2. I've Never Played This Game!
Blood.
A dark liquid ran along the edge of the blade and dripped, drop by drop, onto the floor. His skull had been cleaved open, presenting the udon-noodle tangle of brains within alongside a scarlet broth... The man who had spent the past several days tangled in the sheets with me. And standing over him, brow furrowed as he stared my way, a strikingly handsome man with black hair and clear blue eyes.
My head was still numb from the drugs, but perhaps instinct outranked the haze — my body had begun to tremble, little by little, with fear.
'He killed him. He killed a man. Split his head open like it was nothing...'
Whether the dead man had been a saint or a sinner didn't matter in the slightest. A person must not kill another person. That was simple common sense, wasn't it? And yet this man had drawn a blade and snuffed out a life without so much as a flicker of hesitation.
"E-Eek..."
"Iliene..."
The black-haired murderer started toward me this time.
Why? Why? Why on earth...? Because he'd killed that man, was I next in line?
"Hiiik, no... no, no!! Stay away!!"
"Calm yourself, Iliene. I have come to save you!"
"Liar! You killed him, you killed a man!! Hiiik!"
"That bastard had it coming! Why, he— Iliene, he...!!"
"Who the hell is Iliene?! Who is this Iliene, huh?! I... my name is... eek!"
"...Iliene? Good heavens. Don't tell me this horrific ordeal has cost you your memory?"
Amnesia? As if. I remembered perfectly well who I was. I had been a healthy twenty-two-year-old man living in South Korea. Then I'd woken up in some woman's body... been forcibly raped by a man I'd never seen before in my life... and then watched that same man get his skull split open by someone else...
'None of this makes sense. I don't understand anything!!'
Perhaps it was because one absurd, unbearable thing after another kept happening — my head spun, my breathing turned ragged, and at last my consciousness began to sink into darkness.
In that moment, all I could hold on to was this: my body crumpling toward the floor... the man rushing toward me, calling out the name of someone I didn't know — Iliene — over and over... and how he had wrapped my naked body in his cloak, scooped me up in a princess carry, and carried me off somewhere.
...But still... Iliene. I felt like I'd heard that name somewhere before. Where was it, again? That was my final thought before my brain briefly shut down for maintenance.
When I opened my eyes again, an unfamiliar snow-white ceiling filled my vision. The drugged haze that had clouded my mind was gone as well. And the very first thing that surfaced once I came to... was the "deeds" I had carried out with the man who called himself Zaik.
I had spread my legs and savored his cock. Squeezed my own flesh around him, begging and wheedling for a man's seed. And at the very end, drenched in pleasure and rapture, I'd arched my back and drunk it all in. Sex with a man. In a woman's body.
...No. No, no, no... this is insane. I was a man, damn it! Just because I'd suddenly woken up in a woman's body... how could I spread my legs like some cheap, shameless bitch in heat without a shred of embarrassment?
Of course, the drugs that man had fed me had something to do with it. They had to have...
"Ugh... uuh..."
Shame came flooding up. I felt the heat rise in my face, staining it crimson. Drugged or not, the things I'd said and done with that man felt so utterly base, so utterly lewd.
'Ahh, ah, ah, ahhn... your cock, cock milk... pwease cum, cum all thick and hot in my baby room, pleeease...♡'
'Nghh, I cleaned up every last drop of your cock milk with my mouth, I did? Hehe... so give me another injection, pweeease.'
'Give my soft, bouncy pussy a scorching hot injection―. Ah, ohh! Hnngh, here it comes...♡'
I was out of my mind. Completely insane! God, you crazy bastard...! What the hell was all that...? Okay, fine, I'd turned into a woman, but still. This was too far...
I suddenly remembered that toad-faced bandit bastard — the one who'd pounded into my body over and over — crowing that I was a 'natural-born slut,' and indignation boiled up in my chest until I wanted to scream. Natural-born slut, my ass. The fucker was the one who'd drugged me in the first place... Anyway, it wasn't my fault! I am absolutely, positively not some lecherous slut...!
I sat up. A room as white as the ceiling spread out before me. There was no one inside. I was alone.
'Where on earth was I?'
As I glanced around with that thought, my gaze drifted, unbidden, to my chest — where two magnificent fruits hung ripe. Hmm, not quite watermelons... closer to melons, maybe?
