Chapter Text
Mal crouched in the darkness above the Red Reavers, sizing them up as the oblivious gangbangers relaxed around a game of cards in the gloom of the loading dock. His massive frame was swathed in a dark leather jacket whose patterns shifted to match the shadows, a faint glint of chrome from the cybernetics integrated into his right hand the only hint of his presence.
He scanned the loading dock below, marking his prey. Six men and a thin-framed combat robot, looming behind them and giving them a false sense of security. It should have sounded the alert the instant Mal had entered, but he’d caught the sensors and fed back a false image of rats skittering through the rafters.
The Reavers were wearing patched shirts, jackets, and jeans covered in dyed red slashes. Each one had a pistol and a knife, mostly holstered but some lying haphazardly on the crates they were using as seats and tables. Two had the same horns and rough skin as Mal, marking them as ogre-kin, in shades of green instead of the pale blue he’d been reborn with. Another one was elf-kin, with thin pointed ears, long green hair, and a slender frame. Probably had enhanced senses and reflexes, marking him as the primary target. The rest were human; if they had cybernetic augments, they weren’t the sort that Mal could interface with.
There were no women, which made things easier. Even by the standards of the gangs of Neolagado, the Reavers were sexist predators; any woman present would have been kidnapped or trafficked, and normally Mal would expect to be confronted with something like that on a hunt. The Reavers usually snatched attractive women off the streets, using them until they were bored before selling them to underworld brothels or megacorp experimenters.
That was why Mal was here. When the Reavers had started running their smuggling operation through Echo Park, the local neighborhood watch had tried to chase them off. In response, the Reavers had grabbed one of the watch’s female members in the middle of the night. They’d force-fed her Slice to fuck up her brain, shaved her head and covered her in explicit and humiliating tattoos, then gang-raped her for a week before loading her with a bunch of their own debts and selling her to a corp-run brothel to pay them off.
The woman’s family had filed complaints with CorpSec, but the brothel had documents affirming that the woman was a debtor, the Reavers were useful deniable assets for the corps to smuggle goods and people out of the city, and the gig workers of Echo Park weren’t real corp employees. The family had been told to come back with the money the woman owed.
“That’s why we need you,” Darren had said yesterday, sitting across from Mal at a booth of the faded diner that the Watch used as their base of operations. “We know their routes, but not where they’re hiding their shipments. If you can use your magic to hack the feeds, you could find one and take down the guards, then we can use the shipment to get Zoe back.” His jaw was clenched, fist tight around his coffee mug.
Mal had grunted, staring down at his eggs. He hadn’t known Zoe well, but he’d liked her well enough. She laughed at her own jokes, and never got edgy when Mal slipped out of his lair and made half-hearted efforts to socialize. Most people were a little nervous around him. Hell, he was a little nervous around him.
But even when they were nervous, the folks in Echo Park hadn’t pushed Mal away. Darren had gotten Mal his first gun, helped him find the early jobs that were helping to give him a rep as a reliable hunter. He could stroll into a few local bars and chat with folks over a beer. Without this neighborhood he might have gone insane in that first month, or gotten killed by the gangs before he knew how to handle his magic.
“Three-quarters my usual fee, but I get first dibs on the shipment. Two items.” He wasn’t going to work for free, but fuck the Red Reavers. “You want them alive?”
For a moment, Darren’s eyes were as cold as Mal’s. “Send a message. Your choice how.”
Back in the present, Mal closed his eyes and bit his thumb, letting a few drops of blood splash across his cybernetics and plunging his mind into a quick hacking ritual. Before he’d been reborn into this dystopian hellscape, he’d been a pretty good computer programmer. When he’d woken up a few months ago in a half-ogre body, cybernetics and magic humming in his blood, he’d discovered a knack for combining the two. Most cybernetics were hardened against hacking. A few were warded against enchantment. Not much could handle Mal’s particular blend of technomantic control, and a discount warbot owned by a bunch of lazy rapists was not on that short list. It was the work of a moment to reverse its FOF identifiers.
