Capture Target

Chapter 29 — Y2: Breaking the Hero



...I'm releasing this chapter half an hour early to make sure it actually gets out on time.  Hrmph.  I'm going to get the Subscribestar post ready now, and I'm going to be extra sure to make sure that what happened last chapter doesn't happen again.  I work hard to make sure this comes out regularly!


Huge thanks to all my subscribers, especially TropicalPenguin, Teacher, Yuria, Theslimeofyourdream, User#e20fc711, User#5c472977, User#646966cb, and User#6c53ee46 !

If anybody wants a different name to be used, let me know!

AAAAAH!

I forgot something absolutely critical last time we talked!

There wasn’t any sexy stuff!

It was all ‘blah blah LORE blah blah COSMOLOGY blah blah PLOT’.

I can’t believe I forgot what’s important -- argh -- shit -- fuck -- I blame you for this!

You with your insistence on ‘details’ and ‘consistency’ and ‘timelines’ and ‘understanding what’s going on’ -- you’re corrupting me!  From sex!

Oh just -- shut up!  I know it doesn’t make sense!

Just -- just -- just sit there and I’ll fix this, okay?  I’m going to skip to the hot stuff this time, as fast as I can while fulfilling all your weird ‘understanding’ requirements, and you aren’t going to stop me!


Okay so!  Sevens demanded that Takeo and I meet her in her office… the office that was, just moments prior, the school dean's office… and called me in first.  She claimed that I made money illegally due to whoring without a permit, I said I never got a cent, she turned my ex into a girl and made her my maid for his punishment --

-- no I am not going to go into details!  The transformation was mundane and all that happened was he-then-she freaked out a bit!  We’re moving on!

Shut it!

After that she claimed I was illegally a roper, which was true, but I asked for proof.  She checked in Sumiko’s lab, couldn’t find the roper in the container was in, and I got off scott free.

No!  You’ll learn about that later!  It’s not relevant right now!

Hot stuff!

Sex!

Porn!

Moving!  On!

She let me go and called Takeo in for reasons that I’ll cover later, and that was the end of the time slot for me.  It was also the end of the time slot for Takeo, because the time slot time system is terrible, which meant we were both free at the same time.

No!  I’ve explained the time slot system too many times already!  If you don’t get it just accept it and move on!

Now!  There was one item on the second landmass that was incredibly valuable.  It was the only reason I could think of that Takeo would block me from it, as he obviously had some kind of special knowledge of it.  That item is the only working gun in Alchemical Corruption 12.

There are other working guns in the series, but they’re only produced by Atlantis after it returned to the sky.  And as the Kingdom is completely isolated, from them and all the other nations, there are no others in this game.

This gun was located in the castle in the center of the purply landmass, and you can either go through a long gauntlet dealing with ghosts and spirits and… ugh… zombies, or you can use the secret passages.  One of the many advantages of playing the game multiple times is you learn all about those secret passages, and can use them in new games.

However, I had to assume Takeo knew about them, too.

There are multiple secret paths into the castle, and I had no idea if he knew which one I’d take… so I flipped a coin a few times in as random a method I could come up with to determine a path randomly.

Then I grabbed Shimizu and ran.

Running in high heels wasn’t something I thought I’d be skilled at, but you learn fast when they’re all you can wear.

We ran in through the hole in the side of the outer wall, into the basement, up the secret passage in the wall, into the library, through the fake bookshelves, answered the riddle to the haunted painting, crawled through the fake fireplace, and finally jumped through the secret path down in the kings bathroom.

And then we were in the armory.

The simple rifle was placed on an ancient pillow set up near the back.  I took a moment to breathe as I realized we had made it in time…

…Only for the secret entranceway by moving the armor stand to open up, revealing none other than Otsuka Takeo.  The Hero.  The Protagonist.

And he looked frantic.

He tried to shout out to me to stop, but the moment I saw him I rushed forward as Shimizu went to block him, and I grabbed the rifle.

