A Connection Forged in Hesitation
“Um, there’s something I’d like to tell you.”
“Hm? To me?”
“Yes. It’s just… I have a problem I’ve been worrying about. Could you listen to me?”
What the hell is this?
I couldn’t understand why she was suddenly charging ahead like this. It had only been five minutes since I approached her to dump off those suspicious potions and got treated like a terrorist. Now she wanted relationship advice?
“…Go ahead and speak. I’m listening.”
Still, this was clearly an opportunity. Why had I approached Silewin in the first place? The primary goal was to get rid of the sketchy potions, but the secondary one had been to build some kind of connection with her. In that sense, even if the situation felt abrupt, it wasn’t a bad development at all.
“The truth is, I have a problem. It might not be obvious at first glance, but…”
“You’re incredibly clumsy?”
“!!! How did you—?!”
Well, I had only seen her twice, and both times she had been falling over. Even without Oh Ji-o’s memories, after watching her try to run from me and face-plant spectacularly, I would have realized she was clumsier than she looked. It wasn’t that her legs gave out—she literally tripped over her own feet…
“Y-you have incredible insight. That’s been a secret only my parents knew until now…”
She seemed to genuinely believe she had hidden it well, because she was now staring at me with eyes full of admiration.
“As expected from the greatest genius of our generation—the one who created HelloHello…”
It was a rather burdensome evaluation, but since it seemed to raise her trust in me, I figured it was fine. The only thing I misunderstood at this point was assuming that evaluation was just Silewin being dramatic.
When my father, Heliont, had gone around expanding the HelloHello brand, he had deliberately used the image of a “tragic genius” to crush counterfeits. Since the real person behind those rumors—me—had never appeared in high society, there was no one to compare the image against. And if you looked at the facts alone, what she said wasn’t even wrong. I had come up with the idea, and from a very young age I had been involved in actual operations. Naturally the rumors never died down and the public image became fixed.
I had simply brushed it off as exaggerated PR from friends.
“Actually…”
What followed was a story I already knew. She had been clumsy since childhood, and because of that she had gotten hurt and lost many things. Thanks to her parents’ education, she had somehow managed to cover it up. However, after coming to the academy, she had begun to feel the limits of that approach.
“This time I was lucky that Helio… sir wasn’t a bad person, but if something like that happens again, I might actually die.”
It was a more desperate worry than I had expected. Was the academy really that dangerous to one’s life? In the game, this event only triggered after reaching 70% favorability. It seemed the extreme situation of nearly losing her life had forcibly opened the door to her heart.
“But your acting skills are truly impressive, Sile… win.”
“……Is that so?”
She answered as if uninterested, but in truth, that acting ability was the biggest reason for her popularity. The greatest driving force behind her first-place ranking in popularity polls was the gap between her outward appearance and inner self. She might be a total klutz, but her poker face was incredible. She had almost never broken it in her entire life, and that remained true even now.
“…………”
Even while confessing her worries, she maintained a cold expression and gaze. If a third party saw this, they would probably mistake it for extortion rather than counseling. Appearance-wise, she was one step away from looking like a bully girl.
“That’s why you’re even covering up your true feelings with acting right now.”
“N-no, that’s not it.”
“I’m not saying you tried to deceive me. I’m asking whether this is truly what you feel deep down.”
“………”
I had prodded her because I knew her story, but even if I hadn’t, I probably would have said something similar. People usually lie, after all. And the deeper the truth, the more they tend to hide it. It’s a kind of defense mechanism. Since it was only natural, I didn’t feel any resentment.
“Why… why am I like this?”
And just as expected, her even deeper feelings began to spill out.
“I have nothing to show for myself, and I’m always deceiving people…”
The worries she stammered out weren’t very different from what I already knew. In the end, it wasn’t the fact that she got caught that tormented her—it was the guilt and self-loathing over her own incompetence that she kept hiding behind acting. Thankfully this part matches the game.
I combined the mountain of secondary creations and analyses about Silewin that filled the community forums, mixed in the dialogue choices from her game routes, and wove them together with Oh Ji-o’s conversational style to create natural-sounding sentences. Since she was such a popular character, there was an abundance of reference material, so the task wasn’t difficult.
“You’re not useless. Like I said earlier, your acting is truly remarkable.”
“But acting is deception…”
“So are you saying all opera actors are con artists?”
“Eh?”
“If acting is deception and therefore evil, then every actor must be a bad person.”
The problem with self-deprecating people is that they even drag down their own strengths. By exaggerating that logic, I brought the error in her thinking right in front of her eyes.
“N-no, that can’t be right.”
