"Kami-sama really is..."
The thought got that far, and Tsukuyo Inaba swallowed against a dry throat, never quite daring to finish something so blasphemous. Thick carpet ran the length of the corridor, and her steps made no sound at all.
Inside the girl's head, though, everything was in an uproar.
The words she had overheard a moment ago were like restless moths, beating their wings over the clear lake of her heart.
Something about "making a racket." Something about "private business." One moment's thought and the girl, barely into her teens, felt her cheeks go hot enough to griddle a cake on.
She shut her mouth at once, standing under the dim yellow wall lamp, and drew several long, slow breaths.
Cool night air poured through her nose and into her lungs. Borrowing its chill, she just barely pressed down the tangled noise inside her.
Obeying the veiled order Haimer had given her, Tsukuyo drew in the net of perception she had spread through the house.
She pushed her keen-eared skill, "Mind's Eye," down hard, the way one sheathes a drawn blade, leaving only the shallowest layer of warning to guard against danger nearby.
As for whatever faint sounds might come from behind that wooden door of the master bedroom afterward, the rustle of fabric, or certain low, blush-inducing gasps, she obediently sealed every last one of them outside her senses.
If she were shameless enough to eavesdrop at a time like this, that really would make her a bad child who knew no better.
And so Tsukuyo settled her heart, set her slender feet in their snow-white tabi moving, and hurried back toward her own room with the long sword held against her chest.
Elsewhere in the house, Mary Kikakujou was walking on slightly unsteady feet toward the door of Rei's guest room.
The pale silk sleeping robe she wore was tied carelessly, its collar falling open over a wide expanse of skin white as mutton-fat jade.
She had only just come out of the master bedroom, and her head was every bit as tangled as anyone's.
She knocked twice on the wooden door, and it soon opened a crack from within.
Rei the siren leaned half her body out.
She seemed to have washed recently as well. Water droplets still clung to the blue feathers at her wingtips, and she wore a loose, oversized long vest. Confusion showed in her eyes.
"Miss Marie? It's very late. Is something wrong?"
Rei's voice was as soft and lovely as ever.
"Miss Rei."
Marie bit her lower lip. The heat had not yet left her cheeks, and her eyes did not quite dare to meet Rei's.
"Kami-sama... wants the two of us to go to his room. Now."
"To Kami-sama's room?"
Rei went still.
The monster's simple mind hadn't yet turned the corner. But then she saw how red Marie's face was, and how her gaze kept sliding away.
Clever as she was, Rei understood.
That night...
All she remembered was carrying the tea into the study, then a sharp, stinging red mist. She thought she had knocked the tray over.
After that, she woke up in the guest room.
A feverish heat she had never felt before ran through her body, and below her collarbone sat a strange pattern that burned against her touch.
Putting it all together, Rei's face went scarlet in a heartbeat, and the wings at her back gave a nervous shiver.
"I-I understand. I'll come with you right away."
Rei stammered her answer, pushed the door wide and stepped out.
The two of them walked the empty corridor, and the air between them sank into a delicate, dead silence.
Marie kept her head down.
As a Japanese-French young lady raised on the strictest etiquette, she carried a frightening amount of pride.
Yet now, thinking of walking into a god's bedchamber alongside another girl, of the unknown things that might await her there, she found no refusal in herself at all. What rose instead was a numbing itch that climbed all the way up from somewhere deep.
In a blink, the two of them stood before the master bedroom door.
They pushed the half-closed door open, and warm light spilled across them both.
Haimer sat leaning back against the headboard.
"Kami-sama." Marie lifted the hem of her robe and dipped into a curtsy.
Rei, having no hands, could only bow her head stiffly, wings pressed flat to her sides.
Haimer pointed at the edge of the bed.
"Come sit."
Marie and Rei edged over with great care and sat down on the mattress rim, bumping into each other out of sheer nerves.
Watching how ill at ease the pair looked, Haimer picked up the cup beside him and took a sip of water.
"There's no need to be this tense. I called you here mainly to settle the trouble that night left behind in your bodies."
"Trouble?"
Marie lifted her head, confusion flickering through eyes as blue as open sky.
"Late last night, the raw gemstone Miss Ais gave me got doused by the tea you knocked over. The entire mansion was swallowed by an aphrodisiac poison mist." Haimer spoke at an even pace, laying out the facts exactly as they were.
"Poison at that concentration is lethal damage to a body without high-intensity toxin resistance training. It burns straight through reason."
"Then... what about us now?" Marie's fingers tightened on her sleeve.
"I used a method. To be precise, a Forbidden Art of the Heavens, something beyond what the Lower World knows."
"On the two of you."
As he said it, Haimer's gaze settled on the pale collarbones of both girls.
