Chapter 7: Playing Innocent

Gima nearly leaped out of her skin. In a blind panic, she frantically folded George’s precious “f*pping materials,” stuffed the contraband into her bosom, and only then realized the cheap prison clothes the Holy Sanctuary had given her didn't have any pockets. In a moment of sheer, desperate genius, she tucked the drawings into the elastic band of her underwear.

She flew around the room, smoothing out the bed and trying to erase all evidence of her crime. She had just finished when…

A rush of hurried footsteps echoed from the hall. In the blink of an eye, George’s tall, imposing figure filled the doorway.

Gima, who was now squatting awkwardly on the chair in front of the desk with a heavy theology book in her hands, turned her head in what she hoped was a convincing display of panic. She gave a strained, wobbly laugh and said:

“Ah, you’re back so soon! I just, uh, got here myself. To study!”

She was incredibly anxious, hoping against hope that George might see her “diligently studying” and overlook her blatant, felonious trespassing.

George walked over with a completely blank expression and, with a grim finality that sent a shiver down her spine, shut the door behind him.

Gima’s heart hammered against her ribs like a war drum. In her eyes, the Hero was now more dangerous than a starving, rabid dragon. She desperately tried to hide her tail under her cloak, terrified that George might act on some brutish impulse, make an irreversible mistake, and leave her with a lifetime of painful, traumatic memories.

George walked right up to the desk, plucked the theology book from Gima’s hands, and said in a tired, deadpan voice:

“You’re holding it upside down.”

“Ahahaha, so that’s it! No wonder I couldn’t understand a single word. The illustrations were all wonky.”

As she spoke, Gima guiltily took the theology book back, her hands trembling slightly.

“You can read High Latin?”

For the first time, Gima actually looked at the book she had randomly pulled from the shelf and realized she didn’t recognize a single, goddamn character.

“I just grabbed a random book,” she bluffed, her mind racing. “The cover looked nice and holy.”

George raised his hand and gave Gima a light, but firm, knock on the head.

“Ow, that hurts!”

Gima clutched her head, rubbing it vigorously as if mortally wounded. Tears of genuine, crocodile pain almost sprang from her eyes.

“You can’t just sneak into someone’s private room whenever you feel like it,” George said sternly, channeling his inner disappointed father.

“They brought me to this house, but they never said this room was off-limits! And there wasn't a ‘No Gima or Other Demonic Thots Allowed’ sign on the door,” Gima argued with the righteous indignation of a professional sophist. “Besides, I came in openly with a key. How can you possibly call that sneaking?”

George sighed, a sound heavy with the weight of the world. Gima couldn’t help but notice that he seemed unusually weak and weary today.

“From now on, I am your guardian and your life mentor,” George said, puffing out his chest a little. “You still have many basic morals to learn. Ignorance is no excuse for wrongdoing, but I will teach you. In the future, you are not allowed to enter someone’s room without the owner’s permission, and you are not allowed to steal. Understand?”

“Understood!” Gima nodded quickly, feeling more and more certain that this righteous idiot was so easy to fool it should be a crime.

“Why did you come into my room?”

“I was curious.” About your disgusting sexual perversions.

Gima, ever the strategist, honestly only told him half the truth.

“Alright, next time it won’t be so simple, Gima,” George said, pulling two different books from the shelf. “These two are more suitable for you to read now.”

Gima pretended to be interested and glanced at them. One was a book about the various gods, and the other was a riveting tome about the God of Dawn. Thrilling.

“Mm-hm.”

She took the books and was about to make her grand escape when George suddenly stopped her. “Did you touch my bed?”

“I rolled around on it for a little bit,” Gima said, slowly turning her head, her mind racing to formulate the perfect lie. “The stone bed in the cell was very hard and bad for my delicate skin.”

“Oh.”

Gima breathed an internal sigh of relief, turned her head back, and let a triumphant smile grace her lips.

Phew, got away with it. Piece of cake. By telling him only part of the truth, she could easily mislead the hopelessly dense George. He probably just thought she had been curious and rolled around on his comfy bed for fun because she was a cute, innocent little girl.

Gima walked lightly toward the door, her heart soaring with victory.

Unfortunately, her skin was far too smooth, and the elastic band technology of this era was laughably, tragically poor. The few drawings tucked precariously into her waistband slipped out with her light, cheerful steps and fluttered gracefully to the ground.

Her heart clenched. She spun around and frantically stomped on them. The soft thump of her foot hitting the paper was like a deafening clap of thunder in her ears.

