The Severance of Pleasure (1)
As Yurin kept working him without rest, Seona finally felt the climax surge up through him.
Driven by her rage toward Miel, Yurin had wanted to carve her own mark into Seona's body — and now she was relentlessly stimulating his cock as it came, milking him dry without pause.
"Hah… N-Noona, wait… ah… too fast… it hurts… stop…"
Seona's voice was raw with distress, but Yurin only kept lifting her hips and slamming them down, faster and faster.
Miel had already calculated it: if Yurin wrung him out this savagely, Seona would be certain that Miel was the one tormenting him — even though it was Yurin doing it. She tried to intervene, but the pleasure Seona felt was shared straight into her own body, and she was already teetering on the edge of climax herself. She clamped down hard on every sound, fighting not to make a single noise.
Because right now, Yurin was moaning in Miel's place. If both women started crying out at once, Seona would sense something was wrong and tear the blindfold off.
So Miel could only endure.
When Seona finally couldn't take it anymore and reached up to pull the blindfold free, Yurin snatched both of his wrists in a flash and crushed her mouth against his. As if she refused to let even a single moan be stolen by the woman beside them, she swallowed every sound he made, savoring it like something sweet.
A fierce urge rose in Yurin to rip the blindfold away and look into Seona's startled eyes. But if she did that and his mind shattered again, there would be no putting him back together this time.
Judging that she had drawn enough out of him, Yurin finally climbed off. The blindfold slipped down on its own — but Seona's eyes had already rolled white. Ten full minutes of continuous milking after he started coming, worked like a broken faucet, had knocked him clean unconscious.
Miel hadn't withstood the shared pain and pleasure either. She lay collapsed behind them, her whole body shuddering.
On both of their lower abdomens, the Yin Crests were clearly visible. Yurin stared at those marks with cold eyes.
Those things can't stay. I have to find a way to erase the Yin Crests.
As long as those brands remained, no matter how tightly she held Seona in her arms, she could never feel pure joy. Miel should have been nothing more than an endless supply of aphrodisiacs and stimulants drawn from her own fluids — but because of those crests, even sex with Seona left a bitter taste.
And then she remembered: there was another succubus, a monster of the same kind that used those crests.
For the current Expedition Project, two high-ranking monsters had been captured alive. The plan wasn't simply to persuade a few demons who valued their own skins over pride when death loomed, and send a handful of people into the Demon Realm. These captives were meant to open a Gate and push a full-scale force through.
Of the two high-ranking demons, one was a noble-class vampire. The other was a succubus — the same species as Miel.
Once morning came, Yurin decided, she would go to the Hwaryong Guild's Gate Research Center and ask the imprisoned succubus how to erase a Yin Crest.
The next day, Yurin left Seona and Miel behind and stepped out of the house again.
Most high-ranking monsters of A-Rank and above, once captured, tried to kill themselves. They spoke of the humiliation of being taken by humans they considered inferior, so their reasons for choosing death were easy enough to guess. The word Miel and the other demons had used for Seona and for her back in the Demon Realm — inferior species — was almost certainly a belief shared by nearly every demon.
Gates. Vast resources. And the power they called magic, drawn from the Demon Realm's energy — mana. Those three things often put them far ahead of anything Earth could offer. For humans who were helpless in their bare bodies, magic especially was an overwhelming force. The fact that they could even hold conversations with monsters at all was thanks to magic; that alone was astonishing.
But the high-ranking monsters held at the center she was visiting today seemed to operate on a different set of rules entirely.
The vampire, despite being of noble blood, claimed she was a fallen aristocrat who had joined a Gate raid as a mercenary and gotten caught. Day after day she had barely scraped together enough money to buy blood — and then, as a prisoner, she was given an endless supply of it. Not the garbage-tasting blood of women, either, but men's blood, continuously. She had even said she wanted to live here for the rest of her life. It was enough to shatter every prejudice Yurin had built up about high-ranking monsters.
The succubus was much the same. All she needed was a partner, she said — just get her a man who would become hers. As a bonus, she had demanded a computer be brought into her cell. Of course the center refused; a captive monster asking for a person rather than objects or food was not a request they could grant. Who in their right mind would want to be claimed by a creature like that?
Yurin corrected herself at once. The memory of Seona crying out Miel-noona yesterday flared up, and heat flooded her chest all over again.
