“The hand cannon is considered by many to be the first projectile weapon ever created by humans. It was invented in the late thirteenth century, and was a very simple, if effective, weapon,” Daphne was saying, but all Lilian heard was, “Blah, blah, musket, blah.” Who the heck cared when humans first invented weapons? That didn’t apply to her.
If Daphne wants to really teach me about humans, she should talk about when manga was first invented. At least that would be interesting.
Lilian gazed around the room. It was a very plain room, boring and dull, with drab colors and no decorations to speak of. Hmph. This room was exactly the kind of room she would have expected from someone like Daphne. What a boring old hag.
“Are you listening to me?” Daphne snapped. Lilian gave her least favorite aunt a bored glare.
“No,” she said bluntly. “I’m not listening to you. I don’t care about when humans invented guns. How is that going to help me? What does that even have to do with helping your oh-so-glorious Pnév̱ma Clan?”
“You are mated to a human,” Daphne tried to explain patiently. Tried. And failed. Lilian saw the clear signs of irritation, the dark red veins throbbing on her aunt’s forehead. “For some reason, our matriarch has decided to allow this foible of yours, and let you continue being with that boy.”
Lilian nearly hissed at the way Daphne said “boy,” as if she were swallowing poison. “That boy has a name. It’s Kevin. You should use it.”
“I do not care about his name. He is a human, and humans are beneath us. Just what you see in a human child, I will never understand.”
“I wouldn’t expect an old hag like you to understand anyway.”
“What was that?” Daphne shrieked.
Lilian leapt to her feet. “You heard me. Or has your hearing gone as well, you ugly old prune?”
“An ugly old prune, am I?! That does it!”
Lilian was unprepared for when Daphne grabbed her cheeks and began pulling on them, hard. Her cheeks stretched obscenely as if they were made of rubber.
“Ow, ow, ow! Wet go of ma face, you ol’ hag!”
“Not until you apologize for your rude behavior and remarks!”
“Wike hell I’m apowogizing!”
“Then I’m not going to stop!”
Lilian struggled to get out of Daphne’s grip, but she found the effort futile. She soon realized that her oldest aunt was using reinforcement on her. Unfortunately, that meant Daphne’s strength far exceeded her own. Even if she used reinforcement herself, it wouldn’t matter. When it came to reinforcement, it was all a matter of power, not application, and seven tails worth of power trumped two.
Desperate times called for desperate measures!
Lilian reached into her Extra Dimensional Storage Space and quickly pulled out the object she wanted. She then shoved the object in her aunt’s face, causing it to explode, which elicited a shriek of surprise and pain from Daphne, who let go and staggered back.
“W-what the heck is this?! Why does it sting so much?! And what is that horrid stench?!”
“Ha!” Lilian stood up and pointed at her aunt, who was busy trying to clean out her eyes. “How do you like my pepper bomb? Pretty neat, huh? I made it using a combination of pepper and lysol. Of course, I wanted to give it some extra oomph, so I also added some sulphur to the mix.”
“Y-you little brat!” Daphne’s banshee-like wail cut through the room. “I’m going to murder you!”
“That’s only if you can catch me!” Grinning, Lilian rushed to the window and jumped onto the sill. She turned around to cast a glare at Daphne, who was still futilely trying to find her. Even though she knew the old hag couldn’t see her, she still pointed at the woman. “Remember this day as the day that you almost caught Captain Lilian Pnév̱ma!”
Cackling like a madwoman, Lilian leapt out of the building.
Daphne’s angry ranting followed her.
“Now to find my beloved.” Lilian grinned as she bolted away.
***
Violet was training. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do in this place. The Pnév̱ma Clan ancestral home was pretty boring, all things considered. Nothing ever changed. She honestly understood why Lilian hated living there.
The morning air was warm, a result of it being summer and the generally warm Mediterranean climate. Her toga had become sweaty and kind of gross, but she didn’t care. She continued her training, punching and kicking away at the training dummy that she had created from a log and some really thick rope.
She knew that her style of combat differed from the rest of her family—which was sort of an oxymoron when she thought about it, as no one in her family actually enjoyed fighting.
Unlike most kitsune who believed finesse and elegance to be the fundamental and most important facets of combat, she believed in power. She put her whole weight into every punch she threw. Each strike rang with a clear, resounding smack! as she beat on the training dummy. It rattled and shook under her fists. Such a satisfying feeling.
“Whoo! You go girl! Kick that log’s ass!”
Violet sighed at the familiar voice. She turned around.
“Hello to you, too, Aster—tch!” She looked away. “Do you two really have to walk around like that? It’s unsightly.”
Aster and Azalea looked at each other’s nude bodies, grinned, and then turned back to Violet.
“Nope.”
“Nothing unsightly here.”
“Not the least bit unsightly.”
“We’re about as unsightly as you are tall.”
Violet gritted her teeth at the comment on her height. She knew that she was short, dammit, but they didn’t have to rub it in!
“I don’t have time to deal with you two.” Violet turned back to her training log. “And you two might not think there’s anything unsightly, but we’ve got a guest staying with us, and it’s a man, so you may want to put some clothes on.”
