Well, apparently Sabra's at that unfortunate level of together where complicated seemings bounce of her and thus fail to work, but her sense of what makes sense on a fundamental level is still online.

Well, if she's assuming anything she hears right now is something she's meant to hear, she can roll with that.

Is Sabra forming expectations about Aire maybe hearing her thoughts? Most Living Clothing can't do things like that, don't have Aire's telepathic tentacles, but perhaps she doesn't know that.

She can't be bribed with orgasms if she's getting the orgasms anyway. Hah! She can oppose this enemy and cum her brains out, she doesn't have to choose!

She's not thinking meta-level about much of anything right now, so she's not thinking about her thoughts being read, but that also means she's not thinking that her thoughts are private.

Good enough.

Amusingly, that thought about not having to choose would be exactly what she wanted Sabra to be thinking if she was actually an agent of the Red Queen, and Sabra was just a bit more vulnerable to overstimulation. As it is, she's right. Probably not that long now before she has the mana to fry Aire's body. She just needs to make sure that she's fed the right thoughts into Sabra's head, to convince her that the Red Queen agent was trying to convince her of certain things. 

For now, the only command that she has to obey is that she cum. Nothing complicated. Just let herself cum as much as she wants. Maybe there will be some other things later. But for now it's so simple. Such an easy command to obey.

There, given Sabra's personality that should ensure she fries Aire as soon as she has the mana.

She increases the level of stimulation she's providing, as though she's trying to white out Sabra's brain again with pleasure. She might actually white out with pleasure, but it will be temporary, and Sabra will surface with more mana.

And then the last thing she wants Sabra to think a Red Queen agent was trying to convince her of.

(She needs to break her, she might have seen how they've suborned people in the Inquisitors to help them set up the frame job)

It wants her to think giving into the orgasms is bad so she'll do something else but Sabra will not be fooled now it is going to shut up and keep making her cum because that's what Sabra wants.

There is a flaw in this logic, somewhere.

But it doesn't matter. Whatever the enemy creature's true objective, it isn't accomplishing that objective so long as its busy making her cum! So obviously the thing to do is have more orgasms.

Well, if Sabra had slightly less mental strength this could end up leading to an actually broken Veterinarian-General, which is a better outcome than they were expecting they could get. Apparently a large portion of their ability to suborn moderately high-ranking figures in the Dragon Empire is dependent purely on whether or not they happen to have mutations that allow them to withstand things like this with their volition intact, rather than falling into unthinking lust. Good news for Aire in the short term, bad news for if actual Red Queen agents show up.

She'll run with this.

Hopefully when Sabra manages to stop cumming herself silly she'll think she's seen through the deception, feel very clever if she fully forms the thought that actually she was supposed to see through that deception and escape with all those earlier faked leaked thoughts, and not ever manage to realize that Aire was only pretending to pretend to leak information to her.

All she has to do is cum. Isn't that nice? No other responsibilities. Just cumming.

Damn right.

Since cumming is so nice, and she's ever so grateful, why doesn't she just lift her left arm? There's no reason not to, right? She can even keep cumming while she does it.

And Aire relaxes her iron control over Sabra's body, meaning she could raise her left arm if she tried.

Okay, when that fails she thinks it'll be enough that the inexperienced Red Queen she's pretending to be would realize that making Sabra cum again and again isn't actually working to make her more suggestible.

Withholding orgasms sure gets a reaction.

No no, more, she needs more, what does she have to do to get more.

Her mind starts to clear, struggling back to lucidity to parse the instruction. The threat. No more orgasms unless she lifts her left arm. That's stupid. Sabra refuses to play.

Her mind is clear. Gods she wants to cum again but her mind is clear.

If anyone asks, she's totally going to claim she did that on purpose. Yes. It was totally on purpose, a clever scheme to trick the red queen's agent into giving her a chance to think, and not a total accident that she's taking credit for after the fact.

Now.

Time for FIRE.

WAIT. FUCK. BLOOD. NOT FIRE. BLOOD. SHE COULD CAPTURE IT ALIVE-

Too late.

There is a moment of blinding, excruciating pain, gone quick enough that she almost might have imagined it. And then Aire is nothing but ash. Probably most of Sabra's bedding as well, but Aire is no longer present to check.

Her secondary body is full up on mana and has a hapless, fucked-silly bandit to use as a temporary wearer to allow herself to split into two bodies again.

