I Became the Villain Who Plundered the Heroine
How much ease does a man just starting out in the world really have?
Little, of course. For most, life is a tight thing, with no slack in it at all. The hobbies one can actually enjoy after work, or on a weekend worth its weight in gold, are fewer than anyone likes to think.
So I, too, folded away the badminton I had played without fail until I found a job, and in those honey-sweet hours of rest my one pleasure became staying home, working the fatigue out of my bones, and reading novels.
So long as it wasn't BL—men wafting a pink haze at one another and offering up their asses—I could happily read even a romance fantasy thick with a woman's sensibility. A true golden retriever of a reader.
"No. Fuck…… this really isn't it."
But even I had a rage button.
No. For most readers, this particular element could only ever be a rage button held in common.
NTR.
"……"
Yes. The novel's mood had been dark from the very beginning, but for a debut it had considerable quality, and I had been following it with pleasure even after it went paid—until I reached the scene in which the heroine was forced through a marriage with the villain and made to endure the wedding night. I am not exaggerating when I say I nearly coughed blood.
From the opening the story had been bleak, and it was the meeting with that heroine that warmed it, that made it tender and sweet. The attachment readers like me felt for her ran deep.
Ha……
Even if she was a discarded pawn of a heroine, sacrificed so the protagonist could awaken, she should never have been treated like this.
I reached out with a trembling finger and opened the comment window. Comments that on an ordinary day numbered ten at most were running wild.
Debut or not, did they truly not understand that a development like this would go beyond mere backlash and simply destroy the novel?
What in the world had the editor been doing?
Had they permitted it as the groundwork for an early ending, because the purchase numbers weren't high?
I don't know.
I don't know, but……
Even a reader like me had no choice but to bare his teeth and bite down on a turn like this. The betrayal was far too great for me to quietly step off.
A bad move. Perhaps the author knew it was one. Unlike any other day, today's author's note was nothing but blank space—not a single word written.
As a rule, even when a deeply resented development unfolds, plenty of readers will wait through the next chapter. They expect the author to revise somehow, or else to push the next installment out unchanged and thereby declare the will to carry the thing forward.
I did not want to wait for what came next.
When the debut had found an unexpected popularity and even succeeded in going paid, the author's flustered, rather endearing notes had made me encourage them at every turn, so their nerve would not break. When my paycheck came in I sent small donations, and I cherished this little novel of mine like a treasure, as though it were some grand epic of my own.
Today, I wrote a piece no less than fifty-seven hundred characters long in the comments, sent the same by private message, and posted a review that kept a certain form on the surface while, in truth, treating the author as an emotional trash can and voiding the whole thick sludge of my mood into them.
Now and then they had thanked me in the notes and answered my comments, so the author would remember my name.
There's no way they wouldn't.
Watching a reader who had always encouraged them and sent them money turn coat and throw stones—would they come, even a little, to understand the wretchedness readers felt upon reading this NTR?
"Huu……"
I let out an irritated sigh, lay down on the bed in that foul mood, and closed my eyes, so it would not get in the way of work tomorrow.
Ten days passed.
In all that time, the next chapter of Survive, by Any Means—the novel that had played the worst of bad moves—showed no sign of appearing.
There was no notice that it would be revised. Considering it was a debut, the author would probably just disappear like this.
Right……
Better to take the bad move as a lesson, scrap the pen name, and begin again under a new one. The title of "the author who handed the heroine over to NTR" would be a brand every bit as cruel as "the author who swerves into BL halfway through," or "the serial hiatus-devil."
"Nngh……"
On a golden Saturday I drank long and deep with friends I had not seen in ages, staggered back to my one-room apartment, barely managed to lay my swaying body on the bed, and blacked out. I prayed, desperately, that the hellish hangover of the next morning would come even a little lighter.
!
Fortunately, that wish seemed to have been granted. When I opened my eyes I could not feel so much as a trace of a hangover.
But the shocking sight I then had to witness, in that vivid and perfectly clear mind, was beyond any words.
Pinned beneath me was a woman with green hair that seemed to hold the spring. She was forcing a look of indifference, and from eyes full of sorrow soundless, distant tears were falling.
Insane!
Could my memory of weaving home last night have been nothing but a delusion—and had I, in fact, committed some sex crime?
The bleak sequence of what would follow drew itself in my mind as clearly as an escalator carrying me up, and I tried to scramble back and put distance between us. For some reason, my body would not move as I willed.
What?
And then, together with that uncanny sound at my ear, the body began to move apart from my will.
The cheap bed creaked, an ugly sound, and each time it did the woman pinned beneath me trembled harder. I, on the other hand, briefly forgot the bewilderment this situation had brought me, lost in the stark pleasure rising from my groin.
A hot pulse. A bead of sweat that had gathered at my chin fell onto the cheek of the woman I was looking down at, and from the length seated inside her clenching depths a long ejaculation followed.
I wanted to remain sunk in the afterglow a little longer, but the body, still moving as it pleased with no regard for my will, drew back and began to set its disordered clothes in order.
Immediately after, as if nothing at all had happened, it left the woman sprawled in misery upon the cheap bed, walked with heavy steps to the window, and sat. It bit down on a roll of tobacco, bowed its head toward the oil lamp, and lit it.
"Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug."
It drew the smoke in as it liked, and let it out.
A mouth that moved as it liked, and spoke.
This is……
A dream?