As Mal had guessed, the elf’s reflexes were enhanced. When the robot hummed to life, rifle barrel extending from its right arm, he was on his feet instantly, pistol leaping to his hand. “We’ve got company!” he shouted, voice thin and raspy. But instead of recognizing the threat, he twisted and followed the robot’s gaze, readying himself to fire on the people he thought it had detected. He was still searching for them when the bot’s bullets tore through his chest.
The rest of the Reavers burst into motion as they realized their bot had turned on them. Cries of anger and confusion filled the loading dock as the thugs dove for cover, grabbing their guns and firing shots that pinged off the robot’s armored chassis. The bot shot one Reaver in the chest, the man dropping to the ground with a weak groan. One of the ogres charged out from cover, taking two bullets to the shoulder before he slammed into the bot and drove his knife into its frame in a shower of sparks.
With everyone distracted, Mal dropped from the rafters. He extended his grapple-line as he fell, the launcher built into the arm of his coat. No one saw him fall on the Reaver in the back, reaching out to grab his throat and hold it as his knife stabbed home.
Mal didn’t particularly like killing people, but he didn’t particularly dislike it, either, and that kept him up at night sometimes. Once upon a time, he’d just been a normal person in a normal world. A big guy, sure, but an office worker who balanced workouts and video games. The only weird thing about him was a secret love of harsh bondage and kink that he’d never let himself share with a string of short-lived relationships. But now he was built for this work, and the world kept giving him opportunities to hunt. He couldn’t tell if it was coincidence or magic at work, but he couldn’t deny the thrill it gave him to pull off an ambush.
The two standing Reavers were flanking the bot, peppering it with fire as it grappled with the third. Mal closed the distance to one of them in seconds, looping his line around the man’s throat. As he fell, choking, the other ogre realized that he was flanked. With a roar of anger, he moved from cover to charge Mal.
Which brought him directly under the shaped mine Mal had planted in the rafters. It exploded, raining razor-sharp shrapnel down on the ogre and his wounded companion. They fell with cries of pain, leaving Mal the only one standing.
The combat robot shuddered, servos whining as it looked at Mal. “Allies eliminated --- allies --- error --- error ---”
There was a shower of sparks. Mal ducked behind a pillar as the robot’s arm pivoted towards him, but a moment later it ground to a halt, collapsing backwards.
Mal let out a slow breath of relief. The drawback of his technomancy was paradox. When the spell started to wane, contrasting incompatible orders tended to blow out programming. The robot’s frame might be salvageable, but its command unit was fried.
“Fuckers,” Mal said, kicking one of the bodies as he strode past to look at their cache. Something else he’d learned was that whenever he agreed to one of these missions, there was something present that was just conveniently perfect for him. Seemed to happen to most mercs in Neolagado, and no one thought to question it. Another quirk of the magic that flowed through the city’s bones, or something about this world? Mal wasn’t sure.
He just hoped it wasn’t something kinky this time. He kept running into gear with applications disturbingly in line with his darkest fantasies. Self-deploying lassos that tore apart clothing and left skin intact. Synapse-delivered drugs to force sexual attraction. A collar that could override the signals in a person’s brain and leave them a stiff puppet. Mal destroyed the stuff if he couldn’t think of a good non-sexual use for it, but it kept showing up.
And that might be a concern again. The crates were all marked with the twin-horned logo of Thetacera Solutions, the second-biggest megacorp operating in the city. They specialized in biomagic and pharmaceuticals, extracting and refining the magic that had flooded the city after the Emergence and making it safe for the rest of the world - at a huge profit, of course. But Thetacera also had a sideline in mind-affecting drugs, illegal augmentation, and human trafficking. Mal didn’t want stuff like that on the market, and he wasn’t sure if the watch would destroy it if he didn’t.
At first, his worries seemed unfounded. The crates were filled with alchemical medicines and grey market bio-enhancement drugs. Darren would be delighted, they’d sell for a mint. Mal pocketed a package of strength enhancing ampoules as his first claim; they were too addictive to use often, but better a couple days fighting withdrawal symptoms than dead in an alley.
