Готовый перевод Настучать в бубен / Hit the tambourine: Глава 18-6

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Stepanov's anger passed as quickly as it had come. He was good at getting his feelings under control, and he'd learned it even better when he'd come to the other world and become a shaman. As he calmed down and stopped straining the dining hall's defenses, which had nearly collapsed in an attempt to contain the shaman's anger and keep him from lighting himself up on the city's sensors, he began to do what he'd needed to do all along: think, not freak out. If he'd pressed any further, half the town would have fled to the mansion with thoughts that Malter had gotten her way and was about to be eaten and killed. However, after a moment of angry weakness, he concentrated again and began to act with his head already cooled, first of all checking the obedience of Sylvia and the rest of her chicks, so that they would not pay attention to his systemic oddities and would not even think of comparing him to a certain Master.

With his second move, he finally checked his teammate's Status, which pleased and disappointed him. He realized with his mind that the result was not just good, but awesome, especially if he took into account the gifted attributes. He understood, but he was secretly expecting something more from a creature with several centuries of experience than he'd already seen. Only one mastery, just in bloody resonance control, very little knowledge. It's a rather modest indicator of the depth of that knowledge. He was already far more erudite and deeply knowledgeable by now. This is obviously logical, because the locals, in order for the System to recognize their level of knowledge as at least worthy of being listed in the Status, must work very hard and, more importantly, somewhere to get, snatch, take away, or exchange this knowledge. Sylvia, in her own opinion, was not just not badly erudite, no. She was, against a background of peers of comparable strength and age, a savvy and versatile bloodsucker to the extreme, noticeably outgrowing her characteristics. Now, of course, when she was in the big leagues in terms of pure strength, she could do with some good training in some areas, but that was another matter.

“Get ready, I'm going to perform a gifting, maybe not unpleasantly, but intensely.” Stepan dropped his plans directly to her in images and explained in images what exactly he was doing, what she should expect, and what a “gifting” was in general, but he couldn't do without words either. He felt very uncomfortable. “At least, that's how it's always been for me.”

"For what you promise me, pet, I am ready to endure the torture of the consecrated iron, not to mention the minor inconveniences." Sylvia hurries him greedily and impatiently, figuratively speaking, tapping her hoof against the ground. "Hurry up, Pann, or I swear that you'll spend the next twenty-four hours with your tongue in my slit, forgetting that orgasm even exists as a phenomenon! Well, don't you dare keep me waiting... Oh, first blood, that's... oh, intense indeed."

The vampiress, frozen in immobility, grasped her breasts, which had grown a size and a half, feeling her aura change and expand, determining the volume of the Source and its Power, so important for a vampire. Important in the sense that their gift burns out when they convert. Even one or two units in the Source is a great result for an individual who has passed the first hundred years. The current indicators of her magical gift would be suitable for another adept of classical magic, and a full-fledged and certified one at that! The essence of blood magic - not to be confused with magic of blood - is that it works from the stolen life force, from the blood supply, and the characteristic of the Constitution, which serves as the main fuel. But where blood essence was the fuel for the bloodsucker, the fuse was still pure magic, a fuse, and a multiplier, so that even with a two in her Source, Sylvia could burn with scarlet spells no weaker than a full-fledged mage before she met Stepan, albeit for a short time and with her own peculiarities. Now she had a lot more power, she could add more pure magic to the scarlet magic, getting the result not so much of addition, but of multiplication of what she had spent, albeit with reservations.

In addition to the increased characteristics, the five added free talents also played a role. Or rather they would, when Stepan distributed them, having consulted with Sylvia beforehand. Later, because now she was listening to her aura with delight and triumph, her blood and magic racing through her veins, mixing one with the other, which made her even whiter, and her body was covered with glowing and gradually fading scarlet lines. These lines were followed by slightly brighter scarlet dots followed by a fading trail of scarlet light. It was a concentrated blood supply, the kind used in direct combat. It was similar to Edward's when he was at his peak, but barely visible to the normal eye, visible only to spiritual and magical perception. In Malter's case, no additional perception was required. The thickness of the blood amplified by the ancient ichor, and with the support of the increased characteristics gave such a result. Stepan, using basic erudition, could say with full confidence that, even without the help of the System, the next few years would allow her to raise her Constitution and Resistance by one more unit, and with a minimum of training. The basic characteristics of bloodsuckers don't grow too evenly, often relying on a usual reserve - fuel and fuse, fuel and fuse. And since Sylvia's fuse has increased so much, there will be more fuel, albeit not immediately.

Stepan openly admired the way the woman was handling her gift, testing it, listening to it, then releasing a thin armor of scarlet haze, then turning a single finger into a long bloody claw, then creating and almost releasing powerful blood spells, only at the last moment releasing them and drawing the spent power back into the bloodstream. There was something meditative and at the same time, perhaps, spiritualizing in it - to realize that this machine of destruction, which could tear and destroy a lot of people in a matter of seconds, exquisite and seductive, desirable and deadly, was still completely in his power. It was easy to get hooked on such sensations, which made Stepan wonder very strangely whether local mentalists and other brainiacs were taught some kind of safety technique against losing their footing and losing their brakes. Or do they rely entirely on work ethics and fear of the kicks that a mentalist who loses his brakes is bound to get? Well, unless he's an alien from another world with a System, sorry, a Soul Tablet, and a huge supply of quirks in his not-so-dumb head.

As soon as Sylvia had fully mastered her new power, the shaman used his new trump card meta-skill. One that granted no longer characteristics, but an elite brainwashing property. Sylvia flinched and squeezed her eyes shut tightly, even putting her palm to them. The modification was clearly a modification to an existing one, which made her eyes especially hypnotic. This time she remained motionless even longer, and when she did open her eyes, cautiously looking around and moving her eyeballs, there was something wrong with those eyes. If earlier the young man could, albeit with some difficulty and effort, notice the anomaly in her eyes, mostly because he knew where to look, but now her eyes, at least in the inactivated state, seemed to be the most ordinary eyes of a high vampire. Only at the very edge, in spiritual rather than purely magical perception, did he see something indistinct and disturbing, hidden behind a careful image of normality, as if it were not her eyes but two stingers hidden in her eye sockets.

The system-enhanced property previously called “eye modification: subjugating gaze” was now called “complex spiritual-energetic eye modification: the supreme gaze of subjugation” - a rather significant upward shift, especially considering the prefix “supreme". Stepan, desperate to understand the nature of this change on his own, simply tapped into Sylvia's senses who was probing her new gift, so to speak, understanding much more. From her, these eyes, whose disguise had obviously improved almost several times, were not hiding, revealing all their splendor, making the young man dumbfounded along with his doll. The property was truly elite, worthy of another magister. It was basically the same hypnotic gaze that Sylvia had originally modified, but now Stepan was sure that even his passive defense could not withstand the direct gaze. Even if it didn't collapse in the same second it wouldn't last long. At most, it would allow him to win a few seconds to activate the combat mode and the active defense created by summoning the corresponding spirits, and even then it would stun him and put him in a stupor at once.

"If you're smart and catch them relaxed, you can get into a magister's head with those eyes, I suppose." The Earthman commented, recognizing that he would like to get such a modification for himself. Even if it was still based on vampire tricks. "It's almost guaranteed to get a master that way if he doesn't know what to prepare a defense circuit against."

"Well, no, no, pet, I wouldn't dare to open those eyes on a magister; the chances are very small and the risk of failure is high." Sylvia shook her head in unequivocal condemnation, looking at Stepan as if he were a little boy who had said something stupid. “And a master, too. They're all known. All are deadly dangerous, and they will certainly not relax in my presence. Even if I succeed, there is a high probability that traces of my actions will be visible - if not in a personal inspection, then in an external and complex one. Though the temptation, I won't hide it, just tempts me with a naked vein, really. You have done well, my good man, but now I must finish with those free lines of power that are not yet inscribed in my Tablet. I have definite thoughts, but I would prefer to discuss the matter properly with someone who knows more and would certainly not hide anything from his mistress.”

Her gaze was so full of feelings that Stepan feared she might try to lay him out right here, without direct instruction through the submissive bond, only with the help of the changes that had already been made, such as the aversion to sex as such, which had been removed. In truth, he was tempted not to interfere with her, but then he'd be wasting a lot of time. She without his prompting, would obviously dominate from beginning to end, which the young man did not want now. He had to confine himself to the promise written in the system diary to let himself have a good time later, if possible, and then return to more pressing problems. Whatever it was, Sylvia was his best and strongest asset, and it would be foolish not to try to strengthen her in one way or another, especially if the price was only a couple of hours of explanation. The stronger she is, the easier it will be for him if he needs her explicit and unambiguous support.

"Whatever you say, Sylvia. I'm honestly looking forward to it myself." He neither refused nor concealed his interest, immediately opening the help and beginning to check the degree of availability of knowledge. "I suggest focusing on knowledge, since your characteristics are already overdeveloped, there is plenty of room to develop. Also, there are meta-skills, but don't put too much emphasis on them, their usefulness is undeniable, but it highly depends on the base and personal power. Properties are more complicated, I'll let you decide here, some of them are much more useful than simple knowledge."

So they began to discuss all the small details, and Sylvia behaved as if she had taken a two-week interrogation course with Rodislav Gastoldovich Yanin himself because for a moment Stepan felt as if he were back at his seminar. However, the topic of conversation was of mutual interest to both of them and Stepan also sincerely wanted to participate in the discussion. The list of available talents of a vampire with the class of the Blood Caster obviously did not resemble the same list of talents of a Senior Shaman. The young man spent a lot of time delving into the many options and even arguing a bit with Sylvia. He won some of the arguments because he was more familiar with the canons of the system, but he conceded most of them. The experienced bloodsucker knew exactly what she, as a bloodsucker, needed most of all.

She distributed the five talents at once, despite her attempts to put them in one at a time - a condition of the System regarding the token applied. Malter really didn't want to shut down and fall off the schedule for a few days, but after some sensible thinking, she considered it a tiny price to pay for the coming power. After writing a couple of emails, issuing commands to her agents and fledglings, as well as talking over the amulet and rescheduling some medium important meeting, she grabbed a few vials of enhanced blood, settled into bed, and confirmed the selection. She smiled with such a triumphant and triumphant face that Stepan's hand reached for a non-existent lemon.

The easiest was the only meta-skill, which the woman couldn't help but take. The specific and only vampire-specific skill “blood replenishment I” restored blood supply at once up to the maximum and at the highest level. That is, the restored blood would not be of the level of the homeless people who had strolled in the alley, but at least of the full-fledged gifted in the rank of a strong student, not lower. One use per ten days, but for a vampire this one use is enough. The rapid depletion of the scarlet drop's supply had always been a problem for them. A big part of the tactic of those who confront vampires is to force the creature to use up its reserves and finish it off when it's weakened - in a way, even Stepan had done the same thing to Edichka. In that case, those who try to deplete, and then successfully deplete, poor Sylvia in order to rush forward to finish her off will be in for a surprise of deadly awesomeness. In peaceful life, however, if she doesn't expend blood too drastically and rashly, this ten-day charge will be enough for her to be comfortable without hunting. A golden, diamond even, dream of the lion's share of bloodsuckers, who live their entire lives with a clear addiction to diet and an understanding of that addiction.

She didn't acquire any properties, though she lusted after some with a hungry gaze. The only thing that kept her away was the fact she was already cool enough in terms of properties, but the lag in knowledge was getting dangerous. In this world, it is dangerous to have a pure aura power not supported by the corresponding knowledge. You become interesting to more and more serious people and yet you have no coolness of your own to either reflect their interest or transform it into normal cooperation. The strong are negotiated with, and the weak are just not interesting to anyone until they get into the fray or fall under the roller of history, but those who have strength but are weak... they are the desired prey for everyone. The Slaver and dark ritualists like old Rumorias, are only the tip of the iceberg, the most obvious, but by no means the only danger.

The knowledge was chosen long and with constant questioning, but, not without Stepan's help, Malter made up her mind here too. Maybe in another situation, she would have strengthened herself differently, but Stepan also influenced her, most of the time through arguments, never once using direct control. Sylvia, well aware of the prospects and dangers of possessing the Soul Tablet, did not develop the skills of a schemer, seductress, or alchemist, focusing on what would help to kill and survive. Of course, Stepan wasn't going to get into any deadly duels, even his intentions to hunt down the demonic menace had been reduced to sending a bunch of angry hunters from the other side of the world without his own presence. But situations, as he'd learned, were different, and having a fighting supreme vampire behind him and not having one were two very big differences.

The three points went to the root knowledge of the Blood Caster's class, bringing both to the mastery level. The most correct option. The most universal and correct, Stepan himself had done so with dialog and practice of calls. The received “master control of scarlet drop” and “master practice of blood shaping” brought her to the level where she could already consider herself superior in knowledge, too, at least in the knowledge typical for her vampire class. Yes, it would have been nice to raise a few other branches as well, but the root skills worked like the core, just like Stepan's. The Earthling could create totems even before he had the relevant knowledge, could work with treaties and contracts long before he had the corresponding line in his Status, and even if Her Milfness hadn't given him a branch of enchantments, he would have been able to work with them too. Worse, not as flexible, not as complete, as he could have been with the relevant knowledge. However, at a very competent level by local standards.

Sylvia had a similar situation, only instead of the secondary disciplines of shamanism, she had equally secondary bloody knowledge. And it was even harder for her than for Stepan, who was accustomed to accepting knowledge, because the System not only increased the rank of this knowledge, but also filled the voids where Sylvia herself had not studied enough, had not worked hard enough, bringing her knowledge not just to the point where even the System would recognize it, but to ideal perfectionism relative to the existing rank. However, against the background of three invested points, the “advanced developed methods of bloody acceleration” received for the last talent were much easier. There, the whole basis of knowledge consists of accelerating thinking and the speed of perception to the proper level. Strengthening, acceleration, strengthening, powering up, increasing resistance and regeneration - the trump racial trick of all vampires, due to which Dutzirella gutted Stepan like a fish.

In combination with the previous improvements and bonuses to characteristics, now Sylvia, if she met Edward and his team, could not only fend them off but turn them all into an ignominious flight, nailing the laggards. And if she tried to turn off the same Dutzirella with her new eyes at the first beat of the battle, she could win, not without problems, but confidently and without getting hurt, exhausted at most. Leaving the woman, inspired by the upcoming prospects, to come to her senses and thrashing around in a semi-delirious state, Stepan stepped into the closet, found himself in his hideout, cleaned up a bit, checked the state of the totem's external and internal, and then stepped into the courtyard. His mood was positive, he had a lot of plans, and in order not to waste his enthusiasm, he decided to have lunch at the courtyard.

At the same time, he could listen to conversations, highly intellectual, so to speak.

"I tell you, it was not without a magician of the lord's, who fixes the faces of noble maidens, well!" One of the workers was singing, raising his tone and looking around so as not to be spotted for such talking. "But she's getting better each day, so what's the point? What's the use of waving a saber and running around the house? If running and waving could make someone prettier, I'd be like an elf, well, handsome."

"You're just ugly, whether you wave or don't wave, Dikk." One of the disputants laughed, slapping himself on the stomach and jumping up and down. - And the lady does not just run. She pays money to the teacher, eats the master's food, and perhaps drinks some potion. Well, you like a little child"

"That's right, you said it right from the heart, Mashyr, I couldn't have said it better myself. And I even know who's talking the most." Pirius appeared behind his back so suddenly, as if he was pumping the class of a stealthy and had already finished it to the level of a steadfast adept because even Stepan's spirits did not notice him at once, but only when he moved a little closer, coming out of the dark corner. "Why are you gossiping about the honorable Fanya and discussing the chief's wife? There's no work, so I'll find enough for everyone, you bastards."

Stepan, who was just then finishing a jar of kvass, involuntarily shuddered. The promise of a job sounded very ominous, even if the shaman himself was not involved in the conversation. But he could not resist peeking through his spirit perception at Fanyu, who was steaming in the bathtub after an intense workout, tired and lukewarm to the point where it was hard to move. The adventuress she hired was definitely skilled in fitness training. She exhausted her ward exactly to the point where the strain was useful, not harmful. Also, the more and more beautiful saleswoman had no strength to move from fatigue and, therefore she was helped to soap her paradoxically grown up, not shrunken from the loads by the cheerfully smiling Nika, who was no less cheerfully joking with her mistress. And, judging by how cheerfully the conversation was going on, and the maid's hands kept soaping the same part of Fanja's heavily breathing body, the girls were in a good mood. By the way, Stepan had not suggested that to them. He was even surprised, but pleasantly and in passing.

