The cold shock of her words hung in the silver moonlight like ice.

Kenji lay entirely frozen beneath her weight, his mind stuttering on a name that had no business existing in their shared bedtime.

"Yours are bigger than Martin’s."

The sentence echoed in his skull. Ayla did not notice the immediate, dangerous shift in his posture.

She was focused entirely on the heat building between her thighs, her small fingers firmly gripping his member through the gap in his clothing.

The [Emotion Weaver] trait was humming beneath her skin, driving her own internal temperature higher, making her eager to explore the physical reactions she had observed in Amanda’s mind.

In Amanda’s stolen memories, a very specific sequence had played out. Amanda had told another man in the lower districts that his size was inferior to someone else’s.

According to the data Ayla had harvested, that insult had not halted the encounter. It had produced an immediate surge of competitive aggression, causing the man’s erection to double in intensity before they proceeded to mate.

Ayla had logically assumed that introducing a similar comparison would spark a sense of human sportsmanship in Kenji.

Instead, the air in the room grew instantly frigid.

Kenji did not move. He did not even flinch when her warm palm slid further down, exposing his member completely to the cool air of the bedroom.

His hazel eyes were wide, fixed on the ceiling as his mind gripped the single word that had crushed his heat.

She touched another man’s....

A sharp, ugly spike of jealousy flared in his chest, hot and suffocating.

He gritted his teeth, his jaw locking so tightly the muscle twitched.

"I am asking," Kenji said, his voice dropping into a register that was entirely devoid of warmth. "Who is Martin?"

Ayla paused. Her golden eyes blinked down at him through the silver gloom.

Beneath her palm, she could feel the heavy, pulsing heat of his body beginning to dissipate.

The physical reaction was shifting away from pure lust, moving instead toward a rigid, combative tension.

It was the exact same phenomenon that had happened during her encounter with Martin in the tunnel. Kenji was losing the necessary level of arousal, just like she had lost it at that time.

She bit her lower lip in genuine frustration. Why was he suddenly so irritated?

The logic of human men was entirely inconsistent with the data she had gathered from Amanda.

"Why do you want to know who Martin is?" Ayla asked, her brow furrowing.

She genuinely did not understand his obsession with a dead man. To her, Martin was simply an obsolete data point, a brain she had discarded weeks ago after extracting its useful parameters.

She could not fathom that Kenji was not asking out of tactical curiosity. He was jealous.

A dark, territorial anger was consuming him because he believed another human had taken advantage of his woman, no, his sister.

The distinction felt increasingly blurred in the dark heat of the bed.

Sensing the absolute seriousness in his gaze, Ayla decided to defuse his dissatisfaction. She did not want him to remain cold.

With a reluctant sigh, she began to recount the events of that afternoon in the northern forests.

As she spoke, she carefully chose her words, attempting to paint Martin as a pathetic weakling and an inherently bad individual.

She described his crude approach, his total lack of combat capability, and his immediate demise.

But the narrative fell apart rather quickly. She possessed absolutely no genuine proof to claim he was a villain. To any objective observer, Martin had simply been a normal, foolish human who had crossed paths with a predator disguised as a beautiful girl.

By the time she finished her explanation, Kenji had long since stopped listening to the details. While she had been speaking, his body had reacted on instinct.

He had used his superior physical strength to reverse their positions, pinning her small wrists behind her back with one hand and shifting his weight to trap her beneath him.

Ayla offered no resistance. She lay quietly on the mattress, her face buried into the crook of his neck, her silver hair spilling across his chest like a silk shroud.

Kenji stayed in the silence, his mind spinning in a daze. He had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to feel.

A profound sense of relief washed over him, instantly extinguishing the burning jealousy, but it was accompanied by an equally massive wave of helplessness.

She was entirely naive. She was a creature so intensely curious about her new existence that she had casually tested the concept of human lust on the very first human she encountered in the tunnel.

But the realization also birthed a sharp, lingering doubt in his mind.

"Are you experimenting the same way with me?" he asked quietly, his chest rising and falling against her cheek.

Ayla shook her head against his skin, a gesture that was simultaneously a yes and a no.

"I am experimenting with lust, yes," she murmured, her voice muffled by his collarbone. "But it is not the same as with that man. For that man, I did not feel anything. It was just data. But for you, it is different."

"Different?" Kenji raised an eyebrow, his grip on her wrists loosening by a fraction. "Different how?"

Ayla raised her head slowly, her golden eyes meeting his through the shadows. The clinical certainty she usually carried was entirely absent, replaced instead by a profound, uncharacteristic confusion.

