Chapter 125: Discipline 2
Chapter 125: Discipline 2
I understood where she was coming from. Honestly, I did.
She'd lost her parents, sworn revenge, and landed a Constellation contract before the grief had even settled. In under a year, she'd blazed across the four continents and built a reputation. Her magic power swelled just from healing the sick at a rate other Incarnations couldn't match through grueling training, and she'd awakened Authorities practically on instinct. Hard not to let it all go to your head.
She was a reckless girl in her early twenties who'd never held a real job or dealt with anything resembling society. The same way fresh graduates screw up at their first company or in boot camp—she could stumble just as badly.
Watching her now, pale skin flushed crimson, breathing light and giddy, the thought felt almost generous.
But understanding someone and forgiving them were entirely different things.
I've seen more than a few bastards die mid-fuck.
I came from a world where people killed over a single can of food. Where you strangled an old man to claim a dry corner to lie down in, beat a child to death for the drip of water seeping through cracked concrete. I'd been through too much to hand out forgiveness just because someone was pretty, or because I could see where they were coming from.
"C-Constellation—?"
Kim Ha-eun called my name, voice strangled with terror, her head crushed against the floor under my grip.
Even through the fear, the faintest thread of pleasure coiled inside her—the Dream Demon's magic power doing its work, reliable as ever.
I don't like that.
A single drop of pink paint fallen into black sewage. That minuscule flicker of pleasure could vanish at any second, and I still didn't want to permit it.
So I pulled my magic power up and drove it straight into her.
You're being punished. What the hell is there to feel pleasure or anticipation about?
Under normal circumstances, I imagined threads. Tangled skeins of thread.
Now I imagined a plant's finest root hairs. Thinner. Branching into finer and finer divisions.
Boring through skin, rooting into blood vessels.
"Hk—ghk, hack—"
Maybe another approach existed. Maybe there was some gentler way to make her an obedient Incarnation and get along happily.
But Kim Ha-eun hadn't talked to me. She'd gotten drunk on her own growth and disrespected me. So I'd use the method that was easiest and most convenient for me. Simple as that.
"I was wrong—I was wrong—"
Kim Ha-eun, the girl overflowing with talent for magic power—Dream Demon magic power specifically. She must have sensed my power threading through her, because tears streamed down her face and soaked the floor.
I shut my eyes and focused. There it was: Kim Ha-eun's magic power, swollen past all proportion. Calling it a mana veil at this point felt almost insulting—the sheer volume of it.
But half-formed Dream Demon power, no matter how much of it there was, wasn't going to beat the real thing.
"In any case," I began.
"Y-yes! Yes!"
She jumped the moment I opened my mouth. Eager. Desperate.
What came next wouldn't be what she wanted to hear.
"You seem to have gathered quite enough magic power."
At the Academy, Kim Ha-eun—with her once-in-a-generation talent—had harvested Nightmares by the thousands. And not minor ones either, but Nightmares drawn from soldiers and Incarnations on the front lines. Extending my power through her to feel it directly, her mana reserves had already outstripped the Academy's instructors.
A genuinely staggering talent.
Was that why she'd gotten this arrogant?
"Ah—aah—please—Constellation, please—"
Her wretched pleas reached me. My magic power kept pressing deeper.
Through the skin, riding blood vessels toward the heart, down beneath the ocean of her swollen mana like a submarine descending—further, further—
Until I reached the Dream Demon's Origin.
"I was wrong, please, I was wrong—"
The Origin of the one I'd killed before had been like a glass marble. Kim Ha-eun's was more like jelly. Probably because she wasn't a full Dream Demon.
Tears dripped steadily down her face, terror still locked in her eyes, yet her body writhed faintly—maybe trying to placate me, maybe just a reflex. Chained by the neck, her head caught in my grip, a beautiful woman desperately begging: the sight stirred the Dream Demon's instincts all over again.
But right now I didn't need the Dream Demon's mindset. I needed a Constellation's.
My magic power sank into her Origin and began threading through it.
There was something I'd been considering for a while.
An Incarnation with too much talent. The absolute power dynamic between Constellation and Incarnation. The things that had been second nature to me in the apocalypse—the things I'd put aside while building human connections in a peaceful world.
Oppression. Exploitation.
"This is...?"
Her Origin was being invaded, yet she felt no pain. Maybe that's why a last sliver of hope still flickered in those pale violet eyes looking up at me. She'd probably braced herself for torture, or having her Origin shattered and her mana stripped away entirely.
She'd probably take torture over this.
When I spoke, my own voice startled me—a low, heavy growl that rolled out like a beast's.
"I've decided on your punishment."
I slammed another wave of magic power into her.
From the finest root hairs burrowing into soil—to mistletoe clinging to a tree's bark, to cordyceps sprouting from a host insect's body, to ink spreading in branching tendrils like some osmotic experiment. I drew on every image I could conjure.
"From now on, you will be unable to gather magic power."
My magic power wrapped her Origin like a tight-woven net and sank its roots in.
"That's—"
I had no intention of stopping there.
