07. Ulsro Kingdom - Their Collapse (25)
“Th... well... It seems you’ve had quite a bit to drink.”
“I-is that so...?”
“Your face is... rather red.”
“Ah... I, I did drink quite a bit. ...Mm♡”
“...Serenia?”
Viscount Hermeng’s face flushed faintly.
What is this...?
It had been years since he’d last held a sword, but he was still a knight. He wasn’t so dull that he could miss the fact that his wife looked strangely off. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but a deeply unpleasant feeling was already creeping up his spine.
“Hng, th... mmm...♡ S-sorry... I think I, I got a little nervous....”
“Nervous... Ah, right.”
Viscount Hermeng, still wearing a dazed expression, nodded.
The suspicion hadn’t completely disappeared, but it was enough to make sense of it.
She must have been flustered.
He couldn’t even remember the last time they had sat face-to-face and spoken like this. They had pretended to be a harmonious couple in public, but they had hardly ever had the chance to put on that act properly. Serenia had been busy with her duties as commander of the knights, and even without that, neither of them had ever cared much for social gatherings.
Serenia was nervous too...
Hearing her say that, he suddenly became aware of all sorts of things himself. And once that happened, he started to feel nervous as well.
He stole a glance at his wife’s face.
Unlike him, a man who was practically a middle-aged uncle now, she had retained her youthful appearance and figure. Not so much that she looked like the bright, fresh thing she had been in their twenties, no. Yet that moderate, mature beauty was somehow even more alluring. And her body had lost nothing to those days, either.
The small earlobes visible through her glossy orange hair were flushed as red as her cheeks. Serenia looked beautiful even when she was embarrassed. Sitting there with both of them tense and facing each other, the moment oddly brought back memories of those innocent early days.
...How did things end up like this?
His expression darkened at once, because he knew the answer all too well.
It was all his fault.
And now, to come crawling back and ask her forgiveness? It was pathetic, idiotic stupidity. But he still believed it wasn’t too late. Winning Serenia’s heart back would be terribly difficult, yes, but she was still a kind-hearted wife.
If he showed her his sincerity, she would accept him.
“Th, actually, I wanted to...”
“Ahh...♡”
“......”
“Ah, s-sorry...”
“N-no. It’s fine.”
At Serenia’s sweet, honeyed voice, Viscount Hermeng once again took in her appearance.
Her red cheeks and ears. Her hunched shoulders. The way she seemed to be crossing and uncrossing her legs. The purple evening dress. The hidden flesh he had not seen in so long. Each and every detail was a symbol designed to stir his filthy appetite. It wasn’t because he’d been deprived, either—he had indulged himself just last night, before he even began thinking about reconciliation.
Ah... hmm....
She was obscenely seductive. So much so that he swallowed without realizing it.
For a brief instant, the thought crossed his mind that perhaps his wife was trying to reconcile with him too. But if that were the case, she wouldn’t have brought her disciple to dinner.
Then what was it?
Once that thought took shape, impure suspicions kept chaining together without end. He had been shamelessly fooling around and chasing skirts outside, so there was no reason she couldn’t have done the same. If anything, it would have been stranger for a wife to sit quietly and wait for her adulterous husband to come home.
Serenia was superior to him in every possible way. Even the servants of the manor were on her side. If anything happened, there would be very few people willing to tell him about it.
Their relationship hadn’t soured for just one or two years. During all that time, had she truly just been waiting for the day they would make up?
“...S-Serenia...?”
“P-please, mmm... speak...♡”
“W-what sort of relationship do you have with Valdes?”
In the end, he couldn’t hold back and asked her outright.
But it was a foolish question. Even if they really did have that sort of relationship, there was no way she would ever tell him honestly.
“Well... you know very well, don’t you... haa♡ n’t you...?”
“Know...?”
Her sultry reply was, as expected, deeply unsatisfying. More unsatisfying than he had imagined, in fact.
