Resistance
It was all well and good that I had snatched the cigarette from the Hero’s hand in one swift motion to keep her from touching it.
The problem was that this reckless act had given zero consideration to the strain it would place on my clean lungs—lungs that had long since sworn off smoking.
Immediately afterward, I spent a good while simply trying to steady my ragged breathing between fits of coughing, which proved far more difficult than expected.
“Cough! Cough!”
“P-Priest! Are you all right?!”
It felt as if someone had rammed a white-hot iron poker down my throat and was stirring it without mercy.
The nightmare of chemical warfare that I had buried in the swamp of oblivion bobbed back up like a buoy on seawater, but it was a memory I had no desire to revisit. I decided to sink it again soon enough.
“I’m sorry, Priest. I said something foolish… It seems I lost my senses for a moment…”
“Cough! No! I’m fine! Cough! Hrrk! I-I’m okay.”
I answered the Hero’s worried voice in a low murmur and lightly flicked the ash from the half-burned end of the cigarette.
“Here is the ashtray!”
“Oh, th-thank you.”
The ash I had been about to drop carelessly onto the floor landed precisely in the ashtray the Hero had hurriedly offered me.
A grown man in priestly robes having a young woman tend to his cigarette—the very image was already distasteful enough to stir up a storm of bitter thoughts, one that rivaled the acrid smoke itself.
Yet the Hero’s eyes sparkled so brightly as she gazed at me that I could not bring myself to reject her pure, innocent goodwill.
“Hero. Now you understand, don’t you? Smoking is a vice that brings nothing but harm…”
With the cigarette still pinched between my index and middle fingers, I scratched my forehead with my ring finger and muttered the lazy admonition.
Coming from the mouth of someone who had just downed a cigarette like a shot of liquor, the statement carried all the persuasive power of zero. Still, smokers have always been bundles of contradiction—people who burn through three or four packs a day while earnestly advising nonsmokers to quit. So the hypocrisy was nothing out of the ordinary.
Don’t you people smoke this stuff.
I never thought I’d be the one saying it.
It seemed I, too, was simply another smoker after all.
“Yes! I shall engrave it upon my soul!”
Kneeling neatly on the bed with one hand thrust dramatically into the air, the Hero answered in a booming voice.
Her crisp, upright posture reminded me so much of an honor student eager to ask the teacher a question that a fond smile nearly slipped out. But since I was in the middle of lecturing her, laughing would have ruined the mood. I cleared my throat with solemn dignity instead.
“Ahem! The air is rather stale. Shall I open a window, Hero?”
“Hup! Yes! I will open it myself!”
I undid a few buttons at the collar of my robes and slipped two fingers inside to loosen the fabric around my throat.
“Haa…”
The unpleasant sensation of murky impurities clinging to my exhaled breath made me grimace. I truly could not remember what had ever possessed me to walk around with one of these things in my mouth when I was younger.
Or rather, my head knew perfectly well; my heart simply preferred to pretend it didn’t.
Yes, even I had once been like that.
Perched on a windowsill with a cigarette in hand, gazing into the distance with melancholy eyes, thinking I looked rather cool. There had been a time when I was that thoroughly delusional.
Looking back now, it was such a cringeworthy chapter of my past that kicking my blankets would not have been enough—I would have needed to shred them with a knife. Yet it was precisely the fierce desire to erase that shameful history that had given me the willpower to quit. A truly ironic twist of fate.
I believe it was around that same period when I first realized that humans, when they desperately wish to wipe away their dark pasts, can sometimes summon truly tremendous strength.
“Heh.”
Just as I was about to take the final drag—as if bidding farewell to that wretched journey—a faint, sardonic chuckle escaped me.
“Hero?”
Both hands still resting on the closed window latch, the Hero suddenly twisted only her head toward me at an unnatural angle. Our eyes met.
The bizarre posture made her look like a doll whose neck joint had been twisted sideways, yet it was unmistakable: within those gracious sapphire eyes—eyes so brilliant that the purest sapphires would look like mere pebbles beside them—there burned an enormous, all-consuming desire.
Calling her an emotionless doll at this moment would have been rather inaccurate.
Step. Step.
At that exact instant, the Hero began closing the distance with the predatory gait of a wolf drawn by the scent of fresh meat.
“H-Hero…?”
Without offering a single word in response to my involuntary murmur, she soon seized both of my arms, slammed me down onto the bed with surprising force.
Thump.