The young man had come to the courtyard not for the purpose of gazing at the washing beauties, he could have done it from anywhere in the city and the surrounding area, but to fulfill another moral obligation. The riddle of the mice had gotten to the point where he was ready to climb the wall to find the answer. Hidden under the Shroud spiritual resonance manifested and called directly into the body of specialized spirit-seekers, and not only nine small, but also a couple of strong, which he discreetly released and flooded them in the courtyard. All of them, in addition to searching, were good at stealth and the ability to hide themselves and their presence worked skillfully as a team and knew exactly what Stepan wanted them to do. In its original purpose, this contract, which came from a branch of battle calls, was used to calculate the points of archery or siege equipment, marking the spot where the arrow came off and leaking the coordinates to the shaman.

The Earthman had given the group of spirits a bit of a hard time, but he'd given them his instructions, which consisted of marking the points where new mice were entering or entering the territory. In a couple or three days, they'd get the map exactly right, mark the points, and help get some fucking answers to the old questions. On top of that, he'd done a couple of months' worth of good deeds in addition, sending healing spirits of a specific kind around the courtyard, removing kidney stones, cirrhosis in the liver, sand in the joints, and aneurysms in the brain, increasing the overall health of anyone who needed it. It did little good, the experience dripped cosmetically, but the young man was pleased to be doing something socially useful. He even contemplated, quite seriously, going under disguise to the local slums and curing everyone he could there as well.

Maybe it was stupidity, but he just physically wanted to do something good and kind after twenty days of brainwashing by especially vulgar means. Yes, the bloodsuckers. Yes, the fact that they looked favorable against the other representatives of their inanimate species did not cancel the general evil scuminess, but it still made an imprint. He was constantly pressed by the unpleasant weight of the realization that he had followed the Autogoddess. It seemed to be a small thing, but he did not want to give up even an inch of his personal ethics and morality. His opinion of her may have grown, very much so after she had saved his brain from the full control of the evil bitch Martel, but that only made his desire not to go along with her even stronger.

In fact, he didn't deny himself his whims. Why not? Is he a master of shamanism or not, eh? And if he wanted to dress in rags, pretend to be a beggar, and go to work as a free healer in poor neighborhoods who would dare to oppose him? The rags, tattered and dusty, with a lot of old stains, consisting of tattered pants and shirt, and no less tattered cloak, which completely covered his face, were made of a special fabric, quite valuable and expensive, even in such a shabby condition. Especially in a shabby state, for this garment seemed to have absorbed all the kilometers of roads, paths, and streets traveled, making it the perfect receptacle for some spirits. It's not cheap, even if it's not a special item, but it's valuable. He managed to put the right spirits into the cloth himself, literally on the fly, changing his clothes and putting the hood of his cloak over his head - concealers, suppressors, dusters that blurred his appearance, prevented him from remembering any of the signs, prevented him from paying attention, and, more importantly, concealed the aspect of the call.

Particularly strong concealers as long as you only summon healing spirits and only for those who need healing but can't find it. The effect gained from summoning several strong exotics at once, among which was even a spirit-image of a true holy healing saint. Or rather, not the saint himself, but the memory of him, which was formed into the image of a humanoid spirit, combining the features that possessed, if not the saint himself, then his image, which an unknown religion, little resembling Christianity, cultivated. When he had finished dressing and crossed the crossing, he went out into a dirty alley, reached the widest of the poor streets, adjoining the marketplace, and collapsed in one corner, leaning against the wall of a house, right next to some similarly ragged but stinking individuals, also engaged in begging.

Under normal circumstances, for such impudence as trying to beg for alms without permission and in someone else's field, they would have tried to beat him, rob him, and, optionally, put him on a pen or squeeze him off. People of broad culture, thieves' law and all that. But under the rags that diverted attention and created a field of normality, they didn't even glance at him, because if he was sitting, let him sit. Putting an empty and cracked bowl in front of him, the young man stretched forward his hand, copying the pose of his neighbor, and he partially left his body and began to call. He calls with considerable boldness. The distraction field, as long as he followed such specific conditions of disguise, worked in a way that made the magister envious. It seemed to the young man that as long as he was only calling for healers and only for others, not himself, to contract for the future, even Magister Miller himself, if he decided to take a walk for some dick right here next to him, would see nothing out of the ordinary.

Just one of the beggars, sick and maimed, living out his last days. It was as if he had put on all of them, the innumerable multitudes of them in all worlds, and the multitudes were happy and relieved to give him a part of their pain and hopelessness, sharing in return the indifference that the whole world feels for such beggars. There was something philosophical about it, but even to an elder shaman such emotional strain was not particularly pleasant, not at all easy to control. An ordinary person could get into a suicidal mood even in a couple of minutes, but the young man knew spirits and their effects, which burned his brain much stronger. And he was not distracted from new and new calls of healers, which also fell under the effect of spirit cloaking, also acquired invisibility, so they could fly in full manifestation even under the very nose of a gifted magician. They could fly in full manifestation even under the nose of a gifted magician, especially if they tried to treat not just anyone, but the poor or unhappy, filled with the same hopelessness.

And the young man healed, took away pain in broken bones, pierced maxillary polyps in the nose that had been out of breath for many years, removed inflammation on the slowly rotting wound, restored vision and dissolved cataracts, healed marks from whips or beatings, helped to correct the consequences of miscarriage and peritonitis, as well as a lot of other useful things he did. He didn't help everyone, of course. He didn't even lift a finger in the address of the thug, who was reclining from internal bleeding, and who was mortally wounded by the whore he had beaten to death with a shiv for non-payment of his second “fair ten-day share” in a week. Though he had spent almost a third of his reserve on that whore, who was also beaten by life. He also gave this one a gift of a jewelry token while she, who suddenly began to breathe again without wheezing and foam from a rib that had pierced her lung, was crawling away to lie down. He thought about it and added a boob enlarger to make it easier for her to work. It didn't help other criminal elements either, especially those with a lot of shit and blood on them. Spiritual vision allowed him to see a lot of things that normal magic vision wouldn't, but only vaguely and confusingly. An honest man who'd fought against a steppe-horn horde as part of one of the regular hundreds could have blood on his hands, and a sadistic bastard who liked to tear teeth and nostrils from his debtors. He fixed the debtor's wounds, too, but not too badly, for he was not a particularly pleasant person.

Where spiritual sight alone could not give a definite answer, the readers of thoughts and feelings helped. They were not covered by such a specific disguise but there were fewer of them. Plus, they were called up less often, and Stepan kept a special watch on them so they wouldn't get caught. The number of chronic illnesses among the local people frankly stirred his mind, making him wonder why they could still work, walk, or even breathe. He had to admit that the phrase “if you want to live, you'll be grasping at straws” was true in any world.

The reserve showed the bottom, renewed by meta-skill, and then he renewed the bar of life force, which he also spent quite generously, controllably draining the life to pay for several dark healing spirits, which were eating infections or diseases, every now and then trying to take a bite out of the patient, so they had to be restrained. The second reserve and a quarter of his life reserve showed the bottom, but he only renewed the source, and then he began to distill magic into life force, a skill that wasn't particularly difficult with his advanced spiritual transformation, and he didn't even need to summon a special spirit who could do the same. The sun was slipping towards evening. The passersby and beggars were dispersing little by little. One of them, the most morally normal one, the young man poured into the bowl, unnoticed by everyone, what had been thrown to him, leaving in his own bowl a bent and greenish copper.

Night was about to fall, but he was still treating those who had returned from work to their shacks. One boy had some remarkably persistent form of an obscure disease that had crippled part of his nervous system and now he was doomed to limp on both legs at best. He had to summon a minor but strong spirit that looked like a strange harp, floating like boiling candle wax - this bitch with aspects of threads and music could play on strings, but the strings were nerves and veins. He paid not even for the reserve or offerings, but for the pain he inflicted on the body, but he could mend torn veins or degraded nerves better of other elders. Stepan, of course, did not torture the boy, mirroring his feelings on himself, and he left the body, which made the flesh suffer and sweat, and the spirit only received information about how the body felt bad. The musician, who could be used for torture or a battle blow with the illusion of agony on the square, finished in almost complete darkness. The young man, who had finished with his good deeds and earned almost a seventh of the experience scale, just sat there and went away from the treatment - he had called the string player for nothing because the pain was gone, but the stress of the body was still there.

//“After a day off like that, you should take another day off,” he thought with a slight irritation that he had turned an easy and relaxing vacation into a labor marathon again. . - “I guess I'm unfixable.”

He was distracted from his thoughts of great things by the sound of a coin hitting the bowl, worn and hollow, but still silver, though of the lowest denomination. He looked at the good-hearted individual who had tossed the coin to a ragged geezer in what appeared to be all-black rags, sitting in total darkness, and while the street was so empty that not even the thugs could be seen. The nearest company, if anything, was on its way to collect debts from someone on the opposite end of the neighboring street. The good-hearted citizen turned out to be a street girl, only with a criminal flavor, with the stamp of hard street life on her face, sharp and almost boyish features, black-as-pitch hair, and bright green eyes. He would have given her fifteen, seventeen at the most, but her hands were as calloused and calloused as an adult's, and her eyes were the same.

“What are you looking at, beggar? Go on, go and find lodging. If you won't get cold before morning then you'll just disappear.” Despite the rudeness, he now clearly realized that she was showing a kind of care, showing pity, which had no place on the streets, and therefore had to hide it behind cruelty and anger, including anger at himself, for having felt pity at all. “Are you deaf or dumb? You want a kick in the ass, don't you?”

She was probably masquerading as a boy, aided by a hoarse and low voice, and she was not at all relaxed, despite the pity she showed. Her hand was ready to pull a knife from her belt, and the other to strike with the shiv hidden in her sleeve. And not out of anger or suspicion, just ready, always, as an axiom - you want to live, be ready for the need to use good old ultra-violence, and this need can come literally at any second. It was for such moments he did not like this world, that children, even kind at heart, had to grow up here at an offensively early age.

//“She's gifted!” - Stepan suddenly remarked, concentrating and looking at her with a mixture of magical and shamanic gaze. - “Not too much, just barely, but a unit in Source and Power she's definitely got. She's also sick, yes.”

The aura of the young gifted one, whose gift was in such an embryonic and undeveloped state that she might not have been aware of it only benefiting from the bonuses of greater stamina and survivability, was indeed unhealthy. The yet-to-be-gone healer spirits sitting in his eyes saw no signs of physical sickness, but her aura was in a rather strange state of oppression. Some fragments of the thin body seemed to be covered with a grayish-dusty patina, under which guessed, and only with the full tension of perception of his own and planted in the eyes of a strong spirit, barely distinguishable black dots. A curse, and not the simplest of curses. Stepan and his spirits sensed its danger and complexity, and a tinge of something divine. Whoever her ancestors were, they might have been long ago, but they'd pissed off the higher powers.

Did they loot the temple?

"Are you dead in there, you brat?" Her voice interrupts him from his thoughts, in which he can already hear irritated anger, behind which there is a hidden fear because he has a very uncharacteristic behavior now. "So tell me, I'll take the money, why the fuck am I throwing it away?"

"Your body aches. It aches all the time, doesn't it?" He asked, wrinkling his voice, for he had forgotten why he had kept silent all day to avoid wheezing, as if a dozen equally sick, old, and desperate people and non-humans were speaking through his throat, each word being spoken by a new dozen. "And the pain was getting worse, as if it were not in the body, not in the meat and bones, but deeper?"

The girl stepped back, pulling out both dagger and shiv at once, not running without looking back just because she couldn't bring herself to run from, in fact, a beggar. That's the damage to a whole reputation. An instinct that played against the mind. With her mind, she knew at once that such a fear-monger whistling in a hoarse whisper at her was certainly not just a beggar. She should have run, run, and screamed, as stories and gossip bequeathed when she encountered the inexplicable, but the fact that she was used to running from a bunch of rival gangs, from night slavers and patrols of guards played a role, and she had never met a creature hungry for blood and flesh.

“Stay away. I'm under Burn.” Now her voice is more feminine, which means she intentionally added hoarseness. “D-don't touch.”

"And you don't even want to get rid of the pain?" Stepan clarifies, mentally giving himself another slap, because in his performance and such a voice she will understand something quite different from what he had in mind.

"Fuck it!" She said only in response, turning on her toes and rushing forward, seeming to use the gift unconsciously, because the first of her steps was abnormally wide. "Eee-eeek!"

The last scream sounded quieter than a mouse's squeak, because the spirit Stepan had summoned stole her voice, forcing her to open her mouth in a mute cry, while the wind spirit picked her up in a soft embrace, restraining her and throwing her right in front of the still immovable shaman-volunteer. The third spirit, from the sphere of life, was sent at the last moment and had time to intercept the control of the bladder, or it would be an ugly embarrassment, especially since he was grateful for the girl's generosity. He wanted to repay her generosity, but the longer he looked at what was happening to her aura, the more he realized that he'd have to do a lot of work because he couldn't break the curse right away. A strong spirit and even a team of such, as he was preparing for himself, would not be enough. He couldn't summon an elder now, taking advantage of the fact that he was covered by a unique disguise, and the cure of this street rat fell perfectly within the criteria of that disguise so even the summoning of an elder spirit would be hidden, if not completely, then most of it, leaving only a slight glow on the sensors, and that only if he was unlucky, the chances of that were fifty-fifty, right?

Stop.

Right!

"Hand." He whispers, using his robes like a mediator and a beacon, invoking one of the more fanciful healing contracts that really fits the situation, though it will surely load him up. "Give."

He gave the subordinating impulse personally, without the help of a spirit, and it worked instantly on the untrained and barely gifted one. She let him take her palm, lost and calm, not even realizing what had happened. It was hot and rough as if the girl had a constant and persistent fever that had been present for a couple of months and a very fast heartbeat. But the latter was probably from terror. He paralyzed her, but he did not turn off her mind, for the call of this spirit, she must be fully conscious. This spirit comes to the call and helps to heal curses, but only if you don't demand payment for the healing, otherwise the curse will be thrown on you or he eat you. It also heals only those who received their curse for the sins of their ancestors before the god. The same spirit could also be summoned in the standard way and for very serious offerings, but then he helped to put a curse so that if not all, then the lion's share of ways to transfer or reset these curses did not work.

Stepan was sure that the girl had not worked out such a complex and cunning structure on her own, and even if she had, it would have been ten times cheaper to kill her. Ten thousand times cheaper. A moment, a second, and then he, like the girl, is thrown out of his body. He also has to keep her conscious, because even gifted, she can't think or realize herself in this state. But now, with his help - very much so, seeing all the beauty and strangeness of the world of the high spheres just as he sees it himself. And she sees him, covered in the gray-black haze of the Shroud that hides his appearance, as well as the claws, clawed paws, tentacles, and wings. She can panic, too, but he suppresses that panic, not by subduing or breaking her will, but by sending her the image-confidence that she is in no danger, that she must wait and see.

The spirit is like a whirlwind, a veritable tornado of raven feathers black as night; it falls upon them both, and they both see the same thing. It is as if the girl were looking at her own thin body, seeing the gray patina and the black drops hidden in its depths, which had penetrated her very essence, much deeper than Stepan had even thought at first. Not just sees, no, Stepan feeds her his understanding and realization of what kind of shit it is and how long she has to live with it. And before a new wave of panic hits her, they are both enveloped by black feathers, images of them, images of the belief of the many inhabitants of the apparition, the belief that blackbirds bring curses on their wings, that it is in their power to take the curse back.

//“To take back what was bestowed not on you, as a reward for deeds not you have done, by the expression of anger directed not at you, by the will of those who came once long ago not for you.” - So whispers Stepan in her mind, taking away some of the fear and some of the intensity of the sensation, keeping her from going mad at the sight of the work and the very presence of such a powerful elder spirit, keeping her from losing her mind in this eerie and not for living and breathing people whirling round and round. And, in a moment, when the reserve was dangerously close to its third depletion when it had replenished itself once more, temporarily sacrificing life to be replenished later, when even that replenished was more than four-fifths gone, the feather cloud was gone, gone, vaporized.