“A man?” The twins blinked as one, for they were one. “A man is staying with us?”
“That’s what I said.”
The sisters turned to each other.
“What do you think, my love? Should we put some clothes on in order to appear presentable to a man?”
“Hmm… I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like this guest is the only man around. Granted, the rest are Mom’s brats so they are family, sorta, but I don’t really care about a man.”
“On the other hand, do we want him to see us like this?”
“Good point.”
Violet listened to her sisters’s constant chattering. The more they spoke, the more annoyed she became. Her annoyance soon reached its peak, and she whirled back around to toss them her most vicious snarl.
“Can you two take that somewhere else?! I’m trying to train here!”
“You call hitting that log training?” one of them asked. Violet couldn’t tell which, as they both looked the same.
“Now, now, my beloved sister,” the other chided. “You know that she’s a failure as a kitsune. This is probably the only type of training she can do.”
“I don’t want to hear that from a pair of useless lesbos like you!”
Before the lesbian twins could retort, a loud explosion caused the earth to rumble. Violet grimaced as she turned to a dwelling a few hundred meters away. Smoke puffed out from the windows, black and acrid. Violet could see several anguished faces within the smoke, the remnants of souls as they dispersed into the wind.
“Looks like the idiot scientist and her daughter are at it again,” one of the twins said.
“I wonder what she was trying to do this time?” the other pondered.
Violet shook her head, deciding that, whatever her older sister was up to, it was clearly nothing good. It also didn’t involve her, which was all the more reason to ignore the constant smoke pouring from the house. This happened on a regular basis anyway.
She turned to get back to training, but paused when she saw a figure running across the garden toward
her older sister’s dwelling.
“Hey, sis, who is that?” asked one of the twins.
“That’s the guest,” Violet told them, sighing. The brat was heading right into the mouth of danger without even realizing it. Could she just leave him to his fate like that?
Yes. Yes, I can.
“So that’s the guest, huh?”
“Which clan is he from?”
“Why is he hiding his tails?”
“What is he even doing here?”
“I can’t answer any of your questions when you bombard me like that.” Violet glared at them. “One question at the time.” The twins became silent. “First, he’s not from a clan. Second, he’s a human, so he doesn’t have tails. Third, he’s here because he’s Lilian’s mate.”
The twins blinked. “Not from a clan?”
“There’s a human in the Pnév̱ma estate?!”
“Wait a second—when did Lilian get a mate?!”
“I have neither the time nor the inclination to answer your questions.” Violet turned back to her log. “If you want to know the answer, why don’t you go talk to him yourself? Now leave me alone. I have to get back to my training.”
***
Kevin coughed up several lungs worth of smoke as he burst into the modest abode. He stuck his mouth and nose into his shirt, but that didn’t seem to help much. His eyes also stung something fierce as the acrid stuff aggravated them.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Oh, well. Too late to turn back now.
He stumbled through the house. He was in a hall—or he thought he was in a hall. He couldn’t tell because of the smoke.
Using the wall to keep himself from walking into anything, Kevin slowly, carefully, moved through the house. Soft carpet crunched under his feet. It felt like there were several dozen twigs or something creating a layer over the carpet. Paint chips, maybe? He ignored that in favor of continuing to walk forward—at least, until he nearly fell down a flight of stairs.
Because he still couldn’t see anything, Kevin needed to walk down the stairs slowly. It was actually worse going down. The smoke seemed much thicker, and he realized that it was coming from down below. He had to close his eyes lest the smoke burn them.
He eventually made it to the bottom after a few missteps. The air was much clearer down here than it was at the top of the stairs. He wondered about the oddity of that, but decided not to contemplate such a thing in favor of continuing.
“Well, shoot. It looks like that didn’t work either,” a voice said. “I wonder if the reason we failed to produce a Spirit Guardian is due to a miscalculation between the amount of mountain and spirit youki we used.”
“That could be it,” another voice, similar to the first but much younger, said. “But I could have sworn my calculations were on the dot this time. I used the exact same method that you showed me, Mother.”
“You must have extracted the mountain youki from Violet incorrectly, then. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why you weren’t able to create a Spirit Guardian.” The voice sighed. “Oh, well. We can just extract more youki later, though we need to be careful. I don’t want Mother finding out about what we’re doing.”
“Neither do I.” Kevin sensed the shudder in the younger voice.
He finally rounded the corner and found himself standing at the edge of a circular room. It looked like a giant cylinder. The stone floor was covered in what he mistook for soot at first, along with several large blocks of what appeared to be stone. In the center of the room were two females.
The taller of the two looked like the other one’s older sister. They both had silvery hair, though the shorter girl’s hair was cut to her shoulders, while the older woman had long hair tied into a messy ponytail. They also both wore glasses, which he found odd because he didn’t think any kitsune needed glasses. He also couldn’t see their eyes because of the light reflecting ominously off of those same glasses. He also noticed that both of these women were quite beautiful—even if they were covered in that strange soot that wasn’t soot.
Just then, the taller one’s foxy ears twitched. Her six tails became livelier. Then, as if sensing his presence, she turned her head in his direction.
