When Robert retreated to his room, the hall door ceased to be just a physical barrier and transformed into a threshold symbolizing the beginning of a new era. He now bore on his shoulders not only the burden of leadership but also that of a creator and a visionary. The Council's cold, calculating move, instead of breaking him, had awakened the sleeping engineer, that problem solver within him, and now a single question echoed in his mind: How would he convince the Council that he would not bow to them, but on the contrary, was an asset valuable beyond their imagination?
The answer was a workshop that was his own sanctuary; and the key to that sanctuary was a never-before-seen, revolutionary invention.
Having no other classes today was a rare gift the Academy offered him; he had found an uninterrupted period of time to think, design, and create. When he sat at his desk and turned on his Tu device, this time he brought up not archives or team information, but a blank design interface. Closing his eyes, he sent his mind beyond these metallic walls and alien sky, to his home, Oakhaven.
A memory from his old world came alive in his mind: of bulky yet magical VR headsets that covered his eyes, where he shaped virtual worlds at his fingertips. He used to use this technology not just to play games or watch movies, but to test complex physics equations in a three-dimensional, interactive space, simulating in seconds within a virtual environment an experiment that would take weeks in the real world.
At that exact moment, the idea flashed in his mind like lightning.
In the Academy, which possessed incredible powers and mind-boggling technologies, the fact that everything was done in real arenas with real energies was both dangerous and inefficient. But what if he offered them a technology where they could transform reality itself into a simulation? What if he transformed a Dreambender's mind into a massive, shared virtual training ground—a "Mind Matrix"—where all teams could simultaneously test infinite scenarios without physically harming each other? It would not only be an invention but a revolution that would fundamentally change the Academy's doctrine of war and training.
As the different colored threads in his mind suddenly came together to form a bright, flawless pattern, he heard a whisper, a mix of honey and poison, right by his ear.
"What are you thinking about so deeply, handsome? Or is it how you imagine me?"
Startled, turning to his right, Robert saw Amara standing by his chair, leaning over him, though he hadn't noticed when she arrived. She wore a dress made of thin, silky fabric that seemed almost nonexistent, glowing like the surface of a lake under moonlight in midnight blue. The dress hugged her body like water, revealing every curve of her crystal skin and that faint red glow beneath her skin, her presence spreading that suffocating, electrically charged perfume into the room again.
Though momentarily stunned, Robert quickly composed himself. He was no longer the scared boy in the corridor. "A project," he said in a calm voice. "A project that will impress the Council and earn us our own workshop."
"Hmm, sounds boring," Amara murmured, curling up like a cat in the empty space beside his chair. Her nine tails began to wander slowly in the space around Robert's legs, caressing the air. "I have more... fun ideas."
As Robert began to explain his project and the Mind Matrix idea in outline, he watched those hypnotically moving tails out of the corner of his eye. Each seemed like a snake with its own intelligence, designed to distract him, to test his will, when suddenly another idea, as revolutionary and crazy as the project itself, came to his mind.
It was an idea so sudden and shocking that it made him jump in his seat. As his chair tipped backward, even Amara was surprised by this sudden movement.
With eyes burning with the fire of a wild genius, Robert shouted, "This is it! This is it! Not just a simulation! A weapon! God... I can even turn you into a weapon!" His laughter echoing in the silence of the hall was not the raving of a madman, but the victory cry of an inventor who realized he had solved the impossible.
Although Amara was momentarily stunned by his wild energy, she quickly turned the situation to her advantage, slowly standing up with that familiar, provocative smile on her face. Gliding towards him, she whispered, "I am already your weapon, handsome. Come here and let me show you how to use it."
Just as she reached out to touch Robert, moving like a tiger pouncing on its prey, Robert grabbed Amara's waist and pulled her close. Amara, holding her breath with a mix of surprise and pleasure at this sudden, masculine move, saw in Robert's eyes not lust, but a feverish curiosity, the intense focus of an engineer examining a complex mechanism.
"Do you have high heels?" Robert asked, his voice fast and clear.
Her brain momentarily frozen by this irrelevant question, Amara could only say, "What?"
