052. First Love (2)
052. First Love (2)
I looked over the plot for Volume 16 that Rinne had written.
At the end of volume 15, the protagonist reached the Cradle of Silence, and as volume 16 began, he underwent Eve's Trial.
The protagonist rescued each of the heroines trapped in their respective traumas and ultimately obtained the Healing Phase.
Using that Healing Phase, the protagonist cured his younger sister's incurable illness and gifted salvation to the companions who had journeyed with him thus far.
After that, they resolved to walk together into a new future — the so-called 'Reunion Ending.'
Simple, but all the more stable for it.
There did not seem to be any point where she could possibly get stuck.
And yet Rinne appeared to have run aground in a completely unexpected place.
"Oppa, you know how Roxy confesses to the protagonist at the very end of Volume 15 and they start dating, right?"
"Right?"
Immediately after reaching the Cradle of Silence, the little brat Roxy had a great awakening and conveyed her feelings to the protagonist, and the protagonist accepted her heart.
That is, throughout volume 16, the protagonist and Roxy were officially lovers.
There was even a short date scene right after he gifted salvation to his companions.
So throughout Volume 16, she needed to depict their thoughts and behavior specifically as lovers——
"That's exactly it! I can't manage that point!"
"What...?"
I was dumbfounded.
Wasn't not knowing the mindset for how to treat someone you love a disqualification — not just as an author, but as a human being?
Besides, they had only officially become a couple in Volume 16. Hadn't there already been plenty of lovey-dovey scenes between the protagonist and Roxy?
Even in the latter half of Volume 1, the two had been all over each other, and after that they had spent the whole series flirting.
Wasn't it a little strange for her to say only now that she couldn't write a couple?
"Huh?"
What had set this girl off now?
"That and this are different! Being lovers is fundamentally different from being in a flirtationship!"
"Fundamentally different?"
"Yeah. Different. Com-pletely different."
Rinne then began launching into a long-winded speech.
"Think about it for a second. What does it mean to become lovers? It means tearing down the walls in your hearts completely, right? It's this enormous contract where you swear to trust each other completely, to follow each other, to devote your body and soul... right? The lovey-dovey stuff in that state can't be the same as before they were lovers, can it? It shouldn't be."
Hmm...
"How much dating experience do you have, exactly?"
"Let's see? If you count indirect experience, maybe around 50 times?"
"Excluding comics and novels. Actual dating with a real human being."
Rinne's eyes turned vicious after a brief pause.
"Is that absolutely necessary?"
So she had none.
Honestly, that much was within expectations. She didn't exactly seem like the type who had ever had a boyfriend.
Her facial features were, of course, undeniably those of a beautiful girl.
But a pretty face was the default for a biodroid, so that alone wasn't much of an advantage.
Ultimately, what generated popularity was the frame and exterior (= body shape) and personality.
And Rinne's body shape, well... it was cute, but...
It didn't seem likely to appeal to anyone except a very small minority with unusual tastes.
For starters, her chest was seriously lacking.
"Oppa, you're not having some kind of crappy thoughts about me right now, are you? That's the face you're making. Wanna die?"
As you could see, her personality was also bad.
One more factor was that she herself didn't seem particularly interested in actually dating.
No—she was very interested. She had simply been so captivated by light novels as a substitute for romance that she neglected the real thing.
As a result, most of Rinne's already-scarce romantic instincts had been wiped out.
And in the midst of that, her characteristic excessive sensitivity had acted in a bad direction, nurturing excessive fantasies and unrealistic expectations about romance —
until she eventually became incapable of writing romance properly.
That was my conclusion.
So the important question was what to do with this pitiable girl.
It would be nice if she could go out and experience an actual romance somewhere.
"At this point, finding a guy who'd actually like this one would be impossible..."
"Hah?"
Ah. I had accidentally said that out loud.
Naturally, Rinne began protesting fiercely.
And perhaps because she could not refute my point, she attacked the messenger instead. Like this.
"Fine! I have no guy who likes me! What about you then, Oppa? How much dating have you done?"
It was a surprisingly effective attack.
That was because I, like Rinne, had no dating experience.
We were in the same boat.
But the moment I admitted that, Rinne stopped kicking and asked in disbelief.
