Battling With Temptation

It took around an hour of mopping and peeling glued paper charms off all the walls to clean up my apartment. 

Zafira occasionally tittered and giggled, either poking fun at me or talking sultry and making spicy advancements.

Look, I won't lie, some part of me was enjoying all this attention.

Zafira was insanely beautiful, and with the confidence she carried herself with, along with her bewitching voice, it would be hard for any guy not to feel flattered with a girl… demon… like her clinging to your arm.

I, especially, couldn't help but embarrassingly blush and fluster like an idiot every so often… because, as she said, I wasn't very used to getting female attention. 

Not in this way, I mean. Not sexually.

Maybe it was so because of my looks. After all, who in their youth would want to hook up with a chubby nerd with a boring face?

Or maybe it was my even boring personality. I wasn't weirdly antisocial or anything, but I was also not very funny or the life of the party kind of guy either.

So, needless to say, all her flirting and sensual touching was getting to me. I had to constantly remind myself that it was all a lie.

After all, she was faking it.

She was a succubus. That's what her kind does. They are man-eaters. They seduce and take advantage of men… and women, apparently.

Zafira was no different. Despite her outwardly amicable and approachable personality, she just wanted to use me.

Her aim was clear. Have sexual intercourse with me to enslave me so she could… she could… she could do what?

Okay, I didn't exactly know her endgame. Even after having me under her control, she would not be able to break the contract.

Why? Because I specifically mentioned that the contract could only be over until the terms of the deal are met. In other words, the contract can not be terminated.

So, I don't see the point of what she could do by seducing me, but one thing was clear – if I gave into her, I would become her mindless thrall, following her every whim and living only to serve her.

That was something I didn't want. I love my free will, thank you very much.

So, I actively tried to avoid being in physical contact with her, and also turned off my mind whenever she started whispering promises of unfathomable pleasures she could give me.

Was it difficult? Yes, obviously.

I was a teenager, after all! A boy on top of it! We are horny all the time!

But if there was one thing I was proud of myself, it was my willpower. I knew as long as she didn't use any magic on me to affect my mind, I could keep on resisting her.

Or at least I hoped so…

"What are you doing?"

I sighed in irritation. "What does it look like?"

My hands were full of trash bags filled with several kilos of salt and countless paper charms and talismans.

"I mean, what are you going to do with all that?" she asked, rolling her charming crimson eyes.

"Throw it?"

What else was I supposed to do with stuff used in a demonic ritual?

Zafira sighed, looking ever so captivating even while doing nothing special. "Don't you know you should properly dispose of items that are used in a ritual lest you want to be a target of some black magic practitioner who chance upon them?"

"Black magic?" I dubiously raised an eyebrow as if asking if such a thing actually exists.

The demoness half-lidded her eyes and gave me a long look. "What do you think brought me here?"

…Okay, touché.

Right, stupid Kael. What would a demon-summoning sacrificial ritual be called if not black magic?

Zafira then pointed at the trash bags in my hands and said, "Those items are imbued with your blood and spirituality. An unfriendly black magician could use them to cast a curse on you."

"…Why would anyone do that?"

"How would I know? You mortals are weird."

Wait a second, did a demon from hell just judge my race? But more importantly…

"By the way, what's spirituality?"

Zafira gently rubbed her chin and sat back on the bed. She was slowly marking that bed as her territory, and I didn't like it one bit.

After thinking for a while, she started stretching in a very, VERY sensual manner and asked, "You are familiar with what mana or magic points are in video games, right?''

"Why am I not surprised you know what video games are," I sighed, trying to ignore her sight.

"I told you, you're not the first otaku to summon me," she winked at me.

Trying my best not to blush, I coughed. "I told you, I'm not an otaku."

"Sure," Zafira scoffed and gestured toward my desk beside my computer, where a Rem and Emilia figurines were decoratively set.

Okay, I was a Re:zero fan! Sue me!

Immediately, I switched topics, "Yes, I know what mana is."

The mischievous succubus laughed playfully before beginning to explain: "In reality, there's no such thing as mana. There's Soul Essence, or Spirituality, that's used for magic."

"I see," I nodded before raising up my hands in which I held the trash bags. "So, how exactly do I dispose of all this?"

Instead of answering me with words, Zafira raised one of her hands and casually snapped her fingers.

The plastic bags in my hands caught fire, bursting into black flames. Startled, I dropped them and took an instinctive step back.

Before the trash bags could even touch the ground, there was nothing left of them… not even ashes. The black flames devoured them out of existence.

I couldn't help but gulp with widened eyes. I knew this was another one of her little shows of dominance.

She wanted to tell me that if there was no contract in place to protect me, I would've shared the same fate as those trash bags.

…Unfortunately for her, it was going to take a lot more than that to scare me. I knew what I was getting into when I signed that contract.

And now that I did sign it, there was nothing she could do to me.

But there was something else that infuriated me. I gritted my teeth, controlling my rage, and slowly worded my next question.

"So if you could've done that from the start, why had I been cleaning this apartment for the past one hour?"

Zafira looked at me, perhaps a little astonished by the fact that her little fireshow didn't scare me as much as she was hoping for.

After a short stretch of silence, she giggled. 

"As I said before, I like seeing you struggle. Also, it's kinda on you for assuming I couldn't do such a mundane task after I specifically said there's not much I can't do."

…Never before did I experience such a pressing urge to hit a girl.

•••

Zafira asked me to borrow my laptop. I contemplated the applications of such a bizarre yet totally normal request for a few minutes before agreeing.

According to her, it's been a few years since she'd been to Earth, so she wanted to catch up with whatever was going around the globe – all the drama, news, and politics.

If not for her horns and tail, she would've sounded much like a regular human who had just come online after being off the grid for some time.

But alas, she wasn't human. And so, I needed to be cautious. I cleared my tabs, especially all that was related to porn in any way, as I didn't want her – a literal succubus – to know my personal preferences and use them against me later.

After that, I made sure to turn on Safe Search and set up parental controls, to which Zafira merely pouted.

At last, I installed a third-party app that could mirror notifications and browsing history from my laptop to my mobile.

Of course, none of my precautionary measures would work on the minor godlike entity that she claimed to be, but I needed to at least try to be safe from my end.

That's not to say that I didn't believe Zafira. I could already tell that she was either incapable of or just hated lying to the absolute core of her being.

But believing someone doesn't equate to trusting them. 

After all, there are more ways to deceive someone other than just lying, and demons are especially master manipulators.

 …Okay, maybe I was being a little dramatic over lending her a laptop, but that's just my nature!

Anyway, I told her the password and went to freshen up. Today was… exhausting, to say the least.

As I stood there under the shower, tired out of my mind, with cold water raining down on my face and drizzling down my body, I couldn't help but let out a deep breath.

Until now, I didn't have enough time to myself to process what just happened today. Now that I was alone for a few moments, it all hit me like a truck.

My worldview had really shattered today.

Magic was real.

Hell and heaven were also real, and so were demons and, by extension, angels.

And according to one of those demons, there are hidden human magic societies in the world.

The real world was really not the place that I had come to believe it was. 

Anyone else… Anyone sane would be in the middle of an all-out existential crisis right now.

"...Ha!"

And yet, here I was, uncontrollably smiling and giggling to myself like an absolute madman. I couldn't care less about anything else right now. 

This was the best day of my life. 

This was the day I found out that fantasy was not dead in the real world. There was more to this dull, old, monotonous world than what meets the eye.

Life, from now on, was going to be worth living.

"What a brilliant day."