It was around then that I realized I had, in my rush, made a rather serious mistake.

See, there’s a specific event that happens during year two of Alchemical Corruption 12.  The heroine with the lowest affection score of the hero ends up wandering the ruined castle, and gets inflicted with a certain -- effect -- that makes her much more vulnerable to… well… basically everything in the game.

Especially the hero’s seduction aura.

And right now, the ‘heroine with the lowest affection score’ was me.

So as I grabbed the rifle, I didn’t notice that on it was a small, translucent, purple slug.  I only realized it was there when I felt something wet land on the side of my head as it jumped off the gun, and to me.  I let loose a startled squeak as I tried to brush it off…

…only to brush it right towards my ear.

I realized what was going on as I felt it crawl into my ear.

Now that’s not normally possible.  Normally, you don’t put stuff in your ear.  And even if you do, you can’t really go through it.

But this isn’t the normal world.

This is the world of Alchemical Corruption.

And my body was slutty enough that if a mind parasite wanted to use my ear to crawl up to my brain?

It absolutely could.

I squealed as I tried, and failed, to tug it out, feeling it crawl into my brain, and then it -- well.  It reached its target.

My brain.

Now normally, the brain can’t really… feel anything.  It’s a processing center.  The nerves that actually sense, and transmit, sensations are elsewhere.  The ears, the eyes, the tongue, the skin… all of those can feel.  The brain can’t.

But it can when a sex parasite has crawled into your ear and is attaching itself to your brain!

This sex parasite is a fairly simple one, compared to some of the others you can run into on the second land mass.  It feeds off of pleasure, and lust, and depravity -- so all it does is simply… enhance those portions of the brain.

You might think that’s not a lot, but if so, you’re underestimating what the brain can do.

Have you ever closed your eyes and imagined a song, and then realized that you felt like you were actually hearing it?  Or have you ever imagined you were flying, and felt your stomach drop like you were actually in the air?

While there are parts all along the body that process sensations, the brain is the big one.

I didn’t know this at the time, but one of the more regular effects of this particular parasite is that it can make you feel your fantasies.

If you imagine somebody is groping you, or kissing you, you can feel it.  If you think hard enough about somebody fucking you, you can feel it.  This can, and will, bring you to orgasm.

And that’s only the most basic effect.

It enhances all sexual sensations and desires.

The addiction to Shimizu’s cum?  That’s ramped up.

The pleasure I get from being a slut?  That’s ramped up too.

The effects of the hero’s aura, making it easy for him to seduce others?  That’s ramped way up.

Everything related to or touching upon sex or hedonistic pleasure is turned to eleven.  The parasite literally finds the portion of your brain dedicated to pleasure and attaches itself to it.  Enhancing it, and making that portion of your brain bigger, more active, more effective.  The effects then, over time, spread down through your spine to the rest of your body.

Your pleasure is multiplied, and your desire spirals out of control.

It is a quick recipe to a Bad End.

And I was having a very hard time ignoring how wet that made me as I realized all this.

I was panting already, despite myself.  Sure, I had accepted that I was a slut, but that’s different from knowing that you have practically invited in one of the worst house guests possible into your brain, one that would push you to corrupt and defile yourself until you were little more than a hedonistic nymphomaniac desperate for cock.

And the thought that that was going to be my future made me so wet I was having a hard time focusing.

I was imagining what my future would be like.  How I would invite anybody and everybody to use me.  I could feel them groping me, I could feel them teasing me, I could feel them fucking me.

I was fully clothed in my adventuring gear, and I was lost in my own head of my fantasy.  Being raped on a train, being held down by contless men, each with cocks that matched Shimizu.  Fucked until I couldn’t think, until there was nothing left to think.  Fucking my brains and thoughts out until they poured out of my head, leaving nothing but an empty, giggling toy, desperate for pleasure.

