Rhys touched Soma’s mark and focused, putting his all into it. Immediately, he was struck by the quantity of trashed intents that rushed at him. It slammed into his head with a pounding strike, and his nose instantly began to bleed as his mental energy ran rampant, struggling to contain the onrushing surge of information. Virgil had put his all into Soma’s mark, and he’d thought a lot about making it, so the mark contained a massive amount of trashed intent. Compared to any of the other marks he’d examined, it was absolutely chock-full of intention and deliberation which Virgil had then left behind on accident, which meant Rhys was getting hammered with waves of useless information. His vision blurred, and his limbs weakened. His hand pulled away instinctively from the mark that was overloading him with information.

  No! Rhys slammed his hand back, forcibly keeping it on the mark. He wasn’t going to give up this easily. He’d do it. He’d take all this information and comprehend it all, if it was the last thing he did!

  “Ooh, how forceful,” Soma purred.

  Mercifully, a vision welled up, and Rhys gave himself up to the vision so he wouldn’t have to hear any more innuendos.

  Soma stood before him, his arms crossed, with a totally new expression on his face that Rhys had never seen before—irritation and earnest frustration. “If it doesn’t work, stop trying. Even I understand this principle. No one likes a man who doesn’t know when to give up.”

  I came here to escape the innuendos, but apparently Soma just talks like this all the time! Rhys despaired.

  This time, unlike last time, he was still himself in the vision, even though he saw it from Virgil’s perspective. He immediately understood why: it was the immense overload of information, which was fiercely painful, far more than last time. With it active, he couldn’t immerse himself fully in the vision and remained low-level self-aware. On top of that, the information itself still pounded through his head, keeping a layer of information between him and the vision.

  “If I don’t mark you, I can’t trust you,” Rhys-Virgil said. It was a supremely odd sensation, to feel his body say things without himself saying them.

  “I understand, but do you understand how different my body is from an ordinary human body? There’s very little that can survive on me.”

  Virgil stepped forward. Soma frowned and stepped back. His heel knocked against the wall, then his shoulders, and then Virgil’s hand struck the wall beside his head.

  No way, Rhys thought, stuck in the world’s first non-consensual three-man kabedon. The classic!

  “Then make it work,” Virgil growled.

  Soma shivered, and his eyes lit with a strange light, and Rhys was suddenly very glad he didn’t have to experience this from Soma’s perspective. At least from Virgil’s point of view, he could pretend like nothing funny was happening on the other end of this kabedon. “Oh my.”

  Soma peeled back his robes, giving Virgil a come-hither look. Virgil ignored him and pressed his fingers to Soma’s collar, imbuing the mark into place. Soma’s body battled the mark, as the impurities clung to the threads of mana and gunked them to oblivion. This was no different than the previous times he’d tried to mark Soma. The man had to cooperate, or else—

  Soma’s face bunched up in strain, and veins stood out on his forehead. The gunk pulled back from his mark, and Virgil was able to mark Soma as he pleased, which seems to have pleased Soma, Rhys noted to himself. Foreign thoughts flowed into his head, and he had to force himself not to fight them. These were the thoughts he was after: Virgil’s thoughts as he marked Soma.

  I’ll have to track him, of course. I can’t trust him, even with the compulsion, and the mark will erode in his body, even if he tries to keep it clean, which I can’t trust him to do. If he betrays me, the mark will explode… but will it even have the power to do that, after some time in his body?

  Virgil pushed on, surging his power to—

  The scene cut off. Rhys plunged into raw information once more, but this time it was all garbled and mixed-up, nothing but trash. Instantly, his ability to hold information in his head surged, but there was no purpose to it. Being able to hold a near-infinite quantity of useless, garbage information in his head was… well, he already did it, but gaining the supernatural ability to do it didn’t really do much for him right now.

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  Still, he had the shape of the mark in his head after that, so he ought to be able to manipulate Soma’s mark. With the garbage information still swirling in his head, he turned to Soma’s mark itself, matching the traces of the mark to the mark that actually existed on Soma’s collar.

  And stared.

  The lines still existed. Soma had clearly worked hard to keep his body from totally eroding them. However, they were not nice and neat the way they were in the trashed intent that clung to them. They were twisted and melty, running into one another and riding up on one another, with some of them all grouped together and others totally overlapping one another. It looked like it had been left in the sun and allowed to melt for a while, then un-frozen and re-melted a few times, like a box of chocolates that the supermarket had left on the loading dock in summer. The pristine map in his head and the mess he was facing were vaguely similar, but lining the two up was… rough.