The entire sequence unfolded so slowly it might as well have been in slow motion. Perhaps it was sheer arrogance on my part—the blind conviction that the Hero would never harm me—that had dulled my sense of danger.
By the time I came to my senses, my body was already completely pinned beneath her. She had straddled my waist and fixed both my arms firmly against the mattress.
Our faces were now so close that our breaths mingled. I could clearly see what those blue irises—churning like a lake battered by a torrential downpour—were fixed upon.
My sweat-slicked face.
The exposed hollow of my collarbone.
The glimpses of firm skin visible through the gap in my disheveled shirt.
The scenery reflected in her pupils shifted chaotically, making her expression resemble a television screen being frantically flipped through channels.
“Hup! S-sorry! I’m sorry, Priest! I-I didn’t mean to! I’ll get off right now!”
At that moment, the Hero seemed to regain her senses. She stammered out her apology in obvious panic and suddenly began to squirm.
Yet for some reason, instead of loosening, the pressure holding me down grew steadily stronger.
“Huh? I-I’ll get off right now! W-wait… what? What’s happening…?”
She occasionally bounced atop my waist like a rabbit in an attempt to dismount, but her arms paid no heed to her body’s intentions. They remained glued to my wrists, utterly immovable.
Creak. Creak.
Her labored breathing mixed with the obscene groans of the old bed, and all sorts of thoughts I absolutely should not have been having sprouted like mushrooms in my mind. It was pure torture.
“Hero! You don’t have to force yourself to get off! Just—stop moving your body for a second!”
“S-sorry! I’m sorry!”
If there existed a person who had lost the remote control to their own body, I imagined they would look exactly like the Hero right now.
The plush warmth of her thighs pressed tightly against my sides radiated heat like a hand warmer, and the sweet, distinctly feminine scent that tickled my nose felt as though it were deliberately provoking something primal deep inside me.
“Haa…”
I chewed on the lingering cigarette smoke in my mouth and emptied my mind in one breath.
This was the emotional control technique I had mastered through blood, sweat, and tears during my apprentice priest days. Moreover, the trials I had endured while fending off the Saint’s constant harassment were finally bearing fruit.
“Hero… are you all right…?”
“I-I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Priest. After watching you put the cigarette to your lips and exhale that mesmerizing breath at such close range, suddenly—suddenly my body stopped listening to me!”
“…Pardon?”
“I see it now! I’ve just realized! The reason you sealed away your smoking all this time was to protect innocent maidens from your devilish charm! Of course!”
“……”
I was at a loss for words.
I had grown used to the Hero occasionally spouting absurdities when her instincts overrode her reason, but it was extremely rare for her to deliver such wildly illogical, baseless sophistry with complete confidence.
Come to think of it, the one who had written the ridiculous rumor—that I went around seducing innocent maidens—on the wanted posters searching for me was none other than the person before me.
“Please do not worry! Priest! My brilliant mind has just devised a way to overcome this crisis! Now then! Pay no heed to my well-being! Struggle with all your might and throw me off! This is the perfect opportunity while I am still suppressing my wicked desires!”
“Hero… how am I supposed to move when you’re holding me this tightly…?”
“Hmm? Pardon my rudeness, but the strength I am using right now is less than half of half my usual power! If you exert your full strength, you should be able to shake me off easily!”
“You already know that even if you cut that in half again I still couldn’t get free… Hero. How could I possibly overpower you with brute force…? Stop joking and get off me already. If you can’t do it yourself, at least call Victim who’s standing guard outside…”
“What?”
The Hero suddenly tilted her head as if my pathetic surrender had genuinely puzzled her.
“Then… does that mean this is truly your full strength, Priest…?”
“Yes. Regrettably, this pitiful amount is indeed my full strength. Didn’t you feel it earlier when you were holding my waist and begging?”
“I-I thought you were simply humoring my stubbornness!”
“Ah…”
It appeared the Hero had completely misjudged my capabilities until now.
No wonder the training sessions we had done together had felt unusually intense. She must have known I was frail, but never dreamed it was this bad.
It wasn’t all that strange, really. For a dragon the size of a mountain to try to gauge how much an ant could lift would be both nearly impossible to measure and utterly pointless.
“N-no, Priest. You must resist… you must resist right now…”
“I keep telling you, this is me trying my hardest… H-Hero…?”
Squeeze.
Right then, the grip around my wrists swelled with renewed power, and a sticky breath reminiscent of a spider’s web binding its prey settled softly against the hollow of my throat.
Hero (Female) Triana Abigail. 18 years old.