Chapter 182: Unique Taste 1
Chapter 182: Unique Taste 1
The sudden urge to see a fur-chaser wasn't mine.
To be precise, it wasn't me thinking, "Let me see what this guy looks like—"
It was the Dream Demon's instinct going, "I want to rip open the dream of an unusual specimen and have a look."
The way a wild animal, encountering a creature it's never seen before, grows wary and watches it—
the Dream Demon's instinct apparently drives it to observe an Incarnation with peculiar sexual tastes.
'Screwing around with his Origin might link him to voyeurism or masochism—fur-chasing could be an Origin issue too.'
Even if you handle Nightmares, a Dream Demon is still a Dream Demon.
Does it all just come down to being a species specialized in sex?
Lee Ha-rin, who hadn't grasped that fact, wore a face full of questions
as she left the room, saying she'd summon the Incarnation who submitted the inquiry.
If I were to say something like, "If you have a request, come in person,"
the Incarnation would have no choice but to obey the Constellation.
"A few of them happen to be at the Academy right now—shall I call one over?"
"Yeah, bring one."
Well, not that I was without personal curiosity.
It was just intriguing that someone would make such a blatantly embarrassing request.
I'd figured someone would investigate in secret or phrase it indirectly,
but I didn't expect them to just ask me directly without any buffer.
You're a researcher of contract magic—you could've inquired about familiars instead of Incarnations.
If you were a murim-in, couldn't you have deflected by saying you'd attain enlightenment on your own?
A couple good with money hands their kid 5,000 won and says to eat pork cutlet for dinner;
they don't say, "Motel rooms are pricey, so go outside and fuck." Same principle.
White lies between people are, as ever, necessary.
'Though, are guys here circumcised?'
Still, in this world men are treated with a bit more delicacy,
so I doubt there are any victims tricked by a pork-cutlet lie into hunting whales.
I was idling through these useless thoughts when I heard a knock-knock—.
"Um, excuse me—"
A languid voice, its tail end mushy and drawn out.
A peculiar tone I'd never heard before—had to be that fur-chaser Incarnation.
I stopped my idle musings and immediately called toward the door.
"You can come in."
"Hello—"
The person who opened the door and stepped in was, unexpectedly, a woman with a perfectly decent build.
A white woman with slightly unkempt blonde hair leaning toward brown.
Did they call that dirty blonde? Anyway, she was quite pretty.
Going by first impressions alone, she seemed like the type of sociable, lively, strong-willed beauty
who'd be the mood-maker at a drinking party.
And yet, hidden in her inner thoughts was a furry who wanted to get railed by a Furry One.
When I fixed her with a searching stare, maybe she got spooked,
or maybe it was her first time facing a Constellation directly—
she came walking over with an awkward, creaking gait.
"Sit over there."
"Yes, understood—"
Once she sat across from me at the table, her tension was palpable just from her eyes.
She seemed more nervous than any Incarnation I'd met so far.
Had this one never even met her own Constellation?
Her fingers fidgeted without pause, her pupils unable to fix on any single spot.
Her tone was airily unconcerned, but she was fretting like a timid student hauled into the faculty office.
I didn't particularly need conversation, so I made her lift her head.
"Hey. Raise your head."
"Y-yes?!"
Our eyes met, and magic power surged over her.
Her posture would be a bit uncomfortable if she fell asleep at the table,
but I wasn't planning to keep her in a lucid dream all day long.
※
I caught myself feeling disappointed by the ordinary scenery.
'I thought the dream would be twisted too, since I sensed something twisted in her.'
If a drama or movie script somewhere had the line "a scene of an ordinary street,"
the cityscape before my eyes would've worked as a direct visual for it.
That said, it wasn't entirely without strangeness.
Just as the near-fanatical Constellation otaku Lee Ha-rin's Nightmare
had been a mundane world where Constellations didn't exist,
this world also had exactly one oddity.
"Agh, Manager Kim is at it again today—"
"With this weather, it's an automatic class cancellation."
"Isn't this your third time?"
"Got three people for a scrim against the next class?"
The peculiarity was that every person wandering the city streets was a Beastkin.
Not just beastkin with animal ears, to be precise—they were bipedal animals.
A pitch-black water buffalo, walking on two legs, groomed its long fur while peering into a hand mirror;
on top of a low wall, young cat-girls scampered about, their dress hems fluttering.
I turned my head at something elongated, and there were giraffes, elephants—
gigantically built animal beastkin lumbering around—that was the city's scenery.
Melted into that bizarre landscape, I, too, had become a werewolf, like Loyal Fang.
'Not a wolf—a dog, maybe? Who cares.'
In a world of the one-eyed, a two-eyed man was considered disabled, wasn't it?
In this world populated only by Beastkin, a near-two-meter-tall
wolf-like beastkin counted as an ordinary passerby, apparently.
