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Description
Taeseol was having a weird day.

Actually, now she had a moment to think, it wasn't really a weird day. It had been normal for ten out of fourteen hours. She had woken up at 5am, and been at work by 7am. The day had gone by normally: completing forms, filing, all the usual stuff. At lunch she'd read an exclusive interview with the now-returned superheroine Spectrum and gossiped a bit in the mini-kitchen at work.

After she'd got off, at 6pm, she went to see her friend Dabin, as planned.

That plan had escalated quickly.

Now, she was in the middle of some weird cathedral-like building. It had a standard western-style edifice, but inside it was a far more eclectic mix of styles. On the far side from the entrance was a dais covered by a thin curtain, with classical art of both western and Korean styles (mosaic and scroll) adorning it. Stairs rose on either side to galleries for people to stand in, the walls all decorated with abstract art. The floor was concave, so that anyone in the centre of the tiled surface was significantly below the dais, but also below the congregation that gathered and swayed on the ground level.

That centre of the floor was, of course, where Taeseol was. For some reason.

And she hadn't even fully comprehended the fact that there were massive speakers placed in the four corners of the depression in the floor. Pointing at her.

She had just wanted to accompany her friend to a church service. Taeseol wasn't remotely religious, and even if she were, she'd practice Taoism like a normal person. But Dabin had been acting weird for the last two weeks , just seeming always lost in her thoughts and strangely sex-crazed as well. It was not a normal situation, but it felt like it called for faith intervention, and Taeseol wanted to be a supportive friend.

And what did she get for being a supportive friend? Being forced to kneel in the middle of a kooky building while ₩2,000,000 speakers bombarded her with what sounded like foreign-language gibberish.

There must have been over a hundred people inside with her. There was no dress code - people wore anything from a light cardigan like Taeseol had to literal hanboks. There was no pattern to where people stood, either. Some stood alone in the galleries above. Others huddled together like penguins on sections of the ground floor. Most stood with two or three others.

But there was a clear, shared reason for being there. It was clear in how everyone had their eyes towards the dais, how everyone's chanting had the same tune even if the words were so jumbled as to have no meaning.

The curtain in front of the raised platform started to rise.

The change happened like everything else seemed to in the weird church - utterly chaotic but with a clear order to it. First, there were a few perceptible islands of sound in the jumble of discordant voices. But each of those islands grew, as people and groups nearby adopted the new words. Soon, the sound had become a single, overwhelming wave, unified in purpose, and all being directed through the speakers and directly into Taeseol's skull.

She could feel the tiles shaking below her. Or maybe her legs shaking against the tiles. Didn't really matter.

The only thing that was clear was the words everyone was sing-saying, like a droning hymn.

"Twelve seconds until she breaks."

It didn't sound good.

Was this some sort of weird pain cult? Like a torture church?

She had heard of the US occupying forces using sensory deprivation as a torture method. If someone had nothing to hear but their heartbeat they would start to go slightly mad, hearing things which weren't there and generally unravelling.

This was like the reverse of that. The dissonant visuals of this strange church interior, the resonant sound of a hundred voices saying the same thing directly at her, both made it impossible to sense anything else. Her body prickled with pins and needles and hair standing on end.

But if this was the opposite, she wouldn't unravel.

She wouldn't 'break', if that's what they wanted.

"Eleven seconds until she breaks."

The momentary surge of willpower let her concentrate for a moment. The world stopped being a blur of jarring colours, and became real again.

Taeseol looked through the crowd.

Dabin was there.

She was chanting with the others. Her lips moved in time with the sound that barrelled into Taeseol's skull.

Her friend agreed, she wanted Taeseol to break.

She looked so happy to be saying those awful words.

But Taeseol had always been the stronger-willed of the two. Dabin had got swept up into this weird torture cult in the same way she'd been swept up in church as an escape from real life in the first place.

Taeseol wasn't like that.

She would endure this countdown hymn. Then she would stand, run to Dabin, take her hand, and get out.

"Ten seconds until she breaks."

Just ten more seconds.

She looked away from the cloying sight of her friend happily enthralled in the chant.

She glanced up at the dais.

There stood three women, superior to the congregation by their position and by their pure aura of power.

Taeseol's eyes darted right, essentially at random.

The woman on the right was so perfectly formed she might as well have been a statue. She was of perfectly average height, and slender in the same way a flower is. She wore a simple camisole with a shawl of lace over it which felt perfect and soft even if only to the touch of Taeseol's eyes. Her face was perfectly shaped, her eyes large and beautiful.

