3. Get Lost, You Fucking Whore. If You Really Don't Want to Die.
So... what do I do?
Bless didn't know. He had no idea that the woman he'd searched for so desperately—Iliene—was already dead... or that I wasn't Iliene at all, but a complete stranger who had washed into this body from another world.
Should I try to fend him off with a lie?
But pretending to be Iliene was a lost cause. Unlike my friend Kim, I'd never actually played Garden of the Saintess, the game this world was based on—at most, I'd occasionally peeked over his shoulder while he played. What kind of person Iliene was, how she carried herself, the things she'd be likely to say... piecing all of that together was simply impossible.
Then maybe I should push the amnesia angle...
As it happened, right before I'd passed out, Bless had taken one look at my condition and started going on about memory loss. So if I lied and claimed I'd lost my memories, couldn't I talk my way out of this mess? The thought crossed my mind—but I shook my head before long. I couldn't keep up an amnesia act forever, for one thing. For another, I couldn't bring myself to see the man standing in front of me as nothing more than a game character.
This world was real. The man before me was a living, breathing person. That was my honest read on the situation, and I was not the kind of 'great soul' who could keep lying straight to the face of someone who actually existed.
And so, I told Bless the truth.
"Um, excuse me... the thing is... Iliene is dead."
"...What?"
"I'm not Iliene. I'm, um..."
Leaving out only the fact that this world was the story of a game, I told him everything I knew. That Iliene, having been kidnapped, had found the prospect of defilement so shameful that she shattered her own soul and chose death. And that I was someone else entirely—someone who had flowed into the empty shell that had once been Iliene's body.
"So... you are telling me Iliene is truly dead?"
"Yes... I'm afraid so."
"Haah..."
Bless buried his face in his hands and let out a long, heavy sigh. The tips of his fingers trembled, as though he were blaming himself for failing to save her.
Still... he bought that awfully easily, huh...? I'd assumed he was simply writing me off as a woman driven out of her mind by horrors too cruel to process. The ease with which he took my word for it struck me as a little odd, so I probed him gently.
"You... believe me?"
"I do."
"That's... not exactly an easy thing to believe, though..."
"Hmph. Truth be told, I had found something strange about you. The Iliene I knew was never the sort of woman who would so basely hunger for a man's cock."
"...What?"
"I see it now. So Iliene... refused to be defiled and chose death. As expected of her—what a noble choice, befitting her virtue."
"Um, excuse me...?"
"But the Goddess can be heartless in her own way. Of all the souls that might have filled Iliene's empty husk, it had to be this lecherous whore."
"..."
You fucking piece of shit?
The moment I confessed the truth, Bless abruptly dropped all courtesy and began treating me like a filthy rag of a whore, spouting 'I knew something was off—my Iliene would never!' over and over.
Well, what can I say—from his perspective, I suppose that reaction was only natural, right? Haah. Unbelievable. Hey, buddy. That woman you knew as Iliene? If she'd been marinating in aphrodisiacs the way I had, she'd have been completely broken too. Ugh, for fuck's sake—what I really need to do is shove every last one of those countless sex scenes sitting in Garden of the Saintess' game data right in this bastard's face...!
"Ex-cuse me?! Who are you calling a whore?! Did you eat your manners for breakfast or something?!"
"Hmph. Now I am certain. You are not Iliene. Iliene does not speak that way."
"Grrrkh...!!"
"I will go inform His Grace the Archbishop of this matter. The high priests can perceive the shape of a soul; they will confirm it beyond doubt."
"Hey...! I told you the truth, and this is what I get? 'Lewd,' 'whore'—isn't that going a bit too far?!"
"Silence, you lowborn thing... Do not address me so familiarly! I am the heir of the Leppen Ducal House. Had you not crawled into her body, you would never have been someone I'd deign to exchange a single word with."
"Ha, if we're being technical about it, whatever the circumstances, my current title happens to be Saintess, you know...?!"
"Saintess...? No. You will be cast out of this church soon enough."
When I invoked my position as Saintess, Bless scoffed and said that. That I would be expelled from the Church.
...Huh?
"Even had you been Iliene herself, the situation alone would have justified stripping you of your station, holding you responsible for failing to accept your rescue."
"Uh..."
"And yet, on top of everything, you are not even Iliene, but the soul of a stranger?"
"..."
"Very well. As thanks for your honesty, I shall tell you this much: within days, you will be excommunicated from the Order."
"Wh-what...?!"
"You need not regret having spoken honestly. The seat of Saintess demands constant audience with the high priests—you would have been found out sooner or later regardless."
Wait, what was he even saying...? So I was getting thrown out of here before long? It had only been a few days since I transmigrated at all, and thanks to being locked up in that cave the whole time... I'd only just learned that this world was the world of that game. And I didn't even know the game well. I had no knowledge to speak of, nothing stored up that would let me get by on my own in this world. And they were kicking me out in this state? Wasn't that basically telling me to go die...?!
As those thoughts churned and my face went rigid, Bless studied my expression, clicked his tongue, and said:
"Once the Order excommunicates you and you find yourself with nowhere left to go, come to the Leppen Ducal Mansion here in the Imperial Capital."
"...What?"
"You may not be Iliene, but that body was hers. It would hardly do to leave it abandoned, now would it."