Less than a minute later, her new body is stepping out of a portal and into the sanctum of the Black Eyes.

Hopefully that worked.

Vergil doesn't sleep often. He's still at his desk when, late into the night, a disheveled and barely-dressed Sabra bursts into his office with a wild look in her eye.

     "Sir, we have a problem."

"What sort of problem is that."

     "The Red Queen's agents are already in the city, and they're moving against us."

"How do you know this?"

     "Because a tentacled parasite just attacked me in my own bed, godsdamnit!!!"

"I see."

For a moment, Vergil doesn't move. Then, suddenly, he shoves his chair back and stands, his hand lashing out. Chains form of sparkling blue-white mana as they shoot across the room. In half an instant, Sabra finds herself chained to the wall, arms and legs spread out to her sides, lewdly exposing her flushed, dripping pussy as her nightshirt rides up. Vergil raises an eyebrow, but doesn't bother to cover her up before summoning the next most trusted fleshcrafter on staff, as well as the high-ranking functionary who has Truesight.

     Sabra glares murderously at them but submits to examination without protest.

Once it is confirmed that Sabra is clean of parasites and not compromised in any other obvious way, Vergil kicks the other two men out and starts undressing.

     "...really?" Even Sabra isn't sure if her tone is incredulous or hopeful.

The Lord-Commander doesn't explain himself. He merely steps up to the chained-up woman and slides his cock into her pussy, gripping her hips as he looks into her eyes. "Tell me what happened."

     Sabra tells him. Including the part about how she oh-so-cleverly tricked the thing into giving her an opportunity to kill it.

"It told you it framed Alard."

     "Y-Yes."

"Why."

     "I don't, I don't know. I wasn't exactly, thinking clearly, at the time."

Vergil frowns even as he continues to thrust his cock into the chained-up woman at a steady pace.

"Did it mention the victim."

     "I don't, I don't think so, no."

The Lord-Commander genuinely isn't sure how to read that. What would the Red Queen's motivation be for any of this? What results from this plot? Yui... lacks a rider. Could that have been the goal? Yui is a rather unique specimen as dragons go, but not in a way relevant to military matters. Ideological? No evidence. Frustrating. Very frustrating. How does taking one dragon off the board benefit the Red Queen? What does the Red Queen even want?

For once, his and Sabra's desires align, and he is glad to take his frustration out on her.

The sun rises over the city of Arcadia as a new day dawns.

Aire, locked in her cult's sanctum, does not notice. They are far from the sun, down here. She flows from cultist to cultist and has her fun driving them half-mad from pleasure one after the other. 

One of them seems to have similar mental oddities to the Veterinarian-General, keeping herself mentally intact even through some rather intense orgasms. Aire would be slightly annoyed by her inability to drive her to even temporary dissolution, but Elin throws herself headlong into the pleasure and submerges herself, deliberately. 

Aire rather enjoys that.

Christa wakes with her head resting in Dia's lap. She's obviously been off and bathed since Christa fell into restful sleep.

Time has passed then.

Aire probably already went off to do her thing. Is she okay?

Oh, there she is, having fun with someone else while Christa sleeps. She feels a little jealous, but she'd have done the same thing if Aire had been the one who fell asleep, so she pushes it aside.

She looks up at Dia and asks if everything went well.

It did. Dia herself does not know the full story of what occurred, but she knows that Mistress returned, safe and sound, and seemed cautiously pleased when she did so.

Oh, good! She's glad everything worked out. Hopefully everyone gets to be safe now, and Alard and Yui don't face too many negative consequences for all this. Even if Christa does have to stay in hiding.

Christa knows she doesn't have to pretend here, right? Nobody here will blame her for what Alard and his dragon did to her, she doesn't need to pretend it didn't happen. Alard will be punished, as he should be. The "justice" of the city harms the innocent easily enough, it will be a refreshing change for it to be focused on one actually deserving of it. He's a Dragoon trainee, even if he hadn't done what he had, that would be enough on its own for him to deserve it, the Dragoons have done such horrible things over the years.

Oh. Do they not know, or...

Why didn't Aire tell them all? What's going on here, how does this make sense?

Maybe its like with Christa, and she doesn't trust their ability to keep it all secret? Aire is a bit paranoid like that, Christa thinks. But why would Christa doing things voluntarily be something Aire wanted to keep secret?

