Joji woke late, nearer to noon. Daisy lay beside him, still sound asleep.
He felt a little bad for not being able to have her right now because she had been too tight. Still, Joji did not want her sexual experience to become a trauma that would be too hard to fix later on.
Shaking the thought away, he began searching her room for anything that might help him complete the mission from Sir Risqué.
He found Daisy's small workstation first. Shelves lined the walls, heavy with magic grimoires, alchemical memoirs, and studies on geometry and mathematics.
He skimmed through them, not reading for pleasure, only hunting for something useful. A photograph. A booklet. A letter. A diary. He found nothing.
After an hour of searching with no result, Joji moved on. He let out a slow sigh. Daisy's room was enormous, near the size of a penthouse he had once owned.
He opened one door and found hundreds of gowns and sleeping clothes packed tightly within. He searched through the fabrics with care, checking hems and seams for anything hidden, but still came up empty.
He looked behind the curtains, checked the window frames, and even tapped the tiles one by one.
Then his eyes caught the obvious, and he slapped his forehead.
"How did I not think of that earlier?" he muttered.
He lifted the mattress and ran his hand along the frame. There, tucked neatly into the bed's make, sat a small cache.
"Bingo," Joji said with a grin.
The problem came a moment later. He did not have the key. Daisy was nude, so she plainly did not have it on her person.
That was when Daisy stirred.
Joji froze as he watched her. Her eyes stayed closed, and her lips moved in a sleepy murmur.
"Joji... put it in. Please..." Daisy mumbled, her words slurring together in sleep.
"Don't be mumbling like that. You almost scared the shit outta me," Joji murmured.
Her pajamas still hung from the headboard. A faint glint caught his eye, easy enough to miss if he had not been looking carefully. There it was. A small golden key.
Joji took it gently and slid it into the cache. It opened with a soft click.
Inside were four books.
The one on top was a diary, bound shut with metal. He could have forced it open, but he did not. The other three told their own story by title alone.
Heiress at Day, A Rugged Knight's Plaything at Night.
Defiling the Dignity of the Goddess with His Monster.
The Overbearing Prince Binds the Slum Princess.
"Damn."
Then he noticed the author's name.
Lena Reid.
It felt familiar. Too familiar. For a moment, he frowned, then shook his head and took it for coincidence.
The only Lena he knew well was Lena Snow, a girl their age who had been helping him and Daisy since childhood.
Clearly, anyone could write erotic fiction, he thought as he pushed the useless suspicion aside.
Joji opened Heiress at Day, A Rugged Knight's Plaything at Night.
He read a few lines while telling himself it was strictly for investigation.
'The princess wailed for the knight to stop. Her legs were forced apart before they were hoisted into the air. There was no play as he plunged in dry.'
'The knight rammed her more than a church bell tolls in a lifetime. He never relented from the early dusk to the first rays of dawn. When the sky began to light up, the knight let out his twenty-fourth groan.'
'A voice whispered like a devil in the heiress's ear and told her not to let a single drop escape. The heiress reached for a wine cork and shook her head in a fit of agony.'
'Tears fell from her eyes like pearls. Even so, the wide grin on her face and the way her eyes softened when she looked at the rugged knight made her the worst liar in the kingdom.'
The writing was graphic enough that he shut the book again and closed his eyes for a moment. He had acted through scenes like that before. Still, it felt different reading them here, beneath this roof, on this very bed.
"Well, if that makes her happy, who am I to judge," he murmured.
He put everything back as neatly as he had found it. By then, Daisy was beginning to stir, so Joji slipped beneath the blanket in his underclothes and wrapped his arms around her from behind. The sudden warmth woke her properly, and she hugged him back at once.
"Good morning," he said.
"Good morning," Daisy answered, her voice still hoarse.
Her hand found his arm and held to it. With wakefulness came embarrassment, and after that, guilt. Daisy was a woman grown, yet she felt she had given him nothing the night before.
