Capture Target

Okay, are you ready for --

…What’s with that look?

What - wait -

…You’re telling me that a super-hot slutty succubus like myself just appears out of thin air in your bedroom.

Gives you the offer of your life.

And proceeds to tell you a super-long tangent about her life story that resulted in her being who she is, here, in your life.

And you thought that the story would be simple?

What part of that sequence of events makes you think that this would be simple?

The fact that a succubus shows up in a reality where there are no succubi?

Maybe how she can do magic without being a magical girl?

Or the fact that she’s actually willing to entertain your inane questions?

Not to mention my -- look, you don’t get an offer to jump to another reality every day!  What kind of normal, boring, easy to understand story results in that?!  Even if it’s just some random god that’s offering, why are they offering?  What do they get out of it?  If they say it’s just ‘entertainment’ then why you?

No, my story is anything but simple when it gets down to it.  I thought I made that clear already, when I talked about how I realized that I didn’t just land into a ‘game world’.

The world was full of people.  And people are complicated.  We had twenty seven goddesses under a blind omnipotent moron.  If you were in that situation, for centuries, would you seriously not make any plans?  Would you not have any ideas about how to make things change?

If at any point when I’m talking you think something along the lines of, ‘Wow, somebody should really be doing something about this’, chances are somebody already is.

Gods plan.  Nations act.

And sluts get wrapped up in far more important matters than what dick to suck next.

---

Last time, I covered how I realized something really bad was going on, right?

Right.

As a general rule of thumb, if the gods are real and proof of them is easy to obtain, don’t try to do stupid nonsense regarding them.  You have no recourse if they decide to take offense.

And I had realized that the entire mansion was full of people doing some kind of stupid nonsense regarding the gods.

I didn’t know what, I didn’t know why, and I frankly didn’t have any proof beyond my saying so.  Methods of detecting truth and lies can be fooled in any number of ways, so ‘the Second Prince of the Front is committing probable-blasphemy’ wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

Knowing that they had kidnapped people wasn’t going to get me anywhere, either, if I couldn’t even find out where they were kept.

The fact of the matter is that my master was well respected and, more importantly, powerful.  Not in terms of personal strength, but in terms of wealth and political clout.  He didn’t have as much raw control over the direction of the nation that the back nobility did, but he had more than enough to make the accusations of a single maid disappear.

I’ve found that in almost every reality, the powerful can cheat.

Which sucks, but that doesn’t change the facts.

The next moment I could manage it, I slipped into a side room to recollect myself.  I needed to refocus on my goals, as things had gotten rather… complicated.

My initial goal was to get a particular item the royal family had in their treasury.

In order to get that item, I was going to find proof of ‘something’ regarding the prince.

I had, by that point, discovered that something was clearly wrong… and furthermore, potentially dangerous with a far too large risk of collateral damage.

Ultimately, despite all of my worries and goals, despite all of the plots and plans going on around me, my course of action was… almost hilariously simple.  In that deceptive way, where it’s not actually simple at all.

I just had to find proof that incriminated my beloved master.

Which would become a lot harder to do after the party ended after another day and a half, when everybody could slow down.

While not being caught or suspected of doing anything but ‘being a sexy free-use maid slut’.

…Yeah.

I was panicking, my attempt to ‘calm down and focus’ having backfired horribly.  The core issue came down to the time slot system.

Remember, each time slot can only have ‘one event’ in it.  With a day and a half, if I didn’t sleep, I had… around nine time slots, total.  That means nine ‘events’.  That means nine attempts to find whatever secrets my master's manor had, when I had failed to find anything in the half a month I had been working for him.

And I had to do it on my own.

Without help, without time to plan, I had to overcome a person who had been built up into a perfect paragon of masculinity in my mind.

I was… in a closet, I think.  One that was out of the way, with just enough room for two people to stand in; the walls felt like they were closing in, and I think I knocked over something with some cleaning fluid in it.  I realized I was panting, and tried to bite my lip to help focus.

That didn’t help, so I tried to tug at my hair.

That didn’t help, either.

The smell of alchemical cleaner was filling my nose as a small, desperate whine was bubbling in the back of my throat.  I felt like crying.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m good in emergencies, and I stand by that.  When the chips are down, I can toughen up and power through.  When something needs to happen, I can get it done.

…But whatever Master did to me had messed with my head.  The thought of going against him, of actively trying to take him down, made me shake in anxiety.  The thought of being able to defeat him, now that I was close to doing so, was like ramming up against an impossible wall.

I couldn’t defeat him.

That was the thought that was in my mind.

I couldn’t win.  At most I could avoid getting caught, and the thought was tempting, it was so tempting to just pretend nothing was wrong.  Or to slip out a door and run away.  Find a way to remove my collar and escape into the night before Master realized I was gone.

