Why'd You Have to Say That Out Loud!! (2)
After finishing her shower, Botal Rabbit stepped out with her face flushed a deep red, whether from the hot water or something else.
“Uh… uh, you’re back?”
“Yeah. Work wrapped up early.”
This ordinary exchange was their way of pretending the events from moments ago had never happened, a mutual agreement to reset and start over from the beginning. But Iron Colossus couldn’t do that. He had no intention of nitpicking the fact that she’d been masturbating alone. At least, though, he had to ask about the content. It had been that shocking.
“Lizardman vs. Rabbit Girl Project Part Two, No-Mosaic Crop…”
“Hic!”
Botal Rabbit flinched violently and staggered backward, clapping a hand over her mouth. Her eyes trembled with raw betrayal, like a virtuous housewife who had just uncovered her husband’s affair. No, I’m the one who should feel wronged here.
Iron Colossus stared at her with his usual blunt gaze, steeled himself, and continued.
“Fake Taxi series. Paying With Your Body 12.”
“S-stop it…!”
“Getting Pregnant With the Child of My Most Hated Villain. Virtuous Housewife Hero Wild Bunny.”
“Stop it!! Stop! Stop!!”
Bang!Bang bang!Bang!!
Botal Rabbit charged at a speed Iron Colossus could barely register and slammed three surprise kicks into his chest in rapid succession. Roughly seventy percent of her full power, he judged, absorbing every strike without moving from his stance. So that was about seventy percent of her shame, then?
Women truly were impossible to understand. Iron Colossus looked down at Botal Rabbit as she continued hammering follow-up blows into his chest.
“Done yet?”
“Y-you… you… you…! You perverted, brain-dead, rock-headed, socially-inept golem! You have no heart! How could you even think about snooping on something like that?!”
“It was a taste survey.”
“A taste suuurvey?! That’s just harassment!! Why the hell would you look up someone’s porn preferences?! Why?!”
This demanded a proper answer. Even inside his thick skull, the warning bells were clanging furiously. Of course he possessed no crisis-detection ability—he was a pure physical hero—but this was the instinctive male sense of impending doom.
He hesitated for a moment, then spoke in a voice far less confident than usual.
“They say knowing the woman you like’s preferences is a man’s basic duty…”
“Who says that?!”
“…Onyx Knight.”
“I’m going to kill that bitch and then kill myself!!!”
Botal Rabbit shrieked and spun toward the door. Faster than she had ever moved when apprehending a villain, Iron Colossus’s hand shot out and locked around her wrist.
“Let go! Let me go!”
“Calm down.”
“Do I look like I can calm down right now?!”
“I’m fine with it.”
“What?! What does it matter if you’re fine with it?! I want to dieeeeeee!”
“No. What I mean is—”
Iron Colossus faltered, struggling for the right words. It was difficult to express.
“Your tastes. I’m saying I’m okay with them.”
“…What?”
“I found where you keep your saved video folder. While you were showering, I checked every title in your playlists.”
“Kyaaaaaaaaah!!!”
“And after analyzing them, your preference seems to be… toward villains…”
“Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!”
“Being taken by force…”
Bang!!
Even with her wrist still caught, Botal Rabbit leapt upward, using the trapped arm as a fulcrum. She spun her entire body through the air at a velocity his dynamic vision couldn’t even track and slammed a devastating kick into his jaw.
No matter how strong an A-class body-hardening hero he was, his opponent was S-class. Blocking a martial-arts specialist’s full-power point kick with indifference was simply impossible. For the first time since the exchange began, Iron Colossus was sent flying across the living room. He crashed into the corner with a thunderous noise, smashing the sofa to pieces and kicking up a cloud of dust.
“You, you… I don’t even want to look at you!! You’re awful! I hate you!!! You’re the worst, seriously!! Get out right now!!”
“…All right. I suppose I need time to think as well.”
“What…? W-wait. What are you saying right now…”
“I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Leaving Botal Rabbit behind—her eyes wide with horror as she stammered desperately—Iron Colossus walked out of the house. She started to chase after him, only to freeze when she realized she was wearing nothing but a bathrobe. By then the elevator carrying him had already begun its swift descent to the ground floor.
Staring blankly at the closed doors, Botal Rabbit trembled with anxiety.
“Is he… breaking up with me…? He can’t be…?”
My tastes are a little… intense, sure. But they’re just fantasies. It’s not like I actually did any of it! It’s not like I cheated or anything! No. It can’t be. It mustn’t be. It can’t be.
Still… what if his feelings had cooled because of this? What if, after his affection had already plummeted, she had kicked him hard enough to send him flying?
Countless real-life cases flashed through her mind: catastrophic accidents born from domestic disputes between hero couples, ugly divorce lawsuits, legal battles, and articles written by newly single heroines titled “Thirteen Advantages I Discovered After Divorce.”
…Why is this crap suddenly popping into my head?! I’m not interested, so go away!
At first it had been curiosity. Then affection. But now it was unmistakably love. She still wasn’t used to expressing it honestly, yet she had already fallen completely for him. This was love—there was no other word for it.
If he wanted to break up… what was she supposed to do?
Without even thinking of running after him, Botal Rabbit crumpled to the floor and began to sob with soft, broken hiccups.
*
“So let me get this straight. You came all the way here to ask me for couple’s counseling about your little lover’s spat?”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘yeah’?!”
Boom!
