Chapter 199: Finals 3
Chapter 199: Finals 3
The emotion flooding Kim Ha-eun's wide eyes was unmistakable: euphoria.
Not the physical pleasure of a night with a handsome man—this was a spiritual high.
The sensation of a soul evolving, shedding its humanity to become a magically superior species.
"Ahh— Constellation!"
She clutched her necklace as she milked more semen from my mouth, then, eyes rolling back in a frenzy, grabbed my thighs and drove her hips against me.
A surge of magic power swept through the room, and the office chair vanished, replaced by a massive bed—sparing us any undignified toppling of furniture.
A beauty with skin so pale it looked almost bloodless.
I'd assumed she'd fully transformed into a Dream Demon last time. Apparently not.
The body's evolution apparently needs the soul upgraded to match.
'What is this, upgrading computer parts? Now I have to worry about component compatibility?'
When the horns and wings appeared before, I figured she'd become a full Dream Demon. Wrong.
A completed Dream Demon body, charged with my magic power, and now a fully charged Dream Demon soul.
Only now did I grasp the true might of a complete Dream Demon—and I don't mean the sexual aspect. I mean what was happening outside the window.
"Ha-eun, what's that outside?"
"I don't really know—ah—"
She didn't stop moving her hips, but her gaze kept darting to the window.
A stark-naked beauty plastered against me, and I still couldn't ignore it.
Because the robots outside had started combining.
'Fuck. What the hell is this.'
Drones scattered in every direction were swarming into a hive-like black cloud, and the robots that had been working inside buildings were marching in disciplined ranks like something out of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film.
Their destination was the city center—the building where Kim Ha-eun and I were.
"Ah-hnn, so good, so gooood—!"
"Ha-eun? What's gotten into her?"
She shuddered as if the mana choker around her neck had malfunctioned.
Straddling me, back arched like a bow, riding out her orgasm without a care. Unbelievable.
Outside, robots by the thousands were advancing like the French Revolutionary Army, and she didn't even glance their way.
The black choker glowed.
The robots and drones converged.
And the world grew darker.
※
"So she ate it—no, did it eat her?"
"Mm, I think 'absorbed' is closer."
The city had gone dark, as if a blackout had hit.
Surrounded by robots in that ominous gloom, I summoned my magic power—and when I came to my senses, I was summoning it in my own quarters.
Beastman guards, spooked, came crashing through the door as if they meant to break it down, while Kim Ha-eun, dripping with pleasure and magic, clung to my waist.
Never in my life did I think I'd use Dream Demon powers to summon a wardrobe in front of a door.
I placated the guards knocking frantically and demanding to know if I was all right, sent them away, then roused Kim Ha-eun from her bliss-drunk daze and pieced together what had happened.
"Your heart's really okay?"
"Yes. If anything, I feel healthier. I mean it literally—it feels like there's a power plant inside me now."
"That's not far off."
Kim Ha-eun had swallowed the stone.
No, to be precise, the medium for the dream city had fused into Kim Ha-eun's heart.
What do I even call this? A Dream Heart, instead of a Dragon Heart?
Testing our magic yielded a few discoveries.
"...Leave about three of those in my quarters."
"Got it. Han Ye-ji's place and Lee Ha-rin's lab would appreciate them too."
The functions of the dream city had blended into Kim Ha-eun's abilities.
Where I could materialize and create objects that existed within dreams, Kim Ha-eun could pull out androids and drones from the dream city.
A cooking robot with a built-in coffee machine, a cleaning robot with organizational functions, an air-purifier drone equipped with wireless internet acceleration.
'That bastard The Incinerating Tyrant knew exactly what he was handing me.'
That said, I hadn't found a single downside yet.
Maybe I should see it as evolving beyond flinging raw magic around and into a sci-fi ability that summons robots with magic.
On top of that, she'd effectively swallowed an entire city's worth of power plants, so her mana recovery rate and the durability of her internal magic circuits had been absurdly enhanced.
To be blunt, it was all upside. Which, naturally, only made me more suspicious.
'You don't just hand over something like this without an angle.'
I'd lived in a world where a bottle of water, a can of food, could cost you your chastity—or your life.
Where "there's no such thing as a free lunch" felt like the one true gospel.
Live like that long enough, and even a genuine gift sets off alarms.
"Oh. Every time the mine digs up magic stones, my mana seems to recover."
"What else?"
"Summoned robots that break seem to go to a repair bay... and even if they don't break, prolonged activity sends them back to recharge."
"The ability to smother opponents with magic and overlay dreams?"
"The soul-healing abilities are still intact."
Those flying drones would be perfect for filming the tournament, and a robot that handles both cleaning and paperwork could double as a housekeeper.
But the ability to blanket an area with magic and heal souls hadn't disappeared.
If Kim Ha-eun ever had to fight, she'd probably lean on Dream Demon magic for mental attacks and use swarms of androids and drones to cover the close-quarters gap.
I'd worry about the deeply suspect Incinerating Tyrant later.