“Oh, crap!”
Kevin knew he was screwed only seconds after he said that.
***
Lilian searched for her mate. She hadn’t had much luck so far, though she’d managed to find Kotohime. According to her maid-slash-bodyguard, Kevin had rushed off somewhere, though the kimono-clad femme didn’t know where. The woman had apparently lost him when he scrambled through a copse of trees.
“He is surprisingly agile,” she had said in her defense.
“Ha… I finally manage to escape from that old hag so I can spend some time with my mate, but he isn’t even around when I want to see him,” Lilian complained to no one in particular. She just felt like announcing her complaints out loud. “Shut up.”
…
“He couldn’t have gotten too far,” Kotohime placated her. “He took off in this general direction, and I am sure we would have seen him by now if he changed directions. And if we don’t find him, you could always wait in the house. I am sure that Iris-sama would appreciate it if you visited her.”
Lilian wondered if Kotohime was trying to make her feel bad. After they’d arrived here, she’d gone out of her way to avoid visiting Iris. She didn’t like seeing her sister in such a sorry state. It tore at her heart. If she visited Iris now, she was afraid that her mood would drop, and she’d become depressed again.
I need to stay strong. I don’t want to visit Iris and start crying. The next time I see her should be a happy occasion. I want to see her smiling.
“But I wanna spend some time with my mate.” Lilian pouted at her maid.
“You spend plenty of time with Kevin-sama.” Kotohime’s voice reminded Lilian of a desert. “In fact, I would say that you spend more than enough time with him.”
“You can never spend too much time with your mate, Kotohime.”
“If you say so, Lilian-sama.”
“I do say so.”
Just then, Lilian sensed something, a disturbance in the force.
“My 'Kevin is about to have his chastity stolen' senses are tingling,” Lilian muttered.
Kotohime gave her a sidelong glance. “That is a very specific sense, Lilian-sama.”
“I developed in case I needed to protect my mate's chastity from ravenous vixens.”
“I’m not sure he has any chastity left after what you and Iris-sama have done to him,” Kotohime mused to herself.
“Come on!” Lilian ignored her maid and rushed through the copse of trees in the direction that her “Someone is about to rape Kevin” detector told her to go.
***
Kevin really wasn’t sure how he’d gotten himself into this situation—oh, wait. That was a blatant lie. He knew exactly how he’d gotten into this situation. Damn him and his stupid superhero complex!
He was strapped to a bed, not an examination table like he’d expected to see in a normal lab, but an honest-to-gods bed. And it wasn’t just any bed. Oh, no. It was one of those love beds. The glimmering soft fabric of the comforter was a passionate crimson, and his head rested against several heart-shaped pillows. The bed itself was also shaped like a heart. He had no clue how the kitsune got an honest-to-gods love bed in here—
—Oh. Wait. That was also a blatant lie.
Damn these foxes and their Extra Dimensional Storage Spaces! Who pulls a freaking bed out of their cleavage?!
The cold air hit his bare skin. He was completely naked. There was nothing covering his modesty. He wasn’t sure if the air was causing his goosebumps, or if it was because of the leering looks of the fox-girl and fox-woman.
“This is perfect,” the fox-woman purred, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her middle and index finger. The light gleamed off her lenses, blocking her eyes from view and making Kevin shudder. “I have always wanted
to study a human.”
“Woah, woah, woah! Hold on!” Kevin tried to reason with them. “I don’t know what you’re planning on doing to me, but whatever it is, I want no part in it!”
A reasonable argument indeed.
“Ho… do not worry, young man. I guarantee this won’t hurt a bit. You’ll probably even enjoy it,” the woman reassured him.
Kevin was not reassured at all. Not one bit.
“Ivy?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“H-hey, why are you getting on the bed?! And wait, did you just call this woman ‘Mother’?! She’s your mother?!”
“Indeed, I am Ivy’s mother.” The glasses flashed again. Kevin wondered how such an innocuous action could look so sinister. “Does that surprise you?”
“Kinda.” Kevin squirmed when the younger female straddled his stomach. “I thought you were her older sister.”
“Hn. What a flatterer, you are. Too bad for you I’m not interested in having sexual intercourse at the moment. Otherwise, I would be the one on top of you now.”
Kevin tried not to blush. He failed epically. His entire body felt like a furnace.
“I-intercourse?!” he squeaked.
“Indeed, intercourse is when—”
“I know what intercourse is!” Kevin shouted mere seconds before Ivy disrobed, revealing her milky skin and admirable breasts. If he had to compare them to a fruit, he would’ve said they were about the size of large grapefruits. “Don’t take your clothes off!”
Ivy paused to tilt her head. She looked genuinely confused.
“But I have to take my clothes off. We can’t engage in sexual intercourse if I don’t,” she said as if she were speaking to a child.
“Did you ever think that maybe I don’t want to have sex with you?” Kevin spat, the skin on his face threatening to melt from the heat he was releasing. “Now put your clothes back on!”
“Mother.” Ivy turned to look at her mom. “He does not seem to wish to have intercourse with me. What should I do?”
“How about getting off me for starters,” Kevin quipped.
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