"Uh, umm... th-thank you?"
"Hmph. Then I shall take my leave."
What was that? Acting all prickly while offering to take me in—was that supposed to be his version of kindness? In any case, Bless left those words behind and was the first to leave the room.
And not long after he was gone... an elderly man clad in a black cassock entered the room, several other clergymen in tow.
He cast a single slow glance my way, then spoke.
"Tsk, tsk. Truly, this is not the soul of our Iliene. And to think she bears the blessing not of the Lord God, but of another goddess entirely... ahh."
"Your Grace, then... as you suspected..."
"Hmm. We shall proceed precisely as has been arranged."
Not the soul of the original Saintess, Iliene. The moment those words left the Archbishop's mouth, the priests who had filed in with him began murmuring among themselves, trading whispers back and forth. Then, one by one, each of them shot a glance my way and filed out toward the door.
Before long, only the aged Archbishop and I remained in the room.
"Hmph. No doubt you have already heard from the young lord of House Leppen, but you must leave this church at once and vacate your place."
"Ugh..."
"Iliene, that child, caused such a scandal that we were at a loss over how to handle it... Now that she turns out not to have been herself, at least one worry has been lifted."
"Y-you're seriously telling me to leave right now?! I-I only just opened my eyes after being rescued!? Is the Church really allowed to be this cold-blooded?!"
"Thanks to you, this Order has been branded with infamy."
The Archbishop spat the words at me with murder in his eyes. So much churned in that gaze—resentment, reproach, and blame, all tangled together.
"That child gave her very life to escape dishonor, and now the soul that squats in her saintly body lusts after the flesh... tsk, tsk."
"H-hey! I didn't ask to be transmigrated into her! And everything I did was because I was pickled in aphrodisiacs...!!"
"Heh heh. What a cowardly excuse. The Goddess of Lust... you wear the favor of that impure Succubus Queen about you, and you claim it was not by design?"
"What...? I'm sorry, what?"
"Pathetic."
What...?
The old codger in front of me had started spinning a story that made absolutely no sense from where I stood. Apparently I carried the blessing of the Goddess of Lust. Which meant, supposedly, that I was an apostle of that impure deity—a lackey planted to drag the Saintess's dignity through the mud. An absurd, utterly incomprehensible accusation.
Th-that was insane! Who even was this 'Goddess of Lust'? I mean, a goddess...! I'd never heard of her, never met her, nothing. And now, out of nowhere, this stranger was pinning her blessing and her orders on me. Was this guy even a real Archbishop?! Wasn't he just some cultist crackpot...?
"Considering what you have inflicted upon this Order, even the stake would be too merciful an end for you."
"Th-the stake?!"
"The Goddess of Lust is an impure deity, yes, but a divinity all the same. And it is decreed that a man of the cloth must not harm an apostle of any god... Thus I shall see you sent on your way in peace."
"Eep."
"However, you must be gone from this church within hours. Among the faithful, there may be those who cannot swallow this grudge. Tsk."
Having said his piece, the old man wearing the title of Archbishop glared at me as though I were his sworn mortal enemy... then turned his gaze away and left the room.
...
What had I just heard? Let me see—if I translated that old geezer's words into twenty-first-century terms, wouldn't it come out to exactly this:
'Get lost, you fucking whore. If you really don't want to die.'
"H-hiiiii...!!"
Terror shot through me at those words, and I bolted for the church doors as fast as my legs could carry me—because I could read in his tone, in his eyes, that there wasn't a shred of bluff anywhere in what he'd said.
I'm dead. If I stay in this place one second longer, I'll be killed!
Driven by the fear of death, I fled the church with nothing at all—no food, no clothes, not one of the countless things that might have helped me survive. Content with my body and the clothes on my back, I ran like hell. And perhaps that was the first step in a long chain of regrets that would stretch on and on from there.
Ah, if only I'd swiped something on the way out... money, even a little. No—if nothing else, I should have grabbed a few crusts of bread. But with no money and no food... hadn't I just made the worst choice of my entire life, before and after transmigration combined?
Truth be told, as of that moment, I had picked the single most boneheaded option available and stamped my ticket to a bad ending. And there I was, silently showering profanity on 'Saintess Iliene,' now reduced to nothing at all. You're the one who made the wrong choice, and this is the mess I'm left in!
But the me of the future, every time I looked back on this moment... found it so absurdly, bitterly funny... that the tears would leak right out of my eyes.
Having pulled off my great escape from the church, I was half-starved—in all that time I hadn't eaten a thing except that bandit bastard's cum cocktail. Unable to bear the gnawing hunger and the cold of the night streets, I finally made the choice that could never be undone.
Bless Leppen... He did say he'd look after me, didn't he?
Those were words I should never have trusted. I trusted them anyway. In my panicked state, purely because it was the easiest thing for body and mind alike, I took Bless at his word... and that very same night, I presented myself at the Leppen Ducal Mansion in the Imperial Capital.
And Bless, for the woman who'd turned up at his mansion, laid out a lavish banquet. Which I then devoured like something half-feral. Right up until that moment, I was thinking things like 'I'm so glad I came here.' Empty, hollow thoughts.
Yes...
"Hmph. Now then—take off your clothes."
"Wh... wh-what?!"
That is—right up until the moment that man made his shameless demand.