Chapter 69: The Downsides of Having Two Bodies (Give or Take a Hair)

(Author’s note: the previous R18 Chapters aren’t required reading! They’re simply canon — Freya and Aria’s night together did happen, and Freya’s replica therefore feels every last sensation of it. Which is why she’s in this state for the entirety of this Chapter.)

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"I could comfort you, sweetheart."

TAP.

That made seven she’d put down in cold blood, tears still running, flatly refusing to lose any more time than she already had, as she finally made her way out of the pleasure district.

She passed through the gaming district next, where she saw with her own eyes, for the first time, the scene she’d set off a few hours earlier with a single word.

Money.

Several men were already gathering up the bodies and loading them onto carts that groaned under the weight, while the ground around the pit and inside the cage was still littered with corpses nobody had bothered to cover. Even the stone man was still there, surrounded by shards of rock and a pool of blood that had had time to dry at the edges.

As she took in the sight, still crying, an old man came up beside her and stopped, not looking at her, his eyes fixed on the same thing hers were.

She braced for the crude remark or the wandering hand, purely so as not to waste more time than necessary.

But he spoke.

"Young folk these days don’t know how to enjoy what they’ve got. All of them driven by such enormous greed..."

He shook his head slowly.

"In my day things were simpler. You made do with what you needed, you fed your family and you enjoyed their love."

He let a moment pass.

"All of which is to say, I understand your sadness, young lady..."

She didn’t react to the last sentence, but came back to the one before it, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand.

"Why are you down here, if you yourself need nothing more?"

Wondering whether the old man beside her was just another dispenser of hypocritical advice, or whether there was something else behind it.

A faint smile crossed his lined face.

"I see you’re a clever one..."

He let the silence stretch, in the manner of a sage about to deliver something important. Except Freya had absolutely no time for that.

"Anyway, never mind... I don’t have any more time than this."

And she set off again, still crying, without looking back.

The old man, hands clasped behind his back, watched her disappear into the distance.

What a strange woman...

And so, without a single further incident, Freya crossed the games district and then the black market, where she spotted the young boy’s body still slumped beside the same stall he’d thrown himself at. Nobody had moved him. The merchant was serving customers right next to it as though nothing had happened.

She reached the foot of the platform, where a man was waiting. He seemed surprised to find her in tears but asked nothing, keeping his professionalism to the last as he waved her aboard toward the runes.

Then, on the way up, the tears finally began to fade.

Replaced by something considerably warmer.

It started at the back of her neck, a simple rush of heat that climbed up her skull, then dropped into her chest and settled a great deal lower. Her cheeks flushed to a deep crimson as a raw need seized her all at once, without warning and without her being able to do a thing about it.

Because on the other side of the barony, her real body was kissing Aria with love and with an entirely pure hunger, which flooded through her as well, until she could feel the demon’s lips and hands moving over her own skin despite there being absolutely nobody around her.

Her knees gave out.

She caught herself against the wall of the platform, one hand flat on the stone and the other pressed against her stomach, head down.

"Ha... haa..."

Her breathing had broken apart without her being able to help it, short and burning, every exhale coming out shakier than the last.

Not now. Not now, not now, not now.

She bit the inside of her cheek, hard enough to taste blood, and forced herself to count the runes carved into the pillar in front of her.

One. Two. Three. Four—

A fresh wave went through her right in the middle of the count, climbing from her thighs to the nape of her neck, and she clamped her own wrist over her mouth to smother what came out.

"Nnh— hnn..."

The sound got through anyway, half of it, absorbed into her sleeve.

She breathed in deeply, once, twice, pulling herself together as best she could, and straightened up just in time.

The doors opened all at once and she drew herself upright as well as she could manage, one hand still discreetly braced against the wall, as the barman came toward her.

"Is everything all right, madam?"

He seemed genuinely concerned, already extending an arm to steady her.

She pushed it away as she passed, taking great care not to meet his eyes.

"Yes... yes... I’ve just... had too much to drink... move aside..."

He nodded, keeping his own professionalism intact, while she crossed the cellar, climbed the stairs one step at a time, then made it through the entire bar with the careful gait of someone concentrating solely on walking in a straight line.

Once outside, the cool night air did her good for exactly the length of one breath.

Because as if to pile it on further, thanks to her enhanced body’s hearing, she caught something.

That same barman who’d rushed over to help her, then behaved so impeccably, was now talking to somebody behind the door.

"Yes, that’s her, I’m sure of it. She just walked out."

At those words, heard through the wood and across the distance, she glanced back over her shoulder while still stumbling forward.

Three men came out of the bar and turned in exactly her direction.

Oh for— that’s all I needed...

She kept moving as best she could, one hand against the wall, her fingers catching on every rough patch of stone.

"Ha... haaa..."

Her breathing wasn’t coming down at all now. Every step sent a jolt climbing up her spine, her thighs were shaking beyond her ability to steady them, and she felt something running slowly down the inside of her legs.

Breathe, Freya... breathe... it isn’t your body going through this...

Except it was, technically. That was precisely the problem.

She looked behind her. They were still there.

Right... let’s decide...

Freya had already anticipated that Baron Frarken would send pawns to watch her, or to eliminate her given the chance. She had also already decided to eliminate them, specifically to make the baron doubt whether she and the young apprentice hero were being protected by a shadow of their own, exactly as he was.

But this is honestly the worst possible timing!

Either she went straight home, or she killed them now, for the sake of her plan.

Ugh... for fu—

She turned into the alley on her right, breathing hard, holding onto the walls of the narrow lane, turning again, and again, sinking deeper into grim little passages where even the rats kept a low profile.