They were back in the alley, back in the material world, only now Stepan was no longer squeezing her palm, which should have the marks of his iron grip imprinted with unpleasant bruises. The girl falls on her ass right on the dirty sidewalk, nearly piercing her thigh with her shiv, breathing heavily and struggling to keep from becoming hysterical. Stepan breathes haggardly, like a dog that has run for kilometers, and his clothes distort his breathing even more, making it infernal in the worst sense of the word.

"It doesn't hurt." The girl who forgot to stutter can't even believe what she's saying. "It doesn't hurt."

She came to her senses quickly, however, and shifted her gaze to Stepan, wrapped in his rags and shivering, whose breathing and wheezing could scare the monsters under the bed. He, too, looked at her aura, now knowing exactly where to look, which made him barely restrain a foul swearing in all known languages at once. The grayness was feathering off her, the symptoms were reduced, and the curse was clearly set back. The girl, who could hardly last a year and a half, could now confidently live for three or four years. But the black dots in the deepest layers of her aura and spirit hadn't gone away, not even faded much, at most diminished a little.

“Go away,” Stepan said, which made her immediately remember that she was actually very scared and there was some unknown ominous shit in front of her.

He glanced at the back of the girl, who had started off very fast and had managed to pick up her dropped picks, and put a mark on her for further search, promising himself to find a way to lift the curse. Though, if even the summoning of an exotic of such specific and necessary aspects of the rank of elder didn't help, he certainly wouldn't risk repeating it anytime soon. There were a couple of other elders who could work with aura and curses, and even better than the one who had recently worked, but they would not come to a similar call, and Stepan himself would not call them outside the super-secure protective circle, because he wanted to live. He wouldn't risk it here either, but the combination of knowledge multiplied by the properties of his rags gave him an excellent opportunity. And if he'd tried to put on some protection and amulets and call his retinue to help him, the bastard wouldn't have shown up at all, or even just attacked right away.

The young man sent a couple of spirits after the fleeing brat with criminal tendencies and a carefully concealed good heart, which would provide her with the necessary compulsion so she would not even think of telling about this evening. Kindness is kindness, but it is better to be safe than sorry. An intelligent interlocutor would realize that it was not an ordinary spirit, but something much more powerful, and the call itself, part of it, could be detected even through the protection. For that reason, the shaman should get out of there. Not much had gotten through the disguise of the rags, not enough to raise a citywide alarm or any alarm at all. But the guards might send a patrol or two, just for the sake of checking, so he shouldn't sit here.

Standing up on wobbly legs, he walked to the other end of the street and then went to his shelter, where he sat and meditated until morning, regaining his power and organizing his overworked aura. It was not pleasant to spend more than three reserves in one day. At least with his new property, he could not be afraid of injuries or other consequences, but it did not mean he should neglect prevention at least in the smallest way. And it was better to keep his thoughts of getting a head start by providing healing services under self-control as well. Healers in this world are important, valuable, desirable, and carefully guarding the monopoly at the lower and middle ranks. In the higher echelons, it is not competitors that one should be afraid of, but grateful clients, who would want to acquire such a useful asset for themselves, to take it, to warm it up, and to entangle it thoroughly with obligations, so that it would be only theirs and no one else's.

"Good deeds should be done anonymously." Once again Stepan reminded himself, throwing off his rags in a corner of one of the storerooms, releasing the spirits trapped in them, and then adding more. "Especially if they are also rewarded."

Received: “advanced work with healing spirits”, “basic methods of healing auric and spiritual bodies based on wild magic”, “advanced basic methods of healing auric and spiritual bodies based on wild magic”; significantly increased affinity with the spheres of healing, purity, renewal, clarity, and restoration; increased likelihood of acquiring knowledge and properties of the branch of healing, energy surgery, and spiritual sculpting.

Acquired talents are added to the Player's overall status.

They're very rewarding!

* * *

Stepan thinking of spending on rest the time that Sylvia should have spent on mastering the System knowledge, went down for a couple of days himself, having to process the increased old and brand new block of knowledge. While healing had simply and uncomplicatedly improved pulling the usual cascade of synergy, the new knowledge was noticeably stronger. No, not that, not stronger, but rather more trumped, roughly on par with the same spiritual operation, more advanced in terms of healing work. Working with the aura and spirit, of course, quite allowed for healing the body as well, but the reverse was by no means always true. The worst wounds, curses, and damaging effects are directed at the aura, and healers working with it have to work against the harshest kinds of attacks and influences.

Add to this the fact that the new knowledge did not operate only within the framework of shamanism, initially extending to witchcraft and puppetry, and we get from the next two plus two another one hundred and eighty-five million three hundred and forty-one thousand five hundred and seventy-four. New spirits, new techniques, new approaches, new everything - the array of information required assimilation, and Stepan was forced to spend that time. It could not be said that he was dissatisfied with his new talents and the consequences of that self-appointed quest. The last stage, i.e. summoning an elder spirit “dry”, without preparation, as well as the subsequent healing, brought the scale of the new level to half and a little beyond it, so he was very satisfied. It was just that the weekend was lost again, and there was no more time for it - there were a lot of plans.

After noting a few new contracts, a couple of witchcraft, and envolting techniques he intended to use on that girl ending the curse on her, he plunged into further problems. He saw no reason to look for information on that curse. He was able to analyze and understand that that crap had been sitting in her for at least fifty generations, so he would have to ask at best her great-grandparents, who might not have come to Stepan's call, even if their spiritual bodies were still in good order at the time of their death. Nor was he going to demand payment from the poor girl for the not-too-successful treatment. There was nothing to take from the girl, who had survived thanks to a fleeting attack of pity for a beggar freezing in the street. No, if she had her own personal magical tower on her own magical source, powerful, and with a suitable infrastructure - then yes, he would not hesitate to hint that she could say “thank you” to a kind healer.

No, he was going to do very different things.

"You animal, you have no idea how emotional I am right now," Sylvia says to him as he pleases himself again with a perfectly cooked lamb stew with garlic sauce and a carafe of berry compote chilled especially for him. "My attempts, all my striving, years of labor, decades of tossing, all have yielded less than the single line I have gained with your help. And there was more than one line on my Tablet! Mmmm, it feels almost as good as kissing a vein full of blood magic. Perhaps, my little pet, I will give you permission for two, no, three weeks at a time to demand of me the right to kiss and lick my slit, and, believe me, all these days I will never once refuse you, sitting on your obedient and sweet face."

Stepan was amazed at the way her mind worked, bringing her to such thoughts again and again. It was understandable she considered him completely trained and subordinate. Therefore, wanted such a reward above anything else. But she also considers her “reward” to be fair and incredibly generous, even though she knows exactly the reasons why her “toy” wants such a reward. And nothing in her head does not click, no moral turmoil, doubts, or at least thoughts in the style of “maybe humiliate him a little less in intimate terms?”, only full confidence in her rightness and smugness to the skies. Listen to such thoughts and immediately even those sprouts of conscience, which try to assert the immorality of such use of bloodsucker, immediately wither away, replaced by assurances that he is still too sensitive and can be much tougher.

“I need something different this time - your help practicing resistance to mental and spiritual control, including, but not limited to, your favorite resonance on blood.” He made up his mind, though, especially given the recent news, this option was becoming inevitably necessary. “Given the System I have in place, i.e. the Tablet, the emphasis should be on minimal theory and maximum practice. Some basic knowledge about how to counteract this scourge I have. Now I need to learn how to apply them in the right way. Ideally, I should also pump a couple of lines dedicated to this particular art into the Status, i.e. Tablet.”

"Mm, you have a lot of requests, Pann. If I weren't so sure of your complete obedience, I might worry about you wanting to get out of my noose, if you were capable of such a wish at all.” With undisguised irony, as if the very thought that he, Stepan, suddenly resisted her will, seemed to her incredibly comical, grotesquely impossible, she teased him, achieving only a feeble smile from the Earthman. “As for your request, I don't see the difficulty of it, nor do I see any obstacles to its fulfillment. I, too, could use a few new lines from the same source of power. And you shouldn't be upset, either. If you train seriously, with maximum practice and inevitable defeats, lessons for pride, you'll have time to work with your tongue on my flower.”

Stepan only twitched an eyebrow in response to such a cavalier attempt to push his fetishes even into a serious and important matter. It was the first time he'd ever seen a puppet base malfunction when the modes of submission overlapped, which was why Sylvia had decided to pull her fantasies of sexual domination over the hapless shaman into absolutely serious resistance training. He rolled his eyes, leaving only the whites visible, tapping into her thinking and seeking to correct the slipped and layered streams of thought. To open those eyes a moment later to the envy of the anime girls and suppress the mental mat that was about to come out of her mouth. Because it wasn't a joke or a malfunctioning matrix of spiritual distortion in Sylvia's mind, but the harsh truth. He double-checked several times, secretly hoping to see signs that either Malter or he was crazy, but no, nothing like that.

It was indeed how she had been taught to resist similar effects. And she gave the corresponding lessons to her chicks. That is, the strategy of pressuring through bloody patronage, forcing, for example, to crawl up her legs and lick her boots, begging to be fucked in all her slits - it was a real working exercise, as she had been trained by one of her older brothers-fledglings. And not just because he was a pervert and a complete human being, even if inanimate, no, because it was more effective. Not by an order of magnitude or times, but by seventy percent more effective than other ways, which she also knew. Of course, during the training, there was room for theory, careful demonstrations of how the effect worked, and gradual complication of the material but the point still boiled down to the fact that in such a confrontation the student would inevitably lose.

These defeats can be handled in different ways, both harshly, and harshly, and even painfully, depending on the choice of the teacher and, quite often, of the student. You can turn to the classic tricks of earthly hypnotizers - glued to the table palm, forgetting your name, or convincing that the sky is green. This, alas, is not very effective, because the subconscious mind, which is flooded with someone else's will, does not want to resist what causes neither pain nor other inconveniences, but does calmly and pleasantly. Stepan, as a worthy student of Auto-Damn-Her-Milf, knew that it was true: the lion's share of the correct influence of the subtle and hidden type was to make the subconscious mind perceive the induced influence not aggressively, but as something pleasant, calm, and non-threatening.

The second most effective option is pain, very strong pain, which will train you not to relax your consciousness, not to give up control, otherwise, it is bad, it hurts. You suffer, agonize, and repent. In some aspects, this method is even more effective but has a very significant dropout rate, huge risks of getting some kind of trauma, phobia, or mild psychosis, as well as guaranteed long-lasting aggression and antipathy towards the trainer. Taking into account that Stepan can kill this trainer with a single thought, he may well be left without this trainer after the first couple of sessions, during which he will be compelled to see himself chewing off his hand or dick. The same elves, even dark ones, use such a method - as far as Sylvia could know, which could be wrong - almost never, and this, you must agree, is an argumentative argument.

There were several other approaches and methods, but among them all, the group that stood out was the one recommended by Sylvia's teachers and all those manuals on love magic and methods of counteracting it that she found later. Stepan called it “erotic” as opposed to “methodical” and “agonistic”. Forcing and inclining the consciousness to something vulgar and at the same time completely uncharacteristic - the same licking of everything possible, the conviction that your long-lost love or beloved stepmother was in front of you, involuntary orgasms and impossibility to achieve them, forcing to onanism, both conscious and not, as well as a thousand and one other ways to fill the contents of Pornhub with selected content. First of all, this way the increased effect was achieved, up to “up to seventy percent” - in fact, there was a different formula, Stepan had already converted it into percentages - and the only risk was that they would like what was going on so much that they would have to acquire slightly broader tastes in bed, and this too could be counteracted by proper meditation and self-injury. Secondly, such influences are very easy to identify, they work on the second most powerful lever of influence, that is, on pleasure as opposed to pain, and therefore to isolate them and learn to suppress them much easier both mentally and morally. Thirdly, there was a huge gain in time, because this approach was, with skillful use, really intensive and effective.

There were also fourth and tenth, but the first three arguments were the most important, beating all others. Because, yes, there were methods that allowed one to go that way without any training in a style that even the Autogoddess would approve of, and Sylvia had the right theory, too, but they didn't provide the same time-reliability bond. After all, her teachers had told her, that love magic was named love magic for a reason, even though academically it would be more accurately called “magic of the feelings and passions.” And, worst of all, Stepan perfectly saw the logic and the right approach in it, that was the problem! That is, there were other methods of achieving the goal in his knowledge, even if insufficiently deepened due to the lack of the necessary specialized knowledge, but the effect was still comparable. And he would not apply such methods to himself, because it is like having a debate with himself - you can debate to a split of personality, without moving towards achieving the task.

Honestly, he made a sincere and absolutely firm vow to himself that if at this moment the Autogoddess gave him a quest to learn the favorite method of Sylvia, who smiled ironically in response to his tense musings, he would send everything and everyone away, and then take a longer and more tedious path, perhaps even a painful one. For better or worse, Her Milfness remained silent, though it seemed to Stepan, almost a certainty, that if she had known of the situation, she would have smiled just as Sylvia did. He would have refused anyway, because “fuck it,” as a wise clergyman used to say, but there were so many arguments against his pride and not-so-monolithic principles.

Starting from the fact that he was about to face in battle some infernal creature whose vice, even a Vice, he was sure, was Lust, which in its essence, like any other vice, was a love magic, working on the mechanisms of deep contact with the spiritual body, on the very border of its transition into the matter of the soul. And even he vowed to approach such a thing at a distance closer than a couple of dozen kilometers, intending to attack from behind the horizon and in disguise, to strike with the forces of innumerable spiritual flocks but gods guard the ones who guard oneselfs, especially since demons have a whole arsenal of tricks to counter prayers. His counterarguments ended with the most important one: if he was not mistaken and his namesake, armed with the same class, and arrived a few years ago, before Stepan, was really brought to this world, then he ABSOLUTELY MUST invest in mental defense and countering all kinds of vulgar bullshit as tightly as possible, up to the infusion of free points in the corresponding talents in any available volume.

“Oh, I have a feeling this is going to be terribly regretted yet, but I'll take it.” He said to Sylvia, and immediately shut off her consciousness, pulling out the doll. "I'm going to set a few bans first, or I don't know what you and your teachers had in there about the limits of acceptable damage to honor and dignity. I don't want to wake up in the morning wearing a woman's makeup, dressed in a courtesan's dress, shaved and fucked by someone. And that's exactly how a couple of your chick brothers were taught, damn...”

Sylvia was in a complete mental pause, and therefore could not physically answer him, nor could she hear or otherwise perceive his speech. But it still seemed to him illogical, that she kept silent with a judgment that struck the heart of the callous shaman. He, of course, didn't bother to clarify and banished the idiotic vision far away into the depths of his subconsciousness, from which it had crawled out.

* * *

The first practical lesson didn't start immediately, no. The first thing he and Sylvia did for almost six hours was to exchange experience and knowledge, to share competencies, Stepan even remembered his teaching skills. Clarifying theory, and the boundaries of how deep that theory was, was a matter of importance. Then Sylvia drank a glass of his blood and began to demonstrate the individual knots and the basics of how her effects worked, while Stepan, who was straining his entire spiritual body, tried to feel and understand these effects, to separate them from his own sensations. It was not difficult, because Sylvia didn't try, even on the contrary, she made her influence as noticeable as possible, only masking it for the sake of decorum.

"That's the other side of resonance control, it's believed, my pet. By making these impulses deliberately visible to the recipient, I am able to speak to them, whisper in their ears, and if they exchange blood with each other, even talk to each other." In her words I can hear a kind of old, old nostalgia multiplied by the same old, let's say, not sadness, but melancholy about the past. “It's rare to apply, rare to achieve the right balance where all parts of the whole come together. My parent, bloody drop to his unknown ashes, was a true master of this trick. He could, if he wished, bind the whole nest together like a single organism. He was accustomed to the fact that at any moment he could make his nest a single attacking flock, capable of wiping the enemy from the face of the earth and the sight of heaven. That's what ruined him. He got too proud and forgot how numerous humans are, how intolerant they are of those who are too dangerous, too poisonous. Eh, I'm glad of what I've become, glad of where I've come to, but I still miss the unity we all knew under his net of scarlet thoughts. Enough, though. Pann, signatures, list in order of decreasing intensity.”

Stepan, who had been listening for a while and almost lost concentration, only nodded and, after taking a few more seconds to refresh the sensations in his memory, immediately started listing. In a voice dry from extreme concentration and slightly hoarse from the long conversation he began listing the requested things.