The woman made a gesture, and Taeseol's head bowed.

She hadn't made a decision, she didn't even register a thought to do it. She hadn't felt any force push her, either. She had simply found herself suddenly staring at the floor. Her kneeling stance was slightly deeper. More of her skin touched the tiles which vibrated with every syllable from the speakers.

It was a really pathetic position.

"Nine seconds until she breaks."

Taeseol knew that she was being suppressed. She was being beaten down. There was nothing she could do about it but endure.

But there were three more rounds of what she had experienced to go.

She was already bowing to the dais. A slight taste of bile licked at her throat as she thought about how all the chanting people would probably join her in bowing to the three exalted figures above them once they were done.

The countdown was a signal of inevitability.

They knew she would be done in nine seconds, how could she know any better?

She knew she had to rid herself of that kind of thought if she was going to get Dabin out of this crazy place. But all of her senses were telling her that she was cracking under pressure.

"Eight seconds until she breaks."

Dabin. She was here for Dabin. She would anchor herself to her friend. She needed to be a good friend and save her.

But Dabin was still smiling as her lips moved in time with everyone else's.

It was a smile of ignorant bliss. Taeseol knew that. It wasn't real joy. It wasn't something to emulate. It was something to be rescued from.

That was just it, though. Looking at Dabin's smile, Taeseol could see it was slightly too wide, somehow frayed at the edges.

It was... the smile of a broken woman.

This same thing had happened to Dabin, she was sure.

And Dabin had broken.

Probably when the countdown had reached zero.

And, despite it all, Dabin was happy now.

"Seven seconds until she breaks."

Dabin wasn't the answer. If she wanted to save her friend, which she still did, she would need to look elsewhere.

And the only place her eyes were drawn was back to the dais.

Taeseol studiously avoided the right-hand side. Whatever had happened when she locked eyes with that woman, she didn't want to repeat it.

Her gaze scanned left.

And then fell on a woman who could only be described as stunning.

Her figure was immediately striking, tall and almost impossibly thin. Her face wore what seemed to be a permanent smirk to go along with her piercing, perfect eyes.

She was looking back at Taeseol.

It shouldn't have been surprising, every eye in the room was on their victim. But it still, somehow, surprised her to see that powerful gaze focused entirely on her.

There was a flash of ice blue.

Taeseol's body, already suppressed and slow breathing, froze completely.

"Five seconds until she breaks."

Movement returned to Taeseol's body. It felt good to be able to even shift the position of her fingers while the waves of sound held her against the floor.

As she thought that, she realised her thoughts had started to move again. She had been, for that short moment, completely dazed.

She gathered her thoughts back together. They were the same as before, she was pretty sure. She was worried about Dabin, worried about herself, but resolute that she would make it to the end of the countdown. She wanted to be stronger than her friend.

But the constant, united voice of everyone in the room was wearing her down. She was no longer stunned, but she was basically no less free than she had been two seconds ago.

Cracks were starting to spread through her defences.

She looked around, anywhere but up at the dais. The air around her was filled with visible fault lines. Long, jagged, thin lines of blackness simply appeared in the empty space between her and the congregation.

Either someone even weirder was happening, or she was completely losing her grip on reality.

Both seemed plausible. Both were not good to think about.

"Four seconds until she breaks."

So she didn't think about that.

She just focused on the number. Four more seconds. Four more small moments alone with her thoughts.

All she had to do was hang on. Not get broken.

Around her, the cracks in the air opened up. Winds rushed past her as air moved automatically to fill the vacuums. Even her own body was slightly tugged by the pressure, light as she was. It really didn't help her whole feeling of powerlessness.

It was cold.

It was even hard to breathe, as life-giving air was sucked away.

Sure, she could hold her breath for four seconds. She could endure this possible hallucination for four seconds. She just had to trust that it would end at that point.

But if she trusted the countdown, she would need to trust the whole concept. Not just that it would end, but that it would end with her breaking.

Behind the tiny, fractured vacuums, Dabin just smiled at her. Even as their clothes billowed as air rushed into the cracks from the opposite side, not one person seemed fazed. To them, everything about this was normal (or it was all in Taeseol's head, which was not out of the question yet).

To them, Taeseol was just another person who would be happy like them in a few seconds. Just like Dabin.

Her fingers pressed into the ground.

She wasn't going to give up.

"Three seconds until she breaks."

She came back to the idea that this was all some sensory-overload induced hallucination.

