The Great Rift (2)
A wide bowl. A basin. Set on the table so that wherever I squeezed, the milk would land inside it.
And in that state, I... was milking myself.
No matter how I looked at it, buying a breast pump was ridiculous. What the hell, a contraption that just sent it straight into a bottle...?
I stopped Ha Yujeong from going out to buy one. I lifted my T-shirt and hauled out that massive chest, aimed the nipple toward the basin... and then grabbed my breast with my hand.
It was fucking embarrassing. Humiliating. Absolutely degrading. What the hell was I doing? Was I a cow?
Fortunately, I sent Ha Yujeong out of the room. I felt a little bad for making her come and go after only a few minutes of conversation, but... no, why would I feel bad? That was literally her job.
Anyway. There was no way in hell I was going to strip out my tits and start squeezing them in front of that woman.
Ha Yujeong didn’t seem to want to see that spectacle either, because she left with a faintly odd look on her face. When she asked whether she should buy nursing pads, I told her not to bother. I was going to squeeze it all out at once.
I had no idea how much milk I’d produce, but even so... if I had to stick pads to my chest for this too, the reality hit would be too much. I was already wearing a pad, for God’s sake.
Drip.
Drip.
“Wow... holy shit.”
It was pouring out.
Once I got a good grip on it, it came spurting out like a fountain. There was really that much? Hold on... something felt off. It hadn’t come out when we did a titjob at lunch.
And yet tonight... it had built up this much?
Damn. I really was a cow. This body was.
I squeezed harder, using as much force as I could. There was no risk of damaging anything thanks to the Blessing, so I wanted to get it out as fast as possible.
I’d thought of my breasts as water balloons, but it really had been water sloshing around inside them all along.
Luckily, I didn’t feel particularly horny.
I wasn’t touching my chest with the mindset of masturbating.
And maybe because there wasn’t a man anywhere nearby, my body didn’t react.
When I wasn’t in that kind of mood, my breasts seemed a little less sensitive, too.
Then again, if a mother got turned on every time a baby latched on and started tugging at her, she wouldn’t be a mother—she’d just be a mad slut.
Maybe this body was strict in that regard. It felt like its sensitivity split cleanly depending on the situation.
Plip, plip, plip.
“Ah. Is that everything...?”
After about five minutes of squeezing, the milk finally stopped.
The basin wasn’t completely full. Small mercy, I guess... and now I had to...
Ha Yujeong had said it would keep for three days if I bottled it and refrigerated it, but why the hell would I drink it? Just thinking about it made me feel sick.
I lifted the basin and headed for the sink. I was going to throw it away.
It was a little wasteful... and I did feel some resistance at the idea of throwing out breast milk specifically.
Still, I was throwing it away.
Eh? That’s such a waste.
Waste my ass.
It was garbage that would keep coming out all through my period anyway.
I was absolutely not drinking it.
I had no intention of ever putting this stuff in my mouth.
Somebody else could drink it, though.
Are you insane? Give this to somebody else?
No way. Why would I hand this to someone? Sell it for money? I don’t need that.
Who the hell would even drink this... who...
...Ugh.
You imagined it! You totally imagined who to give it to, didn’t you?!
No. I didn’t. Absolutely not. I’m not giving it to anyone.
What would be the point? He’d just get jealous again, start asking whose baby it was, spiral into suspicion, and end up sulking all on his own.
There was no point in letting that pervert poke around any further. Tomorrow was the real thing.
Unable to listen to any more of Chae Haeun’s bullshit, I shoved her back inside my head again. She immediately started talking from within that darkness about holding a man in my arms, giving him a lap pillow, letting him nurse, and stroking his head.
Better yet, stroking his dick too. She said it was time for nursing play, and asked how about Kang Juhyuk for now. That perverted bitch. She turned motherhood into sex. Even breastfeeding was just a game to her.
Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting...
...and yet.
“...Ugh.”
Damn it.
It was... kind of hot.
In the end, I poured the milk from the basin into a tumbler.
It felt like I’d been swayed by Chae Haeun’s insane chatter, but... no.
It’d be a waste to just dump it. And who knew? Maybe it tasted good. I could drink it myself. I wasn’t giving it to anyone else.
This stirring feeling was probably just my body’s instinctive response, not really my own thoughts at all.
During my period... when the milk was coming in, I seemed to get a little urge to feed it, somehow...
Of course, even when I was Choi Eunho, I’d liked breast-milk play... but I kept that milk-producing bitch around for quite a while. Nearly half a year, actually...
She was one of the few women I didn’t dump because I got bored and told her to get lost; we’d both just gradually decided it was time to stop seeing each other.
But back then I was always the one drinking it. Obviously.
In any case, I had no intention of losing to the voice of instinct.