Onyx Knight stared at Iron Colossus with an expression of utter disbelief and stomped her foot. Her hero headquarters, Golem Kingdom, was an incredibly sturdy fortress, yet it still trembled and shed dust under the force of her genuinely enraged stomp.
Unlike Botal Rabbit’s flashy, cutesy, lived-in, and luxurious Rabbit Hole Penthouse, Onyx Knight’s Golem Kingdom was built with pure practicality in mind. Inside that bleak space, with an even bleaker glare, she fixed her eyes on Iron Colossus.
“To summarize: you looked through her porn folder, decided to talk to her about it, got your ass kicked, and were thrown out?”
“Yeah.”
“Why the hell would you— No. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t try to convince me. Just don’t talk.”
“…Okay.”
She already knew he was terrible with words and stubborn as a mule, but the complete lack of common sense was a fresh revelation. Onyx Knight glared at him in disbelief and let out a heavy sigh. It was already a miracle that this walking boulder had developed romantic feelings at all; the fact that they functioned even slightly normally would have been stranger.
Shaking her head, she pulled a bottle of liquor onto the steel table.
“Drink.”
“We don’t get drunk.”
“The mood, you idiot. The mood.”
Nearly every hero possessed physical specs far beyond those of ordinary people, and body-hardening types in particular had exceptionally resilient internal organs. Ordinary alcohol toxicity couldn’t even make them tipsy. Yet Onyx Knight opened the bottle with the practiced ease of someone who drank often and poured the dark amber liquid into a small glass with a steady glug-glug.
“…So what’s the problem? Just apologize and pretend it never happened.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why? What kind of porn did you even see that— Wait, don’t tell me she’s a lesbian?”
“No. And I can’t tell you.”
“I didn’t want you to, idiot.”
Iron Colossus downed the drink in one expressionless gulp and frowned faintly.
“Tastes bad.”
“Alcohol isn’t meant to be drunk for the taste, but for the vibe.”
“That line came from C-class hero Drunkness, arrested three years and five months ago for repeated drunk violence.”
“Your memory is annoyingly good at the worst times…”
The very fact that he was speaking in such a roundabout manner was unusual for Iron Colossus. Onyx Knight, who had mentored him for years, looked at him with a bitter expression.
“So what do you want to do about it?”
“Let’s assume someone possesses an unusual sexual preference.”
“It’s Botal Rabbit.”
“…No. Someone.”
“Fine. Someone. And?”
“Should that someone’s preference… be corrected? Or accepted?”
“There’s no such thing as a sexual preference that can be corrected.”
“…What?”
Onyx Knight spoke with absolute certainty.
“You can suppress it or hide it, but that’s just repression. A correctable sexual preference? Say that in today’s society and you’ll be socially crucified. Are being gay or lesbian diseases?”
“…That’s not what I meant.”
“Or is this ‘someone’s’ sexual preference so extreme and horrific that it violates other people’s rights, not just their own?”
If it were something like pedophilia, rape, or necrophilia, then yes, that would be a problem. Hero or not, that would simply be criminal. But in this case, it didn’t seem to qualify. She didn’t appear to want to commit rape—she wanted to be raped. Which meant the only victim was herself, and she was the one desiring it. In other words, there was no actual victim.
It was a special taste, but if it remained in the realm of preference rather than crime…
When Iron Colossus had thought that far, Onyx Knight declared:
“If that’s not the case, then what? You claim to love her, yet you can’t even respect a slightly unique taste? How disappointing.”
The most extreme thing she considered “unique” was probably SM play, or… something a bit filthy like a golden shower. Maybe anal at worst. She had never even imagined a fantasy about being gangbanged by villains and forcibly impregnated with thick creampie breeding play.
The gap in their understanding only widened, deepened by Iron Colossus’s miraculously persuasive speech and Onyx Knight’s authority as his mentor, until—
“I see.”
He had successfully convinced him.
“Yeah. If you truly love her, if it’s sincere, then respecting her tastes is possible.”
“Exactly.”
“Incidentally, are you familiar with rabbit ovulation?”
“…Words have context, you know.”
“Rabbits undergo induced ovulation. It’s different from the ‘normal ovulation’ ordinary people experience… Meaning ovulation doesn’t occur in daily life at all, only during mating, and—”
“Stop. Stop. Stop it. No more biology lessons. Especially not biology lessons that make a certain someone come to mind.”
Onyx Knight chugged the rest of her drink as if her insides were on fire.
“So what exactly are you trying to say?”
“I have been having continuous sexual relations with ‘someone,’ yet she has not become pregnant.”
“…Ugh. Fuck. So?”
“What if the reason was that she ‘wasn’t satisfied’…?”
“…You’re saying that’s because the sex was different from that ‘someone’s’ actual sexual tastes. Is that it?”
“That is my hypothesis.”
“It’s not completely illogical… but my head is spinning and I feel sick. Can you leave for today? Please?”
“Understood.”
“This is the first time I’ve actually felt sorry for that ‘someone.’ Seriously. My insides feel like they’re going to burst.”
“Is that so.”
“Yes!! That’s what I’m saying! Go do whatever you want according to her ‘sexual tastes’! And never come back!!”
“Then I’ll be unemployed.”
“This guy is actually going to drive me insane!”
When Onyx Knight roared in exasperation, Iron Colossus gave a single nod—“Then”—and walked out with heavy, deliberate steps.