Then You Don't Want To?
Then... you don't want to?
"O~hohohoho! I am Selena Vernier, the pure and noble flower of House Vernier~!"
Mornings in the Imperial Academy's great dining hall always began with that sound.
A woman with one foot planted on the table laughed behind her folding fan. Platinum-blonde hair fell to her waist. Her tie had not sat a degree out of place in four years; her skirt, meanwhile, left both knees bare. On either side of her, the bearlike twin attendants Thor and Torin applauded.
"Loud as shit, first thing in the morning."
I answered around a mouthful of sausage.
Across the hall, Selena's fan snapped shut.
"A northern barbarian dares take issue with House Vernier's morning greeting?"
"Who asked? About you being a virgin?"
"Y-you... you barbarian...! I'll tell Father!"
From the day of the entrance ceremony all the way to our final year, it had gone like that. Four years, and not a single morning missed.
And then the next day, the great dining hall was quiet.
Selena Vernier stood in front of the table with her fan folded and both feet politely on the floor. Her face was as red as a tomato, and her green eyes swam. Gloved fingers clenched the hem of her skirt. Thor and Torin, plainly unable to make sense of the situation, kept starting to clap and stopping again.
Mina, the commoner on scholarship, tilted her head.
"Miss Selena? You're not doing that greeting you always do today?"
Selena's shoulders flinched. The words rose and caught hard in her throat, and those green eyes whipped toward the far side of the hall.
They met mine. Sausage still in my mouth, I lifted the hand holding my fork.
"Morning."
"......!!!"
Selena's face went scarlet, and she fled the hall. Thor and Torin scrambled after her in a panic. The entire dining hall turned to stare at the reason she had left.
Namely, me.
Which is to say — about what happened last night...
Two months before graduation, in the dawn after the graduation ball ended. The Golden Deer, the pub academy students favored.
Cedric Monte, nephew of Marquis Monte, had brought his crew and ringed Selena in.
"Lady Vernier. Or should I say, soon-to-be Aunt? I hear you're coming to House Monte the moment you graduate. Pour your nephew a drink, won't you~"
Cedric caught her wrist. I stood, set a finger against his forehead.
Thwack!
One flick. Cedric flew clear to the far wall of the pub and slammed into it, and two tables shattered along with him.
"H-how dare you, to a scion of House Monte...! My uncle will not let this stand!"
"Tell your uncle. If he wants to come up north himself and throw a fit, he's welcome to try."
Two of the crew dragged the unconscious Cedric away. Selena rubbed her wrist and glared at me.
"Wh-who asked you to help!"
Instead of answering, I kicked out the chair across from mine.
"Sit. Have a drink."
"Why would I drink with a barbarian!"
"You're going to Monte after you graduate, aren't you? Then today's the last one. Your last chance to drink with me."
"Y-you...!"
Selena's ears went red. She glared for a long while, then pulled off her gloves and tossed them onto the table.
"A drinking duel. If you collapse first, you get on both knees before the entire student body on graduation day."
"Fine. And if I win?"
"Th-then I won't pick a fight with you over the morning greeting."
"Not that. I'd rather something else."
Selena tilted her head.
"If I win, you come to my house. Not Monte's."
"Have you lost your mind?! You insane barbarian!"
She screamed fit to flip the pub upside down. Instead of answering, Selena knocked the first glass back in one go, trying to hide how red her face had gotten.
One glass.
"Th-this much is perfectly fine. It's nothing."
Five glasses.
"Wh-why are you still completely fine?!"
Ten glasses.
"Ugh. Urp. My head hurts."
It was firewater — the sort that had even a northerner swaying after three cups. Selena looked as if she held her liquor better than I'd expected. She didn't.
When I moved the bottle aside, she snatched it back and sloshed a heavy pour into her glass.
"Wh-who said I was stopping! I said it's a duel!"
"For four years, that morning greeting of yours has been pretty entertaining. Shame to hand you off to old man Monte."
"...Shut up, barbarian."
Selena emptied the glass and shot me a look. The corners of her eyes were red.
"You're r-really weird today. Usually you just pick fights."
"Usually, I was holding back."
Fifteen glasses. Selena climbed onto the table and spread her fan.
"O~hohoho! Of the noble House Vernier... hic! The pure... kyaa!"
She caught her own foot and dropped. I caught her.
In my arms she mumbled, tongue in knots.
"I don't... don't wanna go to old man Monte... hic, sob."