She had insisted she could manage it, but she had been too tense, too unready. In her mind, failing to please her man was failure all the same.
Joji knew where her thoughts had gone. He did not soften it with pretty lies, but neither did he let it drag the morning down. He still had a task to finish, and he had no faith in the world to wait for him.
"Daisy, if you feel guilty about last night, don't. You promised you would be honest with me, right?" Joji asked, his voice low and gentle.
She nodded, her fingers tightening around his.
"I saw the same books you were looking at. I won't lie to you. Curiosity got the better of me," he said.
Color rushed into her face, all the way to the tips of her ears.
"If you want to ease that guilt, then answer me this." His tone stayed calm, soft, but practical too. "Do you want me to do those things to you?"
She nodded at once, too eager, her heart beating faster as her thoughts slipped back to the night before, to the way she had begged and the way Joji had never once relented.
In her imagination, he had done it with a cold sort of hunger, as though fixing her into place, giving her the roughness she craved while keeping her wholly under his hand.
Heat rolled through her. Joji could tell she more of last night, but he kept to the order of things. "Which parts you into?" he asked. "Daisy, I need you to keep it real with me. What do you actually want? What's your heart say?"
Daisy did not feel shy around Joji. More than that, she wanted to make it up to him.
In her heart, it felt like a small privilege of being the woman who might one day stand beside him properly, and since he had asked her so directly, she did not want to waste the chance.
She dressed, took the key, and pulled one of the books from the cache.
It was Heiress at Day, A Rugged Knight's Plaything at Night.
She sat close to him and pointed out the specific passages she wanted to enact. She focused on the roughness and how she wanted him to take his pleasure first while she served as his toy.
She described scenes of rough breeding and being forced behind a tree while guards stood nearby. Most of all, she wanted a female friend brought into the same bed to experience that same level of pleasure.
Even Joji, a man who had spent more than half a century on Earth as an adult actor, felt himself blush at how shamelessly kinky it all was.
Daisy pointed to the scenes she truly loathed. She insisted she would rather die than endure them, a statement that made Joji grow serious.
She despised love triangles and the very idea of other men touching her made her stomach turn. She told him plainly that she only read such stories to confirm she would never submit to them.
She wouldn't even do it if Joji forced her or threatened to cast her out of the estate.
Joji nodded solemnly while hiding a wide grin. He was glad she felt that way.
He suggested that instead of her dying, they should just beat up any man who tried such a thing. Daisy agreed.
Their talk stretched into the late afternoon, and the system finally chimed after they finished discussing The Overbearing Prince Binds the Slum Princess, where the slum princess found her happily ever after with twelve children, while the prince himself rose to become the Tyrant Emperor.
Joji pressed lightly at her lower belly, teasing, and Daisy let out a soft moan before she could stop herself.
"You truly mean to bear me twelve children?" Joji asked.
"That is only from the story. I would even give you twenty, if I could," Daisy said with a shaky grin, full of anticipation.
Joji could only shake his head at his masochistic fiancée. Even so, one thing pleased him greatly.
Daisy's bottom line was clear. She wanted nothing that involved another man in any way that felt truly intimate. To any sane man, that was comfort enough.
But what made it feel almost dreamlike was the way she calmly encouraged him to take another wife.
Her reasoning was so neat and practical that Joji found himself with no answer at all.
Two wives, both carrying his children, and neither left lonely because they could keep each other company.
On Earth, such a notion would have drawn hard looks, but here it sounded genius.
The book felt like a blessing to Joji, though the style of it still struck him as oddly familiar.
For a moment, he thought of Lena, a co-star, then pushed the thought aside.
Even if there was something there, it was better to approach it with care, especially since the original Joji had once been close with her.
After a bit more frolicking, like a newly wedded couple reluctant to leave the bed, they wiped themselves clean with hot water Daisy had heated by magic in a bucket kept in her room.
