Chapter 37
Chapter 37
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 37
Chapter Title: Mental Manipulation
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"What the hell? Looks like she's scrambling to prepare for some tournament or other?"
Anyway, it was all for the best. It was about time to start hunting Jin Kyung-pil. My current abilities were too skewed toward mental manipulation.
Song Woo-seop had been easy enough to kill back when he didn't know much about Awakener abilities, but I couldn't do the same with Jin Kyung-pil. Unlike Song Woo-seop, who was just a lackey, that bastard had been the undisputed leader of the gang that tormented me.
Besides, Jin Kyung-pil had a versatile physical enhancement ability. A powerful one that could deflect bullets once its rank went up. I'd get it somehow, no matter what it took.
Of course, Jin Kyung-pil was different from Shin Nari, the college girl who'd voluntarily given up her rights as an Awakener and received no oversight. He was an Awakener affiliated with a private military company called Hunting Raven.
'Well... as long as things go according to my plan, it should work out fine.'
I wrapped up the rough plan for hunting Jin Kyung-pil in my head and called for Nari. If Aurora didn't know, I could just ask Shin Nari.
"Nari, when you and Aurora framed me as a sex offender, was there anyone helping you from behind the scenes?"
"Ah, ah...! S-Sorry...!"
Pat, pat.
"It's okay. I'm not trying to punish you, so tell me slowly. You had a close friend helping out, right?"
She looked like she was about to burst into another fit of apologies, so I stroked her face a few times.
"Ehehe... Y-Yes... There was someone... always with me... umm..."
I waited a long time, but no answer came.
"Huh?"
"?"
"Uh...? Who was it? Her name was definitely... what was it?"
Nari's expression was strange. It was like the memory of someone she clearly should know had been wiped clean.
"Wh-What...? Huh? Ah, s-sorry! For some reason, I can't remember... I-It's true, I'm not hiding anything!"
I knew she wasn't hiding it. Stage 5 subjugation meant her body and mind were completely mine—my total possession.
And that was a fact certified by the System, the absolute truth of this world. That's why I hadn't pressed her further about hiding anything.
But this reaction was too bizarre to be just a simple case of forgetting.
Which left only one possibility...
'...Memory erasure?'
Memory manipulation was an incredibly powerful and dangerous ability that directly intervened in the human mind.
There hadn't been any Awakener students with that kind of power, had there?
Wait a second.
'There's a bit of... empty space... in my head that feels... strange.'
A chill ran down my spine!
I arrived at one hypothesis,
and cold sweat trickled down my back as goosebumps rose.
Why hadn't I thought of this possibility sooner? It felt like my head had been dunked in ice water.
I shuddered!
What if Shin Nari wasn't the only one who'd been hit with memory manipulation?
It was entirely possible. Shin Nari had been an Awakener with Mental Barrier from the start.
A high-rank Awakener capable of breaching her barrier and tampering with her mind would have treated close-combat types like Jin Kyung-pil and Song Woo-seop—not to mention powerless non-Awakeners like me at the time—like toys they could play with without lifting a finger.
The hypothesis dug deeper.
Thinking back, it had always been odd.
In our first and second years, Jin Kyung-pil aside, the other students hadn't really gone along with that kind of bullying.
If anything, the atmosphere had been pretty studious and wholesome. Even Song Woo-seop had kept a low profile before becoming Jin Kyung-pil's right-hand man...
Once I reached that point, a face popped into my mind from the corner of my thoughts.
Pigtails. Plain style. The kind of girl everyone would think of when you said 'class president.'
'That nosy girl.'
Whenever there was even a hint of conflict in the class, she'd butt in like it was her personal mission—whether out of excessive kindness or some obsession—trying to mediate between both sides.
Yet even a girl like that had believed baseless rumors about me being a molester or groping someone and pointed fingers at me. That didn't fit her personality at all.
Plus, she was in my class, so she knew better than anyone that the rumor about me groping Shin Nari during class that day was complete bullshit—there'd been no such incident.
She'd even stepped in during incidents like kids stealing lunch money from each other and proven it was all a misunderstanding. For her to ignore something as serious as my case and swallow those rumors without question was completely out of character.
Which meant the person who'd awakened mental manipulation hadn't just messed with my and Shin Nari's heads...
