The Quota System
It was a perfectly ordinary day.
Birds were singing, flowers were in bloom, and spring had turned itself out in full sunshine. For once the weather had decided to keep its head on straight, and the only thing drifting through the air was warmth.
A day like this usually made you want to get outside, maybe even take a walk...
Unfortunately, that wasn't an option.
"Nnngh..."
This godforsaken body of mine had been ambushed by muscle pain. Amazingly enough, the ache had already dragged on for days, and it was still working me over.
The cause was simple. That day, when I'd thrown down with those thugs in a fight that felt like it reached into my soul, I'd pushed myself far past anything I'd imagined I had in me.
The human body is a curious machine. Drop it into a crisis and it can wring out a kind of monstrous strength it doesn't actually possess. The brain quietly unhooks the limiters it installed itself, and suddenly you're operating past every red line you've got.
That was almost certainly what had happened to me. I'd definitely felt the adrenaline dumping into my system by the bucketful. Thanks to that, I'd managed to shoot one hell of a highlight reel — a one-versus-three beatdown for the ages. The problem was everything that came after.
"Fuck, that throbs."
Muscles driven past their limit come with side effects; that much is obvious. Every fiber that had been worked to death that day was now staging a protest so loud it barely recognized its own damn owner. Shift a leg and it went pins-and-needles. Lift an arm and a deep, grinding pain answered back.
One overexertion, and I was laid up for days. All I could feel was a sour sense of injustice. Had I always been this fragile...? Where had last year's man gone — the guy who'd hauled dozens of cement sacks without so much as a grunt...?
I could have cried at what I'd become.
I really ought to start working out.
I'd already been moving way too little lately, using drawing as an excuse. I could feel myself stiffening up by the day, and taking this as a chance to get some exercise going didn't sound half bad. Finals were wrapping up soon anyway, so the timing was decent.
"...You okay?"
A girl beside me asked it, her voice threaded with worry. Seong A-rin. I didn't say a word. I just reached out and wrapped my arms around her waist. I felt her flinch at the sudden contact.
Today, of all days, I was full of missing her.
"Auuugh! A-rin. I missed you so much. Why does it feel like it's been forever......"
"What are you talking about... We saw each other last week."
"...We did?"
That couldn't be right... At least on my end, it felt like well over two weeks had come and gone. Some kind of gap had opened up between her sense of time and mine — a disconnect so unnatural that ordinary space-time couldn't account for it. That was how punishing that one day had been.
Anyway. I kept my arms around her waist and buried my face straight into her chest. The soft cotton of her shirt met my skin and offered up a warmth that felt like being folded into a blanket. More than anything else right now, I wanted to be healed.
"Hhn... wait a second..."
"Ah-ah. Stay still. Suuup... haaa."
In. Out. Every slow circuit of breath settled something inside my chest. What I was leaning against wasn't a person so much as a calm sea, a wide-open meadow. Every scrap of peace and rest the world had ever produced had been gathered into the place right in front of me.
And that was when I understood.
Yes. Peace was breasts.
If war had been issued a pair, it never would have started. Depression and every other private torment would dissolve on contact if a chest like this were sitting in front of them. Breasts, in other words, were the symbol of peace — and a panacea for every illness known to man.
At twenty-two, I was arriving a little early at the truth of the universe.
Heh heh.
That piece of shit Han Ho-cheol. If he was going to bother with a threat that cheap, he should have threatened me with Seong A-rin's chest. If he'd stepped up and shouted, "From now on, you don't get to touch those tits!" I might actually have had to think about it.
Hrk!
Oh, fuck!!
Never getting to touch Seong A-rin's chest again!! Just imagining it made my balls shudder and my dick try to crawl back inside me. If it had actually come to that, I was fully prepared to drop to the floor naked, press my forehead to the ground, and grovel until my hands wore down to stumps. Even Lord Nyarlathotep would have understood me turning into a dog for that one.
"But this is really bad... Who did this to you?"
She spoke up while I was still entertaining that nonsense. I lifted my head and looked at her. A-rin was watching me with a face that had decided to be angry.
The anger wasn't aimed at me. It was aimed, very precisely, at whoever had left me like this. The damage on my end was nothing but a few bruises and the muscle pain, but the feeling on hers was real. She was trying to scrunch her face up like a squirrel gone feral.
"Just what kind of bitch..."
I opened my mouth fast, before she could finish going dark side.
"Hey, I'm fine. I landed more clean hits than they did, anyway."
"Even so..."
"I'm serious. Come on. I came back with funeral-highlight-reel-tier accomplishments and you won't even believe me."