Her features twisted into a slight scowl as she searched her internal database for an answer that did not exist.

She genuinely had no idea.

The biology of a Mimic Slime did not possess a vocabulary for what was happening within her core.

The sensation of being near him was simply distinct from any other stimulus. It was as though her favorite dish had suddenly changed from high-grade human brains to him.

But she did not want to consume his brain. She just wanted him.

"I—" she started, her lips parting, but she closed them instantly.

Her brows knit together in deep annoyance at her own inability to articulate the data.

Kenji watched the restlessness flicker across her face. He could feel the sudden pressure his questions were exerting on her fragile understanding of human emotion.

She had absolutely no real experience. Every single emotion she displayed was a borrowed garment pulled from the memories of the dead.

It was no surprise that she remained casually indifferent to the rest of the world.

Except to him.

The realization arrived like a soft warmth, forcing a genuine smile to break across his face.

With a fluid turn of his hips, he tightened his grip, shifting her wrists up until he pinned them securely above her head against the wooden headboard.

He leaned down, his broad shoulders blocking out the remaining silver moonlight, looming completely over her.

Ayla glanced up in quiet surprise, her lips parting slightly in an instinctive invitation.

Kenji lowered his mouth to hers.

The moment their lips met, he tasted a sharp, metallic tinge of copper. She had bitten her lip during her earlier frustration, and the small smear of blood transferred to his tongue.

He did not care. He swallowed the taste wholeheartedly, pressing his lips against hers with a sudden, consuming intensity that felt as though he were trying to pull her entire essence into his own lungs.

Ayla was completely clueless.

The mechanics of a human kiss were entirely foreign to her active traits.

She lay perfectly still beneath him, her exhaled breath caught in his throat, her lungs hitching sharply as she struggled to find room to inhale.

She had no understanding of how to reciprocate the gesture. Sensing her confusion, Kenji decided to deepen the contact, pushing his tongue past her teeth to explore the warm depth of her mouth, his tongue curling around hers in a slow, demanding rhythm.

Ayla’s golden pupils suddenly widened to the size of pinpricks.

The sudden, overwhelming sensory input triggered an involuntary biological defense mechanism.

Before her mind could process the action, her face literally split open along the jawline, and a cluster of translucent, blue slime tentacles flashed outward from her throat like a nest of disturbed vipers.

Kenji’s consciousness instantly turned pitch black.

[You have been slain.]

[Ayla has rejected your regression request.]

The prompt flickered once in the darkness and vanished.

When Kenji snapped back to reality, the cool silver moonlight was still filtering through the curtains, and the artificial morning had still not arrived.

He was flat on his back again. Ayla was sitting directly on his stomach, her small knees pinning his outer thighs to the mattress.

Her right hand was buried inside his clothing, her fingers clamped firmly around his erect member with a terrifying amount of pressure.

She was absolutely fuming, her chest heaving as she glared down at him through the dark.

"Why did you try to eat me?" she asked, her voice trembling with pure indignation.

"What?" Kenji blinked, his mind struggling to shake off the disorientation of an instantaneous death loop.

"You tried to swallow my lips," she gasped, her golden eyes flashing with genuine anger. "And you shoved your tongue inside my mouth to eat my tongue. Why?" 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

"That is not, that is not what that was," Kenji stammered. He instinctively raised his hands to facepalm, but he could not move them.

Ayla’s left hand was still pinning his wrists to the bed with an ironclad grip.

"’I am going to eat her,’" Ayla muttered, her voice shifting into a perfect, eerie mimicry of his own internal monologue.

"That is exactly what you said in your mind right before you attacked my mouth."

Kenji rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, a heavy sigh escaping his lips as he realized the absolute absurdity of their communication barrier.

"That is a different kind of eating, Ayla," he said helplessly. "Humans do not mean literal consumption when they do that."

"Eating is eating," Ayla spat, her lips thinning into a dangerous line.

To emphasize her point, her right hand tightened its grip on his member, increasing the pressure until Kenji let out a sharp, ragged gasp of genuine pain, his hips jerking against the mattress.

"Yo, yo! Not that hard!" he shivered, his forehead breaking into a cold sweat. "Stop squeezing!"

A slow, dimpled grin broke across her face, the terrifying predator returning to her features in an instant.

"Yo," she whispered, leaning down until her silver hair brushed his nose. "Yo. Yes, hard."

Poor Kenji, he could only cry.