Sera trembled as Simon's tongue slid against hers, his kiss deep and hungry. She answered without hesitation.
So tasty, Sera thought. So hungry.
I want to keep eating.
Energy rolled off him in warm waves, brushing against the hollow ache that lived deep inside her.
Gotta be careful.
She traced the roof of his mouth with her tongue and felt Simon jerk in response. A soft moan escaped him as his hands wrapped around her waist, pulling her closer. He sighed against her lips, nibbling lightly before searching for her mouth again.
What if I just ate my fill? The thought drifted through her mind, hazy with hunger.
Just a little more.
Simon pressed closer, heavy and insistent, and she let him. His warmth bled into her senses, tempting.
What if I–
A harsh alarm trilled through the air.
Damn it.
Sera flinched and begrudgingly broke their contact with a soft sigh, slipping out of Simon's arms.
He was already leaning forward for another kiss, his eyes locked on her lips, already parting in anticipation. She gently pressed a hand against his mouth to stop him.
"Why?" he asked, a little breathless. He looked up at her, eyes glazed and breathing heavy.
She laughed softly and cupped his cheeks with her hands before rising from the sofa. "Time's up, Simon. The guiding session is over."
"Oh," Simon stared silently for a moment, and then nodded, straightening his posture and smoothing out his clothes.
Fifteen minutes of guiding.
That was all Sera ever allowed - once per esper, once per week.
If anyone pressed for more or crossed her boundaries, she filed a report for overreach and blacklisted them from requesting her again. Several espers had learned that lesson the hard way.
He knew that and she liked that about him. Simon understood where her line was.
And he never crossed it.
Sera knew Simon had a crush on her. It showed in the way he blushed, in the quick yearning glances his bright green eyes stole when he thought she wasn't looking, and in the careful way he chose his words.
It was… cute.
But he was a meal and Sera was never going to find a lover.
She couldn't. She would eat them down to their very bones.
Sera began neatly tidying the tea set she had set out for Simon, while he reluctantly shuffled to the door.
He paused, his hand on the recessed door handle, before turning back to look at Sera.
"Thanks again for the session. Work's been more pleasant with you here, Sera," he mumbled, cheeks flushed.
Sera knew they didn't have a good purification rate, especially since he was a rank higher.
But nonetheless Simon showed up and, without fail, requested her. He always rated her highly on the post-guiding survey when it came to subjective points. That was enough for her and it was good for her rating at work.
Definitely good for her year-end bonus.
She smiled sweetly, "Of course, Simon. See you next week." She bowed as he left the room.
When the door closed with a gentle click, Sera collapsed haphazardly on the black leather sofa they had just been making out on.
Silence filled the room until it was broken by a loud, churning grumble. Sera's stomach was complaining.
"Ughhh, I'm so hungry. Damn." Sera grumbled, pressing a hand to her stomach, staring glumly at the ceiling lights. "What a short meal."
Fifteen minutes.
That was the rule she had established for herself for feeding. Otherwise she might lose control and devour them whole - every drop of pollution, mana, and life essence. She would eat it all. So fifteen minutes was enough to get a little bit of food and keep her sanity and willpower intact.
That was her line to keep her humanity. Any more and she might snap.
Landing in this world had been a blessing, she thought. A world with no uppity Instructor hounding her day and night.
But I'm always hungry.
When Sera had arrived on this planet, an immature civilization not yet past the Great Filter, she had felt free. A place where she was untethered by expectations, limits, and her Instructor lecturing her about becoming a mature, responsible succubus.
"Feed properly on pleasure," he would say.
"Stop eating things that aren't good for you."
"Behave, Seraphil."
Sera had felt suffocated. She knew to properly feed she would eventually need to have sex, continuously, and for the rest of her life as a proper succubus, but there wasn't anyone who could handle her.
Every woman and man she had been deeply intimate with weren't able to tolerate such intense energy drain. She would eat too much and they would wilt, their vitality fading faster than they could handle. They almost always nearly died. Being with her was a death sentence.
Except for the Instructor.
He was the only one who could handle her overwhelming consumption. But feeding with him always felt unbearable.
