No Need For A Core?

Before they left on their training trip, there was one thing Kazue needed to take care of, though she had to admit she was more than a little nervous.

Satsuki had informed one of their inhabitants that she wanted to talk with Kazue. Given the bait she'd laid, Kazue had anticipated this request, so she asked both of her spouses ahead of time to give them complete privacy.

She then put on the outfit she had prepared; a dark green, velvety dress with gold trim. While its cut was flattering, it was primarily designed to help Kazue present herself as regal and confident without being formal or haughty.

Kazue was painfully aware that Satsuki didn't need any help in shifting how she presented herself, but Kazue wasn't going to let pride keep her from using the tools available to her.

After that, she attuned herself to a spirit of Dominion and Control. Kazue needed every edge she could command and she had previously released her lightning spirit into a small but perpetual storm cloud that was now floating around their ocean and wetland zones.

Her final touch was to call upon a daydream of herself as a commanding and unyielding queen. It was a trickier dream to manifest than simpler concepts, especially without creating visual effects, but Kazue was able to don the appropriate aura and she could feel that extra layer of confidence and certainty bolstering her resolve.

The cozy reading room she chose to receive Satsuki in had a single plush chair, placed slightly off center, and a small table on the side nearer to the wall. The table was for holding books, a small plate with snacks, and a cup of tea that was brewed from a variety that Kazue had developed. The slightly floral scent mingled with the scent of the crystal-honey used to sweeten it, and those scents spoke to this space being hers.

The lack of other seating was deliberate, and the chair's off-center placement was part of the same plan, leaving an empty space to that side. Now that the set-dressings were in place, Kazue sat in the chair to wait.

When Satsuki arrived after having been lead in by a bunkin, she looked a bit pensive as she fidgeted with a book she was carrying. One that Kazue had written. "Kazue darling, it seems you've been keeping secrets. Why, we even talked about my little annotations without you giving away anything. Clever, but I think we need to talk about this one."

It was a romance book of course, and the story followed a woman driven by unreasonable needs. No one who didn't already know a lot of things would be able to pick up the real inspiration for the story, but that also meant it would be impossible for Satsuki to miss.

Kazue appreciated that Satsuki wanted to start off the conversation with a light and casual tone, but that was not going to do.

"How badly do you need to belong to him?" Kazue asked.

Satsuki froze briefly at the question and Kazue had to brace herself against the intensity of the older kitsune's attention. She could feel every tiny detail of herself and the room being examined and analyzed in that moment before Satsuki hissed out, "What do you think you are up to, little girl?"

It was hard to blame Satsuki for becoming defensive, but Kazue had been mentally preparing and rehearsing since the day she'd started writing that book.

"I am your only sliver of hope, I am the key, gate, and gatekeeper to that which you desire most, and I am the only one of my family who has fully realized your situation. So, how badly do you need to belong to him? Can you submit to another in pursuit of that faint possibility?" Kazue gestured to the spot next to her chair, opposite of the small side table, where a kneeling cushion waited. If there had been a chair, it would have been an invitation to take a seat. In a way, it still was.

Volatile emotions radiated off of the nine-tail and the depth of her power created minor physical manifestations despite her clear effort to maintain self-control. After a long, silent moment, Satsuki moved to the indicated position and gracefully knelt by Kazue's side, her head bowed.

"That's a good girl," Kazue said softly before stroking Satsuki's hair.

If Kazue had been wielding any lesser leverage, she wasn't entirely certain she'd still have a hand, or arm for that matter. Kazue's talents made her sensitive to strong enough emotions, and these emotions were strong enough that Kazue couldn't actively block them. As it was, she still saw a brief 'daydream' of a giant fox with a bloody maw and Kazue's hand sticking out of its mouth.

"Bad girl," Kazue said as she inserted an image of herself, perfectly healthy and whole, lightly bopping the fox's nose. She was careful to not let herself show how difficult that was, even in Satsuki's current state.

Satsuki looked startled. "What? How?"