Marie and Rei looked down at their own collarbones at the same instant.
There, branded into the skin, ran several winding lines of dark red.
"The forbidden art drained every trace of the poison out of you, and while I was at it, I rebuilt part of your magic circuits."
"That keeps the toxin from ever touching you again. But there's no such thing as a free lunch."
"Because a forbidden art drew that magic circulation, it sits in an incomplete state. A starving one."
"You can probably feel something strange already, can't you?"
Rei nodded. "Yes. Ever since I woke this morning, there's been a hollow feeling right here in my chest. A little... numb."
"That's the price."
Haimer turned his last card face up. "To keep the forbidden art running, to keep the leftover poison from erupting, you'll need to draw magic from me."
At those words, Marie and Rei both froze.
"As for how you draw it." Haimer went on.
"The most basic way magic circuits communicate is to establish a deep physical connection."
"C-connection..."
Mary Kikakujou's brain went off with a bang.
Every plot from the aristocratic romances she had read in secret in her sheltered rooms came flashing through her mind like a revolving lantern.
Punishments accepted under duress. The humiliation of offering up one's body to a master simply to go on living. And doing it together with another companion, the two of them sharing...
Picturing her precious pride torn to shreds, picturing herself sprawled in a god's arms begging to be cherished, Mary Kikakujou's clear blue eyes fogged over with water at frightening speed.
Her stare went blank. And it got worse.
"Ha... haha..."
Marie gazed at Haimer.
A bead of glistening drool slid out of the corner of her slightly parted lips, spilling free without the slightest attempt at concealment, drawing a silver thread as it fell.
Noting that Marie had clearly slipped into a heat-addled stupor with a full-blown masochistic streak awakening on top of it, the corner of Haimer's eye gave a twitch.
It seemed... he had overestimated this young lady's reserve by a fair margin.
Rei, beside her, was not nearly so far gone, yet that face of hers, with all the poise of a grown beauty, had flushed red enough to bleed.
As a Xenos, she had fought and killed in the dark since the day she first understood anything.
And now the god who had hauled her out of hell and up to the surface intended to heal her in a way this intimate.
Gratitude and self-loathing slammed against each other inside her chest.
"If you find this intimate approach hard to accept," Haimer said, "then as a god, I won't force my own children."
He pointed at his own wrist.
"There's a backup plan here. Open the skin, let the blood run."
"Divine Blood is a part of my body all the same. If there's to be no contact, then drinking my blood on a schedule will suppress the sigil's hunger just as well."
"That way, neither of you has to push yourself into anything."
Haimer's manner was perfectly frank. He held up the palm that had finished healing only that morning.
And yet.
The moment Haimer mentioned opening his wrist again, Marie, drowning in her masochistic carnival a second earlier, snapped wide awake.
"No!"
Marie all but shrieked it, both hands seizing Haimer's wrist. The motion was so violent that the already loose collar of her robe tore open wide, baring a bottomless line of cleavage.
"Absolutely not! How could we let Kami-sama cut himself and bleed for the sake of mortals like us!"
Rei panicked too, bringing her handless wings up in front of her chest, shaking her head desperately, tears welling at the rims of her eyes.
"Lord Haimer, we would rather die than have you hurt yourself. As long as you don't find me repulsive for being a monster. As long as you don't..."
Rei's face burned red enough to catch fire, her gaze darting away. She could not lift her head at all.
How could either of them fail to see that drinking blood was only a dignified way out?
For them, to lean against the chest of the god they adored, how was that a punishment? It was a gift.
"It's just..." Rei's voice came out smaller than a mosquito's. "If I happen to not do it well enough... would you come to dislike me, my lord?"
Hearing such a humble question, something soft passed behind Haimer's eyes.
Of course he wouldn't.
"But is this truly what you want?" Haimer asked quietly, making certain.
By now Marie, undone by embarrassment and the fantasies running loose in her head, had let another bead of drool fall past her control, and it landed on her silk robe.
He genuinely had the illusion that he was about to be dirtied by this deranged young lady.
But under Haimer's gaze, Marie and Rei bit down on their reddened lips and nodded, hard.
"Since you've decided."
Haimer said nothing further and spread both arms.
Solid, powerful, they swept out left and right, one hooking Marie's waist, the other closing behind Rei's back. Then he pulled.
"Eep..." Twice over. Two entirely different cries of surprise rang out at once.
Marie and Rei were dragged in together.
Marie went weak from head to toe. Pampered since childhood, she now lay in that embrace like water that had melted out of shape, her toes curling from sheer embarrassment.
On the other side, Rei's height put her head exactly in the hollow of Haimer's neck.
And so, while not a scrap of the lovely goings-on in the master bedroom leaked out, in the room diagonally across the hall...
