Chapter 160: Contract 2
Chapter 160: Contract 2
My magic power was tied to emotion.
It read joy, rage, sorrow, and pleasure, identified what people feared,
and dragged another person's Nightmare into reality.
A Dream Demon's body seducing women was a function of the flesh, not the magic—
the violet magic I wielded possessed the ability to summon dream-entities into the waking world.
Which meant the Dream Demon Heart of the Exiled Serpent worked the same way.
Picking up men in back alleys was a function of the body that came with being a Dream Demon.
The Dream Demon magic she possessed granted the ability to leave no trace behind.
"In other words, she doesn't leave traces, but can't actually block pursuit. I suspect that's how she fooled the Academy barrier as well."
The more I faced Heart of the Exiled Serpent, the more that became clear.
The more I learned, the more obvious it was that this bitch was a fucking idiot.
"Meaning?"
"You made direct contact with her, Constellation—since you're a Dream Demon yourself. That created a trace."
The countless trails left behind by the incarnations of the Tail-biting Hound.
She'd been abusing a charm-type mind-control ability
to enjoy men, booze, and food without ever paying a single coin.
Because her magic eluded every incarnation on the continent,
she could exploit it to deceive citizens and run wild as she pleased,
and nobody could prove she'd ever descended at all.
Sweep the scene with psychic powers and not a single trace would turn up—
missing booze and food got written off as ordering errors,
and the men she raped assumed they'd simply blacked out and let it go.
If a woman got raped, at least there'd be semen left behind,
but a raped man left no evidence whatsoever, so she never got caught.
A blind spot the gender-reversed world had never imagined.
No matter how recklessly she rampaged, she left no trace.
With no trace, neither incarnation nor Constellation could catch her.
So she thought she could laze around the mortal plane doing whatever the hell she wanted.
Like something straight out of a mind-control porn plot.
"So what's the problem?"
"We can trace the traces we now have, but we can't predict when or where she'll descend. If she at least followed a pattern, we could hand her off to a profiler, but... well, as I said earlier, she's got bad taste in men."
"And?"
"She shows up wherever, whenever, next to any handsome man she likes—she doesn't even stick to one continent."
So not a cock-block patrol—or was it a pussy patrol, or a clit patrol in this world?
The point was, she was running completely off her own whims.
My head spun the more I listened.
Like picking porn off a menu—Western one day, Japanese the next—
she descended beside whatever man caught her eye that hour
and fucked around on the Dream Demon's magic tab.
Who on earth could predict what flavor of porn some woman would jerk off to tomorrow?
"If you look here: yesterday she seduced a man at a club in a small Northern Continent city. The day before, at a gym in the Southern Continent's capital, a man mid-workout—"
"That's—I think that's enough explaining."
Her tastes weren't even consistent.
Muscular gym rats,
small-statured high school boys on their way home.
She didn't limit herself to clubs and bars—
she roamed the streets and walked straight up to any man she wanted.
Indistinguishable from the protagonist of a mind-control porn.
Which was exactly why they'd come to consult me.
The Tail-biting Hound was a tracking-specialized Constellation.
I still couldn't figure out if the Tail-biting Hound was a him or a her,
but either way, the Hound's incarnations were the same.
Based in the Southern Continent but popping up in the Northern Continent was already a problem—
even a couple cities over meant no chance of an immediate response.
Like a detective on a stakeout in downtown Seoul
trying to arrest a fugitive who'd just materialized in Beijing.
'This continent is way bigger than anyone thinks.'
Whether the Creator had wanted to gather as many souls as possible or what,
the distances between cities were staggering.
Did I need to hand the clone-intercept job off to someone else?
Have the mages track her in real time,
then dispatch a clone of my own to kill her the moment Heart of the Exiled Serpent descended?
A clone she'd manifested specifically for sex would have an active pain response and full sensory input.
Sending magic-constructed clones before the Tyrant's judgment wasn't an option,
but killing her enough times to shatter her psyche felt doable.
In the end, I still needed other people's help, whichever way I sliced it.
'This bitch is truly impossible to pin down.'
Objectively speaking, it was an exceptional ability.
Setting aside the past-life political battles that had gotten her banished into space,
judged purely on Dream Demon powers, hers might even be more useful than mine.
No matter how you wielded Authorities and magic, you left no evidence—
absolute untraceability combined with absolute mind control.
What separated her from a cheap power-fantasy porn protagonist?
I could almost understand why she'd run wild,
drunk on the omnipotence of invisibility and hypnosis.
Grab any man she pleased, fuck him, swap bodily fluids,
and even that wouldn't become a lead—how reassuring was that?
Though she'd probably never imagined getting stabbed in the eye by a fellow Dream Demon who could then track her down.
