Time stretched long—several dozen minutes, or perhaps several hours.
Creis gave up wondering what Olivia would do to her.
She only knew that [Soul] had been crushed to nothing inside the vast shadow.
In its place a clear demon marking shone, answering the pink patterns at her neck and lower abdomen, sweeping across every inch of her fine skin and branding Olivia’s power firmly into her soul.
If the apostles she had once fought were still here, they would surely have stopped the battle and watched with interest as a Celestial God fell.
Humiliation, pleasure, humiliation, happiness, being moved… and after that, she no longer felt that any of it was humiliation.
Perhaps Olivia had never intended to let her go and had simply seized this chance.
Or perhaps Creis knew that resistance no longer meant anything.
All her hope had been placed in that first choice—the decision to begin changing, the decision to acknowledge and understand Olivia.
From that moment she had already been racing down this road of corruption.
The shadow’s “plunder” made her body somewhat disobedient, trembling hard as it released the excess numbness inside her.
A thread of the densest shadow spilled from Olivia’s lips, flickered and danced at her fingertips, became a flame, and then a chaotic orb.
The orb was the size of a fist, like a beating heart, breathing with a steady rhythm.
Several tendrils crawled out and slowly reached toward Creis’s delicate body, lingering on her skin for a few seconds as if they had deliberately slowed down—declaring victory, and also grinding away the last scrap of resisting reason she had left.
“[Devour].”
Olivia recited it under her breath.
“[Devour].”
Then the shadow began to pour into Creis’s chest.
Her body would once have rejected power that did not belong to her.
Under the remade yielding, it began to absorb this high-purity shadow with all its strength.
She was like a puppet wound in chains from head to toe, every syllable carrying a charming tremble.
“Oli, ah, haah… O… Olivia…”
The scorching heat of Olivia’s body nearly made her forget what reason was.
The shell that had once been utterly solid had softened now until it could be torn as easily as the membrane of an egg.
Her chest burned as if she had swallowed a blazing fireball, yet the faint pain lasted only an instant.
What followed was joy mixed with excitement and a thread of sinking surrender.
Creis let the cute pink tip of her tongue slip out.
The heart-shaped tail tip vanished from her sight.
She could only watch that straight tail, faintly scaled, keep breaking through the few psychological defenses she had left.
As the cooling heat boiled up again, Creis let out several broken cries.
“Haah, aah, ah-haah.”
Even a slight lift of her head let her see the faint glow the demon markings shed in the dark.
Her gaze drifted upward on instinct, and she loosed a moan that invited the imagination.
At first it was only a dragonfly’s probing gentleness.
Later a thread of pain too faint to notice hid inside the cloying sweetness.
Once she adapted, the only thing left in Creis’s unfocused eyes was overflowing love.
A long time passed.
Only when that heat had been washed through her again and again and spread across every inch of her skin did Olivia stop.
“Huff, huff…”
“How do you feel?”
“I… I won’t… I won’t be brought down like this.”
“This isn’t bringing you down. You and I were never enemies from beginning to end, you dummy.”
“Never enemies…”
“Mm-hm. Looks like there’s hope of Creis getting it through her head one day after all.”
Olivia gently wiped the sweetness from every inch of Creis’s skin and greedily took it for herself, yet she did not take away the shadow that was still eroding her.
She stroked Creis’s body lightly, wanting her to fall asleep inside the shadow’s wrapping.
Her body would change while she slept.
When she woke, she would accept her new identity.
Yet Creis, who should have drifted off, remained awake.
That wakefulness let her watch with her own eyes how her body would transform.
From the demon markings, countless black veins visible to the naked eye crawled across her powerless, snow-white, delicate body.
The ruined clothes barely covered her fine figure, a last ridiculous scrap of resistance.
Shadow wrapped Creis.
She was like a pitiful flying insect caught in a spider’s web.
Olivia was the spider injecting venom into her.
At first it was only heat.
The heat was not painful.
Strictly speaking it was more like soaking in warm water.
Even her mind felt light and drifting, and her body was hard to move, yet strangely every sense was sharper than it had ever been, sensitive even to the smallest change.
The same demon mark as Olivia’s appeared on her long, beautiful right leg, like an invisible, scalding brand.
Both sides of her head felt somewhat swollen, a slight discomfort, but that discomfort soon became a pleasant sensation like being massaged.
Olivia stroked her cheek, watched her body gradually change, and showed three parts delight and seven parts worry.
Then she kissed Creis lightly on the cheek and tightened her hold on the hand that had already lost its strength.
“Creis, don’t resist it. Try to accept it.”
As Olivia spoke, the black cross in her pupils pulsed faintly, taking pleasure for Creis’s sake.
Several dozen minutes passed in a blink.
The heat inside Creis was still boiling.
The cyan horns on both sides of her head had already taken full shape.
In Creis’s deep-blue right eye appeared the exact same black cross mark as Olivia’s.
It was the symbol of apostilization.
“I… what am I turning into… ah, haah.”
That distinctive cold tone now carried an echo of love, and even Creis herself found it unbearably shameful.
“Into my kind. We can be together forever.”
“I… I’m so lonely. So sad…”
“It’s all right. It’s all right~ I will stay with you forever.”
Olivia kissed Creis on the lips.
The kiss was deep, and it carried the [Gift] of a kin’s master, letting Creis taste that sweet scent for the first time.
This time, though, Creis closed her eyes as if she had accepted it.
Olivia stopped her hands and no longer poured shadow into Creis.
To be precise, every defense inside Creis’s body had already crumbled without her noticing.
The shadow invaded her unguarded flesh, and remaking her was almost effortless.
Only deep in Creis’s soul did resistance still go on, as if some doubt remained and still made her refuse the new identity.
Olivia nodded thoughtfully.
“So it really is our daughter, hm…”
“In that case, I’ll wait until you’re truly ready before I ‘eat’ the rest.”
Olivia stroked Creis’s newborn horns, let her hand slide slowly downward, and at last rested it on her soft cheek.
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