"Then don't go. Are you stupid?"
"Why do you... pick a fight every single time you look at me..."
"Because you're cute."
Selena yanked my tie.
"...Dummy. I held it in for four years."
I didn't dodge.
"Aaaaaaah!!"
A scream woke me. I looked around and found my own dorm room. Right beside me, Selena was screaming with the blanket hauled up to her chin. The same blanket.
The pale shoulder that had escaped it had nothing on it at all. Under the blanket, I was in no better state. Selena's green dress was, for reasons unknown, hanging from the chandelier.
"Oh. Morning."
"Morning?! What do you mean, morning!!!"
A pillow came flying. I took it with my face.
Fragments of memory surfaced, faint. So I hadn't blacked out completely. I remembered as far as tearing the dress open, because there were too many buttons down the back. And before that, the two of us cackling and swearing at each other. Even this: when I told her to say so now if she didn't want it, her on the bed with my tie clenched in her fist, saying she wasn't holding back tonight.
"Y-you barbarian. You don't... remember, right?"
"You grabbed my tie first?"
"L-liar! You grabbed my waist first!"
"So you remember too."
A second pillow came flying.
"It was the alcohol! Pretend it never happened!"
"Don't want to. How do you un-happen something that already did?"
Selena slammed the door and ran, the back of her dress still unfastened. An hour later was that morning in the dining hall.
I had set that drinking session up on purpose. In my previous life, all I had ever told Selena was to hurry up and get lost.
This world was a romance fantasy.
The Crown Prince's Saintess.
In the life before my previous one, it was the novel I used to read on every commute to work. Through episode sixty, it really was tooth-rottingly sweet, pure-hearted love. Then the bastard of an author slammed the story into a genre drift.
If it had been NTR, I would have dropped it. BL? GL? I would have at least reported him to the fair trade commission. Instead he wrenched the wheel straight into dark fantasy.
A wretched war, the North eaten alive by demonic beasts — and still the capital and the South lifted not a finger, too busy parading the saintess protagonist's reverse harem. In the final episode, all of humanity perishes.
I didn't sit still either. He took my money episode by episode, and then he drifted the genre? I hammered out a 5,700-character rant comment and a scathing review.
And when I opened my eyes, I was inside that novel. Worse — I was the northern delinquent destined to be torn apart by monsters. I had become Rex Blackroad.
House Blackroad rules the North, a great house of the sword and the brawl. The northern grand duke who shows up in every romance fantasy. That was Blackroad. Black hair, red eyes, a massive frame. The original Rex, of course, couldn't even kindle Aura, and lost to the crown prince in a single exchange.
So in my previous life I lived like hell — to keep from dying, and, while I was at it, to try and save the world. I knocked on the council's doors. I grabbed the crown prince by the collar and slammed him to the floor. In the end I went around telling anyone who would listen that the South was full of lunatics. And the demon race's little spy bastards — I went around calling the Great Temple heretics.
I escaped the fate of dying. Instead, on the day I was deep in the Demonic Realm, my father died on the Wall. Once the North was breached, demonic blight spread across the entire continent.
On the last day, only the two of us remained atop the collapsed cathedral's bell tower in the capital. Me, holding out until the very last. And a Selena Vernier worn down to nothing, nothing like the girl she was now. She had fled a convent and helped me with her magic. I hadn't known she was that gifted. She was far more adept at magic than the saintess heroine.
Beneath the stairs, demonic beasts scraped their way up the stone. Through the shattered bell-tower window, that year's first snow was falling.
"Barbarian. Remember the night of the graduation ball? At the pub, you told me to get lost."
"...I told you to drink your milk and get lost."
"I should have drunk. We should have had a drink together."
Selena drew her knees in.
"I liked you. All four years. Maybe from the moment we first met. Putting my foot on the table every morning — I did it because I liked it when you picked a fight."
"Were you a masochist? No wonder, when we fought the demons—"
"That's not what I mean, you lunatic. You're going to crack jokes right to the end."
She said it like that, but she was smiling.
"I had to marry, so I held it in. Father said a daughter of Vernier exists to be spent for the house. I couldn't even go against him."
She let out a snort.
"Funny, right? Old man Monte got hauled off for treason before the honeymoon... and I got exiled to a convent. So I die a virgin ghost after all? I'm so damn bitter I could die."
"I must have written you over a hundred letters since the Academy. Never managed to send a single one."
"...I didn't dislike you either."
"......I knew. I knew. You were busy saving the world."
