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“Come on!”
“Let’s go out.”
“It’ll be fun.”
There were three girls in front of my dorm room trying to drag me out. They were all dressed in short skirts and skimpy blouses. Their hair was up and they were in full makeup. While attending our academy, we lived in coed dorms that were split by sex. The girls had the two lower floors while the guys got the upper floors. It was arranged this way so that people could meet with and grow close to other knights and magi. Eventually, once a magi graduated, she would select one or more knights who would then serve the magi for the rest of her life.
Knights were sworn to give up all material possessions upon being selected by a magi. This is one of the reasons knights were so desperate to enjoy themselves before graduating. It wasn’t like they couldn’t have sex once becoming knights, but if they got the wrong magi, this could become a big problem. Some Magi married their knights, but that depended on the order. Some orders of magi wanted complete celibacy, and if you ended up with such a magi, they might forbid their knight from also engaging in any nightly activities for the rest of their lives. Others simply grew jealous of their knight having fun and forbade it.
The bond between a magi and a knight wasn’t all that different from the bond between the demoness and me. A knight gave their life in servitude, protecting the magi when they couldn’t protect themselves, and in exchange, the knight gained strength, immunity to illness, resistance to poison, long life, and the power of sword arts, which infuse a bit of magic into their blades.
As for why the school didn’t worry about their magi being defiled by their knights, it was pretty simple. Every female magi had a magical spell protecting them. As long as they attended the academy, this spell made it so any guy who tried to stick it in a girl, his thing would wilt and fall off. They showed every man images of this gristly scene on the first day. Now, if the girl was at least C rank, she could deactivate the spell herself, but that would lock her at C rank for the rest of her life, and the school would know she deactivated it and expel her. Few girls so close to graduating would throw away their futures, and few guys would risk their penis in such a manner either.
Of course, that didn’t stop magi or knights from partying and releasing steam. Although magi couldn’t have sex, they could still give head, handjobs, or just make out. Their magical protection only seemed to make them bolder. After all, they could act as slutty as they wanted to and no one could doubt their purity. No guy could go too far, and no one could doubt the school’s magic, so they didn’t hesitate to dress as provocatively as possible and even flirt aggressively.
So, where did I come in? Somehow, I had become my dorm’s designated driver. One day during my first year, a girl got drunk and stranded, and as one of the few guys on campus with a car, I volunteered to go save her. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit hopeful that a drunk girl might give me head. I was still recovering after my childhood friend left, and it was before I had grown close to Denise.
Before we could even kiss, she ended up vomiting all over my car. As soon as I got to speed, she erupted like a fountain. It smelled so bad that I had no interest in her. When I brought her home safe and sound, I had gotten a reputation for being a good guy. Having a car and a license only seemed to seal the deal, although I had to pay to get it professionally cleaned after.
Immediately, a dozen girls in my dorm started to buddy-buddy with me. I quickly learned that it wasn’t my phase of being popular, but rather my phase of being used. They had no interest in me at all, but they wanted me to drive them places, and perhaps more important, make sure they got home safely. The worst of them tried to get me to pay all their expenses. That was when they couldn’t con a guy to do it for them. At best, I was their backup wallet.
At first, I served my role excitedly, even thinking that I might be able to get in their good graces. I figured one of the girls would eventually want to make out and maybe I’d find a knight who wanted to go farther. I eventually learned their flirtation was skin-deep and they never had any intentions of seeing me as anything more than a friend or little brother.
A few situations arose where I could have taken advantage, but I knew these women too well, and by that time I had seen them at their worst. I had seen guys who had been in similar situations who decided to take things to the next step, only to be accused of sexual assault the next day. Even if the school didn’t do anything, the girls would spread heinous rumors and the guys would be pressured until they dropped out. Such a thing had happened twice, and both situations were just as tricky for me.
That’s because the girls blamed me for not stopping them from making their bad choices. Mind you, if the situation was really bad, I’d step in, but even in the borderline cases they expected me to step in. Even more maddening, they wanted me to not step in on almost identical cases, and a few times I stepped in they’d grow angry at me for the exact opposite reason. I realized that their desires were arbitrarily based on how hot the guy was. If he was hot, she was into the dubious stuff, and if he wasn’t, she was not. Thus, my became only helping when the guy was average attractiveness or less.
It wasn’t easy either. I walked a thin line which sometimes got me in trouble with the girls. At the moment, I was in the clear, but despite how long I’ve hung with these girls, and all the compromising situations I’ve seen them in, there wasn’t an ounce of loyalty toward our supposed deep friendships. They would turn on me with a single word, and not look back.