I’d accepted the milk instead of throwing it away because I had felt a little grossed out by the idea of wasting it too, but...
There was no way in hell I was going to do breast-milk play. Absolutely not.
I wanted to call Kang Juhyuk and ask him a bunch of things, but...
Probably this was just my body reacting, so I forced it into a text instead.
...Hmm.
That should be fine.
Send...
No...
Hmm.
Is it not enough?
Should I bring jerky for the preserved food?
...No, wait.
Damn it. There I go again...
I deleted the message right away. I deleted most of them.
Even though I already knew better. This was weird as hell. But...
Still. Leaving a few lines in there would keep me from getting too worried... no, too frustrated.
Damn it. This body’s reactions.
What a pain in the ass.
Thinking that, I packed my bag. I wanted to be able to stuff everything into it and leave the moment it was time to go.
There wasn’t much to pack, really. Just water... and some preserved food?
I could buy things there, but if I already had stuff at home, I might as well bring it.
I’d filled this tumbler with water earlier. Good. I’ll take this too.
Once everything was ready... maybe I should get some sleep.
Chae Haeun seemed quieter lately, too... yeah, letting those urges out really did help...
Yep, Eunha, noona! See you tomorrow!
...Hmm.
Right. I should just read it and reply properly.
That part, at least, he was good at.
True to the phrase “a vehicle for work,” the moment lunchtime arrived I shoved the bags I’d spread all over the living room into my spatial bag, then drove the SUV over to Hunter Association Headquarters with Kang Juhyuk in tow.
The Great Rift gate existed at the North Pole, to be exact, which meant it wasn’t exactly the sort of place you could just drive to. But each country’s Hunter Association headquarters had a Teleportation Gate installed that linked directly to it. At first it had been a tool for clearing the place out, but now it was basically a money machine.
On the first-floor plaza of the headquarters, in front of the teleportation gate, hunters were already gathered again today, forming parties and preparing to enter the Great Rift. Kang Juhyuk and I were no different. Among the non-hunters were association staff members, waiting to buy the byproducts the hunters brought back and convert them into cash on the spot.
“With all the hunters packing their gear and getting ready, it really does feel like fantasy, doesn’t it?”
“...”
Fantasy.
Yeah, that was one way to put it.
The standard way to fight monsters was with cold weapons infused with the hunter’s own mana. Here and there, you had swords, spears, mages... and the kind of people wearing armor that looked straight out of another century.
Armor, though, was cheap stuff. Monster attacks ripped through metal like paper.
The reason people wore it was to cram in more space for enchantments and get a cost-effective layer of protection... but that sort of thing was meant for hunters who only planned to roam the low-depth zones for a while, kill monsters, grab the byproducts, and come back out. If you were going to be walking around for a long time, you couldn’t wear something like that.
On the other hand, hunters who had money to burn often looked more like ordinary civilians. If they wore light clothing made of slightly tougher material to keep thorns and scrapes off their skin, that was already a luxury. Some even wore comfortable tracksuits, and a few cared about fashion on top of everything else.
As for me... well, I didn’t need protection, so I was practically bare.
I’d come out wearing a sports bra, a white T-shirt, and black sweatpants.
Same as last time. At this point, it was basically my work uniform.
It couldn’t be helped. The low-depth zones of the Great Rift were the mines of a new era, and hunters who entered them were basically miners themselves.
It had become an energy-driven economic system for collecting monster byproducts and mana stones, then using them to keep the enchanted, magic-tech society running. Even the association’s practice of disposing of the byproducts for hunters had come about as part of that system’s development. I’d heard that in the old days, you had to lug everything around and sell it yourself.
Go in as cheaply as possible, grab what you can, and come back out. It was basically an extraction looting game.
“Hello. You look familiar, but I don’t think we’ve met. Is this your first time in the Great Rift? You seem nervous.”
“I’m not nervous, so go do your job.”
“...”
And on top of that... there were the ones with so little tension in them that it was almost impressive. The sort of guys who couldn’t resist hitting on any woman they saw, as if they’d come to work a mine and instead found themselves on a date.
I didn’t care if they looked. I just wanted them to stay the hell away from me and not be a nuisance.
If you came here to make money, then make money. What the hell were you chasing women for?
After I shut down two of them like that, the people around us stopped coming close, even if they still glanced our way. Some of them must’ve thought we were looking for a party because there were only two of us, only to give up the second they realized otherwise. A few were clearly disappointed after looking us over and then getting brushed aside.
Feeling the eyes around us, Kang Juhyuk moved a little closer to my side. He’d seemed somewhat nervous because there were so many hunters around, but the moment it looked like I was the one being targeted, he straightened his shoulders and stuck close to me.
That was honestly kind of funny.