I came at the thought.  I orgasmed at the mere thought of it.  I felt my body shudder and nearly fell down as I moaned in lewd ecstasy, my hip twitching with pleasure-seeking instincts.  I only barely caught myself with the pillar the rifle was settled on, panting, as the cold stone brought me back to reality.  I could focus again -- not that I particularly wanted to -- on what was real, instead of what was in my head.

My first thought was wondering why Shimizu was fighting Takeo, when they were both super fuckable, and could be fucking me instead.

Then I slapped myself.

Not, like, that gentle ‘pat on the cheek’ that you do when you ‘slap yourself’, I mean I slapped myself with as much force as my slim, feminine arm could manage.

…Admittedly that wasn’t much, but it was enough to snap me out of my fantasies.  Because as much as I enjoy degradation, bondage, and being groped to the point of discomfort, actual pain doesn’t bring me pleasure.  And the parasite in my skull, thankfully, didn’t change that.

At that point I could call out for them to stop.  Shimizu slowed down her blade at that, hesitating, looking at me.  From her perspective, right after Takeo showed up, the person I was most cautious about, I started freaking out… followed shortly by zoning out and not responding, and then cumming where I stood, seemingly without cause.

Takeo, on the other hand, was ragged, panting, and the moment he had a break from the fight?  The first moment he could breathe?

He just tossed his blade down and broke.

I’m not even kidding~

His rant was so incredible, I’ve got it memorized!

“That!  Is!  It!  I am done!  No more!  I have spent the last twenty seven loops trying to prevent this very thing from happening, you paranoid slut, and every time I fail!  ‘Oh no, Takeo is trying to trick me!’  ‘Oh no, Takeo is out to get me!’  ‘Oh no, because Takeo has a fucking sex aura he didn’t ask for, he must be evil and I must ignore his every word of caution and run right into the middle of fucking danger!’

“Well, congratulations, Eliza, you have out lasted me!  Every time you get that fucking slug implanted in your brain, the entire timeline goes to shit!  Every!  Fucking!  Time!  By the time the fifth landmass shows up, it feels like the entire kingdom is too busy fucking each other to even bother with the Evil God of Chastity and Purity!

“So congratulations, I am done!  I formally surrender my claim to the entire land grab to you!  This hero is, officially, quitting!”

Shimizu and I both just kind of stared at him as he panted.

He then huffed, spun around, and marched back the way he came.

…It took us a solid minute for us to process everything, and when we did, we immediately rushed after him.  Because.  Uh.  We had no idea how to process that.


Phew.  Okay.  I’m feeling better now.  I got to something hot, and we can continue.

…No, I’m not covering what I skipped over in more detail.  Consider that your punishment.  Hrmph.

Don’t.  Test.  Me.

…Good.

Anyway.  After that… incident, all of us returned to my room in the school.  Myself, Takeo, Shimizu, Sumiko, and Yuu -- who was now female and in a maid outfit -- were in my… argh, fine.

Yuu used to be fairly tall for a japanese man, at around five foot ten, but now he’s shrunken down to five foot four.  Still tall for a japanese woman, but he’s lost a full half foot of height.  She was… modestly curved; I’d say she had ‘nice curves’ if I wasn’t so inundated with extremes by that point.  Nice breasts, nice hips, nice waist, nice legs, just… nice.  Nothing exceptional or extraordinary.  Besides how she clearly had no idea how to even sit as a woman.  Her legs were spread wide, and the only thing saving her from flashing her panties was her long maids dress.

She clearly did not want to be here.

I ignored her as utterly important, as we discussed things that mattered.

Namely, ‘what the fuck was up with Takeo’.

I could go through the entire conversation, but it’s a lot of repeating the same points and asking stupid questions… so instead I’ll just skip to the end.

