Chapter 0 True Ending
True Ending
Chapter 1
I must have been out of my mind.
Even if I was destined to die, I never should have provoked my older sister.
So why...?
『1. Admit I was wrong and beg my sister to forgive me.』
『2. Run away.』
『3. Betray my companions and take my sister's side.』
『▶ 4. Kill my obsessive sister and claim my freedom.』
How had I ended up choosing that last option?
"Aaaagh! Cough! Guaaagh!"
I crumpled onto the mine shaft's stone floor, coughing up blood. My injuries blurred my vision, and blood pooled beneath me.
But I had no time to worry about that.
The metallic stench filled my nose. Even the darkness seemed stained red.
Scrrrape.
A figure staggered toward me, swaying like a drunk.
"You really should have been more careful."
A greatsword scraped across the stone behind her. Friction had heated its blade red-hot, and wherever it dragged through the blood, steam hissed into the air.
Scrrrape.
Through the steam, I saw long silver hair flowing to her hips, catching the crimson light.
"Ghk... S-Sis... I'm sorry."
As my blood-soaked sister came into focus, I broke into sobs. There was only one thing I could do if I wanted to survive: beg her for mercy.
"I-I'm sorry... Please. Let me live."
Tears streamed down my face. Shaking with pain and terror, I clutched at her ankle, desperate to live.
"Oh, Si-hyun..." She sighed. "Why did you have to do it?"
Her voice softened, and a flicker of hope made me look up.
Then I saw her expression.
"Why did you try to kill your own sister?"
She was gazing down at me with a smile of pure ecstasy.
And as I lay there dying, a ridiculous thought crossed my mind.
Even with blood smeared across her face and that terrifying look in her eyes, my sister was breathtakingly beautiful.
Her smile deepened.
My left hand went flying.
"AAAAAGH!"
"This is the hand that held that blonde whore. Three times."
Before I could even process the pain, she severed my right hand, too.
"And this is the one that filthy bitch defiled."
With both hands gone, my body convulsed. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, and my eyes felt ready to burst from their sockets.
Watching me writhe, my sister let out a heated sigh.
"There. You're a little cleaner now."
She straddled me, bit my lip, and smiled in a way no human being should.
"Remember this, little brother."
A thin trail of blood ran from her lips.
"You can't escape me. Not now. Not ever."
She seized my chin and raised her left hand. Purple flames sprang from her palm.
An intricate magic circle formed inside the fire, its lines converging into the shape of a skull.
"Even in death, we'll love each other. We'll always be together."
Her bright yellow eyes seemed to warp with madness.
And somehow, her smile grew even more ecstatic.
...Even death wouldn't free me from my sister.
『BAD END』
* * *
"..."
I stared at the 『BAD END』 message for a long moment, then pressed a hand to my forehead.
"I feel sorry for the protagonist, but holy shit. They crossed the line again."
Seriously. How many times had this happened now?
Ding!
『Play Count — 10,210』
"..."
More than ten thousand attempts, and the protagonist still went on about how beautiful his sister was, even on the brink of death. Meanwhile, his older sister was so obsessed with her little brother that she'd stop at nothing to keep him to herself.
"They're both idiots. Every last bit of them."
I slumped back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. One nagging question just wouldn't leave me alone.
'Wait. Wasn't this supposed to be an adult game?'
I hit Alt-Tab and pulled up a walkthrough site.
『Conquers Women Through the Younger Brother's Tower!』
The title alone was enough to make it something you'd never admit to playing in public.
But the character designs and combat were so good that practically everyone played it in secret. It had become a legend among adult games.
Most people just called it <Tower Journey>.
The message boards had been full of praise when it launched. These days, they were just as lively—but for entirely different reasons.
『HaHaParrot: HAHAHAHAHA Park Ha-rin, you fucking bitch! JUST STOP ALREADY!!!』
『Honto Ni Suge: You xxxxxxxxxs! This is an adult game! Where are the heroines? Where are the sex scenes?! You xx xxs!!』
『RedRadishDentures: Lol, still haven't seen a single heroine naked? Same here. I'm out. Good luck, idiots~』
『Eungeung: An H-scene? Lmao, keep dreaming. The title's nothing but bait~』
Park Ha-rin, the protagonist's biological older sister.