Maybe they wouldn't understand, and they'd hate Christa about it? They didn't spend a bunch of time reading Alard's mind, they don't know that he's very good and not even sort of evil. They don't know Yui is a good dragon. They just know they're in the Dragoons, and apparently the Lord-Commander is an evil monster and also Alard's father. Believing he's evil is sort of reasonable, from their perspective. Right?

Would they believe her, if she told them that he wasn't evil, that he just didn't know the Dragoons were evil, that he wouldn't help them do anything bad? Would they let her go off and let people know, so he could be free?

She doesn't think so. She can feel the strength of Dia's hate. That's the kind of thing you feel for people who've killed someone you cared about. Christa knows better than to try to talk people out of feelings like that. She tried when she was a girl. It doesn't matter if you're right, anything you say just sounds like being on the evil person's side, and then they hate you too. 

But. She won't let unfounded hatred break something valuable. Not when she can stop it.

Alard never forced her to do anything. He wouldn't ever! And he certainly didn't kill her. 

All she has to do is make sure the inquisitors know that.

So, how does she escape from this place without being stopped? Dia's watching her right now, and is obviously invested in her well-being. 

Having that thought at all, incidentally, is the point where her plan would have failed, if Rele were in the room. Fortunately, she is busy elsewhere, assigned the job of monitoring the situation up above to learn whether or not Aire's scheme was successful.

Well, Christa is part of the unlucky segment of the population that has to use the washroom. Can she use that? There have to be others in the organization unless they have someone on hand who fleshcrafts that off of all of them for some reason. They probably have something set up nearby. The only reason she doesn't know already is that Aire isn't so unlucky, and her mutations get applied wholesale to Christa in a way she doesn't properly understand but seems to take care of that particular problem. But, well, Aire is busy right now. And the "fleshcrafter who does that to everyone for free" option seems rather unlikely.

The cult does in fact have infrastructure set up to accommodate this! Unfortunately, Christa is correct that that infrastructure isn't a convenient fleshcrafter. Most of the Black Eyes spend most of their time in the sanctum in this communal chamber, but they do have others. Including, of course, a few restrooms. And so, Dia will tell here where she has to go, when she leaves this room. 

Christa follows those instructions!

As she does, she tries to build a general sense of how the sanctum is laid out. Where is the restroom she ends up in located, compared to everything else? What does she pass along the way? She's looking for anything she might be able to use to escape, and secret exits or anything like that. Does she see any hints of anything like that? Probably not, or else they wouldn't be very secret. But she might as well try!

The orgy sanctum has only the one entrance, the wide hallway that zigs upward as one leaves, enough to block the view of the secret door from one end and block the view of the orgy sanctum itself from the other end. There is also a small access tunnel one of Christa's stature might be able to crawl through, but that would lead her to the wall behind the toilets, not to the toilets.

Emerging back into the spiral stairs from the secret door, one can ascend two stories and come out in a dimly lit utility basement beneath the building above. This utility basement happens to have a restroom right next to the stairwell that still works, despite the basement itself having been bricked off at some point. Christa can hear occasional activity in the stairwell itself, a dozen stories or more above the basement, but no one that far up has line of sight to anything this far down.

Still, there's nothing stopping her from continuing to climb those stairs past the basement, past the sublevels, past the ground floor, and just walking out. From what she can hear, though, she will be seen once she leaves the spiral stairwell itself, and she has no way of knowing if there might be a cultist among the people she'd pass by.

She does have a way to know! She can check if the people she's coming up to pass by have mental shielding, or if they're thinking suspicious thoughts. It's not a good way, it would be rather easy to miss a member of the cult who wasn't shielded and wasn't thinking anything suspicious, but it's better than nothing.

She'll move, slowly and quietly, up the staircase, and listen to minds as they come in range.

There are people thinking about various innocuous things. There are people thinking less innocuous but irrelevant things. There are a couple of people with weak shielding, but no one she recognizes from the orgy.

On the ground floor, the exit from the stairwell is a large, well-kept wooden door that opens onto a hallway behind what appears to be an industrial kitchen of some kind, not currently in use. She can see a large atrium through the gap into the kitchen and out the windows in the kitchen's doors. The opposite end of the hallway dead-ends in what looks like a storage closet.

None of the people she can hear out there are obvious cultists, at least.