The cracks and the vacuums and the oxygen depravation persisted after she pinched her leg. She wasn't even sure if that was how hallucinations worked. Was it a dream, or was it purely conjured by her own mind?

If so, it must have came from somewhere. Her brain couldn't have just made up this weird imagery from nothing.

She tried to search her thoughts for any image of cracks appearing in the sky. She found that one old guy from the anime she used to watch, but that was an earthquake thing, it didn't create little chasms of emptiness in the sky.

But she also found a lot of similar gaps in her own thoughts.

She had been focusing on the here and now, so that she could keep herself centred. But around that, the same cracks seemed to be spreading through her mind.

Was it another hallucination? Self-protecting, stopping her from realising that it came from her?

That was ridiculous.

But no more so than a weird church in the middle of Daegu where a hundred people torture and use magic to mind-break a civil servant.

Why did they even want her? She wasn't high ranking, she wasn't a theologian. She wasn't obviously useful. Like many other people, she was metahuman, but unless they had really misread something, she didn't see how the ability to create sparks by rubbing her fingers together would be worth this much effort.

Taeseol did think of herself as pretty, but it wasn't like a hundred people could share her.

... But maybe one person wanted her.

"Two seconds until she breaks."

It was a church. Churches had gods. Usually, at least, she was pretty sure.

There was a raised platform above her, with someone in the centre. Visibly above everyone in status and power, with two amazingly beautiful women beside them.

They were the god of this place. That was the only thing that made sense.

And they had decided to break Taeseol.

They had the power to break apart the very air.

And they had predicted Taeseol would break. In a couple of seconds.

It was inevitable.

She wouldn't be able to hold on.

She couldn't fight the divine.

She was just a normal woman. The very fact that they had started to break her would fulfil the prophecy. She was going to lose.

"One second until she breaks."

Taeseol looked up. At the centre of the dais.

At first glance, the Goddess didn't look very special.

She was pretty, sure, with really shiny brown hair and a cute, round face, but she was nothing compared to the women at her left and right hand. She was also very strikingly short.

But it quickly became clear that her size only emphasised how much her power overflowed from her mortal form. There was a clear, intangible link between the short woman and the cracks in the air and in Taeseol's mind. They were strands of the Goddess' power striking out into the world.

And they were also palpably mere strands. There was so much power in that woman.

She was an overwhelming presence. Impossible to look directly at, but impossible to ignore.

Taeseol saw true, pure power. Enough to command these hundreds of people.

And, after a second of drinking it in, right on time...

Taeseol broke.

She bowed her head, kowtowing all the way down to the floor. As she completely prostrated herself, the voices died down. The high-pitched scream of displaced air disappeared.

Dabin's familiar voice came into her ear as her prim work cardigan was removed by many hands.

Stripped down to her revealing black dress, Taeseol stood with her friend's help. She didn't know if she was smiling, but her body was filled with numinous joy. Her hair still stood on end, but from the overwhelming purity of the experience rather than any cold.

She looked up at the dais and bowed again, formally, her torso parallel to the floor.

Formally, she introduced herself to her new object of worship. She explained what little use she would be to the congregation. She offered her body freely to the living deity and to her lieutenants (which got her hand a happy squeeze from Dabin).

She stumbled for a moment, trying to think of a form of address.

The word came into her mind from outside. An old word for female animist deities.

"I, Moon Taeseol, pledge myself to you as a mind-broken servant, Yeoshin."

---

This was originally going to be a standalone story of the classic Mauri cloth - an exploration of a cool mind control method idea I had. But as I was writing it out, it quickly became clear that this was a bit more sinister than usual, so I like to have those attached to supervillain stuff (or political stuff where the 'bad guy wins') where it feels more okay to root against the mind controller, since normally we think whoever is the dom is based.

So, we now have a reworked story which is also the introduction of a new Spectrum villain. This is part of the ongoing 'storyline', even though no main characters actually appear, for the ~10 of you keeping track (is that an overestimate? Please don't tell me it's an overestimate). Any similarity to the Society of Light from the last prequel story is intended, but they're not an offshoot of the Society, I'm just taking my cues here from Korean fantasy stuff where about 50% of villains are evil cults (seriously, "evil vaguely Christian-skinned cult" is to Korean fantasy what "evil Empire" is to Western fantasy).

On that note, I'm going to try to put out more stories than usual this month, all using other more sinister ideas I've had. All in the name of spoopy season.

Proofreading credit, as always, to the herculean Dormiria .

