EXTRA: Ah… Egel…

As soon as Mordecai spoke, Egel closed the distance between them, her earlier flustered stiffness melting into something brighter, almost bouncy.

She had the walk of someone who had never once in her life lost a physical fight and had made peace with the boredom of it.

"S-So! I wanted to thank you for building a gym for me to train in," she said, and though her words were cheerful and grateful, the deep flush painting her cheeks told an entirely different story. "I've never had anything like it before! The reinforced obsidian punching pillars, the graduated weight sets, the regeneration mats..." She trailed off, her blue eyes going momentarily dreamy. "We trained by hitting rocks in the rain until morning, so I'm still getting used to it. A lot of scars in my body are actually from my training.'"

"Don't thank me, Egel." Mordecai kept his tone professional. "You've done excellent work these past few months. Building a proper training room for you was the least I could do for such a loyal employee."

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Egel's internal temperature climbed several dangerous degrees.]

[WARNING: Arousal levels growing...]

The praise hit her somewhere deep and unguarded. She rubbed the back of her neck, her gaze skittering away from his, unable to hold eye contact for more than an instant.

"T-Thank you..." she managed. "No one has ever been this kind to me before. And..." A pause. Her expression softened into something genuine, revealing the woman underneath it. "Regel is doing so much better now. She's eating properly. She sleeps through the night. Yesterday I caught her laughing at something Larry did with a mop, and I hadn't heard her laugh like that in..." Egel's voice caught, just slightly. "...in more than three years. Seeing my little sister smile again makes me really happy. Thank you, Kaitoyama. For real."

Mordecai studied her for a few instants, and saw that the gratitude was real. No horny system notifications, no Higher Realms Viewers asking for a kiss scene... nothing.

That was the thing that always threw him off-balance about these people: the sincerity of it.

Egel was a woman who could crater a stone floor with a single punch, and she was standing here nearly moved to tears because someone had built her a room with good equipment in it and treated her sister like a person.

But underneath her words, Mordecai felt that she was building up to something. The gratitude was the taxiing; the request was the takeoff.

"Egel. Get to the point," he said flatly. "I know you have a request."

Egel jumped, physically startled, as if he'd caught her stealing from the till. "A-Ah... yes. So..." She pressed the tips of her two index fingers together, poking them against each other in the universal gesture of a nervous request — 👉👈. "R-Regarding the personal training you promised me two weeks ago..." Another pause. Her blush deepened to a shade normally reserved for emergency warning lights. "W-When are we going to do it?"

Mordecai's mind went completely, gloriously blank.

'Personal training.' He repeated in his mind.

He had no memory of this. None. He searched the administrative archives of his own skull and came back with nothing but dust and the faint echo of his own voice saying "Yes, sure, sounds good" in the automatic, disengaged tone of a manager approving a budget line he hadn't read.

[SYSTEM HELPFULLY PROVIDES CONTEXT: Two weeks ago, subject 'Egel' formally requested a private, one-on-one, nighttime 'special training session' with you. She spent an entire day working up the courage to ask. You said 'Yes.']

[SYSTEM ADDENDUM: You said 'Yes' because you were, at that exact moment, arguing via telepathic uplink with a Higher Realms VIP who had written a 4,000-word rage post on Reddit calling Kaito an 'AI-Empowered Slop Protagonist' and demanding a refund on his subscription. You were not listening to Egel. You have, statistically, never been listening. This is now your problem, and I would like it on the record that I find this deeply funny.]

[NOTIFICATION FROM THE HIGHER REALMS: User Dibbs57 has reported the user and a chat fight started, by calling him 'a poor kiddo who got offended because Kaito used logic.']

Anybody would've immediately said, "right now." Me too. But our beloved fake necromancer thought about it.

Mordecai mentally executed a facepalm, a move performed by his soul while his physical face remained a serene, unbothered mask.

'What,' he asked himself, staring at the flushed, hopeful, muscle mommy practically vibrating in front of him, 'do CEOs actually do in these situations?'

And the answer arrived, unbidden and grim, dredged up from the deepest sediment of his former life as a salaried electrician who had watched his own bosses operate for years.

They made a promise in a meeting they weren't paying attention to. They said "yes, absolutely, let's make that happen" to a face they weren't looking at. And then they let the calendar quietly bury it, with six months of "let's circle back on that," of "now's not a great time," of "soon, I promise," until the employee stopped asking and learned, quietly, to expect less.

They accepted the free overtime, the loyalty, the desperate eagerness of someone who'd never been treated with basic decency, and they returned the absolute bare minimum required to keep the machine turning over.

'God,' Mordecai thought. 'I've become middle management with necromancy.'

He had exactly one escape route, and it required knowing his employee very, very well.

"Egel," he said, and reached out to place a hand on her shoulder, gripping it firmly with slow and deliberate pressure.