She could at least have said they were in a proper teacher-student relationship, or a guardian relationship, or something clear like that. Instead, she answered with these vague, slippery words, as if deliberately provoking him. As though she were saying, You know damn well what it is.
Viscount Hermeng’s face hardened little by little.
Anger finally got the better of him, and he blurted out the one thing he absolutely should not have said.
“...Are you willing to reconcile?”
“...Reconcile?”
Serenia’s expression turned ice-cold. Gone was the voice that had been draped in a nasal little purr; from between her red lips spilled nothing but frost.
“......A, that... y-you see...”
“Ha. Reconcile? How ridiculous. Do you really think I’m some kind of fool? You can barely ask forgiveness, and now you want reconciliation? Reconciliation? After pushing me away all by yourself, after chasing other women and tearing down my dignity, you come to me with the word reconciliation? Honestly. Fine, yes, I understand what you mean. Just as you thought, I have no intention of reconciling with you. Now then, dinner still isn’t over, so would you please get out?”
“......”
Even he had to admit it was an incredibly stupid thing to say.
But if he could have judged matters rationally, this disaster would never have happened in the first place. He still loved Serenia, and yet he couldn’t help comparing himself to her. And because he knew full well how lacking he was as a husband, that sense of inferiority kept surfacing at the worst possible times.
It was the same now.
He couldn’t even apologize for the foolish thing he had just said. And then he made yet another blunder.
“...You’re guilty of adultery too, aren’t you?”
“...What?”
Her belated answer and startled face gave him hope.
“Right in front of me, this kind of filthy behavior!”
He shouted in rage and yanked up the tablecloth. With that rough motion, some of the dishes, plates, and food on top of the table were sent flying.
“!!”
“...And...?”
Viscount Hermeng couldn’t understand it.
From the small sounds Serenia had made, he had assumed Valdes was hiding under the table. The fact that he had supposedly gone out for a moment already felt strange. It wasn’t even basic manners, and it had taken too long. In this state, with her body twitching little by little and those soft moans slipping from her lips, of course he would think the boy was fooling around underneath.
But.
“Nothing... ...there?”
“What are you doing right now!”
“N-no, I mean...”
There was no one under the table. All he could see below was Serenia’s dress and her legs.
“Th-this can’t be...”
The dinner dress was so short that it exposed nearly half of her thighs, so there was no way anyone could have hidden inside it. In other words, Valdes had clearly done nothing at all.
This is insane?!
He cried out inside, but nothing changed. Serenia was still seated in her chair, staring at him like he was a madman. That look, that expression—those were what tormented Viscount Hermeng the most.
“W-wait! G-give me a chance to explain...”
“Get out. Now.”
“Ah...”
She wasn’t even using honorifics anymore. It was the first time since they had become husband and wife.
Stunned, he stood there in a daze when the dining room door opened and Valdes appeared.
“I’m sorry. It was rude of me, but I came out in the middle of dinner... huh? Did something happen?”
“......”
Valdes had genuinely come in from outside, looking as clueless as could be. He looked from the disheveled table to the two of them and back again. Seeing that innocent, completely unknowing gaze made Viscount Hermeng feel even more ashamed.
“S-sorry. I’ll, I’ll properly apologize later...”
For now, he would retreat and try to talk to her again once her anger had cooled. With that in mind, he hurriedly fled the dining room.
“......”
“......”
As a short silence drifted through the room,
“...Pfft.”
Valdes broke it with a laugh.
“Ah, this really is beyond my expectations.”
“...Valdes, you...”
“What is it?”
When Serenia looked at him, the coldness had vanished from her face, replaced by embarrassment and a restless need. A look of someone desperately wanting something. Valdes, gazing at his teacher with obvious satisfaction, took something from his pocket and fed it mana.
Click.
Vrrrr—
“Hng! A-ah, w-wait... haaah... I-it suddenly...♥”
A vibrating buzz rose from inside her dress. In time with it, Serenia trembled while keeping her hips pressed to the chair. A string of heated moans spilled from her lips, and her face melted in an instant.
