Dungeon of Niflheim-Chapter 899: Karolina (3)
"Lina can I ask you something personal?" Khione asked after looking down at her own breasts and frowning.
"Huh? Of course you can Nene but if it’s about men I’m utterly useless." Karolina responded with a bright, confident smile, proud of her ignorance in regards to the opposite sex.
"No, no it’s nothing like that." Khione waved her hand in denial.
’Even I probably know more about men than you do.’
"It’s....How did you come to terms with your.... Size?" She eyeballed Karolina’s bountiful chest and pushed up her own making them look even more intimidating.
Karolina blinked a few times, initially confused by the question. "....Oh are you struggling again?"
This wasn’t the first time the two of them were having this kind of conversation. Karolina was a peer who braved a similar trail, someone that was at the same time not a sibling or great elder but rather a friend, a compatriot whom Khione could confide in.
Shortly after she first started to really develop Khione encountered her first struggles, difficulty in following the main branch steps of her father’s spear arts as well as issues with her daily living. Carrying substantial extra weight around every day wasn’t easy after all.
Karolina albeit not being a training and battle fanatic like herself was a senior on this thorny path and one whose work posed no small amount of difficulty for a woman with her figure thus she made the perfect confidant.
"Yeah, and this time I don’t think I can just ignore it like I normally do." For years Khione viewed her breasts as nothing but a burden, a sexy, cosmetically pleasing burden but still a burden, nonetheless. For a warrior especially one as dedicated as her they were a disadvantage.
She gazed down at her breasts, supporting their weight with her hands, finally have the courage to face the problem head on and realising the extent of what they’d become.
"You’re not thinking of wrapping them again are you?" Karolina asked worriedly, misinterpreting her gaze as one filled with pain and desperation.
"God no I don’t want to be lectured like that ever again." Khione visibly shivered as a traumatic memory surfaced from the depths of her mind.
"You can say that again." Karolina also started to shiver as feelings of terror threatened to overwhelm her. Khione wasn’t the only one to suffer as a result that... foolish choice.
A few years ago when Khione was still a teenager in a desperate attempt to reduce the limitations her breasts poised she tightly wrapped her chest with soft fabric forcibly restricting them, not a bad option per say but not all that healthy especially given how tight she bound them and how long she carried out the practice.
Two servants found her collapsed in a hallway one day, her lips cyanotic, her flesh tender and bruised and even showing signs of muscle damage. Freyja was immediately informed of her state and came running like a bat out of hell. Her expression bore significant grief and distress as she barrelled through the doors, nearly knocking the palace’s primary doctor of her feet but the moment she was informed of the reason for Khione’s current plight her demeanour shifted. She ordered for all the servants to vacate the room and for the doctor to wake Khione up.
Groggy and in pain from her excursion while under the tight breast binding Khione woke up to see her mother hovering over her with a terrifying visage, one that she had only seen maybe once or twice in her life, an expression that her mother donned only when she crossed the line and then some.
What happened next was spine chilling, just thinking back to the yelling, the display of aura, the corporal, emotional and even mental punishment was enough to have Khione break out in a cold sweat. She never bound her breasts again, her mother forcibly instilling the belief that she was beautiful, that her body was perfect as it was and that she should never, ever do anything that could be considered as self-harm.
Karolina was unfortunately the unwitting origin of this little idea and being so full of fear in that moment Khione ended up confessing this to Freyja which resulted in the young Loxodon losing a layer of skin off her ass.
"Do you still bind yours?" Eventually escaping from that nightmare Khione asked with concern. She knew despite the event with her mother that Karolina still occasionally engaged in the practise just not to the same degree.
"Honestly yes. I don’t like it but sometimes when I really need to bring my all to a job, I do bind them." From her tone it was clear Karolina was disappointed by her own actions but at the same time felt powerless in the face of the results.
"I don’t attempt to erase them mind you just...hold them together better, stop them bouncing around in my face or rubbing against the inside of my bra." Her methods could be considered minor and not all that unhealthy but that didn’t stop her from feeling dispirited by it. She took firm hold of her breasts and suddenly felt guilty. Karolina absolutely loved her tits; their size, their shape, their weight everything about them was amazing in her eyes. Sometimes she even wished for them to keep growing especially when she -very rarely- spotted someone with a bigger set.
"How did you stop seeing them as nothing but burdens Lina?" Khione had never been able to look at her breasts in the same way Karolina could.
"Burdens...." Karolina sounded offended by the word choice, her gaze becoming enflamed before ultimately simmering down after she let out a deeply repressed sigh. ".....Haaaaaaa there’s a couple reasons, but what worked for me might not work for you." Her adorable little firecracker of a friend was pleading with her for help, she needed to be serious and genuine with her responses.
Ears at the ready Khione straightened her back and gave Karolina her full attention.
"First off let’s start with the biggest issue their impediment when it comes to work or in your case training and fighting." Karolina enter a relaxed crossed legged position as she started to rattle off her insights as a senior walking the same path.
"In my case having such large lumps of fat hanging off my chest makes it pretty much impossible to do the hammering process when it comes to forging equipment... at least through standard means. Not only would my swing have to curve so as to avoid them as you’ve probably experienced yourself they result in a rather significant blind spot." As if portray this dilemma Karolina looked straight down, everything but the edges of her knees was obscured by her own chest. How could she possibly perform precise hammerings if she couldn’t even see the target.
Khione nodded her head in complete understanding knowing full well about the degree of this blind spot, a blind spot that was even more developed in her case.
"However, despite smithing being a male dominated trade big chests run in my family so my aunts, my grandmas and ancestors have already devised methods to counteract such disadvantages and in turn even use them to our advantage." Similar to how Shivali and his more capable subordinates altered the Niflheim royal family spear arts to incorporate those with less than ideal physiques the female side of Karolina’s family developed smithing techniques solely designed for women with substantial weight on their chests.
"By changing where I stand, my angle, the position of the anvil and from where I start my swing I’m able to not only see everything that’s in front of me but I can leverage this extra weight allowing me to generate more force without compressing precision...the only downside being that it eats up a little more stamina with each swing... plus if your attire is off and you don’t take precautions for nipple burn you can end up pretty sore the next day." She learned that the hard way on more than a few occasions.
Khione watched as Karolina demonstrated a shadow attempt at her forging a piece of equipment. Her bearing appearing awkward at first glance, as if a complete amateur attempted to work the forge without much foreknowledge but that was a misconception brought on by what she had normally seen whenever she entered a forge. In actuality her stance was solid, and her swinging was steady and precise, even the jostling of her breasts were controlled, moving up and down in perfect concert instead of shifting about randomly.
"A big part of this is flexing the chest muscles when you swing. To have control you must first be aware of how every part of your body moves when in motion." Karolina fiercely brought down a smithing hammer that she retrieved from a storage bracelet with her right hand perfectly envisioning a piece of metal fresh out of the forge laid out in front of her ready to be shaped. She displayed her technique several times hoping to shatter Khione’s disillusion that her breasts were a burden when it came to her work.
"I know you’ve been stubbornly refusing to change your ways, using brute force to maintain your progress with your father’s spear arts but that’s nothing but a dead end. Instead you need to find a way to use your womanly assets, move with them instead of against them otherwise you’ll eventually hit a wall so hard that you won’t be able to get back up." Karolina had hinted long before Frost that she should give up on the main branch, either dive into a subbranch that was more suited for her body type, find a different style that was foundationally designed for woman like her or develop something of her own like Freyja and the female ancestors of her family had done.