Robert repeated impatiently: "High heels. Do you have them or not?"
Grinning, thinking this was one of Robert's strange fantasies, Amara said, "Yes... I do. Why did you ask?"
Letting her go, Robert said, "Great. Now go to your room. Put them on. And then come to my room."
Her amber eyes shining with rampant desire at this command, which was even better than she expected, Amara turned around without letting him finish and ran towards her room, almost flying, with an excited laugh.
Watching her go, Robert went to his own room, but in his mind was not the kind of meeting Amara thought, but an experiment.
A few minutes later, when his door knocked, it wasn't an ordinary tap, but rather like a hunter impatiently scratching at the door of its prey's den. When Robert said "Enter," the entity that walked in was even more dangerous and fascinating than the Amara from a moment ago. The simple blue dress she wore was replaced by a blood-red leather bustier that fit her body like a second skin and a matching slit skirt. Her makeup was darker, her lips shinier, but the biggest change was on her feet; thin, four-inch, pitch-black, needle-like heels not only made her look taller but also added a deadly elegance to her stance and walk. As soon as she entered, she closed the door behind her and began approaching Robert like a hungry wolf, with the rhythmic, thudding sounds her heels made on the floor.
"Here we are alone," she whispered. "No rules. No time. You are mine."
Just as she was about to pounce on Robert, her movement was stopped by hands grabbing her waist again. While she murmured, aroused by this contact, Robert's voice extinguished her fiery expectations like ice-cold water.
"Not first," said Robert. "First, I want to understand you. Your story."
As his eyes roamed over Amara's crystal skin, he touched every exposed part of her with his hand, starting from her shoulder, over her arm, to the curve of her waist. "How many people have possessed this body? In this way, how many beings... how many souls have touched it?"
Frozen by the unexpected, almost clinical question, Amara's lustful mood shattered instantly. Quickly composing herself and returning to her old game, she murmured playfully, "Are you jealous of me?" bringing her face close to Robert's and letting the tips of her silky hair brush his cheek, she added: "Do you just... want this body to belong to you?"
Without waiting for an answer, she gently but firmly pushed Robert towards the bed. When Robert lost his balance and sat on the bed, Amara immediately settled right next to him, close enough for their knees and legs to touch.
But Robert didn't fall for the game, asking without taking his eyes off hers: "I wonder, is this a hunger need for you? I mean, is it a bodily necessity, or an emotional quest? Or... is it just pleasure?"
Faced with these strange questions no one had asked before, Amara's provocative mask dropped for a moment. They had only wanted her body until today, not her motivation. As she pursed her lips, a genuine, childlike expression of searching passed over her face. "To be satiated," she whispered. "I want to be completed."
"And what happens when you are satiated?"
Amara's face went blank. "I don't know," she said. "I will have been satiated. Nothing... will happen."
With this simple answer, which was the key to everything, Robert saw the beginning of her story. Under Robert's non-judgmental, curious gaze, Amara began to pour out things she had never told anyone before.
She spoke of those early times when she was ostracized and constantly pushed away for being an "anomaly"; how others both feared and desired her because of her crystal skin and uncontrollable aura, but no one truly "touched" her. The emptiness and hunger created by this constant displacement were more primal and bodily at first; like a vampire, she had tried to fill this void by hunting small animals in the forests around the Academy and absorbing their life energy.
Over time, discovering that she could feed not only on life energy but also on emotions and desires, she created this "Succubus" identity. Though a stronger and more satisfying source, it was just an illusion, a shield created to protect herself so her soul wouldn't truly be touched by anyone. While others possessed the lustful illusion she created, the real Amara watched from behind the shield, lonelier and hungrier than ever. Throughout the process, the only thing claiming her body was this copy she created; she had never found a real bond, real satisfaction, or true peace.
Robert listened to her for hours without saying a word, judging, or trying to console her. As Amara spoke, that crazy project and wild weapon idea in Robert's mind slowly changed shape, transforming from merely creating a weapon into a purpose of giving a shattered soul a tool to complete herself.