With the limiters he forced on her, it was like drinking through a straw: slow, restrained, and suffocating. He was always nagging her.
"Eat responsibly."
"Slowly."
"Mindfully."
As if she were some reckless child who couldn't control herself. The annoying, self-righteous, perverted old man.
And worst of all, he was usually right. Sera hated that.
So she stole something she shouldn't have and ran away to this world.
But soon, hunger had become a problem.
For two years, she had struggled with feeding - siphoning pleasurable kisses off interested patrons at night clubs and part-time work as an apprentice massage therapist. But it wasn't enough and it was getting dangerous.
Sera was starving, maddeningly so, and if she didn't find a consistent food source soon, she was going to end up devouring someone or something whole. She almost did once, even.
And if she made waves, then well, then her Instructor would find out and she'd be taken home.
Back to an imprisoned, suffocating life.
Sera rolled onto her side on the sofa, staring at the tea set on the table, the cups drained dry. Her stomach twisted again in protest.
"Yeah, yeah. I know," she muttered.
Causality was weird that way. As an aberration, an intruder, in this world, Sera couldn't do too much. She couldn't stand out or the System would throw a fit and re-correct.
And if Sera wanted to hide, she needed to blend in. But she was starving all the time.
As if by a stroke of luck, a dungeon gate had burst near her subway stop on her commute home - monsters spilled out of the portal like water from a burst dam. It was then, in that destruction and fire, that Sera was able to eat her fill just once; and also where she learned that she could eat the pollution produced by espers, much like how the guides of this world purified them.
Suddenly, she had both a reliable meal and a job. A way to sustain herself while still obeying this world's laws. She could work as a Guide - an excusable reason for the meta to accept. The System and Causality didn't seem to have any problems as long as the work made sense. No blaring alarms trilled in her head, no red warning signs flashed before her vision.
After saving a rampaging Esper in that dungeon break, the government had employed her as a Guide and she had worked diligently at the government-run Guiding Facility before being recruited to join Ratha - one of the country's top guilds focused on dungeon clearing.
Eight months in, Sera had successfully passed her probationary stage, received her own office, and established continuous scheduling with a robust roster of espers.
But never enough to be full. She was always just below satiated. That was her curse.
Be good, Seraphil. Sip like a bird.
Her Instructor's words echoed in her memory.
If Sera was a vase about to overflow, her water was always right against the edge of the ceramic lip, delicately dancing the line.
But she couldn't eat more.
There were two reasons:
Do not harm. Her Instructor had drilled it into her that every life was precious. Even if she had run away to defy him, she felt an inescapable pull to obey the first rule he had ever given her.
Secondly, she was constrained by the System debuff.
She glanced at the corner of her vision. A game-like interface flickered into existence. This was the System: the way the Great Filter, a survival of the fittest mechanism, tested and communicated with immature worlds.
< Dimensional Transfer Debuff >
A post-Filter evolution has defied the System.
Power is halved.
Time left: 7306:34:23s
This was the cost of her escape to this world. A world she didn't belong to. A world she wasn't supposed to be in.
For defying universal law, she had been debuffed - unable to eat properly, unable to do much of anything for the past three years.
Her hunger was enormous, but the System throttled what she could absorb down to a miserable trickle. If her stomach were a container, it would be vast, tied tight at the throat so only the thinnest stream could pass through.
She was hungry all the time.
But she couldn't eat too much either, or she'd trigger a capacity rebound. Too much at once and the excess would burst out of her, wasted.
She had a little under a year left.
One more year and then the restriction would ease.
Then she could eat properly again - chew a meal, swallow a real bite, let it settle and nourish her instead of slipping away. Right now feeding felt like trying to drink a waterfall through a straw, or cupping water in leaking hands.
But at full power?
Then she could eat as much as she wanted. Her stomach could finally hold what she took in. She would still be hungry - she always was - but at least she would be able to satisfy some of it.
"I hate this waiting game," she thought, pressing the back of her hand against her forehead.
A large bell tolled from a distance twelve times. Sera looked outside her window, watching pink blossoms fall delicately onto the lawn below.
Guess it's time for lunch.