Once, she'd been the game's greatest selling point. Now, she was the reason its reputation had plunged through the floor.
Plenty of players had been drawn in by Ha-rin's mesmerizing design, or by the promise of getting close to the other heroines. But then...
"Who were you talking to? I smell perfume on you. Don't tell me... it was a girl?"
"Look at your broken fingers and remember. That's how many times you've spoken to another woman."
Nobody had expected the game's star heroine to turn out to be such a walking disaster.
"Even in death, your big sister will be right there with you."
That line alone had earned Park Ha-rin the nickname "Big Sister of the Orphans."
It was a crude community meme, but nobody argued with it.
The joke was that whenever you teamed up with your sister, you could stand around looking cool with your sword while she crushed every enemy for you.
And what did our protagonist, Park Si-hyun, do in all this?
Who knew? His behavior was impossible to predict, no matter how many times you played.
If his sister was in a bad mood, he'd spend the entire day fretting over her, unable to focus on anything else and letting her drag him around.
His stats would fall, and even his action points for moving around the map would shrink. In other words, the game punished you for trying to play it.
Now that I thought about it...
—Wow. You're still playing? You've got some stamina. I'll give you that.
Lately, I'd almost started hearing the developers mocking me. And I wasn't entirely sure I was imagining it.
Still, Park Ha-rin really was an impossible obstacle.
Even on paper, her abilities were so absurd they'd be hard to swallow in a comic book.
The most beautiful woman in the world.
A physical powerhouse even before the Tower appeared on Earth.
The greatest natural talent of any race.
And to top it all off, every last one of her instincts and desires revolved around a single person: her younger brother, Park Si-hyun.
'But she won't actually sleep with him, and she ruins things every single time he gets close to another woman.'
In short, the whole setup was complete bullshit.
Worse, Ha-rin was impossible to read. She could do something insane without warning, turning any situation into a fresh disaster.
Take an ordinary conversation, for instance.
"Sis, what do you want for lunch?"
"Me? You♡"
Then you reload the same choice...
"Sis, what do you want for lunch?"
"Hold on. That woman was looking at you. I'll go kill her first."
Same question. Entirely different reaction. Every time.
And even if you navigated all those land mines and made it to the late game, the ending never changed.
"The time has come... You'll understand how I feel, won't you?"
Her eyes would suddenly go wild, and she'd lock the protagonist away and keep him like livestock.
"Now nobody can come between us, Si-hyun."
"S-Sis...!"
And for some reason, the protagonist always ended up clinging to his sister anyway. What was so great about her?
"Seriously, what the fuck? I don't usually swear this much, but did they even make this game to be beaten? If the graphics or combat were even a little worse, I'd have quit ages ago."
I'd followed every branch in every walkthrough I could find. I'd even spent hours testing routes that nobody had documented.
This time, I'd carefully controlled Ha-rin's growth paths, kept her stats as low as possible, and unleashed humanity's most time-honored tactic: ganging up on the boss.
—Oh, keep trying. You're adorable.
After that 『BAD END』, I felt like a pterodactyl that had somehow gotten kicked in both balls.
I'd min-maxed every stat until I practically cried blood. I'd even brought along a whole crowd of male characters to overwhelm her. And we still lost?
What the hell was I supposed to do now?
What was even left to try?
"That's it. I'm done. Fuck you, all of you."
If I couldn't even build a party with the curvy heroines, what was the point of playing an adult game?
Had the director ever intended to make money from this thing? Actually... I was beginning to understand.
'Some rich lunatic must have made this game just to torment the people who bought it.'
Once that thought took hold, every last scrap of my motivation disappeared.
I'd suffered enough. I was quitting for good.
I hit Alt-Tab and returned to the game.
Then I froze.
Against a black background, the translucent words 『BAD END』 were still glowing.
"..."
Behind them, the faint illustration began to sharpen. Worse, it seemed to be moving closer to me.
The picture showed...
『BAD END』
Park Ha-rin, her ominous crimson eyes gleaming.
'...What? Did I unlock a hidden achievement?'
No. Hidden events still came with pop-ups. Nothing like this had ever happened before.
"...Huh?!"
Suddenly, Ha-rin's face swelled across the screen as if she were leaning toward me. My heart hammered in my chest.
"..."
