Succubus Kim Rina
"Always pay attention to security when you're cleaning the office."
"Yes, sir."
Sanghyun, a maintenance staffer at the GGC Crew House, answered.
Jaehoon, who might as well have been the head of the entire maintenance crew, repeated the same line every single morning. Sanghyun could already predict the next words out of his mouth.
"In the residential floors, not even a single breath should be heard. And do not enter any rooms without permission."
"Yes, I understand."
Sanghyun gave the same reply every morning as well. It wasn't empty lip service. He had started as a contract cleaner and worked his way up to full-time staff. No one knew better than he did how well GGC treated its people. That was exactly why he intended to clean with everything he had. Guarding security went without saying.
I'll bury my bones here. I want to end up like Jaehoon hyung.
Even so, Sanghyun never dreamed that a succubus was hiding inside his own mind. The night before, a demon had appeared in his dream and forced an untimely wet dream on a grown man, but who would ever connect that to an actual demon?
They've trained their subordinates pretty thoroughly. Not that it has anything to do with me.
Kim Rina surveyed her surroundings through Sanghyun's eyes and ears. Then she gently prodded the air with mana.
Woom.
The moment she stirred her mana, reactions flared from every direction. She hastily pulled it back in.
This place is crawling with alarm magic too.
The elevator—or whatever they called that transport device—was plastered with every kind of alarm spell imaginable. At this rate, casting magic inside the building was close to impossible.
The second I step out of this human, I'll be caught.
The alarm magic seemed to react to any mana above a certain threshold. That meant Kim Rina's body, which held far more mana than an ordinary person, would set the alarms off simply by existing. The only reason she hadn't been detected yet was because she was hidden inside a mind—a kind of separate dimension of its own.
Why are they so tight about this? There are already so many surveillance devices besides the magic.
Kim Rina knew she was being watched from every angle. According to Sanghyun's memories, they were called CCTV. The technology of this world was bizarrely advanced—on a completely different level from the dozen-plus worlds she had passed through. Information traveled at a maddening speed because of it. That was why recovering her power had been so painfully slow.
Normally she would have drained Essence until her victims died, but here she could only siphon a moderate amount. If she started killing people indiscriminately, word of her existence would spread far too quickly. If that happened before she fully recovered her strength, even a demon who had survived more than a dozen worlds would have a hard time staying alive.
In this situation, the best she could do was stay perfectly still and quiet until her power returned. Once she was back at full strength, no one in this world—where individual combat power and mental fortitude lagged so far behind the technology—would be able to stop her. But that would mean two more months of doing nothing, absorbing Essence in tiny sips.
A succubus holding back with Essence right in front of her? It was no different from tossing a raw fish in front of a cat and telling it to restrain itself. Kim Rina had barely managed to endure for a month, but she had no intention of waiting any longer. She already had enough strength to kill Lee Jungmin's group. If she could score a big haul while taking them out, she would recover a significant portion of her power in one go.
The only real variable is if they're stronger than I estimated...
Judging by the power levels she had seen through the earth's memories at the place she was summoned, they were well within her ability to handle.
"I'll take the living room. Sanghyun, you clean the empty rooms and then come out. You know which ones are empty, right?"
"Of course."
Jaehoon and Sanghyun began cleaning the residential floor. There were ten rooms in total; five of them were empty. It was only light dusting, but they still had to move quickly if they wanted to finish before the residents woke up.
Sanghyun walked past the three rooms belonging to Jungmin, Keira, and Elena—lined up side by side—and headed for an empty one. The moment he stepped into that hallway, Kim Rina felt it.
Oh-ho. What an attractive place.
Lust and Essence saturated the air. If she could just absorb that lust, she felt she could recover her full strength in a single stroke.
Who is it? Who the hell is it?
