Chapter 32

Blink.

His eyes snapped open. Though he felt as if he had been submerged in a death-like slumber, his mind awoke with startling clarity.

“……”

He stared blankly at the ornate patterns swirling across the ceiling. For a brief, disorienting moment, he struggled to place his surroundings, but the crushing reality soon crashed over him: he was lying inside the estate of Duke Castillion Luz Grondil.

In stark contrast to his vacant stare, Lino’s mind was an active battlefield. Memories bombarded him in a relentless siege: being selected by the Order of St. Margia as the escort for a distinguished guest whose identity remained shrouded in secrecy; idling away his days at the ducal estate like a useless vagrant; earning Yuneria’s bitter ire and suffering through her endless, petty torments; dragging his flu-ridden body to the Baron Merchant Guild’s underground auction in search of the Duke and Yuneria, only to be ambushed by guards… And then… the Duke… in the bathtub… four days later… claiming it was a punishment…

Fuck.

Snapping out of his daze, Lino suddenly balled his fist and ruthlessly battered his own head.

Smack! Smack! Smack! The heavy, muffled thuds echoed relentlessly through the oppressive silence of the bedchamber. Whenever the knuckles of his right hand throbbed with a stinging numbness, he switched to his left, bludgeoning himself until the pain forced him to alternate again.

Hurts like hell.

The fiery agony radiating through his skull confirmed that he was, tragically, still alive. But wouldn’t death be infinitely preferable to this?

Lino meticulously reconstructed the previous day’s events, parsing Grondil’s words to assess his precarious situation. His greatest secret lay exposed: he was a holy knight utterly devoid of divine power. Worse still, his true identity as the adopted second son of Baron Haklan had been laid bare. The former meant he had deceived both the Temple and the Duke, while the latter constituted outright impersonation before imperial nobility. It would not have been remotely surprising if the Duke had ordered his immediate execution for the unforgivable crime of deceiving a high noble of the Empire twice over. Yet, inexplicably, the Duke showed no inclination to report him to the Temple or drag him back to the Haklan barony.

Instead, he had demanded that Lino endure a ‘punishment.’ Through sex. Until the Duke grew bored of him.

“……”

Lino’s brief moment of sharp clarity dissolved, his eyes clouding over once more. A faint crease marred his brow as the bridge of his nose wrinkled; his eyes narrowed into anxious slits while his eyebrows drooped in abject misery. His tightly pressed lips parted slightly, allowing his white incisors to gnaw nervously at his lower lip. Chapped and peeling from lingering fever and profound exhaustion, the fragile skin ruptured almost instantly, welling with dark blood.

The metallic tang of copper bloomed across his tongue. Fearing that further chewing would send a macabre trickle trailing down his chin, he drew his lip inward, sucking the blood away. It was then he reached his grim conclusion.

“Yeah, dying is definitely the better option here,” he muttered into the empty air.

“Was it truly that grueling yesterday?”

Lino flinched violently. Lost in morbid contemplations of how to engineer a painless, respectable demise, the sudden, intrusive voice jolted him so severely he attempted to launch himself out of bed. Or rather, he intended to launch himself.

“Gah!”

Reality proved far less heroic. Instead of springing upright, he managed only to collapse onto his side, clutching a waist that felt as if it had been cleanly severed in two, while a wretched, undignified yelp tore from his throat.

Even getting trampled by a stampeding elephant wouldn’t hurt this damn much… Lino had registered the dull ache radiating through his muscles even while lying perfectly still, but he had entirely failed to anticipate this crippling level of agony. Trembling violently, he forced his protesting arms to prop up his upper body.

“To think you are this frail. Tsk,” Grondil clicked his tongue disapprovingly, striding toward the bed to support Lino’s collapsing frame.

Lino desperately wanted to slap the man’s hands away and insist he could manage on his own, but survival instincts won out; he meekly accepted the assistance, calculating that enduring the Duke’s touch was vastly preferable to planting his face humiliatingly into the mattress. Surprisingly, the hands that should have been rough and martial were unexpectedly meticulous. Fully aware of the catastrophic state of Lino’s lower half, the Duke deftly slid a plush pillow behind his lower back to cushion the strain.