Then his sensors picked up active electrical signals inside one of the crates. Instantly suspicious, Mal walked over, prying open the boards with his bare hands. Underneath was a sleek silver capsule, about five feet long, humming with digital activity. With a sinking feeling, Mal placed his hand on the capsule, unsealing it with a hiss of released air. The top broke in half and slid to the sides, revealing the contents, and taking Mal’s breath away as he stared in mingled fascination and horror.
Nestled inside the crate was a young woman with Asian features and short-cropped black hair, which curled around her narrow face. Her ears were pointed like a fox’s and tufted with black fur, and he could just see the bushy tail peeking out from under her slender figure.
She was wearing a tight black neolatex bolero straightjacket, its waist a tight corset that shrank her waist to a painful degree, arms wrapped tight around her stomach until the strain on her shoulders was visible. Her breasts, small but round, were on full display, nipples sucked into a pair of long glass tubes. The latex was set against her skin, so tight that he could make out her muscles and belly button through the sheer black material.
It didn’t stop there. The woman’s legs were locked into latex frogties, tight ballet boots pressed up into her ass and knees bound to the bottom of the capsule. The latex ran up her thighs, stopping just short of her crotch and leaving it available to the machine’s ministrations. A pair of plastic cups were suctioned tight against her pussy and ass, allowing massive dildos to slowly but relentlessly pump in and out of her as a small tube collected the fluids being produced and drew them away, leaving her sweaty but otherwise clean. Another dildo was pressed into her mouth, reaching most of the way down her throat as it hummed.
The last piece of the woman’s captivity was a thin VR visor, wrapped around her face and pressing her hair down. A pair of tight buds pressed into the depths of her ear; Mal could hear faint static and the sounds of the woman’s own moans being played back to her. Her mouth was hanging faintly open, a bit of drool on the edge of her cheek as she moaned softly. He wasn’t sure she was even aware the capsule had been opened.
He’d had fantasies like this. Hell, he’d had a whole folder full of pictures like this in his previous life. It was just as hot in person, but he had a feeling he’d just tasted a poison chalice. Who was she?
‘ALERT - UNAUTHORIZED ACCES- OVERRIDE ACCEPTED’
Mal put his hand on the side of the crate, temporarily registering himself as an authorized user as he stared at the machinery. His magic ran through the system, trying to track the processes running through the capsule and shut them down.
“F-fukgges… sto-haa-haaaggglk…” The dildo in the woman’s mouth pulled back just enough for her to whimper out the protest before plunging back in, a garbled choking sound replacing it as she instinctively began to suck on the thick shaft plunging down her throat. The dildos below were picking up speed, inflating as they pounded the woman. Her hips were bucking back and forth, held fast by the straps binding her restraints to the bottom of the capsule, as she struggled to resist the pleasure being forced on her.
As he struggled to untangle the mess of technological programming and magical ritual that made up the capsule, Mal couldn’t help but stare out of the corner of his eye as the pumps affixed to her breasts begin to operate, tiny prongs sliding down to pinch her nipples and pull them out before releasing them. Thin spurts of milk splashed out, drawn down the tubes and filling a row of tiny vials implanted in the side of the capsule. The woman gasped around the dildo clogging her mouth, quick panting breaths as she fought to swallow her moans of pleasure.
‘BIO-REGISTRY IN PROGRESS’
Mal’s jaw dropped as the alert crossed his interface. “No, no - shit -” While he’d been distracted by the woman’s struggles, the capsule had taken his override to mean he was the ‘registered owner of Unit 001’ and was about to alter her conditioning to imprint on him. For a fraction of a second, a vision of this woman kneeling in front of him submissively flashed across his mind, moaning with pleasure as she unzipped his pants and...
He ruthlessly shoved the fantasy down. Nice fucking try, world. Adjusting his connection, Mal quickly activated a timelock on the bio-registry. It wouldn’t buy him much time, but maybe he could figure out how to withdraw her from the machine before the imprint took hold.
