Panties!!
"Don't lay a hand on her, Oliver. Aris is... the maids aren't your property."
He was shaking, but his eyes stayed locked dead on Oliver.
"What? You pig bastard dare to—"
The instant Oliver raised his fist, the family head and his retainers came into view at the far end of the corridor.
"Tch. Count yourself lucky."
With that, Oliver straightened his clothes and strode past Damian.
"Kyaa...!"
"See you next time, pretty thing. Heheh!"
As he passed, he groped my backside and shot me a wink.
"..."
It felt as if a storm had blown through and gone, and at last the tension drained out of me.
"...I'm sorry. Because of me..."
Damian hung his head, his face crumpling as if he might cry.
He was the one who'd been cursed at. So why did he look even sadder than I felt?
"Come on, then! Let's go for that walk, young master!"
Only then did Damian break into a grin and follow after me.
Three months had passed since I began attending Damian.
By now the work of waiting on him had grown fairly familiar.
"Ah...! Eric!"
I was carrying Damian's meal when I ran into him.
Eric used to stand guard in the city. Two months ago he had spotted thugs trying to slip in, subdued them, and been recognized for the feat—and now he was training as a knight of the Arbana family. A slave becoming a knight had never happened before. He had accomplished something truly remarkable.
"Is the knight order treating you all right?"
"I'm giving it everything I've got."
Eric lifted a hand to pat my head. I stepped back and slipped out from under it, and he dropped his head, looking disappointed... but what was I supposed to do? My body refuses him.
"How about you, Aris? I heard Young Master Damian has been researching magic lately. Has that been keeping you busy too?"
It had.
Lately Damian had thrown himself into research, trying to cure his mana sickness. He got so absorbed that skipping meals was a daily occurrence, which meant I had to look after him.
"Haa... all he does is magic research, every single day. If I didn't bring Young Master Damian his meals, he'd starve to death for sure."
Eric let out a short laugh at my complaining, then heard someone calling him from behind, offered a brief goodbye, and left.
Only then did I remember the meal I'd forgotten and hurry off to Damian in a fluster.
"Young Master Damian. Please eat before you keep going~."
When I opened the door to Damian's room, a cool breeze drifted in and tickled my ears. Unlike three months ago, there was no stench.
"...You're a bit late today, Aris."
Damian sat at his desk, drawing something like a magic circle as he spoke, his gaze still fixed on the paper.
He looked completely different from three months ago. The stench was gone. Muscle had taken the place of fat, and the skin once lumpy with acne had gone smooth. Damian was no longer an ugly man. He was handsome—considerably so.
"Ahaha... I got held up talking with a friend."
"A friend... Ruina?"
After three months stuck together, Damian and I had come to know a great deal about each other.
"Not Ruina. An older boy named Eric, who lived next door back when I was a slave. He joined the knight order two months ago."
"Eric...?"
The moment the name left my mouth, Damian set down his pen and looked at me.
"...Are the two of you close?"
"Yes...? We've been together since we were little, so... I suppose we are?"
"...Closer than with me?"
He watched me with an uncomfortable look on his face.
"...Ahaha. Of course not."
I answered with a smile. A little lip service. You never know when some scraps might fall your way.
"Haha... right?"
Lately Damian got jealous like this from time to time. I was no fool. I knew perfectly well that both Eric and Damian were attracted to me. And since Damian was a noble, I was doing my best to squeeze out whatever I could.
"Ah. More importantly, would you open the box on that table?"
I picked up the palm-sized box sitting on the table in front of me. Even at a glance, the wrapping was expensive.
"...What is this?"
Damian only smiled.
I undid the ribbon and peeled the wrapping away.
"Wow... this is..."
Inside the box lay a bracelet set with a blue gem.
"A bracelet...? It's incredibly pretty..."
A band of gold wrapped a jewel that glowed blue—the colors arranged almost as if someone had turned me into a bracelet.
"I happened to see it the other day, when I went to buy a magic book..."
Damian said it with his face red. Magic books were sold on the magic street, and jewelers and clothing shops lay in the exact opposite direction. Still, I decided to believe his lie.
