Chapter 54 -- Y3: Tomboy Dog-Girl
Okay… okay… last time we went over all of the plans, right?
Good. Good. Right.
Ugh… I don’t like going over planning meetings… it’s so boring! Barely any sex!
Hrmph.
I’m going to make a point of remembering what part of the plan we’re on for this year, okay? It’ll help me keep it straight in my mind.
So, we are currently on:
Step One: Meet all Three Rulers in a Single Time Slot
Hehehe, I get to use the cool voice again~!
Of course, we didn’t jump straight into that. After all, I hadn’t returned to the school yet!
~~~
I have something I want to say:
Dog-girl tomboy.
…I see I now have your attention~
I could talk about the process of returning to the school, the apologies from the family, the sense of subdued frustration at a third landmass showing up and connecting itself to the Kingdom… but really, all of that is boring.
What’s interesting is the sight I returned to when I finally, a day late, got back to the school and looked into our claimed club room.
Sitting in an isolated chair, with her arms crossed, and a very annoyed expression on her face was the aforementioned tomboy with adorable doggy ears. Her eyes were closed, and she was wearing a man’s uniform that occasionally shifted to reveal her firm muscles. She was tall… not as tall as Shimizu was by then, but taller than everybody else in the room… and her body was slender and toned.
Sumiko was nearby, seemingly fascinated by this new addition. She had her four tits bundled up carefully under her catsuit, and was poking and prodding the girl with various devices, clearly noting down some measurements as she went. The lack of milk dripping from her nipples indicated she had just recently drained her breasts, and her bovine tail occasionally smacked against her jiggly ass hard enough to make a ‘smacking’ noise.
She didn’t even seem to notice.
Yuki was behind the dog-girl, trying to keep her depraved giggles from escaping her lips. …Trying. Not succeeding. It was clear that her roper tentacles were actively molesting her underneath her fancy dress, with the roiling movements beneath her skirt and between her legs, but she barely even seemed to notice as she leered at the dog-girl when she thought nobody was paying attention.
Yuu was… well, she was in her maid outfit, and was sitting, slumped, in a nearby comfy chair. She looked utterly lost and confused. Like something she couldn’t understand had happened. Every now and then she would slowly risk looking up at the tomboy, and then she’d make a little whining noise and flinch her gaze away.
I’ll tell you what was going on with her in a minute~
Shimizu just had a broad grin on her face. She was a bit over six feet tall by now, her own muscles were becoming more visible by the day, and she was just calmly sitting at a nearby table as she watched the antics of our friends. She was clearly barely holding back a laugh. Her cock was currently under control in the Sex-Shrouding Spats, which was probably due to the new addition sitting in her lap on one thigh.
Ichika Omori was one of Shimizu’s fans. …And by ‘fan’, I mean ‘cock-addict’. She seemed a bit huffy about being there, but was still clearly planning to stay exactly where she was on Shimizu’s thigh.
Omori looked… hmmm… back then, she was actually fairly gangly. I remember how she was represented in the game; her body was, according to her profile, more malleable than most to ‘natural’ changes. This meant changes due to exercise, diet, pregnancy, disease, stretching… things like that.
She stood at around 5’6”, so pretty tall for those in this world, and had brown hair that reached her shoulders. She also had [Nature Magic - B] as a talent, which was actually fairly potent in the right circumstances.
But I’ll get to that later.
For now, I just stared at the entire situation for a few solid seconds, before I said… in this exact tone…
“...What.”
I had just come back from dealing with royalty and apology-giving family; I was in no mood for shenanigans at that point.
It was sweet, don’t get me wrong. Even my father showed up and apologized, and my adorable little sister was sorry enough she swore she’d never be able to pay me back, but it really wasn’t needed. Magic-hypnosis was involved, they weren’t themselves, and I'd needed them to sell me like they'd done anyway. I was just ready to relax.
And then I get to a place that should have been safe and quiet and sane, and what do I see?
Shenanigans!
The doggy opened up her eyes and gave me a very familiar flat, unimpressed look. And she said:,
“Good. You’re back. I’m Takeo.”
And then she closed her eyes and ignored me as I proceeded to freak the fuck out.
It, uh. It took me a bit to calm down.
Unfortunately, dog-girl Takeo was not a permanent change to our little clique.
