Chapter 189: Not Bad At All
"Nooo!"
Aaron shriveled up in his seat, the word tearing out of him in pure fright as the heat plunged deep into his nether regions with the focused determination of something that had a destination and intended to reach it.
It was painful in a way he hadn’t anticipated — not the sharp, clean pain of an injury but something spreading and internal, his blood running so thoroughly warmed through that it burned along every channel it travelled.
His fingers gripped the armrests and his jaw clenched and his entire body went rigid with the effort of processing what was happening to him.
And then, beneath the fabric of his pants, his already fully alert manhood began to tremble.
Not the ordinary trembling of anticipation — something deeper, more seismic, like a dragon that had been sleeping in a cave and had just registered, with considerable displeasure, that someone had disturbed it.
Then it began to grow.
Not in the biological way that Karen’s presence had already pushed him toward — that particular limit had been reached long time ago, every available degree of hardness already accounted for.
This was something else entirely, something that defied the straightforward mechanics of how his body was supposed to work.
His little brother pressed outward against the nanotech fabric that was still dutifully trying to hold the situation in check, and Aaron, suddenly very concerned about the structural integrity of the arrangement and the potential for genuine injury, fired off a swift internal command.
Stand down. Let it go.
The nanotech released its hold immediately and without complaint, unbothered as always by the surrounding chaos, and without the resistance there was suddenly a great deal of room available.
His little brother took full advantage of this development.
The tent forming in Aaron’s pants grew steadily, unhurried, as though the process had a schedule it intended to keep regardless of his feelings on the matter.
Karen watched with open curiosity, her multicoloured eyes tracking the progression with the detached interest of someone observing a moderately interesting natural phenomenon.
Thirty seconds passed.
They passed excruciatingly, each one stretched thin, before the growth apparently reached whatever conclusion it had been building toward and his little brother decided, with the abrupt finality of a dragon that had done enough for one afternoon, that it was time to retreat.
The contraction was as swift as the expansion had been gradual, and Aaron sat in the aftermath of the whole ordeal feeling thoroughly wrung out — slight tears gathered at the corners of his eyes without his permission, his hair had gone disheveled, and his clothing had loosened and rumpled to a degree that suggested a much more eventful thirty seconds than the one he’d technically experienced.
"You held out well for a mortal. I was expecting a pass-out or at least a forced ejaculation. Sad." Karen said it casually, leaning back in her chair with the comfortable posture of someone who had just watched a mildly entertaining performance reach its conclusion.
Her multicoloured eyes swirled with their slow, mystical rotation as they settled on his shaken, thoroughly undone expression, a faint amusement curling the corners of her black lips.
Aaron blinked back into awareness, looked around the white room as though confirming it was still there, and then looked down at his little brother, now sleeping peacefully beneath the fabric as though it hadn’t just put him through a minor ordeal.
He found, to his own mild surprise, that he wasn’t angry about it. Not even slightly.
Because now that the dust had settled and he could think again in something resembling a straight line, the implications of what had just happened were becoming apparent.
Now he understood why Plontis had looked at that vial the way a starving man looks at food.
It wasn’t a subtle gift. It wasn’t a polite token.
It was an upgrade, plain and significant, the kind that a man in his position could only receive from someone with access to things that existed well outside the ordinary boundaries of what was possible.
His previous approach to satisfying the women in his life had relied primarily on technique and stamina — tools he’d cultivated through attention and practice.
Now there was simply more to work with. He didn’t know exactly how much more, but the evidence of the last thirty seconds suggested the answer was considerable.
"Thank you, lady Karen." He dipped into a small bow, simultaneously sending the internal command for his nanotech to sort itself out — wrinkles smoothing, fabric repositioning, the general dishevelment of the past minute erasing itself efficiently.
"That’s quite an interesting toy you got there." Karen bypassed his gratitude entirely and redirected, her gaze dropping briefly toward his midsection before settling somewhere more neutral.
"The nanotech orb?" Aaron asked, not entirely certain which part of his current situation she was referring to.
