Mare Training: Warhorse Conditioning
…Ehh… that's right… I can't lie to the Association… even if it isn't a lie… exaggerating the facts is something a hero of the Association must never do… …Still, this is an incredible achievement… it really is…!
In an instant, the happiness circuit that had been blazing so brightly went ice-cold. The rules driven deep into her brain through the Association's special education paralyzed her reason and seized control of the flow of her thoughts.
Without even realizing it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Sonia resolved to report everything honestly.
It was the only judgment befitting Sonia — a perfect, efficient hero belonging to the Megacorp Hero Association.
She forced herself to find some comfort. Looking at it again, even without padding the facts, this was already a more than impressive achievement.
So then… all that's left is… figuring out how to get myself captured by them naturally…
The plan rewrote itself in a flash. Instead of beating them all down and becoming a hero, she would deliberately allow herself to be taken — an undercover infiltration to discover their base of operations.
The training outfit the Horse Spirit had left her with kept her wrists bound behind her back, but the leotard-style design left her legs completely free.
If she put her mind to it, she was certain she could snap these flimsy ropes and cuffs without the slightest trouble.
"Just a little more effort…!"
"You idiot, it's just the two of us left now, huh?"
Under Sonia's relentless kicks, every last one of their companions had gone down. Only two porters remained.
Neither dared approach the violent, powerful mare lightly. They knew all too well that getting hurt and landing in a hospital bed would mean tightening their already strained belts even further — or risking their lives in some dangerous dungeon.
Then… right now!
"Pffhh… hghk… hhk?!"
Sonia deliberately flailed her feet in a panicked scramble, pretending to flee. It was a calculated performance meant to lure the porters who still hesitated to approach with the leash in hand.
Then she made a show of stumbling as if her feet had tangled, and with a solid thunk she staged a vivid collision of her head against a nearby tree. She crumpled to the ground and played unconscious.
"Wh… what the…? She knocked herself out?"
"Don't waste time! Tie her up already! I said tie her! They said if you just put a collar on her and pull, she goes docile, right? Pull it already!"
"Got it! Ugh… hff… this ought to do it… where were we supposed to sell her again? That horse market over in the other district? That the place? Selling her as a mare… I'd rather get more than for a slave… just hope they don't take too big a cut of the fee."
The two porters' shadows fell across Sonia's deliberately limp body. She felt the rough, scratchy rope winding around her neck, the coarse and musty texture of the crude bandage covering her eyes, and she cast a self-justifying spell over herself: she was a capable hero currently executing an undercover infiltration mission.
She let every muscle go slack and allowed their hands to haul her upright. With her vision completely blacked out, she obediently followed wherever the leash gave its little tugs.
"What about those guys? They showed up on their own responsibility, but shouldn't we do something for them?"
"Leave 'em. Just leave 'em. We're picking up a wild mare and selling her — it's not even against the law, right? You and me, fifty-fifty. After the fee comes out, isn't that better?"
Not… against the law…?
Mare… Horse Market… not a slave… a mare… commission fee.
The more she listened to the porters' conversation, the further it drifted from the secret codes of some vast criminal syndicate.
…Haa?
In that moment, Sonia understood everything. These men were not human traffickers. They were nothing more than utterly ordinary, petty porters who had stumbled across a wild mare by chance and planned to haul her off to the Horse Market the same way someone might dump a broken computer at a scrapyard.
"…"
"…Is this really okay? She's following so well it's actually kind of scary."
"Just keep a good hold on the leash. They said once you put a collar on her she goes quiet. Probably? Let's sell her fast and get out of here. It's not illegal, but if word gets out we left our buddies behind, we won't be able to find work for a while. You know the rumor."
"Ah, that one? Of course I know. Thanks to that, our treatment as porters got a little better, maybe…"
Not that it changed the fact they were still just porters, one of the men added with a self-deprecating laugh. They launched into the story of the spoiled rich academy kids who had abandoned a porter to spider monsters in a dungeon and run for their lives. Bound by rope, listening to their chatter, a female horse walked along meekly… just one mare…
(…Ah… ahaha… what do I do… what on earth am I supposed to do about this…!)
Her mind was in total chaos, yet Sonia's body responded more honestly than ever.
Beneath the leotard-style training outfit that left her thighs bare, droplets of excitement from her most private place slid wetly down her legs.
Being led by a collar like a docile mare — or a well-trained female sex slave… no, willingly letting herself be led — the raw sense of transgression made her whole body tremble. She could feel her erect nipples pushing stiffly against the thin fabric.
With the porters' conversation — which she guessed was probably about Luce — as her background music, Sonia was descending the low mountain of Sky City.
It was already late into the night. Cold dew had begun to bead on every leaf of the forest, and with every step she was being taken farther and farther in the opposite direction from her home.
(I'm… a little curious how this situation is going to turn out, after all…)
What kind of place was this "Horse Market" they kept mentioning? From the sound of it, it wasn't illegal, and it didn't seem to be crawling with vicious villains either. Following them out of pure curiosity couldn't hurt, could it?
Sonia's thoughts drifted in a strange and dangerous direction.
Of course, to satisfy that curiosity, she would be visiting as a secondhand "mare" about to be sold off.
Even as Sonia was being dragged along by the rope, in another district of Sky City a perverse culture known as "mare idols" was spreading with frightening speed.
It had begun as the most trivial kind of gossip. Immigrants from otherworld fantasy cultures — places where the existence of female horses was as natural a part of daily life as anything else — had casually dropped the topic over drinks.
A village chief with a sharp business sense had not let that gossip slip past him, and an entertainment company hunting for a new revenue model had seen the enormous potential hidden inside it.
It had only been a few years since massive investment and sponsorship were locked in under the banner of tourism product development.
Sonia herself had never cared so much as a speck of dust about that kind of gossip, and because it had started like a small local idol scene on the opposite side of a mountain from her own neighborhood, the existence of "mare idols" remained a secretive subculture known only to those in the know — still far from widespread across all of Sky City.
…Listening carefully… that… isn't that just horse racing…?
Buy a betting ticket, pick the winning horse, and receive a payout after a set tax is deducted — perfectly legal gambling. Nearly everything in this world was a legal gambling den of one kind or another, but to Sonia's ears it was unmistakably the structure of horse racing.
The only difference was that instead of real racehorses running on four legs, bipedal "mares" sprinted the track. And once the race was over, a makeshift idol-concert-style event centered on the winning mare would be held.
From the scale of what she was hearing, it seemed they had only just broken out of their local-idol shell and were attempting a full-scale business expansion.
"This… is really popular, right?"
"That's what it says on the internet, anyway?"
Neither Sonia nor these hopelessly simple porters had any real grasp of the truth. One of the porters tapped a few times on the communication terminal on his wrist, and the information window that appeared said as much, so Sonia vaguely figured it couldn't be wrong.
Dark, late-night Sky City. Descending the low mountain with a rough rope around her neck, Sonia's footsteps felt as heavy as if lead weights had been hung from them.
The promotional slogan that Sky City "never suffers power supply disruptions" was no lie. The streets never sank into complete darkness.
Whether high-rise apartment complexes or low-rise residential neighborhoods, the tiny lights leaking from every window gathered into a soft river of light that illuminated the night streets. The closer they drew to their destination — the Horse Market, the night market of the district where the horse markets clustered — the lights grew fiercer and more dazzling.
In another moment of reality-escaping daydream, Sonia was idly wondering, …So does that mean other cities don't get proper electricity…? when the grumbling voice of the porter dragging her deeper into the night market yanked her consciousness back to the present.