Forcing the woman’s panting gasps out of his mind, Mal turned his attention to the capsule’s cybernetics, groaning with frustration as reports and scans flitted across his vision. Orgasms suppressed: 71. Orgasms forced: 17. Orgone Production: 17%. Sensitivity: 114%. Libido: 112%. Endurance: 117%. Pain Tolerance: -12%. Pain/Pleasure Interface: 122%. Conditioning: 28%.
Shit.
The system was reshaping its prisoner’s mind and body towards sexual servitude, blasting her eyes and ears with scenes of sexual servitude mixed with subliminal programming while it rewrote her body’s tolerances and reactions. Her own magic was being used as part of the process, transformed into some kind of magical delivery mechanism that was too complicated for him to untangle at the moment.
The good news was that the process was slow, and someone had gotten impatient. Instead of leaving Unit 001 at Thetacera until she was fully programmed, they’d set up the process to finish over the course of days in transit from Raven Creek. The bad news was that opening the crate early had triggered a swath of security measures designed to lock her in place. Worse, the woman’s brain was fully locked into the process. If he pulled her out without shutting it down properly, she would end up in a coma, or worse.
“Nn–g–no—MNNGGH!”
‘PUNISHMENT CYCLE ACTIVATED’
“Hey, wait -!” Mal tried to abort the cycle, but the system was resisting him. He could blast it clear, but not without sending a potentially deadly amount of electricity through the woman’s body. All that he could do was track the sensors as the system registered the woman’s resistance to the things she was being shown and triggered a program designed to batter her into submission.
The dildo in the woman’s mouth expanded, filling her throat. Her muffled moans turned into gurgled choking sounds as her breath was ruthlessly stolen from her, and she began to shiver and shake even more frantically, body tensing in anticipation of what was about to happen.
A moment later, it became clear what the woman was trying to prepare herself for. The prongs that had been teasing her nipples sparked with electricity, delivering a rapid-fire sequence of punishing shocks that drew squeals of pain from the suffering woman. Another prong deployed from the dildo still fucking her, tapping against her clit and viciously shocking it as well.
The woman’s movements became even more frenetic as she tried to pull away from the vicious shocks, and the sensors feeding her reactions to Mal dutifully responded with a pair of charts, one showing spikes of pain and the other showing spikes of arousal fractions of a second later as the electricity triggered the woman’s masochistic conditioning. More prongs began to deploy all across her body, some of them simply poking her lightly before retreating while others delivered viciously powerful shocks. It was clear that the woman could never know which touch meant a terrible combination of pain and unwanted arousal was about to hit, and which were just there to catch her off-guard.
Mal winced, feeling himself growing hard against his will as he watched the woman gurgle. The strap pressed down against her throat and her body jerked in the throes of the electricity ravaging her, tiny spurts of her juices continuing to flow from her pussy and breasts as the pain pushed her towards another unwanted orgasm, arms jerking faintly against the base of her breasts as her muscles clenched and struggled.
He could end this instantly and save her. All he’d have to do was imprint her on him, breaking her will to whatever degree the system would require, and she would be freed of the pain. She’d thank him. Reward him…
Stop it, you fucking asshole. Mal quickly stepped back, sealing the canister shut again. No, there had to be a way to reverse the process without turning her into a brain-jacked slave.
Reaching down, Mal wrapped his arms around the capsule. It only weighed a few hundred pounds, and he was easily able to heft it over his shoulder and balance it with his free arm. He’d worked out back in his first life, but the ogre strength he’d been reborn with was something else. He still wasn’t fully used to it.
Crouching low, he glanced around as he slipped out of the warehouse, hefting himself up the fire escape one-handed to the roof as he signaled Darren that the work was done and the supplies were ready for pickup. They could leave the Reavers to make a point.
The device continued to hum as Mal worked his way back to his hideout. The punishment routine had finished, but his enhanced hearing could still make out the woman’s faint moans of pleasure as the machines continued to pump away, hissing and whirring. Tapped into the system, trying to stall the mental conditioning, he was also able to follow the sensors tracking Unit 001’s arousal levels, fluid production, and time until the system shifted from preventing orgasm to requiring it. It was a distracting litany, especially coupled with the gasps and panting of the prisoner, but he was able to slip across the rooftops without being spotted, occasionally fritzing a security camera to avoid triggering any corp alerts.
