Ren was still glued to Mina's door, ear pressed against the wood, and every scrap of dignity a hero in training was supposed to have hanging by a thread that got thinner by the second.
This has to be a test, one of those Pussycats' tests to check if I'm a hopeless pervert...
"Ah... mmm... ahhh..."
The sounds bleeding through the wood didn't leave much room for doubt, and each one of them traveled straight toward a very specific part of his body that had nothing to do with his brain. Ren swallowed hard and forced himself to breathe slowly, convinced that if he stayed perfectly still, maybe the universe would have the decency to pretend he'd never been there.
Okay, let's be rational for a second, he told himself, cheek still pressed against the cold wood. A responsible adult would head back to his room right now, crawl under the covers, forget this whole thing, and sleep with a clean conscience. Small problem though. That responsible adult has never lived inside my body for a single day.
The logic was airtight, and even so his feet didn't budge an inch from where they were nailed to the floor.
The universe, as usual, had other plans.
"Nghh... yes... Ahhhh..."
She's talking to herself now. Great. Now she's even narrating the whole show from the front row.
Ren clenched his teeth and tried one last time to convince himself that a gentleman of impeccable conduct like him needed to step away, go back to his room, and get his sacred hours of rest, when a new detail slipped under the door and made him lift his head. It was a faint aroma, sweet, fruity, something close to peach mixed with he didn't know what else, and it drifted from the other side with a stubbornness that wasn't helping his moral crusade one bit.
Wait, I know that smell.
The sports festival, his match against her, the pink liquid he'd spread around with his telekinesis while turning her into a trembling mess in front of half the stadium. That day he hadn't had time to think much about what it was, with the adrenaline and the crowd yelling, but the color and the aroma had stayed locked in some drawer of his memory that was now swinging wide open.
It's exactly the same as that time.
Now that he was thinking about it with a slightly cooler head, it opened up a whole list of questions he hadn't gotten the chance to ask himself back then. In the stadium he'd just used what was in front of him to win the match, without stopping to analyze what the hell that pink substance was or why it reacted the way it did. Now, with the same aroma floating under the door and no referee shouting next to him, the researcher's curiosity that always tagged along with him lifted its head with a whole lot of interest.
Right when Ren started organizing his thoughts with the solemnity of an investigator, his body made a completely independent, and much more enthusiastic, decision. A firm bulge rose between his legs, tenting the fabric of his pajama pants with an insistence that wouldn't take no for an answer.
"H-hey, hey, calm down, this is serious research," Ren muttered downward. "Behave yourself like the discreet traitor you are."
His crotch, obviously, didn't listen to a word.
Ren stepped back and looked toward his own bedroom, knowing all he had to do was walk a few paces over, close the door, and forget the whole episode. His eyes drifted back to Mina's door, then to his room again, and finally he swallowed hard and, with the part of his brain that had been losing every internal vote for weeks, activated his X-ray vision.
The layers of wood turned transparent to his perception, and the inside of Mina's room revealed itself with a clarity no decent gentleman would've ever gone looking for.
Mina was sprawled across the futon, clothes a chaotic mess around her, pink skin shining under a thin layer of sweat, and between her plump pink lips a metal cylinder slid in and out that Ren recognized right away as the water thermos she carried around everywhere.
W-wait a second... That's the thermos she drinks from during every training break. The same one she offered me a sip from this morning.
A shiver of retroactive horror ran down his back.
What a filthy girl. And here I was thinking I was the pervert of the group.
The thermos slid in and out with obscene ease, drenched in that pink liquid that was now dripping in tiny gleaming streaks, and Ren realized this stuff had nothing to do with what his own Quirk produced. He remembered enough of it from the festival, though spreading the substance around with telekinesis in the middle of a fight was one thing, and seeing it right there, working as a kind of natural lube that, if his intelligence didn't fail him, seemed to have a way more interesting effect on whoever was carrying it around, was something else entirely.
Hold on, hold on, does this actually have aphrodisiac properties? Because if that's the case, this isn't just a dirty little discovery anymore, this is straight up material for the future of Hero... For frustrated heroines.
His brain, which had been quiet all night, chose exactly that moment to wake up and fire off a burst of questions.
Does it work the same way as my Quirk, canceling perception while cranking up the senses, or is it a completely different kind of effect? Does it only work on her, or would it work on someone else if they touched it? And if it makes Mina this sensitive with a light rub, what would happen if someone else came into contact with the stuff without knowing? Ahhhhh, so many damn questions, and to think this whole mystery comes from a filthy pink girl with a thermos in her mouth.
On the other side of the wall, completely unaware she had a listener, Mina let out a long sigh and spoke to the ceiling with a half wrecked voice.
"Mmm... this feels way too good, it's not fair..." she murmured, arching her back. "No wonder I got addicted to this thing."
She paused for a moment to catch her breath, thermos still gripped between her fingers, and a mischievous laugh slipped out between her ragged breaths.
"Hah... hah... hah... O-one of these days I'm gonna have to thank the shiny headed dummy," she whispered to herself, no clue the guy in question was a couple feet away catching every single word. "If he hadn't made me so nervous that day, I never would've discovered any of this."