From this close, I could understand why the protagonist cowered whenever his sister looked at him. Understand it, mind you. Not sympathize with it.
'They really went all out making her creepy.'
I was embarrassed to have been startled by a drawing, but the feeling soon faded. The longer I stared into those eyes, the colder my spine became.
'If they're going to sell an eroge, they should make a proper eroge. Why waste all this effort tormenting some random guy like me? They should be fixing bugs and adding actual content instead of pulling cheap surprises.'
Maybe it was just the thousands of hours I'd poured into the game, but the developers' malice felt almost personal.
Whatever. I was finished with it.
I moved the cursor toward the little X in the corner of the window.
A hollow feeling washed over me, and I gave a bitter smile.
Years of my life had gone into this game. Was I really going to walk away with nothing to show for them?
'...I did everything I could. It's only an eroge, anyway.'
Most people played games like this for the same reason. I'd just wanted to spend some romantic time with the other heroines, and I'd worked ridiculously hard for it.
But that was over now, too.
'I need to find a job. Maybe even get a real girlfriend. I can't keep wasting my life on this garbage.'
I was twenty-five, in my final year of university, and about to graduate.
I couldn't afford to keep hiding inside a fictional world.
No one else was going to take responsibility for my life just because I'd spent it having fun.
It was time to end this.
"What a waste."
Enough. I wasn't going to let a hopeless game push me around anymore. I'd delete it and move on.
Even if I was starting late, I'd finally get my real life together.
At least, that was what I'd decided.
Creeeak.
Then Park Ha-rin's eyes moved—and turned straight toward me.
"...What?"
Bzzzt—
A burst of static tore across the screen.
I squinted, wondering if my eyes had played tricks on me, when—
BOOOOM!
The room shook so violently that objects bounced off the furniture.
'W-what?! An earthquake?'
I panicked and tried to take my hand off the mouse.
"...?!"
But I could no longer feel my hand. An icy sensation spread from the mouse, locking my entire body in place.
Only my eyes could still move.
And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop looking at the screen.
There, words were appearing.
『You only need to think of me.』
A message that made my blood run cold.
『Through your choices, protagonist "□□□" has died countless times and finally achieved a perfect death.』
『A suitable entity has been secured to replace the protagonist's depleted self.』
For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
『Protagonist □□□ — Compatibility: 97%... 102%... 107%...』
An icy chill climbed my spine as the inexplicable numbers kept rising.
Until, at last...
『Protagonist □□□ — Compatibility: 121%』
CRACK!
The light bulb burst. Darkness swallowed the room, leaving only the monitor's glow on my face.
I still couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. All I knew was that I was trembling with a terror I couldn't name.
Then my frozen fingers twitched.
What happened next was impossible. I was watching it with my own eyes, and I still couldn't believe it.
Crack.
A translucent woman's hand reached out through the monitor, growing solid as it crossed the screen.
It closed around my hand with crushing strength.
"...!"
Cold flooded my body, so intense that my heart seemed to stop.
Then the touch passed straight through my chest and forced my heart to beat again.
I couldn't pull away. I couldn't even avert my eyes. The moment those ghostly fingers closed around mine, my hand began moving on its own.
『■■■...』
Click. Click. Click.
『Would you like to take over the role?』
My finger clicked the mouse against my will.
Click.
I fought to stop it, but my body no longer obeyed me. It was as if someone else had taken control of every muscle.
『Would you like to enjoy this game?』
『YES ◆ / NO』
After a futile struggle, the cursor settled over 『YES』.
'Wh-what is this?! What's happening?!'
I wanted to scream, but no sound came out.
Guided by those beautiful, terrifying fingers, my hand made one final movement.
Click.
『■ welcomes you.』
Light erupted from the monitor. My vision contracted to a single point.
In the last instant before everything vanished, I saw Park Ha-rin smiling at me with chilling tenderness.
"I love you, □□□."
* * *
When I opened my eyes, I was sitting at a dining table in a place I'd never seen before—as naturally as if I'd been there all along.
And sitting directly across from me was...
"My Si-hyun. Why did you stop moving your hand?"
Park Ha-rin, smiling radiantly.
『Affection Level: ∞ / 10』
The impossible number floated above her head.
She'd called me Park Si-hyun.
I had become the protagonist—the little brother his older sister was obsessed with.