A Careful Approach to the Leopard
There were any number of ways to take a leopard beastkin slowly.
The roleplay that had begun at night carried straight through until morning. Partway in she threw the scenario aside entirely, climbing onto him of her own accord and raking his back with her nails—but taken all together, it had still been a memorable night in bed.
Whenever that animal sex came to an end, the conclusion was always the same.
"Haaah…"
She stayed there with him buried deep, her whole body shivering, until she lost consciousness. The phrasing was crude, that was all. In truth it was closer to her simply falling asleep.
Claws a man's back to ribbons and then sleeps like she hasn't a care in the world. Gaining her ability, Spearwing, hadn't made his body any tougher, nor had it raised his physical ability. She knew that perfectly well, which was why she must have held back when she dragged her nails down his spine. If she hadn't, it would not have ended at lingering marks. The wounds would have been far worse.
This is going to sting for a while. He turned his back to the full-length mirror and glanced over his shoulder. He was no cat scratching post, and yet his skin was a mess of angry red lines.
That ought to kill her sex drive for a good long while. The trouble with training was what came after: for a set stretch of time, the target fell into heat. Even once you'd conquered her, you still had to spend days on end devoted to that one person alone. He couldn't deny the step was necessary, though. Training was not the end. You had to build a bond, and you had to make her understand what true love actually was. That part could not be skipped.
No idea why the symptoms get this bad… It shouldn't have been nearly so severe. He had a fair guess as to the cause. The only one who'd pull something like this is the goddess. She clearly had no intention of letting the work proceed in any tidy fashion. Either that, or she simply wanted to watch him bed yet another woman, even one more time. The goddess who had dumped him into this world in the first place was exactly the sort to have tastes like that.
This side of things is all cleaned up. Time to move on to the next target. Arang picked up Yuyeong's phone and started flicking through it. She had given him the password ages ago, so the lock was meaningless.
Number's here, of course… and quite a few photos of the two of them. Close enough that the girl would turn up at the house itself—so this much was only natural. Should I set a meeting first?
He had meant to leave that to Yuyeong, but he had sprung sex on her out of nowhere. Better to let her sleep it off and send the messages himself, pretending to be her.
He opened an app called GreenTalk at once. GreenTalk was so dominant it might as well have been the only social network in the world. It was also an app everyone cursed for cramming in bizarre ads and useless updates—but it had the market in a near-monopoly, so people used it while grinding their teeth.
In the game you used it to raise affection with the heroines, or to dig up clues about new quests and updates. Now that the game had become reality, it was different. On top of all that, GreenTalk carried an ordinary messaging function, the sort any normal social app would have.
Arang sent Reshi a message right away.
He did not forget to act the part. Yuyeong was cold by nature, but the messages she had sent until now showed that she turned timid and soft for no one except that younger sister of hers.
Not long after the text went out, the little 1 beside it vanished.
Well, yeah. She saw that. How was she supposed to answer nicely? He had expected as much. Even so, he had no intention of quitting here.
Surprised. He was certain it had not been the sort of reaction a person could simply wave off.
After he kept pleading, she finally gave in. Reshi said there was a decent café near her place, and she sent a time and an address so they could meet there. They traded a little more small talk after that, and then the messages came to an end.
Preparations are done. Now I just need the right moment to step in. Arang had no intention of sitting down with the two of them from the start. The plan was to pass by, happen to notice them, and join the table. If he was waiting beside Yuyeong from the beginning, Reshi would obviously balk. What mattered was slipping in once the conversation was already underway, so she couldn't get up and leave in a hurry.
Two days left… nothing else on the schedule. Might as well rest. Training Yuyeong had burned through a great deal of his focus. A day or two of genuine rest, while he settled on his next opponent, didn't seem like a bad idea. Besides, a pile of work had stacked up for him in his capacity as a Sidekick.
He kept at that work right up until the day of the meeting. There was no office to report to—just a remote job of checking documents and contracts and sending them on—so even Arang, unused to this sort of thing, could handle it without trouble.
Villains and kaijin won't start running wild in earnest for a while yet. That's the only reason I can afford this… The incidents began once the protagonist had settled into the academy to some degree. This world was, to the last, a story that flowed around its protagonist. But the goddess had forced someone named Arang into that world, and there was no telling what change the current of the story would meet because of it. Whether he himself would be drafted as the protagonist and dragged into every incident, or whether things would keep running on the original protagonist's rails—he could not know which.
Even so, I'll need to keep the protagonist in check, at least to a point. Put in the kindest light, what Arang was doing now was still unforgivable. Training women was not a thought that would occur inside an ordinary person's head. And he had already brought down one B-Rank Hero. Keep on like this, and it would be no surprise if the grown protagonist took his head off.
He's got so many protagonist traits I can't even remember them. Arang opened a blank file and began writing down the traits the protagonist possessed, one after another.
Goddess's Protection, Holy Sword Unity, Divine Body, Divine Power, Absolute Mind… is this all I can call to mind? Even listing only the ones whose effects he knew, it came to that much. Goddess's Protection granted immunity to all sorts of debuffs and drugs. Holy Sword Unity was exactly what it sounded like: summoning the holy sword. Divine Body and Divine Power meant he possessed a god's flesh and the power a god wields. Absolute Mind, last of all, was a trait that left him all but invincible against mental attacks. Traits that broken were enough to make his head spin, but he could accept them, more or less.
The game was an overpowered porn game from the very start… They were all growth-type traits, and the real problem was that they had no ceiling. No limit meant that the harder the protagonist worked, the stronger he would become.
I'll have to do something about him. But right now he had neither a connection nor a contact at the academy. This was not the moment to act. Set that aside for now… Nothing is more foolish than clinging to a problem you cannot solve. Do what you can first.
Once I train Reshi, it might not be a bad idea to get my preparations in order and register as a Hero. Sidekicks who possessed traits were not unheard of, but when a decent trait appeared, most of them went independent and became Heroes. Quite a few people had become world-class Heroes that way. If you had outstanding ability, there was no need to remain a Sidekick.
Of course, it'll take a fair amount of time. Possessing a trait did not make everything go your way. How you handled that trait was a separate question, and he didn't think he could settle on a firm answer for that part either.
…Looking at it like this, there isn't a single thing I can actually decide. Nothing was certain, and that alone left him uneasy. He did not know every event that would occur in this world. At best he knew the major incidents, the principal heroines, and a hidden piece or two.
Once this training is finished, maybe I can secure at least one thing. If he obtained Reshi's trait, he could raise his physical ability to A-Rank. It would only be a jump in weight class, and yet he would still hold power greater than most Heroes.
The dungeons opening around then were upper B-Rank, too. Villains do not create dungeons. Kaijin do, to flaunt their desire and their power. He didn't know why it worked that way, but most kaijin who had made a name for themselves possessed one.
No information ever came out about that, so it's a problem I simply can't solve. Expecting solid worldbuilding from a porn game is a luxury. It's a game you play to get off. What would it matter if a creative-but-cliché story showed up in a thing like that? Even so, for a porn game, the story had been remarkably solid. If it had been a game with no information about the setting at all, he would have been even more frustrated.
He finished the last of the paperwork, sent it off by email, and shut the laptop with a soft click.
We agreed to meet around two in the afternoon, so I should head out soon. He had told Yuyeong to go ahead and be talking with her, so if he left now the timing would land just right. Arang rose at once and got ready to go.
The final goal was training, and conquest. That alone was the objective he meant to set for himself.