Through the lust exploding beyond the door, Kim Rina extracted the information. Lust was the energy she claimed as her authority; with it she could do a great many things. And because it traveled a slightly different path from mana, ordinary magic could not detect it. She could sense other detection spells on this floor beyond the usual alarm magic, but none of them were sharp enough to pick out her movements amid this storm of lust.
Haah, hng, haaaah.
Elena, Elena, Elena!
The lust painted the scene inside the room in raw, unfiltered detail. The two people she had seen in the earth's memories were naked, tangled together, making love. The act had already been going on for hours, yet neither of their lusts showed any sign of cooling. Neither the man nor the woman was forcing it. To Kim Rina's eyes, they had already far surpassed ordinary levels.
I knew they belonged to this crew, but they live here?
She hadn't known her targets actually resided in the building. She would have to revise her plans. Originally she had intended to locate the target's home from here and eliminate him first, but if he lived in this building she couldn't simply strike at will. The magic blanketing the structure was one problem; the being currently sharing his body was another.
Hng, I'm going strange! If we keep going I'll get even stranger... haaah!
The blonde woman's power was as immense as her lust. Even if Kim Rina recovered her original strength, she could not guarantee victory in a head-on fight. Of course, that only applied to a direct confrontation. Kim Rina preferred slipping into minds and fighting on a different battlefield entirely.
The one silver lining was that while traces of divinity lingered, no actual divinity could be felt.
The man has no divinity either... He had it back then, didn't he?
Lee Jungmin, was it? No divinity radiated from him either. Just like the woman, traces remained, but the crucial divinity itself was gone. It was different from what she had seen in the earth's memories.
Hmm...
Kim Rina decided to proceed carefully and continued gathering information. In the room next to the one where Jungmin and the blonde woman were making love, a blue-haired woman was comforting herself alone.
Jungmin, right there, right there... hnnngh.
This woman's lust was nothing to scoff at either. But her power was nowhere near the blonde's. She was an excellent mage, and that was all. If it had only been the blue-haired one, Kim Rina would have flipped the entire building right then and there.
Did this bitch put up all the magic herself?
Even while pleasuring herself, she was maintaining a spell so that no sound would leak from the room. That mental fortitude deserved praise. Of course, keeping the lust from leaking out was beyond her.
In the room where Jungmin and the blonde were locked together, the blonde was also suppressing the noise with raw power. That was why Sanghyun simply thought the tenth floor was quiet as a grave. He finished tidying two empty rooms and moved to the opposite hallway. Three empty rooms waited on that side.
Kim Rina felt another pulse of restless lust.
Aaah... they're doing it again, aren't they? Keira's making those sounds I don't even know about again, isn't she?
It wasn't spoken words—it was a thought woven into the lust itself. A short-haired woman was lying awake. Softly, softly, she rubbed her thighs together as if her crotch itched. But with nothing there, the emptiness could never be filled.
...I'm the only one falling behind...
"Damn it! Goddamn it!"
This time it was an actual voice. Sanghyun, passing the door, flinched and stopped. A moment later a whirring noise and game sounds drifted out. Only then did he carefully move on to the next room and resume cleaning.
Sanghyun recalled a rumor floating around the crew.
Because of Park Changsik, Nayeon took such a shock she turned into an idiot.
It seemed true enough to him. So he decided to keep quiet about what he had just heard—Nayeon swearing herself awake at four in the morning. That was simple courtesy for someone who cleaned private living spaces.
Is that the kind of shock it was?
Reading Sanghyun's thoughts, Kim Rina found it odd. To her senses, it looked like nothing more than unresolved lust. The lust of a woman left alone in her room could become a serious problem; she had seen scenes like this countless times. That was why she felt disappointed. If someone had been asleep, she could have slipped into their mind through a dream in an instant. She would be discovered the moment she left Sanghyun's body, but given the state of the tenth floor, she could probably pass it off as a harmless incident even if she were caught. Everyone was too lost in their own lust to notice.
Well, it's fine. Today is just reconnaissance. There'll be another chance.
