Lies
On Saturday, we headed to Lapis’s house as promised.
By limousine.
“It’s huge…”
“The car seats are softer and more comfortable than the ones at home…”
Yeonhwa and Jinhyun could barely get the words out.
“…Lapis. Do you ride around in something like this every day when you go to school?”
“J-just as far as the station near my house… It’s too far otherwise…”
I was just as speechless as they were.
I mean, I knew Lapis was rich.
In the original story, whenever she got close to the protagonist, she’d occasionally show the kind of obliviousness that came from having no real concept of money.
And when he visited her house, he’d outright say it was an amazing place.
So I had braced myself, in my own way.
But I hadn’t expected her to show up with a limousine to pick up her friend.
If this had been some “you can’t let your lifesaver ride in anything less than the best” type of thing, then sure, maybe I could’ve understood it. But no matter how I looked at it, that wasn’t why she’d brought a limousine.
If it had been, then Lapis wouldn’t have been inside it—her parents or grandparents would have.
When I imagined her parents casually agreeing to let their daughter take a limo out just because she wanted to bring friends over…
I felt an almost absurd sense of reverence.
How much money did you have to have to live like that?
And that reverence only grew the closer we got to her “house.”
“…That’s the house?”
What we could see from far away was the kind of house that was impossible to insult, no matter how hard I tried.
For one brief second, I even doubted the protagonist’s judgment in the original novel.
“I-it is a house… My grandmother built it herself…”
I had no idea what counted as an amazing house to her, because this was clearly a luxury mansion.
Just the main gate, the garden, the front yard, and the sculpture-lined path were already way too much.
And it wasn’t even out in some province somewhere—it was inside Heros City itself.
A sprawling estate like that, right in the middle of Heros City, where land prices had gone completely insane.
Just in terms of pure wealth, I suspected her family had to be worth dozens of times more than Im Changwon’s.
Yeonhwa, Jinhyun, and I were all on the same page now.
“Your grandmother must be an incredible person…”
“O-of course she is! At least half the buildings in Heros City probably couldn’t have been built if it weren’t for my grandmother…!”
At the mention of her grandmother, Lapis lit up in a way she usually didn’t, and cheerfully dropped a frankly terrifying fact on us.
Hearing that, I couldn’t help thinking that, compared to what they had, they really did live modestly.
“Welcome. You must be Lapis’s friends, yes?”
Once we passed through the massive gate—which was so big it was almost hard to believe it opened on its own—we were greeted by people who looked like Lapis’s parents.
Her mother seemed to be of a returning bloodline, because she also had the same dragon horns and tail as Lapis.
Still, other than the eyes, their features were a little different.
She had long black hair and pale skin, so I almost wondered if her complexion had come from her father instead.
Her father’s skin tone was closer to Lapis’s.
“You must be… Jinhyun! You’re Yeonhwa. And you must be Blanca! It’s lovely to meet you, really lovely!”
Even if Lapis didn’t resemble her on the outside, her personality seemed to take after her mother.
Her father was welcoming us quite enthusiastically, but her mother looked at us with a gentle smile.
“P-pleased to meet you! I-I’m Lee Yeonhwa…! Y-you say it too…!”
“You needn’t bow your heads. If anything, we should be the ones bowing.”
Just as Yeonhwa was greeting them stiffly, Lapis’s mother politely lowered her head to thank us.
“Thank you for becoming friends with our Lapis, and thank you for protecting our daughter.”
Jinhyun looked taken aback too, clearly not expecting this, and Lapis, for some reason, got swept up in the mood and started thanking us as well.
“…Truth be told, we never imagined our daughter would ever have ordinary friends. When Lapis told us she’d made friends with Arena, you can’t imagine how happy we were.”
Her father was tearing up a little, too.
“You, uh, really can’t say that in front of the kids, dear. Come on in. Your food’s getting cold. Eat first, and then you can play with Lapis or talk, all right?”
Lapis’s mother nudged her husband in the side and led us toward the kitchen.
…And even getting to the kitchen took three whole minutes.
- - - -
After we finished eating, Lapis took us to her room.