Ren, on the other side of the wall, felt his soul drop to his feet and shoot up to his head at the same time in a mix of shame and misplaced pride.
Wait a second, I have something to do with this whole mess?
Ren pressed a hand to his forehead and tried, one last time and with every last ounce of strength, to remember who he was supposed to be.
This is insane, I'm a hero in training, a U.A. student, an example of upstanding, impeccable conduct that...
"Ahhhh... nghhh... yes... Mghmmmmmmm."
The long, trembling moan from Mina cut through the wall and killed off whatever scrap of decency he still had floating around inside.
...ahhhh, who am I kidding, I've been a damn pervert since the day I showed up.
Surrendering to the evidence, Ren stopped fighting himself and just watched, because his body had signed the sentence long before his conscience finished reading it. On the other side, Mina pulled the thermos away from her lips with a wet, sticky sound, licked it slowly, and brought it back down between her legs. Ren saw with perfect clarity how her lips parted to take it in, swallowing it up with an ease only natural lubrication could explain.
"Ah... oh..." Mina panted, biting her lower lip as she pushed the cylinder deeper.
"C-come on... focus, Mina... this is... research..." she told herself between broken breaths, trying to get her air back. "I-if I produce it faster... uh huh... it works... even better... Ngh..."
Ren, on the other side, felt a jolt of uncomfortable recognition at the little speech. It was like staring in the mirror.
H-hey, that's my trick. The Pervert is using my own science excuse to justify herself.
"Mmm... a little more... almost found the exact spot..." Mina kept going, oblivious to everything, her voice cracking a little more with each breath.
The pink liquid gushed out in bigger amounts, soaking her thighs and forming a small shining puddle over the wrinkled fabric of the futon. Mina moved the thermos with a rhythm that got more urgent by the second, her pink skin shivering with every push, and her free hand drifted down toward her most sensitive spot to trace fast little circles that pulled a choked sound out of her.
"Nghh... more... a little more..."
Ren swallowed hard at the obscene show playing in the front row, throat dry, heart pounding. Mina in her most shameless phase, no audience, no filters, completely committed to her private experiment, turned out to be a thousand times more intense than anything he had ever imagined during his worst moments of moral weakness.
The worst part was the contradiction boiling inside him. One half of his brain was screaming at him to look away and get the hell out of there, while the other half kept taking mental notes with the discipline of a good student. The pink liquid kept flowing, covering the thermos completely and making every movement slicker than the last, and Ren couldn't stop noticing how Mina's skin reacted to the tiniest touch, shivering all over with a sensitivity his own Quirk could never have pulled off.
This definitely goes straight to the top of the list of things I should never have seen.
"Ahh... ahhh... almost... almost..." Mina's voice cracked between pants, her hips moving on their own against the thermos.
At the worst possible moment of the worst possible moment, a different sound cut through the air.
It came from the other end of the hallway, right from the side he'd come down earlier, and it wasn't a moan or a sigh. It was the unmistakable creak of footsteps coming closer over the wood. Ren froze on the spot.
There were only two options in his head, and neither one of them was good.
Ragdoll or Mandalay. Please let her be sleepwalking, please let her be sleepwalking, please let one of them have the habit of walking around asleep.
The footsteps came again, closer this time, followed by a muffled yawn that gave him zero clue about which heroine they belonged to. Ren ran through the possibilities as fast as he could, and none of them ended with him coming out of this in one piece. If it was Mandalay, he'd have to explain himself to a woman who could talk inside his head just by wanting to, and there was no lie good enough to survive that. If it was Ragdoll, the whole thing would get a thousand times worse, because the heroine had spent days obsessing over the mystery of his untrackable head, and finding him right there would be the perfect gift for her endless interrogations.
Ren stood in front of Mina's door, staring at the hallway wall with the pale face of a peeping tom caught mid crime, and with a bulge between his legs flat out refusing to cooperate with the dignified retreat the situation was demanding.
Yep, no need to be a genius to know exactly how all this looks from outside, no imagination required either. Guy planted in front of a classmate's door, in the middle of the night, ear an inch from the wood, and a circus tent in his pants. Ahhh, I gotta get out of here right now.
Ren moved immediately, crossed the few steps that separated him from his own room, and grabbed the handle with a shaking hand, ready to disappear off the map before the owner of those footsteps turned the corner. He twisted the handle.
The door didn't open.
Ren blinked, twisted it again, pushed, pulled toward himself, moved the handle up and down with all the subtlety of a desperate burglar, and the damn door stayed as shut and as smug as it had been on the first try.
No, no, no, this can't be a coincidence, somebody planned this, somebody is definitely conspiring against me!
Ahhhhh, damn it, shit, shit, shiiiiit. Why now? Why this night out of every possible night? Stuff like this is supposed to only happen in bad comedies, not in the life of a respectable hero like me.
The footsteps were about to turn the corner of the hallway.
On the other side of the wall, oblivious to everything, Mina let out one last trembling moan that raised the hairs on the back of his neck and killed off any chance of going unnoticed.
The owner of the footsteps was seconds away from showing up, and the handle, of course, still wasn't giving an inch between his sweaty fingers.
---
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