Come to think of it, I hadn't had a moment's leisure to examine my current self until now. I'd been locked up in that cave the whole time, without so much as a mirror to look into... and above all, every spare moment I'd had, something had been pounding into me without fail. The only things my eyes had properly taken in were the toad-like bandit bastard across from me... and my own soft, springy, pink 'down there.'
I wanted to see what I looked like. I needed to know, once and for all, what I looked like now. As it happened, there was a full-length mirror standing in the room. I climbed out of bed and walked over to it, and the glass-covered silver plate showed my current form, exactly as it was, reflected straight into my own two eyes.
And the moment I took in my appearance, a single involuntary gasp spilled from my lips.
"Wow... holy shit..."
In the world inside the mirror stood a beautiful woman with an air so pure and innocent that any man alive would want to confess to her on the spot. Snow-white hair, and violet eyes with a faint purple glimmer. The two melon-sized peaks I'd just confirmed with my own two eyes, and a waist that cinched in to set them off. Plump hips and thighs that seemed designed for the sole purpose of tempting men. And above all, her face. The face of the woman in the mirror, still fresh with the bloom of youth, barely into adulthood... held a beauty beyond anything words could capture, like a masterpiece painting come to life.
'Hah... insane. With a face like that, no wonder he never seemed to tire of pounding away.'
I was starting to understand, just a little, the man called Zaik — the one who'd raped the woman in the mirror. Me. A criminal had managed to kidnap a woman too beautiful to be real. So what would come after? Well... eating, sleeping, fucking. Obviously, that on repeat. Of course, the fact that the target was 'me' was pretty damn creepy, but still.
Come to think of it, toward the end he'd skipped the eating and sleeping entirely and just kept fucking. Even without his head getting caved in, he probably would've fucked himself to death before long.
'By the way — the guy who cracked that bastard's skull open. He called me Iliene, didn't he?'
Iliene. It should have been a foreign name I'd never once heard before. And yet, strangely enough... the name 'Iliene' felt familiar, like something I'd heard somewhere before. Where? Where on earth was it?
Maybe because the drug had worn off and my head was clear, I had a firm grasp on my current situation. I had been possessed. Dumped into the body of a woman I'd seen and heard of somewhere before. And quite recently, at that — not to brag, but my long-term memory was never anything to write home about.
'That Zaik guy had called me the Saintess, too...'
Thinking it over again, that man was utterly despicable. To drug and forcibly rape such a beautiful woman... honestly, getting his skull split in two was letting him off easy. With looks like these, did he really think only one or two men would come chasing after me? They'd have come flocking like bees to a flower... It would have been a full-blown reverse harem.
...Huh? Wait. Reverse harem...?
The moment that word surfaced, something tickled at the back of my mind, teasing at the edge of recall. And then, like a key sliding into a lock, the sleeping memories began to wake, one after another.
The Saintess, Iliene. Reverse harem. A romance-fantasy reverse-harem dating sim — Garden of the Saintess...!!
'Oh, for fuck's sake. This is the world of that game that bastard used to play...!'
What surfaced was one of my memories from the days when I was a 'man,' before I possessed this woman — this 'Saintess Iliene.' A worthless memory of shooting the breeze with a friend. But hidden inside that forgettable memory was the clue to my current situation...
"Hey, asshole. Why the hell are you playing some game made for girls?"
"Hoh hoh, you just don't understand this game's true charm, ya know~"
My friend Kim Mo was a self-proclaimed hardcore otaku bastard. Not that birds of a feather don't flock together — I had a streak of that in me too... but let's just say there was a wall around him I could never cross. Anyway, one day I caught him playing a female-oriented reverse-harem dating sim — the kind of game your average guy wouldn't go anywhere near — and gave him hell for it. Asked him if he wasn't ashamed, a grown man playing a game like that.
But my friend fired back:
"Every once in a while, you get a female-oriented title guys can enjoy too, you know? This game's one of them."
"Hmm..."
"Now, now — feast your eyes, good sir! These illustrations!"
"Oh..."
"Fucking gorgeous, right? The artist behind this game has a style that hits both guys and girls! Ehehehe."
To be fair, despite being a female-oriented reverse-harem title, the art of Garden of the Saintess was genuinely top-tier even by a guy's standards. For starters, it steered clear of that uncanny valley peculiar to the genre — no pecs bursting out of every male lead's shirt, no long trapezoid faces. That alone earned it a passing grade.