'At minimum, everyone in our class. At maximum... the entire school.'
That wasn't a school anymore.
It was a kingdom.
It hadn't been a school—it had been that person's kingdom. I didn't know why I'd been targeted by the king, but because I'd fallen out of favor, I'd been utterly destroyed.
"Insane."
"Yes?"
"Nothing. Go make some dinner or whatever."
"Okay~"
I sent Nari off to the kitchen and sank into the sofa, lost in thought again.
If this hypothesis was true, then whoever was behind it was no ordinary person.
I didn't have the power to face a monster like that yet.
Of course, I wasn't worried about being hit with mental manipulation myself.
I had an A+ rank Mental Barrier enhanced by the System from Nari, plus a Mental Power stat of 50.
I didn't know if there was a way to recover memories that had already been erased, but at least any further mental attacks would be completely blocked.
But at my age, right after awakening as a teenager, that person had dominated hundreds of people— an entire small society like a school. While I'd been crawling like a bug in Contaminated Areas for two years, what kind of support network would they have built after entering society?
How solid would their foundation be now?
'A truly terrifying person.'
The fact that I was even suspecting their existence was a one-in-a-million shot.
I'd been the victim of all those incidents in school, vanished into the monster fields as a non-Awakener for two years with my life hanging by a thread, and finally awakened Exploiter to confirm under the System's verification that something was off with Shin Nari's mind.
Goosebumps rose again.
I had no idea how deeply their tentacles extended into both civilian society and the Awakener world. Someone who could hide their identity completely and perform mental manipulation on that scale—what could they have been up to after graduation? Impossible to guess.
'I need to hurry.'
I'd planned to retaliate against the guys who'd beaten me with maximum violence in kind, and turn the bitches who'd framed me as a sex offender into sex slaves, corrupting them utterly. I didn't need exceptional physical prowess for that.
But now that I'd uncovered the truth behind what I'd dismissed as a mere high school false accusation, gaining more power felt like the top priority.
The girls could be captured and trained anytime with this Awakener power.
But only if I stayed alive.
It was the worst-case scenario, but at minimum, I needed enough ability to escape if dozens of those manipulated first- and second-year Awakeners came for my head.
Not just physical prowess—money and connections too.
Money could be handled somehow; there were dark dealings around monster byproducts, and I already had some saved up.
The problem was connections.
Someone not under that person's control, and in society's upper echelons.
Or... someone I could 'turn' into a person whose domination I could nullify, even if they were controlled...
"Who could do that?"
A sigh escaped me naturally.
"Hahk, hahk."
Even in her baggy dark indigo dobok, the woman's curvaceous figure—full where it should be, slim where it counted—breathed raggedly.
"My body... feels so heavy..."
Aurora, who would normally glide through the dojo with light feminine steps, was completely exhausted after just one or two hours of training.
Five days.
Just five days of deviation.
But the cost of disrupting her sword-sharp tension was steep.
She hadn't lost muscle mass. That took at least two weeks to start.
Sensory things like balance might feel a tad off, but purely in terms of physical ability, there was no real difference.
The problem was her mind.
The sword tip, which should trace an optimized path even in a single swing, wavered uncertainly. And that smell kept popping into her head unbidden, dizzying her.
Every time it did, her womb whimpered like a dog in heat, the echoes growing louder with each step.
"Ugh... uuu..."
Classic withdrawal symptoms, like from cigarettes—the prime example of addictive drugs.
The average quit attempt for women lasts just 2.4 days.
No need to mention short-term addiction to deviant pseudo-sexual acts that brought far more pleasure than smoking.
Even champion-level training, optimized with maximum focus, left sweat pouring like rain.
But absorbing that workload while distracted by stray thoughts with every step, soaking her dobok pants in fluids? Impossible.
"I... I guess even though I already texted, it'll look shameless, but I should go see him tonight..."
Biting her lip hard, Aurora finally set her wooden sword on the rack and stripped off her dobok. Pristine white skin. Thick, glossy fluids on her thighs that no mere sweat could produce.
She hurriedly changed into civilian clothes and muttered to herself.
"I need to... refresh... if I don't refresh... just once... just once to refresh, then back to training focus."
Spouting excuses like an alcoholic, Aurora's steps—which had barely moved moments ago—were now springy and light.