I know, right? I should've shown Takeo the joys of being a woman! I still fantasize sometimes about what I could've done if - actually, you know, I still could, maybe if - hm.
Hm.
…Eh? Oh, um, yeah. The story. Right.
Do you remember what I told you about the five years of the Land Grab? Year one is the present, year two the mind, year three body, year four the past and present, and year five the soul?
Right. Well, this was the start of year three. Or, the year and landmass that primarily focused on sexualizing through the ‘body’.
Every year can do something to the body, but this one focuses on altering it more directly and dramatically. Replacing and changing, instead of merely adding to it.
One of the ways in which it did so was with a magical hand mirror one could find in the depths of the wild jungle. It allowed, for one time slot per day, a single individual to appear as a native from one of the three third-year factions. Robots, wild animals, or tamed animals.
And of course, whatever you chose, it would need to be some form of cute girl.
I hadn’t even considered Takeo using that mirror! In Alchemical Corruption Twelve, if you actually use it on the main character, you get an immediate, very joke-y ‘bad end’. The [True God’s Blessing] that Takeo gets at the start of the game does not like being attached to a girl.
Over the many loops Takeo had gone through, he found a way to get over that from Sevens; so long as he doesn’t doubt his gender, the blessing won’t backfire and lock him in that form.
As to why he went to so much effort, using the mirror again and again, over time loop after time loop…?
Well, uh. When he was a girl, [True God’s Blessing] was momentarily blocked from working.
So that meant this was the only way he could, reliably, get me on his side. Since our discussions wouldn’t kick off my paranoia.
Apparently, he had gotten very, very good at grabbing the mirror as soon as possible. Which is… well, frankly, it was a relief for me.
Talking with Takeo as a man -- it feels like there’s a filter over everything he does. It’s all interpreted in the best light possible. When he’s annoyed, the reflex is to blame yourself, instead of him. When he jokes, it’s actively hard to take offense, even if it's at your expense.
This actually relates to why Yuu was sitting in a chair, feeling despair… and this is hilarious.
See, Yuu had fallen hard for Takeo’s seduction aura. Like, absolutely head-over-heels fallen for him. But now that Takeo was, temporarily, a girl, the aura was ‘shut off’.
…So Yuu felt nothing for dog-girl Takeo. Or at least, nothing nearly as strong as she was used to.
She was having a minor crisis of sexuality over there.
I did help explain the matter to her.
…Eventually.
Like, two or three weeks later.
It actually made things worse somehow. I’m still not entirely sure how that happened… eh, we’ll cover it later.
For now, what you need to know is that Takeo was a sexy tomboy dog-girl that was one hundred percent male at heart, and we had a newcomer to deal with:
Ichika Omori.
~~~
Omori was an interesting one.
She had actually gotten the [Angelic Womb Tattoo]. Unlike the normal pseudo-blessing that people can get, [Demonic Womb Tattoo], the [Angelic Womb Tattoo] actually gave the individual a fairly strong resistance to most forms of corruption.
Most forms of corruption. Not all forms of corruption.
That said, Omori had yet to run into any of those exceptions, leaving her remarkably untouched after two years of the land grab. …Well, except for a stint as a slutty maid, but that oddly doesn’t count much for overall corruption and lewdification…
This left her rather willful, stubborn, and annoyed by how slutty the rest of the campus was becoming.
Of course, she conveniently ignored the fact that the entire reason she was there was because she was addicted to Shimizu’s cock.
[Angelic Womb Tattoo] amplified the pleasure of somebody cuming in you, and flooding your womb with their seed. She had kept her desire to not get pregnant firm, so nothing untoward had happened, but that ‘amplification’ worked on the addictive properties of the cum as well as the raw pleasure.
…Much like my [Alchemist’s Fortune] blessing, actually.
That trait is way too broad in what it defines as ‘chemicals I created’ to amplify…
Regardless, Omori was there out of both gratitude for removing her maid-brainwashing, and because she wanted to spend more time with Shimizu… but I was reluctant. I wasn’t the only one, actually; Takeo was actually on my side.
The problem came down to one of reliability. I trusted everybody that was helping me to help me as much as they could, for a variety of reasons. Shimizu had ‘sworn’ herself to me like a samurai, Sumiko was addicted to Shimizu’s cock, Yuki wanted to turn me into her eager tentacle slut, and even Takeo had shown up to help defeat the Parasite Nucleus.