"Left leg, four nodes, numbness. Right leg, one knot, shot cramp, under the knee. Right arm, clear." Here he pauses, as he has already listed the simplest effects, set to physical effect. "Left hand, control override, finger sweep, partial success, didn't immediately notice. Cortex-amort, sensual sphere, itching on the nose. Cortex-malaar, sensual sphere, the urge to stretch out my legs and relax, recline in a chair. Also, more of a kind of... latirmas-malaar?"

"Is that what you're asking me, pet? I don't need questions, but the exact certainty and the given nodal description, if you haven't had time, just say so, and I'll lower the frequency." In her now we can see both strictness and calmness, which exactly convince Stepan that she was definitely a teacher in her long life, these notes can not be etched by any means. "I know it's hard, especially since you don't answer and don't put a hard block on it, just monitor it, but try to keep your concentration on the small threads, they are the basis of the loop if you miss them. So?"

"Latirmas-malaar." The young man speaks more confidently now, and towards the end does catch the right moment, identifies the impact, and smiles slightly at her trick. "The mental sphere, the emotive bias, the instilled sense of uncertainty, of wrongness, of fear of error. It's clever."

In response, Sylvia gives him the same satisfied and slightly approving grin, and a new series of influences, which for the time being are only to be identified. But soon enough, the tasks became tougher and the methods of control more and more sophisticated. In any other situation, he would have been saved by the spirits, by a direct manifestation of spiritual control and an exit from the body, by a blow and an attack on the controller, but now he can't use it all. That's not the lesson. He needs, initially it is important, to learn to catch the influence that has already partially or completely passed through his defense and now tries to take root in his consciousness. And, it should be said, he was doing quite well. The extensive transformation had changed his spirit enough for him to feel more acutely the compulsions tuned to ordinary humanoids, and simply the ability to use the gift at the level of a Senior Shaman. The same spiritual dialog often involved something very similar, both applying suggestions to spirits themselves and blocking their attacks of a similar type. The only difference was that there it was from the outside, and here it was from the inside, through the blood.

It's difficult, but nothing insurmountable yet, and the experience is dripping in little by little.

The first major test came towards the end of the first class when he had already had time to get a little tired and meditate while Sylvia herself had burned off some of her bloody reserve in active training. She came back hungry, washed clean of dust and grave earth, one of her blows having damaged the fortified foundation and covered her with dirt, dressed in nothing but a bathrobe and gazing carnivorously at Stepan's already exposed vein. Again, as then, she drank him almost dry, and he, already losing consciousness and sinking into darkness from which there is no way out, manages to activate the restoration of life and reserve in succession. The look on Malter's face, fully satiated and oozing with overflowing power, was somewhat anxious and worried, and she only shook her head with a distinctly judgmental expression.

“I can't believe you'd take such a stupid risk just to practice.” She spoke to his face in the tone of a self-righteous coworker or a negligent subordinate. “For sustained control, even with your resistance, far less would have sufficed, even a third, even a quarter of what you gave. And yes, I warn you again - with that much of your blood, you're guaranteed to lose. Tablet or not, you cannot hold my momentum, unless you call your retinue or escape from the shackles of flesh altogether. And even then, the latter won't help, not at this resonance. I can feel you down to the last node of your aura right now.”

He shrugged, taking off his shirt and sitting in the chair across from Sylvia, knowing full well what she was saying. And also knowing full well that his System was much more willing to give out experience and rewards for truly difficult challenges. Normally, he himself was all for slow and gradual progress, but that was as long as he was that slow and progressive, exclusively on his own, and not a lagging nub behind his sinister namesake. Hell, he hadn't made fun of Fatty before, hadn't even called him Fatty, but now, when he considered how his quirks and complexes would fit in with the system and the special class... frankly, it was a frightening and sinister picture, so let him risk being subordinated by the already subordinate Sylvia rather than another Stepan. Of course, he could count on the fact that the latter, by virtue of an old friendship, would not mock his former friend, but, to tell the truth, it was better not to hope. And it's disgusting to rely on someone else's mercy, no matter how it is, he wants to be able not only to stand up for himself but also to give a beating to the One Who Doesn't Know About the Gym.

"I'm ready, Sylvia, you may begin, my dear mistress." Fully concentrating all his attention on the spiritual body, he speaks with a confidence that he himself does not feel, and he knows that she can read and discern this uncertainty through the blood bond. "I can't concentrate any harder, I can't prepare myself better, and as you know, you can't breathe enough before death. The last breath is too sweet."

"Don't be dramatic, Pann, I know exactly what I'm doing, and I won't hurt anyone I've taught or trained on." The vampiress says soothingly. That looks exactly as surreal as it sounds, and then immediately adds. "Almost. And don't bulge your eyes, pet, it's a sign of low culture. I begin."

Her words were true, and he felt it at once. The vaguely familiar sensation he'd felt in the midst of the ruined and dead Bzds, on the very edge of awareness, now swept in unabated, unconcealed, and in full measure. He could counterattack, strike back, force the impact to break, and defend himself, but that's not the point. He begins to counteract, bend the spirit, catch the alien presence, squeeze it out, and push it out of the spiritual body. But it's difficult, it's exhausting, it takes time, and it's impossible to get rid of the source, the blood Sylvia drank. Not without training, not without the proper invocations that could help “renounce” the blood he drank, even through Sylvia's blockage. And so he continues the essentially hopeless struggle, trying to catch, grasp, hook, and gnaw away a few more minutes.

Sweat dripped from his forehead, his eyes watered from the sensations, his body became hot, and the young man did not know where in that heat his efforts, the overheating caused by incredible tension, and where the compulsion that spread all over his body with hot shoots, like ivy that tormented the brick wall, slowly and steadily destroying the masonry. Only now it is not slow, not even ten minutes have passed, and Stepan has already surrendered part of his position, feels how his spirit is boiling, how his will is melting and his consciousness is floating away. But that's how intensive training should be, on the very edge, on the very edge of defeat, and he continues to fight, feeling Sylvia slightly reducing the pressure, pretending that he manages to shift some of the onslaught back. This, this give-and-take, the realization that she wasn't even trying hard enough, acting half-heartedly and pulling back even that half-heartedness now and then, made him almost frantic, a wild attack of motivation, a desire to surpass and prove.

The heat of anger allows him to win back some of his control without giving in, even if she doesn't act with all her skill, the heat grows, the heat helps, he holds on a little longer, and then a little longer, straining to the limit, vaguely aware that he's twitching in his chair like a seizure, twitching his legs as if trying to escape somewhere, running in place, not getting out of his chair. And then his tension, anger, and heat reach a climax, and he pushes her control out of him with a long, growling groan, relaxing back in his chair, collapsing like a jellyfish pulled ashore, feeling the pulses of heat and contentment, even pleasure, almost pleasure, shooting through his physical body. With difficulty concentrating, he is surprised to feel viscous wetness in his groin, to feel jet after jet leaves his copiously released seed. It felt a little strange, but it didn't take the smile, victorious and satisfied, off his face as he looked at Sylvia smiling, almost laughing.

"I see you had a good time, pet?" After waiting for his tired and satisfied nod, she unfastens her robe and spreads her legs. "Then will you make me feel good too? That would be fair enough, wouldn't it? As a reward for your undeniable victory in the first beat of our peculiar battle?"

Her words sound surprisingly logical, and he, still reeling from the ejaculation, slides off the chair and kneels before her, again, only now of his own free will, already victorious. Her pussy smells of expensive soap and fragrant oil, something floral and tart, and her arousal, her desire for caress, and he gives it to her. The first kiss comes out even timidly, he just touches her lips with his lips, runs his tongue over them, kisses the bump of her clitoris, and then he is overwhelmed by a mixture of desire to caress and possess at the same time, and he presses his whole face into her. Pressing in, kissing and caressing with his tongue, his lips, his whole face rubbing against the soft and slightly cool skin, feeling the strong thighs clenching around his head, the peaked flesh pulsing around his penetrating tongue, feeling her taste on his lips, still as sweet but now seeming like the taste of victory.

She holds him in this position for not too long, gradually loosening her grip on his hips and control, letting him know that his desire is not really his, that the taste on his lips is not a victory, but simply the love juices of the seductive bitch who has fucked him again. The realization comes somewhere around her third orgasm, when he pulls back slightly from the pale pink bud, realizing that the desire to lick her forever and continuously no longer overpowers him. Reflexively, obeying the movement of her hand in his hair, he still presses himself into that pussy, runs his tongue over it a few more times, but immediately moves higher, to her flat belly, to her now even more voluminous breasts, kissing his way to her lips, covering them with a kiss, which she readily responds to, and then slips out of his embrace, at an unrealistic speed managing to switch places with him, putting the guy in her chair, being on top.

With a touch of her palm to the spot on his pants, she forces the seed to gather into a tight white ball. It levitates over her palm, and she swallows the incredibly nourishing treat, as for a vampire, and then kneels pulling down his pants in one motion. A moment and the tip of his cock is already embraced by her lips, already caressed by his nimble tongue, already captivated by the grip of her cool lips, gentle and knowing exactly what they want. It spills into her mouth after only five minutes, and only because it had already poured out recently, only because Sylvia herself was stalling for time, enjoying the process, for which she had discovered an incredible attraction and a desire to hone her skills. She didn't let out a drop, swallowing it all the way down, caressing just the head, then swallowing his full length, finally stopping and lifting him to his feet in a single spurt.

A moment, and he was half lying in his chair, while she was sitting in hers again. He's a little more than a quarter of his reserves gone, and his condition is surprisingly stable and tolerable, but he won't be able to repeat his heroic resistance in the next half hour, and he probably won't want to. He remains silent for a while, while Sylvia reads a book she'd brought, some alchemical handbook, as if nothing had happened. She catches the moment when he's ready to talk and discuss what happened even faster than he does, putting the book down on the table and staring intently into his eyes.

"Are you going to name your mistakes yourself, or shall I help you?" She asked with superiority, but without direct mockery, as if she wasn't trying to insult, except to tease a little. "Well, other than the one that got you into such an unfavorable confrontation on the spot? Was it even worth the risk of dying under my scarlet kiss?"

Stepan rolls his eyes at the experience bar and recognizes, only to himself, that it was worth it - lecherous development multiplied by peaceful development, polished by intensive development, has brought a meaningful and pleasant result. The level hadn't gotten any closer directly very meaningfully, but, for just a two-hour exercise, even when you factor in the sex that followed, it was still just fine, even excellent. The wound on his pride, he would probably survive, especially since a couple more such battles on the edge of possibilities and he would definitely get the block of knowledge he needed. It would be much harder to repeat such a defeat.

"The moment with my anger when I felt I was winning." He answers the question posed, recalling his thoughts and feelings. "You did something, you equalized mental and physical tension and, uh, intimacy, so when I thought I had squeezed some of your controlling resonance out of the subtle body, there was a moment when that tension came out, and I, ahem, came out too."

“Right, in principle, but now, pet, let's go through the phases. From beginning to end, describe your actions and mine, what moves were more effective, and where you lost more than you gained.” She doesn't give a hoot about his pride or the wounds on that one, but isn't that what he was expecting when he agreed to such training, especially since she's already sparing him as much as possible? Much more than she was spared herself. “Begin, if you don't remember clearly enough, meditate, I didn't blank out the memories, but they may have dimmed themselves in the flow of pleasure and the conflict induced by my scarlet drip and your spirit's conflicted delirium.”

They continued the lesson, interspersing the theory with new practical tests, short, just for a couple of seconds, when Sylvia, again wrapped in her robe, showed the methods she had recently used to defeat him. The experience was indeed flowing with such intensity that it was embarrassing, her grasp of the subject growing, and her ability to fend off new advances more deftly. Still charged to the eyebrows with his blood, Sylvia didn't need to renew the blood leash, so they sat down for the second round after only a couple of hours. The young man had already had time to fully recover from the strain, to calm his mind and meditate, at the same time making a plan for further confrontation. The first time he had rushed into battle without a second thought, but now he would know where to start.

Another charge of someone else's will. A conflict between that will and his own. Again gradually appearing centers-directions-vectors of control, which Stepan carefully suppressed. Very quickly he realized that this time Sylvia was not repeating the previous tricks, even the main direction of influence was different. She was trying to induce not arousal, which would turn into an uncontrollable outburst, but a drowsy and lethargic fatigue. If in the first round, he'd felt himself burning in the cold flames of her passion, now it was as if he were drowning, wrapped in a tight and thick blanket, restraining movement, thought, consciousness. He realized with barely a whiff of irritation that he had become much slower to react and think, to forget how to resist her control, to forget that he was opposing her. For a moment he realized that he had been looking at Sylvia smirking at him for almost a minute now, smiling at her with a satisfied and victorious, but even a little affectionate smile, and simply not doing anything, not remembering that he was doing anything at all.

She parted her lips and simply said one short word to him: “‘Sleep’” - short, quietly, without order, more like permission to stop holding back, and he immediately closed his eyes, sinking into a deep and warm darkness, a viscous cocoon from which he had no desire to get out. He woke up as if on an alarm clock, fully awake and knowing exactly what he had to do, he immediately got up from the chair, approached his mistress, and began to cover her body with kisses. Shoulders, neck, collarbones, and, of course, breasts, snow-white, large, soft, and enticing enough to make it hard to think of anything but those breasts. He himself did not remember how long he had spent in such a state, licking those hemispheres, caressing with his lips and tongue the hard pale pink nipples, almost blending in color with ordinary skin, not noticing anything around him. Such as the fact that Sylvia had long since ridden him right back in the chair, that he was coming down into her gut again and again, simultaneously stoking the tantric hearth and doing his best to cause her more pleasure. Ironically, he came out of the trance with more reserve than he had at the time of his trance dive. He was reflexively replenishing both himself and her, and she wasn't interfering in the slightest, concentrating on getting more pleasure.

"I seem to have lost even faster this time." The shaman said a little irritably as clarity returned to his mind and Sylvia got off him, walking over to the sideboard in the corner, where she pulled out glasses and some alcoholic stuff like rum and poured a lot of alchemically charged pepper into it. "Oh, thank fuck, thank fuck, I'm going to fucking die!"

“Don't be dramatic, this concoction has a specific flavor, but it helps you recover even after a full night of passion, and you can't get intoxicated from one bowl, not with your aura, Pann.” She mixed another batch, only now with less alchemy, and handed it to him, too. “Once the burning in your throat is gone, drink this one too, just not in a volley. And you shouldn't be upset, really. I've made a lot more effort this time. However, you also made a lot of new mistakes, the most important of which was not being ready to change the vector of suggestion - the drowsiness, you know, is the favorite weapon of a sensualist, if only because it is terribly effective in the right application. However, let's get to the subject matter, start listing and describing the tactics of our fight, one by one - my move, your counteraction, degree of success.”

And again the discussion, theoretical speculations, and rather heated arguments. He had something to say on the subject. He having tried to keep her influence on himself, understood much better how to resist it, especially due to shamanic methods of working with his spirit. Sylvia, in any case, was satisfied like the whole world population of elephants, which, by the way, existed in this world too, because she, regardless of the success, was also gaining experience, and, characteristically, even more than Stepan. And this at a formally higher level, damn it! Of course, it's not good to be envious, and even more so of your subordinate doll, but he was still jealous, wanting to shout to the heavens indignant “MY BUTT DOESN'T BURN”. The only thing that stopped him was that the heavens could hear.

By the third time, Stepan had time to sleep and regain his moral strength. Luckily, Sylvia had kept her blood in resonance all this time and didn't demand a new scarlet kiss. According to the traditions of all kinds of fantasy, he should have succeeded at the third attempt, because the third time's a charm and all that, but he failed this attempt, too, though not as defeated as the last two. Without even trying to strive for victory, his goal was to last as long as possible, and by shutting down the main thinking areas of his spiritual body, he stood for a long time. He wasted nearly two-thirds of his reserve, lost control of the very ability to move, and fell under partial paralysis, but he could still think relatively calmly, right up until the moment when Sylvia stood up, threw off her robe, and simply turned her back to him, wiggling her ass right in front of his face, simultaneously pressuring his libido and causing his gaze and thoughts to fixate until there was nothing left in his mind but the image of her buttocks moving in a quiet rhythm.