"Aaaaahhhh!"
Hestia, Virgin Goddess, was rolling across the wide, soft bed like a woman possessed.
She rammed her head into a fluffy pillow and kicked both pale legs wildly at nothing, sending the silk quilt flying off onto the floor.
"Haimer!"
"That bastard!"
"What does he mean, he actually kept them in there!"
"One man and two girls shut under the same roof in the dead of night! What decent business could they possibly be discussing!"
Hestia rolled over and sat up, teeth grinding in fury.
"I'm the very first one who came running to him after he came down here! So why has all his attention landed on those little girls!"
Back in the Heavens, this man always had a whole crowd of gods orbiting him.
Even when she leaned on her standing as a Virgin Goddess and paraded in front of him day after day, all she ever got out of it was a round of bickering.
She had assumed that coming down to the Lower World would at least buy her a few days with him to herself.
And instead.
Look how well that turned out.
Now even a siren out of the Dungeon could compete with her.
The thought filled Hestia with bitterness and turned the rims of her eyes red. She hauled the big plush bear off the head of the bed and throttled its furry neck.
As though it were that ungrateful, dreadful god himself.
"Stinking Haimer! You giant idiot! I'll strangle you! I'll ship you straight back to the Heavens!"
"If you don't come knock on my door tonight and coax me out of this..."
"then tomorrow... tomorrow I absolutely, absolutely will not speak to you for the entire day! I swear it!"
Hestia sniffed hard, a haze of tears swimming in her eyes.
And so this venomous curse from a loli goddess, delivered inside a private room with excellent soundproofing, carried remarkably little menace.
Hestia sat there hugging her bear, eyes fixed unblinking on the door, waiting for the second the handle might turn from the other side.
Meanwhile, things were no calmer inside Tsukuyo Inaba's room.
Cool moonlight fell through the carved window panels and pooled on the floor.
Tsukuyo sat in thin sleepwear with her back to the headboard. Her tachi lay quietly at the bedside, within reach of her hand.
She had buried her whole face in her knees.
That pale, childish little face was so red that heat seemed to steam off the tips of her ears.
Her heartbeat filled the empty room like a war drum, deafening.
"Can't listen... absolutely... can't listen..."
Tsukuyo murmured it to herself, trying to talk her own mind into obedience.
But.
The Mind's Eye had a switch.
If she wanted, she could let her perception open by a crack.
And then.
Whatever gasps Miss Marie and Miss Rei might make in the master bedroom.
The low timbre of Lord Haimer's voice when he spoke.
The rustle of fabric as bodies overlapped...
All of it, every last thread, even through several thick soundproofed walls, would build the most vivid images imaginable inside a mind sharpened by the loss of sight.
It was torture!
Tsukuyo's fingers clutched at the hem of her clothes.
How was a girl like her supposed to withstand a temptation that carried the taste of the forbidden?
The moment she pictured the Kami-sama she looked up to holding Mary Kikakujou in his arms right now, and Miss Rei as well.
The moment she pictured the place she had longed for all this time being occupied by someone else.
Along with the embarrassment, a small sourness welled up in Tsukuyo's chest.
"Marie... and Miss Rei..."
"Is Lord Haimer really... doing that with them right now?"
Against the surging curiosity and impulse, reason was as fragile as the paper over a window, ready to be poked through at any moment.
A wild idea flashed through Tsukuyo's head.
The mansion's soundproofing was so good that nobody else could hear a thing.
So... so maybe Tsukuyo could open it up just a little bit?
"Kami-sama is so gentle... even if he found out Tsukuyo was listening in, he wouldn't be angry, would he?"
"J-just this once. I'll be a bad child just this once."
And so.
In the silent room, Tsukuyo's cheeks flushed crimson, rows of tooth marks pressed into her lower lip.
As the last of her hesitation collapsed, Tsukuyo Inaba made her decision.
The girl's brows drew faintly together.
The next second, as she lowered her mental defenses, the perception network of Mind's Eye punched through the wall like a vast invisible spiderweb and settled soundlessly over the master bedroom off to her front left.
In that instant, the wave of sound inside the master bedroom flooded into her head through Mind's Eye.
Haimer's steady voice came first, pitched very close: "Feeling any better?"
And right on its heels came Marie's murmur, trembling as though it might shatter.
"Mm... so hot... Kami-sama, hold me a little tighter..."
The moment she heard it, Tsukuyo Inaba shuddered where she sat, as if struck by lightning.
Both hands flew up to cover her scalding cheeks, and white steam looked ready to start pouring off the top of her head.
Kami-sama!
Kami-sama really was doing that in his room at night!
Tonight, a great many people grew up.
And a great many people came away with a memory of tonight they would never forget.
Ri Yuchuan
____
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