…Eh? Yuu?
Oh, no, Yuu doesn’t count; she was barely even ‘helping’ anyway, she was just the maid.
Yuu aside, I could trust all of them to stick by me even when things were tough. Maybe not when things were critical, but there was no way to determine that without going through a crisis or two. But they weren’t going to leave the moment things got difficult.
According to Takeo, Omori’s reliability was at roughly an eighty-twenty split, in the timelines he’d gone through. She didn’t join in every timeline, but in them, she was usually reliable.
Shimizu, Yuki, and Sumiko, on the other hand, were reliable in every timeline they’d joined me.
…With a few exceptions, but after hearing the circumstances behind them, I could understand.
Apparently, if I had turned into a herm instead of Shimizu, then Sumiko would end up drugging me and turn me into a convenient super-cum dispensary.
…And, yes, she tried the same on Shimizu in my timeline.Sumiko has… both excellent and terrible self control. When she’s focused, she’s amazing, but when she’s not -- she tends to lose the will to resist things like [Extreme Masochist] and addictive cum with disturbing speed.
There’s a reason we don’t shy away from locking her into her milking stall.
As for why Omori wasn’t reliable -- we weren’t really sure. Well, we still aren’t sure, to be accurate. Takeo suggested, and I’m inclined to agree, that it was simply that she, as she is, had a 20% chance of changing her mind. Perhaps there was some small event that could tip her over, or perhaps she was simply unpredictable -- it’s hard to know, and, ultimately, it isn’t important.
So, moving on.
With only an eighty percent guarantee of reliability from Omori, I would want a guarantee if she were to join us. In this case, I would actually demand her claims from the land grab.
For everybody else, they had just given them to me. Well. I extorted it a bit from Sumiko, but she’s smart enough to have resisted if she'd wanted to. Shimizu was loyal, Yuki wanted to ensure I couldn’t kick her out of the group, and Takeo had his blowup and, legally, couldn't go back on it even if he wanted to. I hadn’t actually expected anybody to give me their claim; I didn’t have Takeo’s ‘seduction’ aura, after all.
This was the first time I was asking for somebody to give up their claim of their own volition, and Omori, quite reasonably, said ‘no’.
The Land Grab is important. It’s one of the only ways for noble families to increase the size of their holdings, and for non-nobles to get holdings in the first place. It was a way to rise up in the thousand-person-long list of emergency succession for the Kingdom's throne. It was the way to bring wealth and fame to your family.
Part of the reason that those that surrender their land claim traditionally become vassals to the one they surrendered to is because, in the past, some of the noble houses would look… very unkindly on a child that gave away ‘their’ land.
The vassalage was to gain protection.
Omori wasn’t the wealthiest student, but she wasn’t an orphan, either; she was from a minor noble family, and this was their chance to make it big. So she was unwilling to give up her chance at securing her and her family's future.
Now, I could, technically, work with her without having her surrender her claim to me.
We could, with permission, extend our land claims from each other's territories. We could split the gains from each exploration she took part in. She would get to spend time with Shimizu, and I would get another set of hands, when I needed as much help as I could get.
The problem was that she could put us in some serious trouble if we went through with that.
By year 3, the administration was sick and tired of collating everything at the ‘end of the year’. From then on, once you claimed a slice of land, that was it. It was yours. You could ban others from crossing it, you could charge a toll on others for the right to explore it, you could even build on it if you were particularly foolish.
…Well, I say that, but it’s actually more complicated. That’s what the game said; in reality, the Kingdom knew that the Land Grab was a massive farce by the chief god, and that something serious was going to happen at the end of year five.
They wanted to cancel it to prepare for war, but that would bring the chief god’s attention down on them; which, naturally, isn’t something that anybody wants to do. So instead, they did the next best things. They started dumping restrictions as fast as they could to aid the ‘potential hero’, Takeo.
And, uh, me, in this case.
Anyway, what we were trying to do relied on tight margins. It wasn’t likely, but Omori could sneakily claim an area that functioned as a chokepoint, forcing us to either pay an absurd amount of coin or waste time finding another way to our target.
I didn’t think it would happen. But I could afford to go without an extra pair of hands.
I couldn’t afford to waste time dealing with a betrayal.