“Come to think of it, Nuna, you didn’t bring a weapon.”
“I’m not planning to go all the way down to the deep zones the second I buy my gear. Today, we’re basically just like those miners over there. We’re going to move around the low-depth areas and see how things look.”
I didn’t need a weapon to wander through a place like this.
My fists were my weapons.
Kang Juhyuk had come dressed with the right amount of tension—nervous, but not terrified. He seemed to have a protector on under his clothes, and a sword was hanging from his waist. His outfit was easy to move in, something he could throw away whenever he needed to, and his shoes were sturdy, like military boots.
That was the style I’d seen at the gate. Not bad.
In fact, most of what this guy would be doing was walking long distances, almost like marching.
“You came.”
“Ah—Geon!”
Just as the mana circuits were stabilizing and the teleportation gate was about to open again, a man suddenly walked up beside us.
Honestly, I’d forgotten who he was, but Kang Juhyuk’s voice made me remember.
He was the man who had led that dismantling team I’d saved inside the gate. His name was... no idea. If Juhyuk called him Geon, then I guess he was Geon.
The man called Geon had apparently been waiting for Kang Juhyuk, because he nodded at him first, then turned to look at me with a somewhat tense expression.
“Hello. Hunter Chae Eunha. I really did appreciate your help last time.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I heard you invested in Juhyuk... though.”
Geon trailed off, then looked at the gear Kang Juhyuk was carrying and wearing.
The sword was expensive enough that it was understandable, in a way, but the protector he had on was top-of-the-line Rynel gear—something anyone who could read mana would recognize at a glance.
The miners gathered here were mostly C-class, and there weren’t many mages among them, so not many people would notice. But if you were a man leading a team, you’d be able to tell immediately.
“I was just going to say I hoped you’d take good care of him, but... you really don’t spare any expense.”
“I’ll take care of him. He’ll be treated better than he is there.”
“...Yes. I understand.”
The worry in that man’s eyes was obvious. Caution. Maybe even unease.
An A-class top-tier hunter—and a woman who handed out Rynel gear like it was nothing.
What on earth did she want from Kang Juhyuk?
He probably wanted to believe it was simple kindness, but... no matter how generous you were, handing out tens of millions of won worth of equipment out of goodwill alone was strange. They’d only just met, after all.
“Geon, what brings you here?”
“Well... I needed quick cash. I’m a miner today too. I’m borrowing a party over there.”
“I see.”
That was only natural concern. Only natural worry.
I understood it... but it was annoying.
And even if it was annoying... I understood it.
This man had come in the role of a father. A paternal instinct not unlike motherhood.
The man he’d been looking after as Kang Juhyuk had been lured off by some woman and was now stepping into a dangerous place called the Great Rift, so of course he’d followed him here.
He’d said it was because he needed money fast, but really, he just wanted to see for himself whether Kang Juhyuk would make it back from the Great Rift safely.
But honestly, it was a problem if eyes like that were going to keep watching us. Kang Juhyuk and I were going to be having sex whenever we wanted to. Something that should’ve stayed a rumor would become a certainty, and he’d stop being a partner and start looking like a gigolo and a sucker.
No—actually, to anyone who already knew, we probably looked like that already...
But it’d be a pain if there were actual proof.
Teleportation Gate has stabilized.
It will remain stable for six hours, and once it closes, the next scheduled stabilization time will be...
“Time’s up, then. I’ll go back to my party now.”
“Geon, be careful.”
“Yeah. You too.”
“Enough of that. Kang Juhyuk. Let’s go. He’ll manage.”
“Ah, yes.”
After sending his guardian off, the two of us stood in front of the teleportation gate.
Along with the pulse of mana, I could see an alien land beyond the distorted dimension.
I went in first, and Kang Juhyuk hurried after me.
Once we crossed the dimensional distortion, we would reach the starting base on the other side—the place where only Koreans were stationed for now, since each nation’s entry point was different.
There were association hunters assigned to guard the gate, therapists for emergency treatment, and a few craftsmen who rushed to repair damaged gear. There were even temporary facilities for the people deployed there to eat and sleep.
Sure, it was inside the Great Rift, inside a gate, but the entrance area was civilized enough to count as part of the developed world.
It had been touched by human hands so much that it practically had to be. There was a reason they called it a mine, and a reason the people here were miners.
This base was managed by Korea, but if you went a little farther around, there were bases from other countries not too far away, so if anything happened, you could get help.
In other words, there was no need to be tense from the start.
I’m talking to you. You. The one already stiffening the second he got inside.
“Hah...!”
“Breathe. Unlike that gothic hell you were trapped in, the air here is clean.”
“I-it’s just... I’m not used to mana being spread through the air like this...”
So he wasn’t nervous after all.
He was just unused to a place overflowing with mana...