A Friend, Not the Girl Next Door
I kept feeling that rising sensation even while searching for a new practice target.
It kept climbing as time passed.
Is this how it’s supposed to work?
If this is like levels and experience points, then maybe it’s because I’m still Level 1, but the rate at which the bar fills feels pretty fast.
It reminds me of how quickly experience points rack up when a Level 1 character farms low-level mobs in an RPG.
I figured the drunk guy at the bus stop yesterday only got a few minutes, and the college girl next door only got one or two minutes of hypnosis before I released them, so the short duration meant I never noticed the buildup.
But now, with the kid at the playground, the hypnosis has been running for thirty minutes, forty minutes, almost an hour… and some kind of experience is accumulating in proportion to that sustained time.
Even while sensing that, I kept looking for the next target.
Now that I knew proficiency was building, I needed to find safe, everyday targets I could hypnotize without complications.
The homeless guys were on hold for today.
They weren’t going anywhere, so I could hunt them later.
I walked toward the shopping street, observing people.
A guy tapping away on his laptop in a café. No good. If he suddenly lost an hour of memory, he’d notice the time gap right away and feel something was off.
A woman walking while texting someone. Also no good. Same problem—if an hour vanished, she’d realize it, and the person on the other end would keep messaging her, making the blackout obvious.
The situation had to be one where a memory gap could be rationally explained away.
Time’s up.
Time to check on the kid.
When I reached the playground, it was around 9:26.
Roughly six minutes left before the hypnosis ended.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you? I said it’s time to go home.”
“No! I don’t wanna!”
The hypnosis was still working perfectly.
The little kid I’d hypnotized was stubbornly refusing to leave even though his mom was scolding him.
By now, the playground was empty except for the two of them.
Too bad. If they’d stayed another hour, I could’ve tested the two-hour consecutive-use cooldown.
9:29.
Time kept ticking.
The kid’s mom looked ready to explode, but she was holding it in. This was an apartment complex, after all—she couldn’t lose her temper in public.
The kid was still happily swinging on the swing set.
It might look a little strange, though.
Playing alone with no friends around and enjoying it that much?
He’d already been at it for well over an hour including the hypnosis time.
Hypnosis command.
‘Make a sulky face.’
The kid’s expression changed immediately. Much more natural now.
His mom seemed to notice the shift too.
“Are you going to keep throwing a tantrum? Is this how you’re going to act? Let’s just go home and watch Honey Ping.”
She switched to coaxing, probably thinking he was just being difficult.
Time kept passing.
31 minutes. 15 seconds… 25 seconds… 40 seconds… 32 minutes.
A few seconds after hitting 32 minutes, the kid who had been heading for the slide suddenly stopped.
He looked around, spotted his mom, and ran toward her whining.
The sensation faded.
Whatever had been running in my head stopped.
The hypnosis had ended. It felt exactly the same as when I released it myself.
I’d worried that maintaining the full hour might trigger the same headache as yesterday, but my body felt fine.
And then it happened.
Something heavy and solid filled my mind, followed by a burst of light, refreshing energy.
No floating message like “Level Up” appeared, but the feeling was unmistakable.
I had clearly reached the next stage.
And I knew I could choose one of two options.
[Targets: +1] vs [Duration: +1 Hour]
The first option meant I could hypnotize two people at once.
The second meant I could still only target one person, but the duration would increase to two hours.
If I could control two people at the same time, then two women at once… a threesome…
No. Fuck. This is all because of those gallery bastards.
My brain isn’t in my dick.
There’s no way I’m being ruled by my cock.
Even if that’s the only part of me worth looking at, it definitely isn’t in charge.
Besides, even with just one person, hypnotizing a woman into sex without complications or leaving evidence is still a long way off unless I plan some elaborate perfect crime.
Maybe things will change once the hypnosis grows stronger, but right now that’s how it looks.
So increasing the number of targets doesn’t seem useful yet.
It wasn’t just my dick thinking about threesomes—there simply wasn’t a clear use for two simultaneous targets.
But extending the duration by another hour would definitely open up more possibilities than having two targets right now.
Can I choose later?
I tested the thought.
Positive. But right after the confirmation, I learned something else.
I could choose later, but experience points would be locked until then.
Damn it. The system only bothers to tell me the important stuff immediately.
It never mentioned the consecutive-use cooldown either.
I can’t afford to stall on leveling up. I have to pick now.
I’ll go with time.
I chose [Duration: +1 Hour] in my mind.
And then the fundamental rules updated.
[Hypnotize 1 person for up to 2 hours]
[You can release the hypnosis at any time. The target will not remember anything that happened while hypnotized.]
[Issue commands by whistling]
The original rules I’d seen when I first obtained the ability had changed.
Now it said two hours instead of one.
I wondered if the rest of the rules could change too.
That would be convenient.
I’d think about that later.
Right now, the only thing that mattered was leveling up.
To do that, I needed to figure out the optimal interval between uses.
The consecutive-use cooldown.
How many hours after using hypnosis could I use it again without issues?
If the safe window without headaches or strain was three hours, did that three hours start from when I began the hypnosis or from when it ended?
