The Hopeless Hero of Helon Academy
Surely they wouldn’t punish me just for cracking a little joke, right?
With a faint thread of worry, I stepped out of the student council room.
What came next required a moment of thought. I had already sworn off worrying about saving the heroines or any of that nonsense. Felice Ansberg’s betrayal of all my hard work had left me deeply disappointed. Yet my mind drifted to a woman who was not one of our party members.
Yeah. She, at least, is innocent.
I exhaled a long sigh. I had no idea whether this would work, but trying was better than doing nothing. Before heading to the infirmary, I returned to the dormitory first. Someone might call it a pointless detour, but once I had decided, I needed to move as quickly as possible. I pulled out parchment and a quill and began writing a letter.
Hmm. The wording came out a little messy, but there was no helping it. I left the dormitory again and stopped by the academy’s post office. At first I had wondered what a post office was doing in a fantasy world, but the game’s setting was what it was. There I handed over money that felt like my own blood and sent the letter by the fastest express service available. A minor curiosity flickered through me—would they use carrier pigeons, or would an actual person carry it?
After that I went to the infirmary, got treatment for a few bruises, returned to the dormitory, and finally allowed myself to rest. It really had been one hell of a day, even though evening was still a long way off. I washed up in a bathroom that was suspiciously modern for a fantasy setting, then threw myself onto the bed.
Once my body relaxed, my head grew crowded. The events of the day flooded back unbidden—emptiness, frustration, the sting of betrayal. Emotions I could not name tangled themselves into a knot inside my chest.
Hero of Helon Academy.
That was the name of the game I had poured hours into back in South Korea. It was also the name of the game that had swallowed me the instant I cleared it, after a sudden flash of light. The premise was simple enough: until you graduated from the academy, you went on adventures, completed assignments as quests, attended classes, uncovered hidden opportunities scattered across the grounds, and recruited fellow cadets as companions. Then you defeated the Demon King who appeared at graduation.
The protagonist and playable character was Leo Epsilt—heir of the Epsilt ducal house and a Hero candidate who could wield the holy sword. If they were going to shove me into someone’s body, shouldn’t they have stuck me in the protagonist’s? That petty complaint had been with me from the start, and it was still valid.
According to the setting, Helon Academy assigned cadets to parties from the first year onward. At the same time, the academy carefully selected external requests and handed them out as “assignments,” supposedly to build real combat skill and experience. Honestly, it looked to me like they simply hated leaving excellent manpower idle.
The members of the party I currently belonged to were exactly the default party the game assigned to the player. Seven people to a party. Why such an awkward number? My guess went like this: first the core of the party—the Hero, the protagonist. Then the usual heroines—thief, mage, saintess, archer, knight. Textbook composition, right down to everyone except the Hero being female. Apparently the developers decided a pure harem party made the story feel empty, so they slipped one villain character into the mix. That was me, Louis Wallenstein. That, I suspected, was how the clumsy seven-member party had been born.
Among the game’s systems was the recruitment of academy cadets as companions. Those companions were precisely these party members. In the story, each of the five heroines faced a single crisis before graduation. The game demanded a salvation narrative. Save them and they became true companions who would stand against the Demon King. Fail, and they simply dropped out of the plot.
When I first realized I had been possessed into this game, the person I was most curious about was Leo Epsilt. I had played the game like an addict; every other character felt familiar. But Leo was the playable character, so I wondered what kind of person he would actually be in this world. After watching him a few times, I reached a hard conclusion.
This bastard is hopeless.
His personality was pure trash. He had no real skill, yet swaggered around on nothing but innate power. As heir to a ducal house, no one ever reined him in. You could picture his upbringing with painful clarity. Being named a Hero candidate only made that personality worse. Candidate or not, unless something extraordinary happened, a Hero candidate became the Hero. Because he believed himself strong, he never trained properly. The result? Last time he had been thoroughly beaten by me—someone far inferior in both mana and physical strength.
I understood then. As long as that bastard remained the protagonist, the Demon King would never fall; the heroines would all drop out long before that. Every one of those five heroines was a character I genuinely liked. So I had made a decision. Since things had turned out this way, I would become the protagonist myself, save them, defeat the Demon King, and live happily ever after.
Today, they had shattered the most important resolution I had made since arriving in this world.
“Fuck it. Do whatever you want…”
I muttered under my breath. I would stop caring about them too. From now on I would live well on my own.
“I finally feel like I can breathe now that that man is gone!”
The saintess declared. That man, of course, meant Louis Wallenstein.
“Haha, I should have kicked him out ages ago!”
Leo laughed as he spoke. He meant every word. Himself as the Hero, and the five women who would support him—wasn’t that exactly the legendary Hero party of every old tale? Even the party number the academy had assigned them was number one. Everything felt as though it revolved around him. The only eyesore in that perfect picture had been Louis Wallenstein. Today, at last, he had succeeded in throwing the bastard out.
“Now that we’ve gotten rid of that dead weight, our party can finally grow. We’ll take on tougher assignments too.”
Whenever Leo had chosen missions worthy of the next Hero, that coward had opposed him over every little thing. With the nuisance gone, nothing stood in the way. Leo was already imagining himself breezing through difficult assignments, raking in high scores and reward money.
“Right?”
He turned the question on Veronica.
“Uh… y-yeah. That’s right.”
Her answer sounded oddly half-hearted, but he decided it was just his imagination.
“With one lesser human gone, things feel a little more livable.”
Elin remarked.
“Hey, elf. You calling me lesser?”
Leo bristled at once.
Elin only smiled and shook her head.
“Of course not. You’re special, Leo—unlike other humans…”
“Haha, damn right! This body of mine is special!”
The simple-minded Leo threw his head back and laughed. Inside, Elin was thoroughly disgusted.
Why am I stuck with a human like this…
Felice and Aine remained silent. Felice in particular seemed lost in thought, still turning over the words Louis had spoken earlier.
Leo addressed her.
“Felice, don’t waste a second thinking about that guy’s words. Anything a bastard like him says is bound to be nonsense, right?”
No. She wasn’t so sure. In Felice’s experience, Louis’s words had always turned out to be right in the end.
“A traitor would say exactly that. Earlier he was just making excuses because he didn’t want to admit we got hurt because of him.”
At that, Felice found herself nodding. Yes—he came from a traitor house. You could never trust a man like that. He could never have acted out of concern for their family.
Finally Leo’s gaze settled on the thief, Aine. She was quiet for a slightly different reason than Felice. Was she actually feeling guilty? The thought soured his mood. Come to think of it, the girl had hung around Louis a little too often.
He called out to her.
“Hey, commoner!”
“Y-yes!”
She answered in a daze.
“Prepare the meal.”
“What? But today’s duty is—”
“Shut up! Menial work like that is for commoners like you. Right?”
Everyone except Aine was a noble; they all nodded.
“From now on, handle this sort of thing yourself. Got it?”
“…Yes.”
Aine lowered her head. The whole duty-rotation system had grated on him from the start. Because Louis had pushed so hard, he—the next Hero—had actually been stuck cooking meals. The memory still burned with humiliation. He hadn’t wanted to listen to that bastard, but the problem was that he had lost their match. Of course Leo still believed he was stronger. Louis had only scurried around dodging attacks like a rat. One clean hit would have put him down. They were scheduled to spar again soon. The reason he had kept putting it off had absolutely nothing to do with the fear of another beating.