“Talent has neither good nor evil, neither high nor low. The only question is whether it can be used well. In that sense, acting is a talent with many uses.”
“U-uh…”
Silewin opened and closed her mouth, wanting to refute me. But what could she possibly say? She had simply developed a self-deprecating personality out of guilt for deceiving others; at her core, she was a person with normal judgment.
“And that’s not all. Are you a special admissions student?”
“No.”
“Then you must have grades worthy of the academy.”
The academy was an institution where nobles—or more precisely, anyone with a unique ability—had to attend. At the same time, it was the empire’s top educational and research facility. Naturally there were ways to enter even without a unique ability, and the academic cutoff was notoriously high. Of course, not all special admissions students are idiots. There’s a bottom to every floor, after all. Those with excessively low grades were placed under special surveillance and effectively isolated.
In any case, since her grades had been high enough to enter on her own merit, it was clear her head wasn’t the problem.
“On top of that, you have quick situational judgment, beautiful looks, a caring heart toward others, and furthermore…”
“S-stop! That’s enough! Please stop!”
When Silewin turned bright red and frantically waved her hands, I couldn’t help but laugh. With this, I had successfully followed a flow similar to the game. All that remained was the final line.
This is where the routes split.
It was the crossroads between the friend route and the lover route. The lover route line was “I’ll be by your side.” The friend route was “You can do it.” And of course I chose—
“You can do it, Silewin. Don’t worry.”
Perfect.
The large man walked away. Silewin quietly watched his retreating figure.
“Helio…”
A certain emotion had begun to bloom in her chest toward that man. It was still too faint to call it romantic affection. Yet it was too deep in color to call it mere friendship. Only time would tell how that feeling would change.
“That was lucky.”
Even though I would eventually leave the academy, I couldn’t just abandon all the connection characters. In the game, when the Great War broke out, having close relationships with characters meant I could appoint them as generals and command units—an obvious bonus. But the real value lay in events like the one that had just occurred.
Connection characters could die or survive depending on the event, and the number of characters who grew stronger through them was countless. Since war wasn’t fought alone, the more strong people around, the better.
Besides, all the connection characters have good personalities and solid abilities.
It was only natural. Academy Great War was a game, and games don’t deliberately create unlikable characters. Every connection character had guaranteed competence and decent personalities, so getting close to them was beneficial whether the Great War happened or not.
Silewin is the bridgehead.
As someone who didn’t attend the academy, there weren’t many ways for me to get close to current students. Even if I ran into them by chance, the odds of exchanging greetings and then parting ways forever were extremely high. But now that I had grown close to Silewin, I had created a channel through which I could talk to others via the “friend of a friend” connection.
“I wonder what Diana was planning to do.”
Since she was called a mad dog in high society, she probably didn’t have many close friends. Well, it’s not like I, who never went out into society, have any right to talk.
Anyway, thanks to a series of coincidences, my character farming had gone smoothly. Now it was time to move on to item farming.
“…I should have brought a bag first.”
I sighed at the sight of myself jingling along like a street peddler. I had already recovered fourteen health potions and five mana potions. Thanks to my muscles, weight wasn’t an issue, but volume was something even muscles couldn’t solve. It was starting to get cumbersome to carry everything.
“Bottles, nothing but bottles…”
Just walking down the path revealed farming spots, so I unconsciously picked them up. What else would Oh Ji-o do? He was the type of gamer who felt uncomfortable unless he achieved 100% mapping. It was a relief that it was limited to items. If it had been collecting every dialogue, every event, and every achievement, it would have been far more exhausting.
I saw Cold Law and Fire Law earlier too. If I run into Baby Only, does that mean I’ve seen most of the major characters?
However, since Baby was the undisputed number one most hated NPC in player votes, I couldn’t just casually stroll by when I saw her.
“Found it.”
I finally discovered the bag in the corner of the warehouse. With the sound of glass clinking, all the potion bottles that had been dangling from me poured into the bag. The bag was clearly smaller than the volume of items put inside, but there was no problem at all.
“I should have gotten this earlier.”
Both bags in the warehouse were spatial storage bags. In the game they were just extra inventory slots, but right now, without an inventory system, they were essentially the inventory itself.
“I’ve obtained the most crucial thing… Next is…”
In my mind, the major farming locations unfolded. Beginner weapons, low-grade elixirs, spellbooks, magic tools, potions, and a bit of gold. The community had compiled farming routes that excluded deep events which consumed too much in-game time, and the accuracy of those routes had already been confirmed through the potion farming. So logically I should collect everything possible, but of course there were priorities.
“Then shall we go get the most important one?”