As I ran experiment after experiment to sate my curiosity, another urgent knock—rap-rap-rap—cut through from outside.
"Mm? I told you I'm fine, what is it now—?"
"C-Constellation?! It's not that!"
The door burst open with borderline insolence.
I peered out, trying to parse what was happening, and it wasn't just one or two people.
Han Ye-ji, fully kitted out in duel gear with a gun, Lee Ha-rin clutching an unfamiliar long staff and a bundle of parchment scrolls, even Song Ye-na in a snow-white martial-arts uniform with her sword already drawn, poised as if she'd flown here.
Beyond them, a whole swarm of familiar guards clustered in the corridor—none of them on shift rotation.
Nothing had made sense since earlier, and this wasn't helping.
"Look, the magic surge was an accident. I was testing something."
"What magic surge do you mean, Constellation?"
"...Huh?"
I'd assumed the guards had panicked over the magic I'd summoned inside the room and that my Incarnations had rushed over because of it, but the blank looks told me they had no idea what magic I was talking about. So there was another reason?
I glanced at Kim Ha-eun, who was fiddling with a robot arm. She gave a small shake of her head.
"I was in a lucid dream until just now, so I'm behind. Start explaining."
"Ah, you were inside a dream."
A few female guards' eyes glittered with envy at that, but Han Ye-ji simply lowered her gun with visible relief and stepped inside.
My Incarnations Lee Ha-rin and Song Ye-na followed as if it were the most natural thing.
The remaining beastman guards sniffed the air, ears twitching, and once they confirmed nothing was amiss inside beyond the robot, they withdrew.
A couple of beastmen shot me a lewd look as they caught the words "lucid dream," but hey—this world's women, especially beastkin who prided themselves on following their instincts, were just like that. I wasn't the type of delicate man who'd throw a fit over a dirty look.
"So, what the hell happened that brought the guards down on us like that?"
"Let me turn on the TV first, for context."
"Hm? Go ahead."
Han Ye-ji found the remote and flicked on the screen.
The image that filled it was a handsome man with alabaster skin and flamboyant red hair—shoulder-length, like some medieval European wig.
He sat on an ornate chair, looking down at the camera with practiced arrogance.
Frankly, it was a stupid camera angle that would've given anyone else a double chin, but his face carried it.
Before I could ask why she was showing me this man, the TV boomed.
— O true nobles who bear the bravery of crimson and the composure of verdant green!
— O exalted beings blessed with noble white skin and the green-eyed mark!
I watched, just to hear what nonsense he'd spout next.
But wait—if I hadn't changed the channel, wasn't this the Academy's internal feed?
I'd turned the TV off while watching the live duel broadcast on the Academy's internal channel, so it had to be.
'Back in my world, red-haired gingers were so marginalized they practically got called white-skinned blacks. Here, red hair's a mark of nobility?'
The man's speech boiled down to something simple.
He was insisting that not all Constellations were equal.
Only those like him—red-haired, green-eyed, white-skinned—were true nobility, and he was loudly proclaiming that distinction.
A racist trying to stratify society by skin and hair color, and on top of that, a eugenicist who treated beastkin, elves, and dwarves as lesser species.
Put bluntly, a red-haired Adolf—a fantasy-world Hitler.
"As you can see, he's hijacked the Academy's internal broadcast during the main-round replay and inserted his own."
"Any idea who this joker is?"
"No, it's a Constellation I've never seen before."
The one who answered wasn't Han Ye-ji, who'd been explaining, but Lee Ha-rin, who was staring holes through the screen.
If she didn't know him—and she browsed the Constellation database as a hobby—then the odds were highest that he was a new arrival to this land, like me.
The problem being that this newly hatched baby Constellation had just hijacked the Academy's airwaves.
"A new Constellation, you say?"
"Then he's almost certainly someone's puppet."
"Constellations, ability users..."
A grinding, blood-chilling crack of teeth filled the pause in the conversation.
Every gaze snapped toward Lee Ha-rin, driven by the sheer murderous intensity rolling off her.
She didn't even notice the blood welling from her bitten lip as she gnawed at it, her bloodshot eyes fixed on the screen.
"All Constellations are noble. But some Constellations are more noble than others."
"That statement—that measure of the nobility of Constellations—has been uncontested across the continent for centuries. Uncontestable, rather."
"Because no human standard can ever presume to judge the sacrifices and devotion of the Constellations."
— Behold those vile pretenders who rule through falsehoods!
— Behold them, who claim nobility without bearing its mark!
"That's not the kind of statement that should be casually dismissed even here at the Academy, and someone dares to spew insults at the Constellations inside its walls?"
— And so we declare to those hypocrites, who drape themselves in gaudy ornaments to hide their filth!
Crackle—!
In the darkened room, sparks shot from the TV and the remote.
...So a person really can cry bloody tears if their magic power runs deep enough.
But wait—"some Constellations are more noble than others"—isn't that literally ranking them?
It must mean something different in this world, but this wasn't the time to ask.