Then, together, they entered the great dining hall. The moment Joji sat, he felt a weight pressing in from nearby.
Duchess Rosalind.
Joji did not flinch. His conscience was clear. Rather than shrink from whatever fate came for him, he chose to meet what had been placed in his hands.
"Good evening, Duchess," Joji said with easy calm.
Rosalind gave him no answer. Her gaze shifted instead to Daisy, studying her daughter as though she were seeing her anew.
The rounded shoulders were gone. The slight bend in her upper back had straightened. Even Daisy's usual sleepy haze had vanished.
Her eyes looked sharp now, awake in a way they rarely had before. Beneath the lamplight, her skin seemed almost radiant, her color soft as blooming peonies.
To the Duchess Rosalind, Daisy looked like a different woman at the table.
Joji finished first. He leaned over and kissed Duchess Rosalind on the cheek, then did the same to Daisy.
Afterward, he returned to Daisy's room and opened the System interface.
Two missions were waiting there, both completed.
{First Mission of Sir Risqué}
{A true gentleman draws out a lady's hidden truth with gentle patience, not by force.}
{Your betrothed, Daisy Everhart, has been unwell. Something within her has swollen and grown hot, and shame has bound her tongue.}
{Learn what she truly wants, what she truly needs. Make her feel safe enough to speak plainly, not wrapped in polite lies, nor concealed behind easy shrugs.}
{Marks of thy undertaking: SSS}
{Will you claim your reward this very moment?}
Joji was satisfied. He turned it over in his mind and knew Daisy's honesty had helped a great deal in earning the marks the system had given him. He did not claim the reward at once. Instead, he looked toward the other interface, the one marked Honorable.
{First Mission of Sir Honorable}
{The estate's knights are worn to the quick by your quarrel with Duchess Rosalind Everhart.}
{Go to the yard. Spar with a hundred of them, and by your spirit and example, lift their hearts, knit their fellowship anew, and draw them back into camaraderie with you.}
{Marks of thy undertaking: A+} (Maximum Assisted Rating)
{Will you claim your reward this very moment?}
Joji had played enough games to know when a system was being generous. For now, he wanted to see what his time had truly earned him. He chose to claim Sir Risqué's reward first, but before he could, a prompt appeared at last and told him what he was about to receive.
{Take heed: This is an alteration of the flesh, and it shall grant you command over myriad energies.}
{Are you certain to continue?}
{Proceed?} {Withdraw?}
Joji searched the interface for some hint of what the reward might be.
There was nothing.
No description, no warning, not even a scrap of fine print for him to pick apart. His caution sharpened at once. He had not trusted Sir Engine much before. Now he trusted it even less.
"Sir Engine, how is this supposed to work? Could you at least give me a hint?" he asked, quiet frustration seeping into his voice.
{Compose yourself. This change shall not hinder your daily life, nor shall it alter your appearance. You will merely require more food for your sustenance. That is all.}
He thought it through. If it only meant eating a few more meals, that was no trouble. He had lived in gyms, counted portions, cut, bulked, and repeated the same dull discipline until it became second nature. Whatever the Engine demanded, he told himself he could bear it.
So Joji made his choice and accepted.
Smoke spilled out of nowhere, blacker than any dark he had ever seen, swallowing the room like ink loosed into water.
"Yo. Yo. I ain't signing up for all that," he said, but even his own voice sounded far away.
Lightning flickered within the churning smoke. He could not see his hands. Panic climbed into his throat.
Then the electricity hit.
It slammed through his body and bowed him like a hooked fish, every muscle locking as though some unseen hand had wound him tight.
"S-S-Shi-Shit," he rasped as the current tore through him.
The smell came next, sharp and vile, like burnt cloth and singed hair. He tried to slap at himself on instinct, but he could not even find his own skin through the dark. Heat rolled over him without mercy.
Then the world snapped shut. Joji lost consciousness.