"Yes." She nodded with casual certainty. "The gadget that’s forming all your clothing."
"Ah, actually this is also your gift in a way." He grinned, some of his natural ease returning now that the worst of the ordeal had passed. "It was the reward I got for choosing this class over a new class that was created for me."
"A new class?"
"Yes, it was called cassanova something," he said. "Based on politics, interpersonal relations and stuff."
Karen hummed, the sound low and thoughtful as she turned this over.
Then her expression shifted into something that walked the very precise line between perfectly reasonable and entirely unreasonable.
"Doesn’t that mean I have already given you two gifts in return for a vial of venom that will simply serve as a collectible for me? If I wasn’t wiser, I would assume you’re scamming me. But since I am, how about I have the nanotech orb instead? Fair enough, if I say so."
"Surely you’re jesting, lady Karen..." Aaron laughed, and the nervousness underneath it was only partially concealed. "There’s no way a being of your reputation would want a used product of a mere mortal like me. And I doubt it would even serve you any use."
The response landed, and Karen went quiet in a particular way — the kind of quiet that has texture to it. Her eyes narrowed slightly, not with anger exactly, but with the focused, assessing quality of someone recalibrating.
Her gaze moved across him slowly, taking stock, before it settled onto his eyes and stayed there. A challenge, unmistakable and direct.
Aaron felt it land and made the decision, perhaps unwisely, to meet it. He held her gaze and didn’t look away.
The white room offered no assistance in tracking how much time passed.
There was no sky to chart the movement of a sun, no clock ticking at any wall, no ambient noise to serve as a metronome.
Time in this place was purely subjective, which meant it could stretch as long as either of them was willing to let it.
The eye contact held, steady and unbroken, though the effort required to maintain it was distributed extremely unevenly between the two of them — for Karen it cost nothing, her multicoloured eyes slow and patient and entirely unbothered. For Aaron it was an exercise in stubborn endurance, his will pressed up against hers like a hand against a current.
And somewhere in the middle of holding that gaze, he became aware that she was closer than she had been.
He wasn’t sure exactly when it had started — the proximity had increased gradually, incrementally, the way a tide comes in rather than the way a wave arrives.
But the distance between them had narrowed from comfortable to close to something that no longer had a polite description, and when he finally registered the full extent of it, Karen was barely a palm’s width away from his face, her own expression unhurried and faintly playful, her cheek resting in her hand as she watched him with slow, deliberate blinks.
The effect on his recently resting dragon was immediate and unanimous.
It stirred back to wakefulness with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation technically called for, and the new tent forming in his pants was noticeably more substantial than the previous one had been — the upgrade making its presence known in the most inconvenient possible context.
"What’s wrong?" Karen whispered, her voice dropping into that low, velvety register that seemed specifically engineered to dismantle whatever composure he’d managed to reassemble.
Her black lips parted slightly, teeth catching the lower one in a way that sent his thoughts scattering in several deeply inadvisable directions at once.
"No-Nothing." Aaron swallowed hard, his grip tightening on the armrest as he worked to clear the parade of intrusive thoughts marching through his head — vivid, unholy, and capable of getting him killed if even a fraction of them made it to his face.
Karen, for her part, couldn’t care less. She slid closer still, smooth and unhurried, as though personal space were a convention that applied to other people.
Then his body convulsed.
A sharp prick registered somewhere very specific, followed immediately by a strange, spreading itch that began to move — pressing tighter and travelling higher, tracing the entire length of his little brother with the slow, deliberate thoroughness of something taking careful measurements.
The sound that left Aaron’s throat was soft and involuntary, his hands locking onto the armrests, his back pressing into the chair as his eyes snapped to Karen’s face and found her slender, beautiful hand positioned exactly where the sensation was originating.
Her nail. Sliding along the length with unhurried precision, the black lacquer and its hidden red and orange designs tracing him through the fabric like she was appraising something she hadn’t fully decided what to do with yet.
"Not bad at all." Karen whispered, blinking once, slowly, and then letting the smile that had been waiting at the edges of her expression finally arrive.