“Just how big is this thing?” Jacob muttered, glaring at his computer. The words “Tower Conquest” were stretched across his screen, in large golden letters. Beneath that was the subtitle, “Can you take Dimona tower as your own?” and beneath that was a loading bar, which had been slowly filling up for the last fifteen minutes. It was still only at ninety percent, though it did tick over to ninety one even as he glared.

“...Maybe I should make a snack or something,” Jacob sighed, glancing at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. It was apparently only two. Since it was the weekend, he didn’t have to worry about how late he stayed up, either. In other words, he would have plenty of time to play. He was just being impatient.

“Guess I’ll wait another minute…” 

***

“What is the matter with you!?” I screamed, glaring at the maid in front of me.

“I-Is something the matter, Princess?” the maid asked me, causing me to glower even more harshly.

“You certainly have audacity to ask me that,” I told her, looking her up and down. She was a lesser succubus, a demon whose ancestors had settled in the mortal realm some generations back. She had golden blonde hair, cut right above the shoulders, with a touch of curl at the end. A long cord-like tail, with a spade at the end, poked out from beneath the skirts of her dress, while black wings stretched out from her backless uniform. Her eyes, like all of her kind, were pure black, making it impossible to tell just where her pupils were focusing. It did seem like her eyes were directed downward, though, instead of at me. I was glad to see she knew her place.

“I-I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Princess,” the maid told me. Her voice was trembling, but the tray in her hands was perfectly steady. It was actually impressive that she managed to stay so composed in my powerful presence. Not that I intended to compliment a being who was so far below me.

“Your ignorance is part of the problem,” I told her, before gesturing to the very tray she was holding. “What do you see on that plate?”

“E-eggs, bacon, and toast, Princess?” the maid said, brow furrowing. “Is that not what you ordered?”

“Of course it’s what I ordered, you dimwit.” My lips pulled back into a sneer as I spoke. From the look of confusion on the maid’s face, it was clear she had no clue what my issue was. Which, of course, only made me more irritated. 

“The toast,” I said, magnanimously deciding to indicate the problem. Despite that, the maid’s brow remained furrowed. “Are you seriously such an idiot that you can’t recognize a problem even when it’s pointed out to you?”

“I’m sorry, Princess,” the maid said. “I really don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

“I don’t know how it could be more obvious,” I complained, letting out a sigh. It seemed I would need to point out the flaw myself if I wanted anything done about it. “The toast is cut vertically; as my maid, you should know that I prefer it be done diagonally.”

“I… I see, Princess… I’ll go to the kitchen and get new toast, immediately.” 

“That’s not good enough,” I informed her, narrowing my eyes. Was this woman new? I didn’t remember seeing her before, but that hardly meant anything. I never bothered to memorize the appearance of mere servants. “By the time you return to me with new toast, the breakfast will have cooled. Inform the head chef that I wish her to remake the entirety of my breakfast, so that I can enjoy it all at the proper temperature.”

“Understood, Princess,” the maid said, bending lightly at the knees and turning to leave.

“And if you bring me the wrong thing, again, I’ll have you and the chef both thrown in the dungeon,” I called after her.

The maid didn’t respond, but I was sure she had heard me. Just as I was sure she would do as I asked. Unless she wanted to spend a few days in a cell, at least.

“Honestly,” I sighed, shaking my head. “You’d think they could at least get my last meal as a princess right…” I just hoped they wouldn’t make such a crucial mistake during dinner. If they got my first meal as the queen of Dimona Tower wrong, even I didn’t know how I would handle it.

***

A small ding rang out from Jacob’s speakers, telling him that the game had finished loading. 

“About time,” he grumbled, moving his mouse toward the start button. He was grinning, though. “Let’s see… Right, we start with the classic scrolling text for the game’s background. Lucy the heroine has trained her whole life to fight Devilla Satanne, the demon queen - well that’s a porn name if I’ve ever heard one. Lucy has made a solo trip to the demon tower, against the wishes of the church… Yada yada yada… Bla bla bla… Alright. So it’s like Alice said - a hundred and one floors, ten generals, and the demon queen as the final boss. You seriously wouldn’t know this was a porn game from the description, though… Guess that’s why they put warnings all over the store page.”

