Chapter 59: The Fox and the Serpent
No!
Freya, what are you doing?
It wasn’t the replica who’d had that thought, but the real Freya, the one currently sitting in the dungeon, sharing it with her other self.
Except the replica only half heard it.
Because Kyiara wasn’t leaving her any room to think.
Her lips were back on Freya’s before she’d even caught her breath, slower this time, more patient, as though the kitsune had all the time in the world and fully intended to use it.
One hand ran up her back, palm flat, following every vertebra to the nape of her neck before closing there and sliding into her hair, tipping her head back to bare her throat.
The other hand was already at her hip, and it didn’t stay still for long.
"Relax," Kyiara breathed against her mouth. "You don’t have to do a thing."
Her fingers moved down, then up, tracing the curve of her waist through the fabric, before settling on her thigh and pressing slowly, rucking the dress up until they found bare skin.
A tail slid behind her knees. A second wound around her waist and tightened, and Freya felt her body drawn forward, pressed flush against the kitsune’s, without having had any say in the matter.
The fur was warm. Far warmer than she would have expected, and impossibly soft, gliding over her skin wherever the dress had lost ground.
Wait—
A third tail moved up the inside of her thigh, slowly, working its way beneath the dress, and settled between her legs.
Freya jolted hard, a sound escaping her against the kitsune’s lips before she could do anything to stop it.
Kyiara smiled into the kiss.
She used that jolt to press deeper, her tongue finding Freya’s without hesitation, while her free hand undid the collar of the dress and pushed it aside, baring her chest in the lamplight.
The fur was on her at once, curving around one breast before sliding over it, the peak tightening under the contact.
Freya, you have Aria, don’t forget!
The thought arrived, clear and sharp, from the far side of the barony.
And dissolved almost immediately.
Because her body was burning.
It was climbing from low in her stomach, slow and steady, a thick heat that traveled up her spine and settled behind her eyes, blurring absolutely everything else. Her skin had gone too sensitive, every pass of fur leaving a trail that made her shiver from her neck to the small of her back.
Her fingers, which should have shoved the kitsune off long ago, had closed around the fabric of her dress and were pulling her closer.
She wasn’t even sure at what point she’d started kissing her back.
"There," Kyiara murmured, shifting toward her jaw. "That’s much better already."
Her lips traveled down Freya’s throat, stopping beneath her ear to nip at the skin, and Freya heard her own breathing break apart.
The tails were still moving. One wound tight around her waist to hold her in place. Another working back and forth between her thighs, pressing just hard enough on each pass to draw a shudder out of her. A third running up her back, a fourth attending to her breasts one after the other, until she could no longer tell which ones were holding her and which ones were touching her.
She felt herself tip backward, her elbows meeting the wood of the desk, the suitcase scraping across the surface somewhere to her right.
Kyiara followed her down, a hand on either side of her head, one leg already slipped between hers.
The stars in her eyes were spinning much faster now.
"You came here to offer me the entire world," she said, moving down toward her collarbone, her tongue drawing a wet line into the hollow of her throat. "So let me thank you properly."
Her hand left the desk and took Freya’s breast in full, kneading slowly, her thumb passing back and forth over the already stiffened peak while her mouth made its way toward the other.
This is getting—
No, wait—
The haze was total, cottony, the same feeling as one drink too many, except no alcohol had ever done this. She could feel Kyiara’s hands everywhere at once, the heat of her breath against her skin, the fur sliding between her legs, and everything else had stopped existing.
She wanted it to continue.
That was the alarming part, somewhere in the last lucid corner of her skull. She wanted it to continue.
Then the second thought landed from her main body, harder than the first.
Imagine if Aria finds out when she gets back! We’d lose our Kyiara piece! Pull yourself together!
And that was it. The way out of the tunnel.
Not morality. Not guilt. The calculation.
Freya planted both hands flat on the kitsune’s shoulders.
And shoved.
With everything she had.
Kyiara’s body left the desk outright and went flying backward, her tails coming unwound one after another under the pressure without being able to resist, one of them cracking against the edge of the furniture.
Her tongue withdrew from Freya’s mouth in the motion, and a thread of saliva hung stretched between them for a full second before it broke.
The kitsune stumbled back three paces and caught herself on the back of her chair.
Freya’s replica wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, pushed herself upright on the desk, chest rising fast, her gaze still fogged, and pulled her collar closed with a sharp tug.
Then she slid her hand inside it.
The Beretta came out, already leveled.
"Phew..."
She let out one long breath, and the barrel didn’t waver.
"I hope you’ve got a good explanation for that, little fox."
Kyiara didn’t move.
She was staring at Freya, mouth slightly open, and there was no desire left on her face. It was pure shock.
Because nobody had ever broken free of her hold.
Nobody.
