"Hmm? How could there possibly be a woman more beautiful than a Great Witch?"
A sudden alarm rose in his heart, and the feeling of being enchanted vanished in an instant. Shade sprang to his feet, unable to believe that despite his high Mental Resistance and so many anti-enchantment blessings, he had actually been charmed by an oil painting with no Elemental Reaction.
He clearly knew he absolutely should not look at the painting again, yet his eyes instinctively swept over it once more. Though the face shape, hair color, and eye color were all quite different, the woman underwater in the painting possessed an air of ultimate beauty. The more he looked, the more captivated he became, even feeling the urge to kill its current owner and claim it for himself. That unique charm suddenly reminded Shade of something familiar.
"This can't be..."
He instinctively took two steps back. His eyes widened as he felt that, though the painting had clearly not changed at all, its pull on him was becoming increasingly irresistible. Shade unconsciously swallowed, and then the woman in the painting, whose eyes were slightly narrowed, moved just as he had expected. She turned to look at him outside the painting, then blinked and smiled at him.
At that moment, Shade felt as though his heart had stopped beating. Part of it was because he was shaken by that charm, but the other part was because he had confirmed exactly what the oil painting depicted:
"Desire!"
More precisely, it was Desire as an ordinary painter imagined her.
Cold sweat had already broken out across Shade's back, but Upton seemed not to have noticed the woman in the painting moving at all. He continued enthusiastically describing the inspiration he had gained from the painting.
Only at that moment