Description
Taeseol was having a weird day.

Actually, now she had a moment to think, it wasn't really a weird day. It had been normal for ten out of fourteen hours. She had woken up at 5am, and been at work by 7am. The day had gone by normally: completing forms, filing, all the usual stuff. At lunch she'd read an exclusive interview with the now-returned superheroine Spectrum and gossiped a bit in the mini-kitchen at work.

After she'd got off, at 6pm, she went to see her friend Dabin, as planned.

That plan had escalated quickly.

Now, she was in the middle of some weird cathedral-like building. It had a standard western-style edifice, but inside it was a far more eclectic mix of styles. On the far side from the entrance was a dais covered by a thin curtain, with classical art of both western and Korean styles (mosaic and scroll) adorning it. Stairs rose on either side to galleries for people to stand in, the walls all decorated with abstract art. The floor was concave, so that anyone in the centre of the tiled surface was significantly below the dais, but also below the congregation that gathered and swayed on the ground level.

That centre of the floor was, of course, where Taeseol was. For some reason.

And she hadn't even fully comprehended the fact that there were massive speakers placed in the four corners of the depression in the floor. Pointing at her.

She had just wanted to accompany her friend to a church service. Taeseol wasn't remotely religious, and even if she were, she'd practice Taoism like a normal person. But Dabin had been acting weird for the last two weeks , just seeming always lost in her thoughts and strangely sex-crazed as well. It was not a normal situation, but it felt like it called for faith intervention, and Taeseol wanted to be a supportive friend.

And what did she get for being a supportive friend? Being forced to kneel in the middle of a kooky building while ₩2,000,000 speakers bombarded her with what sounded like foreign-language gibberish.

There must have been over a hundred people inside with her. There was no dress code - people wore anything from a light cardigan like Taeseol had to literal hanboks. There was no pattern to where people stood, either. Some stood alone in the galleries above. Others huddled together like penguins on sections of the ground floor. Most stood with two or three others.

But there was a clear, shared reason for being there. It was clear in how everyone had their eyes towards the dais, how everyone's chanting had the same tune even if the words were so jumbled as to have no meaning.

The curtain in front of the raised platform started to rise.

The change happened like everything else seemed to in the weird church - utterly chaotic but with a clear order to it. First, there were a few perceptible islands of sound in the jumble of discordant voices. But each of those islands grew, as people and groups nearby adopted the new words. Soon, the sound had become a single, overwhelming wave, unified in purpose, and all being directed through the speakers and directly into Taeseol's skull.

She could feel the tiles shaking below her. Or maybe her legs shaking against the tiles. Didn't really matter.

The only thing that was clear was the words everyone was sing-saying, like a droning hymn.

"Twelve seconds until she breaks."

It didn't sound good.

Was this some sort of weird pain cult? Like a torture church?

She had heard of the US occupying forces using sensory deprivation as a torture method. If someone had nothing to hear but their heartbeat they would start to go slightly mad, hearing things which weren't there and generally unravelling.

This was like the reverse of that. The dissonant visuals of this strange church interior, the resonant sound of a hundred voices saying the same thing directly at her, both made it impossible to sense anything else. Her body prickled with pins and needles and hair standing on end.

But if this was the opposite, she wouldn't unravel.

She wouldn't 'break', if that's what they wanted.

"Eleven seconds until she breaks."

The momentary surge of willpower let her concentrate for a moment. The world stopped being a blur of jarring colours, and became real again.

Taeseol looked through the crowd.

Dabin was there.

She was chanting with the others. Her lips moved in time with the sound that barrelled into Taeseol's skull.

Her friend agreed, she wanted Taeseol to break.

She looked so happy to be saying those awful words.

But Taeseol had always been the stronger-willed of the two. Dabin had got swept up into this weird torture cult in the same way she'd been swept up in church as an escape from real life in the first place.

Taeseol wasn't like that.

She would endure this countdown hymn. Then she would stand, run to Dabin, take her hand, and get out.

"Ten seconds until she breaks."

Just ten more seconds.

She looked away from the cloying sight of her friend happily enthralled in the chant.

She glanced up at the dais.

There stood three women, superior to the congregation by their position and by their pure aura of power.

Taeseol's eyes darted right, essentially at random.

The woman on the right was so perfectly formed she might as well have been a statue. She was of perfectly average height, and slender in the same way a flower is. She wore a simple camisole with a shawl of lace over it which felt perfect and soft even if only to the touch of Taeseol's eyes. Her face was perfectly shaped, her eyes large and beautiful.