He woke up kissing the gorgeous buttocks of the vampiress, who leaned over and leaned on the chair, allowing him to kiss her pale ass. Judging by the taste in his mouth, he also had time to lick the exposed pussy, but that moment was simply lost in the flow of images of her ass and admiration for her. He got up from his knees in mild irritation, which he was careful not to let turn into rage, and immediately began to fuck the willing Sylvia without words or foreplay, rewarding her with slaps on the buttocks every time she gave him a triumphant and mocking look. The fact that she enjoyed it and she was deliberately pissing him off so that she could get another spanking and show him again how much power she had over him, that she could make him spank her lovely buttocks without magic, only added to the spice.

But on the fourth time, when he, who had learned all the previous lessons, strengthened his weaknesses, and consciously merged some of his positions for the sake of greater emphasis on the most important areas, took up the task, he succeeded. He spent almost all his strength, cum in his underwear several times in a row, fell asleep with his eyes open, and then barely took them away from Sylvia, who had spread her legs and began to caress herself fondling her breasts. But he held out for the three hours specified in the terms of the exercise. The upholstery of the chair could be wrung out, his spiritual body was a little whimpering from the constant tug-of-war, the shaman's appearance was such that he could be mistaken for a relatively fresh ghoul, and his aura was suffering from the overstretching of certain nodes. But he still won, even if Sylvia still wasn't acting seriously and at full strength. So he was only playing on her field, not trying to fry her with direct lightning attacks to cut off control!

"Congratulations, pet, and also a mild admiration. Amazingly fast progress, I can't even believe it." The bitch lets herself praise her enslaved shaman, proud of the fact that she managed to subdue him despite his talents, and then so quickly taught him to fight against his own subjugation, without seeing any strangeness or inconsistency in these facts. "Am I right in understanding that that sudden leap in the skill of your resistance was caused by the gift of the Tablet, a new line of it?"

"Yes, that's right, that's right." He drank a full carafe of slightly warm tea, or rather, its analog, with a lot of lemon and a couple of drops of soft elixir of recuperation, purchased through the system, a couple of drops from the bottle were enough for three hundred of those drops. "Uh, now I'll digest the knowledge, I won't be disturbed until morning, it's been a hell of a night."

"It's morning, Pann, so I won't bother you until nightfall, and then you can tell me whether to wait or continue." Sylvia nodded, getting up from her chair and going about her business while Stepan checked her thoughts to see if she had done anything wrong with her control or had any plans to do so in the future, finding only the usual loyalty and obedience disguised even from herself. "Just be warned that next time I'll hold back a lot less, if at all."

She left her last word and ominous promise, and Stepan threw off his sweaty clothes and went to the bathroom. The vampires of this nest knew a lot about quality ablutions and bathing procedures, so the shaman lounged in the water perfectly, while the trained servants, who were charmed to ignore the guest, put his clothes in order. He lazily contemplated whether to call one of the bloodsuckers to keep him company, but frankly, he was so fucked up, in both senses, that he wanted nothing more than to rest. Already collapsed on the bed, he let his body relax and opened his mind to the flood of information.

Received: “basic practices of spiritual-cognitive confrontation”; increased intuitive understanding of the degree of control of one's spiritual bodies; increased likelihood of acquiring the knowledge and properties of the agent, mind healer, and suggestor branches.

Acquired talent added to the overall Player Status.

The new knowledge was surprisingly appropriate. It was not purely defensive, though, allowing him to not only catch attempts to control himself, but also to deceive others' defenses, attention, and readiness when imposing control of his own. A double-edged sword, and useful in every way. But as with any sword, it should be drawn from its sheath first. Yes, with this knowledge, it would be much easier to overcome a spell, a bloody resonance structure, an attempt to influence through some primitive envolt, to curse or bless, but everything depended on whether one could notice the moment of influence, the moment when the outer defenses were passed. But if he could, it would be much easier to fight back his own thinking. It would be even easier to bypass such protection, to get into someone's head without disturbing passive defenses or honed active reflexes.

There was an expansion of contacts and contracts with the possibility of calling new spirits, which could relieve some of the burden, especially in combat conditions, there were outputs and a lot of local spells on the territory, which would be able to monitor the state of the shaman, while he is on this territory, with which he is connected. Very good defense and, importantly, a relatively passive form, although it requires preparing the ground under himself, which is also fraught with problems. Methods of remote strikes and defenses, when protecting and checking your spirits in a dozen kilometers of subjective space, and it is not seen by those trying to get into the head of the shaman. Ways to make his suggestion from a distance of those very kilometers, although here it is more difficult - the spirit needs if not the possibility of direct contact, then at least a lens-targeting based on some amulet, mark, or totem.

The ways of using the new knowledge seized Stepan so much that he woke up at midnight and ate excellent cheese pasta, the cheese being bought at the Borshakl cheese factory, he was picking up a familiar spiritual trace, not paying any attention to the rich shades of flavor or to Sylvia, who had come to keep him company, full of readiness and anticipation. Apparently, she was eager to pump herself up, to get another talent and spend it on something tasty, so she was ready not only to train Stepan but even to go on some kind of battle raid in order to fight strong opponents and properly pump herself up. She didn't care who she had to fight but luckily she was a really peaceful creature, almost a pacifist by the standards of both vampires and the local society in general, so she didn't go further than sweet dreams of rivers of blood and future levels. And what this world lacked was a pumped-up bloodthirsty creature who was going to naturally farm and grind the local population for exp.

“I will go full force this time, but what will play for you is that some of the blood used for the scarlet loop I have already burned off, so the extreme pressure of my will will be more bearable.” She explained, pacing around the room and flaunting herself, even dressed not in a pantsuit, but in a heavy and long dress with a deep and slightly tight neckline. “Today and in the future, expect not only direct attacks, but a combined approach, hiding one compulsion behind three others. Prepare yourself, you'll find it even harder than yesterday, I promise. And more enjoyable. I promise, too.”

"You may begin, most beautiful lady." The sarcasm in the young man's words could fill the cracks in the concrete fortifications, but she obviously didn't notice the sarcasm. "Try to be gentle with me, but don't hesitate to be tough. Damn, I've always wanted to say that line in all seriousness. Gestalt's closed, though."

Alas, the only good news apart from the phrase he had said, was that his experience was still growing. The first act of the confrontation ended even more defeat than the previous defeats. The young man did not realize the trick until the last. He was again soaked, again gave out everything he could give out, confronting not a single shaft of another's will, but hundreds of individual needles and worm-like threads, as if climbing into his vessels and through them into his head. It seemed to him, sincerely seemed to him, that he had overcome the compulsion, and so, quickly throwing off his clothes and caressing his cock as he walked, he went naked into the bathroom, quickly washed off the sweat and fatigue, and then came back. Sylvia was already partially naked, pulling her dress up, exposing her long legs and tender pussy, which was so attractive to the eye.

“Don't you want to celebrate another little victory, Pann?” She asked, glowing with contentment and affection so pleasing to his senses. "I think your success deserves a little tongue work on my petals, don't you? You're a good, clever boy, you've managed to throw off my control and now I won't make you lick, now you can do it yourself, of your own accord, and I'll respond in kindness, submit to your will, so be it. Come on, don't hesitate, or I'll change my mind.

The young man procrastinated, not because he was resisting. What was the point of resisting if he had won and she could no longer control him? She can't even try. He hesitated because of an acute sense of deja vu. And also it seemed to him for some reason, with stunning clarity, that she should not be wearing this dress, but that robe from yesterday - dark blue, with a memorable pattern. It was as if he'd seen this moment somewhere else, this victory and his victorious right to lick the vampire's pussy, but he couldn't remember where, so he lost a few seconds, which he made up for by crawling toward Sylvia's dress on all fours. It seemed like a great idea to him. She'd made him crawl like that the first time they'd met, made him do it under her control, and now he was doing exactly the same thing, but at will, as if mocking her.

The young man was covered with a pile of fabric when Malter lowered the hem of her dress, but he had already managed to press his face into her crotch, already kissing her inner thigh, forgetting all his problems and thoughts. She released the compulsion very slowly, gradually, as if giving him a moment to realize the wrongness of his actions, and he, to his shame, realized this wrongness quite late, even under partial control continuing to believe in his victory. Unwillingly and unplanned, Sylvia caught him on the same hook that he used to justify her submission - unwillingness to admit to himself that you were fucked. Stepan delayed the decision until the last moment, continuing to lick and kiss, slowly and carefully masturbating, so as not to cum and not to spill his seed past her mouth. He finally realized the extent of his failure only after he had come down the insatiable throat of the subordinate creature, immediately pausing her, turning off her thoughts and consciousness.

Checking himself of all things, as well as her, but through the doll, he was very careful. He had even called upon a couple of spirits already summoned beforehand, who were monitoring his training and would have to prevent Sylvia from taking advantage of his defenselessness if she somehow got free. Still, it was a mirror image of how he'd subdued her and so he had to worry, or little else, it was better to be careful in such matters. Fortunately, nothing dangerous could be found, the control on Sylvia's consciousness was unbreakable and the thought of subjugating her toy by any additional means did not and could not even cross her mind. Why? He was already completely submissive to her, there was nothing to think about.

"Hidden resonance. And you didn't hide it behind the main attack, but before it started. You started the loop intentionally weak, with a low danger threshold, when you attacked from a dozen vectors at the beginning. I reflected all of them and, it seemed to me, burned them out, but one, apparently, not to the end, and then the main attack came, forcing me to focus on it, distracted and not finish the check." Stepan commented on his defeat without anger, he had time to get used to it, especially since the lesson was really valuable, and learned in practice. "Did you choose this vector from the beginning or strike where you saw weakness? Because if the first option, I understand why you have mastery in the bloody control."

"Yes and no, Pann. I originally intended this outburst to be this way, in this particular form, deliberately influenced from so many origins but I was sure any of them would do, not just the one you failed to weed out." If the International Bureau of Weights and Measures were to host such an exhibit as “smug bitch,” Sylvia would be hired for the position without an interview, by default. "And you missed not only one of the vectors, but a third of them at once, and a couple more you just didn't notice, but I let them go already, it was more important for me to direct the drop of scarlet along the channel you considered blocked. Actually, I won't even hide that our further game of fairground log pushing was necessary only to hide my compulsion. The taste of victory especially such a swift one is intoxicating like dragon wine, and our minds cling to the possibility of tasting it.

"Thank you for the lesson, ma'am, I remembered it." The Earthman muttered, wiping from his head the images of being scammed like a fish in the clutches of crooks - they work the same way there, but without magic and brainwashing, playing on pride and unwillingness to admit that you were a fish. "And I hope I've learned."

"Always glad to help, either with advice or deeds, my dear." Her smile would have made the gardens bloom now, whereas Stepan's face would have made them wither, and so it was just like that, nothing changed. “Shall we start again?”

And so they began, pausing for rest, then clashing in the confrontation of wills. Now, it had taken Stepan three days and six attempts to get the right mechanics working, learning how to counter even the uninhibited Sylvia with sufficient effectiveness. Fortunately, if one is aware of being affected by a mentalist, the sword and shield situation mirrors back and defense requires less strength and skill. Well, if defending yourself for a limited time and under controlled conditions. That's why mentalists lose to everyone in direct combat, that's why they have to work against a completely defenseless victim, preferably chained and doped with alchemy, or simply unaware of the fact that they are being affected. On the other hand, this only applies to those who are at least equally gifted, or if the mentalist's advantage is not absolute. Because at the level of the same “Presumably Namesake” who opened his mouth on a god and almost swallowed it, in direct combat he can if not tie the brains in a knot then just burn them.

Stepan had paid for these six attempts with a significant chunk of his own self-importance, but Sylvia did not repeat herself and did not suffer from a lack of creativity. Another good thing was that, even without any additional compulsion on his part, she behaved correctly and did not go further than light jokes and smug comments. It was a common practice to distinguish between the actions of the mentor and the opponent so that one would not be confused with the other and that normal relations could be maintained later. After the defeat, she was always courteous, calm, and serious, not pushing or hurting, but only teaching, showing, explaining, and revealing her knowledge.

But during their peculiar duels, she was a thousand times a hundred. In the opinion of the boy, who found himself, time after time, in an extremely delicate situation. To plunge into complete and utter indifference, knowing perfectly well that Sylvia had pulled his specially tried-on underwear over his face and left him in that position for a couple of hours. Completely paralyzed his thinking and body, bringing him to catatonia and the certainty that he, in fact, had become a footstool, and then to read a book, putting those feet on his back, occasionally stroking with her feet the сock erect and throbbing from unconscious arousal. Instill an urgency to lick his buttocks, so urgent that he can't even remember why he's going to do it in the first place. Convince him that there has been a release of alchemical gaseous poison in the room where their class is being held and he urgently needs to save himself by sitting Sylvia on his face, which of course she will agree to. To relax and at the same time angered at how easily she passes his defenses, how she plays with his mind and feelings, making him blaze with vengeful desire, which was expressed in the fact that he put her on his knees and repeatedly slapped his cock on her smiling face, coming down from just this measured touch, literally flooding her face with a solid white mass.

And so, on the sixth attempt, it ended the way he wanted it to. He hadn't spent even half of his reserve, he was constantly on guard, keeping the vampire's mind and sensuality in check. In this attempt, she tried to play on his insecurities, to confuse his thoughts and knowledge, to convince him that she wanted to make him not lick his pussy, not kiss his buttocks, not beg him to sit on her face, and so clearly that it made him suspect the opposite, that that was exactly what he needed to do, but that she had distorted his perceptions so that the norm no longer seemed normal. She lacked skill, to be honest, just experience and practicing an obviously new, previously unused trick, so she made a couple of blunders and he took advantage of them. The shaman had almost lost that round anyway, almost ready to put her on his head again but at the last moment he noticed the scarlet web on his consciousness, her reflection in the spiritual world, and immediately began to tear those chains as hard as he could.

Despite his losses, it was in sheer strength and skill with the spirit that he was not too much inferior to her, if not superior in some aspects, and Sylvia herself had been in a hurry, too relaxed from the victory that had almost been accomplished, letting it slip away in the last few minutes. He hadn't even expected, to be honest, when he went on the offensive, that he would be able not only to burn out her presence and will, but also to counterattack, sparingly and accurately, forcing him to break the connection and cover his eyes, to extinguish the annoying grin. For a few seconds, the system seemed to think about how to react, but finally did give out that his new skill had been upgraded to “advanced basic practice of spiritual-cognitive confrontation.” Stepan was still a bit put off by the internalization process, though. He grabbed Sylvia's arm with all the power available to the trio of corporeality, threw her, not even resisting, to the floor, pulled up the damn dress, pulled down the satin underwear, and dumped all the accumulated irritation mixed with tension. Harshly, sharply, rapidly bringing his partner to the peak, and then again and again, deliberately accelerating the tantric technique to the limit, to the moment when she couldn't stand it and started moaning and screaming, and then turned off, plunged into a trance, absolutely submissive and obedient.

He lifted her in that position, kneeling her down and taking her into his mouth, having previously ordered her to be careful with her teeth, and already her reflexes and lust had finished the job. He didn't order her to suck, but she subconsciously wanted to and immediately moved her head with the clarity of a metronome, up and down, up and down, as if nodding to the words she heard alone, looking nowhere with completely blank and gradually rolling eyes. Leaving her to come to her senses, with her face covered equally with her drool and his seed, stains on her dress, and the sensation of an unrealistically pleasurable fuck all over her body, he went to the bathroom and to the side. He didn't feel like talking or even discussing anything. The young man was very stressed by the series of defeats and constant exhaustion of all his strength and thoughts, and he wanted to lose steam and rest. He lost steam, but rest, alas, only after accepting knowledge. The system deemed the pause to end exactly the moment his head touched the pillow. This time the assimilation took only a little more time, but it was more intensive than the base assimilation, and there were more connections with other knowledge, especially in the work with territory and, strangely enough, with contracts. The ability to chew out other people's control, in fact, helped quite well against contracts and obligations, especially those that are oriented on the mind and thoughts of the one who makes the deal. Any merchant or other swindler would sell his soul for such knowledge, especially if it was not his own, but someone else's, ideally a competitor in the market.

