"You met someone? What do you mean?" Ruth asked as she looked at Heather apprehensively.
Mara blew her nose into a tissue and said, "I met a man."
Ruth and Heather looked at each other in shock before erecting a sound barrier.
Heather looked at Mara with a solemn expression, "Did you sleep with him?"
Mara nodded, "I applied for the enhancer exchange this year and was assigned to him."
Ruth came over to Mara and placed a hand on her shoulder. "You know that this is a problem, right?"
Mara cocked her head, "I know that nobles prefer it if their partner is a maiden but that only applies if one is marrying up."
Catching Ruth and Heather glancing at each other, Mara questioned, "Why are you two looking at each other?"
"You are marrying up," Heather said after contemplating for a second.
Mara looked quizzically at the pair, waiting for the "sike" but it never came.
"How can I be marrying up?" Mara asked, baffled at the implication.
'Mother would never marry me to someone from another empire, so it has to be someone from the human empire. . . but who?' Mara thought.
'Even the empress greets my mother when she walks in the room…' Mara tried to come up with an explanation but couldn't figure it out.
While Mara was thinking, Ruth and Heather were whispering, deciding whether they should reveal the suitor's identity.
"She deserves to know," Heather said.
"But if she learns the truth, she might lose all hope. That man is infamous for his actions, after all."
Heather said, "But who do you think this guy is that she met? Do you think he has something to do with her constitution being suppressed?"
"I already messaged our private team to figure it out," Ruth said.
Suddenly a red exclamation mark appeared in the top right of her vision. Clicking on it, she saw a notification from the dawn net.
[Your contacts marked as Spy1, Spy2, Spy3, and Spy4 are deceased and have been removed from your friend list.]
Seeing Ruth turn pale white, Heather asked, "What's wrong, Ruth?"
"Ruth!" She had to yell and shake her shoulders before Ruth shakily answered, "w-what?"
Looking around dazed, Ruth found it hard to breathe as she felt a panic attack forming.
Hearing the yell, Mara looked over at the two and saw that Ruth was hyperventilating while pale as a sheet.
Running over to her, Mara took a pill and stuffed it into Ruth's mouth.
After waiting a few seconds, Ruth's breathing steadied, and her skin returned to its natural rosy color.
"What happened?" Mara asked Heather while still making sure Ruth was alright.
"I don't know. She suddenly stopped talking and turned as white as a ghost."
"They're all dead," Ruth whispered while looking up at Heather.
"Who's dead?" Heather asked.
"Our spies."
Heather frowned for a second before coming to a horrifying realization.
"You don't mean. . ."
Ruth nodded.
"Spies?" Mara asked, confused about who they were referring to.
Heather turned towards Mara, hesitated, then asked, "Who was the boy you met?"
Mara was confused but still answered, "His actual name is Anthony Dire, but he goes by Ryan."
"Anthony Dire as in. . ."
"Yes, he's an orphan." Mara nodded.
Ruth was flabbergasted, "How is that possible?" She screamed.
"They died within minutes of their job confirmation. That's not a coincidence."
Heather mulled over the details and then asked, "Mara, is there anything. . . strange about Ryan?"
Mara thought about Ryan. The first time they met, he miraculously suppressed her constitution and ejaculated faster than most men took to get their dick out of their pants.
In their second meeting, she found out he was one of only two living Overlords in the human race.
To top it off, only hours after their second meeting, he became a sworn brother of the demon royal family, something no one to her knowledge had done before.
"I don't think so," Mara touched her chin, pondering, "He's just an above-average enhancer."
The two looked at Mara skeptically, but before either had a turn to argue, a servant burst into the room and shouted, "Lady Mara, Master Frost requests your presence in her chambers."
===
Stretching, Ryan slowly got out of bed as he welcomed a new day.
Time had been flying by, and he was now only one day away from the enhancer event.
Today was also the last day he could get points that would go toward his ranking for the first month.
As he pulled up his wristband, he saw his current class ranking.
<Anthony Dire>
<Class Rank: 14>
<Points: 2371.6>
Ryan remembered he had somewhere around 1200 points before his night with Grace. The first time he saw his points only increase by 1100, he was baffled.
'What happened to my S-Rank sperm?'
But recalling that the first girl he had been with, Avery, was some cultivator not assigned to him, he figured she must have had much lower cultivation than Grace.
Grace was, after all, the first in her class. She must have been in a much higher bracket because he shot two loads into her and got around the same as the one he shot into Avery.
Suddenly a thought just occurred to him. 'Is the military incentivizing us to enhance worse students?'
For Ryan, the logic didn't make much sense. Enhancer's got stronger by sleeping with powerful cultivators. Why would they reward sleeping with the lowest-ranked cultivators?
Abruptly his mind went back to his earlier conversation with Emily, where the two talked about the military getting only 30% of recruits coming out of the academy.
'I bet those are the lowest ranked 30%.'
Ryan's distaste for the military and the human empire grew.
He already had suspicions that his memories were altered by someone high up in the military. Although Ryan didn't know how men were treated in other empires, Ryan had overheard a lot of conversations that pointed to men being in abysmal conditions in the human empire, which only added to his hatred.
Now that they were possibly using underhanded tactics to keep enhancers down, he decided that just because they were called the "human" empire didn't mean he had to side with them.
Going over to Lizzy and Izzy's rooms, Ryan fed them a pill he had purchased for a few campus credits to help maintain their body.
[Conversion Time Remaining: 8 Days, 15 Hours, 24 Minutes, 56 Seconds]
[Conversion Time Remaining: 8 Days, 15 Hours, 24 Minutes, 55 Seconds]
[Conversion Time Remaining: 8 Days, 15 Hours, 24 Minutes, 54 Seconds]
Making sure nothing changed with the conversion time, Ryan headed out of the house in search of his last remaining points.
"One more boob I must set free. The top 10 in the ranks is what I seek. My goal tomorrow is to slap Mila on her proverbial cheek."