It's Not a Diary
"Elly! Good morning…."
"Oh, uh! Did you sleep well? Morning. Nice weather today, too. Yeah."
Elly's usually well-groomed fur and hair were a complete mess. Dark circles hung so heavy under her eyes they looked like makeup, and her unfocused gaze drifted as she muttered nonsense. Anyone could tell she hadn't gotten a wink of sleep. She looked like someone who'd spent the night in an endless dawn rather than greeting a fresh morning.
"…Did you stay up all night?"
"I did not?!"
She jumped at the casual question, denying it outright. That reaction told me everything.
"Were you up all night thinking about yesterday and getting yourself off…?"
"I-I have no idea what you're talking about?! Saying stuff like that first thing in the morning… hngh! What are you doing?!"
"……."
She really was the type to get turned on by just a little dirty talk. Incredible! …Or at least, that's what I'd thought. Seeing it in person felt a bit off. It would've been great if she'd acted like that in bed at night, but this was early morning in the hallway.
"Ah."
Only then did it hit me—I was actually someone who knew when and where to draw the line. A sensible person. At the same time, a hint of post-nut clarity washed over me. Becoming a sensible human being meant my identity as an author was starting to blur.
You know how there are those famous sayings about writers. Creation is a cycle of suffering, so keep piling on the pain and you'll keep writing. Or that every writer needs a touch of madness, so all writers are lunatics. It's a pretty big logical leap, but… I couldn't completely disagree with parts of it, if I was being honest.
In that sense, I'd been getting too comfortable lately. Not that comfort was bad, but seeing the panties still sleeping in my inventory and looking at Elly right now… it gave me a sense of crisis. It sounded ridiculous, but I was afraid of becoming a sensible person. What if I stopped seeing this world I'd created as my own work and started treating it like an ordinary world? What if I stopped marveling at the detailed monsters, stopped snickering at adventurers' dirty jokes, stopped being moved by powers beyond human limits? The thought terrified me.
This world came with its share of hardships, but the Pan Continent was still the greatest gift I'd ever received. And yet the idea of growing bored with that gift…
"…I can't let things stay like this."
"Huh? Y-Yona? Why are you suddenly…"
Elly, who'd been muttering to herself, started looking anxious, clearly misunderstanding something. Not that it mattered. Once I'd made up my mind, there was no point hesitating.
"Elly. I'm heading out for a bit."
"N-No! That wasn't what I meant just now!"
I gave her trembling shoulders a couple of pats.
"Don't overdo it or you'll wear your bones out. Take it easy. See you later."
I flashed her a thumbs-up for good measure. She just sat there with that dazed expression. Leaving her behind, I hurried down the stairs. If I wanted to write in a world without computers, there were things I'd need.
After leaving The Elf and the Silver Coin, the first thing I checked was my wallet.
"Three silver, huh."
That was all I had left after yesterday's gacha pulls. Well, not that three silver was nothing. My sense of money had been getting warped by gacha, but three silver was still a decent amount. It could feed me for a week if I was careful. At the very least, it was enough for paper and a pen.
I bought a pen, some ink, and a bundle of cheap paper from a general store, then headed back to the tavern. For some reason Elly was already drinking heavily first thing in the morning, looking miserable, but that wasn't exactly new for her. I gave her a casual wave and shut myself in my room.
"Hoo… So, what am I supposed to write?"
I'd been thinking about writing again for a while now. Even though I was working as an adventurer, I'd always considered writing my real job. That was why I'd been able to love this world, and probably why the Goddess of Love had summoned me here in the first place.
But the moment I actually sat down with a pen in hand, my mind went blank. That much was inevitable.
"It's a gender-reversal world, so there's not much I can actually write…"
My roots were in erotic fiction. Thanks to the Goddess of Love, erotic stories were a major genre here. Well-written ones even got bought up by temples for huge sums. I'd secretly read a few in Elly's room, and there were definitely a lot of good ones. The problem was they were all the male-sub version, so some scenes had been a bit much for me.