Amara's story hung in the dim silence of the hall like a fragile bridge woven between two souls. Robert looked not at the provocative, dangerous succubus before him, but at the pushed-away, lonely soul beneath; recognizing the accumulated pain of years and that deep, bone-aching emptiness of being misunderstood from the echoes in the white room of his own mind. It was a song born of different worlds and tragedies, yet ringing on the same note of pain.
When he put his hand on Amara's shoulders, his touch was filled not with the analytical curiosity of an engineer like a moment ago, but with the compassion of a friend. "Come on, stand up," he said softly.
Coming to herself with the gentle touch, Amara cast a shadow of anger mixed with disappointment over her face as that rare, vulnerable moment created by the story she told ended. She thought Robert, like everyone else, pitied her and pulled back after learning her secrets. As she reluctantly stood up, trying to don her lustful hunter identity like armor again, the sharp, solid sound the thin, needle-like heels made on the floor sliced through the room's silence like a whip.
Clack.
For Robert, whose eyes flashed with lightning the moment he heard the sound, the final, missing piece of the crazy project in his mind had fallen into place.
Just as Amara was turning to leave, Robert moved with the speed of a tiger, grabbed her waist in an instant, and spun her around harshly towards him. Amara, turning back with an "ah" of surprise at the sudden, masculine move, saw no trace of the compassion from a moment ago in Robert's eyes; instead, she saw both a predatory desire and that dangerous fire of genius shining there like she had never seen before.
"My plans for you," whispered Robert, his voice husky and determined. "You will learn later. But first..."
And suddenly, he fastened his lips to Amara's.
This was not a kiss; it was an annexation, an invasion. Robert's plans and logic evaporated with the rhythm of that single heel sound, leaving only primal instinct.
In that one-second moment where the universe stopped, Amara's entire existence exploded like a supernova; the moment she had waited for, desired, but never found for hundreds of years had arrived. This was not the kiss of a victim feeding on her weakness, but of a hunter who saw her power, wanted her, and challenged her.
The first reaction came from her tails. The nine snow-white snakes suddenly came alive, wrapping around Robert like a cage of desire, squeezing him, sealing his body to Amara's. The second reaction came from her lips; responding to Robert's hardness with an even wilder, wetter hunger, they kissed each other ravenously, like two travelers stranded in a desert for years attacking an oasis.
Robert deliberately began walking backward without separating from her lips, dragging Amara with him; his goal was not just to get to the other end of the room, but to hear that sound.
Clack... clack... clack...
As every step of Amara's heels thundered in Robert's ears like a war drum, every sound heated the blood in his veins further, pushing his logic into the background. With this rhythm, he pulled Amara closer with more lust, more hardness, his muscles tensing, his body hardening.
The first victim of this wild dance was Robert's uniform; Amara's nails buried in his back tore the dark, durable fabric as if it were paper. Growling with the sharp pain he felt on his back followed by the warm touch of nails, Robert tore his own top apart in one move, ripping the buttons off, and threw it on the floor.
Amara's blood-red leather bustier was being battered by Robert's hard, possessive moves, his fingers catching on the edges of the leather and bursting a seam. The tearing red leather opened dangerously over Amara's crystal skin, displaying the fullness beneath even more daringly.
Finally, Robert's back met the cold surface of the wall. But he did not stop. Squeezing Amara against the wall, leaving not even an inch of space between their bodies, their kissing was no longer a silent desire; it had turned into a noisy war full of moans, husky whispers, and lustful, meaningless words. His mind was locked onto a single thought: more. He wanted to touch every particle of this woman, to taste every secret. As his hands slid down the curve of her waist to the beginning of those silky tails, the desire to touch those extraterrestrial limbs tensed his thigh like iron, making it ready to explode.
He buried Amara into the wall with such force that the succubus's waist arched back like a bow; her moan was a sharp mixture of pain and pleasure.
When Robert lifted her, Amara instinctively wrapped her legs and tails around Robert's waist, clamping on as if she would never let him go. Turning backward with this weight and ball of desire, Robert let himself fall onto the bed.