※
When I first took the commission,
I thought I'd wrap it up cleanly on my own.
Then again, it really had started small, hadn't it.
The original job was simple: the Incinerating Tyrant would grab an incarnation,
and I'd do the research to track Heart of the Exiled Serpent from there.
If I hadn't dreamed that first precognitive vision—if the Incinerating Tyrant had really driven a space battleship into that small Northern city
and launched an orbital bombardment—that's exactly how it would have gone.
If not for my first precognitive dream, a city would be ash right now.
The arrest dragged a small Northern city into the mess,
the investigation tangled with the Academy barrier,
and before I knew it, something resembling an academic conference had convened around that single incarnation.
'Even the butterfly effect doesn't go this hard.'
Factor in the Tail-biting Hound and its incarnations,
and the headcount tied up in this case blew past triple digits like nothing.
We were about to catch the mastermind of a murder that had kicked up ripples this enormous—
"Are we absolutely sure this method works?"
"Yes—she could hole up deep inside a sanctum, but... based on her behavior so far, she'll descend. No question."
And the fact that she was posting photos online just made the whole thing absurd.
The idea Han Ye-ji, Lee Ha-rin, and Kim Ha-eun had cooked up together.
[Grinning Hunting Constellation]
[Recommend If You Want to Get Fucked by the Girl in the Pic]
[Update on the Constellation Who Declared War on the Incinerating Tyrant]
The plan: post Heart of the Exiled Serpent's face all over the internet.
When the Academy asked the police departments and guilds of every continent for cooperation,
and that cooperation was granted, the information trickling down to low-level cops and small towns
was maddeningly slow.
So we'd use the internet, which was far faster than the police and guilds.
And we weren't just writing posts on the Constellation and Incarnation Gallery, either.
[EMERGENCY BROADCAST] Fallen Constellation Doxxing Project
[LIVE] Academy-issued Breaking News
[Academy Incarnation Live] There's a Constellation Who Preys on Men?
'My head is genuinely spinning.'
The Constellation and Incarnation Gallery—Seonghwa Gallery for short.
I should probably have spotted this coming when Han Ye-ji and Lee Ha-rin first dug in.
Actually, it wasn't just the two of them.
Back when Han Ye-ji was with her guild on the Eastern Continent,
those guild members had posted proof shots of me hauling coffee around too.
It was a world where anonymous internet communities existed.
So naturally, internet streaming sites existed too.
These were people who, desperate to become incarnations, would join dedicated gyms or even enlist in the military.
Would people with that near-maniacal fervor balk at livestreaming?
"Are there really this many streamers?"
"It's all about visibility. Pretty much every incarnation who serves a more open-minded Constellation does it, I'd bet."
"Visibility... right."
Why had the Incinerating Tyrant loaded up newly contracted Constellations' rookie incarnations—first- through third-years—
onto space battleships for a continental tour event?
Wasn't it to blast his name across every continent, north, south, east, and west?
"And the Academy is normally a broadcast-prohibited zone. This situation's an exception."
Made sense: the Academy was essentially
a joint military training facility for incarnations.
Of course broadcasts would normally be banned.
I'd wandered the place plenty and never once spotted a cadet taking selfies.
I'd caught plenty of couples breaking dorm rules to have sex in hiding, though.
The Constellations got a visibility multiplier compared to usual and were happy.
The incarnations raked in extra income and decent side-points from their personal streams.
And the Academy—
"Actually, how'd you get Academy approval so fast?"
"The volume of goods donated under your name turned out to be larger than expected. According to the negotiators, they're actually anxious about how much they've received. Would you like to review the list later? They set aside some of the more valuable items and suggested you not donate everything."
So the Academy had swallowed too much from me to dare object.
Now that I thought about it, every single item I'd ever received under the banner of 'treatment fees'—
I'd forwarded them all to the Academy, hadn't I.
I possessed zero specialized magical expertise,
but rare valuables kept arriving as gifts, so I'd dumped the whole pile onto them out of sheer laziness.
Which meant the Academy had been taking dirty looks from other Constellations—
eating up a Constellation's gifts without lifting a finger in return.
"Wow, it's not just personal streams anymore—newsroom reporters are filing articles now too. This'll be in tomorrow's morning edition."
While I was listening to Lee Ha-rin summarize the negotiations,
Han Ye-ji, who'd been staring at her smartphone, held up an internet news article.
[Constellation Today] The Fallen Constellation the Academy Unmasked... What Crimes Did She Commit?
[Photo News] Illegal Intrusion Incarnation at the Academy: Which Constellation Does She Belong To?
Was it the bizarre clickbait angle of legally being allowed to trash-talk a Constellation?
The internet, viewed through the smartphone the Academy had provided,
was in a state of absolute chaos worse than any incident I'd seen in my previous life.