The woman made a gesture, and Taeseol's head bowed.

She hadn't made a decision, she didn't even register a thought to do it. She hadn't felt any force push her, either. She had simply found herself suddenly staring at the floor. Her kneeling stance was slightly deeper. More of her skin touched the tiles which vibrated with every syllable from the speakers.

It was a really pathetic position.

"Nine seconds until she breaks."

Taeseol knew that she was being suppressed. She was being beaten down. There was nothing she could do about it but endure.

But there were three more rounds of what she had experienced to go.

She was already bowing to the dais. A slight taste of bile licked at her throat as she thought about how all the chanting people would probably join her in bowing to the three exalted figures above them once they were done.

The countdown was a signal of inevitability.

They knew she would be done in nine seconds, how could she know any better?

She knew she had to rid herself of that kind of thought if she was going to get Dabin out of this crazy place. But all of her senses were telling her that she was cracking under pressure.

"Eight seconds until she breaks."

Dabin. She was here for Dabin. She would anchor herself to her friend. She needed to be a good friend and save her.

But Dabin was still smiling as her lips moved in time with everyone else's.

It was a smile of ignorant bliss. Taeseol knew that. It wasn't real joy. It wasn't something to emulate. It was something to be rescued from.

That was just it, though. Looking at Dabin's smile, Taeseol could see it was slightly too wide, somehow frayed at the edges.

It was... the smile of a broken woman.

This same thing had happened to Dabin, she was sure.

And Dabin had broken.

Probably when the countdown had reached zero.

And, despite it all, Dabin was happy now.

"Seven seconds until she breaks."

Dabin wasn't the answer. If she wanted to save her friend, which she still did, she would need to look elsewhere.

And the only place her eyes were drawn was back to the dais.

Taeseol studiously avoided the right-hand side. Whatever had happened when she locked eyes with that woman, she didn't want to repeat it.

Her gaze scanned left.

And then fell on a woman who could only be described as stunning.

Her figure was immediately striking, tall and almost impossibly thin. Her face wore what seemed to be a permanent smirk to go along with her piercing, perfect eyes.

She was looking back at Taeseol.

It shouldn't have been surprising, every eye in the room was on their victim. But it still, somehow, surprised her to see that powerful gaze focused entirely on her.

There was a flash of ice blue.

Taeseol's body, already suppressed and slow breathing, froze completely.

"Five seconds until she breaks."

Movement returned to Taeseol's body. It felt good to be able to even shift the position of her fingers while the waves of sound held her against the floor.

As she thought that, she realised her thoughts had started to move again. She had been, for that short moment, completely dazed.

She gathered her thoughts back together. They were the same as before, she was pretty sure. She was worried about Dabin, worried about herself, but resolute that she would make it to the end of the countdown. She wanted to be stronger than her friend.

But the constant, united voice of everyone in the room was wearing her down. She was no longer stunned, but she was basically no less free than she had been two seconds ago.

Cracks were starting to spread through her defences.

She looked around, anywhere but up at the dais. The air around her was filled with visible fault lines. Long, jagged, thin lines of blackness simply appeared in the empty space between her and the congregation.

Either someone even weirder was happening, or she was completely losing her grip on reality.

Both seemed plausible. Both were not good to think about.

"Four seconds until she breaks."

So she didn't think about that.

She just focused on the number. Four more seconds. Four more small moments alone with her thoughts.

All she had to do was hang on. Not get broken.

Around her, the cracks in the air opened up. Winds rushed past her as air moved automatically to fill the vacuums. Even her own body was slightly tugged by the pressure, light as she was. It really didn't help her whole feeling of powerlessness.

It was cold.

It was even hard to breathe, as life-giving air was sucked away.

Sure, she could hold her breath for four seconds. She could endure this possible hallucination for four seconds. She just had to trust that it would end at that point.

But if she trusted the countdown, she would need to trust the whole concept. Not just that it would end, but that it would end with her breaking.

Behind the tiny, fractured vacuums, Dabin just smiled at her. Even as their clothes billowed as air rushed into the cracks from the opposite side, not one person seemed fazed. To them, everything about this was normal (or it was all in Taeseol's head, which was not out of the question yet).

To them, Taeseol was just another person who would be happy like them in a few seconds. Just like Dabin.

Her fingers pressed into the ground.

She wasn't going to give up.

"Three seconds until she breaks."

She came back to the idea that this was all some sensory-overload induced hallucination.