I had crawled out of a pit of blood and mud and stood back up on my own two feet, thank you very much, but she didn't look convinced. Then again, in this world a "man" was apparently the weaker party by default. I couldn't blame her for taking one look at the bruises and worrying. From where she sat, I probably just looked like I was putting on a brave face to keep her from fussing.
A-rin watched me like that for a moment, worry still sitting openly on her face. Then something in her settled, and she spoke as if she'd made up her mind.
"I-if something like this happens again... I'll protect you next time..."
A small, stubborn resolve gathered in those bright, earnest eyes. I couldn't help feeling proud.
Well, well.
Because she was a "woman," was that it. She had a face like a squirrel and she still carried around a sense of chivalry — the kind that said she was supposed to be the one doing the protecting. I wouldn't have called it reassuring, exactly, but it was extremely cute. I took that precious little heart of hers under advisement, dumped her onto the bed without further ceremony, and climbed on top of her.
She let out a small shriek at the sudden move.
"Kyaa—"
"If you want to do that, you're going to have to beat me on this bed first. Right?"
The generous swell of her chest and the curve of her waist filled my vision, and something south of my belt took an immediate interest. Hers was a body that made you want to hoist her clean off the ground.
For a second I wondered — if I actually stuck with working out, maybe I'd be able to pull that off someday.
Oh...
Nice. Just like that, I had one more reason to hit the gym.
"See you~"
"Uugh... my legs are still shaking..."
After a quick, easy fuck, I saw her off in a vaguely responsible fashion and sat straight down in my chair. Play hard, then get back to making a living. That was the rule. I'd drained the bad stuff out of my own body, so now it was time to drain it out of everybody else's.
I booted up the computer and picked up the tablet pen. The cold touch of it against my fingers sent a little thrill through me.
Yeah. This. This was it.
For some reason it felt like I hadn't held a pen in ages. I'd drawn yesterday. I'd drawn the day before that. So why? Probably another one of those transcendent disconnects. Whatever the cause, one thing was obvious: I was in good condition. I spun the pen across my knuckles and thought about what to put on the page.
What should I draw first...
Geumtaeyang didn't appeal right now. No heroine had wandered into my head, and this week's manuscript was mostly wrapped anyway. No reason to waste a condition this good on something I wasn't in the mood for.
I sat with that for a moment, and then a particular commission surfaced in my memory.
Come to think of it, Eun-byul sent me a request.
A fresh one, still warm, from Good-for-nothing Me. I'd been in the middle of going at it with A-rin when it came in, so I hadn't looked at it then. I could look at it now.
I opened the request.
The contents were about what I'd expected. I already knew her tastes, so I'd figured something on the harder side would show up.
The setup itself went like this. A woman, naked, kneeling on the floor at the foot of a bed, a dog collar locked around her throat. A man sitting arrogantly on the edge of the mattress, holding the leash. The woman growing more and more short of breath as the collar drew her in, never once breaking the kneel. The man idly nudging her with his foot, talking down to her for no reason at all.
A perfectly standard humiliation-play beat. The composition assembled itself in my head without much effort. Low angle, built around the woman's ass, with the man's looking-down face given plenty of weight. The drawing itself I was confident I could make filthy enough to get both of us off.
The problem was—
"...Wait, what?"
The problem was that the man she wanted, no matter how I looked at it, was me.
Fierce eyes. Dark circles underneath them. Roughly pale skin, black hair, black eyes. She'd even described the body type in uncomfortably fine detail.
On those features alone, it could have been a coincidence. People come in a lot of flavors; overlap happens. The problem was that the client was Good-for-nothing Me — which was to say, Lee Eun-byul. She already knew me in real life. Which meant I had every reasonable cause to wonder exactly where this character had come from.
So I asked. Whether there had been any kind of model for it.
Luckily she seemed to be on her phone, because the reply came back fast.
And then, after a stretch of silence, the rest of the reply arrived.
Which only made me more confused.
"What is this?"
No, seriously. What was this?
There had been a sliver of dead air in there. After "Aww, haha," there had definitely been a pause before the next message went out. It was only about a minute — a blink, really — but I was sure some kind of internal argument had taken place in that blink. Nobody needed a full minute to type "Of course not, haha."
Guilty conscience? Or had she just gone to get a glass of water...?
"...Hnn."
It was a little fishy, but I decided to take the commission anyway. It looked easy enough to draw, and I couldn't pretend the situation itself didn't do something for me.
I tapped out a reply.
I see... So she'd been that desperate for a picture like this.
My head swam for a second. Then I picked up the tablet pen anyway. I'd taken the money. Now I had to earn it. That was a clean exchange, and it wasn't going to change.
So I'd draw it.
Whether that character is actually me...
I'd know once I started drawing and watched how she reacted.
I set my hand in motion.