[ Five Years Earlier – Ratiora ]
[ Imperial Castle – Archmage's Keep, Study Chamber ]
Sera shuddered as a familiar hand slipped beneath the hem of her dress, a cold shiver racing up her spine.
"Endure it," her Instructor murmured against her ear. His breath was warm, unhurried, the warmth of someone who was in no rush whatsoever and found her impatience privately amusing.
His teeth grazed her clavicle, leaving a dark mark behind. His left hand tightened around her waist while the other pressed slow and deliberate against her inner thigh. She could feel his pleasure from here – that dense, particular warmth of it, the thing she fed on, already rising off him like heat from stone. Steady. Controlled. Portioned out with the specific care of a man who was enjoying himself thoroughly and had decided the pace would be his.
Slow sips, remember Sera?
His voice dropped to a low growl as he leaned closer, their breaths mingling.
It won't be good if you eat too fast.
His lips brushed hers. He kissed her firmly, teasing her mouth open with the slow push of his tongue, and she felt the pleasure deepen – warm and dense and deliberately unhurried – and hated, not for the first time, that she couldn't simply take more. That she had to wait for him to give it. That he was so thoroughly, infuriatingly in control of both of them simultaneously.
And just as Sera's lips parted to accept it–
She woke up.
✦ ♡ ✦
[ Ratha Guild – Residential Wing, Guide Quarters, Floor 3 ]
"Wuh!"
Sera jerked awake and promptly rolled off her bed. Her head cracked against the edge of the nightstand on the way down.
"Fuck, ow."
She lay sprawled on the floor, rubbing the back of her head, and stared at the ceiling with the deflated expression of a person who had just been defeated by their own furniture.
A dream about the Instructor.
She pinched her own cheek in irritation.
Of all the things her sleeping brain could have produced – a pleasant nothing, a meaningless abstract, literally anything – it had gone directly to him. Which meant she was hungrier than she'd thought. Her body surfacing the memory of what adequate feeding felt like because it had run out of better options.
She pressed her face into her arms and groaned.
The thing she hated most about those memories – about him – was that they were accurate.
Under his supervision she had never gone hungry. The meals had been reliable, carefully portioned, and exactly sufficient. He had been thorough about it the way he was thorough about everything, which was to say completely and with full awareness of what he was doing and an expression of composed satisfaction that she had spent years trying not to find as irritating as she did.
Slow sips.
Yes. Because he was savoring it.
Because the pace had always been his, because he had seventeen years of being an incubus and two-hundred and twenty-one years as a competent mage before that, and had optimized himself accordingly, and because – and this was the part she found most galling – it had worked. It had always worked. The method was effective. She had never once gone to bed starving when he was managing her diet and she hated that fact with a specific, focused hatred that had only intensified with distance.
The annoying, self-righteous, perverted old man.
She pushed herself off the floor.
Her stomach growled.
I know, she thought, miserably.
The raid announcement had upended everything. Her normal schedule – sessions, feeding, the careful rotation of her roster – had been suspended for three days of orientation while the guild prepared for the operation. Dungeon studies. Monster identification. Combat protocols. Classes until two in the morning, training resuming at eight. No time to slip out to the clubbing district at night, no willing strangers to siphon from, nothing.
Before Ratha this would have been familiar territory. Before the government facility, before the gate break, she had spent nearly two years managing on exactly this – scraps, the thin unreliable trickle of atmospheric pleasure from people enjoying their coffee or a rather warm coat. Nightclubs. Massage studios. A familiar desperation of a succubus in a pre-Filter world with no infrastructure and a System debuff and no one who could handle her properly.
She knew what starving felt like.
This wasn't starving. Not yet. But her body remembered starving well enough to be anxious about the direction of travel.
The C- and D-rank espers she normally guided had been reassigned to non-raid guides for the duration of training. The B-ranks joining the raid were on guiding supplements – standard protocol during the pre-formation week, keeping everyone focused and the schedule clean. No personal sessions. No exceptions.
Four days until formation training. That was when the rules shifted. Once formation began, espers could request sessions again – and they would, because they always did before a gate. The pre-raid dynamic had its own momentum. Espers who had barely thought about their pollution levels all month suddenly remembered how much better they felt after a proper session. Like soldiers before battle, seeking comfort wherever they could find it, the guild quietly permitted what it normally regulated with surprising leniency.
Higher output too. Pre-raid anxiety produced more pollution. More pollution meant more to take. Meant the sessions ran richer and faster and the ceiling approached sooner and the net gain after backfill was actually worth calculating.
Four days.
Her stomach had opinions about four days.
Sera stared at the ceiling fan and did the math.
I might die before then, she thought. Die waiting for the pre-raid buffet.
She exhaled. Then pushed herself up and began getting ready.
At least orientation was over. From today onward she'd be training alongside the raid espers – familiar faces, familiar pollution, and the prospect of four days of proximity that her hunger was already calculating the value of.
The last three days had been miserable in other ways too. Guide training groups were not welcoming. Hibiscus wasn't the only guide who disliked her – the rumor mill had done its work thoroughly and her fellow guides had expressed their opinions about it quite well.
A shove during sparring practice. A drink spilled into her lap. A sewing needle in one of her shoes.
Sera brushed her teeth and regarded her reflection with mild displeasure.
At my age, I'm seriously getting bullied.
The straightforward solution presented itself, as it always did. Beat them into a pulp. Crush them into paste. Eat them whole. Any of the three would resolve the situation immediately and permanently.
Unfortunately any of the three would also alert Causality – her Instructor's inexplicable cosmic acquaintance, the universe's enforcement mechanism, the thing she had been carefully not attracting the attention of for three years.