Kazue smiled and said, "You are off balance, we are in my place of power, and this sort of dream is my specialty. Speaking of which, let me speculate upon your dreams. You spoke before about your plans for rescuing Mordecai, but I think there is much you have left out. Now, don't close up, you and I both need you to be open with me if we are going to maybe, possibly, find a way to make you a happier woman."

As she spoke, Kazue began to weave an illusion, though she did not control it precisely. Satsuki's emotions and feelings were unusually exposed and open in this moment, and Kazue took advantage of that by letting Satsuki's instinctive emotional responses shape the images, which in turn helped Kazue fill out the details of her narrative.

"You would have drowned him with pleasure and sensuality, lavished him with affection, and ever so gently wrapped him in your will and love. You do love him after all, do you not?"

Satsuki looked mildly offended at the suggestion that she might not. "Of course I do!"

Kazue raised a brow and asked, "Have you ever said that to him, directly?"

That caused the older woman to glance down and clear her throat. "Perhaps not in those direct words. Though I made sure he knew!" She paused a moment before reluctantly adding, "At least, I think he knew."

Part of Kazue wanted to strangle Satsuki for her foolishness, but at the same time, she was grateful that this weakness had led Mordecai and Moriko into her life. Selfish perhaps, but it was her true feelings. She set those thoughts aside and continued.

"Mordecai would have been weakened of course, and you'd have taken advantage of that, but you'd have also been feeding him power. Your power. Normally a core needs more than mana alone in order to process it efficiently, but his core would have been starved. All that capacity to hold mana, but so empty of it. You could have simply fed him from your own reservoir even as your body and life force produced ever more. He'd grow stronger of course, but it would be easy to feed him enough of your power to weaken yourself too."

Satsuki was trembling, an unusual giveaway for the powerful and confident woman, but Kazue couldn't afford to relent yet. "Eventually, he'd notice and struggle against those soft constraints, push back against being wrapped in your power. But I don't think you'd let go; no, you'd continue to make him stronger and provoke him into forcing his way free. Provoke him into claiming you the way you spoke of before, when we talked about your reaction to Mordecai's rage and war."

The illusion had fully formed now, in response to Kazue's imagination and Satsuki's emotions, dreams, and desires.

It showed Mordecai's avatar next to a purple dungeon core several times larger than their combined core currently was. Satsuki was curled up into his arms with a happy and content expression on her face, even as faint shadowy lines hinted at a thin collar about her throat that was connected to lines leading to both Mordecai's avatar and core. So while not a literal collar, it was a visual representation of belonging to him.

Some of the details surprised Kazue, but she hadn't been trying to project a specific image; she'd been drawing upon Satsuki's rampaging emotions to manifest a hidden dream. She certainly hadn't guessed that the dream would include Satsuki being pregnant, but in retrospect it made sense.

"How did you figure it out?" Satsuki asked in a trembling voice.

Kazue smiled softly and said, "Don't worry, it wasn't obvious, but I am afraid that you gave a few clues that got me speculating. Honestly, the biggest clue was that Norumi is your only child still, despite more than two thousand years passing without Mordecai around. Most of your obsession has displayed itself in more commanding ways, but a few other things were off as well."

She continued to gently pet Satsuki's hair as she continued. "You have an excellent command over yourself most of the time, yet what both you and Mordecai have hinted at suggests that your fights involved your inability to not stray. Such a wild creature as yourself surely couldn't be easily domesticated, but perhaps, if the right person had come to the right understanding, you could have been tamed?"

It was a dangerous game she was playing, peeling back layers to expose Satsuki's weakness like this. The woman was powerful and emotionally unstable and Kazue was forced to ignore the literal pain she was feeling as Satsuki's wild emotions tore at Kazue's spirit.

"If he could craft such powerful inhabitants, surely he had the power to claim you as an inhabitant, probably as a raid boss. If you were an inhabitant and his lover, dungeon magic would make it impossible for you to not be loyal to him. But Mordecai doesn't like to do that to begin with, and he certainly would never have done so if it wasn't offered to him and the offer pursued. But you could never have made yourself ask, could you?" Now it was time to offer a soothing balm before Satsuki's control broke.

