Her upper body strength was real — she’d built it over years, the substitution of everything she’d lost going into the defined muscle of her arms, shoulders, and core — and she pressed with it, her palms pushing against his forearms with genuine force.

He held her legs open anyway.

Not struggling. Just holding. The position maintained without particular effort, his hands curved around the shape of her thighs in their asymmetry, her scarred left side and her prosthetic right, both parted at the angle that his hands required.

She was wearing panties.

He could see the fabric — plain, dark, practical — stretched between her parted thighs, and the unmistakable wet patch that the pheromones and the last twenty minutes had produced there without her consent or cooperation.

His hand moved.

One finger curling under the fabric at the side.

She grabbed his wrist.

He tore the panty.

One clean motion — the fabric parting at the hip seam with a sound like a thread pulled from a needle — and the panel beneath her registered the exposed warmth of her immediately, the crystal surface lighting faintly at the contact.

He looked.

Dark hair. Thick, untrimmed, spreading from the base of her stomach across the whole surface of her — the uncurated density of a woman who has not had occasion to think about this, who has spent the last however many years in a chair in a mechanism room managing dolls and cameras and has not been thinking about this — and below it, her lips, flushed and wet, parted slightly at the center with the involuntary evidence of everything the pheromones had done to her.

"What a wild pussy," he said.

Her face, still raw from the last several minutes, went through several colors.

"You—" She had his wrist with both hands now, her grip fierce and shaking simultaneously. "You absolute bastard, I will—stop it, I am telling you—"

He positioned himself.

The broad head of him — still warm, already hardening again with the recuperative certainty of a man whose body was not subject to normal timelines — pressed against her, against the slick, involuntary wetness of her, and she felt it and her voice changed.

"Stop." The word came out different this time. Lower. The low register of a warning that had something else behind it — not just anger, the other thing her hands pressed against his forearms couldn’t quite disguise. "You stop right now, I’m—"

Movement behind him.

His divine sense caught them before they cleared the mechanism room’s threshold — two women, three, the qi signature of trained mercenaries, the tight formation of a protective entry response, swords drawn, formation arrays active on their wrists. Fast. Well-trained. Moving with the coordinated certainty of women who’d run this exact drill.

They entered through the east arch at a run.

And dissolved.

Not violently. Not with the drama of destruction. They simply ceased to be present in a way that could affect him, the spatial technique moving through them like a thought through smoke, their coordinated attack arriving at the location where he was standing and finding only the residual warmth of someone who had already moved through their formation and was now still exactly where he’d been, undisturbed.

Three mists where three women had been.

The mercenary queen’s eyes, which had tracked the entry of her guards with the relief of something arriving on schedule, went wide.

He turned back to her.

"Where were we," he said.

She stared at the three dispersed mists. At the east arch, empty now. At the one hundred screens showing him from one hundred angles, every panel reflecting the same scene — her on the control panel, her panty torn, his cock pressed against her, her hands on his forearms, her face naked and exposed and wet with everything the last half hour had cost her.

"You—" Her voice had stopped working the way she needed it to.

The head of him pressed forward.

Her entrance resisted — the initial resistance of a body that has not been touched like this, that has been in that chair and in this room and has had, clearly, exactly zero occasion for this — her walls tensed, tight and unwilling, her hips pressing backward against the panel as though the cold crystal surface might provide some counterforce against the thing that was arriving.

It did not.

He pressed forward.

Slow. Specific. The way he had done everything since walking through her arch — with the calm, unhurried certainty of a man for whom the outcome was not in question, only the timing.

Her eyes went wide.

The wetness of her, the pheromones still running through her system, the involuntary heat of her body that had been building since he first pressed her palm against him — all of it working against her, working with him. Her entrance stretched around the broad head of his cock with the overwhelming intimacy of first contact.

"It—" Her voice had the quality of something said from very far away. "I—that’s—"

He pressed deeper.

She felt the barrier.

Her own body, confirmed. Her own history, documented in her flesh — the fact that this room and this chair and this life had not included this.

He felt it too.

He paused.

One breath.

She looked at him. Her iron-colored eyes, still raw, still tear-tracked, still carrying everything the last hour had stripped from her — looked at him with something she could not immediately classify and did not have time to, because his hips rolled forward.

The barrier gave.

PAH—

"IAAANGHHHH~~!!!"

The scream tore through the mechanism room from her chest, from somewhere below language, from the part of a body that exists before choice — her back arching off the control panel, her shoulders slamming down, her hands leaving his forearms entirely to seize the edge of the panel, her knuckles going pale against the crystal surface.

Her legs — what there was of them — trembled.

The prosthetic scraped against the panel. Her left thigh shook with a vibration that ran all the way up her spine.

His cock was inside her.

All nine inches, seated fully now — punching through the barrier, through the first resistance, through the total shock of a body receiving something it had carried as theoretical for years and was now processing as real — and the sensation, the sheer overwhelming fullness of him, the heat, the stretch, the pulse of a body that was harder than steel and warmer than anything she’d been near in the cold of this room—

Her mouth was open.

Her scream had used everything her lungs contained and her throat had not yet recovered enough to make a second sound, the air rushing out of her chest in a single, continuous, ragged exhale that filled the mechanism room and ran along the copper threads of the runic energy vessels and echoed briefly against the one hundred formation crystal screens, each of them reflecting the same image back at itself—

A young woman on her control panel.

Her dress off one shoulder. Her panty in two pieces. Her hands white-knuckled on the surface of her own command station. Her face tilted back, eyes showing white at the edges, mouth open.

And above her, completely unhurried, his robe still immaculate, his expression carrying the warmth of a man who has just confirmed something he already knew—

Tianlong, looking down at her.

His thumb moved to the hair at her temple.

Brushed it back.

"Your pussy," he said, with the gentle, specific appreciation of someone saying something they mean, "is absolutely delicious." His hips pulled back — a slow, devastating inch — and pressed forward again, the obscene wet sound of her filling the room. "And tight."

"AaaannnnNnnnGgghhh— IT HURTS!!!"