Figure It Out Yourself (2)

"Answer me! I will not ask twice. What is your relationship with the Saint of White Light!"

Killing intent seeped into the point of her blade. Hesitate one more time, and my head would come off my shoulders on the spot.

"…"

Gulp.

My saliva went down hard.

"So you refuse to answer, then…"

"I'm her friend!! A fr—friend of the Saint of White Light! We've known each other a long time!!"

The blade creeping toward me froze mid-step.

"The Saint's true name?"

"…Estelle Ramiere."

"Place of birth?"

"Seraph Holy City."

"Hmm…"

Leah Harben's eyes narrowed to slits.

"And the Saint's favorite food?"

Fuck, how the hell would I know what a saint who only passes through in cutscenes likes to eat, you lunatic.

"Sh-she never ate in front of me."

"Close friends, yet you never once shared a meal?"

"I always ate before ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠coming over."

"And how often did you meet?"

"…"

The reason the Saint had been monsterized was, in true eroge fashion, that she'd been violated by the Demon King's avatar. Addicted to forbidden pleasure, she betrayed humanity, slipping out of the church at every opportunity for her forbidden trysts.

There was even a scene where the protagonist catches the Saint mid-tryst with the Demon King and shuts her mouth with sex.

Either way, the fact that a woman holding the very office of Saint had conspired with demons was a capital sin—the moment it got out, heads could roll across three generations and no one would blink. No matter how devoted Leah was—her sworn bodyguard, ready to throw away her life at a single word—this was not something I could just come clean about.

"We met often as children, and recently she reached out of the blue, and we met a few times."

"Childhood friends? You—who aren't even from Seraph Holy City—and the Saint??"

"Before Estelle became the Saint, the church's pilgrimage came to this lakeside for an extended retreat, didn't it?"

According to my father, a church pilgrimage had once stopped by the lake for a camping trip, way back. Beer in hand, he'd said it plain as day: 'I didn't know it at the time~! Them folk what came campin' was saint candidates, y'hear? Them old codgers was elders an' the Mission Pope, so they say~?'

"A retreat… Ah, surely you don't mean the Imperial Inspection Prayer Service held a dozen years ago?"

"Yes, that'd be it. I was young, so the name escapes me."

"Now that you mention it… I believe I did come here as well. Though I did nothing but train from dawn to dusk, so I remember little of it…"

"While you were busy swinging your sword, Estelle and I got to know each other by the lakeside for a few days. You feelin' it yet?"

"…"

"Still don't believe me? There—three dots in a row on the Saint's shoulder, right?"

"!"

"She wasn't a Saint yet back then, so she wore sleeveless tops all the time. That's why I remember something unusual about her. Wonder if she had it removed once she grew up."

As I rattled off information I'd seen in H-scenes, Leah's blade wavered. Little by little, she seemed to start matching the times the Saint had slipped away to consort with the Demon King against my words.

Definitely—if you slept with her three times or more, an event popped up where she reminisced about the Saint.

"Estelle always said she didn't understand why she had to become the Saint."

"……"

"But she said that with her only friend Leah at her side, she wasn't afraid."

"Her only friend…? But she has you?"

"Heh… th-that's why I told her I'd become another friend for her. Ahem—talking about it chokes me up, you know."

Whoa. Almost slipped up there.

I coughed awkwardly, uncorked the water bottle, and wet my throat.

"…In that case."

"Hold on. Just drinking my water."

"Ah—yes."

Gulp.

I savored that water, dragging it out as long as humanly possible. Because I had absolutely no idea what to say next.

The Saint business seemed patched up well enough. Now I had to rack my brain and get myself chosen as her butler—that was the only way to stop the ducal heiress from dying.

If Leah died, the shockwave would dwarf even Carla's death. For one thing, she's a sub-heroine who shares the cover art with the two protagonists, so a hefty chunk of cutscenes would get axed. And as I said before, with the front line left wide open, most of the adventures and battles would become pure misery.