"A young man becomes the new warden and gets passed around by evil female prisoners until he breaks…"
Elly's tastes were really something. Well, sexual corruption had always been popular across time and cultures. The details were just a little… much. The real issue was that this was apparently the average taste in Pan Grave. If I wrote the way I used to, I'd end up with femdom—er, mel-dom—stories that only appealed to a niche audience. If that was the story I wanted to tell, fine, but right now I was in "I want to write something, but what?" mode. I needed to avoid that.
I wasn't trying to write a diary. I wanted to write something for other people to read.
After staring blankly at the half-dried ink on my pen, an idea finally struck me.
"Ah!"
I remembered where I'd last felt the urge to write. The hobgoblin village. The two surviving adventurers—a man and a woman. The woman who'd dragged her childhood friend and lover into adventuring, only to abandon him when their lives were on the line. The man who'd been rescued by sheer luck and still believed his lover had risked everything to save him, just like she'd promised. The woman watching the man she'd crippled for life, now forced to live as a cripple. What had she been thinking? What did it feel like to face a sin no one else knew about?
Honestly, I didn't care about the pain, guilt, or pity. What mattered to me was the regret, the ruin, the obsession that would bloom from their twisted relationship. I wasn't completely without reservations about turning someone's misfortune into entertainment… but I'd saved their lives in the first place, hadn't I? This much should be fine.
"Alright. Let's go with this."
I dipped my dry pen deep into the ink and scrawled the first sentence that came to mind across the page.
Scratch, scratch.
Stand up. That's all a legless cripple like you can do, isn't it?
I had a feeling this could be something special.
***
She was screwed. Elly chugged the expensive liquor she'd been saving for customers while scanning the noisy tavern. After three seconds of thinking with her alcohol-soaked brain cells, she came to the same conclusion again.
She was screwed.
"They definitely heard everything, right?"
This was a world where any form of sexuality was accepted as long as there was love and it wasn't illegal. But that was just about respecting people's preferences. It didn't mean you could say things like, "Wow, you get excited watching the guy you like mess around with another woman? What refined tastes! Mind if I borrow your husband next time?"
Yona was probably the same. He'd definitely caught on, but couldn't bring himself to say it outright and had fled outside instead! That had to be why he'd been holed up in his room all day without coming out even once…!
…Completely forgetting that Yona had been the one constantly saying he'd seduce other women, and that he might actually like the fact that she'd awakened to NTR.
The reason was simple. Virgin loser Elly had a bit of an inferiority complex about her hymen. Even without experience, she didn't want to be looked down on, and that complicated feeling kept fueling her worst-case scenarios.
After trembling for a while at the thought that she'd been branded as an NTR-obsessed masturbation addict, Elly ultimately chose the direct approach.
"I'll just beg him to pretend it never happened…!"
A very Elly-like idea. Resolved, she downed the rest of her drink in one gulp and threw herself into work while tipsy. He'd skip lunch, but he'd come down for dinner, right? He was still a growing boy. Should she make pasta with lots of basil sauce? Or fry up every kind of meat she had and serve it with a sweet-and-sour sauce? Either way, they were things Yona usually liked, so she'd be able to bring it up in a nice atmosphere.
Having made up her mind, Elly set aside some ingredients and waited for Yona. One hour passed, then two. Even after deep night fell and she closed the tavern, she kept waiting. Yona never came down.
"Oh no…"
Overcome with anxiety, Elly reached a conclusion she never would've considered while sober.
"If it's come to this… I'll just pick the lock."
Of course, she couldn't do it completely sober, so she downed an entire bottle of strong liquor first. With the courage that came from alcohol, the Brave made her way to Yona's room.
Creaaak—
The master key she'd brought turned out to be unnecessary. The door was already unlocked. Feeling deflated, Elly stumbled inside on unsteady legs. What she found was Yona asleep at his desk, hugging a bundle of papers.
"Is this… a diary?"
Simple curiosity. She peeked at the papers with a light heart. The moment she read the black text written there, the alcohol vanished from her system.
"……."
She couldn't help it. The story written on those pages bore an uncanny resemblance to the tale of Elly and Yona.