He was still rolling around in his head with plans to summon a very funny older spirit that worked with other people's mental commands and compulsions. The young man was even tempted to call the essence of the sphere of thoughts with aspects of appropriation and theft, a professional hijacker of other people's sex toys because the spirit with amazing skill rewired all the controlling influences on someone else's mind so that the target changed the owner. And it worked with almost any approach, from simple and standard, through the classic mentalistic, to exotic conjuration potions, from the created envolt, which will make an ordinary chump, pulling all the power to the new doll in Stepan's hands, to all sorts of subjugating tattoos and artifacts sewn into the body, which will change the binding. It was a strong entity, on a par with other higher beings and a step away from such, though, of course, it too had a limit and a lot of restrictions. The Earthman wished to summon it, obviously not to steal a harem from the local sultan, but to study the very mechanics of its abilities. The very indifference to the method of control with which it broke and rewrote subordination on the basis of almost any magic school. If this method could be unraveled and reverse-engineered, it would literally be the key to a universal mental shield.

Or an equally universal mental hack.

Stepan dozed off right when he was thinking the last thought, and immediately he had another avalanche of dreams, which he had not had for a long time, well, not so intense. Bunnies in Abibas sneakers were laughing cruelly, jumping on the skulls of random passersby, and shoving Dudasel batteries in all their holes. Nikola Tesla was beating Elon Musk with a big stick, demanding that he remove the scientist's name from the brand name, while the entrepreneur claimed with knocked-out teeth that “Zhat wosh plannet”. A group of North Koreans would enter a breach that led to a systemic apocalypse-like dungeon that had come to Earth, and then slaughter the predatory deer-like creatures that lived there for meat, cooking them over an open fire right there. A beautiful, even very, very beautiful and deadly Asian woman was swearing in pure American English at a young red-haired man dressed in heavy enchanted armor, no less dangerous, with a very insolent cat hovering around his feet, and she was yelling that he, the Watchmaker, was to blame for everything, everything at all, and she pronounced the profession of a master of clockwork mechanisms as if it were a name.

* * *

Stepan saw himself standing in the middle of a familiar city, not alone, but in someone's company. A company he didn't need, but necessary if he wanted to keep his job and not ruin his legend. Stepan looked at the city's magical tower, which today seemed to him not particularly ominous, no, but foreboding danger and the danger came from the tower, not from those who lived in it. He did not want to go forward, did not want to move further, closer to the tower and the magical quarter, but the crowd, or rather the procession, was going that way, and he was following them, looking around more and more nervously, more and more expecting some kind of trouble. But then the whole procession, as well as the shaman himself, and the images of the dream, were swept away by the horses, a whole pack of them, roaring mockingly and with a clearly distinguishable foul language.

* * *

Light, an incredible amount of sunlight, which naturally looks at those who are blinded by it, penetrates everywhere and anywhere, promising warmth, protection, and, of course, punishment. Personally, he is promised mostly the latter, promised by a beautiful woman floating in the air and sunlight, sheltered by the protection of her own angelic wings. She looks at him judgmentally, and in that judgment is the weight of the whole world, which bends him to the earth and makes him bow, bow to the Sun. Those who stand beside him bow, recognizing the truth, which may not be too fair but is bought by the right of power, and one cannot argue against the truth. Only Stepan, glancing at one of his companions, on whom he does not quite give a shit, does not hurry to bow down, the strength and protection hidden under the shroud allow him to keep the divine attention and not turn into a trembling stump whimpering from his sinfulness. He meets the sincere surprise in the eyes of the angel, saying in a barely audible whisper, but clearly audible to everyone in this huge square: “Secret movement in the sky without end, I see the reflection of your face”. At that moment his image seems to flash, only for the sleeper, not for the reality, so Stepan sees himself wearing goat's horns, beard, and hoofs, and his eyes acquire a kind of sinister glitter.

* * *

A huge ship, so big that it seems impossible without magic, and so magical that it looks as if it were made entirely of Mellorn wood, is pounding some small town with siege water charms. There's already a massacre in the bay and on the coast, and the troopers who landed from smaller ships, along with underwater newts, snakelands, and mermaids, have already taken the first lines of defense. In the hobbled donjon, where the magic shield has already been breached, a swearing shaman draws ritual signs on two pieces of the same stone column, summons the appropriate spirits, and calls as if for the last time. The stone debris gradually loses the features of the interior details, acquiring other, very reminiscent of either giant earth bullets, or equally earthly impact missiles with a length of about four meters. The shaman hurriedly works and finishes his preparations under the mumblings of “I'll show you bitches now, just wait”, hardly recognizable in the surrounding bedlam. On the side of each magic projectile, he writes a single word in blood, and for some reason, not in the local alphabet or magic runes, but in good old Cyrillic: “Dagon".

* * *

A large-scale battle in which military equipment, magic, and all sorts of shit came together against each other, but then came the magical fairies and organized even more destruction, so both sides were forced to fight together. The fairies also turned out to be extremely chthonic, in the spirit of old fairy tales about good people. In the center of events swearing in a wild mixture of languages evil dwarf, multiplying constantly teleporting non-Eldar to zero with the help of a magical gift, which clearly does not match its power to his tiny height. In the ether-sleep-image hangs his cry that this is no Doomsday for him, but only a miserable micromolecular leap above the usual difficulty. Perhaps the non-eldar would have had something to object to, but they were too busy disintegrating into bloody mist and ash under the sweeping blows of some absolutely fierce charms.

* * *

He woke up cheerfully, especially taking into account the drink prepared especially for him, which could be considered a local analog of coffee. While having breakfast, as he woke up in the middle of the morning, the young man tried to formulate the images he had seen in his dreams, extracting something understandable from them. He was not usually very successful in this, but this time he remembered that he had a dream vision of a city magic tower, which caused him, for some reason, vague and unformed anxiety. The other images were too blurry and indistinct, but he remembered this one and the first thing he did was to think about what it was all about. He certainly wasn't going to mess with the mages and Miller himself, not even particularly eager to approach the magical quarter, let alone conflict. Unless they tried to get at Sylvia, but she and the old man were on good terms. Unless his involvement in Valdis's murder came to light. However, he didn't believe he'd left any clues. And those who could try to find these clues despite all the reassurances and secrecy would not be involved in the case of the asshole's murder - not the caliber of the problem.

"There has been a rumor lately that Maester Miller and Maester Sedric are planning a large-scale ritual, timing it to coincide with some of the magical dates and the position of the stars. I can't say for sure, but by implication, they're going to summon and bind a powerful elemental, but that's just a rumor.” His anxiety was immediately transmitted to Sylvia, who was not going to underestimate the intuition of the master of shamanism bearing the System in his essence. “Most likely another water one, for Mlatra's defenses, with less protection and fewer trained traps. The city has not been stormed or besieged for a long time, and the green-skinned, as well as the Steppe, have a serious movement lately, a new major player has appeared, who wants to play their favorite game of gathering another Horde and trying to make it Great again. Brygosz the Coock is currently stuck in another conflict with the tribesmen, Khorbrand the Robber is also far away, but the same Pragroth the Arsonist or the newer Sarativ the Swimmer are much closer to Dantmark than old fox Herbert would like. They can pass through the wild lands without clashing with the undead or with the local tribes, or even join the latter, and come for tribute. Herbert doesn't like to pay tribute, so he has to spend on armor and amulets for the guards or, here, on such surprises.”

The briefing on what mages did was complete and took enough time for Stepan to eat and even drink another portion of non-coffee. A short dossier on Miller and his first assistant, a close friend, distant relative, and established master of hydromancy, Sedrik de Lonnir, was quite appropriate. And no, he first of all clarified that if Sedric had known who had nailed his relative, he would have planted flowers on his grave and made the grave more beautiful. Because revenge for his kinsman was obligatory and inevitable, but he couldn't tolerate the sadistic little waterman, though not for bloody entertainment, it just so happened. After thinking, fortune-telling, and searching in his head for ways in which the elemental's call could harm him personally, Stepan decided to put this mystery aside and not get involved in any shit, reducing activity in the area of the magic quarter even more.

It was decided to start the new series of exercises with the same theory, as well as discussions of what could be done before the duels themselves, how best to prepare, and what to expect. This time, Sylvia only drank a cup and a half of his blood. He wasn't even recovering with the meta-skill. He had summoned a pre-prepared healing spirit with the ability to replenish blood from the magic reserve. Also, now there would be no sitting in a chair across from each other, no announcement of the start of the lesson. Stepan and Sylvia would just go about their business, and the vampiress would begin to influence them at any moment, slowly and smoothly, then sharply and in a swift attempt to subdue them, trying to guess the moment, to catch them in a moment of weakness or unpreparedness.

Of course, now the call practice was canceled because with such conditions communicating with any spirits is fraught with any imaginable and most of the unimaginable dangers. Likewise, it was decided to stay out of the backyard and generally outside the mansion. It was a very vulnerable state in which one could easily get into trouble, not magical but physical. Even intensive training in the work with the spiritual body and it is not possible to conduct, or even tie yourself in a knot accidentally. Quite an excuse to relax and rest, but, damn it, you can not relax! This is some kind of universal conspiracy, no other way!

“The library is at your disposal, as is the opportunity to call on any of my fledglings for a fencing lesson, a lecture on local society, or simply pleasant company. I've voiced my will, and they'll be happy to help you if you ask.” Sylvia informed heading off on her own important business catching up on the issues she hadn't had time to address while busy with his training. “I'll be in my office, I've had a lot of work to do these days. Some important conversations have had to be canceled.”

“Yeah, cheers.” Stepan waved at her, mentally expecting some kind of mischief the second the door closed, but the blood connection, much less rich and strong, was deaf and blocked from the other side so Stepan himself wouldn't hit it, as he had recently learned after the increase of knowledge rank. “Should I go and actually read?”

Of course, the book collection of this mansion was not comparable to the Neurath library. However, it was very difficult having money, healthy curiosity, and thirst for self-development, not to accumulate for so many years a number of rather scarce volumes. The young man rummaged through the shelves, including the special section, feeling his magical protection let him through, selecting literature to his liking. “History of the Rise and Fall of the Island Empire,” "Code of Laws and Rules of the Confederate Trading Houses," and "A List of Classic Necrotic Rituals Based on Blood Magic," written by and for vampires. “Stepping on the young grass”, by the way, according to Sylvia, was a very cool manual on love magic and practical seduction... yes here you can read for weeks, or even months, although, of course, the most delicious he would swallow quickly.

The textbook for seductresses had to be put aside, it was written in high elvish, and Stepan didn't know it. The System had not gifted him with it. Of course, it was possible to put a spirit translator in his eyes, which would put the meaning of what was written into his head, or a spirit of the same type, but stronger directly into the pages of the book so he could sound the written words with a sound illusion. But he gave himself a vow not to call, so he had to postpone it. But it was really interesting, and even very relevant, given the training that was going on right now. He had to read a rather boring and full of pathos self-glorification textbook on Kuordemar history, where the Island Empire was presented almost as a beacon of universal goodness, misunderstood by primitive barbarians and mean subhumans, who sank their super-ships, made of a pile of cut down Mellorns. This is about the topic of why the islanders are still not loved by individuals of high sharp-earedness, longevity, and vindictiveness.

To be honest, it was much more fun to read Sylvia's handwritten comments on this book. Here you have another pathos act of kindness and sympathy in the form of supplying medicines and supplies to a cholera-ridden coastal city. And below and to the side of the lines in a much simpler and not-so-ornate font are the prices for those medicines and supplies, with which the city's coffers were milked almost to the bottom, as well as a suspicious coincidence in the form of the fact that at that time one of the candidates for the post of High Priestess of Calisto was a cheerful mermaid with the nickname of Possessing Pestilence. At times like this, reading the story is really satisfying and fuels the mind with genuine interest.

He almost missed the first attack, but it helped that he was partially paranoid. When, when reading about another successful subversive raid of mermaids, which knocked out the magical defenses of the port of the enemy city, he suddenly got the thought that the mermaid could not lick her pussy if she did not provide herself with underwater breathing or its analog, and he took this thought as normal. But the thought did not go away, but shifted to the fact that with Sylvia there would be no such problem, and her pussy was soft and inviting, asking to play with her lips. That's when he realized he was being compelled, and he ran the scanning wave through his spirit and burned out the partially sprouted grid of compulsion-resonance. He shook his head in mild indignation, but he didn't even quit reading his book, lazily sending back a blast of communication, more to keep the bloodsucker on its toes than anything else.

The second attack came almost immediately. The thoughts of pussies and their licking were instilled again, only now at the mention of the eternal dispute about the species of Sea Lady Calisto. No one knew if she was a mermaid, a human, or a snake-folk. The disputes were sometimes very serious. Only the titanic work of the clergy, as well as rare interventions of the goddess herself, did not reach the traditional modern Muslim or slightly older Christian fun with the slaughter of all dissenters. Pogroms and small conflicts, in which blood was often shed, still came regularly, providing a natural loss of the most violent and zealous representatives of the flock. A more recent note stated that from a certain moment, all Her images or statues were shown only submerged in water up to the waist so it was impossible to tell to which species She belonged. In general, if you want to look at the divine in every sense pussy, you can not, but it would be nice to look at such a thing. Or even to wonk, though that would be considered blasphemy, well, or prayer.

He thought about it for almost five minutes this time, feeling a gradually growing arousal come over him. But by the time he started to reach into his pants, he checked his spiritual body again. This time it was much harder to get rid of the compulsion. It had taken root, and some of the influence was blurring perception, making the need for purification unimportant, unnecessary, unthreatening, or even fanciful. Sylvia seemed to have managed to calculate the interval at which he conducted regular pulse checks of the subtle body, oriented strictly according to the clock, affecting the free windows. Unsurprising, if you thought about it, and so had to create an irregular algorithm of checks to keep her from adapting to them. It helped, though she didn't stop sending hidden and very careful pulses, becoming even more careful and managing to pass through static defenses, taking advantage of the insane efficiency of the blood bond.

And, as if she wanted to piss him off a little, she kept pushing his mind into a stupor through images of pussy and pussy-licking. No, he realized that it was Sylvia Malter's main fetish after all, and even his influence hadn't diminished her passion, just added new ones of comparable strength. Still, it was distracting and a little annoying when you read an interesting thing but catch yourself thinking about vampire pussy, again, again, again. About how nice it would be to drop all this literature and reading and go lick Sylvia, just to please both her and yourself. Again. Again. Again. Toward the end, he learned to fish out that exposure almost faster than it took hold. The clearly exhausted vampiress herself unwittingly fell into a rhythm, making her attacks regular and alternating, making them predictable.

At some point Stepan just got tired of sitting there with a hard-on, so he decided to relieve some of the tension. He obviously wasn't going to lick Sylvia's pussy, but thanks to Milf's tits, he now had a wide selection of blood-and-not-just-sucking ladies who wouldn't deny him a little favor. Stepan rolled his eyes, connecting to spiritual perception, and then left the reading room and went to one of the small offices. He knocked tentatively and quickly waited for an answer and an invitation to enter, immediately slipping through the doorway. Lemira's office was much more modestly furnished than Sylvia's, but she didn't have much time to receive guests - it wasn't her specialty or method of work. The woman was reading, too, and if Stepan was correct, she was reading a collection of classics, not specific literature.

"Greetings, Pann. Sylvia warned about your visit and training, you can go through." Stepan was a little surprised that Malter had warned all her fledglings about his possible visit, but he didn't stand at the threshold and came closer. "You can start, young man, I have plenty of free time, and Sylvia praised your lips so much that I can't wait to see for myself."

Rolling his eyes in annoyance at the way Malter shamelessly bragged about her “victories” over her favorite toy, he stepped closer, watching Lemira's exposed crotch. She was wearing only a man's shirt at all, completely exposed below the waist. The young man who had no intention of licking Sylvia's pussy, however, had a fondness for vampire pussy, and with the opportunity to bypass the compulsion, he couldn't help but take advantage of it. Unlike Malter, the emotionally colder Lemira didn't moan or growl just breathed heavily and stroked his hair, nuzzling her head between his thighs. The taste of her was a little different from what he already knew, but it was still pleasant, and arousing, causing a very legitimate desire to keep going and bring her to orgasm after orgasm. He licked her for an unknown amount of time, occasionally fending off another attack from Sylvia, who tried to convince him that he should lick her, too, as soon as he got off Lemira.