But the chance arrived sooner than expected.
Soft, even breathing.
In the office, one person was asleep, leaning back in a chair. It was Nari, still wearing her office clothes.
"Jaehoon-ssi, over there..."
Sanghyun spoke in a low voice. Jaehoon stopped with his hand halfway to the light switch.
"Is it my turn to wake her today?"
"Unfortunately, yes."
Sanghyun and Jaehoon had standing orders to wake Nari whenever this happened. At first they had rotated the duty out of sheer nerves, terrified of whatever scolding she might unleash. But at some point, waking her had become a reward.
A reward for getting a close look at beauty that never broke even in sleep. A reward for hearing baby-soft breathing from right beside her. On days when she muttered work-related sleep talk under the weight of her workload, the good mood lasted all day. And though it had never actually happened, there was the theoretical reward of being allowed to touch her shoulder if voice alone failed to wake her.
Jaehoon approached Nari with a smile on his face.
What should I do?
If Kim Rina wanted, she could emerge right now and slip into Nari's body. Sanghyun would immediately fall into sleep and have another wet dream, but that was none of her concern. The real problem was that Nari's lust was vanishingly small—almost nonexistent. People like this appeared from time to time. So-called asexuals. They lived ordinary lives without any trouble, and as long as their bodies were healthy they could even produce offspring. But they never found joy in the act itself. Because they had no lust.
An asexual was the natural enemy of a succubus who absorbed Essence and played with lust. First, drawing Essence out of an asexual's mind was difficult. A succubus used lust as a lever to pull Essence free; without lust, that simply didn't work. Unable to absorb Essence, escaping that person's mind also became hard. Entering was possible using the succubus's own lust, but exiting required using the host's lust. A succubus of Kim Rina's caliber could still leave with even that meager amount of lust, but she could never exit as instantly as she would from an ordinary person's mind. So if she entered Nari's mind, Essence absorption would be painfully slow, and leaving whenever she wanted would be nearly impossible.
The advantage of being right beside Jungmin and waiting for an opening was real—but what good was it if she couldn't leave when she needed to?
Right... I'll wait for the next chance.
Just as Kim Rina finished settling her thoughts, Jaehoon was already waking Nari.
"Um, Captain? It's five o'clock."
"Mmngh? Wanna sleep a little more..."
Watching Nari twist her body and whine, Jaehoon hurriedly clamped a hand over his own mouth. She was so cute he almost made a sound. He barely steadied his breathing and tried again.
"Um, Captain? It's five in the morning."
"..."
Regrettably, this time Nari opened her eyes. Those eyes were razor-sharp, nothing like someone who had just woken. She stared at Jaehoon as if she meant to pierce straight through him. Jaehoon understood the meaning of that gaze better than anyone. He simply nodded without a word.
"...You always work hard."
"Not at all. It's our job."
"Starting the day after tomorrow we'll be entering a Gate, so you'll be able to rest for a while."
"Pardon? Ah, understood."
Nari found it curious that Jaehoon's voice actually darkened at the mention of rest, but she decided not to dwell on it.
"Well then."
The moment Nari left the office, Jaehoon and Sanghyun both let out long sighs.
"...There goes the highlight of the day."
"Still, Jaehoon-ssi got to do it today... Aah, I should have been the one to wake her."
"There'll be another chance next time. Let's clean."
"Yes."
While the two men tidied the office, Kim Rina thought this might turn into an excellent opportunity.
A Gate? If that human Lee Jungmin goes in with them, I might be able to score a massive haul.
Inside a Gate she would be freer to move than in this building smothered in surveillance devices and magic. If she could properly absorb Jungmin's Essence in there, dealing with the blonde woman would become possible as well.
First I need to find the other Keepers who will be entering the Gate.
Sanghyun's workday still had a long way to go. During that day he often crossed paths with other Keepers. She decided to wait for those moments.