"Pffft, that's not all there is, ya know?! Behold these mouth-wateringly naughty scenes...!!"
"Whoa, dude..."
On top of that, the quality of the H-scenes — Iliene getting hot and heavy with the game's male cast — was superb. More than good enough to serve as fap material even for a guy.
But back then, one question nagged at me, so I asked my friend:
"Hold on. This is supposed to be for girls? Is it really okay for it to be this lewd?"
"...? What do you mean?"
"It's way too dirty. This is basically straight-up porn."
"Ugh, you're impossible. So what's the problem?"
"Hmm, don't girls hate stuff this dirty?"
Don't girls dislike works that show blatant sex scenes like this? To me, it had seemed like an obvious question. And hearing it, my friend Kim Mo let out a scornful snort and laughed in my face, plain as day.
"Wow, you dumbass. That is the single most virgin thing you have ever said."
"The hell? Was I wrong?"
"'Girls hate lewd stuff,' PUHAHA! Wait, isn't the whole meme that schoolgirls aren't even human?"
"What the fuck are you even saying... You're a virgin yourself, asshole."
"Sure, I'm a virgin 'cause my face looks like it got run over, but you... ugh, forget it, forget it. Dumbass. You insufferable bastard, get lost."
"Hey, what the hell...!"
"Sigh. What this idiot needs is to take a TS beam to the face and find out firsthand what kind of creature a woman really is."
"What a load of crap, you crazy fucking otaku."
...Ha. Fuck. Right. That happened.
'And thanks to your goddamn big mouth, I really did get TS'd, you absolute maniac!!!!'
The beautiful woman in the mirror grabbed her own hair, tearing at it, her face crumpling into a sobbing wreck. I remembered. I remembered everything! This place — this world — was the world inside the female-oriented reverse-harem dating sim, Garden of the Saintess. And the owner of this body was the game's protagonist, the Saintess, Iliene.
So why was Iliene — no, why was 'I' — in a state like this? Being a dating sim, the game had all manner of bad ending routes. I'd witnessed one such scene while watching my friend play. Among the many 'Where shall we go?' choices, if you picked the one place Iliene so obviously shouldn't go... she would get kidnapped by some bandit and find herself on the verge of being forcibly raped.
But our protagonist Iliene was, after all, a Saintess of the noblest virtue.
["Rather than be defiled by the likes of you, I would choose death!"]
["You may sate yourself on my body, but you shall never lay hands upon my soul! Hnngh..."]
In the standard bad ending route, X-C, declaring that she could not possibly allow herself to be defiled like this... she went and split her own soul, casting Soul Shatter. The illustration of Iliene — turned into a dead-eyed empty shell and devoured by that bandit fellow — had been quite the sight, I remembered.
'And into that empty shell... I was the one who got dumped.'
Ah, fuck. This is so unfair... Unfair, unfair! Why me, of all people? I've never even played this game, I swear! I just watched from beside my friend, that's all...!! So why me? Why did I get possessed instead of that hardcore otaku bastard?!
Worse, even the parts I had watched didn't cover most of the game's story. All I'd really seen were the fragments of the story my friend happened to show me. It was all dark. Pitch dark before my eyes. What on earth was I supposed to do from here on out?
While I was agonizing over that, I heard the door open. It was him — the man who'd brought me to this room. The man with jet-black hair and clear blue eyes stepped inside. Seeing me up and out of bed, he greeted me with a face full of joy.
"Iliene! You've awakened...!"
Right... I remembered him, too. Bless Leppen — one of the game's romanceable male leads. The cool, aloof young-noble type...
"Ugh, how does a pathetic dumbass like this even exist? Seriously, I've seen plenty of idiots in my day, but this guy's even worse than you."
"Shut the fuck up."
Per my friend Kim Mo: a bastard even more of a hopeless dumbass than me. The kind of guy I'd genuinely want to deck if I ever ran into him in real life. Meek as a doormat one moment, then suddenly flying into a rage the next... the King of Bad Endings, whose every appearance sent the game's playthrough straight down the gutter. And that man was smiling at me. Saying, 'Thank goodness, Iliene.'
Thank goodness? Um, no? That Iliene person is dead, though...