His wives were watching.

Akane's nine tails had reached their full, magnificent spread—the crimson of all nine fully extended, tips curled upward with the expression of someone who has witnessed something that deserves acknowledgment. Her golden eyes followed the scene with the slow, warm amusement of a woman who has watched her husband exercise his particular brand of persuasion enough times to recognize the stages.

Yu Xiang was looking at the hand working between the giant slave's thighs with the specific professional attention of a woman who takes notes. Not enviously. Just: comprehensively.

Sabrina's arms were no longer folded. They were at her sides. Her tail was fully upright. Her golden eyes were very wide.

Helvora had one hand over her mouth. Not in shock—in the specific containment of a woman suppressing an expression that has decided to happen without consultation.

Sylvea's emerald eyes were following the slave's face—the rapidly cycling expressions of contempt, fury, involuntary pleasure, and back to contempt—with the expression of someone watching a narrative develop in real time that she intends to think about later.

Thessa's ears were pointing in two different directions.

Tianlong walked toward the door with the slave over his shoulder and three of his fingers doing their work between her thighs. She was still producing sounds—muffled now, bitten back, each one torn from her between desperate attempts to reclaim her dignity, her palm slapping repeatedly against his back with the frustrated energy of someone who cannot reconcile where they are with how they feel about being there.

He pushed through the door.

"'Let's meet the mercenary queen,'" he said.

The sky outside the compound was the color of late afternoon—copper and slate, the light going amber at the edges where it caught the quarter's copper-stone construction. The market sounds carried from the avenue beyond the wall: commerce continuing, the world unaware of the particular sequence of events inside the VIP lodge.

He stood in the compound's outer yard with the slave over his shoulder and raised his qi.

His divine sense, unrolled at full extension, moved outward from his position in a sphere—crossing the compound walls, crossing the market district, crossing the distance between this place and the terrain beyond it. Scanning. Reading.

The mountains to the north-east.

There.

A qi-signature that had the specific quality of something that has been behind layers of concealment for so long that the concealment itself had become a habit rather than a technique—the qi of the mercenary queen's real body, layered with formation-script suppression and spatial diffraction, positioned inside a mountain's natural stone with the institutional comfort of someone who had been in that position for a very long time.

Old wound in that energy. The particular signature of cultivation maintained through mechanism rather than direct meridian work—the compensation pattern of a body that had adapted to loss and built around it.

'There.'

He noted the direction. Filed the distance.

Turned.

His wives had followed him into the yard, grouping naturally around him. Akane had her nine tails folded back to a manageable arrangement—appropriate for travel, not display. Yu Xiang was already doing the spatial calculation in her posture, her butterfly aura contracting into its compact configuration. Sabrina had moved to his right with the automatic positioning of someone who defaults to flank-coverage. Sylvea's hands were folded.

He said:

"'Go to the mermaid region. I'll find you there.'"

Nobody moved immediately.

Akane looked at him. Her golden eyes moved once to the slave hanging over his shoulder—who had stopped slapping his back and was now gripping the back of his robe with both hands, her legs hanging ahead of him and her face still somewhere between outrage and something it didn't have a name for yet. Then back to his face.

She read what was there.

"'Mn,'" she said. The specific syllable that contains several things, delivered as one thing. Her nine tails gave a single, unhurried sway. She had her opinions. She had put them somewhere she could retrieve them later.

Yu Xiang looked at him for half a second longer than the situation required. Her violet eyes went through a complete thought cycle, arrived at a conclusion, and closed the file.

"'We'll be there,'" she said.

Sabrina's tail swept. Once. Her golden eyes went to the slave one more time—the brief, comprehensive read of a warrior assessing an unknown entity—and then she turned.

The separation happened without ceremony. One by one, then in clusters—Helvora and Seris together, Vyrena a step behind—they moved toward the gate. Akane last, her crimson tails trailing. She didn't look back. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

What she knew: he wanted the meeting private. Not because he was hiding anything from them. Because there were conversations you had in front of your wives and conversations you didn't, and the kind that happened while flying alone toward a mountain with a woman over your shoulder and your fingers in her cunt was the second kind.

She trusted this. She had done it a long time ago, trust, and the deciding had already happened.