The shaman was not even annoyed. He only fondled the first post-parent in this nest even more fiercely and obsessively, bringing her to a frenzy, to the brink of orgasmic stupor, beyond which there was only trance and submission, but not allowing her mind to shut down its cognitive functions. Only when he was tired until his jaw muscles ached, did he allow himself to rise from his knees, to kiss the eagerly, albeit still as coolly, as some kind of duty, unburdening and even pleasurable, but still forced, responding vampiress. She didn't resist when he bared her breasts, kissing and squeezing them, playing with them, trying to be as gentle as possible, not to make them uncomfortable. Nor did she resent it when he laid her with those breasts on the desktop, bending her over at the waist and going to get her from behind. At the last moment, though, he changed his mind, hesitated a little longer, and began licking her again, hurriedly and passionately, pleasing himself, too, with the pleasure of licking a vampire's pussy.

He still came inside her, brought her to more orgasms, and cummed himself, once, and then again, but it was more of a reprieve, boring and routine. As much as he wanted to limit all his intimate games to just polishing pale slits, he had to maintain some illusion of control over himself, otherwise, it was easy to become a real slave to his toys ready for any conditions, as long as they kept spreading their legs and exposing their slits. That would be very ironic. To allow yourself to become a common twat licker for all vampires, having full control over them. Though, of course, such a role was very alluring as well, just overwhelming in how nice and logical it seemed. No, really! He already has them completely under his control, why should he be embarrassed about his desires? If he wanted Lemira or even Sylvia to lay him on the floor and ride his face with her slits when she wasn't in his head like this, then why should he hold himself back at all?

Stepan thought for a while, but he had already wasted too much time, and Lemira asked him not to distract her even more. She was busy using a volume of classical poetry as a cipher-key for secret correspondence. Having politely said goodbye, he still arranged another meeting to realize the fantasy that had come into his head, and Lemira did not refuse him even without additional compulsion. However, she admitted that it would be impossible to realize the idea of using Stepan instead of a chair in the near future due to the peculiarities of his training. The Earthman did not argue, but laughed to himself: ///“Ha-ha, damn! As if Sylvia could forbid me to lick your submissive slit in such a way as to force you to squeal like a bitch from continuous ecstasy!”

"Will you list your mistakes yourself, or shall I tell you?" Sylvia snapped at him again as soon as he entered her office. "If you guess, I'll spread my legs and give you a lick as good as my sweet Lem."

"What do you mean, mistakes? And yes, I'm not going to lick you, rather I'm going to go get another one of your girls... licked. Fuck. Fuck! Fuck! How did you do that, huh? I tracked every impulse and then I purposely didn't repeat them on a regular basis!" He didn't want to yell, but he couldn't. He was counting on success and new knowledge from the System. "It would be fine just to put to sleep or lust, but you have distorted the perception of normality again, it can not be done in a couple of minutes of the window. Or did you get a skill boost, too?"

"No, no new line in my Tablet has been revealed, unfortunately, although a new stage has come closer." She denies it, not looking too upset, but rather the opposite. "And as for your “irregular” window... eight minutes, nineteen minutes, six, seventeen, two, twelve, and again in a circle. Pann, if you wanted to insult me and belittle my intelligence, you have definitely succeeded. I am many, many years old, and I would have seen your great-great-grandfathers in their cradles if they had lived under this sky. I can think faster than most mages and count better than a dwarven banker. Did you really think I couldn't figure out that algorithm? You know, if I did not feel sympathy for you, and sincerely, you would not come to the thought of Lemira's flower, you would have decided that you yourself, with your lips, can satisfy yourself better than this obsessive and stupid seed-sucker, who keeps beating at the locked gate and can't find the entrance to it. Now, stop your ugly hysterics like a kicked yard mutt, and list the steps of your and my actions."

He wildly, inexpressibly, wanted to turn off Sylvia's consciousness, to change a few details so that she would cum from being insulted, and then to swear at her, her family, her nest, her methods, tactics, and character, but he held back. Though it was difficult, he realized he had volunteered to be pumped by such a method. But he noted that if he had not put strict reassurances in her head, her lessons would have taken a very shameful and ugly form. Though to be frank, her slight insincerity became apparent through his association with her, for she would not have turned him against herself in such a way, not after the initial treatment.

"Okay, I'm calm." He finally said, receiving an approving smile in return. “I guess after you figured out the algorithm for the frequency of my spiritual body's amplified pulsation frequency in purifying mode, you just started hiding the main circuit behind intentionally...”

* * *

The second attempt was not particularly successful either. However, he is now held out much longer, not already immersed in reading with the same carelessness, and does not consider a glass and a half of blood as too small a factor for influence. This time Sylvia didn't suggest any one thought or idea. She didn't give specific shots at all, trying to confuse his thoughts, almost plunging him into delirium. And in some moment he concluded that delusions and strange thoughts, like wondering why the sky, if it was blue, didn't taste cool, had become too much. The best way to get rid of the extra thoughts was to spill them out with the semen, and he did it himself, not intending to call Sylvia or her chicks for help. Artemia, who had come to visit, only said hello and took off her panties right in front of him, throwing them in the face of the jerking shaman with anger in his voice.

Sylvia came to him only after the fifth orgasm, when he, satisfied with his victory, sat in the same chair in the reading room, lazily bringing himself to the sixth orgasm in a row, already without thrusting and speed, only in order to relax more. Why not? He didn't lick anyone, didn't call any of his doll toys, even returned the books to the shelves so they wouldn't get stained, and didn't get Artemia's panties too dirty. Sylvia, who had brought him back to his senses, did not scold him, and even praised him, honestly saying this time she had to work hard. However, she quickly stopped talking, suddenly experiencing an irresistible and absolutely normal for a semen-sucker desire to lick up all the spilled and wasted seed, and then so intoxicated by the drunkenness that she turned off with her face to the floor and her ass up. They had a normal discussion of the lesson notably later when the shaman's head had stopped buzzing. So many orgasms in a row even with his Constitution was a bit much. He'd clearly overdone it and exhausted himself.

The third visit lasted two and a half days. The young man even managed to sleep, sinking into a deep and protected meditation, fending off Sylvia's attempts in his sleep. She caught him on the evening of the second day when he began to prepare for another non-sleep session. She caught him because she had time to learn this method of defense and hit him much more prepared. So he had quite suddenly let go of the fact that he wasn't exactly going to sleep by closing his eyes. So he passed out. There were no dreams, just some kind of murky shroud as if wrapping him in cold towels and preventing him from breathing, but no negative feelings, even pleasant. He woke up to a barefoot foot in his face, which he began to kiss and lick irritably as if to express his desire to have it removed from him. And it worked, for the foot was immediately replaced by another, and then by a pussy, Sylvia Malter's familiar and already well-studied vampire slit. He began to bring her to ecstasy with vindictive pleasure, the sneaky, sly joy of a successful bully, but Sylvia was no stranger to it. Her hands and lips gripped his cock tightly as she moved into the sixty-nine position, and they peaked almost simultaneously, a couple of seconds apart. With equal irritation and anger, he laid her on her back, fucking her with uncharacteristic harshness, looking thoughtfully at her quivering tits and considering whether to let those tits hypnotize him. Coming to the conclusion that it would be a great way to get out of his training and piss Sylvia off even more. The student is in a deep trance and she should be the one to deal with her own schemes.

Even though the nest mistress's breasts were ordinary, though large, beautiful, and desirable, he managed to convince his subconscious that shaking tits made good boys sleep, and then he passed out with his face in them, convinced that he would hurt Sylvia very badly by doing so. To be fair, he did, because she had been bringing him out of his trance in a way that was safe for his mental body, not rough and painful, for a good hour and a half, and she was pretty pissed off. She still had her schedule, and even had to interrupt their “debriefing” to talk to a representative of the Druid circle about new reagent supplies, because it would have been unprofessional of her to carry this conversation through the amulet of communication, and Sylvia kept the appearance of an extremely businesslike lady with nauseating care.

The fourth attempt also stretched for a long time, for a day and a half of tedious confrontation, but now Stepan kept his defenses much more steadfastly and carefully, and when he went to non-sleep, giving himself a mental rest, he twisted his spiritual body into such a squiggle that his attempts to understand this type of rigid defense and to find the keys took enough time for the shaman to have time to get non-sleep and wake up, starting to actively respond to the attempts to get into his thinking again. He suspected something wrong at once when his regular and almost constant interference stopped for three and a half hours. He had checked himself six times, fearing that he had missed the moment of suggestion again and was already under control. But then the attacks resumed, and the young man calmed down, thinking it was Sylvia's important meeting again.

He was used to spending time in the reading room, especially since reading serious literature gave him some crumbs of experience, negligible against the background of the main exercise, but also pleasant, when an unexpected company showed up in the room. With long red hair, delicate facial features, and elegant plasticity of movement, tall Reshka-Rowena was the complete opposite of the cold and reserved Lemira. She looked at him with an interested and mischievous gaze and sat down in the opposite corner of the reading room, nodding at him.

"I've heard of you, and I think you've heard of me too, but I'll introduce myself, Rowena de Martel, at your service. I tell you, it is not often that I have seen our Lady Sylvia undertake such training for someone other than her chicks, and I have not seen the ice-cute Lemira agree to participate for fifty years. Since Artemia was taught the importance of self-control." There was a swift and calm carelessness about her that easily inspired a false sense of security and harmlessness. Still, while Sylvia's image was carefully controlled and did not detract from her powerful nature, Rowena behaved in a way that could not be taken seriously. “What interesting thing did you find in this long-ago hall of wisdom? I, as you can easily understand and believe, have been reading it all for a long time and, if you will take my advice, I can suggest something interesting.”

Stepan nodded warily and introduced himself in return, simultaneously repelling another intensified attack from Sylvia, intuitively suspecting that the bloodsucker had sent her chick to distract and embarrass him so that he would miss the moment of the decisive blow. He checked himself several times and listened to his thoughts, but he did not experience any unnatural desires to kneel before the red-haired creature in beautiful form and polish her slit. In the end, he answered her question by simply lifting a thick and very heavy volume of the Almanac of the High Aristocracy of the West, South, East, and North, which was clearly an outdated version of the Almanac, because it was three hundred years old. If it weren't for very high quality and constantly updated household charms, a whole set of them, the book would have been worn out long ago.

"Oh, it's a familiar book, and we keep it more for the fact that it's a fine example of preserving charms. It's hard to argue with the fact that some of the pages are still relevant today. The Ink Seal Guild get wild on the section on the Forest." Stepan, for example, didn't know about this guild and could hardly refrain from turning off Sylvia, who was still attacking him with sluggish and cautious impulses, getting into her head and finding interesting information about local book printers. "Also, the engravings in this book are excellent, the likeness close to the portrait. It is said that the ink printers have invented a special immovable golem that can copy images, but not just by illusion, but by redrawing them, repeating the work of even a very skillful artist down to the last line in seconds. Well, or they just use an alchemical matrix with an illusionary template and copy pictures. To raise an adept illusionist and alchemist, with an addiction to brushes and easels, is still, if not easier, then certainly cheaper than a specialized golem with such fine-tuning."

“I'm not going to judge the drawing method, but the engravings here are my fav, the detail is on the level.” He wanted to summon a spirit that could see into the past and the origins of things to find out exactly how the book was made. “The wart on the face of the head of Dartman's town government, I'll be honest, was drawn noticeably better than the town government itself.”

"It was because he had, during the years when the almanac was being finalized, advocated the creation of his magical conclave to break Neшrat's monopoly. The idea, of course, failed. But he tried noticeably harder and, inexcusably, more effectively than the others. He even founded a couple of free mage guilds, financing them out of his own pocket and some for island gold." She explained the background of the not especially skillfully disguised political caricature that this picture was. "One of those guilds had survived to this day, though the leadership had been changed, and the Unquenchables had laid down under the Academy and spread their buttocks, forgive my lack of courtesies. When Maximus was eliminated by a clever contact curse on a letter, everything fell apart. My parent's parents said that his heir had so easily sent everything that his father had done to the cesspool solely because a couple of his maids were agents of one of the magisters, who had taken him by the famous organ with love magic, but it would be impossible to prove it. The boy and his maids mysteriously disappeared with the rest of the treasury and the property they carried.

One of the advantages of dealing with bloodthirsty, heartless creatures is that they know a lot, and if you ask them, they'll tell you a lot of things that wouldn't be published in public literature. And in a long life, they will know plenty of such unpublishable things, to suit all tastes. If it weren't for Sylvia's suggestion, which was gaining intensity and irritating him more and more, it would have been a perfect time. The bloodsucker pressed just as skillfully, but now she relied on the speed of creating a new suggestion, on its rapidity, and therefore lost at once in power and stealth. Her calculation was based on overloading Stepan's attentiveness, especially since she could think very quickly, especially if she additionally accelerated her consciousness with a bloody rage. But it was even gratifying. If she had reached such harsh methods, then the usual tricks or tricks were no longer able to cope. Yes, the fact that he's still waiting to attack plays for him, as their competition lasts for hours and days, instead of pausing for days or even weeks between attempts. Alas, he didn't have that much time, and the System smoothed out the corners of the too-fast approach.

“But the elves and, especially, the elven women, were sketched very well, as if they had brought money to the authors. Though, if the rumors of the Forest's wealth are true, they may indeed have.” When he opened the page with the coat of arms, title, and engraving of Queen Sibylla, who still held her position, he involuntarily admired it, for it was really good, one could feel how the artist had conveyed the majesty, pride, and aura of the superiority of the ever-living over the rest of the upright creatures. “All the more, they can get it once and then just don't worry about it, because they've obviously been in their positions for centuries, and they are fired far less often than book publishing houses go bankrupt.”

"There is a grain of truth in these words, but I don't know the exact answer, Pann. Our scarlet tribe clings to the society and bites into it like a tropical mosquito, but only those looking for the end of non-life go to the Forest." At that moment Stepan had to repel Sylvia's multi-layered attack, which sent a flash of irritation and even a little anger at her for interfering, and his fingers clenched reflexively, almost crumpling the thick and enchanted paper. "You must be careful with this book, for it's also important to Sylvia as a memory, and she'll be sad if you spoil it, tear it, or stain it."

Stepan looked at the book thoughtfully, and some irrational part of him wanted to throw it into the fireplace just to spite the vampire, but that would be not only stupid but useless. He'd be burning his own thing. And it's not like it would burn with so many charms on the cover, especially if he threw it closed instead of burning it page by page. Again, the pictures are beautiful, the elf queen here did not look like a character from cartoons for adults. More like someone who would multiply by zero for just such thoughts. Sylvia's new lunge, now formalized into a wave of lust, partially succeeded in causing tightness in his pants, rekindled the irritation that had died down, and then Stepan let out a nasty smile.

"Uh, Pann, what are you doing? Or do you like me that much? You should have at least voiced your desire in a courtly manner, we didn't meet behind a barn." Rowena said with a slight ironic condemnation. Though she didn't really resent the suggestion, she resented what came next. "No, that's almost an insult, young man. What am I to you, a common girl, that I can be changed for a picture?"

Stepan said nothing, continuing to jerk off methodically over the image of the elven queen staring majestically before him, feeling the vengeful and satisfying pleasure of staining Sylvia's book with his semen, of openly insulting Rowena by preferring the picture to her available body, of it all at once. The flash of pleasure came sharply and suddenly, coinciding with another of Sylvia's attempts at suggestion, again successfully repelled. With a quiet groan, he poured out a white line, a second, a third, covering the picture of the woman's face with a dense and continuous layer of incredibly violent eruption, additionally squeezing out every last drop. With a sigh full of pleasure he sat up, even slumped back in his chair, feeling simultaneously a winner and a loser too. That is, yes, he had done Sylvia a disservice, but in reality, he had just jerked off to a pretty picture right in front of a not-so-judgmental Rowena, despite her words and comments. And the judgmental comments themselves weren't so sincere, he could feel the mockery in the depths of her eyes, carefully concealed and therefore disturbing. He was certain that Sylvia hadn't gotten to his mind, what he had just done was exactly the natural course of his thoughts, but there was still something else wrong. After all, his actions had seemed natural and right all those times before, too.

“I don't know what else to say to a move like that, Pann, other than my condemnation. My parent will definitely not approve of such a thing, I can tell you that right off the bat.” Her words cause a new flash of satisfaction from her own deed and revenge, banishing unnecessary thoughts, and the spiritual body tensed again, repulsing another lunge of the vampiress. “Okay, at least end it there, and don't dirty the new pages, you wonker. There'll be Archmagistress Alinariel in four pages, at least don't spunk on her, young man, okay?”