"Eh? You've never done it at all?"
"I haven't. Why?"
"No, that doesn't make sense. What about that woman, Sion or whatever? And come to think of it, what about Laika?"
Why did everyone at Krädel arbitrarily assume Sion and I were lovers?
And leaving that aside, why had Laika now joined the list of suspected girlfriends?
It was truly unfathomable.
Whatever the case, I decided to make the same thing clear to Rinne that I had told Laika: Sion was only the benefactor and guardian who had raised me. There was nothing romantic between us.
And that the same went for Laika.
In other words, I had no dating experience either.
I was about to tell her that when——
"...Ah."
"What. Finally confessing? That you and Laika are in a relationship?"
"That's not it, but..."
I remembered.
I did, in fact, have some dating experience.
When I was a child—before I even met Sion—I had once dated a girl.
In other words, my first love.
Had this sudden first love bait stimulated Rinne's light novel brain?
A moment ago, she had shown little sign of interest, but now her eyes sparkled as she began firing questions.
"Really? Who? How did it happen?"
"Well, it wasn't the kind of huge incident worth getting your hopes up over."
More than that, I wasn't even sure it properly counted as dating experience.
Above all, I barely remembered it. It had happened an incredibly long time ago.
"Ah, save the excuses. I'll be the judge, so just tell me. Listening to a first love story might revive my writing flair, you know."
"Talk about forcing it."
"Just tell me. If you don't, I'll call Senior Laika and expose the fact that Oppa has a secret first love!"
Did this girl think Laika was some kind of cheat key?
Well, either way, it wasn't something worth desperately hiding.
So I decided to tell her. The story of a first love that barely felt like a first love.
The problem was how to start it off...
"First, I've told you I was an orphan wandering the outskirts of Metropolis, right?"
"Yeah. That you then met a strange biodroid called Sion or whatever and were raised by her."
"Right."
But as I said, this happened a little before I met Sion.
So, when I was about ten years old.
I was an orphan with no one to rely on, and I survived by collecting scrap parts and selling them to resellers.
It wasn't easy work. The good spots had already been claimed by more organized street gangs. Young and weak as I was, I had to wander all over looking for unclaimed spots.
That day, the situation had been particularly bad.
After getting beaten up in a turf fight and ending up with one black eye, I was driven all the way out beyond the urban center of Metropolis.
That was how I eventually reached the so-called Ghost House.
"...Ghost House?"
"Ah, I need to explain that first."
If you crossed from the large junkyard in Metropolis's District 8 into the outskirts, a forest suddenly spread out, out of nowhere.
And if you walked through that forest, even more out of nowhere, an abandoned mansion would appear.
The nickname of that mansion was the Ghost House.
As you might have guessed from the eerie nickname, it wasn't exactly a splendid, beautiful mansion.
To put it nicely by force, it was antique. To put it plainly without dressing it up, it had looked scary.
In particular, a strange rumor had spread that a ghost's figure would appear in the second-floor window at night... and on top of that, the fence was damned high, so absolutely no one approached the place.
However.
That day, I decided to enter the Ghost House.
The reason was nothing admirable. I thought there might be something inside worth stealing.
Usually, ownerless mansions were completely cleaned out by vagrants, but the Ghost House had such a bad reputation that there might still be some leftover odds and ends.
With that thought, I sluggishly climbed the fence and slipped in through the second-floor window where the ghost was said to appear.
"That's totally scummy."
I wouldn't deny it. I had been living recklessly back then.
"So? Did you manage to score anything from the break-in?"
"...No."
"Guess someone had already cleaned it out."
Rinne jumped to her own conclusion.
But she was mistaken.
Once I actually got inside, however, the Ghost House was lavishly furnished.
From the furniture to various ornaments, everything was intact, to the point where it couldn't possibly be seen as an empty house.
And that was because.
"It actually wasn't an empty house."
"Huh?"
"Someone was living there."
Countless hooks seemed to latch onto Rinne's face.
And that must have been exactly the expression on my own face when I opened the second-floor window and climbed in.
Because inside the Ghost House, known to be uninhabited, there was a girl.
...Well, from where I stood now, she was a girl.
But to my roughly ten-year-old self, she was an older girl.