Mal’s base of operations was a derelict warehouse on the banks of what had been a major river before the Eruption turned it into a monster-filled mudhole. There wasn’t much local surveillance, and it had been easy to spoof the sensors so they didn’t know he was here. It wasn’t much, but it had power, it had a kitchen, and it had plenty of space for him to tinker with different gadgets. This world was hell sometimes, but their tech was next level, and scavenging all sorts of weird shit and playing with it was his favorite pastime.
Mal dropped in through the ceiling, switching on the lights remotely as he gently set the capsule down on a long table in what he’d marked off as his workshop. He hooked it up to his collection of bought and claimed sensors before stripping off his coat and throwing it on a chair. Underneath, he wore a tight black tank top made of lightly armored fabric, muscles on full display. He unsealed the opening again, overriding its internal alerts with a quick maintenance notice.
The capsule’s latest round of punishment had passed, and now it was in an edging cycle. The woman’s mouth was hanging half-open, drool being gently removed by a pair of small tubes pulling her lips wide as her breast pumps deployed a pair of small spoked wheels to run across her nipples, and the dildos in her pussy and ass vibrated relentlessly instead of pounding away. As Mal cut his fingertip and began to interface with the machine, its prisoner began to twitch as an unwanted orgasm swelled inside her - instantly, all of the machinery teasing her stilled, drawing a muffled wail of need. A few seconds later the process began again, slowly but relentlessly building towards another ruined climax.
Trying not to listen to the parade of whimpers and moans coming from the woman, a treacherous fragment of his mind still imagining those sounds coming as she was pressed under him, Mal focused on the software. It was miraculous stuff, combining the best biotech this world had on offer with a level of alchemical brilliance Mal had never seen. When the conditioning process was complete, the woman would be a willing sex slave, doing whatever her master commanded. She could endure almost anything, but her physical sensitivity would be inhumanly high, making her feel pain and pleasure more sharply than any normal person. The two sensations were twined around each other in the conditioning, making her thrive on punishment and humiliation, and the capsule had already replaced her need for food, water, and sleep with direct electrical charging.
The most notable thing, though, was that the conditioning was feeding on the woman’s own innate magic. Sexual stimulation would allow her to inject her magic into her fluids, turning her into a living farm for magical energy. With no natural sources of magic in the world beyond Neolagado, that might be the most valuable thing of all.
Sex, servitude, and magical slavery. This technology could heal trauma, reshape bodies to survive traumatic injuries and chronic illness. It could create new pathways for curing mental illness and addiction. And Thetacera had used it to make a sex slave.
Neolagado in a nutshell.
But that was the endpoint, and there was still time to stop it. “Hnrg…” Mal’s low growl echoed through the room as his first hacking attempts faltered. Detaching the woman without bio-registration kept throwing up alerts, and so did trying to convince the capsule that conditioning was already complete. Finally, he hit on an option.
‘DEMONSTRATION MODE ACTIVATED’
The VR visor shut down with a final burst of static, plugs withdrawing from the woman’s fluffy ears as it retreated into the system. The breast pumps and dildos detached with a wet, slick sound, folding to the sides as decontamination processes began, and the straps holding her down unlatched one by one. The frogties unsealed in the front, her pale skin revealed as they folded back into the frame of the capsule to leave her lying unrestrained inside it, and the bindings on her straightjacket fell away to allow her to squirm her hands out from under her.
The woman’s eyes fluttered, long lashes blinking in the dim light of the warehouse. Mal took a half-step away from the capsule, not wanting to panic her. “Take it easy,” he started. “You’ve been stuck in there for…”
“YOU BASTARD!”
Mal’s eyes went wide as the woman’s shriek of rage echoed through the warehouse. He’d expected her muscles to be weak and strained from their long restraint, but the woman flipped out of the capsule with ease, legs extending above her as her tail fluffed out and she did a momentary handstand on the rim of the device. “Hang on…” he started.