I could do those.  I could do any of those.  It would be hard, but I could do them.

But I couldn’t conceptualize actually defeating him.

Nine search attempts?  And needing to waste some of those to do my job, to avoid getting anybody suspicious of me?

It wouldn’t have been a matter of effort  It would have been a matter of luck.

What snapped me out of it was when I remembered my conversations with Takeo.

He had said that I had managed to pull this off before.  And while that wasn’t enough to snap me out of it?

I remembered he'd told me that I wasn’t relying on the people around me.  My friends and allies.

I had been working on that, don’t get me wrong.  I had recognized that I had been short-sighted, that I wasn’t thinking of the people around me as people, and more as just -- action figures on a battle map.

And I realized, suddenly, that I was still making the same mistake.

I wasn’t alone.

Oh, I was surrounded by enemies, sure.

But I was also surrounded by my fellow maids.

---

I’d like to pretend that that thought snapped me out of my panic, but it wasn’t that clean.  My body was still primed to run or cry, and I was starting to feel light headed due to the alchemical cleaner fumes.  But it did give me something to hold onto, something to grab with a tight grip.

Master had maybe three male bodyguards. I quickly realized that they were used for the very rare instance a brainwashed maid wouldn’t be suitable.  For example, when going to talk to a member of the back nobility, you don’t want to show off your cult's slave-maids.

It’s just not a smart move.

That aside, this was clearly a cult recruitment party.  None of those that had shown up were allowed to bring in their own bodyguards, with very few exceptions.

The maid servants outnumbered the non-maid servants over ten to one, and most of the guests wouldn’t know how to defend themselves if their lives were at stake.

And even better, some of the maids doubled as security.

We had a perverted prince that surrounded himself with a harem of adoring, servile maids, why wouldn’t he have some of them double as his defense force?

Maid security is so much cuter than non-maid security.

You had the martial-artist maid in a flowy outfit, the knightess maid in plate-mail patterned after our uniform, the… you know in retrospect, given how sneaky she was, she was probably a ninja maid that had a dark blue catsuit underneath her uniform…

…I’m getting distracted.

Back on topic, here was one big, obvious problem with getting the maids on my side.

We were all brainwashed.

But, this helped clear up what I needed to do.  And the task was a much simpler one.

I merely had to remove the brainwashing.

And so long as I managed that, it didn’t matter how obvious I was doing so -- so long as I wasn’t caught until I was done.

So, with that in mind -- after I managed to calm down -- I knew what I had to do.

I had to get back to my job as a slutty sextoy maid.

…What?  

I had a job to do, and I wasn’t ready to get caught!

More importantly, the party was where the rest of the maids were.  And it was time for the most important of all maidly traditions:

…What?  No!  It wasn’t --

…Okay.  Actually?  On second thought, yes.  You’re right.  Being groped and teased by your fellow maids is the most important maidly tradition.

Let me clarify.  It was time for the second or third most important of all maidly traditions:

Gossiping.

We were the servants.  Obedient little maid-sluts that couldn’t ever dream of disobeying our beloved master.  We had voluntarily put tracking collars around our necks and let him not only lock them shut, but also let him keep the keys as well.

And you know what the invisible servants hear?

They hear everything.

Frankly, the hardest part about gossiping with them was managing to get away from the grasping hands of the guests.  And not because I couldn’t get away, but because…

…um…

…

It was kinda super hot?

Wh-what’s with that look?  It was!  I was still drugged with a horny-potion and everything, too!  And I liked being groped and teased and fucked and -

- a-anyway.  I spent what time I could, gossiping with my fellow maids, and I quickly learned a surprising amount.

For example, the kidnapped guests?

Yeah, they were being held in the attic that I didn’t know existed.

I learned that from, like, the third maid I talked with.

Apparently, there were two entrances on opposite sides of the manor that were… not hidden, exactly, but certainly not easy to spot.  They were behind doors that should have led to closets, and not stairs.

It was infuriating to realize I had completely missed an entire floor of the manor, simply due to never being assigned to it.

That said, I couldn’t get them out on my own.  So I was still trying to figure out how to deal with the brainwashing.

It wasn’t until close to the end of the time slot that I learned what I needed to.  I and several other maids were on our hands and knees in a line.  Some of the guests had the ‘brilliant’ idea of a ‘sex-line buffet’, so they got some volunteers for it.

I was next to tsundere maid, and we were chatting in between being fucked.  …Well, it was actually mostly her teasing me at how easily I managed to orgasm, and about how desperate I was for them… but there was also some talking in there!

Our conversation ended up drifting towards Tsundere Maid’s early days as a maid.

To my immensely non-existent surprise, she wasn’t particularly keen on being a ‘loyal slut-maid for some asshole royal’ back then.