She had nearly killed a man once, early on when she had just arrived to this world, and the backlash had been severe – mana stripped, blaring red interfaces occupying her vision for weeks, a tight knot of terror in her chest that hadn't fully loosened for two months. She had lain in her shabby apartment convinced her Instructor was already on his way.
He hadn't come.
She still didn't entirely trust that.
So she had endured three days of aggressive snark from her colleagues and kept her head down and focused on her studies.
Now orientation was over. She was hungry and heading to the training hall and trying very hard not to think about her Instructor – about the dream, about how reliable he had been, about the fact that she had stolen something rather significant from him and had run very fast and had absolutely no intention of examining any of that further.
She wasn't examining it.
She grabbed her bag and headed out.
✦ ♡ ✦
[ Ratha Guild – Combat Wing, Gymnasium, Floor 1 ]
The training hall was already filling when she arrived. Espers and guides trickling in through the wide double doors, most already in workout gear, the low buzz of people preparing for something.
Sera scanned the room.
Then someone called her name.
"Sera!"
A melodic voice, bright and carrying. She turned.
Julia Agnato was jogging toward her, ponytail bouncing, grinning with the bright enthusiasm of someone who had been stuck on supplement tablets for three days and had found the one person in the room who represented relief.
"Julia." Sera smiled.
Julia was one of her regulars. Blonde, pink-eyed, broad athletic build, the kind of physical confidence that came from someone who had never once been uncertain about what her body could do. Fraternal twin of Administrator Risa Agnato, which Sera had always found mildly funny. Their compatibility rate sat around seventy percent, well above Sera's usual average – not because Sera could take more from her, the ceiling was the ceiling regardless, but because Julia's vitality was strong enough that what came through arrived quickly and cleanly, the pollution dense and rich and easy to absorb. Sessions with her were efficient in a way that sessions with lower-vitality espers weren't.
Which also made them mildly dangerous. Strong vitality meant strong pollution, and strong pollution meant her hunger noticed. Paid attention. Sniffed the air. Pressed closer to the ceiling faster than it should.
Sera managed it. She always managed it. But Julia required a certain amount of careful attention that her other regulars didn't.
Julia scooped her up in a crushing hug before she could complete that thought.
"I've missed you! Sera-cutie-pie!"
Sera wheezed.
"I want a session so bad," Julia continued, entirely unbothered. "These supplement tablets are disgusting. Chalky. They taste like chalk. The research department should be embarrassed."
"Julia. Suffocating."
"Oh! Sorry."
She set her down and immediately rubbed her cheek against Sera's hair. Sera endured this with patient resignation. She had learned that Julia expressed affection physically and that attempting to redirect it was more effort than it was worth.
The pull was natural – people who spent time with Sera tended to gravitate closer, espers especially. Something unconscious, projected without effort, a faint warmth that made proximity feel easy and comfortable to those who were already inclined toward her. It worked best on the friendly and the open.
Succubi and incubi had always done it. From birth, from awakening, without thinking, without trying – a low constant projection that kept potential prey nearby and relaxed and favorably disposed. Not manipulation exactly. More like ambiance. The difference between a room that felt welcoming and one that didn't, except the room was her and the feeling was deliberate on a biological level even when it wasn't deliberate on a personal one.
For those who disliked her – like Hibiscus, or most of the Guide wing – it simply collapsed under the weight of the hostility and produced nothing useful. You couldn't make someone comfortable who had already decided not to be.
Julia had never decided not to be.
Julia was very friendly and very open and entirely unaware she was being gently, passively encouraged to stay exactly where she was.
Sera liked her anyway. Genuinely. She was direct and honest and judged people by their actual behavior rather than the rumors circulating about them, which in Sera's current situation was a quality she valued considerably.
Julia resumed talking about her supplement experience in some detail. Sera found her attention drifting to the blonde esper's mouth.
An impromptu session, something in Sera thought, with the patience of something that had been waiting for an opportunity. Just a few minutes. Just enough to take the edge off. Her stomach growled in agreement.
Julia's lips were pink and soft and right there and Sera was four days from the pre-raid buffet and three days into a fast and the hunger was making very compelling arguments.
She leaned forward slightly.
Julia kept talking.
A little closer. Something deep inside her urged her forward. Were those her thoughts?
"–and then I had to go to the storage room and – eh?"
Julia blinked.
"Sera?"
Sera's eyelids had lowered. Her breathing had slowed. Her gaze was fixed on Julia's mouth with a focus that had nothing to do with the conversation.
"Are you okay? You look flushed. Do you have a fever?"
Julia's palm pressed against her forehead.
Sera blinked. The spell – such as it was – broke immediately.
She surfaced from her ravenous haze. Embarrassing. She had nearly kissed a colleague outside of a sanctioned session in the middle of the training hall and that was – that was sexual harassment. That was the definition of it. She had personal rules about this. Rules she took seriously. Rules that existed precisely because she knew what happened when she didn't have them.
Moreover, unwilling partners were distasteful. Even for a being that thrived on pleasure – perhaps especially for one – there was something fundamentally low about feeding on someone who hadn't chosen it. The meal was worse for it. Thin and unsatisfying in a way that went beyond mere nutrition. Succubi and incubi had standards. She had standards.
Julia had not chosen anything. Julia had been standing there talking about supplement tablets.
Blessedly oblivious Julia. Sera was a little thankful for that.
"A-ah, I'm fine," Sera said. "Just a little dizzy. I skipped breakfast."
"Oh no." Julia was already digging in her bag. "You have to eat before combat training. Here."
She held out a banana.
Sera looked at it.
An extremely inappropriate thought crossed her mind. She dismissed it firmly. Bad thought.
"Thanks."
She peeled it and chewed slowly while Julia stretched beside her, chatting about something Sera was no longer tracking. The banana tasted like nothing in particular.
Four days.
She could survive four days.
Probably.