Not only that—thanks to her particular personality, Leah holds over thirty percent of the H-gallery's shares. This game was born an eroge, and gallery completion directly feeds stat enhancement. The moment Leah vanished, the protagonist's party would eat a triple combo: garbage early-game team composition, annihilated late-game value, and a straight line to the bad ending.

'Fuck, but if I get picked as butler, everything's gonna spiral into a clusterfuck anyway.'

"…"

Sipping the last mouthful from the bottle, I studied the look in Leah's eyes as she stared out at the lakeside.

I was fucked.

Even my father, who'd margined his entire life savings into semiconductor stocks, never looked out at the Han River with eyes like that.

She was going to die. If I wrapped this up half-assed, this idiot would be dead within three days, goddamn it..!

Think, Evan! Why did this idiot accept Iris as her new Lord? Because Iris saved her from execution and put up with her tantrums again and again, that's why.

Then that won't work. I don't have that trigger.

Then why did the Saint follow her again…?

Ah, fuck, I fapped every single time her scenes came on and went straight into sage time, so my memory's all fuzzy.

"Have you finished drinking?"

'So when did Adrian come to follow her emotionally… it was when they had sex in the carriage, right… what were the lines again…'

Half-deaf to Leah's voice, rewinding the scene in my head and moving my hand through empty air—

Grab.

Suddenly, a soft, squishy sensation filled my hand.

Huh?

Lost in H-scene reminiscence, I had unconsciously reached out and seized Leah's chest. The exact spot from that eroge scene—the place Leah always begged to have touched—landed precisely under my palm.

"Ahh…♡..!?"

Leah staggered backward in shock and fell straight into the lake.

—***

"…"

"……"

"…So what was that, exactly? That act just now..?"

"I touched her tits."

"H-how can you be so shameless!?!"

"Well, you asked."

They were fucking soft, by the way. Having also felt up Carla's chest, I can report that Leah's only loses on size—in sheer softness it outclassed Carla's.

Sorry, honey. You know I can't lie.

"A-anyway! Get back to what you were saying! Your relationship with the Saint, whether you knew about the monsterization in advance… explain everything, from start to finish!"

"Yes, yes…"

While fishing Leah out of the lake and getting a campfire going, my thoughts had more or less sorted themselves out. What I had to do now was simple: turn the Saint—who was, at the end of the day, just a bitch—into a noble, tragic victim.

The autopsy would turn up demon semen somewhere among her belongings regardless. The church would scramble to contain the information in the face of an unprecedented scandal—but there was no way that news wouldn't reach Leah, a ducal heiress and captain of the Saint's honor guard.

'She was the person closest to the Saint, so she'll be put through the wringer herself. Ninety-nine percent chance the Saint's shame comes to light in the process.'

"Brace yourself, Lady Leah Harben."

"Nothing could shock me more than I already am."

"The Saint was a lesbian who loved you. Despairing over her life as a homosexual, she went to offer her prayers—and was raped by a demon lurking behind the church cemetery, at which point the monsterization took hold. Have a good night~"

"!?"

I dumped it all in a single breath, left her standing there, and headed home.

Exactly one minute later, Leah's voice came hammering at my door.

—BANG BANG BANG!

"Who is it?"

"Who do you think!?!! Open this door right now!!!"

"Yaaawn… What."

When I opened the door without a shred of ceremony, Leah snarled and seized me by the collar.

"Y-you! There are limits to defiling the dead! Even in death, if you dare insult my Lord..!"

"If you don't believe me, go talk to the church elders. I saw the Saint entering the cemetery behind the church. Suspicious, no?"

"Grrh, a-and if it turns out to be a lie...!"

"Then you'll get to share a nice, warm reunion greeting with Estelle."

"No…"

"'No' my ass. Off you go. I'm dying of sleepiness here."

When I shut the door without a second thought, Leah—who stood at it for a long, long while—finally trudged off toward the forest. Worried she might be marching off to die, I secretly tailed her with a first-aid kit in hand.