The yard cleared.

He rose.

The air at flight altitude was colder—the particular clean cold of elevation, carrying no market smell, no oil, no iron. Just stone and sky and the faint electrical trace of formation-energy in the mountain peaks.

The slave had stopped making sounds when he left the ground.

Not because anything else had changed. Because the ground had left, and there was something about looking down at the compound's rooftops receding beneath her—hanging over a man's shoulder at a height she had no relationship with—that had temporarily reorganized her priorities.

He flew northeast.

His left hand, between her thighs, had not stopped.

"'NHH—'" She tried to be quiet about it. She was not succeeding.

The mountains moved toward him—grey-green with altitude growth, the bare rock faces above the treeline catching the last of the afternoon light. He tracked the mercenary queen's qi-signature with his divine sense, following the thread of it through the stone, navigating toward its source with the patience of someone who has found a path through difficult terrain and is walking it at their own speed.

Three minutes in, the slave's thighs clenched on his arm.

She tried to hold it. The cultivator's grip of someone attempting to exercise will over physiology—the full compression of her stone-strong thighs, the deliberate breath held, the bitten-back sound.

It held for approximately six seconds.

Then her hips rolled forward against his forearm, the motion pulling out of her involuntarily, and she—

Squirted again.

Warm, insistent, soaking his forearm entirely, running down his sleeve and catching the wind and dispersing—her thighs shaking open and closed with each pulse of it, her voice coming out in a fragmented string of sounds that were not words.

"'HNN~—HAAH—NGH—BASTARD—NHHH~!!'"

She was wet against his shoulder. Against his back. Her body trembling in the full-frame way that it had the first time, only now she was forty meters above the ground and the trembling wasn't stopping.

Something warm and golden moved through her that she had no container for.

"'You—you absolute—you—'" She was trying to reform the profanity and finding the words out of reach.

He said nothing.

The mountains were close.

He descended.

The pool announced itself with sound before he could see it—the particular acoustic signature of contained water, the depth of it catching the ambient noise and flattening it. Hidden between two rock faces that leaned toward each other without quite meeting, a natural basin fed by a seam in the stone where groundwater reached the surface and formed something that was smaller than a lake and larger than intention.

Clear. Mountain-deep. The kind of cold that doesn't apologize.

He landed at its edge.

Set the slave down.

Not gently. He shifted her weight off his shoulder and let her feet find the ground, his hands releasing, and she—whose legs had the structural integrity of something recently reconsidered—caught herself on her own feet by a margin that was technically successful.

She stood. Straightened. Glared at him.

Her thighs were wet. Her face was flushed the particular deep flush of earth-mineral skin pushed from within. Her hair was wind-disordered. Her breasts hung full and unbound, the bite marks on the left one still visible, the nipple still dark and affected.

She looked spectacular and furious about it.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

He looked at the pond.

"'You're stinking,'" he said.

She opened her mouth.

He picked her up—not over his shoulder this time, just: by the waist, two-handed, her enormous body lifted with the casual, comprehensive ease of someone for whom the weight is irrelevant—and threw her.

She hit the surface.

'SPLAASSHH.'

The pond took her entire height and then some, the water receiving the impact in a broad eruption of displaced surface before closing over her and then revealing her again as she came up—hair plastered, water sheeting from her face, sputtering—with an expression of pure, total, unfiltered outrage.

"'WHAT—'"

He was already removing his robe.

The outer layer came off first. The red cloth—Yuna, his living garment—slipped from his shoulders with the specific, warm unwillingness of something choosing to let him go temporarily. She pooled at the bank's edge in a gathered heap of crimson, her presence warmly patient.

The inner layers followed.

She—the slave, treading water in the mountain pool with her hair floating around her—was watching.

She had been watching men her whole life with the comprehensive contempt of a woman who had been told men were lesser and had never found reason to update the assessment.

She watched them with the evaluative flatness of someone who has written a conclusion and needs only evidence to keep filing.

She watched him undress.

Her expression—the outrage, the soaking-wet fury—did not disappear. But it acquired a quality that was doing something different. The way an argument acquires a quality when the person arguing against you says something that requires you to actually pause.

His shoulders were—

'Is he even Real?'