He knew precisely what her masochistic instincts would do with the sensation of a strong hand closing over her muscle. "If I promised you, then I will honor your request. A promise is a promise. But not today. I have an important appointment, you know? I need to conduct a secret audit of Oakhaven and pick up a few things for little Yssrath."

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: Egel's internal temperature achieved thermonuclear parameters at the sensation of his strong grip.]

[SYSTEM WARNING: BE CAREFUL, WE'RE ON ROYALROAD AND THERE'S NO APPROPRIATE TAG FOR EROTISM IN THIS STORY.]

A visible shudder rolled down her entire frame, starting at the shoulder he was holding and traveling all the way to her boots.

Her breath hitched, and her pupils did something... complicated.

For a woman who could shrug off a mountain troll's haymaker without blinking, she was catastrophically vulnerable to being firmly held by her own boss, and some part of Mordecai filed that fact away for future scheduling emergencies.

"V-Very well," she breathed, her voice about an octave higher than usual, her fists clenched. "In the meantime... what should I do?"

Mordecai released her shoulder before the situation could develop any further tropes.

Egel gasped at the loss of contact, with her body involuntarily leaning forward by an inch.

"Go find Wukong," he said. "She's out in the western courtyard, and she's in a bad mood. She's convinced that a legendary rival is coming, so she's nervously polishing spoons. She needs a distraction until there are no more spoons to clean; otherwise, she'll randomly destroy cities out of boredom. Go to her, tell her you want to learn her combat technique and that you need a real sparring partner."

Egel perked up. Combat instruction from the Great Sage Equal to Heaven was, to her, roughly equivalent to being handed the keys to paradise.

"But... are you sure that she will agree? She doesn't listen to anyone and keeps doing whatever she wants." Egel shrugged.

"At first she'll turn you down," Mordecai continued. "She'll say sparring a mere martial artist would bore her within thirty seconds, and she'll be insufferable about it." He paused, and a faint, knowing glint entered his eyes, the specific gleam of a man setting up a domino run he wouldn't be present to witness. "After that, mention, casually, offhandedly, like it barely matters, that a certain six-eared macaque has been spotted in the eastern woods. And that it's been going around saying it wants to challenge both you and her, at the same time, because it doesn't think either of you is worth fighting separately."

Egel blinked. She had absolutely no idea what a six-eared macaque was, why it mattered, or why saying such a thing would produce any result other than a confused monkey queen.

But she nodded anyway with the total trust of a devoted employee receiving instructions from a manager she'd decided was infallible.

"Understood, Kaitoyama. Anything else?"

What she didn't know was that the Six-Eared Macaque was Sun Wukong's single greatest nemesis from the original legend: a perfect duplicate of herself, identical in power and appearance, the one being in all of creation that even the Buddha had struggled to tell apart from the real Great Sage Equal To Heaven.

The mere suggestion of its existence would send Wukong into a euphoric, hair-trigger frenzy of anticipation that would keep her thoroughly occupied for the entire afternoon. It was the single most effective babysitting maneuver in his repertoire. Mordecai was already hearing Wukong's words in his mind. "WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?!??!" Screamed with that Shonen-like protagonist high-pitched voice.

"Not for now," he said. "But..." He turned as if to leave, then added over his shoulder, in a cool way, "if you finish your training with Wukong quickly, ask Ugo to teleport you to Oakhaven. The guild's been asking about you lately. And if you'd like... I could treat you to a meal while I'm there."

Egel's eyes lit up like twin signal flares fired over a sinking ship.

"EH? REALLY?"

"Yes." A pause, timed to the millisecond. "But it depends on how fast you are."

The effect was instantaneous and total. The flustered, blushing girl evaporated as if she'd never existed, and the muscle mommy returned in her full, terrifying glory.

Egel launched herself into a crisp backward flip, landed in a low, explosive crouch, and slammed her right fist into her open left palm with a sharp, echoing CRACK that dislodged dust from the ceiling.

Yeah. The classic shonen protagonist pose.

"See you in Oakhaven later, Kaitoyama!" she declared, grinning, and then took off down the corridor at a dead, floor-cracking sprint, leaving a faint slipstream of displaced air in her wake.

Mordecai watched her disappear around the far corner, listened to the diminishing thunder of her footsteps, and then let out a long, slow, deeply weary sigh that seemed to deflate him by several inches.

'Since when,' he thought, staring at the empty corridor, 'do people think a harem is a good thing? Every light novel, every anime, every isekai... they all sell it like it's the dream. Multiple beautiful women, all devoted to you, all fighting for your attention.' He pinched the bridge of his nose. 'Nobody mentions the logistics, the scheduling, the emotional labor of managing multiple simultaneous relationships with women who can each individually destroy everything. It's not a fantasy. It's an unpaid, twenty-four-hour, high-stakes HR department where every employee is in love with the manager and armed with weapons of mass destruction. It's a goddamn nightmare with a smile painted on it.'