"I won't tell of course, not unless I decide to pursue this possibility in depth. I don't want to hurt you Satsuki, but for all your commitment to not allowing harm to befall any of us, I fear you might not be able to prevent yourself from causing harm indirectly. There is, however, a faint possibility of this:"

The figment reformed to match Kazue's imagination now. It showed Moriko, Mordecai, and Kazue wearing crowns and Satsuki stood before them with her head bowed. Behind them was a core of mixed gold and purple. Kazue took the faint lines from Satsuki's figment and used them here in the same way, but this time they tied to Kazue and Moriko as well. "So many ways to bind, and so many of them can be combined. Citizen of our domain, inhabitant and raid boss of our dungeon, loyal bodyguard, and finally, royal consort."

Satsuki was regaining command over her emotions slowly, but there was a sense of desperation even in that act and she asked, "What would be needed to make that happen?"

"Time would be the first step, and an absolutely necessary one," Kazue replied. "Your power is currently beyond ours to claim, and that will not change for many more years. Until that changes, there will be no outward progress towards this possibility, and I will not present it to my spouses in any fashion."

There was pain in Satsuki's voice as she quietly said, "Time, so much time has passed and yet more is being asked of me. Dare I ask what else you require?"

That was something Kazue was still working on, so for the moment she slightly diverted the topic. "You can't approach either of them about this either, it would only damage the chances of this happening. Mordecai is being very careful about what memories of you he unpacks, so you have less leverage there than you might think and if you press him, well, the man knows how to be stubborn. This is, in fact, one of my most important motivations for opening this possibility. I don't think he sees it this way, but I find the idea of him permanently keeping all detailed memories of you sealed away forever as him harming himself. And he's doing it for the sake of Moriko and myself. I do not find his solution acceptable, and I can't imagine you like the idea of Mordecai only remembering what he knows about you, rather than remembering your time together."

Satsuki looked to be in pain as she whispered, "No, I don't."

Kazue continued and said, "As for Moriko, well, when she made the decision to refocus herself on the passions involved in commitment, she had to reshape her image of herself and how she thought and reacted. If anything, she's now the least seducible of us."

Satsuki glanced up speculatively at Kazue. "Does that make you the most seducible?"

Kazue smiled and shrugged, "Technically, yes. I'm the most open to the idea of having some flexibility in our relationship, but only within strictly defined limits and only if it won't interfere with the happiness of the lives we already live." Which hadn't be true at first; Mordecai had been the one less bothered by Moriko's initial lack of commitment. With that commitment well settled, Kazue seemed to be the one willing to introduce conditional flexibility. "But I certainly can't be seduced in isolation, my husband and wife are part of anything involving me. I'm just the only one who might be willing to even try convincing the other two." That was the most important condition; they were an all or nothing package.

"Which brings us back to what would be needed to convince you to do so," Satsuki said.

That made Kazue sigh. "Honestly, I am not entirely certain yet. There is one thing I am going to require, but it's a light restriction and it is as much about shaping your habits as anything else. When it comes to sex, you need to only bed people who you are helping, such as how you are helping Deidre."

She wanted to wrap one of her tails around herself and stroke it to soothe herself, but that would have ruined the image she was projecting."If you are going to belong to us, I want you to come in with a mindset closer to that reality, though I don't know if relative chasteness is something we'd necessarily demand of you in the end. I just don't want to claim you in the more forceful way I have no doubt you dreamed of with Mordecai alone."

"More forceful?" Satsuki asked with a wicked smile. "That makes me think of some of the other books you have written."

Kazue blushed and the dream she'd wrapped herself in cracked. Well, she'd gotten what she needed out of it, so she let the magic fall away. "Yes, I might have had some fantasies along those lines myself. But for me, there's no attachment to an obsession. Anyway, enough of this display, I think we can talk normally now." She conjured a chair to match her own and waved Satsuki toward it, along with producing another side table with tea and snacks. There was quite a bit of talking still to do.