“Scum! I won’t fight for you!” As the woman yelled, she pushed off with her hands, tucking into a tight ball as she spun through the air towards Mal. He raised his hands defensively as she exploded into a combat posture, arms high and knees out. She wrapped her legs around his waist, raising her hands into a dual knife-hand pose and moving to strike at his throat.
Then,to Mal’s shock, her hands gently settled on his shoulders and she kissed him.
It was not a chaste kiss. It was hungry, almost desperate. There was a tingle of energy through the kiss that stirred something deep inside him, and he reached out to grab her and pull her close, their lips mashing together. She tasted like sweat and honey, a charge of sweetness that rippled through him, her tongue licking out into his mouth.
Mal could feel her pressed against him, hips grinding against his stomach. His cock stiffened under the layers of cloth, straining upwards towards her. Her pert breasts were pressed into his tank top, nipples rubbing against his abs as she craned her neck up to his face. A moan of pleasure slipped out of her, and Mal grunted in response.
The grunt shocked him out of the moment, at the same instant that her moan broke whatever conditioning was affecting his would-be attacker. The two of them broke their kiss in the same moment, Mal shoving the woman away as her legs unlocked from around him and she pushed off. She twisted in midair, one hand tapping the ground as she narrowly avoided falling to her knees. Her other hand wiped at her mouth with disgust, confusion dancing across her face.
“You bastard!” she growled. “What did you do to me??” A bright pink flush was spreading across her cheeks as she realized both what she had done and how much of her was on display. One hand twitched as though about to fall to cover her breasts, before she obviously decided that was showing even more vulnerability than leaving herself exposed.
“Fucking saved you from the Red Reavers, that’s what,” Mal snapped. “Calm the fuck down!”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said, rocking back on her heels and crossing her arms demurely in front of her. The straightjacket’s straps hung down around her bare crotch, inviting new avenues of bondage that briefly distracted Mal from his frustration.
Then her face twisted in annoyance. “What in the nine hells,” she growled again, shifting back on her heels and raising her hands defensively.
“Huh.” Mal rubbed his forehead. “Fuck, demo mode. We can fix that. Probably.” He took a deep breath. “Look, I’m Mal. I’m not with Thetacera and I’m trying to fix this. You were in a fancy conditioning pod, and it’s messed you up. Do you have a name?”“Iris.” Her tone was loaded with suspicion. “If you’re not with Thetacera, then why am I in your lab?”
“Because the Red Reavers were smuggling you out of the city, and I stopped them. What was I going to do, take that to a public clinic?” Mal waved at the capsule. “How the fuck did you even get in there in the first place?”
Iris took a step back, eyes darting around the lab as she crossed her arms over her bare breasts. She tried to make the gesture look casual, ignoring her flushed cheeks and the dampness still clearly visible around her crotch. “I’m a monster hunter,” she said curtly. “Scarlet Phoenix Sisterhood.”
Mal nodded slowly. He’d heard rumors of the hunter clans - people who had kept knowledge from the old days of magic, preparing for the next emergence, and who had come to Neolagado after the Eruption to deal with the magic-twisted creatures, unleashed daemonic forces, and dark mages that had spread through the city’s underbelly in the following years. He didn’t know any details, except that they had a complicated relationship with the megacorps and street magicians of the city. “Didn’t know the hunters recruited hybrids,” he said, gesturing to her ears.
Iris’s flush deepened, and her jaw clenched. “What you know about us would fill a thimble,” she snapped.
Sore spot. Mal filed that away just in case. “Sorry,” he said. “So how’d you go from hunter to prey?”
Iris winced, anger draining out of her. She sat down on the edge of the capsule, crossing her legs to cover her crotch as best she could and leaving her left hand across her breasts. Her bound right hand dropped down, brushing absently against one of the dildos. Mal wasn’t sure that she’d noticed she was doing it, and he didn’t want to bring it up, so he did his best to focus on her expression and not her actions. “Someone sold me out,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I was assigned a task. Thorn devil, down in the Bulwarks. It should have been simple, but when I arrived I was ambushed by a Thetacera acquisition team. I tried to trigger my evac beacon, but it failed. Tried to run, but they tracked my stealth suit and subdued me.” She shook her head. “That would be impossible without help from one of my sisters, and only a little less so without several conspirators. At least one in task assignment, someone among the artificers. Someone on the council to muddy the waters."
