The System Sent Me to Breed an All-Female Amazon Tribe

Chapter 430: Men Truly Are Just...

The memory of that moment, of my desperate attempts to seduce a man who had no interest in me, still makes my cheeks burn with shame.

I was so foolish, so naive, so utterly convinced that my body was the only weapon I needed to win against my mother.

Rhine held my waist and took me off him with surprising gentleness, his hands firm but not rough, lifting me as if I weighed nothing at all.

He set me down beside him on the floor, then he patted my head with the kind of affection one might show a child, and said the most stupid thing I have ever heard:

"I am... in love with your mother, Marina," he smiled a sad smile—a smile that knew the wearer was fighting a hopeless battle, that understood the odds were stacked against him, that accepted defeat even as it was happening.

It was the smile of a man who had already lost but refused to stop loving anyway.

"Don’t be ridiculous," I, ashamed at being rejected for the first time in my young life, quickly took a sheet and covered my bare body, clutching the fabric to my chest as if it could protect me from the humiliation washing over me. "Mother is a prostitute. I know plenty of men who have fallen into this same ditch. They all think they are special. They all think they are different. And they all end up discarded."

"I know full well what happened to them! Or is missing Marina concerned about me?!" Rhine laughed, letting himself fall on my bed with a soft thud, his arms spreading wide across the silk sheets as he stared up at the canopy above.

His crimson eyes were distant, lost in memories that I could not see. "But I love her. I love her very much, even if it is her job to make me happy. Even if I lose in the end. Or if she breaks my heart and moves on to the next man. Do you know why it happened like this?"

I reluctantly shook my head, my curiosity piqued despite my embarrassment, and he explained;

Rhine was close friends with a man named Zeus, and they both were close particularly because they were celibate and disliked women.

They had made a pact together, a vow of bachelorhood that they swore would never be broken.

They spent their days in each other’s company, hunting and drinking, and philosophizing, convinced that women were nothing but trouble and that they were better off without them.

Rhine’s father was a god, so he aged slower than the usual human. This made him feel there was nothing about the feminine body that would attract him to the other side.

He had seen it all—the beauty, the charm, and the seduction—and none of it had ever moved him.

He believed himself immune to the charms of women, immune to the pull of desire, and to the weaknesses that plagued "lesser men."

And he and Zeus were two peas in a pod... until Zeus broke first.

Zeus had met a woman who had shattered his resistance, who had made him forget his vows and his promises.

The two friends had argued and gone their separate ways, their friendship destroyed by the very thing they had sworn to avoid.

After their friendship ended, Rhine wanted to see who in Elyndor broke that hard nut of a friend, and he ended up finding them: Hedone.

My mother. The woman who had brought his friend to his knees.

"It was not her body, neither was it her face," Rhine was in a fantasy world as he shared his story, his voice soft and dreamy, his eyes glazing over with the warmth of memory. "Those are great too, do not misunderstand me. She is beautiful beyond measure, and her body is a work of art. But that is not what captured me..."

He turned to me again and smiled; and that smile was so familiar, so warm and disarming that it made my heart skip a beat.

He smiled just like Benjamin Mark, with that same gentle kindness that seemed to see right through to the truth of a person.

"I learned to love Hedone particularly because of the way she loved her children. Especially you and Deva who are currently under her wing. She brags about your accomplishments, worries about your health, plans for your futures. She loves you with a fierceness that puts all other loves to shame."

Rhine’s testimony was that mother almost never spoke a few statements without mentioning our names in it.

She was apparently obsessed with us, he said, in the best possible way. Her clients knew our names, our ages, our favorite foods, our dreams and our fears.

She talked about us constantly, endlessly, with a pride and devotion that was nearly unhinged.

The sheer, dripping love for her children, and her trying to baby her customers, always drove men to love her AND her children.

Especially great men like Rhine who had kingdoms and a lot of stress.

They saw in her the kind of mother they had always wanted, the kind of warmth they no longer received, and would normally despise as powerful men.

And they fell for her not despite her children but because of them.

"Well... do not tell her I got your first kiss, please?" He put his hands together in a prayer gesture, his expression a mixture of pleading and humor. "I would never hear the end of it. And... Marina, I believe you should be a little nicer to her. Because your spite is even cute from her perspective. She finds your anger adorable, and your resentment endearing. You will make a good lover to the one you meet one day. You have passion, and passion is what makes love worth having."

"..."

And he left me in my room, his footsteps fading down the hallway, leaving me alone with my thoughts, with my shame, and the weight of everything he had said.

...It took another few months before I heard Rhine had died in a duel between him and Zeus over mother.

The news came to me in fragments, whispered by servants and gossiped about by the household staff.

Apparently, Zeus was THE god of gods. Not a mortal bearing the name for status or power. The actual, original, terrifying god of thunder and lightning.

Also shocking was that Rhine—the gentle, foolish, lovesick Rhine—managed to put the god in a state of unconsciousness that would take several thousands of years for him to recover.

That was the first time I had heard of a man who had stood against a god and had not been instantly destroyed.

He had fought with the fury of a hundred men, all because of love. All because of my mother.

Men...

Men truly are just...