Chapter 193: Preliminaries 2
Chapter 193: Preliminaries 2
Dozens of matches that ended in frantic flailing inside of ten seconds flat.
A skittish beauty who recoiled at every little thing.
Given the choice between the two, I'd take the beauty every time.
Hard not to sympathize with all the complaint threads flooding the internet lately.
On the screen, a nearly naked shaman faced off against a shaman buried under layers of ornaments.
The light-brown-skinned shaman had painted her body like living canvas,
brandishing her staff with her pretty teardrop breasts fully exposed.
Her opponent, covered head to toe in colorful bird-feather regalia,
let out a piercing shriek and sprang into the air, rattling a bell-tipped rod—
—only for every ornament to explode off her body, just as the internet had promised, before she crumpled to the floor.
Barely five seconds from start to finish. At least it wasn't one second flat, so I suppose that's something.
At this rate it's less a tournament arena and more ten-second glimpses of naked women: adult broadcasting.
Indistinguishable from scrolling a porn site for lewd gifs.
Unsurprisingly, it was the kind of hollow duel Song Ye-na would never spare a second glance.
"So. How does it feel to win a duel like that?"
"There isn't much... worth calling a feeling."
She turned from the screen and leaned into me against the sofa, almost sprawling out to lounge. Her swordswoman's body, honed to a razor's edge, took my weight like the finest cushion. I let my fingers wander idly, stroking her thigh while I kept talking.
Hm. The way things are going, this has turned into the missus teasing the farmhand.
Song Ye-na had acquired a voyeurism quirk because of me, and that, along with Lee Ha-rin, was the hand she was dealt when she made her contract. So when I tuck her against my side and run a gentle hand over her the same way I'd handle Han Ye-ji, her face starts flushing bright red, just like our incarnations back in the early days.
Han Ye-ji, Lee Ha-rin, Kim Ha-eun, Song Ye-na — all four of my incarnations, and every last one of them is a virgin who's barely ever spoken to a man because all she's done is study and train. By this world's standards, a virgin like that is little more than a laughingstock, but if I'm enjoying myself, what else matters?
"Still, her blows felt heavier than a murim-in's. Knights really are nothing like martial artists."
Calling her a murim-in here feels a little silly, but a murim-in is still a murim-in, I suppose.
By the time the hand stroking her thigh drifted up to her waist, she had recovered her composure. A waist so lean I couldn't find a single ounce of spare flesh. What my fingertips registered wasn't a waist narrowed by cosmetic Dream Demon magic but the solid core muscle forged through sword training and mabo. Where my other incarnations' skin felt like pressing a fingertip into springy pudding or firm tofu, Song Ye-na's skin felt like pressing a fingertip into a block of rubber polished to a smooth, dense surface — a waist so taut you'd wonder if a fingertip could even dent it at all.
"Well, I mean, just looking at them makes it obvious how different they are, right?"
"Y-yek!"
The sly hand creeping upward lost its battle with curiosity and slid back down. The moment I grabbed a handful of her rear, she jolted and bit her tongue, answering me like a raw recruit snapping to attention.
By now the TV had moved on to the tournament's final match. Naturally, neither of us found it particularly important.
※
Voyeurism.
Translate the Chinese characters literally and it's a compulsion to witness obscene acts. Put simply: the person derives pleasure from spying on others in lewd situations. Honestly speaking, whether you're peeping or filming, isn't that just criminal territory? Which leaves me stuck with one question that's incredibly difficult for someone carrying the sensibilities of another world.
'When you're alone with a woman who has a voyeurism kink, how exactly are you supposed to satisfy her?'
I'm hardly a master of paraphilias and I don't know that much about voyeurism, but there's one detail most 19+ subculture works depict over and over:
'These are the people who prefer masturbating to sex.'
Because the paraphilia has colonized their brain, they'd rather spy on someone and masturbate alone than lie with another person and have sex. So what, are we supposed to face each other and have a mutual face-to-face masturbation session? You want me to sit here jerking off into the air with a gorgeous woman right in front of me?
all of this is the confusion of a human — me. As a Dream Demon and the Constellation of Nightmares, I know a very simple answer. The answer I devised as the master of a lucid dream where everything you imagine becomes real.
"My Constellation...?"
"I'll go wash up first."
Before my eyes stood Song Ye-na, cheeks flushed. In a motel room with enormous mirrors installed across the walls and ceiling, we faced each other and prepared like a bashful young couple.
I, the man, had casually slipped into the shower first, which meant Song Ye-na was outside getting the condoms or towels ready, and a second Song Ye-na was probably getting ready to masturbate.