George stood there with his arms crossed, his eyes radiating a holy, and deeply unimpressed, authority.

Gima forced a sycophantic, boot-licking smile. “Hehe, this… actually… if you’ll just listen to my… brilliant and completely plausible explanation, ah, no, I mean—Ah! I was wrong! I’m so, so sorry! Please don’t kill me!”

George bent down, his hand shooting out to grab the girl’s slender ankle, cutting her off mid-blubber. He picked up the papers, unfolded them, and saw his own secret, very private drawings—the very “f*pping materials” he used for his most private of holy rituals.

“Hehe~.”

Gima didn’t dare look at George’s face. She instantly adopted the persona of a cute, demure, and utterly innocent maiden, clasping her hands primly behind her back, her slightly flushed face turned to the side, her big, innocent eyes looking anywhere but at him, a perfect picture of shame.

Unfortunately for her, George was in no mood to be gentle with a fair maiden. He reached out and grabbed Gima by the ear.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch, that hurts! I was wrong, I was wrong! I’m sorry! I’ll never snoop through your porn stash again!”

Gima was unceremoniously pushed onto the bed. In a blind panic, she scrambled on all fours, trying to escape.

George’s voice was firm and unyielding. “Stay put. And lie down.”

Due to the slave contract, Gima’s limbs instantly lost their strength, and her upper body collapsed onto the bed. This particular position—face down, ass up—immediately brought to mind, for the very experienced and worldly Gima, at least a dozen different vigorous, two-person sporting activities.

Gima had no doubt that George was about to use her to replace his now-confiscated f*apping materials. If she were a tail fetishist and happened to be the guardian of a succubus with whom she had a slave contract, it would be an absolute, criminal waste not to take advantage of the situation.

Putting herself in his shoes, Gima completely forgot about her Demon Lord dignity. Her tail tip trembled with pure, unadulterated, mortal fear.

The holy judgment began.

“What were you looking for in my bed?”

“Curiosity.”

“Don’t play dumb with me. Why were you looking for my drawings?”

“I was really, really, really just curious!”

As soon as the words left her mouth, the hem of Gima’s robe was lifted up, exposing her small, pale bottom to the cool air.

He’s really going to do it! This is it! My virtue!

Gima clutched the bedsheets in terror, her tail thrashing wildly behind her. “No!” she cried. “Don’t!”

“Too late.”

George’s voice was ice-cold. He raised his hand high and brought it down hard on Gima’s little, heart-shaped bottom.

SMACK!

An incredibly crisp sound echoed through the room, and a fiery sting instantly spread across her rear.

Although things weren’t developing as badly as the old pro Gima had expected, being punished like a naughty child was a profound, soul-crushing humiliation to her Demon Lord pride.

Tears welled up in Gima’s eyes. She gritted her teeth, holding them back. She secretly, fervently vowed to slice George into a thousand pieces, roast him over a slow fire, and feed his charred, heroic remains to the dogs.

“My dad used to say, if a child does something wrong, you have to spank them, or they won’t learn,” George said, his voice stern. “Stop playing dumb. Tell me the truth.”

“Hmph!”

Gima’s temper flared, and she stubbornly lifted her chin.

I, the great Demon Lord, fought my way to the top of the world (with cheats)! You think I’m afraid of a little spanking? Bring it on, you amateur!

George had originally thought his first slap was too hard for Gima to handle. So he delivered another one, with a little more gusto.

SMACK!

The pain made Gima’s tail twitch uncontrollably. Tears streamed down her face. All thoughts of Demon Lord dignity and manly pride were thrown to the wind, scattered like dust before a hurricane.

It really, really hurt! After all, a little girl’s skin is incredibly tender.

“I’ll talk, I’ll talk!” Gima sobbed, lowering her head. “I… I came in because I wanted to… to understand…”

She paused, not just out of shyness. She was worried that if she confessed the whole truth, George would give a lewd, sinister smile and take the opportunity to have his wicked way with her.

“They were right,” George sighed, sounding deeply disappointed. “The path to redemption is long and arduous indeed.” He delivered another sharp, stinging slap to her bottom.

“It hurts! I was really wrong! I’m sorry!”

Gima heard her own voice, thick with sobs. Humiliating tears soaked the bedsheet. It wasn’t that she was afraid of pain, but this new, delicate body definitely was. To think that she, a magnificent Demon Lord, would one day be spanked to tears by her sworn enemy. It was the ultimate degradation.

“Are you going to confess or not?”

“I… I wanted to know what your fetishes are!” she finally blurted out in a rush of shame.

