In an NTR Game, the Childhood Friend Is a Bitch Worse Than the Demon King (7)
Let's get one thing straight from the start.
I was only someone who had possessed Ronan's body. I was not Ronan.
The body was his, sure, but the mind wasn't, so it was only right to see myself as an entirely different person.
I was planning to just let it slide if I could manage it.
So the anger boiling in me right now didn't stray far from simple pity for Ronan. He and I were separate people, and I myself had never been betrayed by those women.
That was why I had hesitated, wondering whether I even had the right to get angry at the party members the same way Ronan would have. Who was I to yell at them? That was exactly why I had tried to walk out of the inn earlier without saying a word.
But eighty-nine days? That's fucking insane, you bitches.
No matter how I looked at it, though—
Leaving him with less than three months of life left was just too much, wasn't it?
They had worked him that hard?
"You lot are dead today."
And after wringing him dry like that, the second he became useless they just tossed him aside?
I genuinely could not believe a human being was capable of something like this. By any normal standard, I had every right to be furious.
I gripped my sword and walked slowly toward the party members, face twisted with rage.
"Hmph. Ronan, in the end this is your own fault, isn't it?"
Why the hell did they look angrier than me?
Charlotte, the mage of the hero's party, glared at me without a shred of fear even as I approached. It was so absurd I almost laughed, but asking what had her so worked up didn't seem like a bad idea either.
"What the hell is she even talking about?"
She was blaming Ronan? Right here, right now?
I stared at her in pure disbelief as she answered.
"Didn't you hear me? It's your fault. Not ours."
"Ha... Keep talking. What exactly is my fault?"
"The fact that your lifespan ran out."
"And?"
"If your life hadn't been running out, we would have stayed with you."
"So?"
"Isn't this all because you barely had any life left? Who told you to push yourself that hard?"
Listening to Charlotte insist that Ronan was the one at fault, I felt my mind go blank for a second. What kind of twisted logic let someone say something like that?
"Ha. Hey. You know damn well why Ronan's—why my—lifespan disappeared, don't you?"
I shot the words back at her, clear and deliberate. She couldn't pretend she didn't know. Not now.
"You nagged me every single day for being weak. You pushed me to fight. You know I burned through my own life force forcing myself to save you every time you got into trouble, right?"
Everything Ronan had done, he had done for them. He had never been able to leave his party members behind, so he had made that choice again and again.
"You even threatened to leave the party if I didn't get stronger. Remember that?"
He had done it because he didn't want to be abandoned. Because he wanted to be strong enough for them no matter what. No one had cared about the party more than Ronan.
"And now you come at me with this shit? After you sucked every last drop of use out of me?"
And what had he gotten in return? Betrayal. Ronan had never suffered all of that just so he could be stabbed in the back while listening to garbage like this. The thought that he had sacrificed himself for bitches like them made me so furious I could barely stand it.
"You should have managed it better. Who ever asked you to get strong like that and then come crying for help?"
Even when I was practically choking on the words, Charlotte didn't flinch. She just kept blaming me. Looking at her, I gave up on talking. There was no point trying to reason with an animal.
Thud!
"Kyaa!"
My fist slammed into her face. Charlotte flew clean out of the training grounds and hit the ground unconscious.
"My bad for expecting anything from you."
One down. Time for the next.
""...""
The party's priestess, Tricella, and my childhood friend Amy were staring at me blankly. The moment Hero Jaxx had gone down, both of them had already lost the will to fight. Even with him they might not have won—of course they folded now.
I considered who to deal with first, then walked toward Tricella.
"You got anything to say?"
"Hero Ronan. I know I did wrong as well."
She trembled slightly as I approached. At least she seemed to feel some kind of guilt, unlike Charlotte.
"Yeah? So this is reflection time?"
"Of course not. I am going to become a saintess. Naturally I have no mercy left to spare for a hero who is about to die. I believe it was an unavoidable choice."
In the end, Tricella was exactly the same as the others. No real remorse for betraying Ronan at all.
"If it were the Goddess, she would have abandoned you without question. One cannot rely on a hero with so little life remaining."
She, too, insisted that betraying me had been the right call—just like Charlotte.
"Unbelievable. A lowly priestess bitch predicting the Goddess's will. How blasphemous."
"...Even if you say that, my thoughts remain unchanged."
I already knew from the story that the Goddess Church—the state religion of the Empire in this game—was rotten to the core. Even knowing that, the idea that a woman like this was a leading saintess candidate...
The end times really were here.
Shunk!
"Kyaaah!!!"
"Stop the theatrics before I actually kill you."
I drove my sword into Tricella's arm once. This was a non-lethal duel, so I only meant to disable her. Leaving her whimpering in pain, I finally turned to Ronan's childhood friend—Amy.
"Amy."
"Ronan... I'm sorry... We were wrong."
She looked at me with those same teary eyes, silently begging me not to do this. The sight only made my irritation spike harder.
"Hey. If I think about Charlotte and Tricella a hundred times, I can understand them a tiny bit, okay?"
Honestly, compared to Amy I didn't even hate Charlotte and Tricella that much. They were still unforgivable traitors, but at least they had some kind of purpose.
"Charlotte needed a hero's power to rebuild her fallen house."
As the daughter of a ruined noble family, the only reason Charlotte had ever liked Ronan was the power he held as a hero.
"And Tricella, for better or worse, was just fulfilling her duty as a saintess candidate."
Tricella had only ever followed Ronan because that was what a saintess was supposed to do. Both of them had at least been chasing some greater cause. There was a sliver of something that could almost be called justification.
Of course, that still didn't mean I would ever forgive the people who had destroyed Ronan's life.
"But what about you?"
Amy was different. Completely different. I walked up, grabbed her by the collar, and yanked her close.
"I... I only did it for you, Ronan."
Of course. The same empty answer as always.
Slap!!!
"...Ro... Ronan?"
Amy's pupils blew wide. Had she really believed Ronan would never hit her? Well, to her he had always been the sucker who would love only her no matter what, so of course she thought that.
"Hey. Cut the bullshit and talk straight."
Sorry, but I wasn't him. I wasn't Ronan.
I asked her again for the real reason.
"I'll say it again... I... I did it for you, Ronan..."
She clearly wasn't going to break that easily.
Slap!
Her cheek turned an even deeper red.
"I told you to cut the bullshit."
"Hic... Ronan. I..."
"Ha. You're really going to keep this up till the end."
No matter how hard I pressed, Amy just kept parroting that she had done it for Ronan. The way she tried to scam me right to the finish line was nauseating.
"Hey... Think about it for a second. Just think about it."
For the record: never fall for it. There is not a single percent of truth in the tears of a whore wearing a childhood friend's face.
"Someone who claims to care about me drains my lifespan like this? And then spreads her legs for another hero?"
She did it for Ronan, yet she wrecked his body beyond repair? She did it for him, yet she threw him away like garbage? How the hell was any of that "for Ronan"?
"You never once acted for Ronan's sake. You just used him for yourself."
No. Absolutely not. To Amy, Ronan had never been anything more than a convenient tool. A tool for her own advancement.
"If you really cared about him, you wouldn't even say the words 'I did it for you.' Am I wrong?"
That was the only truth about Amy. I demanded she finally be honest.
"Ronan. I really... hic... I did it because I liked you..."
Fat tears rolled down her cheeks like she was the most wronged person in the world, like she couldn't understand why I refused to see her heart.
"Ha. Seriously. Say 'I did it for you' one more time. Go on."
She was vicious. Truly vicious. She was going to play this game all the way to the end.
I drew my sword and set the tip against Amy's throat.