Chapter 138: Dreamland 3
Chapter 138: Dreamland 3
I spread the nightmare, handed it off to the demonfolk, and returned to the Sanctum immediately.
The demonfolk asked for my help, so I helped them—exactly that and nothing more.
I'd listened to their curses and shouting in the sanctum of the Unfading Giant Tree, then come straight back to the Academy and sprawled out on the sofa.
Given time, the culprit would be caught eventually.
Because this world ran on reversed gender roles.
'I hadn't even considered the smaller implications.'
A gender-reversed world.
More precisely, a matriarchal society.
A world where women went to work and men stayed home as homemakers was the obvious default. A world where women confessed first, escorted their dates, and took the lead in everything.
I'd heard somewhere that human imagination lacked attention to detail, and living in a world that wasn't my own drove that point home with perfect clarity.
A gender-reversed world made it easy to find a male assassin.
Most men chose to become full-time homemakers. There were men who went into corporate work or other fields, but the assumption that a man's proper role was domestic support hadn't gone anywhere. So filtering men out of the suspect pool was simple.
Going to the Academy was like traveling to a neighboring continent. In practical terms, it was an overseas business trip that took at least a week. In a gender-flipped society, it was women who took on that kind of work, not men—so an ordinary male civilian who was neither an Incarnation nor a soldier had almost no reason to set foot on Academy grounds.
"So. Have you been waiting here this whole time?"
"Yes. What should I do next?"
Kim Ha-eun was the one who greeted me when I returned to the Academy. She'd been waiting outside my door in the exact same posture as last time.
I'd siphoned off her magic power and forcibly sedated her unstable mind, and now she was showing me an utterly passive version of herself—one that did nothing except execute the commands she'd already been given. I didn't see that as a negative. She wasn't a colleague I worked with, nor a retainer entrusted with anything major; there was no harm in her being extremely passive.
A beautiful woman following me around quietly, ready to do whatever she was told—any man who disliked that would have to possess a truly distinctive set of tastes.
"I was thinking I'd check on some patients for the first time in a while."
"Understood. I'll guide you."
She gave a slight bow of her head and walked ahead of me. Her narrow waist swayed side to side in rhythm with her steps, her hips full and rounded. Had she always walked like that? The question surfaced on its own. Her figure was so Western in proportion that she drew more eyes than the beastman guards and mages did.
Had turning into a Dream Demon altered even little things like the way she walked? Her backside bounced upward with every step, as if proving its elasticity. That Western rear view stirred me.
'Now that I'm looking at her, I'm getting turned on again.'
If Lee Ha-rin was devoted, then Kim Ha-eun was submissive. Similar, yet very different in the kind of arousal they triggered. And her body kept getting sleeker by the day.
Her going off and doing whatever she wanted without asking still irritated me, but a man's instincts took one look at that beautiful face and conceded the match. If I'd been born and raised in a fantasy world, I might have flown into a rage. But twenty-first-century modern sensibilities were still rooted firmly in my head. Worse, what Kim Ha-eun had actually done was, strictly speaking, a form of medical treatment. The female student had come out of it on her own without me lifting a finger.
I'd put a leash on her, stolen her magic, pressed down on her Origin, and the whole thing had ended in a pleasure-driven punishment that went all the way to rough, punishing sex. A beautiful woman who was devoted to me made a single mistake, and I'd tortured her with pleasure inside a dream for it. Made me feel like a real piece of shit. By this world's standards, my actions were perfectly justified, but...
'I feel like absolute garbage about it.'
What could I do? I felt like garbage. A man's instincts didn't go anywhere—I was helplessly weak to a beautiful woman. If she'd at least had a bad attitude about it, that would be one thing. But she'd admitted it was her fault immediately and accepted her punishment with humility. If I kept being angry at her after that, wouldn't that make me the petty one?
Was this a body fixation, a sex fixation? I was putting that huge stolen mass of magic power to good use, but I still felt a little guilty about sealing off her magic absorption entirely.
I kept turning those thoughts over as I moved my magic power. What came to mind was a rubber hose and a gas station. She'd been expending magic for days now, and I'd never refilled her.
A portion of that enormous magic reservoir sloshed and began flowing into her in a slow, controlled stream. Her reaction went a direction I could never have predicted.
"H-hyah—?!"
Her knees drew together and her shoulders quivered on the spot. The moan that came with it was embarrassing just to hear. If I hadn't instantly coiled the moving magic back under control, everyone outside the building might have heard it too. I found myself genuinely grateful for the reflexes I'd forged during the apocalypse.
'What is this, some cheap adult game?'
She was feeling pleasure from magic power alone. What exactly was going on here? Dream Demons were a race that read emotions and memories and manipulated dreams, not a race that made people come just by injecting magic into them.
'If that's the case, I'm not a Dream Demon, I'm a sex demon. Fuck.'
Patients could wait. Kim Ha-eun needed attention first. More accurately, maybe Kim Ha-eun had become the patient.
"C-constellation?"