…But I had told myself that I would rely on others more often. We could really use another pair of hands.
I asked Takeo if he had any idea how to convince her to my satisfaction, and nagged him until he gave me an answer. He said that ‘money is your go-to a third of the time’.
I was highly unimpressed by this suggestion, and Takeo gave me a look that screamed ‘that’s why I didn’t want to say it’.
Which, uh.
Was fair.
Regardless! I had a far better idea!
I didn’t bother informing Takeo of it in advance, but he seemed to catch on the moment I turned my back on him. Apparently, he had an expression that merged ‘conflicted’ and ‘exasperated’ into one perfect and unholy mixture.
I crossed my arms under my jiggling jugs as I walked up to Omori. I saw her eye them in distaste or jealousy -- one or the other, I wasn’t sure which. I leaned down to show off my cleavage to her and Shimizu both. I looked her in the eye and said, “If you really want to join us without surrendering your claim, I need to know one thing.
“What are your kinks?”
…What?
What?!
What’s with that look?!
This was porn land! Eroge world! A reality based on getting people to fuck more often!
I just needed to know her kinks, so I could supply them to her. That would guarantee her loyalty, and -
- I know not everybody is a sex addict!
~~~
Hrmph.
…One more scoop.
…
Fine. I forgive you.
For now.
You’re lucky this ice cream is so good…
…Anyway.
It took some effort to draw it out of her, but it turned out Omori was something of an exhibitionist and voyeur… and, perhaps more importantly, rather upset about the state of her body.
I mentioned earlier that she was rather gangly, yes? Well, there are ways to fix that. Potions and creams made through alchemy work for the most part, but to make changes stick through some of the more potent restorative effects you needed to get more creative.
I’d like to note that I warned her of the consequences!
Repeatedly!
I told her what could happen if she jumped into this head first! If she just slid down that sexy slope without stopping herself!
I refuse to accept responsibility for Omori turning her [Angelic Womb Tattoo] into a [Fallen Angel Womb Tattoo]! I am not the one that turned her into an eternally pregnant broodmare slut!
…But I did point her in the right direction~
*
**
***
A/N:
Phew! Finally back to the reasonable chapters. Compared to the last few, this one was a breeze.
Now it's back to our normal sexy-time antics! :D
Good. Good. Right.
Ugh… I don’t like going over planning meetings… it’s so boring! Barely any sex!
Hrmph.
I’m going to make a point of remembering what part of the plan we’re on for this year, okay? It’ll help me keep it straight in my mind.
So, we are currently on:
Step One: Meet all Three Rulers in a Single Time Slot
Hehehe, I get to use the cool voice again~!
Of course, we didn’t jump straight into that. After all, I hadn’t returned to the school yet!
~~~
I have something I want to say:
Dog-girl tomboy.
…I see I now have your attention~
I could talk about the process of returning to the school, the apologies from the family, the sense of subdued frustration at a third landmass showing up and connecting itself to the Kingdom… but really, all of that is boring.
What’s interesting is the sight I returned to when I finally, a day late, got back to the school and looked into our claimed club room.
Sitting in an isolated chair, with her arms crossed, and a very annoyed expression on her face was the aforementioned tomboy with adorable doggy ears. Her eyes were closed, and she was wearing a man’s uniform that occasionally shifted to reveal her firm muscles. She was tall… not as tall as Shimizu was by then, but taller than everybody else in the room… and her body was slender and toned.
Sumiko was nearby, seemingly fascinated by this new addition. She had her four tits bundled up carefully under her catsuit, and was poking and prodding the girl with various devices, clearly noting down some measurements as she went. The lack of milk dripping from her nipples indicated she had just recently drained her breasts, and her bovine tail occasionally smacked against her jiggly ass hard enough to make a ‘smacking’ noise.
She didn’t even seem to notice.
Yuki was behind the dog-girl, trying to keep her depraved giggles from escaping her lips. …Trying. Not succeeding. It was clear that her roper tentacles were actively molesting her underneath her fancy dress, with the roiling movements beneath her skirt and between her legs, but she barely even seemed to notice as she leered at the dog-girl when she thought nobody was paying attention.
Yuu was… well, she was in her maid outfit, and was sitting, slumped, in a nearby comfy chair. She looked utterly lost and confused. Like something she couldn’t understand had happened. Every now and then she would slowly risk looking up at the tomboy, and then she’d make a little whining noise and flinch her gaze away.