I asked my mind.
From the start time.
Confirmed.
Makes sense. If it started from the end time, then extending the duration would be pointless—it would just make the cooldown longer.
In that case, the only way to level up quickly would be to keep the duration at one hour and increase the number of targets instead.
So what exactly is the cooldown?
Yesterday I hypnotized the drunk guy around 8 p.m.
The bus ride home took about twenty-five minutes, then another ten minutes walking to my building. I ran into the college girl in front of the elevator around 8:40.
The interval had been roughly forty minutes, and I’d almost gotten a splitting headache.
Maybe trying it again after one hour would be safer now?
Since the base duration was one hour, maybe the cooldown was also one hour.
But if I was wrong and the headache hit anyway, I’d ruin my whole day.
The new duration is two hours. So to be safe, let’s set the cooldown at two hours.
I could hypnotize someone in the evening and then again two hours later.
Or, since I can only hypnotize one person at a time, I could hypnotize someone, release them after an hour, find a new target, and test the one-hour consecutive-use window that way.
My head was getting complicated again.
First, I needed to find a target.
There probably wouldn’t be any little kids at the playground in the evening, so maybe I should go after the homeless guys?
I hadn’t planned on it, but now that I knew leveling up was possible, I couldn’t just sit around.
Since I’d decided against testing the one-hour cooldown right away, I might as well take care of other things first.
It had been a while since I practiced boxing. I should head to the gym.
Time to loosen up.
As I started walking, I spotted a familiar silhouette up ahead.
A beige dress. The girl next door.
Even from a distance, her looks stood out, and I recognized the outfit I’d seen that morning.
Hmm… I’ve got nothing better to do. Might as well follow her for a bit?
I couldn’t hypnotize her, but my eyes were already drifting elsewhere.
Another girl was walking with her. Looked like a friend.
Hard to tell from this far, but she seemed pretty too. At least her profile was striking.
Huh? The library?
I kept my distance and tailed them…
So that’s why she was all dressed up since morning. The library?
I thought she was going out to have fun.
Don’t tell me college kids these days do blind dates at the library?
Oh, right. It’s early April. Maybe midterms are coming up?
Still a bit early, though.
I slipped inside the library and found a seat at a corner table in the reading room. The girl next door looked sulky.
That reminded me of when I’d hypnotized her.
She’d said she wanted to do well on her exams.
She’d even lied to her parents about her grades.
The way her lips were sticking out was kind of cute. Her friend seemed to be lecturing her.
The girl next door looked deflated, shoulders slumped.
Her friend was a good one, though.
I’d wondered what kind of studying they could do without any books, but the friend pulled out textbooks, notebooks, and pens from her own bag and handed them over.
She wasn’t as pretty as the girl next door, but still attractive—and her personality seemed nice too.
If the girl next door gave off a gentle, adorable, clearly well-loved vibe, her friend had a cooler, more straightforward look.
The girl next door was still under her one-week cooldown, so hypnosis wouldn’t work on her anyway.
But her friend was fair game.
I grabbed a book from the shelf—positioned so the girl next door couldn’t see me—and started reading while standing.
From that angle, I could still watch her friend.
The book was on social sciences, something I vaguely remembered hearing about, and I found myself getting surprisingly absorbed.
Stealing glances at her friend’s face made it even better.
…They were actually studying hard.
Well, mostly the friend. She was a model student despite her looks.
Whenever the girl next door tried to stand up and slack off, her friend would give her a stern look and pull her back down.
Over an hour had already passed.
It wasn’t that long for actual studying, but I’d been standing the whole time.
My legs were starting to ache.
The girl next door got up, apparently asking to go to the bathroom, and her friend nodded.
I hid further behind the bookshelf.
This was starting to feel different from what I’d originally intended. A creeping sense of self-loathing was rising.
Like some subway pervert.
Well, what I was doing wasn’t really any different.
Still, the reality check hit hard.
Damn it. This is all because of those gallery bastards.
They kept equating hypnosis with sex, so now every pretty girl I see makes me act like this.
I should leave once the girl next door comes back from the bathroom.
If I walked out now, I might run into her on her way back.
A chance encounter would be fine, but a working adult hanging around a library on the weekend?
And running into the girl next door—the same person he saw leaving that morning?
The stalker scenario wrote itself.
No. Looking at me right now, I basically was a stalker.
Once I confirmed she’d returned, I headed for the exit—only to see her friend standing up too.
What? Is she going to the bathroom now?
She’d looked like she wasn’t planning to leave at all.
Anyway, I needed to get out fast. If I didn’t, the girl next door—who clearly didn’t want to study—would probably look toward the door after her friend.
I walked out quickly and waited near the bathrooms.
The hallway was empty. I could see her friend approaching.
The distance closed.
I pretended to walk past her.
Whistle—
Soft, but aimed precisely at her ear.
Hypnosis command.
‘Follow me to a corner of the outdoor lounge.’
Her footsteps stopped behind me. Then I heard her following.
A faint thrill ran through me.
Even if only for a little while, she was mine now.