be happy if I asked about something like that? The way I lost track of time talking about romance manga...
"...I'll eat first and think about it later."
Han Sua set down the phone that had worked hard all day and buried her face in the cushion. The old resolve—I'm going to find a new hobby!—had long since vanished without a trace. In its place, something else was spinning round and round in Han Sua's head.
"......"
...Masturbation.
Doing it in bed was risky; she might get caught. So later, when she showered, just a little.
Really, just a tiny bit.
Mm-hm.
There's a phrase, usually shortened to normie cosplay—dressing up as an ordinary person.
Simply put, it's this. When someone asks what you like, you can't answer being forcibly raped, so you say music and movies are my hobbies. Something like that.
In any case, because your actual hobby is a little embarrassing to tell other people, you pull out some other hobby you learned by skimming the surface and pretend to be a normal person.
The upside is that you can hide one thing that might become an obstacle to living in society.
The downside is one very minor drawback: sexual frustration.
"........."
And so.
"Uuuugh..."
The moment the weekend arrived, the smell of alcohol radiating from every inch of Yozora's body was a perfectly natural consequence. She'd tried to slam into her body, across just Friday and Saturday, all the alcohol she should have been pouring in over the course of a week.
Of course she wasn't without limits, so Yozora's challenge had stopped at a combined twenty bottles—but unopened soju, sake, and beer cans still rolled around nearby. A butter-grilled squid, gone cold and stiff, came as a bonus.
"...I have to clean all that up too..."
And air the place out.
...But she was too lazy to get up. Uuugh... If only someone would clean all of that up for her...
Not Kwon Namho...
Master, or the health teacher, or Seo Woojin...
If she whined at him to clean it up instead, then slept in the bed like it was someone else's problem... maybe an irritated Seo Woojin would pin her down so she couldn't get up and rape her, pounding away until his anger cooled...
"Hehehe..."
Ah, getting done in a public restroom—a men's restroom, at that—had been better than she'd expected...
Had she told Seo Woojin that story...? Back in her schoolgirl days, taking every groper on the train who groped her breasts and ass into the restroom and testing them all...
She felt like she might have told him... and also like she might not have...
Hehe. Who knows...
Anyway, to think he understood her tastes that well... Next time she wanted him to creampie her irresponsibly, since she'd handle the rest herself... Even if she screamed at him not to, just force it in...
...Ehehe...
"...Eh...?"
While she was sprawled on the sofa savoring a blissful hangover, Yozora's ears twitched. The phone she'd left on the table was whining and tapping against the glass.
They say if you talk about someone, their shadow appears. Could it be Seo Woojin?
With a groan, Yozora stretched her arm as far as it would go. The phone bumped against her fingertips and dropped to the floor.
A clatter, then a tap. A sound from the floor that was, somehow, a little unsettling.
...Squinting through half-lidded, hazy eyes as she picked the phone up, she found a small crack along one edge of the screen.
"Uuugh..."
It's fine. Thank goodness.
Yozora roughly rubbed the glass shards off with her thumb, then immediately turned the phone on and checked the message.
"...?"
But the owner of the message on the screen was Han Sua.
The A5-grade meat she was meant to offer up to Master.
"...What the hell..."
Unsolicited TMI. And setting aside this creepily awkward texting—
Why was she suddenly texting on the weekend...
...Ah.
On Friday she'd said she had something to talk about with Seo Woojin separately...
...Ah.