Not by much, just about one or two years older.
"What did she look like? Pretty?"
Rinne, who had been listening quietly, abruptly asked.
I was dumbfounded.
"Why are you suddenly asking that?"
"It's obvious that older girl was your first love. How pretty your first love was is important."
So that's how it was.
Rather than let the conversation wander off track, I decided to answer honestly.
That she had been rather pretty.
"Specifically? What type?"
"Let's see. It's too long ago, so I don't remember the details..."
Roughly, she had a sickly beautiful girl look.
Skin as white as snow, long black hair, slightly gaunt.
Yet despite that, somewhere, a graceful and dignified air remained.
And that sickly-looking beauty was lying on an ornate bed in the middle of the second-floor room I had broken into.
She hadn't been asleep.
Only her body was lying down; she was clearly awake.
Meaning, she had clearly noticed the intruder's presence.
More than that, we had even made eye contact.
I was considerably flustered.
As someone from the streets, I had done things like pickpocketing, but I had never committed outright robbery.
It wasn't for lack of opportunity; I had simply never considered it. Even in my wildest days, I had lines I wouldn't cross.
Breaking into an empty house was about the worst crime I was willing to commit.
And now I had come to burglarize an empty house only to suddenly find myself in the middle of a robbery.
No, more than that, robbery probably wouldn't even have been possible. If it wasn't an abandoned house, there would be adults besides the girl.
The moment the girl screamed, adults or maid biodroids with security functions would appear.
Then I would be beaten black and blue by them and thrown out.
Sensing that fate, I couldn't bring myself to do anything.
But the girl hadn't made a sound.
She simply stared at me with blank, vacant eyes.
—......
Then, as if she had lost interest, she turned her gaze away from me.
I was bewildered.
But I also saw an opportunity.
I escaped the mansion the same way I had entered.
In a frantic hurry.
"What. That's it?"
"That was the end of the first day."
"...First day?"
"Yes."
Was it the next day? A few days later?
Anyway, not long afterward, I went back to the Ghost House.
"Why?"
"I had something to retrieve."
To go back over the sequence, I had entered the girl's room through the second-floor window.
During the ten seconds or so before I noticed the girl lying motionless on the bed, I had opened the backpack I brought so I could sweep jewelry boxes and ornaments into it.
But the moment I noticed her, I panicked and bolted.
In the process, I left the open backpack on the floor.
The problem was that the backpack contained what little property I owned, including a PDA I had struggled to acquire.
I could hardly live without it, so I broke into the girl's room again to retrieve it.
Of course, it was practically a gamble.
Of course, I assumed the girl had failed to scream only because she was too shocked or frightened, and that after I left she would certainly have told the adults about the intruder.
In other words, I returned to the Ghost House thinking, "Even if I get beaten up, I might as well try before they beat me up."
But when I entered the girl's room again, everything was exactly as before.
As if time had stopped at the moment I left.
My backpack was there. The ornaments I had meant to sweep up were still there. Above all, the girl was still in the same place.
Without screaming.
More than that, without uttering a single word, just still.
I could have simply left.
In fact, I was about to.
What stopped me was finding something inside my backpack that hadn't been there before.
A medical eye patch.
As I mentioned, one of my eyes was bruised at the time.
—Did you put this in here?
I asked her that.
The girl hadn't answered with words.
Instead, she just nodded, nodded.
—For me to use?
The girl had nodded again.
At that point, I had no choice but to ask:
—Can't you speak?
The girl hadn't answered with words or gestures.
Instead, she pulled something she had hidden beneath the blanket and handed it to me.
It was a rice ball, completely mismatched with the interior décor.
At the time I was always hungry, so I wolfed down the rice ball.
Then, as if my business there was finished, I tried to leave the mansion again.
But the girl grabbed my collar.
Eventually, the girl took out something like a notebook and wrote words in it.
[Where's my return gift?]
It wasn't the kind of writing you'd expect from a refined-looking sickly beautiful girl.
Nevertheless, the meaning got through.
So I asked back.
—What. You can write?
The girl didn't answer.
—But what do you mean? You want a return gift?
The girl nodded.
I asked again.
—What kind of return gift do you want?
The girl answered in writing.
[Want to know about the outside world]