I Have to Become Her Friend
I had to become her friend. Even if that was all it ever amounted to.
Realizing I had transmigrated wasn’t particularly difficult. The pet I used to see every morning was gone. The blanket I had painstakingly cleaned each day now lay dusty and neglected. But above all, there was no roof over my head. To wake up one morning and find myself an orphan sleeping on the street instead of with my family—it was easy enough to conclude this was a case of possession.
So I worked desperately hard. First, what kind of world had I been dropped into? Second, how was I supposed to survive in it? I needed answers to those two questions.
The fantasy world hadn’t simply abandoned me without any tools for survival. Using the Practical Compressed Swordsmanship I had taught myself on the streets to fight monsters, I managed to enroll in the academy—the surest path to success—and was even scraping together some savings. In any world, money was the most important thing, so my goal in entering the academy had been to earn a diploma that would let me become a high-ranking adventurer or a palace knight.
Everything had been going smoothly. At least until the day I entered the academy and saw a noble lady sobbing in the back row of the commoners’ classroom.
“Claire Artifare?”
Claire Artifare. The villainess from the novel I once loved reading. She had endured horrific bullying and ostracism, crushed beneath the absurd guilt-by-association for the war crimes her disgraced family had committed. Eventually, she had broken completely.
“...Do you know me?”
A noble girl, crying in a commoner classroom. Covered head to toe in what looked like raw egg. Even though she was being bullied, the novel had portrayed her as a mercilessly cruel villain. The moment I looked at her, the memories flooded back.
“You empire scum are filthy. Like beasts. The fact that you can speak, that you dare beg for your lives—it disgusts me. I want to rip you all apart.”
“If the Artifare ancestors had been a little more cold-blooded… If those monsters wearing human skin had never stunk up the world with their talk of ‘glorifying the empire’ or ‘the emperor’…”
“Don’t leave a single one alive. Hunt down every last person born in the empire and burn them. If even a trace of the empire’s stench remains—child or dog, it doesn’t matter.”
The moment those memories of the racial annihilation ending surfaced, I shrugged off the academy uniform coat I had worked so hard to obtain and began gently wiping her hair.
I didn’t believe this single act would change the future, but…
Friend. Yes. If I become Claire’s friend too, she’ll definitely spare me.
It was pure instinct—the desperate desire not to be wiped out in a genocidal ending. The action of a man who refused to die in a world he had been thrown into.
Claire, who had been staring at me with strange eyes, glanced around the classroom before swatting my hand away in clear disgust.
“...Did they put you up to this again?”
Then, choking on tears, she hurled the words at me like I was her worst enemy instead of someone offering help.
“...Why? Do they say it hurts more when you pour hot water on dry skin? Or do they just want to watch a noble girl get defiled by a commoner’s hands? Why are you tormenting me even here!”
Hot water? The shocking implication left me speechless for a second. With the perfectly normal mindset of a modern person, I muttered under my breath.
“They’re complete fucking bastards.”
That single sentence earned me the hostile glares of every timid commoner in the room—kids whose greatest dream was to become servants in some noble household.
“...Don’t toy with me.”
And Claire herself clearly didn’t believe my intentions were sincere. A truly shitty start, all things considered.