Chapter 232: Fatal Weakness

Chinatsu Ayase thoroughly enjoyed moments like this.

Like fine, sharp spider silk, slowly and deliberately binding the victim’s limbs–

She had all the patience in the world to watch the prey in her web exhaust its strength inch by inch.

And her timing was precise to the point of cruelty.

An unbreakable chain, a secret that could not be confessed, an everyday life that could not be reclaimed.

Even the lover he treasured most was now shut away on the other side of that door.

–Was this why Aina had abandoned him and left?

Was it because Aina had finally noticed too?

Scalding tears overflowed uncontrollably from his eyes, sliding down his cheeks.

He could not even tell why these tears were flowing.

Was it hatred toward his body’s shameful submission to the violation?

Or was he blaming his own cowardice and powerlessness?

The dizziness and muscle aches brought by the high fever were still raging inside him.

But what filled him with the most despair was that this body actually trembled and panted instinctively amid the fever and humiliation, betraying the last remnants of his will.

“Oh my… that pitiful expression makes it look like you’re declaring to the whole world that you’re the most wronged person under heaven.”

Chika narrowed her long, narrow eyes, and a smile without any warmth curved her lips.

“However, Xun Jun can use the rule we just set right now, you know. Aren’t you having trouble confirming Aina’s situation? In that case, why not take out your mobile phone and try sending her a message?”

“…Huh?”

“If you do that, maybe you can grab the last lifeline in despair~?”

That whisper soaked in malice drilled straight into his eardrums, wildly shaking his brain.

‘Don’t touch it.’

‘Absolutely don’t do what she says!’

The moment he showed any wavering toward Aina, he would only step right into the trap this woman had already laid!

“Come, look here, Xun Jun.”

Chika casually turned the screen of a mobile phone placed in the corner of the bedside table toward him.

That was her own mobile phone.

The faint light of the screen flickered in the dim bedroom, clearly playing a muted video–

It was the “care record” she had personally set up in a corner of the room and filmed last night.

“Nngh, ah…!!”

The remnants of his rationality screamed a warning: Don’t look, close your eyes!

His nerves, pushed to the limit, also roared madly: Absolutely don’t keep watching!

But his gaze seemed to have been cursed; he couldn’t move it away at all.

The scene on the screen violently shattered his rationality.

In a corner of the kotatsu, the boy whose fever had not yet subsided lay helplessly on his back, face flushed, eyes unfocused.

Fingers roamed freely over his skin, unbuttoning his clothes, stroking, pressing…

Yet he could only weakly let out whimpers, letting himself be manipulated, unable to offer even a shred of proper resistance.

That was the normally gentle and reserved Kaoru Hoshitani, who would clumsily fry eggs for Aina in the morning.

Now, however, like a sacrifice stripped of skin and bones, he was frozen into irrefutable proof.

His stomach churned violently, and the intense nausea almost made him vomit on the spot.

“Hehehe, how is it? If people with special tastes saw this, they might get incredibly excited~”

Chika leaned down, her warm breath spilling against his ear.

“A junior burning with fever while being toyed with by his senpai, his cute face messed up by tears… quite a performance, isn’t it?”

“Stop looking… turn it off!! Turn it off, ahhh!!”

He clenched his teeth, both hands desperately gripping the bedsheet, letting out a deathly, cornered-beast-like wail.

Faced with this recording that crushed his dignity to pieces, how could he possibly remain unmoved?!

“Don’t move around for now. It’s okay–how could your senpai bear to hurt you—-haven’t you long been used to my touch, Xun Jun?”

Chika’s palm gently pressed against his burning cheek, her tone so tender it seemed it could drip, yet the words she spat out were freezing cold.

“Instead of worrying about yourself, shouldn’t you worry first about that poor girlfriend? If this gets exposed, Aina will be dragged down with you and become the victim who ultimately pays the price for you.”

Chika lifted her fingertip slightly and pointed lightly toward the half-open bedroom door.

Following her gaze, he looked.

At the end of the corridor, the foyer was empty; no one’s figure could be seen anymore.

Only a solitary black umbrella lay tilted by the shoe cabinet in the foyer. Rainwater dripped from its tip, pooling into a small, glaring dark puddle on the cold floor tiles.

Unlike him, still painfully gasping in the room, that puddle was dead silent and cold, utterly motionless.

“Aina left a long time ago,” Chika declared lightly.

“—-??!!”

It felt as if his chest had been struck hard by a heavy hammer; all the blood in his body nearly froze in an instant.

That umbrella… that was Aina’s umbrella!

The water dripping from the umbrella tip was irrefutable proof that Aina had rushed back here through the rain.

“What a careless girl.”

A mocking smile hung at the corner of Chika’s lips, as if she were reading out a predetermined verdict.