I walked over to her as she trembled, her legs unsteady. In less than a minute, the first thing I noticed was her skin, flushed bright red. Pale white skin, a Western figure, body heated and lightly slicked with sweat. The sight was so provocative it looked like she was filming outdoor-exposure pornography. Not that I had any intention of doing outdoor-exposure play in the middle of the training grounds.
"Take my hand and get up."
"Yes... thank you..."
Her face was burning scarlet as she ducked her head and reached for my hand. Her fingers were warmer than usual, trembling against my palm. I thought about giving her some time for her buckling legs to steady themselves, but standing in the middle of the training grounds with magic power coiled tight around us would draw too much attention. So I just pulled her along.
"...Hehe."
"Hm?"
Even in the middle of all this, was she actually happy that I was leading her? Her quaking legs and slowed pace should have made her wrist hurt, but there she was, grinning like an idiot about it.
'Is that not passive obedience? Is she just a masochist?'
No, wait—weren't masochists people who experienced pain as pleasure? What did you call someone who experienced submission as pleasure, then?
Her flushed skin combined with her glassy, unfocused eyes kept tilting my train of thought in a lewd direction. Specifically, in a female:drug kind of direction.
I couldn't go to a ward full of patients in this state. I changed course immediately and headed for the Sanctum where my quarters were. Han Ye-ji's team was at the shooting range, doing drills and making bets. Lee Ha-rin had said she was going to the Magic Building to look over a new paper. So the only people at the Sanctum would be the guards at the entrance. Nobody else.
The beastman guards politely averted their gazes as we passed. But their bodies gave them away despite themselves—their noses twitched.
"Ah, that—"
"Let's just get inside."
Kim Ha-eun's face heated to the point of bursting when she saw that. It wasn't sexual arousal turning her face red—it was pure shame. Since I was a man, my quarters' entrance was staffed with more male guards than female ones, and that had to be unbearable for her. In my previous life, when men got erections they hid them by singing the national anthem, covering themselves with their shirts, adjusting their posture. How many had walked around proudly displaying one? Not many.
I looked at Kim Ha-eun, stopped dead in the entrance hall with shame blazing across her face. The sleepy, drunk, dazed eyes had been nice, but the eyes glistening as if tears might spill over at any moment were nice too. That a pretty face beat everything—that was a fact the world turning upside-down couldn't deny.
So I roused my magic power without further delay.
"Constellation, what should I—yah!"
I prodded her with the hose of magic power and she jolted in alarm. Now that I was looking at it, it was less a rubber hose and more like a tentacle. Maybe the memory of the Unfading Giant Tree binding my wrists with vines was surfacing.
I shaped the magic power into vines and bound Kim Ha-eun tightly. Not in the titillating, artfully wrapped style you'd see in porn, but the way a snake constricts its prey—coiling around her entire body.
"H-hyaaah, hyaaaaah—"
A harrowing wail came from inside the mass of magic. A moan so loud it was like someone had cranked the speaker volume all the way up by mistake. It brought back memories of secretly watching porn and then realizing your earbud volume was still at max.
'She's absorbing normally, so why is she reacting like this?'
She seemed to absorb magic through her skin, as if breathing through it—the ropes of magic wrapped around her were visibly thinning. Each time, I replenished them, pressing more magic onto her like packing snow onto a snowman. Was I supposed to keep this up until the absorption stopped?
'If I just pumped it into her directly, would it get out of hand?'
She was already trembling and climaxing from skin contact alone. If I combined it with sex and hammered magic power into her directly, things would probably escalate badly. I'd have to keep replenishing her magic this way until she got used to it.
I kept pushing magic into her slowly as I thought. She sucked it in like a parched sponge, and each time, those little hitching gasps—"hih, hih"—escaped her. At this point, something had to be wrong. The female student from the Yoke-Severing Sword was the same way, and somehow everyone whose Origin I'd touched seemed a little off.
'Am I messing something up when I touch it?'
Kim Ha-eun's face after her magic absorption finished was... well. The only thing I could do was grab some wet wipes and clean her up. Tears streaking down her face, the rims of her eyes flushed red, her mouth hanging open as she panted in sharp gasps, her disheveled hair clinging to the corners of her lips.
"I-I'm so sorry..."
She reached out her hands as if overwhelmed by the favor when I gently wiped from her forehead down to her cheeks with a tissue. But the ongoing pleasure had sapped all her strength, and she couldn't even manage to hold the wet wipe between her fingers.
'I really think I messed something up.'
A vague unease settled over me, like the feeling from childhood when a Blue Screen suddenly appeared. Nursing that nebulous sensation, I lifted Kim Ha-eun's head onto my lap. She squirmed as if, yet again, she didn't dare presume—but with a body too weak to even hold a wet wipe, how was she supposed to escape?
"I'll get up right away..."
"It's fine. Stay still."
I was mulling over the Origin, idly stroking her hair and cheeks, when a heavy knock-knock sounded at the door.
"Are you in, Constellation?"
A voice I didn't recognize. But the presence was familiar.
"...Come in."
The person who entered was a handsome man with flowing blond hair and piercing blue eyes. A classic Western pretty-boy. He dropped to his knees without preamble.
I knew who he was.
A knight of the Incinerating Tyrant's personal guard. And the older brother of the woman who had died at the Academy.