Thankfully, she boarded her own carriage parked along the forest road and whipped her horse toward the Holy Church's main cathedral.

'Nailed a super save. That's two lives saved already. Maybe I should quit fishing and apply to be a lifeguard.'

—-***

And so time flowed on, until two days remained before enrollment.

My stats, ground relentlessly through fishing day and night, still boasted only a single S-rank.

"What is this… is there some probability rigging going on? Agility just refuses to drop, seriously…"

Grinding Agility through fishing had been so brutal that around dawn yesterday I'd switched it up, trying to raise the stat through herb-gathering instead—and promptly ended up in a duel to the death with a wild boar. Thanks to that, Father ate his fill of pork stew plus a boar steak on top, while I collapsed from total exhaustion and lay flat until the sun went down.

By the time I floated the boat out toward the middle of the lake, the moon was already climbing.

'Don't get greedy—just fill mana to exactly 1,000,000. Yeah. Exactly one million……'

"Fuck."

"…That old bastard?"

"You gotta be kidding me!!!"

Just as my rage boiled over and I hurled the fishing rod away, a strange wistfulness in the drawing stayed my hand, and I carefully folded the doodle up and tucked it into my pocket instead.

"Enough, enough… not my day. Let's just rest today."

Convinced it was hopeless, I turned the boat around and headed back to the dock. And then…

—Creeeak.

The door of a gilded carriage so ostentatiously luxurious it should be illegal for anyone below Carla or an imperial princess swung open, and from within, Leah signaled me aboard with a gloomy look on her face.

"Let us have a word."

"Just say it from there."

"You truly do nothing but fish, all day long. Yesterday you fought a boar in the middle of picking herbs."

"So I hear."

"No matter how hard I dug, there was nothing—no political backing, no connections, nothing at all. A fisherman of no consequence whatsoever, who has never once left this lake in his life."

"Why are you suddenly talking shit?"

The moment the curse left my mouth, the burly Harben family butlers closed in around me in a ring.

"W-why is the weather such bullshit~. Should go tie the boat up over~ there before it drifts off~…"

—Yes, we'll see to it.

—No need to worry, young man. Please board the carriage where the young lady waits…

The butlers, scowls entirely unmelted, jogged off to tie down my boat. In the meantime, Leah stepped down from the carriage and bowed her head to me with perfect courtesy.

"I apologize. In my haste, I was discourteous to my Lord's friend."

Bewildered, I waved her off, and boarded the carriage with her. The door clicked shut, and tears quietly welled up in Leah's eyes.

"Everything I was able to verify turned out to be true. Demon traces were found behind the church, and from the Saint's remaining garments… hic…"

"Are you alright?"

"Yes. The body could not be examined for… certain reasons. But the garments were analyzed, and demon DNA was detected."

"Your innocence is proven, yet it's hardly a joyful thing. But at the very least… I trust you now believe that I don't lie."

"In a single day, my entire world collapsed. Haha."

"For all that, you took your time getting here. I figured you'd come storming over the moment you heard the results, yelling this and that."

Fuck, you didn't come back for over three days and I was worried sick you'd dropped dead somewhere else.

"Did the Saint leave you any other words?"

"…Pardon?"

Whoa. That was not in the plan.

I'd intended to wait for the right moment, mumble ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠something like, 'You have reasons to live even without the Saint. One month… just one month—try living, and then we'll talk again,' and brush it off.

"Not really…"

Leah let out a soft sigh and bowed her head low.

"At first, I gnashed my teeth at the fact that she was a homosexual."

Figures. In this world, that's practically a serious crime.

But you, for someone like that, were enthusiastically having threesomes with Iris and Adrian, your new Lord. From where I'm standing, you're every bit the bisexual Carla is, you idiot.

"I understand."

"That she mingled her body with a demon was likewise filthy and repulsive to me—but that was not her will, so I forgive it."