“Because she was so worried about Xun Jun that she ran back through the rain, but ended up hearing the sounds we made last night outside the door… she was so scared she didn’t even dare push the door open, and just slunk away. It’s all Xun Jun’s fault, you know–the sounds you made last night were a bit too wanton.”

Chika’s voice was like poison slowly seeping into his brain.

“Ah, but it doesn’t matter. To me, as long as I have Xun Jun, that’s enough. As for a girlfriend who only knows how to run away… I can get as many replacements as I want.”

She ran away?

In the terrifying picture Chika painted, Aina stood outside the door soaked through, separated by a thin door panel, heard those unbearable sticky sounds, and then…

Silently fleeing in panic amid despair and collapse?

–It was because of me.

–It was all because last night I didn’t completely reject Chika, because of my weakness, my compromise!

If I hadn’t opened the door last night, if I had fought to the death last night… would none of this have happened?!

Guilt and a sense of sin turned into a boulder, pressing heavily on his heart.

No.

Wait… this is that woman’s rhetoric!

She was deliberately pushing all the blame onto him, forcing him into a desperate pit of self-reproach!

He bit hard on his pale lips, his gaze nailed to that cold puddle.

Under the blanket, his right hand trembled as it crept bit by bit toward under the pillow.

There, his own black backup mobile phone was hidden.

‘I have to do something…’

‘I can’t let her manipulate me…’

“Don’t rush to blame yourself, Xun Jun.”

Chika’s voice sounded from above his head.

“Can you tell your senpai? Just now you secretly reached your hand under the pillow… what exactly were you trying to send to Aina?”

His body abruptly froze.

“Why do you always think you can slip past under my nose? But it doesn’t matter.”

“…”

“Your eyes are already broken, aren’t they.” Chika looked down at him from above. “Hey, Xun Jun, have you ever experienced being treated like disgusting filth by Aina and completely abandoned?”

“…Shut up…”

“Oh? Are you begging for mercy? It’s far too late to beg now, isn’t it?”

“Aina… will definitely find out!!”

Along with the tears bursting through the dam, he used the last bit of strength in his chest to let out an almost tearing roar!

“Hah?”

The fake smile on Chika’s face froze for an instant.

“Stop being so full of yourself!! You lunatic! Aina will absolutely discover the truth!!”

The boy’s eyes were bloodshot, desperately flashing the last of his defiance amid humiliation and fever.

In that instant, the gloom in Chika’s eyes flashed and vanished, but then a sharper, more aggressive laugh burst out in the narrow room.

“Pfft, pfft hahahahahaha—-what is this?!”

She laughed so hard she rocked back and forth, one hand covering her forehead, even laughing physiological tears from the corners of her eyes.

“Is this some kind of low-class joke?! Aina will find out? Stop being so full of yourself. With everything currently under my control, you actually yelled at me [Aina will definitely find out]?!”

“Pfft hahaha, Xun Jun, you’re really too funny! I didn’t know you were such a sore loser of a boy!”

“Mmph?!”

The next second, the laughter stopped abruptly.

A cold, slender finger, with irresistible force, pried open his tightly clenched teeth and thrust straight in!

The nausea of a foreign object invading his mouth shot straight to his head, and his throat spasmed with intense revulsion.

“Aha, you want to throw up, right? You really want to bite it off in one go, don’t you? But do you dare?”

Chika lowered her head slightly, that delicate face only inches from his, her eyes so cold they suffocated him.

“Not only can you not bite, you have to hold it obediently. Where did the courage go that you had just now when you yelled at me and poked at my sore spot?”

‘Don’t…’

‘With that disgusting face…’

“I told you… not to say her name!!”

He resisted indistinctly, his tongue desperately trying to push that finger out of his lips.

“What a stubborn look. Even at this point, you’re still struggling in vain.”

Chika gave a cold laugh. Instead of withdrawing her fingertip, she viciously stirred it around inside his feverish mouth, crushing his faint resistance bit by bit.

“Guh… urk! Cough…”

Tears mixed with saliva slid from the corner of his mouth as the boy heaved violently.

“It hurts, doesn’t it? Since you’re so stubborn, I have no reason to hold back anymore. Just accept your fate, Xun Jun.”

Chika dropped all her mockery and coldly announced his sentence.

“You just said Aina would find out, right? So what if she notices? In the end, all she’ll be able to see is you–the ‘accomplice’ who willingly hooked fingers with me and begged me to hide the truth for you!”

“If I tell Rika Kawasaki about the vow you made with me while hooking fingers, or read it word for word to Aina’s face… take a guess–what will be left of your precious pride, the everyday life you fought to protect with your life, at that moment?”

Suffocation.

A boundless suffocating feeling, like a black swamp, swallowed him whole.

Is it… going to end like this?

This time too, is everything going to be taken from me again?