She finally stopped when she saw the alley was deserted and free of witnesses, took a second to straighten her back, then turned toward the men.

"Right... make it quick... haa... I don’t have time..."

One of them laughed, looking her up and down, lingering on her flushed face and on the chest rising far too fast.

"Look at that, the peasant girl’s all worked up!"

TAP.

Why are they all exactly the same?! Does this world only have one template when it comes to second-rate henchmen? Or is it just the era? Maybe the men of this time were simply more primitive...

The other two stood frozen at the body that had just collapsed at their feet, without having seen a movement, a weapon they recognized, or anything at all.

One of them blurted out, his voice a full octave higher:

"What do we do?!"

Already ready to run from a power he’d just witnessed and still didn’t understand.

The other answered simply, not taking his eyes off Freya.

"You know perfectly well our odds are better here. If the baron hears we ran without doing anything, we get bled for it, guaranteed."

Good, good. I wasn’t going to let you run anyway... come to mama...

"Hnnn~..."

She gritted her teeth, the barrel shaking slightly.

TAP.

Then the third one, the very one who’d wanted to flee, changed completely in an instant.

His gaze hardened, his hand settled on the grip of his sword, and he drew a long breath as he bent his knees.

The air around him began to vibrate.

A bluish glow ran up the length of his still-sheathed blade, traveled to the guard and then along his forearm, tracing luminous lines that followed his veins all the way to his shoulder. The cobblestones beneath his feet cracked outward in a star pattern without him having moved an inch, and the dust on the ground lifted in a spiral around him, drawn upward.

Freya was already somewhere else entirely.

Her body grew hotter still, a wave rising from low in her stomach straight up into her chest, and an explosion of pleasure tore through her from end to end.

"Nghhhhn~..."

Her hand left the wall. Her legs gave out completely beneath her and she dropped to the ground, head thrown back.

At that exact instant, the man simply ceased to exist where he’d been standing.

A blue line split the alley end to end, so clean and so fast that it stayed burned into the darkness for a full second after it had passed.

The ground detonated behind him. The cobblestones didn’t lift, they disintegrated, thrown up in a spray of dust and shards that reached the rooftops. The shockwave went out in both directions at once, and the building faces went with it, stone splitting from ground to cornice, shutters ripped off their hinges and carried away, an entire drainpipe torn from the wall and folded double like paper before vanishing into the dark.

Every window in the alley shattered at the same moment.

FWOOOOSHH—

The blade passed through the exact spot her skull had occupied a tenth of a second earlier.

Freya felt the displaced air slam her dress against her body and crush the breath out of her lungs, while a handful of her hair, still hanging in the air from her sudden drop, was cut clean through and drifted slowly down around her in the silence that followed.

A charge built to kill, not to impress.

The man reappeared at the far end of the alley, ending his run against the back wall which he half went through, the stone collapsing around his shoulder in a cloud of rubble.

He stayed frozen for a few moments, sword still extended into empty air, unable to work out how his target had ended up on the ground at exactly the right moment.

Then—

TAP.

He dropped to the ground, a hole through his skull, blood spreading across the cobbles.

Then Freya, panting, one hand flat on the damp stone and the other clenched in the fabric of her dress, hauled herself back onto her legs as best she could, between two moans she half managed to smother.

Her dress clung entirely to her back, soaked through with sweat, and the fabric against her chest had become so sensitive that every movement sent a shudder through her that nearly took her legs out again. The insides of her thighs slid with every step, forcing her to keep them pressed together as she walked, which improved absolutely nothing.

"Haa... hnn..."

Come on, Freya... almost there...

She resumed her walk through the city, hiding what she was feeling as much as she possibly could, which worked well enough given that the surface of Evangel was barely inhabited and the few people about didn’t spare her a glance.

That said, she had to stop three times.

The first, one hand against a wall and her forehead pressed to her own arm, waiting for a wave to pass. The second, crouched behind an abandoned cart, one hand clamped over her mouth and the other fisted in her dress, shaking from head to toe while her chest heaved faster and faster.

"Hn— hnnn~... nn..."

The third time, she didn’t even remember stopping. She simply opened her eyes again against a carriage entrance, with no idea how much time had gone by, her legs like cotton and her vision swimming.

She eventually reached the manor.

Fortunately for her, the place was perfectly silent and still, since everyone was asleep at this hour, the servants included.

Which suited her enormously, because she was making her way down the corridors far more breathless than before, her breathing entirely gone, sweating to the point that her hair stuck to her face and neck, cheeks scarlet and eyes glazed, incapable of walking straight for more than a couple of meters.

Even so, Amélia was there.

Sitting in a chair in the corridor, a book in hand, at an hour when no child her age had any business being awake.

But Freya didn’t give her the chance to speak.

"Haa... step aside... ha... young miss... haa... I’m... hn... ill... ha... don’t come near me... haa... you might... catch... what I have..."

The girl nodded and moved aside.

Not because the woman in front of her looked like she was suffering from a monumental flu, the flu of a lifetime.

No.

Because her mind and her eyes were fixed on one single thing, picked out by the moonlight falling through the corridor window.

Freya’s shoe.

The one she’d used to crush the head of the man who had touched her face. The one she’d originally intended to wash before coming home. The one she absolutely had not washed, given the state she was in.

Now entirely caked in dried blood.

As for Freya, knowing her room was already made up, she quickened her pace between two stifled moans, hand on the handle before she’d even reached the door, went in, shoved it shut behind her with her shoulder, and threw herself bodily onto the bed.

She finally let her mind surrender to the pleasure.

And then go completely blank from it.