Her parents said to call if we needed anything, then tactfully left us alone.
Once it was just the three of us in her room, Jinhyun, who’d been holding his tongue the whole time, finally spoke.
“…This is the first house I’ve ever seen this big.”
“The room’s huge too… N-no, wait. That’s not what matters right now. Lapis! Are the jewels in your room… decoration or something?”
“Huh? Oh, no. They’re… snacks…”
“Snacks?!”
Lapis panicked and tried to explain that, because of family circumstances, she apparently had to eat a little stone on a regular basis.
“I-is that weird…?”
“What’s weird about it? People can eat rocks if they want. There are people who eat poison.”
As I said that and pointed at myself, Lapis’s tension seemed to ease, and she let out a silly little laugh.
“T-then… could you tell me your story now, B-Blanca…?”
…Ah, right.
I’d gotten so overwhelmed by the sheer force of money that I’d completely forgotten.
We’d come here so I could tell my story.
“Well, it’s not exactly a thrilling tale, but if you really want to hear it, then sure… I’ll tell you.”
Taking off my school jacket and folding it neatly, I began talking about people who had never existed and things that had never happened.
“When I came to my senses, I was already being raised by nomads out in the Outskirts, with no real parents to speak of.”
“W-wait. What happened to your real parents?!”
“No idea. I don’t know whether they’re dead or alive. Maybe they sold me to the nomads, or maybe the nomads killed them and took me in.”
Don’t think too hard about it.
Out in the Outskirts, families staying together was rare to begin with. I added that as an afterthought, then kept going.
“Anyway… I grew up doing odd jobs among other kids who were in the same boat as me. Every now and then, monsters that came out of the gates would drag one of my friends off, but somehow I managed to survive.”
By the time I was around ten, there were only a handful of us left—so few I could count them on both hands.
After that, we started going into the gates with the adults.
“K-kids, inside the gate…? That’s, that’s not right—”
“Jinhyun. When it comes to survival, there’s no such thing as justice or morality. Those high-and-mighty ideas only come up when your stomach’s full and your back is resting on a soft bed.”
I cut him off before he could spout more nonsense.
Even if I was lying, I couldn’t stand listening to that sanctimonious drivel.
“Where was I? Ah, right. The gate. Our role inside the gate was bait.”
We were used to check corners when there was a fork in the road, or to shove in first when they wanted to see whether something was a trap.
“…How many survived?”
I held up one finger, then pointed that finger at myself.
“When I was on the verge of dying, I ended up gaining powers similar to what I have now. Before that, my ability was just that I could eat basically anything, but after that I could spew out all sorts of things like I do now.”
“Like Teacher Gazer, your power awakened…?”
I hesitated over the word awakened, then decided that wasn’t quite right and corrected myself slightly.
“No, I’d say that was when I finally understood what my ability actually was. Though I did end up dragging a bunch of people into it because I couldn’t control it properly, just like Jinhyun.”
Still, I didn’t really feel sad about it.
Those people had treated me pretty brutally, after all.
“Naturally, once my teammates got caught up in it too, they were furious and came after me trying to kill me. So I ran. Deeper and deeper into the dungeon.”
“G-goodness…”
Lapis had clearly never expected this kind of story, because she was covering her mouth in shock.
But only for a moment. Soon enough, curiosity got the better of her, and she asked how I’d ended up coming to Heros City.
“While I was running, I happened to run into hunters and heroes.”
It was fate, really. I let the lie roll off my tongue.
Normally a gate should only have one entrance, but the gate I’d gone into was apparently a little strange, because it had several.
And by sheer coincidence, one of those entrances was where a hunter from Heros City had gone in, gotten badly hurt, and sent out a distress signal.
“…There was a bit of a misunderstanding, so they almost attacked me too, but luckily a hero took me out with them. If it hadn’t been for that person, I would’ve died.”
“W-wow… What a story…”
I finished by saying that hero had looked at my ability and circumstances and offered to take me in, which was how I ended up living in Heros City.
“That’s why I entered the hero department. I wanted to become someone like them.”
“…Could you tell me that hero’s name?”
Jinhyun, maybe sensing some