The funny thing was that even amidst all this, the gender-role reversal was maintained.
Bulging chests covered in fur were bared and swinging freely as they walked,
but the males, with their broad slabs of chest, kept their torsos covered with tops.
So: no clothes or maybe just a pair of pants sloppily thrown on meant female;
properly dressed like a human meant male.
My own body likewise had a suit draped over its thick fur.
Far off in the high sky, I saw the face of a bird in flight;
from four blocks away, my nose caught the smell of frying grease at a food stall.
The original plan had been to enter this Incarnation's Origin directly,
but curiosity got the better of me and I began roaming the city.
"Welcome—looking for something in particular?"
"Uh, no."
"How about this, then? It's a new product that just came out—"
The moment I stepped into a shop that looked something like a café, a fox beastkin popped right out.
A male, probably—he wore dark-gray slacks and a light-gray shirt like a uniform.
Then, wasn't he beaming and swishing his tail side-to-side at me?
Whoa—what's this? Before I could even gather my wits, a waterfall of information came rushing at me—wham—.
When I came to, my shopping basket held a new-brand dog treat and something like a folding claw-trimmer for Fangs.
'Now that's a hyper-specific dream.'
A dream is a world built inside the unconscious mind.
Because of that, a lack of imagination or information imposes limits on the dream itself.
The way a Paleolithic primitive doesn't dream of enjoying chimaek while watching a movie.
You know—there's that joke in humor posts about being right about to get it on with a woman
and then waking up from the dream because you lacked the data files.
In that regard, this Incarnation, the dream's owner, was pretty serious about it.
Her thing wasn't just fur-chasing as a mere sexual taste—
she had truly imagined things like, "If a world of Beastmen actually arrived, here's how it would change—"
and apparently stored up vivid reference material for it somewhere.
"Come check out our XXXL size special—"
"Sorry! We're completely out of ingredients for the extra-large salad!"
A deer in front of a clothing shop, flapping a gigantic shirt like a flag;
an elephant turning away from a salad bowl the size of a hiking backpack with disappointed steps.
Who goes around regularly imagining this kind of scene in their daily life?
A herd of bison beastkin carrying coffees so huge you could bathe a newborn in them.
A species of animal beastkin I'd never seen before, gnawing on a blunt, elongated stick—was it sharpening its teeth?
And the owner of this dream, striking with her horn-rimmed glasses—a female who, despite that, had bundled herself in clothes—
"Ah—"
"?"
Should I say she was a fox wearing glasses?
The protagonist of this lucid dream, transformed into a beastkin just like the rest, was looking at me.
When our eyes met, I saw her amber-brown tail swishing side to side.
She was walking leisurely with a coffee in hand, and her outfit was ordinary—a college student, maybe.
Her tail swaying and ears twitching like that, she strode right up to me.
This slender fox beastkin with exquisitely sleek brown fur came up to me.
since I didn't possess the fur-chaser attribute myself,
the only urge that welled up in me—more than lust—was the desire to pet her ears or her tail.
"Um."
"Yes."
"Could I maybe get your number?"
I hadn't expected to hear that line even in a Beastkin world.
If anything, it was such an ordinary and clichéd come-on that I briefly spaced out.
She must have taken that as rejection, because weren't her ears and tail drooping way, way down?
'Goddamn, that's fucking adorable.'
No lust flickered up, but other desires came sprouting up vigorously.
Her fur was sleek, and her features were pretty—probably thanks to some Incarnation buff.
I felt weirdly like a bad owner who'd snatched a puppy's treat away,
so I yanked my smartphone out of my pocket, its weight a solid presence.
Come to think of it, I'd kind of forgotten after all my rolling around in the apocalypse,
but in my previous life I'd liked pets quite a bit—dogs, cats, and such.
Enough that, to kill time, I'd become a regular at the neighborhood cat café and gotten on open, friendly terms with the owner's family.
The kindly owner who'd sheltered abandoned cats had long since become a fistful of ash and scattered, but—anyway, that's how it was.
"Here. Put your number in."
"Ah—oh, yeah! Thank you!"
Her tail swayed, side to side, like a branch trembling in the wind.
Just as I was mulling over whether grabbing a Beastkin's tail counted as sexual harassment or not,
behind her, a raucous clamor slammed against my eardrums—wham—.
"Whoa—what?! She actually pulled it off?!"
"No way—there is no way she pulled that off!!!"
Several women with dog-heads, looking something like dachshunds or hyenas.
Except, unlike the Incarnation who was the dream's owner, they weren't wearing anything—full Furry One mode.
When I stared blankly, wondering what kind of situation this was,
I saw the edge of the world crumbling away in the distance.
'You're telling me, in her own dream, her friends tell her there's no way she'd succeed at getting a guy's number—and she actually wakes up from the dream because of it?'
So, was this one also a case of "lacking those data files"?