“Thank… you,” Lino squeezed out, his voice practically retreating down his throat.

“Indeed,” Grondil murmured, accepting the gratitude with a slight nod. Then, without a single word of warning, he ruthlessly stripped away the blanket covering Lino’s lower half and snared his leg in a massive grip.

“I—I absolutely cannot do any more!” Lino shrieked, panic surging through him as he mistook the action for an immediate continuation of yesterday’s brutal punishment.

“What nonsense are you spouting?” the Duke replied smoothly. “No matter how much of a beast I may be, even I know better than to shove myself into a sick man’s hole.”

“……”

While relief washed over Lino that this wasn’t a resumption of his ordeal, agreeing with the man’s horrific statement felt impossible. Beast. Sick man’s hole. Know better than to shove… Grondil was openly acknowledging his own predatory nature while simultaneously issuing a terrifying declaration of war: the very moment Lino shed his invalid status, he would be relentlessly ravaged again.

“You overexerted muscles you rarely use, so it will ache quite a bit,” Grondil noted, entirely unfazed by Lino’s internal horror.

Rather than stripping off Lino’s pajama trousers, the Duke began kneading his thighs right through the fabric. He applied measured, expert pressure with his large hands, slowly rolling and pressing into the severely abused muscles along the inner thighs.

“Ugh…” a soft groan slipped past Lino’s lips as the knotted tension began to dissolve.

When those long fingers dug slightly deeper into the sensitive inner flesh, his body jerked violently, but Grondil merely let out a low, amused chuckle at the hyper-sensitive reaction, keeping his movements strictly therapeutic rather than sexual.

Before he fully realized it, Lino had been maneuvered into an incredibly compromised position, both of his legs draped shamelessly over the Duke’s thighs to receive the massage. It was a profoundly irreverent posture for a mere knight to take with the Empire’s highest noble. Uncomfortable with the brazen intimacy, Lino attempted to discreetly slide his legs away, but Grondil’s iron grip refused to yield, forcing him to endure the indulgent treatment in that scandalously relaxed sprawl.

“You will need to build up your stamina moving forward,” Grondil remarked casually.

“…Stamina?” Lino echoed, his face contorting in pure indignance. Despite his current pathetic state, he possessed a robust constitution that ranked within the top five of the Order of St. Margia for pure endurance. To be told to build up his stamina was an absolute insult.

“We barely managed a single proper round, yet you have been bedridden for three entire days,” the Duke elaborated, his tone dripping with mock pity. “I know human bodies are fragile, but… what a disappointment.”

“Three days?”

“Yes. Three days.”

Dumbfounded by the timeline, Lino numbly dragged a hand over his own cheek. Three whole days? Reading the sheer disbelief plastered across his face, Grondil simply reached over to the nightstand and handed Lino his mobile phone.

“It really has been…” Lino whispered, staring at the screen.

Verifying the date displayed on the lock screen, Lino subconsciously examined his own wrist, paranoid that it somehow looked thinner than usual after his prolonged unconsciousness.

“I suppose I can be understanding, given that the Baron Merchant Guild’s aphrodisiac had not fully flushed from your system, compounded by the lingering effects of your flu,” Grondil conceded generously.

“Ah…”

“I even took it upon myself to personally apply your ointment and meticulously administer your suppositories. How is your body feeling?”

“Thank… Wait, what? Ointment? Suppositories?”

Lino froze midway through offering his gratitude for the Duke’s personal care. Ointment and suppositories. Where, exactly, had this man been applying and inserting those medications?

“It truly is an admirable little hole,” the Duke mused, a wicked glint in his eye. “Even while you were completely unconscious, the moment my fingers slipped inside, it clamped down and sucked so deliciously… I found myself regretting I didn’t just feed it my cock instead.”