Their fall onto the bed was less a soft landing and more a hard roll of two intertwined predators. Robert, clutching Amara's hair and pulling her head back, began to trail his lips from her chin, down her neck, past that sensitive, pulse-like spot below her throat, leaving a long, wet trail down to between her breasts. Every lick tore a trembling moan from Amara.
The slit red skirt, riding up to her waist during the roll, completely revealed Amara's long, flawless legs and that forbidden zone of her inner thigh. Although Robert's eyes locked onto that spot, he had a more dangerous curiosity first.
Lifting his head and meeting Amara's eyes, he whispered breathlessly, "Your tails... what happens if I suck them?"
A demonic mixture of pleasure and danger appeared on Amara's face, her amber eyes darkening with this question. "Just you try," she groaned, her voice husky and provocative. "The world stops. And no one... can ever save you from me again."
"Is that so?" Robert's sentence was cut short in his mouth.
As if a hunter were pouncing on its prey's throat at its most vulnerable moment, he bowed his head and took the tip of the nearest tail between his teeth.
Amara's body convulsed violently as if lightning had struck inside her, her eyes rolled back, and a raw, pure, elemental scream that was neither pleasure nor pain tore from her mouth. This was the explosion of a hunger of thousands of years, of a loneliness, with a single touch. Though she tried to trap Robert under her, the wave of pleasure was so strong that her muscles didn't listen to her; she just thrashed and trembled on the bed.
Getting even wilder with her reaction, Robert didn't just suck; he gently sank his teeth in, licked, tasted that silky fur and the living, pulse-like muscle beneath.
Then, changing targets, he focused on that leg visible through the slit. Burying his head in Amara's inner thigh, proceeding slowly and deeply as if sucking the world's sweetest honey, he simultaneously bit the edge of her skirt with his teeth, pulling that last piece of fabric away and burying himself in her flesh.
"Deeper..." groaned Amara, drifting in and out of consciousness. "Feed me... Bender..."
And Robert fed her. He busied himself with that spot, the source of insatiability, for a long time, as if it were his only purpose in the universe.
During the wild movements and the thrusts on the bed, one of Amara's thin, needle-like heels caught on the headboard and snapped with a sharp crack. Coming to herself for a moment through the fog of pleasure and seeing the broken heel, Amara let out a lustful laugh. "See, handsome? You wanted me so hard... you broke my toy. Now you have to pay your debt."
Hours later, the room was filled with the sharp scent of sweat, expensive perfume, and passion. Both had marks of love and war on their bodies; scratches, bruises, bites. Even after Robert had kissed Amara repeatedly on both her lips and that sensitive spot, bringing her to the peaks of pleasure and back down again and again, Amara stretched on the bed with her sweat-glistening skin and purred like a coy cat: "I'm not full..."
Smiling at this never-ending game, Robert chose the only way to silence her words and fastened onto her lips; this time not wild, but deep and possessive, silencing her with a kiss that explained everything, using his tongue...
At the end of this marathon that lasted nearly four hours in total, when Robert joined his own thigh with Amara's repeatedly and mixed their fluids of pleasure, Amara felt that emptiness fill for the first time in her life. What she experienced was a true completion rather than a temporary satisfaction.
As they lay on the bed intertwined, breathless, and covered in sweat, Robert thought that fortunately, Amara's species had a different biology, so this passion wouldn't have unexpected consequences. This was the union of not just two bodies, but two souls in the most primal, honest way, and its echoes would shake the walls of the Academy forever.
The air in the room was filled with the sharp, musky scent of sweat, expensive perfume, and satisfied passion following the union of two bodies and two souls. Torn pieces of clothing scattered around the bed like banners left on a battlefield, Robert's shredded uniform and the remains of Amara's blood-red leather, were the silent witnesses of the storm that had just passed.
The dark, rotten-cherry lipstick Amara wore was now like war paint; a part of it on Robert's lips, a part on his chin, and a part next to the scratch marks on his chest stood like a stain won with victory. While both tried to regulate their breathing, piled on top of each other with sweat-glistening skins stuck together, Robert looked at the succubus lying beneath him, who had lost all her savagery and calmed down for that moment. Her amber eyes were closed, her long black lashes stood like shadows on her crystal skin, and there was a pure, unfiltered peace on her face he had never seen before.