“It is not for you or your mistress to order me around, I'll make you lick these pages.” Stepan snaps, turning over four spreads and opening the view to a picture of an elven woman in a very opulent high-collar robe, probably one of the strongest personalities in the world, but even the robe can't hide her quite outstanding forms. “When I want to, ugh, then, ugh, I'll stop!”

This time he almost doesn't help himself with his hands, squeezing the ring of fingers at the very base, and with his other hand clamping his scrotum, starting to just slap his cock on the picture, feeling the indifferent coolness of the enchanted paper with all its length, feeling Rowena's humiliation and embarrassment, anticipating Sylvia's reaction and coming down even faster than the first time, again pouring a thick white mass on the face of another mighty elf, smiling like a fool. Sylvia's new attack is already being reflected automatically, and he is sure that he will get a long-awaited system promotion very soon. Swiping his tip across the picture, smearing the splatter on the page, and glad that the book had so many cleansing charms on it that he didn't have to worry about picking up any crap from an accidental touch, he turned to Rowena, teeth grinning in a grin no less fierce than a vampire's.

“Well, what other beautiful elven women are depicted there? What other pages can't I cum on, so as not to upset Sylvia once again? What other beauties, even on paper and in flat format, would be better than you, bloodsucker, who didn't even get a semen?" He is already openly amused, not holding back the insults and not fearing her retaliation, knowing for sure that there will be none because he set the necessary compulsions in several mutually reinforcing blocks. “You, come on, don't be silent, I'm already hard as steel again.”

“You're a naughty boy, you such a wonker. I have no words to express my disapproval. I can only humbly beg you to stop this insulting farce and not flip through seven spreads, to an engraving of Gradiana of the White Grove House, dirtying also a picture of one of the Queen of the Forest's closest relatives.” Her words have all the right tones of humiliation and pleading, but the part of him responsible for intuitive understanding of the world intuitively sees in the vampiress's perfect play a certain falseness, something insincere. “Oh, well, of course, you won't stop, and continue mixing me and my parent with dirt, youngster. It's been a long time since I've felt so soiled.”

The young man had already managed to turn the pages, again beginning to slap his cock against the picture, now not squeezing it at all, only squeezing his balls with both palms, providing a touching motion with his pelvis, as if fucking an invisible girl right above the book, but in reality, only parting the air with his cock and slapping the paper. Slap. Slap. Slap. Reflecting another blow from Sylvia, and then continuing on afterward. Slap. Slap. Slap. A sly spark of superiority and triumph in Rowena's eyes, which outwardly is still as humiliated and filled with the most offended feelings. Slap. Slap. Slap. The thoughts in his head seemed to flow into his loins, into his very balls, making him remember how he'd been under the control of Shera's curse repentance, as if all thoughts were about to come out with the semen. What could be a greater insult than to flood a sucking bitch's favorite book with not only cum, but brains, thoughts, and feelings as well, draining them right onto the book and the table.

*Slap*

*Slap*

*Slap*

He was almost ready to cum, squeezing and releasing his balls a little with each slap, feeling his readiness to go over the edge and take revenge on Sylvia, to humiliate Rowena even more. But that thought, the realization that he had once been held by Shera by the balls like that, the one who had then subjugated his will, kept him from calming down, even though Sylvia was still beating unsuccessfully in his defense. He could try to drain the lion's share of the reserve, running it through his spiritual body and aura at once, and then, if the compulsion did get through his shields, he'd be able to latch on to... latch on to what? It didn't matter, he needed to squeeze and slap, slap and cum, cum on a picture of a beautiful elfess so his submissive bloodsuckers would know how he had defeated and humiliated them. Slap. Cum. Just like back then with Shera, when she'd subjugated him... Only now, of course, it's his will. He's humiliating his bloodsuckers, humiliating them as he cums his brains out on this page.

Only... it's... like... something's wrong, but what? The page isn't covered in semen yet, that's what's wrong here! He needs to cum, needs to flood the paper with a white, to pour out his clumpy brain so that his head has more time to think and he can... can do what? Lick pussy? But no, he's not subordinate. Not subordinate? Yes, not subordinate, he doesn't need to think about that, he needs to cum, slap his dick on the engraving, and cum. Or is he? He is. Is he? Something's not right. It's like, like a conflict in the back of his mind, something's wrong like he sees it but doesn't see it, something's wrong like he's met something like this before, but he doesn't need to remember it, needs to forget and cum, he'll spank and cum, needs to move his pelvis and clench his palms, squeeze his seed out of himself and cum, cum, cum!

Instead of a seed, he releases a stream of pure power, straight from the hearth of the reserve, opening the spirit to its fullest and groping every bit of it. Sylvia tries unsuccessfully to break through the outer layers of defenses, even though she managed while he was too distracted, to bypass some of the shields. But he suddenly realizes it's not just Sylvia who is affecting him. Moreover, Sylvia is trying to influence, Rowena, whose skill at mind influence and suggestion is second only to that of her parent. Rowena has successfully influenced. He felt for one moment and for one moment only this web of hers - coarser, simpler, less reliable, weaker, and less skillful than even Sylvia's had been before she had received the system gifts. He was able to feel it and immediately slap his dick on the engraving, to feel it and almost let it go at the same moment, realizing that it had overridden the realm of touch and memory, that he was forgetting and would forget right now what he had managed to realize.

He'll forget.

Forget about what?

About the important stuff.

About the picture?

No.

About.

About... he's almost there, but not like this, no, he needs to remember something.

Right!

Suggestion!

At the last moment, already losing the thread of his fading thought and preparing to pour a new portion of seed on the unfortunate book, Stepan activates time stretching and begins to act even faster than Rowena, bending the spiritual body and its parts responsible for thinking, beginning to think more like a spirit than a man of flesh and bones. And it works, giving him back the ability to understand, think, and act, allowing him to uproot Rowena's not-so-sturdy structure in effect, going on a staunch counterattack while fending off Sylvia who smells victory slipping away. Everything freezes for about a minute, during which Stepan freezes in a very compromising pose, Rowena looking at him tensely almost breaks the arms of the chair with her grip, and Sylvia clearly wastes the reserve and crushes his defense. It was all decided by the charges to the meta-skill he had managed to activate. Thanks to his accelerated thinking, he was able to withstand. Then his existing skills and excellent command of his spiritual body played a role.

“Ooh, you're slippery, young man, you impossible beast! I'm almost done. I'm on the final impulse, you wouldn't even be able to think, let alone fight back!” Rowena said angrily and tiredly, hiding the fact her hands trembled as she received a couple of hits through the resonance channel of the blood connection. “Good one, though, I'll admit. You noticed, of course, very late, but I came in only after our scarlet rivers were tied up, and Sylvia backed me up with all her reserves. So good, good.”

Stepan, who had already realized that the terms of their training did not forbid sharing blood with one of the fledglings and striking together, only waved something not too rude. There was no anger, nor was there any resentment. Even his irritation and longing to humiliate, to insult, to attack, had been instilled in him by Rowena as part of the key to his higher cognitive functions. She is not Sylvia Malter, after all. She, even after gaining control of a part of his subjective perception could not bend it with the same ease. She needed to unsettle the shaman's defenses and will, little by little leading him to suggestively pour out his brains. Quite dangerous in fact, if led to believe the suggestion too much, the victim could actually damage the spiritual body, losing some of his memory, mind, or intelligence. His knowledge bases even indicated that there were a bevy of mental elimination techniques where a man or woman was similarly turned into, if not a vegetable, then an idiot or, at best, a very dumbed-down individual. This couple, of course, knew what they were doing and would not have been brought to such a thing, certainly not the type of exposure and not enough depth, but it would still not be pleasant. Well, then, not at first.

Nevertheless, the young man felt no anger and even approved of Sylvia's approach. First of all, because it had worked. Not only had he raised his level to twenty-ninth, but he'd also gained some hard-won knowledge, two of it at once. And a reward from her Milfeischestvo for taking the level. The latter was not surprising, considering the methods he used to gain that level. He felt a pleasant languor and fatigue in his body, and he also wanted to sleep, because he had used up a lot of energy, moral and physical, having organized a duel, albeit quite specific, but a full-fledged magical duel. Turning to his abilities, he activated the tab in the spiritual body of the often blinking Rowena, who focused her gaze on his cock, which had not cum for the third time and could not take it away. Sliding off the chair, she reached Stepan on all fours and immediately began to caress him gently, tenderly, and greedily with quick touches of her tongue and lips, licking along the entire length, kissing and swallowing him as if that was the meaning of her existence. At that moment, that was exactly what it felt like to her.

Received: “developed practices of spiritual-cognitive confrontation”, “techniques of mental-sensual defense within the framework of agent training”; improved intuitive analysis of one's own spiritual and auric bodies; increased intuitive understanding of the state of one's mind; increased probability of acquiring the knowledge and properties of the agent, spy, and creator of masks

Acquired talents are added to the Player's overall Status.

Stepan allowed himself to enjoy the fruits of victory in the form of a quality blowjob from the wily Rowena, as well as Sylvia, who came, or rather, rushed in, eager to suck. They worked perfectly as a team as if they had really been practicing. In fact, of course, the dexterity and speed of perception had an effect, but from the outside, it seemed that they had been practicing a double blowjob for years to achieve a perfect performance in extreme synchronization. Stepan did cum, but now not on the pages, but on their smiling satisfied, and affectionate faces, because from their side it seemed to be the greatest gift and honor he had given them. Leaving the women to clean up, including the soiled pages of the book, he strode to his room and collapsed on his bed.

He didn't fall asleep. The System thought he was tired enough, so he just had to clench his teeth and endure the barrage of information, digesting it and shelving it. Having reached an advanced rank, spiritual confrontation had finally turned from a method of defense against mind attacks to a method of attacking someone's mind, which could be used for one's defense. The main synergy was with the spiritual form and spiritual operation, allowing you to do a lot of work and tasks that previously could only be done by a summoned spirit, including repeating some of the exotic properties, although not all of them, not all of them at all. No less synergy occurred in conjunction with healing and curses. He could cast and remove all sorts of crap before, but now he could do it even better, even to the point of shutting up the mouths of certified maledicts with his powers, rather than calling on the spirits. Healing would be a lot easier, with increased control over his own and other people's spirit bodies, allowing him to perform perfect surgeries at minimal cost and without harming the victim, i.e. the patient.

He was able to influence the mind and feelings, whether of the patient or the victim, perfectly well anyway. And much earlier than the moment he had acquired new skills. But, importantly, he had now made a leap in his ability to remove the effects of other people's influences on the mind. There was every reason to believe that he could sell his services as a certified mind healer, especially if he practiced on those slaves who had been in the hands of Slavemancers. At the same time, training the techniques of eliminating protected targets on the masters and mistresses of these slaves and slave girls. Mental bookmarks can be unlocked and squeezed out of cognitive parts of the spirit, which will make them disappear from the mind in time or at once. Control stigmas can be unraveled, deactivated, and then carefully removed and destroyed, while charms can be eaten directly because it is a very close specialty to him.

His ability to conduct spiritual combat in a spiritual body had grown tremendously. In fact, this talent could be perceived as an analog of a combat skill for the spirit world, becoming a utilitarian skill in the world of matter. It was a very useful acquisition, even if it wasn't as absolutely powerful as he would have liked and as it turned out with the same curses. New facets of spiritual dialog opened up, mostly aggressive, though not always. Some spirits need to be able to prove the purity of intentions and thoughts, which requires a dense and difficult for the shaman contact, which can traumatize. Methods of calls expanded adding several separate sub-methods which can be used, especially if you are going to call the spirit, initially knowing that you will be constrained by a rigid type of contract, or if you fear that the cunning suggestor persuade you to give him a left kidney and the soul of the firstborn.

The second knowledge was the same analog of agent work, coming from the same branch as the methods of elimination, but its usefulness was simply enormous. First of all, it should be said that the knowledge itself had methods of countering almost all known and most of the exotic types of taking control, and what is unknown, you can analyze at the expense of the existing database. How to calculate the gradually shrinking web of the classical mentalist's web around thinking, the witch's spell gnawing into the senses, the effects of an alchemical potion, or the curse of passion? How to recognize additives in food, extraneous effects in systems of household charms, hidden in the whisper of the wind and immersing in a trance sound? What are the basic tactics for working with a victim out of the victim's field of attention, how to regularly check yourself for influence, and how to make it difficult for enemy sensualists, mentalists, puppeteers, malefics, fuck-knows-who else? What to counteract the influences of unintelligent entities, but also able to wash brains, how to counteract the racial skills of certain individuals, even the same illithids (hint - yell loudly and run)? Such little things were just too much, even if along with the knowledge came the understanding that against a properly charged and ready for your tricks and defense of the enemy with specialization on the imperceptible influence of a comparable “level” of help will be little. As little use will be made of new knowledge, if the level of work of the opponent is too high for your favorite and here it does not matter how ready you are to confront this or that school.

A very important part of the block was devoted to how to behave when captured by brainiacs, how to resist their tricks, block compulsions, cut or redirect them, how to hold on as long as possible, changing as little as possible in the process, and with luck to attack back, burning out the captor's brains or starting to subtly act on his mind. Yes, in the case of the same equal levels, the chances are practically nonexistent, unless the enemy makes a mistake or is not framed, the maximum you can hold out longer, and the best trump card in such a situation will be not to be captured at all. Nevertheless, he, due to charming and suggestive skills, could well have success in case of an attempted game of “who will brainwash the second first”, especially if the enemy underestimates him, and Stepan himself is captured intentionally, having prepared in advance for future scans. No kidding - there was a considerable layer of knowledge allocated for such operations, synergizing with the agent branch and methods of elimination. A note to myself that future captives, if any, should be checked very carefully.

Well, the latter was certainly not the most useful part of his new knowledge. He's not going to surrender himself willingly into captivity. Moreover, a smart opponent will certainly check his new victim in every possible way, and not smart ones do not live to the level where they can open the brains of the resisting Stepan. In principle, in such a confrontation fixed, restrained, and drugged victim against a mentalist slaver the work of a weaker or a group of weaker mentalists is quite acceptable. The fixation and softening of the victim play in their favor, but elite goods are usually and exclusively handled by elite individuals. If someone buys a slave in the rank of master of magic, if someone has enough money and influence, enough power not to be afraid to buy and keep such a slave, then they can hire the best, even those who do not work for money alone.

The last gift of the System was from the Autogoddess, and it improved the recently obtained meta-skill that bestowed a property in the autodivine spirit. The skill was now called “doubled small corrupting gift in the name of Liarat si Merrinal, Lady of Gifts and Giver of Gifts, loyal servant of Innelas Innelay”, which caught Stepan's attention. He had expected “small” to be replaced by “ minor”, as was the case with other properties that started with “minor”. The new version of the property reduced the rollback time to ten days and opened the possibility of using the skill a second time on the same target. Also slightly changed the typing of gifts - the first of them will always be with the aspect of influence on consciousness and thinking, and the second is no longer necessary, although also possible, but guaranteed vulgar and obscene in one way or another.

Having assimilated new knowledge, the young man switched off and plunged into cloudy and wakeful dreams, in which spaceships bombed the expanses of the Sydney Theater, squads of catboys in Hitler Youth uniforms marched in an embrace with titty catmilf, Canadian lumberjacks competed in manliness with Chelyabinsk steelworkers, but the winner was still the third, and a large combat robot-destroyer in the form of Klara Petrovna from the neighborhood destroyed all the drug addicts and prostitutes in range. The most memorable fact was that the robot had a very good view, because it was scribbling clouds with its head, without pushing through the lithospheric plates, and it was calculating drug addicts and prostitutes according to the same algorithms as the original Klara Zakharovna Kabyzdokh - that is, classifying as such all those who were younger, prettier and kinder than her.

Stepan swore very loudly on waking up, because in his attempt to dodge the all-destroying laser he rolled off the bed, wrapping himself in the armor of his own fortified spiritual body and summoning his retinue under his banner, but he still banged his forehead painfully against the nightstand, from which a decanter fell and spilled. The decanter contained ice-cold water with lime and mint, and it spilled out, as it is not difficult to guess, right on the head of the unsuccessfully awakened isekai, who immediately enriched the other world with the depths of Earth swearing.

* * *

Внимание! Этот перевод, возможно, ещё не готов.
Его статус: идёт перевод

Переведено на Нотабеноиде
http://notabenoid.org/book/86785/577360

Переводчики: Camrad_RIP