Blocked Before It Begins - 1
Ian, the protagonist of In the Countryside, had been a decent young man.
He was devoted to his wife and worked tirelessly to earn the villagers’ approval, since he had come from outside the village.
And for that, he was betrayed.
They took me for a pushover.
His wife took his devotion for granted, and the villagers were always eager to exploit him.
They were chewing him up both inside the house and out in the village, so it was only natural that he would rot from the inside.
In the end, the reason he died so miserably was probably because he had been a fool.
If there was such a thing as a loser’s life, this had to be it.
I’m not living like that.
I hadn’t asked for this possession.
Sure, I’d once thought I wanted to be reborn into the world of an eroge, but not like this.
So from here on out, I was going to live for one person only: me.
“The problem is...”
◎ Name: Ian (Male)
◎ Age: 25
◎ Job: Hunter (Lv: 10)
◎ Attributes
- [Health: 5] [Strength: 5] [Vitality: 5]
- [Agility: 5] [Senses: 15] [Dexterity: 10]
- [Mana: 5] [Mental: 30] [Focus: 10]
◎ Trait: Ugly
As expected of the NTR protagonist in an eroge, he had utterly miserable stats.
With numbers like these, there was no way to survive in this rotten world.
And more importantly...
“It’s fucking tiny.”
I stared down at my own manhood—or rather, the pathetic excuse for one—and felt despair wash over me yet again.
It was small enough that I seriously considered suicide.
“Don’t give up! This is still inside a game. There’s got to be some way to fix it!”
This might be an eroge world, but it was still unmistakably a fantasy setting.
There had to be an item somewhere that would restore my masculinity from the level of a microscopic joke to something fit for a man.
Like the Great Root Herb from Kunoichi’s Circumstances.
Wait a second.
Half-helplessly, an idea flashed through my head.
Didn’t Sumire visit this village?
In the Countryside featured the protagonists of previous games passing through in brief cameo appearances.
In other words, this was a shared universe built out of multiple eroge settings.
Then maybe the Great Root Herb really does exist here?
The Great Root Herb was a gimmick item from Kunoichi’s Circumstances that turned the heroine Sumire into a futanari.
If it could make a woman huge, what would happen if a man ate it?
I had no idea, since that event hadn’t been implemented in the game, but at the very least it would restore my masculinity.
Could it make things any worse?
If the Great Root Herb didn’t exist, I’d be hard-pressed to function as a man anyway.
No, in a world like this, living like a human being was close to impossible.
In that case, it wasn’t such a bad idea to stake my life on my dick.
Fortunately, being a hunter means it won’t look strange if I head into the woods.
Lucky for me, the Great Root Herb was supposedly in the forest near the village.
If I got ready, I could obtain it whenever I wanted.
Should I get married first, though?
With my thoughts sorted out, I headed straight for the village.
Considering everything I’d need to prepare, I was going to be busy for a while.
...
Ordinarily, rural villages were closed off and wary of outsiders.
But they had accepted Ian.
Why?
Part of it was because Ian was socially adept, but the main reason was that they were trying to pass the bomb along to someone else.
“You’ve made the right call. Isolde is the most beautiful woman in the village, so you won’t regret it.”
At the chief’s explanation, I snorted.
Isolde was certainly beautiful.
In fact, the game said Ian had fallen for her at first sight.
But would the village really hand over its greatest beauty to an outsider?
There was a flaw the village men wanted nothing to do with, so they were dumping her on someone from outside.
If there’s a flaw, it’s in her personality.
Beautiful women know they’re beautiful.
That usually made them selfish, and Isolde’s personality wore that selfishness openly.
Ian had to tiptoe around her just to get her into bed.
Even so, he had seemed more or less satisfied with married life to Isolde.
That was how beautiful she was, I supposed.
Her looks are enough that her personality doesn’t even count as a factor.
The real reason the village men avoided marrying Isolde was something else entirely.
“But her younger sister is not in good health.”
“How bad is it?”
“Without her mother, Adelia, she can barely manage daily life.”
That younger sister, one year below Isolde, was Isabel.
If I remember right, the incurable disease was called Rose’s Punishment?
True to a fantasy world’s logic, Rose’s Punishment was a disease that only afflicted girls, and its symptoms could be summed up as full-body paralysis.
Needless to say, Isabel was a burden who couldn’t even contribute basic labor to the household, and that was why the village men were reluctant to marry Isolde.
Even if they could overlook the beautiful Isolde, no one wanted to take responsibility for a disabled sister as well.
What a bizarre setup.
Heroines in the NTR genre were usually either fucked by other men or betrayed the protagonist.