Yet, some guys in the dorm chose to envy me. They saw me going out to the club with three pretty women and they thought I was lucky. To them, I look like one of those protagonists from a harem anime. After all, in most of those shows, sex isn’t even available, and the male lead still got to experience the joy of women hanging all over him. How could they even understand how shitty it was hanging out with a bunch of girls who just wanted to use you? Only someone who lived in the friend zone could truly appreciate just how crummy such a zone was.
I hadn’t wanted to go out. My mind was still buzzing after what happened earlier with Sophie. She had sucked my dick because I told her to. I even took pictures and blackmailed her. I looked at the pictures on my phone a few more times just to convince myself. Yet, her pictures remained. She was looking up at me like a fox caught in the trashcan, cum leaking down her face. I wished I could savor the experience, but it had barely lasted a minute from when I gave the command to when I fled the room.
I was far too shocked at the time, so I could barely remember it at all. More than that, I wanted to do it again. Yet, I could only do one mandate a day, and I had used that mandate up. Furthermore, I had to save that mandate for something really important, and I already knew what that thing was. Craig was planning on taking Denise to make-out point tomorrow, and she was finally going to give in and give him her virginity. That was something I couldn’t tolerate. I had to come up with a mandate that could prevent this.
The problem was, what mandate should I give, and who should I give it to? I realized with Sophie just how fragile and easy it was to mess up a mandate. You could only tell someone one thing. So, what if I told Denise to break up with Craig? Well, as soon as she did so, the mandate would be over. Craig would ask something like “You want to break up?” and then Denise could respond. “What? No, I was just joking!” Of course, the way around that would be to mandate, break up, and go home, but that’s two orders!
My mind went through dozens of such possible outcomes for mandates. I thought I could tell Craig to tell Denise the truth. Then again, what truth? He might tell her something true that is inconsequential. Even if I told him to tell her he cheated on her with a dozen women, he could just say he was making a joke five seconds after the conditions of the mandate ended. I could tell Craig to jump off a cliff, but that probably would be investigated. If people determined hell magic was used, that could lead back to Andromeda, and then me.
I had been arguing in my head nonstop about this until a group of girls suddenly arrived wanting to go out. It was Friday night, so with school out for the weekend they wanted to party, and thus they needed their designated driver. Tomorrow would be Denise’s fated date. I told the girls no, but then they started begging right in the hallway, calling me a ‘meanie’ and ‘no fun’. They certainly didn’t respect my feelings. The guys in the nearby dorms poked their heads out of their rooms, and seeing three scantily clad girls begging me to go out, their expressions immediately darkened.
Maybe… getting out and clearing my head would be a good thing.
There was just too much that had happened today. My hand instinctively rubbed my arm where the mark of the devil appeared.
“Fine, I’ll go,” I responded.
“See, I told you he’d turn around.”
“You’re a great friend!”
“We’ll set you up with a girl tonight, promise.”
“Yay… yay…” I had heard it all before.
If they did set me up with a girl, she was rarely a ready and willing slut, but their ugly friends with great personalities, although more often they were bitch queens who wanted nothing to do with men and no one else would date. Then there were the traumatized sexual assault victims who were told I was as harmless as a flower so they could work on their trauma. I did try with one of them once, and six weeks into it I walked in on her sucking a guy’s cock. Her trauma only existed around men she didn’t want to fuck.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t want to be set up with anyone. As far as being a friend, that lasted as long as I paid for their drinks. As soon as I refused, they’d take off, usually finding their way home in the passenger seat of whatever Chad managed to pick them up. I always like to laugh at them. I wondered what their faces were like when they found the magi mark, which was placed on the small of every female magi’s back.
Well, only two of the three girls begging me tonight were magi. The third girl was a knight. They were taking her out because she had just passed the Knight Valour exam. With that, she was a Chevalier, capable of forming a bond with a mage. The two other girls wanted to drag her out for one last night of debauchery before she settled down and became a knight.
Well, she had been sowing her oats every week for the last year. I had already seen her take ten guys home. I pitied whatever guy ended up becoming her magi. To finally get a knight and have them be heavily used goods was pitiable. Then again, knowing how few female knights there were to male, she’d be snatched up by a male knight instantly.
After changing out of my school uniform and into something more casual, I left the dorm and met the girls. They excitedly dragged me to my car, unwilling to wait for the party, even though the sun hadn’t even set yet.
It felt the same as every other night, but one thing did change. I had made a deal with a demoness. I wasn’t the same pushover I used to be. In time, everyone in school would realize it.