Jacob waited for the scrolling text to finish, then left clicked to start the game. Despite being porn, the game had a surprising amount of combat. The heroine, Lucy, had to work her way through a narrow passageway, slowly climbing up the tower, defeating demons with her sword as she went.

Most of the climb was fairly monotonous, with only the floor counter in the upper left corner telling the player how far they had progressed. Every tenth floor, however, the passageway would open up into a wide area; the boss room. From there, one had the option of either trying to seduce the demon general through dialogue, or just jumping straight to combat. Either way victory ended with the demon general submitting to Lucy, having sex with her, and then giving her part of their magic power so that she’d be strong enough to fight her way through the next ten floors. The dialogue boxes seemed to ignore the hacking and slashing Lucy had been doing so far, with the generals and Lucy both treating it as if she’d simply incapacitated all the demons she’d met so far.

The combat was exciting for Jacob. So was the dialogue, though in a very different way. Combined with the fact that every demon in the tower seemed to be a hot girl, Jacob could see why Alice had recommended the game to him. She knew Jacob was almost as fond of lesbian porn as she was, after all.

“Though it’s sort of strange how all most of the demons just look like different types of monster girls,” Jacob had to admit.

***

I held out my arms, allowing my maids to examine me carefully for any defects in my state of dress. My outfit was pure white, with a pleated skirt that stopped just short of my knees and a backless, armless top that hugged my breasts and showed off all my curves. All of it had been tailored to fit me perfectly, and it had even been adjusted the very day before, so there was little doubt of it fitting right. This was my coronation, though, and there was no room for error. 

“Everything looks wonderful, Princess,” one of my maids declared. She was a lamia, a lady with the bottom half of a snake and an upper half that was mostly human. She was also one of the many demons that served me - not a true demon, like the lesser succubus who’d delivered my breakfast, but it was all the same so far as the human church was concerned. If you weren’t a human, you were a demon, and that was all there was to it.

“I have your shoes ready, Princess,” another of my maids told me. This one was something of a rarity: a unicorn girl, with hair as white as white as my own, if only half as long, and a single pale horn growing from her forehead. She was holding out a pair of high heels, which of course also matched the white motif. I stepped into the proffered shoes without comment, slipping my toes through the open ends and allowing my unicorn maid to strap them on. 

“Your generals are ready, Princess!” yet another maid called, opening the doorway. I couldn’t see many of her features from where I was standing, but she seemed to have a faint green tinge to her skin. Perhaps a goblin, then? I didn’t care enough to check.

“Let them be ready,” I told the maid. A faintly ticklish sensation spread across my back, then disappeared. I heard a faint gasp from one of my maids, and it brought  a smile to my lips. It was always like this when I manifested my wings. I was sure they looked magnificent today, as always - each feather as dark as the void itself.

“I’ll make my way to the throne room at my own pace.”

***

Jacob let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. He’d managed to seduce the final general, which was good. According to Alice, if you entered combat with her it wouldn’t end until she was completely destroyed. In other words, there wouldn’t have been a sex scene.

“Though it’s not exactly like I really have time to enjoy it, anyway,” Jacob groused to himself. It was almost seven A.M. Jacob had been playing nonstop since the night before, something he would never have done if it hadn’t been the first day of his weekend. He was tired, and desperately wanted to sleep, but he was so close to finishing the game that he couldn’t quite bring himself to stop playing. True, he was more or less numbly skipping through the majority of the dialogue, at this point. He wasn’t even paying full attention to the sex scenes. The game let you make a save file whenever you defeated a general, though, so once the sex scene was unlocked you could simply reload the file and run through it all over again. Even if he didn’t have the energy to enjoy it during this play through, being able to go through it at his leisure later would be well worth the trouble.

“Next up is the demon queen...” From what Jacob had read, the generals were only capitulating to the heroine because Devilla herself was so terrible to them. Even Lucy herself seemed to view the demons as pitiable victims of Devilla, true villainess. It made Jacob wonder just how bad the woman really was.