It seemed that Takeo had been running through the ‘game loop’ of five years over upwards of a hundred times, trying to defeat the Evil God of Chastity and Purity.  The vast, vast, vast majority of those had me becoming a super mega-slut of some form or another, and in those, his attempts to lead a force against the god always failed.  In a small percentage of attempts, he managed to stop me getting infected by this neural parasite -- and they got much closer to an overall victory.

He had just spent twenty seven loops in a row trying to stop me from becoming doomed to mega slut-hood, and he has had enough.  He’s opted to just follow my lead this time around, because he can’t be bothered to try again.  …Given his frustration with me, I, uh, kinda sympathized.  I’m not sure how much of that is due to his ‘protagonist aura of love me’, but still.

Now, as for how he managed to go back in time -- okay.  This relates to the whole ‘new game plus’ thing in Alchemical Corruption 12.

See, blessings from the gods are hard to get for women.  Thankfully so, or there’d be so much more competition for top slut!  That said, for the ‘heroes’?  The goddesses are required to make it easier for them to obtain, by chief god asshole.

In Alchemical Corruption 12, no matter what you do, the main hero manages to collect all 27 blessings, obtaining the last one upon either victory or defeat in the battle with the Evil God of Chastity and Purity.  Now, upon collecting a blessing from every currently extant goddess, you are automatically transported to the chief gods domain to talk to him.

If you’re a woman, and you manage to convince him that you’d happily fuck him whenever he wants?

He blesses you with his blessing, and you become a goddess.

No, I am not joking.

That is the only way to become a god in this reality.

You have to make him think you’d love to be in his sexy slut-goddess harem.

…Thankfully he can’t remove that blessing after granting it even if he was tricked, or this world would be in much worse shape.

Now that said, if you show up as a man?

Well, he doesn’t want any dudes in his harem goddess fantasy.  So he’ll instead grant you a relatively minor wish.

‘Time travel’ is one of the ones that he can grant, because the time system in this reality is so fucked that sending somebody’s mind and a few items back in time doesn’t even register on the ‘bad idea’ meter.

So Takeo has been running this loop, over a hundred times, with me as part of it, trying and failing to defeat the Evil God of Chastity and Purity.

Frankly, I still don’t quite get why everybody in the room seemed depressed after we were all on the same page.  Well, I got Takeo being tired, that made sense, but Shimizu and Sumiko?  Yuu?  Them being upset makes no sense.  Really, it was quite simple, even more so with one of our group being stuck in a time loop.

We do our best to win, and if we fail we try again.

Ultimately nothing had changed.

The Evil God of Chastity and Purity was going to come, we didn’t want to let it win, so we were going to fight it.  The fact that we had, apparently, failed over a hundred times really didn’t change the equation unless we wanted to give up.  Which… obviously… we didn’t.

…Shimizu and Takeo’s twin warm smiles in my direction made me feel all gooey inside, though I’m not sure why they looked like that after I told them my opinion.

What was next to do was already known.  Hand the magic rifle gun thing to Sumiko to see if she could figure out literally anything about it beyond how to ‘point and shoot’, and then… then it was time to, finally, meet with Koiki Yuki.

The [Sadistic Mistress] seer, whose letter to my father broke me.

I needed to figure out what was going on with her, and the resulting confrontation was very fun~

Surprise!  The hero is literally just the game protagonist, stuck in a NG+ loop!

…Some of you have already guessed it, or gotten very close, but yup!  I've been looking forward to this reveal for a while~

Oh, also, as to why he’s ‘annoyed’ instead of ‘exhausted’ like Sevens is?  There is a reason for that.  Like all reasons, it boils down to ‘chief god is a lazy ass’.  It's explained in more detail in a later chapter, when Sevens starts to become more relevant to the plot.

As for last chapter, a surprising number could tell why Sevens asked out to that specific number -- it was a 32 bit unsigned integer, for reasons that I have thought out but would be a small bloat to say why.

But none of you guessed that the critical thing that was missing was the porn!

...I'd include more here, but right now I just want to be sure this gets published on time, so maybe next chapter.


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