I’ll tell you what was going on with her in a minute~
Shimizu just had a broad grin on her face. She was a bit over six feet tall by now, her own muscles were becoming more visible by the day, and she was just calmly sitting at a nearby table as she watched the antics of our friends. She was clearly barely holding back a laugh. Her cock was currently under control in the Sex-Shrouding Spats, which was probably due to the new addition sitting in her lap on one thigh.
Ichika Omori was one of Shimizu’s fans. …And by ‘fan’, I mean ‘cock-addict’. She seemed a bit huffy about being there, but was still clearly planning to stay exactly where she was on Shimizu’s thigh.
Omori looked… hmmm… back then, she was actually fairly gangly. I remember how she was represented in the game; her body was, according to her profile, more malleable than most to ‘natural’ changes. This meant changes due to exercise, diet, pregnancy, disease, stretching… things like that.
She stood at around 5’6”, so pretty tall for those in this world, and had brown hair that reached her shoulders. She also had [Nature Magic - B] as a talent, which was actually fairly potent in the right circumstances.
But I’ll get to that later.
For now, I just stared at the entire situation for a few solid seconds, before I said… in this exact tone…
“...What.”
I had just come back from dealing with royalty and apology-giving family; I was in no mood for shenanigans at that point.
It was sweet, don’t get me wrong. Even my father showed up and apologized, and my adorable little sister was sorry enough she swore she’d never be able to pay me back, but it really wasn’t needed. Magic-hypnosis was involved, they weren’t themselves, and I'd needed them to sell me like they'd done anyway. I was just ready to relax.
And then I get to a place that should have been safe and quiet and sane, and what do I see?
Shenanigans!
The doggy opened up her eyes and gave me a very familiar flat, unimpressed look. And she said:,
“Good. You’re back. I’m Takeo.”
And then she closed her eyes and ignored me as I proceeded to freak the fuck out.
It, uh. It took me a bit to calm down.
Unfortunately, dog-girl Takeo was not a permanent change to our little clique.
I know, right? I should've shown Takeo the joys of being a woman! I still fantasize sometimes about what I could've done if - actually, you know, I still could, maybe if - hm.
Hm.
…Eh? Oh, um, yeah. The story. Right.
Do you remember what I told you about the five years of the Land Grab? Year one is the present, year two the mind, year three body, year four the past and present, and year five the soul?
Right. Well, this was the start of year three. Or, the year and landmass that primarily focused on sexualizing through the ‘body’.
Every year can do something to the body, but this one focuses on altering it more directly and dramatically. Replacing and changing, instead of merely adding to it.
One of the ways in which it did so was with a magical hand mirror one could find in the depths of the wild jungle. It allowed, for one time slot per day, a single individual to appear as a native from one of the three third-year factions. Robots, wild animals, or tamed animals.
And of course, whatever you chose, it would need to be some form of cute girl.
I hadn’t even considered Takeo using that mirror! In Alchemical Corruption Twelve, if you actually use it on the main character, you get an immediate, very joke-y ‘bad end’. The [True God’s Blessing] that Takeo gets at the start of the game does not like being attached to a girl.
Over the many loops Takeo had gone through, he found a way to get over that from Sevens; so long as he doesn’t doubt his gender, the blessing won’t backfire and lock him in that form.
As to why he went to so much effort, using the mirror again and again, over time loop after time loop…?
Well, uh. When he was a girl, [True God’s Blessing] was momentarily blocked from working.
So that meant this was the only way he could, reliably, get me on his side. Since our discussions wouldn’t kick off my paranoia.
Apparently, he had gotten very, very good at grabbing the mirror as soon as possible. Which is… well, frankly, it was a relief for me.
Talking with Takeo as a man -- it feels like there’s a filter over everything he does. It’s all interpreted in the best light possible. When he’s annoyed, the reflex is to blame yourself, instead of him. When he jokes, it’s actively hard to take offense, even if it's at your expense.
This actually relates to why Yuu was sitting in a chair, feeling despair… and this is hilarious.
See, Yuu had fallen hard for Takeo’s seduction aura. Like, absolutely head-over-heels fallen for him. But now that Takeo was, temporarily, a girl, the aura was ‘shut off’.