“……”

Lino’s jaw dropped in sheer horror. He scrambled for a retort, opening and closing his mouth like a suffocating fish, before clamping it shut entirely. He knew with dreadful certainty that absolutely anything he said would be seamlessly twisted into further obscenities.

I have to change the subject. Yet, his mind drew a total blank when trying to conjure a safe conversation topic with the man. The sum total of his knowledge regarding Grondil consisted of three terrifying facts: he was a Duke of the Empire, possessed astronomical wealth, and wielded a monstrous, beast-like cock between his legs.

Bringing up my own interests would be completely out of left field… Ever since childhood, Lino’s singular obsession had revolved exclusively around the grand framework of Isberg. He harbored a deep love for literature, but almost all the texts he consumed were strictly dedicated to Isberg’s lore and history.

Cheeks burning from the unrelenting vulgarity, Lino kept his head bowed, stealing a cautious glance at the man currently kneading his calves. With Grondil’s head slightly lowered in concentration, his flawless forehead and the sharp, aristocratic bridge of his nose caught the ambient light. A few stray strands of long hair tumbled forward, immediately drawing Lino’s eye. As he observed every single time he looked at the man, the Duke’s hair was an extraordinary shade of heavy, overcast grey—a color that vividly evoked dense winter storm clouds teetering on the edge of unleashing a torrential blizzard.

Studying him closely now, Lino realized the Duke’s fluttering eyelashes were uncommonly long. Despite lacking mascara or any feminine artifice, they cast distinct shadows. Beneath that smooth, rounded forehead, his eyebrows sat perfectly sculpted and remarkably thick. Both his lashes and brows were a shade lighter than his storm-cloud hair, yet they still undeniably conjured the image of Isberg’s perpetually clouded skies.

I wonder if he shares an interest in Isberg to match his appearance?

Lino was deeply engrossed in dissecting Grondil’s aesthetic when those piercing blue-grey eyes suddenly snapped upward to meet his gaze, causing his heart to plummet into his stomach.

What kind of eyes are those…?

It was only a fraction of a second, but Grondil’s pupils had constricted into vertical slits. It was the exact, predatory contraction of a carnivore turning to face a sudden light, an illusion so visceral that Lino genuinely mistook the man sitting before him for a literal beast rather than a human being.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Grondil asked, blinking slowly.

“…E-excuse me?” Lino stammered. Snared in the paralyzing terror of a prey animal caught in a predator’s sights, it took the sound of the Duke’s deep voice to shatter the spell and drag him back to reality. He rubbed his eyes furiously, and when he looked again, Grondil’s pupils had returned to the perfectly round, normal proportions of a human.

Did my mind just play tricks on me? Lino desperately tried to soothe his violently galloping heart. I thought his words and actions were beastly, and now my brain is actually hallucinating him as one? He began to seriously question his own mental and physical stability. Between the chronic stress inflicted by Yuneria’s malicious schemes, a raging flu, the Baron Merchant Guild’s potent aphrodisiac, his exposed secrets, and the so-called ‘punishment’ meted out by the Duke—which was simply a polite euphemism for violently rough sex—it was a miracle he was functioning at all. Under such immense strain, experiencing vivid hallucinations was entirely plausible.

“Do you want me to shove it in?” Grondil inquired, dropping a question so devoid of context it defied logic. Or rather, Lino desperately feigned ignorance because he absolutely refused to acknowledge the obvious implications.

“…I beg your pardon? Shove… what in?” Lino choked out, his voice trembling as pitifully as a newborn goat’s.

“What do you think? That little hole of yours,” the Duke stated matter-of-factly.

“Absolutely not! Never. Not a chance! If you do that to me right now, I will literally die…” Lino wailed, his face crumpling into a mask of pure despair. He frantically pleaded his case, emphasizing that his abused nether regions were throbbing with such excruciating pain that merely sitting upright was a herculean task. Seeing Lino’s violent, terrified rejection, Grondil nodded with a heavy sigh of genuine regret.

