The True Nature of the Curse (2)
1.
Why does this bastard keep calling me that?
More than that—wasn't his personality a little different to begin with? Or was this guy the type whose whole attitude shifted depending on whether he was dealing with a man or a woman?
...Was he?
If anything, he had always been the indifferent type, same as me. We only ever had eyes for each other, you could say.
I minimized conversation with other people simply because I found the time wasted on it too precious. I preferred spending those hours clearing monsters, reducing the danger to civilians, making money I could put toward donations or whatever other good I could do. He was similar. A touch more sociable than I was, maybe—but from where I stood, the difference barely registered.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Han Sung-jun."
He snickered as he answered.
That alone sealed it. Whatever this was, it was something else wearing his face.
Absolutely not.
He was a blunt, serious man. Serious enough that I was usually the one needling him. He was not the kind of person who flashed easy smiles at strangers like that.
A fake with the same body. A dream. ...Is this just what dolls are like?
I had never exactly... communed with a doll before. Did every doll have dreams like this?
I never had—but rumor had it that plenty of people used dolls for sexual relief. It made a certain sense. A doll's appearance could be coordinated to the owner's taste, so lusting after one molded into your ideal type was probably common enough among humans weak to emotion and desire.
...I wouldn't know. I had never properly held a conversation with a doll either. I just barked orders—"Do this"—and that was that. To me, a doll had always felt like a high-performance robot vacuum that handled housework on autopilot.
No leads.
While I was still sorting through my thoughts, he reached out. The first thing his hand found was my face.
"What are you thinking about?"
Fingers cupped my jaw with casual ease. Given how much larger he was than me, the hand that closed over my cheek forcibly redirected my gaze until our eyes locked at the same angle.
Those eyes were nothing like the hard, taciturn ones I knew. They had softened into the same look worn by people who went around grinning all day—rounded at the corners, so completely unlike his usual sharp gaze that the whole impression of his face had changed.
"...That you're a fake."
"A fake?"
He chuckled under his breath.
"I am very much Han Sung-jun."
"He isn't like this right now."
Right now, he had the small frame of a first-year middle schooler—smaller even than I was after becoming a female-type doll. When I had scanned my own body with mana, the reading had come back at exactly 163.3 cm. Call it 163 and drop the decimal; his height sat somewhere around 153. Not the 182 or 183 centimeters standing in front of me now.
A thirty-centimeter gap was more than enough to rule out any claim of being the same person.
"I'm the real thing, though."
He shifted the hand holding my face and tapped my lips lightly with his index finger.
"Still feel fake?"
"..."
That sensation just now...
...What kind of dream is this?
The thing in front of me was telling me this was a dream—and yet the touch had felt real beyond any doubt. Lips are a more sensitive area than people tend to think. Even that small, idle tap registered with startling clarity.
"The real Han Sung-jun would never do something like this."
I laid out the plain truth. He was famous for being rigid to a fault. A man like that would never tie a woman down and climb on top of her on a bed.
"Hmm. Is that so?"
He grinned and spoke again.
"Well, so what? Eun-ha's a doll right now."
"I—!"
...I was a doll. That much I couldn't deny.
"And even if I am a fake, what of it?"
His face drew closer, and his mouth brushed my cheek—a kiss, if you wanted to call it that.
...Unwanted skinship was intensely unpleasant.
"Especially when Eun-ha can't even fight back."
"...Are you out of your damn mind?"
It was no different from refusing to engage in conversation at all once you realized you couldn't win on logic.
"Come on, don't be like that."
Shackles locked around my still-free legs as well. That settled it for certain—this was not him. What he had just used was magic.
"We'll be seeing a lot of each other from now on."
"No. Today is the last time."
I had weighed every condition. This was a dream. Why I wasn't the one dreaming it, I couldn't say—but the fact that my last memory was of going to bed, that he wore Han Sung-jun's face, and that I couldn't use mana were all evidence pointing the same way.
Which meant I had been kidnapped into someone else's dream. This first ambush had caught me off guard, fine—but I could make sure there was no second time.