She drew a grimoire from inside her robes. A demon's crest marked the cover.
"Golden Rakht, the one we killed not long ago. Remember him?"
"Strong as hell. According to him, he used magic better than the Demon King."
"What he was carrying turned out to be time regression magic."
"...That was real?"
For a romance fantasy that had drifted, the internal logic was so clean it made me suspicious instead.
"I completed it. Yesterday at midnight. But the caster can't go. That's probably why Rakht only carried it around."
Selena opened the grimoire. A blue magic circle spread across the floor.
"...Even if I could have gone, I would have just obeyed Father again."
The circle began to shine beneath my feet.
"When you go back, if you see me that night... get me drunk out of my mind first. I'm actually terrible with alcohol. I just hold out so I'll look strong."
Just before the light swallowed my sight, Selena broke into tears and laughed.
"This time, please don't tell me to get lost. And don't you hold back either."
There was no time to answer. Those words — that I hadn't disliked her — were the last thing I ever said to that woman in my previous life.
I opened my eyes and I was ten again, the age at which I had first taken this body.
This life, I changed the order. The first button on the tragedy was the marriage between Monte and Vernier. Running around raising hell at southern bastards in the name of saving the world had been plenty for one lifetime. This time, I just hit them.
I manifested Aura at eleven. By fifteen I already had no equal in the North, except my father. At eighteen I went into the Demonic Realm and came home with a cart full of heads. Just before entering the Academy, I beat my father.
Twenty. On the day of the entrance ceremony, I faced Selena again for the first time, in front of the auditorium. Ten years. The face that had wept atop the bell tower was laughing its ohoho behind a fan.
"Oh my. Do they tailor the uniforms with axes up north?"
"Down south, do you comb your hair with a fan?"
A first greeting identical to my previous life, not a syllable off. The attendant twins came at me, and I planted them in the fountain as they did. That same week I sent House Vernier a marriage proposal in my own name. It came back torn in half.
The next morning Selena stood on the table and declared she would rather die than take some northern barbarian. A knight of House Vernier watched the whole performance from a corner of the hall.
So I started by digging up old man Monte's money. I learned that Monte was converting funds from the Great Temple's vault into promissory notes and hiding them by painting magic over the seals. The notes themselves, as it turned out, sat inside Duke Vernier's study.
From that day, four years. Every morning I picked a fight, and she answered just enough. Masochist that she was.
And then that night arrived. She had told me not to hold back, so I didn't.
Starting the next day, Selena put her foot back up on the table.
"O~hohohoho! I am the flower of the noble House Vernier, Selena Vernier~!"
"...You dropped the 'pure,' didn't you?"
"I heard it. Perfectly clearly."
She was the woman who, atop that bell tower, had been sick with the unfairness of dying a virgin ghost. At least that particular worry was gone.
In the meantime, a hawk came winging down from the North.
The movements of the Demonic Realm are anything but ordinary.
In my previous life, that word had reached me three years after graduation. Three years early, was it?
Two months later. The day before graduation.
The door burst open. Had she used magic to undo the dormitory lock? Selena slapped a sheet of paper down on the desk.
I read it three times. I was so moved I couldn't get a proper word out.
"O-ohohoho... sob... I'm going to tell Father..."
Then the words stopped.
"...No. I can't tell him. If Father finds out, he'll kill you."
"Let's get married."
"...What?"
"You're pregnant, aren't you? It's my kid. So we get married."
Selena shouted.
"D-don't say it like it's that easy! Do you know who I am? The only daughter of Duke Vernier! With a northern barbarian like you...!"
"Says the one who slept with the barbarian."
"......"
The Monte betrothal that had dragged this woman all the way to the bell tower in my previous life was about to snap. This time I was here. So was the child.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"M-my lady! The infirmary records have gone to the ducal house! His Grace the Duke is at the Academy gates this very moment...!"
Thor came sprinting in, shouting. Selena's face had been plain scarlet; now the color drained to white.
I belted my sword at my hip.
"Perfect. I owed him a greeting anyway."
"Wh-where are you going!"
"To say hello to my father-in-law."
"I haven't said I'll marry you yet!"
I shoved Selena back against the wall, leaned down, and whispered at her ear.
I got the villainess of a romance fantasy pregnant.
My previous life had been a bad ending, no question about it. This life, I meant to see a romance-fantasy happy ending.
We even had a kid. If this wasn't a romance fantasy, then what was it?