…So Yuu felt nothing for dog-girl Takeo. Or at least, nothing nearly as strong as she was used to.
She was having a minor crisis of sexuality over there.
I did help explain the matter to her.
…Eventually.
Like, two or three weeks later.
It actually made things worse somehow. I’m still not entirely sure how that happened… eh, we’ll cover it later.
For now, what you need to know is that Takeo was a sexy tomboy dog-girl that was one hundred percent male at heart, and we had a newcomer to deal with:
Ichika Omori.
~~~
Omori was an interesting one.
She had actually gotten the [Angelic Womb Tattoo]. Unlike the normal pseudo-blessing that people can get, [Demonic Womb Tattoo], the [Angelic Womb Tattoo] actually gave the individual a fairly strong resistance to most forms of corruption.
Most forms of corruption. Not all forms of corruption.
That said, Omori had yet to run into any of those exceptions, leaving her remarkably untouched after two years of the land grab. …Well, except for a stint as a slutty maid, but that oddly doesn’t count much for overall corruption and lewdification…
This left her rather willful, stubborn, and annoyed by how slutty the rest of the campus was becoming.
Of course, she conveniently ignored the fact that the entire reason she was there was because she was addicted to Shimizu’s cock.
[Angelic Womb Tattoo] amplified the pleasure of somebody cuming in you, and flooding your womb with their seed. She had kept her desire to not get pregnant firm, so nothing untoward had happened, but that ‘amplification’ worked on the addictive properties of the cum as well as the raw pleasure.
…Much like my [Alchemist’s Fortune] blessing, actually.
That trait is way too broad in what it defines as ‘chemicals I created’ to amplify…
Regardless, Omori was there out of both gratitude for removing her maid-brainwashing, and because she wanted to spend more time with Shimizu… but I was reluctant. I wasn’t the only one, actually; Takeo was actually on my side.
The problem came down to one of reliability. I trusted everybody that was helping me to help me as much as they could, for a variety of reasons. Shimizu had ‘sworn’ herself to me like a samurai, Sumiko was addicted to Shimizu’s cock, Yuki wanted to turn me into her eager tentacle slut, and even Takeo had shown up to help defeat the Parasite Nucleus.
…Eh? Yuu?
Oh, no, Yuu doesn’t count; she was barely even ‘helping’ anyway, she was just the maid.
Yuu aside, I could trust all of them to stick by me even when things were tough. Maybe not when things were critical, but there was no way to determine that without going through a crisis or two. But they weren’t going to leave the moment things got difficult.
According to Takeo, Omori’s reliability was at roughly an eighty-twenty split, in the timelines he’d gone through. She didn’t join in every timeline, but in them, she was usually reliable.
Shimizu, Yuki, and Sumiko, on the other hand, were reliable in every timeline they’d joined me.
…With a few exceptions, but after hearing the circumstances behind them, I could understand.
Apparently, if I had turned into a herm instead of Shimizu, then Sumiko would end up drugging me and turn me into a convenient super-cum dispensary.
…And, yes, she tried the same on Shimizu in my timeline.Sumiko has… both excellent and terrible self control. When she’s focused, she’s amazing, but when she’s not -- she tends to lose the will to resist things like [Extreme Masochist] and addictive cum with disturbing speed.
There’s a reason we don’t shy away from locking her into her milking stall.
As for why Omori wasn’t reliable -- we weren’t really sure. Well, we still aren’t sure, to be accurate. Takeo suggested, and I’m inclined to agree, that it was simply that she, as she is, had a 20% chance of changing her mind. Perhaps there was some small event that could tip her over, or perhaps she was simply unpredictable -- it’s hard to know, and, ultimately, it isn’t important.
So, moving on.
With only an eighty percent guarantee of reliability from Omori, I would want a guarantee if she were to join us. In this case, I would actually demand her claims from the land grab.
For everybody else, they had just given them to me. Well. I extorted it a bit from Sumiko, but she’s smart enough to have resisted if she'd wanted to. Shimizu was loyal, Yuki wanted to ensure I couldn’t kick her out of the group, and Takeo had his blowup and, legally, couldn't go back on it even if he wanted to. I hadn’t actually expected anybody to give me their claim; I didn’t have Takeo’s ‘seduction’ aura, after all.
This was the first time I was asking for somebody to give up their claim of their own volition, and Omori, quite reasonably, said ‘no’.
