Chapter 379 - 379: (Epilogue of Saga 1) Beginning After the End

[A/N: A new saga starts and our hentai king carries on his legacy!]

Rigel did not sleep in the annex.

He sat in the gatehouse with two men who complained about the hour, the packet cold against his ribs, Blade's order still in his head. Do not open that latch. Do not check if hospitality learned their names.

Sometime after midnight the cold iron ticked once.

Not a bell.

A stitch.

His mouth filled with flour-sweet air that was not in the gatehouse. The complainers' voices stretched and went thin. He reached for the packet and his hand closed on a robe hem instead.

Then he was standing.

Stone under his boots.

A room cut out of a rock face, lamps, a bed, a desk with textbooks stacked like someone still had to pass a term.

A woman in a cheap nurse costume in front of him, black hair, adult face, thighs bare, smiling like the smile had been practiced until it sat right.

"Good morning, Master."

Rigel did not answer.

Another man was already in the robe.

Not a ghost. A body. College-age, loose shoulders, the easy stance of someone who thought the room belonged to him. He stood where Rigel was standing, overlapped, like two people had been told they were the same throat.

The woman—Akie, the name arrived without anyone saying it—pinched the robe hem and looked up, cheeks pink.

"Put a lot in me today too, okay? I can't live without your semen, so make it thick."

The other man laughed, fond, stupid.

"Obviously."

Rigel felt the word try to leave his own mouth.

He bit it off.

Akie was already rolling the robe up, fastening it with a band, nuzzling the front of the shorts like this was the start of a normal morning. College calendar on the wall. July. Red circle on a campus day.

"You're already hard. That's nice. I want to keep rubbing my face on it, but I also want to suck you. Is that bad?"

"You turned into a pervert," the other man said.

"Because you use me every day. Do you hate that?"

"No. I love it."

Rigel shoved.

Not with a hand. With the same ugly push he had used on a crack in Blade's corridor. Opposite mana. His own cadence against a copy.

The overlap tore.

Pain split down the middle of his skull. The other man staggered out of him, still in the robe, erection tenting the shorts, face slack with offense more than fear.

"The hell—"

Akie was on her knees with the shorts already in her teeth. She froze, eyes flicking from one face to the other, script broken and trying to restart.

"Master? There are… two?"

Rigel grabbed the lamp off the desk and smashed it across the other man's head.

Glass and oil.

The man dropped to one knee, swearing, reaching for Akie's hair like she was a handle.

"Get off. This is my place. She's mine. You're some leftover—"

Rigel hit him again, then put a knee in his chest and drove him onto the stone.

No speech about justice.

No offer.

The man still tried to talk his way back into the morning.

"It's a dream, right? It's a dream. I go to class after I finish. You don't get to—"

Rigel found a work knife on the desk that did not belong in a college dorm and did belong in a cut-out fortress. He put it through the man's throat and leaned on it until the sentence died.

Blood ran toward Akie's knees.

She did not scream.

She swallowed, once, and the trained voice tried to stand up through the shock.

"Master? Should I… clean that? Or do you still want my mouth first?"

Rigel pulled the knife free and wiped it on the dead man's robe.

"How old are you."

Akie blinked.

"Twenty. We started at the same university. I'm a healer in your party. I come here in the mornings before campus. You told me to wear this because you like it. Did I do the greeting wrong?"

"Stand up."

She stood. The nurse skirt was ridiculous. The body under it was an adult's. No collar on her neck. No film on her hands. That almost made it worse. The obedience was sitting in the words, not in iron.

Rigel checked his own hands.

Same scars.

Same age.

The packet was not in the coat. The coat was a robe. Under the robe his shirt was still the one from Blade's gatehouse, blood-spotted from a lip that had split yesterday.

He cut his palm with the knife.

It hurt.

It kept hurting.

The corpse did not fade.

"Not a dream," he said.

Akie looked at the dead man, then at Rigel, and her voice dropped into something closer to a person.

"Then who was I sucking off all July."

"A mouth that stole a morning."

She let out a shaky breath, laughed once, and the script tried to climb back because scripts are easier than blood on a dorm rug.

"If you're the real one, you can still use me. I'm your toilet. That's the rule you set. Campus is in an hour. One shot and we go back, you always say that—"

"Stop."

She stopped.

That, he knew.

That was his stitch wearing someone else's sex life.

Rigel walked the room.

Rock walls, carved, not plaster.

A window slit showed pine and a slope, not Blade's court, not Gousel.

On the desk: lecture notes, a student ID with a name that was not his, a party charter listing Akie as healer, and a second page written in pale film-script that made his teeth itch.

If the maker will not sleep in the annex, give him a bed that already kneels. A childhood friend is faster than a slave. A campus is faster than a castle. Let him finish. Let him like it. Then ask him how the little sisters are sleeping.

He burned that page on the oil and glass.

Akie watched the paper curl.

"That handwriting shows up on my assignments sometimes," she said. "I thought I was tired. I thought I wanted those things because I wanted you. If that was written into me I need you to say it straight."

"It was written," Rigel said. "Not by me. By something that copies how I train a mouth."

"And him?" She nodded at the body.

"The copy's favorite actor."

Akie wrapped her arms around herself, then dropped them, angry at the pose.

"I can still feel the routine in my tongue. If you walk out of here without giving it an order, I think I'll go to campus and greet the first man who looks like he expects it. I don't want that. I also don't want to kneel on his blood and pretend this is still a cute morning."

Rigel glanced at the slit of sky.

A distant clock tower rang the hour.

For a second it was also Blade's cracked bell on a yoke.

Two places, one cadence.

"You go to campus," he said. "You don't call anyone Master. You don't wear that costume off this floor. If a sentence comes up in your head that starts with 'please use,' you bite your tongue until you taste blood and you find me."

"And you?"

"I find the door they used to drop me here."

He rolled the corpse in the robe and shoved it toward the inner dark of the carved hall. The fortress went deeper than a student hideout. Stairs down. Old soap. A faint flour smell that did not belong in a mountain in July.

Akie pulled a real coat over the nurse outfit and buttoned it to the throat.

"If I see the other you on the path—"

"You won't. I cut the throat."

"If I see the smile," she said. "The polite one. The one that asks if a room's been aired."

"Then you don't answer it."

They went down the first stair together.

At the landing a second door stood open on a lecture-hall morning that should not have existed inside rock: light, bikes, a vending machine, students moving, ordinary.

Behind them the carved hall still smelled like the servant stacks.

Akie stopped with her hand on the ordinary door.

"Which one is the lie."

Rigel looked at his bleeding palm, then at the vending machine humming like it paid taxes.

"If I knew that I'd already be hitting the right one."

From the campus side, a boy he did not know waved and called Akie's name like a classmate.

From the stone side, very faint, Count Blade's cracked bell tested its wedge.

Rigel kept the knife.

He stepped toward the light first, because the film-script had wanted him to finish in the dark and like it.

Akie followed, coat buttoned, mouth shut, the unused greeting still sitting behind her teeth like a second tongue waiting for a name.