“My mistake, then. You were staring at me with such a heated gaze, I naturally assumed you were begging me to fill you up again.”

“It wasn’t… heated in the slightest.”

“We need to do it frequently to properly pave the path, you know,” the Duke reasoned smoothly.

“Pave… the path…”

“Is it not the same with a weapon? One must wield it frequently for it to truly fit the hand. Even in a dense, untamed forest, one must continuously trample the wild grass to forge a proper trail.”

“Y-yes… I suppose so…”

Lino shuddered. The logic was technically sound, yet utterly horrifying. No matter how many times he turned the metaphor over in his mind, it was glaringly obvious that the ‘weapon’ and the ‘dense, untamed forest’ were thinly veiled allegories for his own… anatomy.

Yes. This is fine. It’s far better he speaks in roundabout metaphors like this. If he were to abandon the poetry and speak plainly, it would be…

“It was only a single time, and I couldn’t even breach you properly before you passed out for three days,” Grondil complained, instantly shattering Lino’s fragile hope. “That means your tight little entrance has likely shrunk right back to how narrow it was initially. Granted, I have been slipping my fingers inside to apply the ointment, but as you have seen for yourself, Sir Cliff, my cock is hardly comparable to mere fingers, is it?”

“Uh… well, um… Yes… That is… true…”

Lino turned deathly pale. The very moment he had consoled himself with the Duke’s metaphorical tact, the man had casually unleashed a string of obscenities that would make a slum thug blush.

Is this man truly nobility? Not just a noble, but a Grand Duke of the Empire—how could he spew such appallingly vulgar filth as easily as drawing breath? His actions were just as degenerate as his words. He seemed far better suited to ruling an underground slum syndicate than governing a ducal estate.

No, wait. With a face like that, he definitely wouldn’t be a slum boss. Based purely on his devastatingly regal exterior, if someone claimed he was the Emperor himself, everyone would readily believe it.

Moving with agonizing caution, Lino sneakily slid his legs off Grondil’s lap and buried them safely beneath the blanket. The hasty retreat was entirely motivated by the terrifying discovery of the swelling bulge tenting the Duke’s groin. The sheer, monstrous size of the erection tucked against his thigh was so immense that its terrifying contour strained clearly against the thick, loose fabric of his trousers. Paralyzed by the terrifying certainty that remaining in this bed would inevitably trigger a repeat of the horror from three days ago, Lino desperately wrung a new topic of conversation from his panicked brain.

“Is… is your body faring well?” Lino ventured.

“My body? Ah, you mean the flu?”

“Yes, you caught my cold that day, so I attempted a healing prayer…”

Lino froze mid-sentence, his stomach dropping. He should have just stopped at asking if the man felt alright. Why in the gods’ names had he brought up the healing prayer? His face immediately broadcasted his catastrophic blunder.

Watching Lino squirm in transparent panic, Grondil let out a soft, amused laugh. He isn’t a child, yet he possesses absolutely zero ability to mask his thoughts. The knight would never, ever be mistaken for a con artist out in the world. If anything, he was the exact type of naive fool who would let a swindler shake him down until not even a speck of dust remained in his pockets.

“The flu has completely cleared up, entirely thanks to you, Sir Cliff,” Grondil purred.

“Thanks… to me?” Lino balked. I didn’t do a single thing. In fact, his humiliating lack of divine power meant he had completely failed to cast a basic healing prayer.

“I was informed that the most effective cure for a cold is to work up a good, hot sweat,” the Duke continued idly.

You were informed? Lino frowned internally. Taking medicine, burying oneself under thick blankets, and sweating it out in a deep sleep was universally known common sense. The Duke spoke of the remedy as though he had never experienced a common illness in his entire life.

“Since you clamped down so spectacularly tight, Sir Cliff, I managed to work up quite the productive sweat. I look forward to entrusting myself to your care the next time I catch a chill.”

“I beg of you…” Lino whimpered, burying his face in his hands. “Please… leave those requests to the doctors, the pharmacists, and the priests…”