“Shit,” Mal said.
Iris nodded glumly. “Shit,” she agreed.
“So they wanted to smuggle you out of the city, turn you into a sex slave,” Mal rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Get you somewhere your Sisterhood wouldn’t follow and use your magic for their own ends. Can you go to your… I don’t know, den mother? Get it sorted out?”
Iris groaned. “It’s not a sorority, Mal,” she said. “And… I don’t know. I am not… influential… among my sisters, and my dominae does not approve of me. It could be claimed that I was inventing a conspiracy to excuse a humiliating failure. If I approach the wrong person I could be returned to Thetacera, and if the person I approach goes to the wrong person they could be removed as well.” She paused. “Why am I telling you this? This is not information for outsiders to know.”
Mal groaned again. “Demo mode,” he said. “I couldn’t break you out of the capsule without triggering it. It must be treating my questions as orders you have to follow. You aren’t heavily conditioned…”
“... and so I resist after the first moments,” Iris finished for him. “And you couldn’t work around that?”
He heard the accusation in her voice. “Magic is complicated,” he said, trying not to sound hurt. He was sticking his neck out here, and she was still treating him like an enemy. He reminded himself that Iris didn’t know him, didn’t know the situation, and frankly was in a hellish mess of her own. He’d be suspicious and pissed too, in her shoes. “If I issue overrides that are too at odds with the system your head will explode. Not exactly something I want to test.”
“Hm.” Iris stopped toying with the dildo, looking him up and down carefully. “An inconvenient power.”
“Yeah,” Malcolm said, agreeing with the words instead of the tone. “Useful as hell if I don’t mind making a mess, but it’s not just a win button. Gotta be subtle.” He rubbed his chin again, turning over the problem in his mind. He’d been hoping to dump Iris back on her team, maybe get a reward for saving her, but it looked like that was going to be a tricky prospect. And the longer she was here, the trickier this whole demo mode situation was going to be. Her could still feel the lingering effect of her kiss, running through him like a sexual sugar rush.
It was as if the universe was getting annoyed, trying to push him into a situation where he wouldn’t have any choice but to become a slave owner. Where he could excuse all of his worst impulses.
“Fucking universe,” he muttered under his breath.
Iris’s ears twitched as she heard him. “There, we are in agreement,” she said. For the first time, her lips twitched in a smile.
Mal smiled back, feeling surprisingly shy. “I do not have any clothes in your size,” he said apologetically, “but I’ve got a 3D-printer. A quick scan and we can get you into some fabrics that are a little more comfortable.” Or a little less comfortable, but he doubted she would want that set.
When he’d first gotten the printer and realized what it was capable of, he’d immediately picked up a few dozen kinky patterns for potential sexual encounters, mind swimming with the possibilities that the gear offered. With no one to model them for him, he’d printed a few and then immediately recycled them, and he doubted Iris would want to trade her current getup for something equally sexual.
“I can’t even take this jacket off myself,” Iris said, waving her bound hands at him. “Can you… can you help me get out of it?” She fought to sound stern, but Mal could hear the vulnerability underneath.
“Yeah,” Mal said, pushing down the thought of gently peeling the jacket away from her skin, seeing her body emerge an inch at a time. Don’t be a creep. “Uh, turn around. I’ll start with the back straps, maybe you can do the rest yourself.”
“Thank you,” Iris said, shoulders slumping. “Gods, I’m so tired…”
“Not a surprise,” Mal said as he walked up to her. She kept her arms carefully at her side, but he could see her tense as he loomed behind her, straining not to turn to face him. From behind, she wasn’t any less attractive. He could see the curve of her bare ass, framed by the latex running up her thighs and linking to her tight-waisted corset. It was quivering with anticipation, as if begging to be touched. Which couldn’t be right, she must just be exhausted.