Uh, it was one hundred percent voluntary though?

"I mourn her as well."

"Hearing that she loved me… I came to understand that the oath we first exchanged carried meanings upon meanings."

"An oath?"

Leah quietly laid a hand over her heart, then murmured the vow she had once shared with Saint Estelle, low and reverent.

Thanks to my slander, the oath the Saint had once made while dreaming of a life led on her own terms had apparently taken on a twisted new meaning—like the vow of some demented pussy-devouring monster.

My sincerest apologies, Lady Saint.

But who told you to go sleep with humanity's enemy? This is all your karma. Your. Karma.

"So that's the oath you swore… I had no idea."

"I simply meant to die. I thought, 'Just die like this, and trouble the loyalty in my heart toward my Lord no longer.'"

"P-please don't die!"

When I lunged forward and seized her hands, Leah gave a faint smile and shook her head.

"But I no longer intend to die. At least, not yet."

"O-ohh!"

Okay. Problem solved. I don't know how, but good job, idiot.

That's right—life's absolutely stuffed with awesome things, why the hell would you die? You'll find a wonderful connection soon enough. I'm rooting for you.

"Kya, well done. Keep that spirit up. Drop by sometime. Well then, I'll be off—"

Leah blocked my hand as I reached for the carriage door.

"Thinking it over carefully on the verge of death, I recalled something—she once spoke to me of a child she had liked in her younger days."

"A child she liked?"

"Back then, cheeks flushed, she would go on and on about a boy she'd happened to meet by chance."

"I-I suppose she liked men back then! Haha…"

"Considering all the circumstances… I suppose that must be so."

Leah nodded and clasped my hand tight.

"She fell truly in love with the friends she could open her heart to. You, and me."

"…Me?"

Leah gave a small nod at my words.

"Only ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠then did everything fit. At the very least, I was relieved to know that the oath I have staked my everything upon has not been muddied. I found the courage to live all over again!"

"O-oh…"

"'Live a selfish life, solely for the sake of "me," who will become the Saint, and for my "friend" alone—Leah Harben.' Do you truly not understand what this means?"

"Which is…?"

"Until this very moment, I believed the 'friend' she spoke of was me."

"Isn't that right?"

"But that was born of my arrogance—the conceit that I was the Saint's only friend! Perhaps she only came to love me out of the sorrow of being unable to have you..!"

"That's…"

"The friend the Saint sought to meet in secret, right up until her death."

"Yes…"

"Someone who knows a past even I never knew, who knows even the shame the Saint hid away. The one person to whom she could confess everything—the unspeakable disgrace she suffered at the hands of a demon!!"

"Huh. That's me, isn't it?"

Leah nodded at my words and fixed me with eyes blazing with conviction.

"Someone like you could never have been a mere friend."

"Heh heh, and yet that is exactly what happened, Lady Leah. Lady Estelle and I were simply, plainly, friends…"

"A Harben knight's loyalty does not vanish when her Lord dies. It merely passes on to the one to whom the Lord entrusted her will. So here, in this place, in honor of Lady Estelle's final wish……"

Uh oh.

I'm fucked!! Fuck!!!That's the line that's supposed to be said to Iris!!?

"W-wait! Hasty loyalty..! Stop!! You don't even know my name!!"

"Then what is your name?"

"You crazy woman, I am never telling you!! Loyalty, schmoyalty—just, just calm down, let's talk a little more, and think this over rationally…"

Leah reached out with both hands, clamped my cheeks firmly in place, and gazed up at my face through shimmering tears, mournful as a saint in a painting.

"My new Lord, though I know not even your name! In your service I shall follow the will of my Lord, who bade me 'live a selfish life, solely for the sake of "me," who will become the Saint, and for my "friend" alone'!! I, Leah Harben… shall offer up my life for you!"

Oh, fuck.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

That's the pose. The one from Adrian's first H-scene.

…Bye-bye, protagonist party.

Your team tank.

Existed once. Now, gone.