  “Is there a problem?” Soma asked innocently.

  You. You’re the problem, Rhys thought, but didn’t say it. He took a deep breath. “This mark is… it’s something. Your mark is actively decaying in you. It’s not like any other mark I’ve seen so far. It’s a total mess. Honestly, if I mess with it and Virgil examines you, I’m not sure he’d even know it had been tampered with.” He paused. “Actually, when he was making the mark, Virgil did make it so it could self-destruct, but he wasn’t sure that it would self-destruct after any time in your body.”

  “And he was so forceful about putting it in me,” Soma gasped, absolutely shocked and with no ulterior motives.

  “Thank you, Soma. I know. I’ll do my best here, but I’ll be honest, I’m not sure any part of your mark is functioning right now, let alone something as complex as a obedience compulsion.”

  “It’s still functioning enough for me to be upset by it,” Soma stated.

  “But not enough for you to deliberately erode your mark?”

  “But he was so forceful about it.”

  Rhys rolled his eyes. “Is this some kind of weird roleplay… never mind. I know it is. Hold on, let me take another shot… but honestly? Don’t worry about it self-destructing under my efforts.”

  “That is a relief, at least,” Soma said, with the attitude of someone who wasn’t surprised in the least.

  Rhys frowned at him, a little confused. Was this whole thing—making him test it on Lira and invent it on Amos—just a complicated test? Was he wrapped up in some weird roleplay, too? Was Soma unsurprised to find out that the explosion was gone, but had the take of ‘better safe than sorry,’ or did he have some alternate plan for dealing with the self-destruct, and had therefore only been worried about Rhys triggering the mark in some way Virgil could detect?

  Wait, wait. I forgot. He’s only having me edit the mark because otherwise he would be compelled to fight me to the death. The self-destruct function is totally unrelated to the reason he wants the mark edited, so aside from the fact that my editing is now almost-certainly zero risk, it wasn’t that exciting to hear that. Rhys took a deep breath and nodded, diving back into the mark. The editing was for his benefit, basically. He was the one who needed it edited, not Soma, so if it was melty, that was his problem—not Soma’s.

  I can do this. I understand the mark. It just got a little melted. If I take a little time, I’m sure I can untangle this mess.

  His eyes widened, and he turned to look at the garbage information sloshing around in his brain. Wait, no! That’s not it. I have the answer. I just have to understand it! The useless information was the intent that had gotten degraded by being in Soma’s body. If the lines were degraded, then the intent would also be degraded; therefore, the answer to the degraded lines was in the unreadable information. But the unreadable information was absolutely trash, which meant—well, it meant it was right in Rhys’s wheelhouse.

  Rhys put his all into it, narrowing his attention onto that garbled information and nothing else. The garbled information whirled before him, completely void of meaning, and yet—and yet, there was something to it. Looking at it, feeling it whirl, and comparing it to the garbled mark and the map of the mark as it was, back when it wasn’t a melted, corrupted mess. There wasn’t meaning in it, but he could force meaning out of it, just by looking at it.

  There! He reached out. Rather than corrupting it with his own impurities, he took Soma’s own impurities and put them to the line, corrupting the mana ‘naturally,’ in a way that Virgil wouldn’t necessarily find fault with immediately. The line flickered and went dark, and Rhys withdrew from the mark.

  “I’ve done it,” he announced.

  “Virgil likes rabbit spirit girls and he should suck my cock!” Soma said triumphantly.

  Both Lira and Rhys stared at him.

  “Oh! It is gone. How wonderful!” He clapped.

  “Did he compel you not to say that?” Rhys asked, confused.

  “Well, I was generically compelled not to say negative things about him. It was difficult to imply anything sexual about him at all.”

  “He likes rabbit girls?” Lira murmured.

  “Totally normal. Lots of people do,” Rhys said. It was kind of a weak thing to be embarrassed about. Very vanilla. Liking BDSM would be more spicy than liking bunny girls.

  Lira nodded. “It is kind of a boring thing to hide.”

  “I know, right? Insane that he wouldn’t let me say it.”

  Rhys squinted at him. “Was that the part you couldn’t say, or the… part about the chicken?”

  Soma grinned. “In any case, this is a great revelation. I think we can proceed with your plan.”