Apparently the succubus had experience sifting through human memories before, because she chattered about amusing things related to the internet — streaming, funny videos, community sites. Once she got a taste of content culture, her speech even started to sound like a young human of the current generation. Yurin had only heard about her secondhand, but the succubus seemed remarkably well adapted to the human world.
She had seen the vampire once with her own eyes. The succubus would be a first.
Today she was going to promise the succubus whatever she wanted — and in exchange, ask how to erase the Yin Crest carved into Seona's lower abdomen.
Under normal circumstances, only a tiny handful of people were ever allowed to meet the captives. A B-Rank hunter like her would never have gotten near them. But she was part of the advisory staff for the expedition beyond the Gate into the Demon Realm. No matter how much information the succubus and vampire spilled, words from a human mouth carried a different weight. Demons could not be trusted. She, a human, was the most reliable advisor the expedition had.
A few months earlier, she had cross-checked what she had witnessed in the Demon Realm by talking with the vampire, digging out information. The staff had reviewed what could be verified and asked her to flag the solid facts from the conversation logs. In truth, she had already heard almost everything useful back then; meeting the succubus was unlikely to yield much new intelligence worth extracting.
But this time, she was asking for purely personal reasons.
A space sealed behind walls and doors of steel that almost no one could enter. Yurin pulled out her keycard and completed all four layers of authentication — iris, fingerprint, voice recognition — before she was finally allowed into the isolation cell where the succubus was held.
Inside, a backpack-sized device was strapped to the front of the succubus's body. Tubes ran from it to a mask covering her mouth and nose. Yurin knew exactly what it was.
When monsters crossed through a Gate, as long as the mist lingered they could still fight to some degree and manipulate mana. Once the mist cleared, their physical abilities dropped sharply and their focus for channeling mana collapsed, making proper magic nearly impossible. Earth's oxygen concentration made concentration for spellwork difficult. The device on her chest was officially labeled a high-pressure oxygen generator; everyone called it a mana interference unit. As long as it stayed on, her physical power was reduced to roughly human levels and she remained unable to cast. If she tore it off herself, an alarm would sound and a kill team would be deployed. Both monsters knew that, so neither tried anything stupid.
Yurin introduced herself first, then began the conversation.
The succubus kept talking, clearly delighted to have someone to speak with after so long. She smiled brightly and launched into every entertaining story she had.
If not for the wings on her back, Yurin thought, she would never have guessed this was a monster at all.
"So then, on VTube, that girl was eating so much I nearly fell over. I want to film something like that myself someday. Hahahaha!"
Looking around the roughly twenty-pyeong room — a computer and a bed, that was everything the succubus owned — Yurin almost felt a twinge of pity. And still the succubus chattered on, endlessly amused, about dramas, movies, animation, games, anything she could reach through a computer and the internet.
Because Yurin needed something from her, she listened to every last word from this talkative, almost human succubus.
Eventually the succubus ran out of topics. Yurin asked her question.
"There's something I want to ask. You know about the Yin Crest, right?"
"That's something only a succubus carves into her partner. How do you even know about that?"
The succubus answered a question with a question, rude as it was, clearly wondering where Yurin had learned of it.
"Is there a way to erase a Yin Crest?"
"Hmm… hard to say. Have you ever actually seen someone with one?"
"…"
Yurin hesitated. Should she tell the truth and accept the help? But while she was thinking, she failed to notice the look in the succubus's eyes. Even after everything Miel had put her through — even knowing how well a succubus could scheme — the fact that this one had adapted so cheerfully to the human world made Yurin treat her like a person.
"I was just wondering if there's a method, for when one gets marked. Curiosity, mostly."
Yurin brushed it off, pretending it was nothing more than intellectual interest.
"Hmm… I'd probably need to see it in person. There are crests that can be erased, sure. But I'd have to do it myself, which means you'd have to bring the person here. That's the problem."
"…"
The conflict inside her sharpened. Then the memory of Seona calling Miel's name the day before rose up — and the choice became easy.
"Actually… there's a man with a Yin Crest on him. Can you keep that secret?"
In the end, Yurin chose the path that would erase Seona's crest.
When she returned in three days, she would bring Seona inside a specially ordered oversized carrier bag.