She giggled at me a bit, with her familiar ‘dere’ side blush, and said, “I admit it took a few days, but I agreed to spend some time with him in his bedroom.  And, ya’know, sure, he’s hot and fun to fuck and stuff, but I didn’t think that he’d manage to actually get me in this frilly outfit, ya’know?”

She had to pause for a moment there, as one of the party goers opted to take the time to fuck her.  …They fucked me immediately afterwards, so she had some time to recover after her orgasm.

I urged her to continue after I caught my own breath.  And it turned out… I believe she put it as… “Ya’know, the first two days, they were ‘alright’.  But the third day, there was just something different about him!  He slipped into his private bathroom for a bit, and I was considering just running, but when he came back out?”  She gave a very familiar lovestruck sigh, then.

…One that I copied, frankly.

I knew exactly what she meant.

I probed her a bit more, and it turns out that, for some maids -- such as herself -- he wasn’t as obviously attractive and desirable as he was to me.  At least… not at first.  She wasn’t the only one that he took into his bedroom for a time.

He was, after all, still a front noble.  He could get almost any girl he wanted in his bed, at least for a night or two.

…And, I suspected, those that he couldn’t, he could just kidnap.

I asked a few of the other maids that didn’t immediately fall for him, and it turned out that, for each and every one of them, there was a ‘moment of realization’.  After that moment, he was always hot enough to make them desperate to please him.  There were never any ‘gaps’ after that ‘moment of realization’.

And all of them either had it happen while in his bedroom… or after some time away from him.

Whatever he was doing, he did while in his room.  Specifically, in his restroom.

Which meant I needed to get into it, without him knowing what I was doing.

That, at least, was easy enough.

It was trivially easy to make him convinced that I needed his touch after having spent so much time being groped by ‘lesser men’.  In retrospect, he started to finish my sentences after he got sucked into the narrative of it -- convinced that I was tortured by the thought of entertaining those lesser than he.

Of course, at the time, I almost bought into it myself.  His voice just had a way of blanking my mind of complaints and issues…

Haaaa… he was so hot…

…A-anyway.

Despite him being very well-practiced in ‘fucking the maids’, I was an eager and willing nymphomaniac slut that had been getting regular intensive practice in immediate recovery after sex.

So I could have even more sex, naturally.

This was actually when my C-rank talent, [Endurance], managed to rank up!  It even morphed as it did so!

It became the B-rank talent, [Sexual Endurance]!

…Sure it didn’t give me as much general stamina, but I didn’t need that as much as I needed the ability to stand up and walk in a straight line after being railed for three hours straight.

That was very relevant in the next school year.

With the aid of my newly improved talent, I managed to fuck master to the point where he passed out.  Which left me, in his room, during the first of the two ‘night’ time slots.

This was… okay, you don’t generally want to operate during ‘night’ time slots.  If you don’t have a talent or use a potion to help manage yourself, you’re going to be feeling very weird during that time.

A study was actually done about that; the shortest you can reliably make a time slot is around thirty minutes of real time.  Do that for all four ‘awake’ time slots, and that’s a mere two hours of being awake.

But then the first ‘night’ time slot comes, and you will want to go to bed.  You will feel groggy, have a hard time focusing, and your eyes will drift shut.

It’s an artificial bodily regulation.  Used to help make the time slot system, in all its trashy glory, actually work.  And I was just going to force myself through it.

It sucked.

All the blood went out of my head when I crawled out of Master's bed.  I shivered in the cold night air away from the blankets and Master's warmth.  I felt like I was going to trip over my feet with every step I took into his bathroom, like I was going to accidentally knock something over and make a noise loud enough to alert my master.  And my master, fast asleep, was still so close to me!  I could have been cuddling with him!

But I forced myself onward, went into his bathroom, and froze.

It took me far too long to realize what I was seeing.

He had a personal hot tub in his bathroom.  The bathroom that was attached to his bedroom.  The one just for him.

It had a hot tub in it.

And the hot tub was an alchemy cauldron.

Once I realized that, I couldn’t un-see it.

It was a massive alchemy cauldron that was very poorly disguised as a private hot tub.

…I realized that he was using himself as an alchemy ingredient.  That’s what he was doing.

This was something that had cropped up in a few older games of Alchemical Corruption.  It was actually the ‘big reveal’ in the very first game of the series, and it’s cropped up a few times since.

That said, it was rarely used effectively, because of how finicky it could be.  You’d need to be very precise with your recipes to avoid turning yourself into a monster.

And if you hadn’t turned yourself into a monster, then the changes would be very unstable.  Trivially easy to remove, so long as you knew enough of what, precisely, had been done to them.

And I happened to have my sleeping master in one room, and a fake hot tub coated with alchemical residue that Master had never bothered to remove.

I might have been half asleep, but I was still more than skilled enough to work with what I had.