Six days. Eighteen days in felt time, trapped inside a false dream. I'd spent that entire stretch doing nothing, staring blankly, and I had some venting to do. I hadn't brought to mind prisons, chains, and iron bars only to swap them out for plant roots at the last second for no reason.
The magic power that now encased her Origin and had rooted into it—I reversed its flow.
Not burrowing in. Pulling. Siphoning.
"H-haa—ahn—?"
Her Origin was being drained, her magic power exploited—and the only consideration I could offer was making sure she felt pleasure instead of pain. Though calling it consideration was generous; it was really just my own preconceptions shaping the sensation.
Can't seem to get magical-girl rape comics out of my head.
Back when I first thought of Dream Demons, I'd pictured Freddy Krueger. Now when I thought of mana exploitation, my brain kept coughing up those demon-defeats-magical-girls-through-sex comics. Probably lodged itself in my memory because the premise was so lurid. The fact that Kim Ha-eun's hair was a pale violet you'd struggle to find in either the East or the West didn't help. That alien hair color, stark against her snow-white skin, spilling messily around her as she lay too dazed to even think of getting up.
...Her talent really is something else.
Even as the thought crossed my mind, the magic power I was pulling in was overwhelming. This wasn't like sipping through a straw stuck in a drink. This was dunking your head into a bathtub—no, a swimming pool—and gulping. I could suck at it endlessly and never hit the bottom.
That's a problem.
The original plan had been to drain her dry. Hold her Origin hostage, exhaust her mana, plant my magic power deep inside her to cement the hierarchy between us. But draining her wasn't even on the table—I could absorb until I bloated and burst and still not take ten percent.
I changed tack and drove my power deeper still. Not just rooting into her magic and brushing against her Origin—I pushed all the way into the soft center of it.
"There is only one way you can gather magic power now."
I'd come up with it on the spot, but it would work on Kim Ha-eun.
"You receive it directly from me. Nothing else."
"Guh—guhk—hurghh—"
Kim Ha-eun gasped like someone hauled out of water. Her chest heaved so violently she nearly tore her own clothes, clawing at her sternum as she fought for air she couldn't find. The clatter of chains tangling couldn't even drown out her ragged breathing.
The suffocation must be maddening.
This time I'd drawn on a memory: a busted gas mask from my army days. That horrible sensation of trying to breathe but no air coming through, suffocating while your lungs screamed. Your nose aching from the force of inhaling, your chest tight and empty. I'd conjured it to physically block her from taking in magic power on her own.
Maybe by now she'd realized that all these constraints layered on top of each other were more terrifying than straightforward violence.
Crawling across the floor with desperate effort, Kim Ha-eun reached me and latched onto my feet.
I ignored her and tested my magic power a little further.
This is definitely effective.
Half-formed Dream Demon Origin or not, she was as close to a perfect test subject as I could ask for.
Messing with someone's unconscious mind while lingering inside a dream, pulling entities out of delusions—all of that was less efficient than getting my hands on an actual Dream Demon's Origin and working it directly. Like how grinding PVP against a real player gives you more experience than wailing on a training dummy all day.
While I was mulling that over, Kim Ha-eun—who'd crawled barely a few meters and looked half-dead doing it—bowed her head low.
"Please... forgiveness... no—mercy."
She must have seen my eyebrow go up, because she caught herself mid-sentence, her lips still pressed to the top of my foot.
If she's stuck like this in daily life, it's going to be a pain to make use of her.
No matter how vast her mana reserves, if I siphoned from her every day, she'd eventually run dry. On top of that, I couldn't exactly shut down the Academy's medical ward in the name of corporal punishment. She needed to be disciplined—but the patients still needed treatment. There were hundreds waiting, and I had zero desire to handle them all myself without Kim Ha-eun.
I reshaped my magic power, smoothing its jagged, thorny edges into something blunter. Instead of barbed spines stabbing through her insides, I made it more like thick, sticky tar clogging the channels where magic power flowed.
"You do understand what 'receiving it directly from me' means, don't you?"
I raised the hand holding her chains. Her sweat-soaked head dragged up with it and drooped onto my thigh.
Her magic power was sealed. Her Origin was half-drained. The very pathways her mana traveled through were blocked. She'd have come to her senses by now. In human terms, it was like plugging someone's nose and mouth, then slugging them in the solar plexus so they couldn't inhale. If she hadn't straightened out after all that, then tearing up the contract really was the right move.
"I'm sorry—I'm sho sorry... please... give me magic power..."
I hoped it wouldn't come to that. Tearing up the contract.
As I sat with that thought, a warm, wet sensation spread across my thigh. Kim Ha-eun's eyes had gone unfocused and glassy. She was rubbing her cheek against me, inching upward with small, tentative licks.
She's this far gone already?
Blocking her magic absorption had fried her that fast. This wasn't just cutting off someone's air. This was like snatching a narcotic from an addict. More like withdrawal than suffocation.
As if to prove me right, Kim Ha-eun—who could barely breathe—kept straining toward my groin, pushing her head forward bit by desperate bit.
She probably knew exactly what she was after. The only way to get magic power now.
Receiving the Dream Demon's essence.