“This is stage three. It’s not even close to the half-baked stuff from stages one and two, right?”
“Mmm...♥ Ah, y-yes, yes, this... hng! It’s... pretty good...”
The teacher tried to keep her expression under control as she looked at the disciple walking toward her, but it was simply too good.
It was on a completely different level from fingers. Of course, Valdes’s own equipment was still much better than this, but the sensation of something vibrating rapidly inside her hole delivered a pleasure entirely unlike a human touch.
“Right? The vibrator itself has the same basic vibration function, but I specially made this one so it can be operated remotely with mana.”
“W-with ma... na... hng♥ Y-you’re just... doing filthy things...”
“Filthy? This is just about making our teacher, no—Lady Serenia—happy.”
Valdes came right up beside her, smiling faintly. Serenia kept twitching and glared at him.
What had just happened was beyond anything she could have imagined.
As soon as her husband left the dining room, Valdes showed her what he called a fun little toy: a wooden vibrator, a crude cock-shaped thing. At the time she had been startled, but she hadn’t considered it anything particularly special.
After all, it was only because she herself had never used one; among noblewomen, those things circulated in secret all the time. There were even some chaste young ladies who hadn’t yet lost their virginity and would use them to tease themselves right up to the brink of breaking their hymens. And for the expensive ones, there were even magical tools that would vibrate when mana was poured into them.
But she had never heard of a remote-control function. She had been flustered when he suddenly pushed it between the folds of her dress and told her he wanted to test it, but she hadn’t stopped him. She was a little curious.
Then Valdes had left the dining room for a moment, and after that Viscount Hermeng came in, twisting the situation into something absurd.
“How was it? Feeling a toy like this in front of your husband.”
“Th-that... hng♥”
She tried to answer, but her moans kept breaking through.
“B-before that, c-can you turn this off... haaah♥”
Because of this thing, even the moment her husband had yanked up the tablecloth she had only been able to twitch helplessly, unable to stand. She had been afraid she might lose control, afraid he might discover the wet mess running from her.
“No way. That was fun, wasn’t it?”
“I-I...”
“It was thrilling, wasn’t it?”
“Ah... y-yes♥”
Even though she had done it in front of her husband, guilt was not what surged through her first—it was excitement. And hearing Viscount Hermeng’s words made that even stronger. Once he had thrown out the final, decisive word—reconciliation—she had erased guilt from her heart entirely.
“By the way...”
Valdes looked around the dining room. Thanks to what Viscount Hermeng had done, it looked as though they would have trouble continuing the meal. The tablecloth ran the length of the long table, and most of the plates had toppled over. Eating what remained would be awkward, and it wasn’t as though she was hungry enough to ask for everything to be prepared again right now.
“So where should we go now?”
At her disciple’s question, Serenia’s eyes wavered.
“Actually, there’s something I want to eat.”
“Ah... hng, r-right?”
She couldn’t answer at once.
On one hand, she felt regret; on the other, the relentless vibration made her feel as if she were on the verge of coming any second.
“Haa, I, I think I...”
Vrrrr— click.
“...Huh?”
She was rubbing her thighs together and breathing out hot, ragged little gasps when she looked up at Valdes in a daze. She had almost gone over the edge, and then, all at once, the vibration stopped. Just looking at that smiling face made it obvious it had been deliberate.
“You...”
Valdes climbed onto Serenia’s lap and brought his mouth to her ear.
“Teacher, aren’t you curious what it is I want to eat?”
“More than that...”
“It’s you, Teacher.”
“......”
He took her hand and guided it between his thighs, whispering into her ear in a voice that sent shivers through her. Serenia said nothing and quietly stroked the man’s rapidly swelling pillar. It was incomparable to her husband’s—a clear, undeniable proof of a male.
“Don’t you have anything you want to eat, Teacher?”
“...I’ve just thought of one thing myself, too.”
“Then... since the dining room’s such a mess, would you like to have it in your bedroom?”
“...Yes♥”