[ Embrace of Lust ], her skill, the one she’d carried since childhood and that had given her everything. The one that let her reduce anyone at all to their own appetites, drive the pleasure up until their will drowned in it, and climb every rung of this district until she sat in that chair.
It had its conditions, of course. It worked as long as the person opposite let themselves be carried and stopped resisting, and as long as they knew nothing about her beforehand. Kyiara knew, for instance, that she could never use it on the other two kings, who would kill her long before she got close enough.
Which was precisely why she stayed hidden, hoarding information to hold onto her power and stand as the other two’s equal through pleasure.
Going so far, at times, as to handle the high-value clients herself, senior nobles or merchants at the head of vast trading houses, because a man who’s just finished between her tails will tell you absolutely anything you ask him.
But that skill, normally infallible once it took hold, had just been broken without effort by the woman in front of her. The very same one claiming to be an invader of this world.
So the fear she’d been holding back behind the shock came surging up.
Because she had just understood that even her trump card was useless, and that for the first time in her life, or more precisely for the first time since she’d become a queen, she was entirely and completely in someone else’s hand.
She was no longer the cunning fox who toyed with everyone else.
She was a fox coiled up and starting to suffocate in the loops of a serpent that was calmly tightening its grip.
"H-how... how is that possible??"
She was stammering. The way she had as a child in the lower districts, an era she’d erased entirely from her memory until this exact moment.
Freya took a step forward.
Kyiara flinched and backed away on instinct, caught her feet on her own chair, and went down onto the floor.
"Kyiara... I’d have loved to give in to your charms. Whether through that unsettling technique of yours, and..."
She seemed to search for the word, bringing the barrel of the pistol to her mouth and tapping her lip with it.
"...and completely arousing, let’s not lie to each other!"
She came closer.
"But you see, unfortunately, I’m already taken."
She crouched down to her level.
"Or fortunately. Depends which way you look at it, as you’d put it, I suppose?"
Her eyes were utterly certain, and full of disgust for her. It was something Kyiara had picked up on from their very first exchange, underneath everything this girl put on display. That sense that she held her in enormous contempt.
"Anyway. You were asking me how it’s possible?"
Freya tilted her head.
"Do you really think me stupid enough to walk up to you without any way out of your hold?"
Which is something I had absolutely done, by the way...
Kyiara scanned her from head to toe, hunting for the flaw, the object, something.
"Is it... that thing?" she said, staring at the Beretta.
"No. Unfortunately for you, Kyiara, that’s not it."
Freya lowered the pistol toward one of her tails.
TAP.
Something whistled through the air.
Kyiara felt a simple jolt of pain in the tail first, brief, almost bearable, and had no time to work out what had just happened.
Then the rest arrived.
The electricity ran up the tail to the base of her spine and spread through her entire body at once. Her muscles locked on their own, her back arched off the floor, and her hands closed on the carpet without her being able to control them.
"GAAAAAH—"
All her tails bristled at the same time, shaking against the ground. Her jaw seized, and the scream jammed at the back of her throat into a raw, ragged sound.
It lasted three seconds. Maybe four.
Then everything dropped away at once.
Kyiara lay sprawled on the carpet, shaking with aftershocks, her breathing ragged and whistling, a thread of blood beginning to run from her nostril down to her lip.
She tried to push herself up on one elbow. Her arm gave out.
"Ha... ha..."
So that’s [ Elemental Chamber ]. I still hadn’t gotten to use it. Rather effective.
Freya filed the observation away in a corner of her mind, came around the chair, and lifted the still half-dazed kitsune with one free arm.
She set her back down in her own seat, without any particular roughness, then went and sat on the desk again, one leg crossed over the other.
A fly came circling in front of her face.
Freya tracked it, focused her vision on it, and raised the pistol.
TAP.
A pellet of ice crossed the room and pinned the insect to the shelf at the back, where it stayed caught in a small frozen shard.
"Evangel is full of these damned flies. I miss my dungeon so much~~..."
What on earth are you talking about?! Do you have any idea how bored I am down here?!
"I know... I know... sorry."
She lowered the barrel, and her gaze came back to Kyiara, serious all at once.
"Right. What am I going to do with you?"
~~
A Fox ruled over the lower districts, holding each and every soul by their secrets, and believed himself the cleverest creature in the whole underworld.
One day there came a Serpent, every bit as certain of her own cunning, who offered him gold, power, and the entire world.
"What a naive little thing," thought the Fox, and he wound his tails around her to charm her as he had charmed all the others.
And the Serpent, who believed herself above all such things, found she rather liked it, then found she liked it a great deal, and stayed far longer than she should have.
But the Serpent already had a servant waiting for her at home, one who would gladly have wiped an entire kingdom off the map over considerably less than this.
And so it was neither the Fox’s charm nor the Serpent’s cunning that settled the outcome of this contest, but the simple and terrifying thought of what an SSS-rank yandere would do upon finding out.
— Fables of Mana, banned shortly after publication. No particular reason~