'Eh, I'll just make her a clone.'
The content of the lucid dream we'd slid into while leaning against each other on the sofa was simple. The virgin Song Ye-na, yearning for a tender first time, and Lethargic Nightmare make love. And on the other side of the motel's magic-mirror wall, Song Ye-na's clone watches and gets off on it. Splitting her into the self-conscious Song Ye-na dreaming of romance and the unconscious Song Ye-na craving voyeurism.
Beyond the magic-mirror wall, Song Ye-na Mk. II was gnawing anxiously at her fingernails. Feeling emotions so intense they seemed to seep right through the mirror, all the way into the bathroom. Getting aroused while feeling an NTR-like jealousy toward her own self — seems like this is mostly my fault.
Even though it's a dream, I let the hot water soak into my body and dragged things out. Because I could feel the burning gaze flying at me through the frosted glass.
"Towel out there?"
"Y-yes!"
I'd barely touched the shampoo or body wash, just kept splashing hot water over myself, and now I shouted toward the bathroom door with the excuse of a towel I didn't need. Startled by a voice louder than the shower spray, a silhouette stumbled toward me. Beyond the frosted glass, a trembling hand struggled to push through the narrow gap. The glass door, shoved back just far enough to crumple the towel and scrape her knuckles. And through that crack came the rush of hot steam billowing out.
"Here, the towel..."
"Ah, thanks."
A door opened so narrowly you couldn't see past an elbow, let alone her eyes. I didn't take the towel slipped through that gap — I just yanked the door wide open. Impossible with a hinged door, but a sliding door? Doable.
"Ack! You have to cover—"
"Why would I do that?"
The cold air crashed against my body, heated hot as a bath. It hadn't been this temperature earlier; she must've turned on the air conditioning out there ahead of time.
I turned my head and through the steam saw Song Ye-na covering her eyes with the hand that wasn't holding the towel. Her fingers were slightly parted, so I could see everything as she stole glances at my chest. Then, from beyond the wall, the lecherous aura surged once more, intense as ever.
Voyeurism isn't just about peeping on sex scenes — it's a paraphilia where spying on anything lewd triggers arousal. Seeing this man's body, forged in a dream, seemed to excite her.
"What're you doing? Not going to wash?"
"No — I'm washing."
She practically dropped the towel into my hands and fled into the bathroom. Still, the others didn't panic like this just from seeing me naked. Is it because she's a virgin who never even watched porn, locked away in that remote house doing nothing but sword practice? Well, if I thought back to the Song Ye-na I saw inside her Origin, it made sense. The only male bodies she'd ever seen were probably the chunks of meat at the military base — nothing but scars, blood, and monster venom. Never visited a rear-echelon unit; she was thrown straight into the frontlines alongside her Constellation.
'Come to think of it... isn't that basically a child soldier?'
The uncomfortable truth of stuffing a minor into a soul-destroying war fleetingly surfaced, but so did the truth that this continent had been hammered flat by the Creator and every day since has been war. The Creator, spanning universes and parallel worlds, made it that way. What can I do about it.
"Um, excuse me—"
"Yeah? What?"
As always, I was lost in useless thoughts when a hesitant voice sounded from beyond the frosted glass. She'd opened the door even less than before. I grabbed the door and yanked it open again.
"There aren't any towels?!"
Startled again, but this time she didn't cover her eyes. Not that she was covering her own naked body, either. What man in any world would shyly hide his chest and his dick? Two of them and one hidden one — the only thing that mattered among the three was my, the man's, naked body.
I toweled my hair off with a few sharp pats and tossed the towel aside. Immediately I felt my lower half, stiff with anticipation, swinging free. Her eyes dropped smoothly, naturally downward — like a soccer player stealing the ball from a child. And from beyond the wall, a wave of lust so intense it almost felt slick. Though I showed not a trace of the demureness expected of men in this world, the body I displayed with such bold confidence, chiseled like a sculpture, satisfied both Song Ye-nas at once. Rolling my body like a skilled male prostitute wasn't what this virgin Song Ye-na wanted, anyway.
"...So, how long are you planning to stand there?"
Feigning that it was too difficult to keep exposing myself, I settled lightly onto the edge of the bed and pulled the blanket over me. Acting shy and modest doesn't come naturally to my personality, but when a reaction like that makes things more entertaining, I'll put on the act.
A beautiful woman with a magnificent body trudged toward me, her eyes half-bloodshot. And already, from the mirrored wall beside the bed, wet, squelching sounds had begun to rise.
From voyeurism to her ideal type — she really was a woman brutally honest about her own sexual tastes.