The cracks and the vacuums and the oxygen depravation persisted after she pinched her leg. She wasn't even sure if that was how hallucinations worked. Was it a dream, or was it purely conjured by her own mind?

If so, it must have came from somewhere. Her brain couldn't have just made up this weird imagery from nothing.

She tried to search her thoughts for any image of cracks appearing in the sky. She found that one old guy from the anime she used to watch, but that was an earthquake thing, it didn't create little chasms of emptiness in the sky.

But she also found a lot of similar gaps in her own thoughts.

She had been focusing on the here and now, so that she could keep herself centred. But around that, the same cracks seemed to be spreading through her mind.

Was it another hallucination? Self-protecting, stopping her from realising that it came from her?

That was ridiculous.

But no more so than a weird church in the middle of Daegu where a hundred people torture and use magic to mind-break a civil servant.

Why did they even want her? She wasn't high ranking, she wasn't a theologian. She wasn't obviously useful. Like many other people, she was metahuman, but unless they had really misread something, she didn't see how the ability to create sparks by rubbing her fingers together would be worth this much effort.

Taeseol did think of herself as pretty, but it wasn't like a hundred people could share her.

... But maybe one person wanted her.

"Two seconds until she breaks."

It was a church. Churches had gods. Usually, at least, she was pretty sure.

There was a raised platform above her, with someone in the centre. Visibly above everyone in status and power, with two amazingly beautiful women beside them.

They were the god of this place. That was the only thing that made sense.

And they had decided to break Taeseol.

They had the power to break apart the very air.

And they had predicted Taeseol would break. In a couple of seconds.

It was inevitable.

She wouldn't be able to hold on.

She couldn't fight the divine.

She was just a normal woman. The very fact that they had started to break her would fulfil the prophecy. She was going to lose.

"One second until she breaks."

Taeseol looked up. At the centre of the dais.

At first glance, the Goddess didn't look very special.

She was pretty, sure, with really shiny brown hair and a cute, round face, but she was nothing compared to the women at her left and right hand. She was also very strikingly short.

But it quickly became clear that her size only emphasised how much her power overflowed from her mortal form. There was a clear, intangible link between the short woman and the cracks in the air and in Taeseol's mind. They were strands of the Goddess' power striking out into the world.

And they were also palpably mere strands. There was so much power in that woman.

She was an overwhelming presence. Impossible to look directly at, but impossible to ignore.

Taeseol saw true, pure power. Enough to command these hundreds of people.

And, after a second of drinking it in, right on time...

Taeseol broke.

She bowed her head, kowtowing all the way down to the floor. As she completely prostrated herself, the voices died down. The high-pitched scream of displaced air disappeared.

Dabin's familiar voice came into her ear as her prim work cardigan was removed by many hands.

Stripped down to her revealing black dress, Taeseol stood with her friend's help. She didn't know if she was smiling, but her body was filled with numinous joy. Her hair still stood on end, but from the overwhelming purity of the experience rather than any cold.

She looked up at the dais and bowed again, formally, her torso parallel to the floor.

Formally, she introduced herself to her new object of worship. She explained what little use she would be to the congregation. She offered her body freely to the living deity and to her lieutenants (which got her hand a happy squeeze from Dabin).

She stumbled for a moment, trying to think of a form of address.

The word came into her mind from outside. An old word for female animist deities.

"I, Moon Taeseol, pledge myself to you as a mind-broken servant, Yeoshin."

---

This was originally going to be a standalone story of the classic Mauri cloth - an exploration of a cool mind control method idea I had. But as I was writing it out, it quickly became clear that this was a bit more sinister than usual, so I like to have those attached to supervillain stuff (or political stuff where the 'bad guy wins') where it feels more okay to root against the mind controller, since normally we think whoever is the dom is based.

So, we now have a reworked story which is also the introduction of a new Spectrum villain. This is part of the ongoing 'storyline', even though no main characters actually appear, for the ~10 of you keeping track (is that an overestimate? Please don't tell me it's an overestimate). Any similarity to the Society of Light from the last prequel story is intended, but they're not an offshoot of the Society, I'm just taking my cues here from Korean fantasy stuff where about 50% of villains are evil cults (seriously, "evil vaguely Christian-skinned cult" is to Korean fantasy what "evil Empire" is to Western fantasy).

On that note, I'm going to try to put out more stories than usual this month, all using other more sinister ideas I've had. All in the name of spoopy season.

Proofreading credit, as always, to the herculean Dormiria .