The moment I heard the name Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug, I could take the present situation for nothing but a dream. That was the heroine's full name in the novel Survive, by Any Means.
But……
If this was a dream—and a lucid one at that—then usually, from the moment you realized it, you could move as you liked. Couldn't you?
And dream or not, being forced to live through the heroine's filthy, unpleasant NTR sent a considerable irritation surging up in me.
This bastard smoking tobacco, my body and yet not my body, was probably the villain who had plundered the heroine—Ferzen von Schweig Brutein.
No. He had married Euphemia and succeeded to the countship of Ruerug, so he would be Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug.
……
However I tried to ignore it, the sound of the synchronization's progress kept grating at my ear.
What would happen when it reached one hundred percent?
It did not seem to mean I would wake from the dream. Would I then be able to control this body of Ferzen's completely?
If I could, I would open the window at once, throw myself out, die, and wake.
"Clinging to me like a doll—was that a resistance of your own? Then you ought to have carried the performance through to the end."
He had been described as a young nobleman, and the voice, at least, was a mid-low tone, sweet enough to melt in the ear.
"A doll does not shed tears."
Having cast off that single line, he turned his head toward the window and smoked, and the face reflected in the glass was handsome enough to damn him.
Short black hair, neither arranged nor dressed, merely disordered—how could it look this refined? Refined enough that one might have believed it a new style.
On looks alone, Ferzen would have been no disgrace had he been the protagonist.
Had they twisted the plot this way because handing the NTR to some pot-bellied middle-aged noble felt like too much?
No.
If they had thought that far to begin with, they would never have considered NTR'ing the heroine in the first place.
"It is said that a person thinks most when lying upon a bed."
Just then Ferzen, the tobacco finished and with not a shred of lingering attachment, rose and left the room.
And when he stepped out into a cold, bitter, dark corridor where no one else was, together with the notice that synchronization was complete, I became able to move Ferzen's body as I wished.
Not only my sight, but the body's other senses came through so clearly that I could hardly tell whether this was truly a dream or reality.
The latch snapped. Wind howled.
"Hup—!"
I opened the corridor window, shut tight until then, and drew in the night wind of Ruerug, the worst domain in the North. The instant I understood, bone-deep, what it meant for a lung to freeze, I shut the window again at once.
"Ngh!"
My finger scraped an icicle that had formed there. With a stinging pain, drops of blood fell to the floor. Drip. Drip.
"……"
Was this truly a lucid dream?
The pain was so vivid that I did not dare carry out the choice of throwing myself out, killing Ferzen, and waking. And so I stood in the corridor for a long while, saying nothing.
How much time passed like that?
Without warning, memories of my childhood rose. Right after them, as if set against my own, Ferzen's childhood imprinted itself upon my mind. Again and again that process repeated, the memories of Lee Seojin and of Ferzen tumbling over one another in turn, until they settled completely into place.
By rights, I—Lee Seojin—was twenty-seven. Ferzen, by the setting, was twenty-four.
Someone might call it nothing. Even so, there had been a difference of three more years lived. Was that why? I could feel it, nakedly: Ferzen's self stacking, gap by gap, into the openings of Lee Seojin's ego, and assimilating.
"……"
Even so, it did not feel as though either self had been wholly extinguished. More precisely, I would have to say that I had accepted it. Absorbed it.
Only—the habit that surfaced of itself in a skull-splitting moment, the biting-down upon the lip, was Ferzen's.
Could I call this having taken the upper hand?
A flinch.
Even the act of referring to myself felt terribly awkward.
"Ah……"
I was still deep in the question of how I ought to accept this situation when moonlight, driving back the dark, seeped softly in through the corridor window and branded upon my eyes letters hanging in the empty air—letters I had not been able to see until now.
It was not Korean.
The language of the Empire—Ernese.
The parts of Ferzen's memory bound up with knowledge were assimilating slowly, and so here and there I saw letters I could not understand.
"Ha……"
At the turning of the year I had listened to the midnight bell and even called out Status Window, and there had been no response at all.
"……"
I had been standing blank as a stone. The latch snapped again, and I opened the corridor window once more to meet the night wind of Ruerug, the worst domain in the North.
It howled—a knife of a wind that felt as if it would flay the flesh off me at any moment. I had not left it open long at all, and already a pain climbed as though my ears would freeze and drop away.
I had no choice but to admit it.
I had become the villain of Survive, by Any Means. The second son of the Marquis House of Brutein. The bastard who had stolen the protagonist's heroine. Ferzen von Schweig Brutein.
"Haha……"
I had torn into them because I hated NTR.
And they had kindly changed the genre to NTL and handed me a gift like this.
What a fine talent.
They had not even rolled the story back to the early chapters, so that the wrong might be set right. They had neatly skipped me forward to the moment after the water was already spilled.
Had the author who wrote that novel become a god?
I don't know.
But one thing was certain. The man I was now regretted it.
I did not regret having savaged the author in the comments, the messages, and the review. What I regretted was one thing only.
Even then, I had kept a certain form. I had voided my feelings onto the author without crossing the line.
I should not have done that. I should have cursed the lot of them together—the author's great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and every name on the family register.
Far too naturally, in Ferzen's own cadence, I let the words fall, and slowly drew the corridor window shut.
Even if the theory of parallel worlds were true, there would be no world in which I welcomed a turn where the heroine was plundered by the villain.