The Land Grab is important. It’s one of the only ways for noble families to increase the size of their holdings, and for non-nobles to get holdings in the first place. It was a way to rise up in the thousand-person-long list of emergency succession for the Kingdom's throne. It was the way to bring wealth and fame to your family.
Part of the reason that those that surrender their land claim traditionally become vassals to the one they surrendered to is because, in the past, some of the noble houses would look… very unkindly on a child that gave away ‘their’ land.
The vassalage was to gain protection.
Omori wasn’t the wealthiest student, but she wasn’t an orphan, either; she was from a minor noble family, and this was their chance to make it big. So she was unwilling to give up her chance at securing her and her family's future.
Now, I could, technically, work with her without having her surrender her claim to me.
We could, with permission, extend our land claims from each other's territories. We could split the gains from each exploration she took part in. She would get to spend time with Shimizu, and I would get another set of hands, when I needed as much help as I could get.
The problem was that she could put us in some serious trouble if we went through with that.
By year 3, the administration was sick and tired of collating everything at the ‘end of the year’. From then on, once you claimed a slice of land, that was it. It was yours. You could ban others from crossing it, you could charge a toll on others for the right to explore it, you could even build on it if you were particularly foolish.
…Well, I say that, but it’s actually more complicated. That’s what the game said; in reality, the Kingdom knew that the Land Grab was a massive farce by the chief god, and that something serious was going to happen at the end of year five.
They wanted to cancel it to prepare for war, but that would bring the chief god’s attention down on them; which, naturally, isn’t something that anybody wants to do. So instead, they did the next best things. They started dumping restrictions as fast as they could to aid the ‘potential hero’, Takeo.
And, uh, me, in this case.
Anyway, what we were trying to do relied on tight margins. It wasn’t likely, but Omori could sneakily claim an area that functioned as a chokepoint, forcing us to either pay an absurd amount of coin or waste time finding another way to our target.
I didn’t think it would happen. But I could afford to go without an extra pair of hands.
I couldn’t afford to waste time dealing with a betrayal.
…But I had told myself that I would rely on others more often. We could really use another pair of hands.
I asked Takeo if he had any idea how to convince her to my satisfaction, and nagged him until he gave me an answer. He said that ‘money is your go-to a third of the time’.
I was highly unimpressed by this suggestion, and Takeo gave me a look that screamed ‘that’s why I didn’t want to say it’.
Which, uh.
Was fair.
Regardless! I had a far better idea!
I didn’t bother informing Takeo of it in advance, but he seemed to catch on the moment I turned my back on him. Apparently, he had an expression that merged ‘conflicted’ and ‘exasperated’ into one perfect and unholy mixture.
I crossed my arms under my jiggling jugs as I walked up to Omori. I saw her eye them in distaste or jealousy -- one or the other, I wasn’t sure which. I leaned down to show off my cleavage to her and Shimizu both. I looked her in the eye and said, “If you really want to join us without surrendering your claim, I need to know one thing.
“What are your kinks?”
…What?
What?!
What’s with that look?!
This was porn land! Eroge world! A reality based on getting people to fuck more often!
I just needed to know her kinks, so I could supply them to her. That would guarantee her loyalty, and -
- I know not everybody is a sex addict!
~~~
Hrmph.
…One more scoop.
…
Fine. I forgive you.
For now.
You’re lucky this ice cream is so good…
…Anyway.
It took some effort to draw it out of her, but it turned out Omori was something of an exhibitionist and voyeur… and, perhaps more importantly, rather upset about the state of her body.
I mentioned earlier that she was rather gangly, yes? Well, there are ways to fix that. Potions and creams made through alchemy work for the most part, but to make changes stick through some of the more potent restorative effects you needed to get more creative.
I’d like to note that I warned her of the consequences!
Repeatedly!
I told her what could happen if she jumped into this head first! If she just slid down that sexy slope without stopping herself!
I refuse to accept responsibility for Omori turning her [Angelic Womb Tattoo] into a [Fallen Angel Womb Tattoo]! I am not the one that turned her into an eternally pregnant broodmare slut!
…But I did point her in the right direction~
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A/N:
Phew! Finally back to the reasonable chapters. Compared to the last few, this one was a breeze.
Now it's back to our normal sexy-time antics! :D