Ian apparently killed himself and was then dumped in the forest, right?
But Isabel was different.
She had a tragic ending, like a doomed heroine in a melodrama.
That bit about her secretly loving Ian always left a sour aftertaste.
They said Isabel had seen the way Ian loved her older sister so sincerely and had dreamed of being loved like that herself.
Of course, she only realized how futile that dream was when she was abandoned in the forest.
The H company’s eroge settings really are malicious.
I kept up the performance of a sociable Ian as best I could while making small, formal talk with the village chief.
“As you know, our village is the largest in this region.”
“I see.”
“And we even have a church. You have to pay in cash, but if you’ve got the money, you can receive all sorts of miracles.”
That sounds like a pyramid scheme.
From the chief’s perspective, he’d want to keep a professional like a hunter on the hook.
There was a forest near the village, but they didn’t have a hunter, so they couldn’t even get meat properly.
He definitely wouldn’t want to lose Ian, a docile fool who’d do what he was told.
Problem is, I don’t actually know how to hunt.
If this were inside the game, I wouldn’t need to worry, but after the possession, this wasn’t just a game anymore.
Whether I could really hunt or not was still an open question.
Somehow, it’ll work out.
Even if I couldn’t, it didn’t matter.
After all, the chief was just one more bastard who wanted to use me, and I had no reason to bust my ass for him.
“We’re here. This is Entiel Village.”
As the village finally came into view, the chief introduced it by name.
I already knew it, but hearing him say it again still made me twitch.
How the hell do you name a village NTL?
The village was called Entiel, a direct play on NTL, the opposite of NTR.
I hadn’t even arrived yet, and I already felt like shit.
“That over there will be the house you’ll be living in from now on.”
“That...”
“It may not look like much, but the inside is fine. With a little repair, it’ll be a decent home.”
“....”
Even though I already knew from the game, my in-laws’ house was in pretty bad shape.
They haven’t had a man in the house since the year before last, right?
With a poor household already stretched thin because of a sick younger daughter, they’d suffered some kind of accident and lost the family’s patriarch, leaving the whole place in ruins.
That was why the mother-in-law had arranged the marriage without even seeing the outsider’s face.
“I gave them advance notice, so it should be all right for you to go in.”
“Then, excuse me.”
At the chief’s words, I opened the flimsy front door and entered my in-laws’ house.
“What the hell?”
And the moment I saw the beautiful woman inside, I nearly stopped breathing.
Her flawless skin was set in sharp contrast to her brilliant red hair.
Even her features were perfect, all compacted into a small, lovely face.
Most striking of all were her eyes, bright as sunlight.
“Chief, who’s this guy?”
Her tone toward the village chief was rude and completely lacking in manners.
And yet it was the kind of rudeness she could get away with because she was that beautiful.
In fact, her insolence was almost charming.
That bitch is fucking gorgeous.
Every time I played In the Countryside and had to do fool’s work for Ian’s sake with Isolde, it had always been infuriating—but now that I was seeing her again, I could understand, at least a little, why Ian had acted like such a sucker.
Was she beautiful enough to make a man act like a sucker?
No matter how much of a game setting this was, it was absurd to have a woman this beautiful in some backwater village.
And then the woman who gave Isolde’s beauty a sense of logic appeared.
“Isolde, greet him properly. That’s the man you’re going to marry.”
“Huh?”
At the chestnut-haired woman’s words, Isolde’s expression twisted at once.
Her identity was Adelia, Isolde’s mother.
She wasn’t as stunning as Isolde, but she was still a remarkable beauty in her own right.
And unlike Isolde’s sharp, self-centered presence, Adelia gave off a warm, gentle impression.
Her voluptuous figure was especially unforgettable.
“Mom, marriage? I already told you I’m not thinking about getting married yet.”
Isolde protested sharply at Adelia.
So Adelia had decided on the marriage all by herself after all.
Needless to say, Isolde objected, but Adelia simply brushed aside her daughter’s opinion.
“Isolde, you’re twenty-one now. You can’t keep putting off marriage forever.”
It might seem cruel to force marriage on someone so young, but this world was basically stuck in the medieval era.
People were recognized as adults at fifteen, and for women, marrying around that age was normal.
“He’s an excellent hunter. You’ll be able to eat all the rabbit meat you like.”
“No. I’d rather die than marry that man.”
“Why not? He’s exactly the capable man you wanted, isn’t he?”
“T-That man is...”
At Adelia’s words, Isolde looked at my face—and suddenly made the expression of someone who had bitten into shit.
“He’s ugly. I don’t want to marry some hideous man like that!”
This bitch?
Isolde had just handed me a direct insult for no reason at all.