With that, Gima buried her burning, crimson face in the pillow, wishing she could dig a hole through the bed, through the floor, and crawl deep into the earth to die.

George was stunned for a moment. His first reaction was, As expected of a legendary succubus. The very first thing she does in a new environment is this sort of thing.

Then, he immediately felt that he had been far too harsh. Gima looked incredibly shy, which meant she still had a basic sense of shame, and yet he had forced her to say such a terrible, mortifying word out loud.

“Ahem.”

George awkwardly withdrew his hand.

Gima’s heart pounded like a drum. She closed her eyes, her hands clutching the bedsheets so tightly her knuckles ached. She hated how weak she was, just a piece of meat on a cutting board, unable to even protect her own body from being… defiled by a man.

“Get up.”

The sordid, unspeakable acts she had imagined didn’t happen.

Gima sat up, clutching her red, stinging bottom, and looked at George with a puzzled expression.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking genuinely remorseful. “I was too strict with you.”

Gima was even more confused. Could this be some kind of special Paladin… foreplay? A little light BDSM to get things started? Is he into that?

“It’s… quite normal for a succubus’s nature to make you do such things,” George said, his own face a little red. “But I didn’t think twice and forced you to admit it. The fact that you felt ashamed proves that you have a basic moral compass.”

“My method of education was wrong. I shouldn’t use human logic to educate a demon.”

Gima couldn’t understand it at all. She was certain the situation was a perfect setup for a full-blown hentai plot. If she were George, she would have already gotten down to business. She could only attribute his baffling, almost superhuman restraint to some kind of unspeakable, hidden problem.

“It’s okay,” she said quickly, deciding to play along. “It was my fault in the first place.”

Gima breathed a quiet sigh of relief. As long as she didn’t have to unlock her succubus abilities through defilement, she was fine.

George, however, was beginning to realize that Gima’s skin was much, much thicker than it looked.

“Your hand?” Gima suddenly asked, pointing with a small, delicate finger.

Only then did she notice a trickle of fresh blood dripping from George’s fingers to the floor.

He spanked me so hard his hand started bleeding? Could it be that my residual Demon Lord power reflected the damage? Yes! Gima excitedly opened her “personal information” panel but found no trace of any newly acquired supernatural abilities. Drat.

George raised his hand and saw that the wound on his palm had split open again. “The tribunal requires me to pass a trial,” he said wearily. “To show them my determination to redeem you.”

Gima tilted her little head and looked at the angry red wound on his palm. Although it had been treated with divine magic, it had only scabbed over. From her vast experience with battle wounds, she could tell the wound was deep. It must not have been an easy trial.

She felt a little touched. But the feeling didn't last long. A sudden, violent rumble from her stomach reminded her that her hunger was far more pressing than the lingering, stinging pain in her butt.

A wicked, brilliant thought floated into Gima’s mind. Since I know his fetish…

“Let me see.”

She took George’s large hand in both of hers and looked at the cracked, bleeding wound on his palm with what she hoped was a concerned expression.

Although this was her first time attempting to seduce a man the succubus way, Gima wasn't at a loss. For one, she had her innate “succubus talent,” and for another, she had plenty of experience being served by her many, many maids. The only obstacle was her own lingering sense of masculine pride… but filling her stomach was far, far more important right now.

She pursed her small lips and gently blew on the wound. “Blow, blow, blow the pain away.”

“That’s useless,” George said flatly. “I’ve never heard of a succubus being able to heal with her breath.”

He’s even denser than I was. A true man of steel. This is going to be a challenge.

Gima lowered her head, extended her soft, pink tongue, and delicately licked the rough calluses on George’s palm, then the cracked, bleeding wound.

It was soft and ticklish. George immediately pulled his hand back as if he’d been electrocuted, though his expression remained stoic. “That’s not necessary. It will heal on its own by tomorrow.”

But Gima had felt it. A very faint, sweet, peach-like fragrance emanating from him.

She quickly opened her “personal system” and saw a new, delightful notification:

>DM: You have absorbed a trace amount of lust.

Gima’s spirits soared. She put on an annoyed, pouty expression and said petulantly, “I’m not done yet! I want to see if I can heal it. Let me try!”

Of course, she was acting. Mostly.

George sighed, a sound of pure resignation, and extended his hand again. But then he saw Gima nonchalantly pick up her pale golden tail and bring it forward with a flourish.

“What are you doing?”

“Huh?” Gima looked at him with the most innocent, wide-eyed expression she could muster. “Trying to heal you, of course. Now, don’t move your hand.”