The alarm went off at 6:00 AM sharp, and I contemplated throwing my phone through the window. Two hours of sleep wasn’t enough for anyone, let alone soone who had spent most of the night engaged in physical activities that would qualify as Olympic-level endurance events.
ra groaned beside , burrowing deeper under the covers. "Turn it off."
I slapped at my phone until the noise stopped. "We need to get up."
"Five more minutes."
"You said that ten minutes ago."
She erged from the blanket cocoon with her hair wild around her face and her yellow eyes narrowed to slits. "I hate morning people."
"I’m not a morning person. I’m a ’we have class in two hours and need to shower’ person."
"Shower together?"
I hesitated, rembering what happened the last ti we "showered together" and how we ended up being twenty minutes late to first period.
"Separate showers. We need to be functional today."
She pouted but climbed out of bed, gloriously naked and completely unconcerned about it. The morning light filtering through the blinds caught her red skin in a way that made it look like she was glowing from within.
I watched her walk to the bathroom, admiring the view. The curve of her back, the sway of her hips, that tail that never stopped moving—it was hard to look away.
"Staring is rude," she called over her shoulder.
"I live here."
"That doesn’t make it less rude." She paused in the doorway and looked back at with a smile that promised trouble. "It does make it allowed, though."
The bathroom door closed, and I fell back against the pillows, exhausted but satisfied in a bone-deep way I couldn’t rember feeling before.
The contract sat on the nightstand, printed and ready for signatures. Next to it was my phone with three missed calls from Marco, my driver, asking what ti I wanted pickup.
Reality was creeping back in. School. Battle trials. The contract with Cheon. My newly registered "adaptive-type" Essentia that I needed to learn how to fake convincingly.
The bathroom door swung open a few minutes later, releasing a cloud of steam that rolled out into the bedroom in lazy waves. ra leaned in the fra, hair loose and damp around her shoulders, looking at with the specific expression she wore when she’d already decided sothing and was waiting for to catch up.
"Are you coming?" She tilted her head toward the shower behind her. "You said separate showers. I don’t recall agreeing to that particular clause."
"You heard say it."
"Hearing isn’t agreeing. I have a whole philosophy about this."
"You have a whole philosophy about everything that benefits you."
Her smile widened, shaless and unhurried. "That’s not a no."
It wasn’t. I got up.
The shower was efficient in the sa way a negotiation with ra was efficient — she conceded the broad strokes and contested everything else.
We managed to get clean. That much I could confirm.
The rest of it was a consistent battle against her hands finding their way to sowhere interesting every ti I turned around, which was often enough that the whole operation ran about fifteen minutes longer than any reasonable person would call separate.
Forty minutes later, we were dressed in our uniforms and sitting at the kitchen counter with coffee and the contract between us.
"Sign here," ra pointed to a line at the bottom of the page.
I scrawled my signature. "This feels unnecessarily formal."
"It’s necessarily formal. She needs to understand the seriousness." ra signed her na below mine. "There. Now we’re officially co-conspirators."
"I think we beca co-conspirators when you let drain you in your dorm room."
"That made us accomplices. This makes us partners."
I laughed. "Is there a difference?"
"Accomplices help you hide the body. Partners help you plan where to bury it."
"That’s... morbid."
She folded the contract and slipped it into her bag. "I’ll handle getting her alone. You be ready to explain enough to satisfy her without giving away everything."
"What if she doesn’t sign?"
ra’s smile turned sharp. "She’ll sign. She wants answers more than she wants to be right."
"You sound confident."
"I am confident. Won like Cheon don’t pursue things this hard unless they’re personally invested. She’s not doing this out of duty. She’s doing it because she can’t stop thinking about what happened between you."
The mory flashed through my mind again—Cheon pressed against the storage room wall, her skirt pushed up, her voice breaking as she ca on my fingers.
"You’re thinking about it again," ra said flatly.
"Sorry."
"Don’t be sorry. Be useful. Figure out what you’re going to tell her that will satisfy her curiosity without giving her leverage."
"The truth, mostly. Just not all of it."
"That’s always the best lie." ra checked her watch. "Marco’s waiting downstairs. We should go."
I grabbed my bag and followed her to the door. Before I could open it, she turned and kissed , her tail wrapping around my leg in that possessive way I was starting to crave.
"One more thing," she said against my lips.
"What?"
"If you sleep with Cheon, I want details."
I pulled back, surprised. "That’s not what I expected you to say."
"What did you expect? Jealousy? Threats?"
"Kind of, yeah."
She rolled her eyes. "I told you I understand what your ability needs. I’m not going to fight it. I’m going to manage it."
"By asking for details?"
"By being involved. By knowing what’s happening. By not being left in the dark while you build your collection." She tapped my chest with one finger. "I’m your first. That ans sothing."
"It does."
"Good. Rember that." She kissed again, briefly. "Now let’s go deal with Panda."
We left the apartnt together, the contract in ra’s bag and a plan forming between us. Cheon Hae-Won wouldn’t know what hit her.
But first, we had class. Battle trials were coming on Friday. My Essentia was officially registered. And sohow, in the span of three days, I’d gone from a transmigrated soul in a strange body to having a devil-girl girlfriend who was helping plot how to seduce the class representative.
This was not how I expected the "Harem Lord" quest to go. But I wasn’t complaining.
Not even a little bit.
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