"Are you full?" whispered Robert, his voice hoarse and tired after hours of struggle.
Opening her eyes slowly, the amber depths of Amara no longer held that mocking, predatory glint; in its place was the serenity of a sea after a storm. She nodded yes, leaning her head further against Robert's chest. Her voice was no different from a murmur: "Yes..."
Robert ran his hand over one of the tails wrapped around his waist, stroking the silky fur, and felt the muscles underneath twitch slightly. Even this touch caused a trembling breath to escape Amara.
Closing her eyes again, a mischievous smile appeared on Amara's face. "But," she murmured, "you'd better wait for my charges to fill before I get hungry again, handsome. You... completely drained my batteries."
Robert laughed at this answer. "Is this a threat, or a promise?"
"Can't it be both at the same time?"
They lay silently for a while, listening only to each other's heartbeats and slowing breaths; this was a strange, unexpected moment of intimacy following lust.
"It was different," Amara whispered after a while. "This... wasn't just like feeding."
"What was it then?"
Raising her head to look at him, Amara said, "It was like sharing. As if... you didn't just fill my emptiness. You left a piece of yourself there too. It... feels less empty now."
This confession, more intimate than the four hours of wild passion, told Robert that he had fed not just her body, but a piece of her soul. An unexpected, emotional layer had been added to the crazy project in his mind.
Finally, the real world intervened. As Robert tried to sit up slowly, he said, "We need to get up." Murmuring in protest, Amara wrapped her arms and tails tighter around him. Smiling at her state, instead of getting out of bed, Robert buried his face between Amara's breasts, into that soft, warm valley, and inhaled the scent of her skin one last time. Responding with a pleasurable sigh to this move, Amara whispered, "Come to my bosom, bender," squeezing him closer. "We could stay here forever."
Although they stayed in that warm, safe haven for a few more minutes, Robert pulled himself back with determination. When he stood up, Amara sat on the edge of the bed, and at that moment, they faced the practical problems of the situation. Looking at the tattered, almost non-existent leather and silk pieces on her, Amara's body was mostly naked.
"I guess... I can't go to my room like this," she said, a slight shyness in her voice for the first time.
Thinking for a moment, Robert said, "You can use an illusion, right? You can make it look like you have clothes on."
Her face lighting up, Amara said, "Of course! Sometimes I forget the simplest solutions," and stood up. Before Robert's eyes, a shimmering layer of air formed around her body like a heat wave, and a moment later, it took the shape of an elegant, dark-colored, simple dress, though not as much as Syla's.
When she came to the door, she turned around. "Tonight..." she began, but couldn't finish her sentence.
"What happened will stay in this room," said Robert, understanding what she meant.
Responding with a genuine, warm smile, Amara opened the door and stepped into the corridor. After pausing there for a moment, her body became transparent as if she were a ghost, and with a blink of an eye, she vanished, leaving only the faint scent of her perfume behind. Robert knew she reached her room in almost two seconds.
After Amara left, Robert stood for a while in the middle of the room, in the silence of the room turned battlefield. His mind was trying to process what had happened in the last few hours. What happened was not just a rule violation or an explosion of instinct, but also an experiment, a moment of understanding. He had seen firsthand that Amara's power, her insatiability, actually stemmed from a weakness, an emptiness. His project, the Mind Matrix, was no longer just a training simulator, and the plan to modify his teammates was not just about making them stronger; it was about 'completing' them.
He picked up the rags left of his uniform from the floor. Entering the bathroom to wash, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. All over his body were traces of Amara's passion; scratch marks, bruises, and most importantly, that rotten-cherry lipstick stain still standing on the edge of his lip and neck. After examining these marks for a moment as if they were medals from a war, he turned on the water and washed them all, the evidence of the past, off his skin.
When he put on a clean, new uniform, his body still ached, but his mind was revitalized. That night, when he collapsed into bed from exhaustion, he didn't dream; he just drifted into a deep, dark, restful nothingness.