"Call it thanks for back then... I was grateful."
Back then—when I had given him the clue to treating his mana sickness.
Mana sickness was a congenital condition in which the body could not release mana on its own. So Damian and I had been experimenting with ways to force that release artificially, and the most effective method had turned out to be ejaculation. Mana sits close to life force, so I had suggested he try expelling semen, the very stuff that makes life. Damian had been horrified... but once he tried it and it worked, he had kept up that research ever since.
"Oh, come on... then I'll accept it gratefully."
I quickly stuffed the bracelet into my pocket and smiled. I had already received jeweled shoes from him, along with a necklace, earrings, and more. Someday all of it would be my emergency fund.
"And... there's something I wanted to discuss..."
Damian flushed and lowered his head.
"Yes? What is it?"
I stepped closer.
"Lately... strangely... I can't release. I can't ejaculate... is there no way to fix it...?"
He couldn't ejaculate. No wonder a pimple had bloomed dead center on his forehead recently. So that was why.
"Hmm... could you tell me a little more? I can't tell what the problem is from just that..."
Damian went even redder, then finally got the words out.
"I... do it by hand... but I barely feel anything..."
In other words, he had been jerking off by hand every day, the stimulation had gone dull, and he couldn't come.
"..."
"I... wondered if there might be some other way... you seem to know about that sort of thing, Aris..."
That was true enough. From childhood Damian had been awkward around women, and the appearance his mana sickness had given him left him traumatized. It would be fair to say he had no sexual knowledge at all. How a child was made appeared in educational books, so that much he could learn. How to masturbate alone did not. I had even had to explain the method to him in words. And now it seemed to have come back to bite me.
"..."
So what, exactly, did Damian want me to do? Surely he wasn't asking me to offer up my body. The Damian I had watched for three months wasn't the sort of person who would do that. He wasn't implying anything else. He was genuinely asking for help.
"...First of all, how do you do it?"
At my question he flushed and hemmed and hawed.
"Ah... the way you taught me... I hold it and shake it up and down..."
"If you only tell me, I won't really understand. One moment."
I stood a candlestick upright on the desk.
"Would you try it while pretending this is yours, young master? It'll be faster if I see it myself."
"O... okay."
Damian took the candlestick and started shaking it up and down.
"L... like this... is there some kind of problem...?"
Watching him, the method itself didn't seem to be wrong.
"Hmm... the act doesn't seem to be the issue. Has there been any change in your state of mind, anything like that?"
"...A change in my state of mind? I'm not sure..."
Then had he simply grown used to the same stimulation over and over, until he got bored?
"What do you usually think about when you do it?"
"...Why do you ask?"
"Depending on what you're thinking, the stimulation can change."
"..."
Damian flushed, hung his head, and clamped his mouth shut.
"Young master?"
"I'm just—I'm not thinking about anything...!"
That reaction made it obvious. He's thinking about me. A chill crawled up my spine. No matter how kind and decent Damian was, the thought of him looking at me that way made my skin crawl all on its own. If I were a woman I would already have fallen for him and done this and that, but I had been a man, and there was no way I could fall.
"Haa..."
Even so, picturing Damian groaning in misery for days made me feel sorry for him... and when I remembered everything I'd been repaid with in the meantime, I started to think that helping a little might not be so bad...
Shit. This is bad. Just because my body is a woman's, is my mind turning into a woman's too?
I hurriedly called up Ruina's breasts and groped them in my imagination.
"Heh... heheh..."
"A... Aris?"
Saliva dripping at the mere thought of wildly grabbing Ruina's breasts proved I was still a man. Or should I call myself a lesbian now? Anyway.
"It seems Young Master Damian has grown used to the same stimulation. How about trying a different kind?"
"A different kind...? What would that be?"
"Looking at an erotic book, or something like that."
"Th-that...!? But... those are hard to get... and I feel a certain reluctance..."
Fair enough. If anyone found out Damian had an erotic book...
"Hmm... then something that would actually work... ah."
One idea flashed through my head.