But when he reached out, a hand resting on the clasps of her straightjacket, he heard Iris let out a sound halfway between a moan of lust and a whine of need, her neck craning back towards him. Her flush was spreading down her cheeks towards her neck, eyes slightly unfocused and blinking. “Something’s wrong,” she said thickly.
She swayed on her feet, and Mal reached out to catch her without thinking, one hand around her waist and the other on her shoulder. As he wrapped his arms around her, diagnostics flashed through his mind. For a fraction of a second every part of Iris’s bio-rhythms were available to him, monitored by her suit and feeding directly into his mind through his magic. “Ah, shit.”
“Now what?” Iris asked slowly, looking over her shoulder at him. A lock of dark hair had fallen across one eye, ears twitching with desire.
“Well, there’s bad news and even more bad news.”
“I’ll take the… bad news.”
“I figured all the parts of your physical conditioning were moving at the same rate, but of course that’s not how it works. You’ve already been adapted to use internal bio-batteries instead of food, drink, and sleep, and while you were being conditioned they were being deliberately let at minimal viable levels. And you transferred what you had to me when you kissed me.” Which explained the rush of energy he’d felt.
Iris whined softly. “That’s why I’m so tired,” she said. Her eyes darted back to the pod. “And I recharge by…?”
He nodded. “Getting in the pod.”
Iris stepped away from Mal, waving her arms in the air as frustration momentarily fought back exhaustion. “Thrice-damned son of a fallen god!”
“Do you want the worse news now?”
“That wasn’t the worse news??”
Mal winced at the defeated look in Iris’s eyes, shaking his head. “Without bio-registering you, I can’t shut off the conditioning process. The power you gave me gives me some options. I should be able to pause the mental conditioning, focus the pod on recharging instead of changing your body. But that means locking it into a full-power denial and punishment cycle until you’re at full power again.”
Iris sagged, staring down at the ground. “Of course,” she murmured under her breath. “I am cursed.” She looked up at Mal, suspicion and trust warring on her face. “There’s no other way?”
“Not if you want to live.”
Iris whimpered, looking from Mal to the capsule. “No, please…” she moaned. “I can’t. Not so soon.”
“If your energy runs down the system will cannibalize your body,” Mal said evenly. “You have to get back in there before it’s too late.”
Iris nodded, fighting back tears. “Alright,” she said. She stumbled over to the capsule. “Please strap me in,” she said with a moan of desire and fear. “I can’t do it myself.”
Mal nodded. He stepped up behind Iris, gently taking her small hands in his massive ones and pulling them behind her back. She squeaked softly as the straps on her gloves were latched in place, tightening the pressure against her stomach again. It wasn’t quite as painfully constrictive as before, but it was still enough to visibly push her breasts out.
Picking Iris up, Mal brushed her tail out of the way. “Bend your legs,” he said, and Iris immediately complied, folding her ballet boots back against her bare ass as she was lowered into the capsule. The latex sealed around her thighs, pulling her flat against the back of the capsule as it hummed back to life.
“Please don’t leave me in here,” Iris said, defiance and fear warring in her voice.
“You’ll be out soon,” Mal said. “I promise.”
She nodded once as the VR visor descended over her face. Straps were deploying, pressing her tightly against the base of the device as the tubes began to emerge from their hidden compartments, seeking out her breasts and crotch once again. “F-fuck…” She moaned as she sagged against her restraints, a new wave of pleasure overwhelming her as her mind drifted into an uneasy slumber.
Mal groaned, leaning back from the capsule as the top slid closed over Iris. Faint moans were already drifting out of it, barely audible through the thin metal shell. “How the fuck am I going to get out of this one?” he muttered to himself.
He stripped off his boots and pants, stumbling over to his bed and falling face-first onto the pillow. A handful of ideas were spinning in his brain, but if he tried to deal with them like this he would just fuck something up. Tomorrow, when Iris was recharged and Mal had slept, they would figure this out.
As he drifted off, the faint sounds of Iris being teased on the edge of orgasm filling his ears, Mal had a feeling that he wasn’t going to have peaceful dreams…