As if I'd ever come back to a place like this.
A foul space where I couldn't even feel mana. I never wanted to set foot here again.
"You look all soft and squishy, but you're stubborn, huh."
He snapped his fingers.
"...Ngh!"
And in the same instant, my clothes vanished.
So he really was the master of this dream.
What he intended by stripping me bare was... easy enough to guess. Wherever I went, I was the kind of beauty who pulled every eye in the room. He had dragged me into his dream on purpose. Of course I was the target.
Might as well chalk it up to getting bitten by a dog...
The small mercies were that this was a dream, and that my sense of chastity as a woman was still thin at best. With less than a single day of experience as a woman, I had the mental fortitude to file being assaulted in a dream under "unpleasant experience" and shake it off.
My mood'll be foul for a day or so, sure.
But I wasn't going to sink into despair over it. Of that much, I was certain.
"That look on your face... it's almost too delicious. But I'll hold back for today."
"...?"
He pecked my cheek again. The same unpleasant sensation as before; I scowled.
"See you next time, Eun-ha."
"You'll never see me again, you pervert."
With those words, the dream ended.
2.
"...Worst dream of my life."
When I opened my eyes in bed, my clothes were intact.
No marks from the shackles either.
My arms and legs were clean, and my connection to mana answered as readily as it had the day before.
Except...
That disgusting sensation was still there.
On the cheek he had kissed, on the lips his fingers had touched—the feeling lingered. It hadn't even been much in the way of skinship, and yet the sensation remained with perfect clarity.
...Forget it. If nothing was wrong with my body, then it was time to start the day. It had been a filthy dream, but all I needed to do was take measures so it never happened again.
"Hooooo. Morning."
"Training first thing in the morning... that's rough—"
...Had he gotten taller?
Yesterday he had been noticeably shorter than me. He looked like he had grown about three centimeters.
"Did you get taller?"
"Yeah. Guess my level went up overnight."
...Did levels normally go up while you were asleep?
"Hold on. Can I check?"
"Check? Sure, go ahead."
Common knowledge said you needed a dedicated scanner to check someone's level. But I was a genius among geniuses of a mage who threw common knowledge to the dogs. As if I couldn't do what some machine did.
Mana wrapped around him. From his end, the sensation was probably a little sticky—mana was sweeping every corner of his body, after all.
"I feel this every time, and it never stops being unpleasant."
He muttered as much. Fair enough. A check was a technique that sent mana into every nook and cranny of the subject.
"Let's see..."
The moment the check finished, a translucent interface appeared before my eyes—the same information a machine would have spit out onto a linked monitor.
Name:Han Sung-jun
Level:2
Race:Incubus (Cursed)
...?
Incubus?
A few more lines of information scrolled out beneath—specialties and the like. But what seized my eyes was his race.
He's not human...?
I looked at the boy standing in front of me.
"What?"
He asked it back like something was wrong.
"Your level went up."
I decided not to say anything for now. I needed to properly research what kind of race an incubus even was.
After making breakfast, I told him my business first.
"There's material I need to collect. I'm heading out for a bit."
"Yeah?"
He probably assumed I was gathering information related to my lectures. He nodded right away.
"Don't wander around too much. If you're using my identity, you'll become a target too."
"Got it."
He was right. If the current rank 2 had been the one to curse Sung-jun, then having failed to kill him, they would be watching for any opening. If they ran into a doll using Sung-jun's ID...
At minimum, they'd tail me. Possibly abduct me. Worse, they might just kill me and use magic on my brain to parse the memories.
I wouldn't go down easily, but...
That would mean exposing that I was a mage despite being a doll. Getting found out might not matter much in the grand scheme—but some instinct told me it was better to keep my identity hidden until I finished the contract with Sung-jun.
I finished breakfast and got ready to go out. There wasn't much to prepare, really.
Dressing a doll up in your personal taste is the kind of thing only a pervert does.
I wasn't quite ready to turn him into one, so I decided to head out in a doll's default outfit—a maid uniform.